DocWatts

Here is what advocacy organizations are actually proposing, as opposed to the straw man characterization of these organizations being about Police Abolition.

This is a straw man argument. Defund does not mean Abolish. No serious advocacy organization on the Left is calling for abolishment of the police. What Defund means in this context is demilitarization and reallocating funding from bloated police departments to human services. Much of what the police are asked to do could be better handled by Social Workers who have actual training on things such as mental health problems, domestic disputes, and substance abuse. The police would still exist, but the scope of what they are asked to achieve would be reduced; namely responding to violent crime, rather than being asked to be warriors and diplomats and social workers. If someone breaks in to your house or an active shooter is present, you would still call the Police. If you're going to argue against Defunding at least respond to the actual arguments and proposals that are being made.

Of course Corporations and affluent Individuals are going to use every means at their disposal to avoid contributing back to the system that made them wealthy by finding ways to evade taxes, because that's exactly what a culture mired in toxic individualism incentives. Since we know that this is the case, it's on the more socially conscious among us to work and advocate for systemic reforms to limit the opportunities for the affluent to game and cheat the system. Allowing individuals and syndicates to amass so much wealth in the first place is one of the Root issues, as it gives Bad Actors opportunities to capture political institutions and corrupt them to serve their own interests. Unfortunately this is a feature rather than a bug that is baked in to Capitalism, where Capitalism and Democracy are working at cross purposes. Social Democracy is a step in the right direction, but more fundamental reforms towards a post-capitalist society that takes a different approach to how markets and capital interact with the broader society will be what's ultimately required to fix the flaws with this perverse incentive structure.

Jordon Peterson fans : "JP's such an concise and articulate speaker!" JP when asked a direct question about his beliefs : (Here's the actual clip, but the fact that a satirical show from the 2000s about a half man half bird half angel is reminiscent of Jordy's answer to this same question is illustrative).

Less of a binary thing and more of a sliding scale of Devilry. Exon Mobile is further along on that scale than Tesla, but they're both playing a game where the incentive structure rewards Devilry.

Truth. Compare either of these figures to someone like Noam Chomsky to see the difference between YouTube pseudo-intellectuals and an actual intellectual who's made important contributions to several different fields of knowledge. Both Jordy P. and Sam Harris's take on political issues are routinely so ill informed and reductive that they make my brain bleed. Being able to speak coherently on a given subject doesn't automatically mean that one's opinions are well thought enough to be worth taking seriously. Ben Shapiro is also someone who is decent at stringing words together to form coherent nonsensical arguments; that doesn't mean he should be taken seriously.

While 'if you're going to talk the talk then you should walk the walk' is a valid criticism to make, I do wonder how much personal responsibility a 15 year old Zoomer should be expected to have for thier personal consumption habits. Especially when there are multibillion dollar industries whose whole purpose for existing is to use knowledge of psychology to shape consumption habits in people at an early stage of development. Suffice to say that consumption habits are highly influenced by predatory forces baked in to the system. I'm all for taking personal responsibility for collective problems, but we also have to take in to account that a systemic problem like Climate Change isn't going to be solved by individual consumption choices. Whether the United States remains a democracy a few decades from now will have orders of magnitude more impact on the Climate than whether pockets of the country opt for more eco friendly options when buying groceries.

That list is pretty spot on. The next question is what's the lifeblood of this societal pyramid that's in scarce supply? I'd argue that it's capital, meaning both financial and social capital.

The question brings to mind a fun game where someone proposes a Wish for a genie, and the other person proposes a monkey's paw sort of twist to that wish. The point is to examine the hubris of your own wishes. So when someone Wishes for peace on Earth, the genie responds by setting the clock forward to when the Sun is a dwarf star and all life on the planet has been extinguished for billions of years. No life, no conflict. So maybe conflict has an actual purpose then, eh?

