Buckley himself was not exactly an enthusiastic supporter of the Civil Rights movement when it counted. — Joshs

When did it count? Did it count in the early 1960s or over the long term course of the next half century. You're still playing "gotcha" by trying to dig up old quotes in order to character-assassinate Buckley and not trying to gain an understanding of the historical reality of the Republican party, what they really believe and why these people believe the things they do. That's the point I'm trying to make, not to run historical revisionist apologia for the personal character of William F. Buckley.

Maybe I expressed the conservative movement's embracing of liberalism on race in a way that was a little revisionist about the early 60s, but what I'm trying to articulate is the actual content of the ideology that formed a core tenet of the movement by the time they really got into power: that all men are created equal. I may need to revise how I discuss this, but I'm not imagining the fact of this as a core tenet.

Buckley rejected Rand’s insistence on absolute rationalism and her rejection of tradition and religion as arbiters of morality. — Joshs

I think Buckley rejected Rand's atheism -- which is not synonymous with rationality and rejecting it is not an anti-reason project -- and Rand's moral framework of altruism being evil, largely following Whittaker Chambers on this.

Many of the most direct and scathing attacks on Trump I have read have come from old line National Review conservatives like David Brooks, Peter Wehner, David Frum, George Will, William Kristol, Charles Krauhammer, Michael Gerson, Ross Douthat , and many others. These conservatives were the first to raise the alarm that Trump is ANYTHING but a normal politician, and that his playbook is explicitly autocratic and a direct threat to the survival of American democracy — Joshs

National Review had changed a lot by then, no longer being the central vangard of the broad movement that it once was, no longer representing the cross section of different factions it once did. But even still, the real cause of these people's alarm isn't that Trump really is so extreme (that's ridiculously overblown) but that the massive success of Trump does stand as a public indictment of the older ideology of National Review (and what remnants of it are still represented by its current editors) as dying, on a civilizational level. Doctrinaire retrenchment of Buckley fusionism is not going to save the American Right. In my opinion, only a new construction can -- and it's going to have to be a lot more flexible.

As an old-fashioned socialist, it's clear to me that "the left" lost its way when it turned from class (working class, ruling class conflicts) and toward identity -- all the woke crap of gender, race, etc. I am also an old fashioned gay, the sexual liberation era immediately post Stonewall. "We" (whoever belongs in that collective noun) weren't interested in gay marriage and family and trans identity (etc). I'm still not (though at 80 years old, it's now kind of irrelevant). Whether one is gay, straight, some sort of transgender, male, female, and so on is only personally important. Economics trumps identity. — BC

That is exactly the situation on the American Left but unfortunately, I'm not able to tell them this as a friend and they absolutely aren't going to hear it coming from an enemy. But the reality is that left wing identitarian politics is exactly as toxic, corrosive and dangerous as white nationalism on the American Right ever was. Ditching that -- for both sides -- is going to be a precondition for ever reaching across the aisle for Americans to work together on anything ever again.

Horseshoe theory is real.

Is it gospel? Probably not, but the gospel truth is pretty hard to find. — BC

Oh, absolutely. I recognize here that what I'm doing is articulating an opinionated interpretation of political history and that this isn't the only valid one that could be constructed. But I would argue that it is a valid one -- that when we say "American conservative" we mean not just conservatism as a perrennial mindset which exists in every society, but a very specific, historically contingent ideological stack -- one which Reagan was in and Nixon was out. One which I still admire, despite no longer fully believing in. And one which, in the 2010s, has shown clear signs of expiration. It now needs a replacement, just as it replaced the previous American conservatism before it.

This is an ideological stack which was preceded by influences from people like Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk, was first articulated and formed into a coalition by William F. Buckley, was championed into national public office by Ronald Reagan, was further popularized by Rush Limbaugh, started to break under the attempt to redirect it under George W. Bush and finally has broken against the reality of Woke Capitalism in the 2010s having openly demonstrated the faillure of Buckley fusionist conservatism to deliver on its own promises, combined with Trump's far less intellectual populism making it seem not just wrong, but irrelevant to current events.

