Women who like Palin are idiots

"Brendan Moran, I've decided I agree with you. I've also decided that you annoy me and I want to eliminate you. Now if I could just convince a lot of other people to feel the same way and then...geez, how to do it...maybe some cool uniforms, guns, symbols to rally around, some slogans. Would you mind submitting an insulting caricature of yourself so I can post it under the words "Transhumanists verboten?" O.K., just kidding! But really, why shouldn't I, if I could?"

No reason you "shouldn't," but that's a big "if," don't you think? In general, most people in this society have accepted that the costs of being the sort of society where armed purges of other adults with whom they disagree outweigh the benefits.

Jeez, Brendan, why even waste your meaningless time from your meaningless life to post on this meaningless blog?

Because I enjoy it! Why else does anyone do anything?

""Rights and needs and all that poppycock." Grim freaking world you occupy."

Not at all! It's quite liberating to see the world as a place without a defined purpose or any rules other than the ones we choose for ourselves.

"Anyone could decided based on their own personal preference that you are worthless and needed to be eliminated."

They *could* decide that, yes, indeed, but the last time the forces of pluralistic capitalism went up against the forces of fascism, it didn't work out so well for fascism, and since then the world has had 60 years to enjoy the fruits of the victory of pluralism and capitalism.

How did the US and Britain win World War II? By tapping into the monstrous advantages of a multinational labor force, both to fill boots on the ground and to crank out war materiel. We out-produced the s*** out of the Axis, and we bombed them into the f***ing ground. The best part is that our significantly more pro-scientific and ethnically-diverse intellectual atmosphere enabled us to host the displaced Einsteins of the world, who then built us a handy bomb, with which we not only won the war, but enforced a stalemate in the Cold War long enough for our almost absurd productivity advantage to run the Soviets into the ground, too.

The big lesson of the 20th century is that pluralism + capitalism blows the pants off pretty much everything else on the board. No society that isn't already basically in a state of collapse hasn't learned that lesson, and as a result everyone knows that cosmopolitan educated types like me are the engine driving our economy into the 21st century. No nation or faction with the kind of power necessary to organize such a purge has anything to gain from killing the goose that keeps laying such lovely golden eggs (i.e. the open society => prosperity => highest living standards in the history of the world)

"Amoral anarchy"

Define anarchy. I'm not unsympathetic to anarcho-capitalism, and I surely don't see what would make it a horror.

"or fascism are only two possible horrors that could arise from your worldview,"

And you stand a good chance of being killed every time you pull your car out of your driveway. There are always horrible, horrible things that *could* happen as the result of any belief system, but we are not incapable of taking precautions or remaining alert to make sure they don't actually happen. What I see *actually* happening is a world that gets better by the day, despite the best efforts of some to turn the wheel backwards.

In any case, in practice, people do what they want, and make up the rationalizations afterwards. If someone wants an excuse to go all Nazi, they'll make one up.

"which Nietzsche already did a bang up job of elucidating more than a century ago. You are essentially an emerging fascist, Brendan,"

Someone on a "crunchy con" blog is calling *me* a fascist, when "crunchy conservatism" is, itself, basically fascism lite (the sanctity of the traditional family, the need to breed, the kitschy romanticizing of small-town village life and pastoralism, the obsession with authenticity, the rhetoric about public virtue and the health of the community, etc etc). Classic.

"and it is no surprise that in a society that has begun to lose its moorings,"

Every society has moorings. The ones that succeed are moored to values that are useful adaptations in the technological and economic circumstances predominant in their place and time. I think it's safe to say that my values are better adapted to the reality of a post-industrial globalized urban information/knowledge/creativity economy than yours. They would be less useful in a small-scale agricultural society like, say, Europe in the Middle Ages, where you would be much better adapted.

"people increasingly share your views."

Another reason I don't stay up at night worrying that Betty Carter's brownshirts are going to come for me.

"Do not take this as an unkindly comment, Brendan, but this is all intellectual masturbation on your part, and a tremendously wearisome exercise in willfully obtuse semantics and sophistry."

It's not masturbation, nor am I being willfully obtuse. This is how the world works, this is what "morality" means, and I am not just goofing around with ideas I don't actually believe and don't actually live by. I'm also pretty far from being the only person who thinks this way: there is certainly a strong Nietzschean current in contemporary philosophy.

We don't share enough common principles to make further discussion much more useful, admittedly, but I'm not arguing that you don't sincerely believe the things you're saying or that you're just being masturbatory. I am saying they're irrational, oppressive, and have no bearing on reality, but I don't doubt that you believe them (however terrifying that thought might be).

I am an idiot, too!