DocWatts

For those not aware of how big of a deal this actually is, it will essentially give Bernie Sanders enormous leverage to push for progressive economic policies using the process of budget reconciliation to override Republican obstructionism through the use of the filibuster. Why this is important is because, unlike traditional Legislation which requires a two thirds majority in the Senate to pass, budget reconciliation requires only a simple majority. In the past, Republicans in the Senate have used the process of budget reconciliation to push through unpopular policies such as tax cuts for corporations, the flip side of that is that the same process can also be used to pass policies that aim to help ordinary people. Of course it's important to manage expectations, as there are limits on what can be achieved using this method, but it does at least give the incoming Biden administration an avenue to pursue policies like Covid relief, investments in Green energy and in Infrastructure, and support for families and small businesses. And for the record Joe Biden is far from a Social Democrat like Bernie, but from what we've seen so far he does seem amenable to popular pressure for needed reforms, and has been willing to work with more progressive Democrats in several areas. **I'm aware that using budget reconciliation to pass policy is far from ideal, but until the Senate filibuster is either reformed or removed, this is one of the few methods available to prevent public policy being held hostage to the obstructionism of a minority political party. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/bernie-sanders-budget-committee.html Explanation of the Senate Budget Committee https://www.budget.senate.gov/about/committee-history

Agreed. Spiral Dynamics is a great starting point, but the model has limitations, and sloppy applications of it can be used to reinforce cultural stereotypes (assuming that everyone at Stage Green is a socialist, or a hippie, or that Stage Blue has to be a God fearing religious zealot, etc, etc). Even when applied properly and with nuance, one of the main limitations of Spiral Dynamics is that it attempts to merge several dimensions of development down into one Stage or Meme. It doesn't make a clear enough distinction between the complexity of someone cognitive capabilities (a person's mental 'hardware', if you will) and the cultural code (or 'software') that they operate from. Spiral Dynamics fails to incorporate how people can either out-complex, or be outcomplexed by, the SD-Stage they're centered at. Consider a 16 year old girl brought up by hippie parents and roughly at SD-stage Green. And let's compare her to someone like Aristotle, a deep and complex thinker who happened to be at SD-Stage Blue. Which one is at a higher stage of Development? The hippie girl relates in a very shallow way to a more complex stage of Development, while Aristotle relates in a more deeper, more complex way to a much simpler and less nuanced SD-Stage. Which of the two is more developed according to Spiral Dynamics? The fact that it doesn't give a clear answer is a demonstration of some of its limitations. Probably much too complex to cover in this thread, but works by people like Ken WIlber and Hanzi Freinacht combine Spiral Dynamics with other developmental models to arrive at a more nuanced and complete developmental system.

Heh, probably just means I internalized Ken Wilber's ideas more than I was aware of, as this wasn't intentional on my part I do think that Ken Wilber does strawman Green to some extent, but his basic critique of postmodernism is valid

Phrasing it that way is a bit of a strawman argument... A better way of putting it is that Green postmodernism is suspicious of Grand Narratives, with the contradiction being that the postmodern perspective fails to recognize that it itself is also a Grand Narrative. It also says that all knowledge and social values are contextual and socially constructed, while failing to see how that's also true of its own perspective. It's suspicious of hierarchies, while refusing to see how the postmodern paradigm sees itself as superior to all preceding paradigms.

Also, what I picture whenever someone mentions Turquoise in relation to themselves:

I read a handful of books on Developmental Psychology , so guess I'm what's known as 'Spiral Wizard' now. Do they send you your pointy hat and staff, or do you have to go somewhere to collect them?

In a strict sense no; it's a developmental model used to contextualize why people have the worldviews they do, how different worldviews relate to one another, and how worldviews change over time. A rough analogy might be something like the Hegelian Dialectic or Darwin's Theory of Evolution, in that all three are systemic ways of examining change over time for living systems. But because all three are very broad and have vast implications, they can still be used to provide structural support for various ideologies and worldviews, even if the models themselves are not ideologies. For example, the Theory of Evolution is not an ideology; at the same time it does end up being used to provide a sort of foundation for Modernist ideologies like scientism and new atheism (which couldn't exist without it). The Hegelian Dialectic, which proposes that new ideas result from a synthesis of two opposing thought systems being in tension with one another, is also not an ideology in the strict sense of the word. But it was used as a starting point for Karl Marx in the creation of his ideology. And in a similar way, I do think that insights from developmental models like Spiral Dynamics are being used to construct a newly emerging paradigm (or meta-ideology) that places itself in opposition to both postmodernism and modernism : metamodernism. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/202004/what-is-metamodernism

Michigan's really a microcosm of the entire country in a lot of ways; cities like Ann Arbor and Ferndale are as progressive as anything you'll find on the West coast, while rural areas forty minutes away are deep Blue Trump country. Only thing Michigan doesn't really have is a huge SD-Orange financial Capitol that would be an analogy to something like New York City.