Milton Friedman's doctrine of market self-correction -- Adam Smith's invisible hand -- has been definitively discredited by seeing what happened to Americans freedom, especially during COVID. The people still preaching that crap, I now see as fundamentally unserious, not willing to base their beliefs on data from the real world. This time, the rich really are getting richer and the poor really are getting poorer. Libertarian economics has to go.

I think Gore Vidal was quite right. The "property party" isn't about the working class owning a car and a house (if they are lucky). — BC

I think real historical Communist regimes really were against the working class owning a car and a house and were simultaneously just as supportive of societal elites owning a limo and a mansion as any Capitalist regime ever was and the reasons for this are structurally unavoidable. All they did was a reshuffling of elites in such a way as to discard merit as a criterion for elite status. That killed their project.

And that's also why the current year wokists project is also doomed.

It's about the rights and prerogatives of the wealthiest class who own and control capital wealth -- stocks, bonds, factories, income-producing properties, businesses, and so on. The 1% is not a new group in American society; the rich we have with us for a long time, generally calling the shots. — BC

That's not just American society: that's every society. That's the Golden Rule: "Whoever has the gold, makes the rules."

I'm not at all confident in utopian schemes which make grand claims that we can somehow get away from this near universal reality of human life. I would instead be inclined to look at policy to align incentives so that the reward of wealth stays linked to socially constructive and morally positive behaviors.

The Left has an ideological crisis right now too, but I honestly have difficulty articulating it in a non-polemic way, since I'm not one of them myself.

It is just a fact that American blacks are in fact responsible for many of their problems -- just like American whites are in fact responsible for many of their problems. Not all, but many. The narrative that systemic oppression is to blame for every single problem anyone ever has ever is indefensible. And this is a truth that every group is eventually going to have to acknowledge about itself if they're ever going to truly become real citizens, not just formally, but morally. Real citizens aren't just victims of circumstance -- they're moral agents.

But it's true that Buckley didn't come right out of the gate with support for the Civil Rights movement initially. It was a transition which took some time. But the point is that it was a real transition. And not just for Buckley personally, but for his movement. It wasn't a cynical plot to fool minorities into voting for Republicans in order to get white nationalist policies passed once in office. It genuinely became not just acceptable and not just a historically contingent strategy, but fully internalized institutional dogma.

I feel like I should maybe clarify why I perceive Vidal as having Communist sympathies: It's because his rhetoric on Vietnam went so far, to what I perceive as such an extreme, that he seemed to regard Soviet expansion as a totally reasonable option for people and not as a threat at all, neither short nor long term. It wasn't just that we should stay out of foreign wars: Soviet domination was just a different way of organizing resources to Vidal, which to someone on the Right sounds like a claim that the Holocaust was just a different way of arranging train schedules.

Maybe Vidal wasn't really a Communist sympathizer: maybe he was just another Chamberlain who let his rhetoric against the Vietnam war go too far on occasion. But combining that with his extreme views on sexuality which seem not just hedonistic but intentionally subversive and the result is that I don't perceive him as really being right-of-center at all.

I see debating the wisdom of pursuing particular war policies as reasonable, but doctrinaire pacifism as absurd. My approach to war would be informed by Thomist just war theory. If you go over just war theory and explain why a particular cause for warfare is good or bad, that'd pretty much be how you'd persuade me one way or the other on it. But I see total pacifism that isn't historically contingent on the specific injustice of a particular cause as unserious because incapable of sustaining a real human community. Talk like that is parasitic on those who provided the material security to allow that kind of talk.

a religion strongly based on war. — Athena

War is a universal human default expierence. Your constant assumption that pacifism is somehow the norm is false. Pacifism is a luxury belief that grows up under air conditioned circumstances among people who have never dealt with real life.

I know what philosophy is. I have a BA in it. The fact that my post does discuss particular candidates and electoral cycles means it doesn't qualify as being political philosophy itself and I know that. You're right about that part.

However, the point I make in the essay is the need for a new unifying political philosophy on the American Right. Understanding the recent history I discuss would be a prerequisite for developing any such theory. It's an essay about why political philosophy is needed, who needs it and where it's needed. So even though it's technically more politics than philosophy, it is an essay about the necessity of political philosophy, which does make it relevant to political philosophy.