If someone knocks on your door, waving around an assault rifle 'asking' to be let in, it's not really a question at that point. Likewise, if someone drives to an incredibly tense protest in another city, open carrying a weapon with the intention of enforcing vigilante justice, that person has intentionally put themselves and others in a situation where someone is likely to be injured or killed. He was looking to escalate an already tense situation, and unfortunately he succeeded Third degree or negligent homicide (aka manslaughter) would be the appropriate sentence. And for what it's worth, I don't think it's unreasonable to see Rittenhouse himself as a victim of the toxic Right Wing gun culture in the US, any more than it would be to see a 17 year old kid living in a inner city who was indoctrinated in to a gang as a victim.

That's a rather good way of characterizing the current state of the two political parties; one being regressive, the other with some factional splits but on the whole conservative.

Conservatism is always going to be contextual to some degree. In some contexts that would entail maintaining the status quo. In the context of contemporary America which has been undergoing a paradigm shift towards Green over the last half century, Conservatism necessarily entails trying to roll the clock back on societal progress. So it's fair to say that Conservatism in a contemporary context is quite regressive. For example on abortion, maintaining the status quo would mean preserving Roe v. Wade, rather than trying to erase 60 years of progress on reproductive rights. Ditto for the expansion of civil rights that happened as part of this paradigm shift, as much of contemporary Conservatism is motivated in part by a resentment of the gains that have been made by communities of color in the last half century. Trying to reimpliment elements of Jim Crow by restricting voting rights with surgical precision towards communities of color is reactionary, rather than a preservation of the status quo.

The manufactured controversy about the long overdue removal of Confederate statues isn't all that dissimilar from the manufactured hysteria about Critical Race Theory. The fact that these statues of Confederate leaders were erected in the 20th century as a deliberate anti-civil rights statement meant to intimidate black people, is besides the point. The entire political strategy of the Right hinges upon emotionally manipulating low information Voters into a hysteria over issues that have no actual impact on their day to day lives. Not like the Right in America has anything to offer these people that will make their lives better, so they'll go out of thier way to move the narrative to literally anything other than socioeconomic issues.

@supremeyingyang Not sure if you've had the chance to read The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology, but they're a two book treatise on Metamodernism and Integral politics which emphasize exactly this; building a more compassionate society which makes it easier for people to self actualize.

The Good Place said it best. This is true not just for people damaged by growing up in rough circumstances. But also for privileged folks who never develop curiosity about what life is like for people less fortunate than themselves; because they were likely not surrounded by empathetic people, and thus were never encouraged to explore the possiblity of having social responsibilities for the well being of other people.

I'd say that the difference is that Conservatism picks an arbitrary point in the past to romanticize, then works to roll back aspects of societal progress that it finds distasteful / threatening. It's a regressive ideology. Centricism is more about preserving the status quo by making incremental tweaks to existing institutions. Progressivism is about transformative change.

For sure, and I wasn't trying to imply that development is deterministic, as individual volition does have an important role to play. Yet at the same time, drawing from my own experiences, the fragility or robustness of one's ego has everything to do with one's willingness to introspect and learn. Not surprising that this is a far more challenging task for people who had to construct a highly defensive ego in order to meet their survival needs.

Well said. It's important to keep in mind that development is a matter of privilege and opportunity, rather than a moral defect in people at earlier stages of development. Framing it in this way is crucial for keeping whatever worldview we happen to hold ethical by grounding it in compassion.

Yes Radicalism is relative to the culture one lives in, but the cultural differences between the US and somewhere like Canada or Britain are so minor as to be negligible. People who think that think that something like Universal Healthcare or raising taxes on Capital Gains are pie in the sky ideas tend to be aggressively unimaginative and resistant to learning from other countries. There's a reason that this type of mentality is a refuge for the egoicly fragile anti-intellectualism found at the lower levels of Spiral Dynamics. It's like they insist on driving a car with square wheels because that's the way they've always done things. And when thier next door neighbor points out that the rest of the neighborhood is laughing at them as thier car struggles to make it down the street, their response is to take issue with the mere suggestion that they could learn a thing or two from people who've figured things out that they haven't.

