DocWatts

The closest thing to Yellow political parties / candidates are Process Oriented political parties like Volt, something that can only be found right now in some of the progressive Social Democracies of Europe. A Process Oriented political party is one that seeks to improve the level of public discourse by consensus building and by a process of co-determination to discover what the best political solution to any given issue may be. Naturally a high degree of social solidarity within a mature Green democracy is pretty much a prerequisite for this sort of system to function, which is why they're only starting to appear in the most developed countries in the world. Green Social Democracy v2.0 is another way to think of these sorts of parties. https://metamoderna.org/the-danish-alternative-a-party-about-nothing/

There's also an important difference between personality traits that are ego-centonic and those that are ego-distonic. The difference is that ego-centonic traits are those that are parsimonious with your values, and are congruent with who you think you are as a person. They're things you like about yourself and identify with. Ego-distonic traits on the other hand are things that you don't like about yourself and wish to change, because they conflict with who you think you are (or would like to be) as a person. While a self described 'race realist' like Richard Spencer or Ben Shapiro's racism is ego-centonic because it's not seen as a problem, what you're describing is obviously an ego-distonic trait. The way you fix that is to unlearn ways that you've been conditioned towards pre-reflectively 'Othering' people with a different ethnic or cultural background. One of the ways that you begin to solve this is by positive face to face interactions with the group that you're Othering. Is there a point of contact you can find (such as a social activity you enjoy doing) that would bring you in to contact with people outside of your own background? For a lot of people college serves this function, but really it could be anything: sports, dancing, music, board games, social activism, etc. Finding ways to bond with individuals from other backgrounds will begin to dissolve those pre-reflective judgements and make them untenable over time.

Canada hasn't been listed as a backsliding democracy, for one. If the idea of a coup attempt taking place in Canada sounds ludicrous, then you enjoy a level of social and political stability that's no longer taken for granted in the 'States. The lived reality of the political landscape here involves everyone outside of the far Right trying to forestall the collapse of democracy over the next four to ten years. So yeah, things are quite bit worse here than in Canada.

@vizual If I'm understanding you correctly you're not opposed to social programs that aim to raise the socio-economic floor, and that everyone has the right to a decent standard of life. But have you perhaps considered that forcing people to give birth who aren't emotionally or financially able to support a child might be contributing to cyclical trends of generational poverty and emotional neglect/abuse? And that people who grow up in abusive or neglectful circumstances are more more likely to harm other people as a result? You mention parental responsibility. Does that extend to giving the parents the right to terminate a pregnancy if its determined to be particularly dangerous to the mother? Or if the doctors can tell that a pregnancy is unviable? If not, are there any circumstances where abortion should be allowed? You also mention that sex education mostly doesn't help. What in your experience leads you to believe that this is indeed the case (since the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests otherwise)?

@vizual If that's your position, are you also fully supportive of funding universal health care, universal child care, paid family leave, high quality public education, and social welfare programs for struggling families? Do you support comprehensive sex education and easy access to contraception to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies? Are these things also important to you, or do you see society's obligation to the well being of children end once an infant has left it's mother's womb?

Mask wearing is something that's been culturally accepted in Japan long before Covid. They're also a much less pathologically individualistic society than a place like the US, where grown men and women have been throwing temper tantrums in public over having to weak a mask before going in to a store. The US still has quite a bit of SD-Red in it (as evidenced by the appeal of Trump), which is where a lot of the anti-mask and anti-vaccine sentiment is coming from.

In some ways he can be likened to someone like a Henry Ford who was responsible for the propagation of technological advancements that contributed to the development of society, but was also highly problematic figure who advocated for some repulsive social and political ideas. Society needs to transition to electric vehicles and Tesla has played an important part in kicking that off. And under the capitalist system that exists, venture capital is how that happens (not saying this is ideal, but just stating the facts). So one can give him some credit for bankrolling industries with obvious social utility, without giving him a pass on the ways he's been socially irresponsible by preaching that the rich don't need to pay thier fair share of taxes and that society isn't obligated to help the less well off.

Or to put it another way, the radicalization of the American right wing has furnished Trump with what what are essentially contemporary brown shirts. Scary stuff.