I clicked "join" many years ago but just didn't participate much at that time.

I don't know who you're talking about but whatever. You're clearly neither liberal nor democratic.

Now, if anyone wants to talk about WW2 nostalgia then I'm all for that, outside of politics. I could talk about WW2 cinema like "Sargeant York" or "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon" and how great the golden age of Hollywood and old timey radio was. I'm a huge fan of Wolfenstein 3-D to go shoot the Nazis. But uh, that's cause, y'know, they represent actual Nazis. Knowing that a woman is an adult human female doesn't make someone a Nazi.

Hitler actually was bad, mkay. But he's so ridiculously overused as to have gone beyond absurdity into an absolute iron clad rule that bringing him up in any context that isn't firmly historical deserves only mockery and no apology at this point. You've played that card too many times. It's worn out. You need a new Satan.

Christian nationalism is the attitude that all Americans should be Christian. — frank

Then the "nationalism" part is redundant, because Jesus said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature."

The people who are worried about "political Islam" are also anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, and sexist. And they publicly praise Adolph Hitler. — frank

The people who are worried about "anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, and sexist" are lunatics who think every politician from the party opposite theirs is literally Hitler, no matter what they say, no matter what they do. Always Hitler. And not even any other monster of history like Stalin, Mao or Pol-Pot: always always Hitler and only Hitler. Every time all the time Hitler everywhere Hitler everyone is Hitler.

Have you ever considered mixing it up a little? It doesn't even have to be a Communist dictator. How about mentioning Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet?

It's likely to be Vance's Christian nationalism in 2028 if the Republicans win. — BitconnectCarlos

"Christian nationalism" isn't a clear idea either. I'm a Christian and a civic nationalist -- does that make me a Christian nationalist? The press wants to make "Christian nationalist" a pejorative label and that's why a politician as smart as Vance won't touch it -- not until or unless he is in a situation where he gets to define what the term will henceforth mean. Otherwise, it is just going to be abused by the Leftist press to category-launder him in with some random fringe nutcase somewhere by changing what "Christian nationalist" means the next day after he says he is one.

Conservatives today are deeply concerned with mass migration and political Islam rather than free market capitalism. — BitconnectCarlos

They haven't yet become willing to acknowledge the fact of the failure which has ocurred. Libertarianism offers no defense against Woke Capitalism and that's why it has to go.

No, actually. You've been wrapped up in your own side's propaganda. We know what governance under Buckley conservatives is like, because it is played out history now. They've had a trifecta multiple times and that shows their real policy. Accusing them of not being liberal on race IS a conspiracy theory contradicted by real world evidence. They were in fact not racialists. Past tense, where we now have absolute knowledge. That's not speculation. That is history now.

Can you see seriously any elements of the US right going agaisnt the corporations? — Tom Storm

They already have, if Disney counts. You would not believe how much and how many people hate Amazon's Rings of Power on a zealous, religious level. I really think the American Right is ripe for explicit anti-corporatism to take hold.

All that stuff about Big Tech, wokeness, shipping jobs overseas and DEI: that's not really about women or brown people. That is about corporate HR.

But it isn't enough. They won't make the reasons explicit yet that libertarian economics (lack of regulation) is the problem. I am hoping soon they will get there.

Is there really a right wing and a left wing in the US, or was Gore Vidal right when he said, “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat”? — Tom Storm

It's amazing how that one debate of Buckley v. Vidal in 1968 continues to define American politics!

Vidal was just a Communist bemoaning the fact that neither American political party was explicitly Communist because both of them preferred living over dying. I notice Vidal was absolutely protective of his own property and the profits from his book and film royalties. Vidal's life illustrates Conquest's First Law: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."

What do you even want in a political party that doesn't protect property at all? Bread lines? Purges? Gulags? Chernobyl?

I'm willing to move left on economics ... but within some limits.

As I see it, we need to protect private individual property from corporate overreach, not abolish private property!

Trump doesn't seem to be a conservative, he's more of a radical. — Tom Storm

I don't know if Trump is radical enough for me.

Or are they just a showbiz distraction? — Tom Storm

Like Gore Vidal was? He was clearly part of the show if anyone ever was, not above it.