Focusing on 'wokeness' is easy as it doesn't entail having to challenge corporate interests funding thier political campaigns with any sort of substantiative change that might hurt thier donor's bottom lines. It's an insincere way for moderate Democrats to try and placate progressives to come out to the polls. But it doesn't work because a majority of progressives are able to see through this when people like Hilary Clinton try to come of as 'woke' without offering any transformative political reforms to address systemic problems. As for the 'success' of neo-liberalism under Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama, it's failure to actually address the decline in living standards that began in the Reagan era is partly to blame for the rise of far Right Populism.

Yeah in my mind modes of production and thier relation to social systems, which then give rise to shifts in value systems, is a more useful application of the four quadrants model. Technologies don't rise in a vacuum after all, they're always going to be situated in a survival context. Something like the widespread adoption of agriculture and the associated gestalt shift that it brought wasn't an conscious decision to switch lifestyles; rather it was a response to shifting survival needs and adopted out of necessity rather than as a deliberate choice. (Indeed, an agriculturalist's day to day life is much more laborious than that of a hunter gatherer). As for SD-Orange, the seeds of Industrialization were sown by the scientific method which was developed by an Aristocratic elite freed from day to day Survival concerns thanks to the stability of a State. The competitive advantage to be gained by applying the scientific method to modes of production is of obvious utility for syndicates and nation states in competition with one another. As the first world-centric Stage, it's no surprise that it emerges amongst a background of commerce and trade (though military conflict and imperialism are also used as part of this competition). Of course Industrialization is a double edged sword, unleashing both the productive capacity of mankind as well as a charnel house of horrors (both of which are emphasized in Marx's critiques of capitalism, Marxism itself being a thoroughly Orange ideology). The 'Post-Industrial' economies that characterize SD-Green societies (or the Social Democracies which are the closest to having a Green center of gravity) are only post-industrial in the sense that they rely on less developed countries for raw materials and basic consumer goods, in a sense 'exporting' things like sweatshops and child labor from thier own populations to poorer countries. While a portion of thier population has transitioned to a knowledge and information based economy, the material basis of these societies is still reliant on the modes of production pionered from Orange, even if the worst aspects of Orange have been exported off-shore. As far as Green modes of production, one would expect them to be non- exploitative and grounded in ecological sustainability. While these sorts of businesses do of course exist in the form of things like worker co-ops and Fair Trade syndicates, they're far from the majority in any society on Earth.

As far as being in the camp of Centrist Contrarians with poorly thought out political takes, he's in good company with the likes of Joe Rogan and Sam Harris.

@Hardkill I don't deny that AOC is further Left than much of the rest of the country. Just that calling her a radical Leftist is an inaccurate caricature advanced by bad faith actors on the Right, as she's a reformist Social Democrat. Advocating for policies that are uncontroversial in most of the rest of the developed world is hardly the mark of a Radical.

Marx was aware of this as well, though his take on modes of production as the driving force behind historical change was more Reductionist than Ken Wilber's holistic model. It's interesting to notice how different modes of production naturally lend themselves to different types of social and political organization. Beige and Purple are an outgrowth of hunter gatherer and horticulturalist survival bands, where social organization is face to face and non-depersonalized. Intimate knowledge of one's ecological environment, which plants are edible or useful, can be considered a technology at this stage every bit as much as fire or hand tools. The agricultural mode of production brought with it changes to social organization which resulted in changes in the collective interior as societies grew too large to operate on an interpersonal, face to face basis. Survival conditions are such that we begin to see the rise of dominator hierarchies and social stratification. This mode of production also necessitates the shift from a spirit haunted world to more distant power gods who are to be pleased with and appeased. The mercantile system which emerged as agrarian societies grew larger and began to operate on a basis other than pure 'might makes right' dominator hierarchies also brought with it changes to the collective unconscious. Here societies are characterized by a shared mythology (usually religion) which serves the sociological purpose of allowing large societies to operate on something other than raw power Dynamics. The mercantilist mode of production allows for the specialization of labor in to professions on a wide scale basis, setting the stage for the emergence of industrialization. Will get to the Industrial and Post Industrial stages later to keep this post from turning in to a giant wall of text

Since I see some book recommendations popping up, I've been interested in learning more about the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Anyone familiar enough with the subject to toss a book recommendation my way?