Democracies don't just collapse overnight. Every collapse that's happened was proceeded by a period of years to decades where democracy was ceasing to function in a normal or healthy manner. And the truth is that democracy has been on the decline in America for some time now. The incentive structure of capitalism is at cross purposes with democracy, and unlike the Social Democracies of Europe the US has been unable to prevent political system capture by oligarchs who were able to roll back much of the New Deal and force austerity measures on the public. In addition to the meta-paradigm shift (and resulting ego-backlash) towards Green, I don't think it's any coincidence that the resurgence in fascism is also taking place amid a half century decline in living standards for most Americans. I have to think that a lot of the resentment that's fueling the resurgence in white-nationalism is a result of a large portion of white Americans being subjected to the same sorts of economic deprivation that communities of color have experienced throughout the history of this country. Material deprivation and economic anxiety provides fuel for Bad Actors to channel feelings of anger and resentment towards societal 'elites'. Capitalizing upon these feelings, they then work within the existing democratic system to garner support among a portion of the public to end democracy. The reason that this is possible is due to widespread feelings that existing institutions have become corrupted and lack legitimacy in the eyes of the public, which is the kernal of truth that fascism exploits for the purposes of amassing power. What we're seeing right now is exactly how one would expect fascism to work if and when it came to America. Most people have too restricted a notion of what fascism is (ie Nazi Germany), not realizing that fascism adapts itself to the conditions of the society it finds itself in. It sells itself as a return to a 'traditional' way of life towards a segment of the population that's feeling threatened by changes happening in the society, and this necessarily will look different in America than it did in Germany, Italy, or Spain.

My own perspective is that Hegel's dialectical system was superior to Marx's in almost every way. That's not to say that Marx doesn't apply dialectics to good effect for the purposes of deconstructing oppressive hierarchies, just that hitching it to materialist assumptions makes it a far more limited tool and also introduces the likelihood of commiting epistemic errors.

I can envision communism working quite well on a small scale for communities that are under the Dunbar number. The problem comes with scaling that sort of system up to work well for a society of millions of people, because it introduces Game Denial which would require changes in human nature to overcome. That's not to deny the validity of Marx's critique of Capitalism. Just that his perspective is true but partial.

That's a little outside my wheelhouse (most of my non-fiction reading these days is stuff like philosophy, science, history, etc) Plenty of people here who would probably be more qualified to answer that, and happy to hand out a few recommendations

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is what you're looking for, as it's a book that explores the epistemic foundations of science. The author's intention is to present a more accurate picture of what science is and how it works, as opposed to misconceptions about science in the popular culture. Among these misconceptions are the notion that science is a collection of facts and theories gradually building towards 'The Truth', similiar to bricks that are laid down by someone who's building a house. Rather, the author demonstrates that the endeavour of science is a dialectic of shifting paradigms. Old theories get tossed out, and differing paradigms see the role of science in differing (often incommensurable) ways. The author also goes in to how a scientific paradigm is formed, how it proceeds under normal conditions, under what conditions it is thrown in to crisis, and how crisis leads to new paradigms. And that this dialectic is ultimately what makes scientific advancement possible. Anyways, hope this helps!

My own perspective is that questions of whether or not ethics is either relative or universalist (a binary), seems like the wrong of way of framing the issue. A better way of framing it is to consider relativism and universalism as a sliding scale, with the question of how relativistic should a workable system of ethics be?

@Fleetinglife Interesting write up and analysis. One of the upcoming books on my reading list is Zizek's Less Than Nothing : Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, which I'm looking forward to. My contention wasn't that Marxism itself was Red (indeed it was a thoroughly Orange, modernist ideology). Just that the conditions of early 20th century Russia where Leninism emerged led quite naturally to a Red/Blue version of Marxism being in the best position to win that power struggle (just in case that wasn't clear from my previous post). My own perspective is that the possibility of internal dissent isn't something unknown to Red, for example the Roman republic had plenty of internal dissent yet was pretty good example of a Red (or a Red/Blue) society. And support for secession by itself doesn't necessarily indicate higher levels of the Spiral. The US civil war is a good demonstration of this, as the sect lower on the spiral was the one pushing for secession so that the institution of slavery could continue to exist. To add to this, from my perspective it seems that Rosa Luxemburg's reservations about secession come from concerns that emerge higher up the Spiral (Orange / Green), rather than allowing allowing secession regardless of the cost it may have on the people living in the seceding territory It was also my understanding that the toleration of national liberation movements had more to do with the view at the time that the Soviet experiment was seen more as a holding action, whose security depended on revolutions toppling capitalist governments in other countries. And that a single Marxist country couldn't survive on its own because the capitalist counties would band together to destroy it (which was true as evidenced by the Civil War, but also a self fulfilling prophesy due to an ideology that was antagonistic towards every other major government in the world). Also, I'm curious if you're familiar with Noam Chomsky's critique of Marx-Leninism, and if so what your thoughts on his critique are? For my own part I agree with his assessment, but if you disagree I'd be curious to hear why.