Aren't some of the debate guys also canaries in the coalmine? Testing sometimes appalling positions to see if the public has an appetite for them? — Tom Storm

I can't say there are none, but that is in general not the problem you're facing.

What is your potion on corporate power in general? — Tom Storm

That is, I think, my main point. The Right needs to go anti-corporate in a big way. Wall Street abandoned us in 2008, then actively persecuted us from 2014-2024. It is time they got what's coming to them: a massive regulatory backlash. An American right wing actually willing to wield political power because it has ditched libertarianism to reign in and stop Woke Capitalism.

Speaking of disappointment, Ben, your comment addresses nothing specific in the video. — Art48

OK fair enough, but am I right about the initial impression? Is this just garden variety Reddit atheism from the 2000s or do you have a thesis which is actually new, or even somehow develops that premise further than others?

By the way, it's not required for your position to be new in order to have merit for someone else. Just for me to be interested in it personally.

Exactly. Once you downplay and subvert the function of language to define itself and fix its terms, you destroy the ability of two communicants to coalesce on a shared understanding. Once you try to argue that “woman” need not mean the same thing to me and to you, today and tomorrow, then why bother trying to clarify anything? Whatever is clarified is not actually clear, and the words used to clarify it are not clarifying. — Fire Ologist

I would usually not want to bring up Matt Walsh because he's not philosophically deep and the politics he normally espouses are neither original nor interesting. The Daily Wire people are not only shallow but still not critical enough of the dogmas of the old Conservative Inc faction for my taste.

But Walsh was right about this one thing. What you just said is the central thesis of his mockumentary, "What is a Woman?" If it was OK to cite Michael Moore's documentaries in the 2000s, then turnabout is fair play. Walsh directly hit the very heart of the issue dividing our civilization.

This is for people who are really trying to dissect the phrase and think about it in non-political way. — Philosophim

OK, I can see how my argument won't seem constructive to you because it doesn't accept enough of your basic premises to help you refine it. But I think what you're really doing here is smuggling in the deeply, inherently political and pretending you can treat it as non-political, in order to establish norms which make trans political victory inevitable. And by "inevitable" I mean that one can't even say one diasgrees, not just because it's against the rules but because this aims to take away the words necessary to even express the idea. Meaning, "trans" language use is Orwell's Newspeak.

Nazis -- assuming we're talking about the very real 1930s-40s political force here and not your leftist fantasy -- would be an example of the kind of people who needed killing, as Churchhill and Roosevelt correctly pointed out. America's military-industrial complex is what beat the Nazis.

If we're ever going to talk about Nazis then let's keep it historically grounded in who the actual Nazis were and why we fought them, not indulge in self-serving self-righteous current year political metaphor & revisionism.

I'm a Foucault guy, so my narrative tends toward discursive power.

Foucault was a critical theorist which puts him in this same post-Marxist / neo-Marxist space where social idenities replace economic determinism as the drivers of oppression, which formed the academic and ideological grounding for the current anti-liberal "woke" worldivew.

Now personally, I'm against that entire worldview, but that doesn't mean that all of the critical theorists were completely devoid of insight either. For example, Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" while I strongly disagree with his main thesis, does raise some valid ancellary points. Maybe Focault does too: I haven't read him.

And this post is an attempt to get away from that.

My argument is, you can't. This isn't a position which only seems political on the surface, but underneath it is making a good faith sincere general point about language. The reality is: this is politics all the way down, with nothing underneath but more politics. The politics of the trans movement is doing aren't there to serve their preferences about language as a goal: their preferences about langauge are only a means to their overtly political ends.

Has someone done that?

Yes, yours did that, which is what my argument about the age of consent demonstrates.

> "Ah, excuse me I don't see how the story of Ham can have any merit."

The idea of linking Ham to Africans is a later addition, not from the original story at all. The original story was saying something completely different from that very modern spin by white racialists. But at the same time, the Bible does not assume or even permit your modern quasi-Marxist moral framework in which slavery and colonialism are the prime historical evil to which all other evils are lesser. Just like how the Bible doesn't support the white racialists modern moral framework, it doesn't support yours either. So while you're wrong to attribute this white racialist moral framework to the story of Ham in the Bible, you're not wrong to have gathered that the Bible in fact does have a different moral framework from yours. It just isn't the same one as the white racialists.

> "Those stories are about worshiping a God of war,"

Sometimes people need killing. I'm not a pacifist.

> "leading to our very offensive culture"

Sometimes people should be offended.

> "in the US prepared for the Military-Industrial Complex and acts of war that violate international agreements."

I'm not a globalist either.

What the Book of Mormon is doing to white racialism is far more devastating than what you're doing. What you're doing is an external attack: rejecting the basic premises and asserting your own alien moral framework to judge the position from outside. What the Book of Mormon is doing is accepting the basic premises and moral framework and then showing, from the inside, how completely unworkable the position is. (which emerges near the conclusion of the narrative) And that is far more powerful than an external attack could ever be.

But again, it also isn't compatible with your quasi-Marxism so that doesn't mean it's necessarily on your side, except for also by coincidence being very clearly against 19th century white racialism as you are.

I admire William Blake's work on this actually and also Emerson, Lake and Palmer's surprisingly sincere and heartfelt rendition of it.

But the Book of Mormon is a little different, because Blake is using poetic license, while the Book of Mormon contains zero poetry. (that's not a critcism: it's a genre categorization. The Bible has poetry within it while the Book of Mormon does not contain any)

Also, the Book of Mormon claims that certain events surrounding the United States in particular are the literal fulfillment of some of the prophesies of Isaiah.

If you have a theory of language which appears to break down as soon as you swap out a few simple nouns, then I'd say that's a pretty strong argument against your theory of how we should be approaching language.

Words mean things! Or, as Richard Weaver put it, "Ideas have consequences"!

I recently encountered on another forum a really absurd argument, that, "It's not politics: it's human rights."

That's just so completely absurd, because human rights are the most political thing in the entire world. There's literally nothing more political in all of human capacity for thought than the concept of human rights.

Our society has normalized a great deal of what I call "category laundering" to pretend that the most obviously political things aren't political, right along with the absurd category laundering of men being women and vice versa.

> "This is overly political"

Yes it is but it's political philosophy and it's historically grounded. I am not using "Marxist" as an accusation or insult, but as the real, openly acknowledged political forebear of a modern political coalition.

> "and I see no evidence of this."

I wasn't aware that my pointing out the historical grounding in Marxism of current left wing movements would be factually controversial. I could definitely go do the research necessary to prove this point historically. Not that doing so would prove the movement false or bad, because I never accused them of being Soviets, just ideological Marxists or more precisely post-Marxists.

I'm anti-Communist on theoretical grounds, but I've grown far more open to socialist economics in the past decade. Some of Marx's critiques of capitalism stick! I would not claim that Marx is a barren field devoid of insight!

> "No offence, but I'm interested in talking about the topic of the OP, and this is veering off."

I really don't think one can really get into the substance of the claims of the transgender movement without getting into its anthropology and the historical development of that anthropology.

The movement is very, very overtly political and always has been. It's very situated in a very specific ideological stack, just as surely as the Pope is Catholic.

> “Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?” isn’t something we can answer by grabbing a biology textbook and pointing at chromosomes."

Actually, it totally is and we totally can do exactly that.

> "Words like woman and man aren’t fixed labels; their meanings come from how we use them in our lives, in law, in society, in everyday practice. Language isn’t a static system of definitions—it’s a web of practices, habits, and shared understandings."

Uh-huh. And this fluid, ever shifting approach then applies directly to words like "child" and "adult" and "consent." We're no doubt supposed to understand these words, not as a static system of definitions, but as a web of practices, habits, etc, so that we can't point at a statute and say, "This person was underage" because words like "underage" can't be understood in such static, rigid terms.

I do agree but there's more to it than this.

The trans ideology has an absurd premise that the word "gender" means what previously would have been understood as only part of gender role -- they posit that gender is just a social role. Never a biological role -- just a social role and that's all. And this is based on the further absurd premise that society is constructed so as to produce these social roles in a way which is arbitrary and elective, not essential or necessary and defintiely not determined even in part by a universal unchanging human nature.