Concern for the well being of others does not make one obligated to validate whatever toxic or delusional beliefs that other individuals happen to hold, especially if those beliefs motivate behaviors which cause harm to others.

I agree. But that doesn't mean turning a blind eye to toxic, destructive behavior because of this. Compassion doesn't necessitate that every noxious, harmful belief structure under the sun should be tolerated by the rest of society because it arose from people who were hurt, demeaned, or humiliated. We can be compassionate towards people who have been victimized in these ways without condoning thier bad behavior.

That's a fair critique, but at the same time these same problems plague every other system of ethics. And this includes universalist ethics because if everyone in the world agreed on what a universal ethic should be, we wouldn't need a philosophy of ethics. Radically different contexts are always going to be incommensurable to some degree. Any ethical system (whether it's consequentialist, deontological, or virtue based) can only work when there's enough of a shared context for certain underlying assumptions to be taken at face value as a starting point. Also, I feel that I should point out that virtue ethics need not necessarily be radically relativistic either. Contexts for human beings aren't so boundless that some broad principles can't be used as a starting point for the assumptions underlying a particular virtue ethic; things like honesty, compassion, etc.

By this point if someone is still stubbornly refusing to get vaccinated, that indicates to me that what I would consider a basic concern for the well being of others isn't an important component of that person's value system. And are in all likelihood probably beyond convincing by this point. In the same way that I'm not expecting a MAGA cultist to be able to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, I'm not holding my breath that short of an existential crisis those selfishly refusing vaccines will seriously introspect and reflect on thier basic beliefs. The point of calling out toxic ideologies isn't necessarily to change hearts and minds, but to innoculate communities from noxious beliefs and behaviors by making it crystal clear that certain attitudes are outside of what's considered socially acceptable.

Value arises from having a sense of meaning and purpose. For happiness to be sustainable it has to be connected to what that person finds meaningful about thier life. Human beings can tolerate many things, but they won't tolerate for very long not having a meaningful answer to why it is they get up in the morning and go do whatever it is they do throughout the day. As to ethics, I wouldn't say it's a neglected part of philosophy so much as its often something that most people's understanding of is implicit rather than explicit. It's something that becomes embodied and expressed in various ideologies and worldviews. Of the three major philosophical schools on ethics (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics), virtue ethics seems to me to be the most sensible of the three. Deontology is too restrictive and not practical for the ambiguities of every day life. Consequentialism is easily abused and can be dehumanizing if not applied with a great deal of care. Virtue ethics seems to jibe with whatd we understand about human psychology and development. It's implicit in wisdom traditions such as Buddhism, and for a good reason. It's better suited for the ambiguities of every day life since it's not always practical or possible to run a cost benefit analysis on every decision. Or develop and apply rules that are universally applicable across the wide degree of contexts that decisions need to be made in.

Brutal survival conditions lead to oppressive Red ideologies. Considering the brutal survival conditions of early 20th century Russia it's no surprise that Lenin's authoritarian Marxism (Red/Blue) ended up winning the power struggle over more humane forms of socialism.

Marx was a valuable philosopher and economist whose critical perspective on capitalism deserves to be taken seriously. That doesn't mean he was right about everything though, or that conditions haven't changed in the century and a half since Marx. Can't say anything positive about the revolutionary vanguard-ism of Leninism, as it's an authoritarian version of Marxism born from brutal survival conditions which led to the deaths of millions of people.

As for polarization, the American right wing intentionally chose to politicize a virus. There wasn't such a Left / Right divide on this issue until Trump propagandized his legions of Cult like followers to reject the vaccine along with masks and social distancing, with the help of opportunistic simps within the GOP and right wing media. But nice attempt at gaslighting. This isn't a joke. Close to 800,000 people in the US alone have died of Covid. That's more than all the US deaths in of all the wars of the 20th century combined. The freedumb to refuse a safe and effective vaccine along with refusing to follow basic safety procedures such as masks during a pandemic has caused thousands of preventable deaths. Making a bare modicum of effort to keep others safe during a pandemic is a matter of basic human decency towards other people.

Here in the US, god forbid if you have a heart attack or get in a car accident in Trump-istan where hospitals are at full capacity due to the strain that the unvaccinated are putting on the health care system. Healthy people choosing not to get vaccinated because Trump or Joe Rogan told them not to are prolonging the pandemic and leading to unnecessary deaths. The vaccine has had full FDA approval for a while now. Vaccine mandates are fully justified by this point, and it's completely understandable why the rest of society is running out of patience for people who selfishly are still refusing to get vaccinated.