And that assumption that society is arbitrarily constructed and that human nature is not fixed comes from their ideological grounding in Marxism. Marx posited that societies and social roles are products of the class system and that the class system can be changed to produce different societies and social roles. Marx saw social roles as determined, not by a universal unchanging human nature, but by economic determinism, or in other words, by money.

However, because the trans ideology gets its Marxism not directly from Marx but filtered through the heresy of the Frankfurt School, they substitute money for social roles being determined by sexual oppression instead. Still, the reason they were initially open to the idea of social constructionism is ultimately because of their historical / ideological heritage from Marx.

That's why, even though the transgender practices are very obviously a very capitalist product of Big Pharma, to make them reliable customers for life, they can frame this obvious exploitation as liberation, because their worldview says it isn't money that determines social roles: it's social systems of oppresion.

But here's where reality impacts their project:

Gender (or sex, which is in fact synonymous no matter what anyone says) is more than a social role. It's also a biological role. Humans are mammals, designed to send and receive signals concerning the feasibilty of sexual reproduction all day, every day. This is not a product of The Patriarchy bemoaned by feminists: this is either Creation or human evolution or both, depending on which propaganda mill you prefer to shop at.

And when you start engineering signals that intentionally disrupt how the process of sexual selection works for the whole community, then you aren't showing what a wonderfully expressive unique individual you are who sees through the oppressive system. Instead, you screw up and dump interference into the signals everybody else around you is sending all the time.

The most obvious example of this is that men can't be friends anymore, else all the women will assume they're gay, and so won't consider them suitable mates, thus disadvantaging (in sexual selection terms) any men who publicly maintain close male friendships, thus discouraging them from cultivating said friendships. Thus public homoeroticism kills public male friendship at not just a psychological but also at an institutional level. Not because anybody decided there was going to be a formal rule against male friendship in order to persecute gays, and not because they think they might be actively persecuted for being gay, (they won't be) but because you've manipulated and changed the baseline social assumptions about what the sexual signals everyone is sending mean, and in the process, destroyed something very precious and very human.

And that's just public homoeroticism. Transgender takes that effect and only magnifies it tenfold, so that now, overt signals of attraction between the sexes -- the exact kind necessary to carry on the human race at all -- become inherently suspect. Men and women don't know what the hell they're even supposed to be or look for on a visceral level. The new standards and practices this movement advocates don't liberate and support the one different individual and insulate them from xenophobia -- in fact, they jam and disrupt the social/sexual signals for everybody else!

This is a real problem -- not just a religious problem, but a very secular problem -- because it affects birthrates. Not birthrates among gay or transgender people, but across the whole society. The more sexual confusion you dump into the system by making deviant sexual behaviors "loud and proud" in public, the more difficult it becomes to navigate how the hell normal people are supposed to meet up and have babies. And the world is not overpopulated -- that's nonsense. This is killing us.

This is one of the many reasons why sexual deviancy needs to stay marginalized. Not necessarily persecuted, but definitely kept out of the public eye. Sexual norms have a social function which is critical for the long term prosperity and survival of any human community and cannot be modified within certain very narrow guidelines without widespread chaos and destruction in the long term.

In short, the conservatives are right about this.

> "Because this is a question of linguistics, and not an attack on any individual. I'm simply noting common language, and what is most rational for any English speaker to conclude based on the sentence structure."

When it comes to gaytrans, language is the battlefield, not held in common at all.

If you go listing your preferred pronouns, then that act is the most definite public signal of your entire political platform that you can make. It guarantees which side you voted for and support in politics 100% of the time. It tells everyone all they need to know without any serious doubt about your stances across the whole slate of public issues, from abortion to zoo subsidies. Even an actual literal Trump hat isn't as clear of a one-sided partisan poltiical signal as that is.

And critically, it doesn't matter at all what the actual pronoun preferences are. Only the fact that you did it alone says everything. (I mean the rhetorical you, not you personally)

How we should use words is itself the critical question. There really isn't any neutral, objective standard of reasonable English to which you can appeal. English is what's on trial. It can't also be the judge.

> "I am not denying that trans gender people exist"

Are you a Catholic?

Do you believe that when the priest says mass over the bread and the wine, that they transubstantiate to become the actual literal body and blood of Jesus Christ?

If you deny that belief in transubstantiation as not being true, then are you attacking Catholics -- or Christ? Because you're certainly denying that the thing they believe in exists.

And for the trans movement, the eqiuvalent of that denial is blasphemy. It should get you ostracized. It should get you fired. It should get you stripped of any public credentials or authority. It should get you banished not just from the public square but from the universe itself.

There's no "separation of church and state" for the trans religion. No "two kingdoms" theory. There's just, ironically, iron clad dogmatic absolutes.

Or at least so far. They'd need to probably have some kind of schism so that they have to deal with significant sectarian problems within their own communities before they'd develop anything approaching liberalism.

That is, if we approach calling transgenderism a religion not as an insult, but as a genuine way of undersatnding their historical development. Which I think is key to comprehending what's even going on with this issue.

> "The question is mostly pointing out that the phrase in ambiguous without further clarification, and the most rational conclusion is to assume 'woman' not modified by any adjective, means 'adult human female'."

That really does entail denying that "trans people" exist. It clearly is saying "trans women" aren't really women: that only adult human females are real women. And that is clearly what the trans movement is explicitly against and has been very vocal about.

> "Trans can be due to trauma,"

Just like homosexuality.

> "trying to escape a sexist environment,"

Just like homosexuality.

> "heterosexual inversion (straight men who get sexual and romantic feelings from taking on femininity),"

This seems to literally be homosexuality? Unless I'm misreading you?

I obviously don't have a degree in gender studies so what I'm saying is not necessarily intended as sarcasm. I really do look at transgenderism as being based on homosexual tendencies that have merely been socialized and politicized under a new branding to manufacture a victim narrative identity, the same way that the "gay" identity was originally manufactured out of homosexual tendencies in the 19th century. (Proudly and openly at the time, I might add, by those who were consciously doing this. They said they were doing this: it wasn't a debate at the time whether this was the case or not)

> "This place is not reddit, and as long as people understand what philosophy is supposed to explore, you can dive into any philosophical concept about any topic."

OK, well, let's hope so, but when I saw that rule, my immediate thought was, "This is totally is Reddit." Reddit is exactly the site I thought of -- that this is just like Reddit, so why aren't these people just using Reddit? But I don't know that it's just like Reddit: I'm only saying that was my thought or suspicion.

In fact, the Book of Mormon is fully informed by this narrative about the curse of Ham and is referencing it clearly, and everything that I said is true about it. It looks like it's endorsing the curse of Ham narrative early in the text, but late in the text it is revealed that it is really against it, by showing the consequences of it on a large scale. The more righteous people in the Book of Mormon, turn out in the end to be the Lamanites who started out with this curse you refer to, but by the end of the text, they are elevated above the Nephites and given all the Nephites promises, while the Nephites themselves are utterly destroyed for their pride and hubris. And those promises extend explicitly to the present day. It is a complete reversal by the end of the text! In a way that doesn't seem possible early on!

Even having this topic open for discussion at all is something I find surprising because the rules of the forum say:

> "Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them."

And the "etc" pretty obviously includes a maximal dogmatic presumption that any challenge to left wing orthodoxy on any questions of social issues whatsoever is clearly disallowed, no matter how civil, no matter how educated. That is what this rule as written means and any disagreement with me on that point concerning what this text from the forum's rules in fact says is frankly dishonest, because words mean things.

Which means I may very well get banned for pointing this out:

The trans movement is fundamentally anti-philosophical and dogmatic. Dissent is not tolerated and even attempting to define the boundaries of orthodoxy so as not to stray from them is against the whole spirit of that community because what's valued there is a vibe, not an idea. Criticism is for apologists to dismantle outsiders with nihilism, not to show the movement itself a way forward. There will never be a genuine philosopher for the trans movement unless it grows past this stage early religions always have.

Saying the trans movement is a "cult" is actually intelligent if by "cult" you mean "early stage of a newly emerging religion" in a historical sense and not in the pejorative sense of the 20th century anti-cult movement. "Cult" after all, is the root word of "culture" and the historical root of cultures as well. It remains to be seen whether anyone within the deeply anti-conservative trans community will ever grow the conservative instincts necessary to conserve their own community in the long term, so that they can eventually grow from a cult into a religion and from a religion into a philosophy. (a process that typically takes at least something around 150 years)

Not that I even want this to happen: I just recognize the historical pattern.

But anyway, about the rules of the forum: this raises the question of why the trans question is being allowed at all. You're not allowed to question feminism or the gay movement, but you are allowed to question the trans movement? Why? What possible combination of philosophy and political theory allows for drawing the line at such a completely abitrary place?

As far as I'm concerned, trans is just gay with extra steps. All these movements are a package deal, not meaningful to evaluate separately. And I've thought for years that, while I understand you need to have some rules to maintain some common ground, a philosophy forum which would ban Thomas Aquinas, were he alive today, can't be any good.

Believing some people have dark skin because "God" cursed them is a little too offensive for me. — Athena

I hope you are aware that the Book of Mormon completely reverses its narrative on race by the end of the text. It sets things up to make you think it's going to side with 19th century white racialism early in the text, but then pulls the chair out from under that view by the end. It goes to the very core of that worldview and then brutally rips the guts out of it. Not as an outsider, but from a place of deeply understanding it, paying the narrative cost of doing that. And this wasn't an accident by any possible account either because Joseph Smith Jr and the early Latter Day Saints were vocally anti-slavery in a time and place where it was physically dangerous to be so. It is an explicitly liberal text (in the 19th century sense of the word liberal) and not what you'd assume if you go into it with a shallow reading, uninformed by historical context and then quit reading early on because of a stereotype.

Yes, it does say some things to set up the kind of world where white racialism makes sense: the kind of world which that worldview implicitly assumes must be how things work. But those statements do not stand unexamined by the end of the text.

Now I'm not saying everybody who gives it a fair reading does or should get convinced or converted to the Mormon church. I'm not with the Mormon church. I'm just saying, for the moment, that this particular charge of racism against the Book of Mormon can't be sustained given what was really going on both in the text and in the historical context of the 19th century.

Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether the Book of Mormon is true or false -- which is fair enough, because the text obnoxiously necessitates that kind of evaluation in its opening lines. But I think insufficient attention has been paid to the orthogonal question of whether the Book of Mormon is deep or shallow. My argument on this would be that no matter where you stand on its historicity, in fact, it is deep.

This is real disappointing, because I was hoping for something far more interesting: The question of, when specific religions fail to be passed on to the next generation, what causes this failure to happen, approached as philosophy of history. And not just religions but institutions, beliefs and practices of all kinds.

Instead, it seems to be just garden variety Reddit atheist stuff from the 2000s.

This is why the first new world religion spawned in the New World, Latter Day Saintism, fixes this problem with the Book of Mormon.

T

So, can the state (governing body) just dictate that women cannot have abortions unless their health is severely threatened? In other words, could all 50 states have a policy that automatically rejects abortions on the grounds of rape and incest? — Chany

I'm Pro-Life. The media and pro-abortion activists always seem to assumr this is an irrational religious thing. That only shows they're in an echo chamber. They aren't listening or thinking.

Pro-Lifers are logical. They aren't just expressing a personal dislike of abortion as being icky or disgusting. They are reasoning from the premise that abortion is murder and that's not an extreme position in the Pro-Life movement -- that is the mainstream Pro-Life view. So they do of course want to ban abortion / murder.

Are rape and incest babies somehow less human than other babies? If abortion is murder, then no exception for rape or incest can be rationally justified. Such a thing would be logically indefensible.

By the way, I'm not praising Hamilton here either. He had his own set of problems. But going to France wasn't exactly a genius move.

Also, Lin-Manuel Miranda is a racist. A great songwriter, but also a huge racist. He's like a 21st century Richard Wagner. Puts on huge impressive stage musicals constructed out of leitmotifs, and is super racist in his politics. Totally Wagnerian.

Jefferson gave up on the inanity and went to France.

That is called real thought, based on real knowledge — ernestm

What?

You do know France erupted into a violent revolution which was a complete and utter failure to protect the people's liberty to such an extreme degree that they spread war to all of Europe all for nothing under an egomaniacal dictator and eventually straight up abandoned the republican project altogether and restored the monarchy just to stop the madness, right?