The point to take away here is that it's possible to be an asshole about anti-racism, just like it's possible to be an asshole about veganism, or feminism, or any other number of laudable ideas that become counter productive when practiced in a very judgmental way.

Like it or not, in this day and age, public intellectuals are a large part of how ideas get transmitted from Specialist Fields within Academia and into Mainstream Culture. This has both positive and negative aspects to it. No matter how intellectually curious and developed you are, no one is going to be able to become an expert in quantum mechanics and comparative theology and psychology and evolutionary biology and sociology and AI Research and so on, and so on. And I don't care how many days a Mystic spends sitting in a cave meditating and contemplating, there's just some knowledge that depends on Empirical observations and Interpersonal Interactions, that they're not going to have access to unless they go out and seek it. Taking a deep dive into any Specialist Field is going to come with opportunity costs, so the breadth and depth of one's knowledge will always be limited. Part of the job of public intellectuals is to make these ideas more accessible for a wider audience. Serious question: how many people here have tried actually reading an Academic Paper from a field you're not familiar with? It's likely to be filled with technical terms and jargon that you're not familiar with, and trying to wade through it will likely feel like banging your head up against a wall. The problem comes when Cults of Personality begin to form around these figures, and when they begin transmuting their Specialized Knowledge into an Ideology, often in a very subtle and sneaky ways. So it seems like what we should be doing is pushing for a Healthier and more Honest form of Public Intellectualism.

The work of Steven Pinker comes to mind when trying to come up with examples of contemporary public intellectuals who display some of the Healthier aspects of the Orange vMeme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. Pinker is also the author of eight books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007), describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, arguing that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014), is a general language-oriented style guide.[9] Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) argues that violence in human societies has generally steadily declined over time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. Enlightenment Now (2018) uses social science data to show a general improvement of the human condition over recent history.

More intelligent than a starfish or parrot? Eh, I'll grant him that. All kidding aside, if we were to chart him on a cognitive developmental level using something like the Hierarchical Model of Complexity, he would have reached something like Formal stage (which is what most adults reach), where one can present arguments and spin narratives, but has trouble dealing with complexity or systemic thinking. The cultural code, or 'software' he's running is one level of development below the center of gravity of his society (roughly SD-stage Blue). Not really a lot of support for him being 'intelligent'. More like he's an average guy parroting some outdated cultural ideas.

Sorry about that, and thank you. I can't recommend the book highly enough for anyone with an interest in the emerging paradigm of metamodernism, or in developmental psychology. If models like Spiral Dynamics and The Nine Stages of Ego Development are of interest to you, you should read this; you'll come away with a much richer understanding of the paradigm that gave birth to both of those models.

While Institutional failings here can and should be criticized and investigated, let's also give due credit to the professionalism and integrity of individual Officers like Eugene Goodman, who kept things from potentially becoming much worse under incredibly difficult circumstances. Someone well deserving of the Congressional Honors he received. Goes to show that cops, just like anyone else, aren't one monolithic group, and for every Cop who sympathizes with White Supremacists, you'll also have people like this, and many more in between.

That's less on the individual officers, who were going to have difficulties doing thier job under those circumstances, and more on institutional biases within the Capitol Hill Police for not taking the threat of MAGA violence seriously, and negligently failing to take steps to prepare for an obvious threat.

Great and useful article, thanks for sharing.

I also love Moby Dick; although I think it's a mistake to try to introduce it to kids still in High School, as it takes some basic familiarity with literary novels to understand and appreciate it. Some knowledge of history also helps, as the book is chock full of historical and cultural references. As to the book itself, it plays with so many interesting ideas such the self destructive nature of revenge, the harms of trying to anthropomorphize nature, the mysterious nature God. And it even explores multiculturalism in a really progressive way for its era. Something that's often overlooked is that the book is actually quite humorous and playful in parts as well: “and tell him to paint me a sign, with-"no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;" might as well kill both birds at once.” " With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.”

Agreed; knowing what I do about Gorbachev, the idea that he's at 'one right way' Blue or even corporatist Orange is just not correct, for the reasons you outlined. I think people have trouble separating him from the larger Soviet system. And while it's true that in order to gain power in that system he had to at least pay lip service to Blue rhetoric early on, what's clear is that he was playing by the Rules in order to Change the Game, so to speak. By the time he stepped down from the Presidency in 1991, he was clearly a Social Democrat. And since that time, he's been advocating for Green political ideals. Assuming that Gorbachev is Blue just because he emerged from the old Soviet system is just as misinformed as assuming that every American politician is an Orange corporatist.

Let's just let every freedom loving American the right to buy an Abrams Tank while we're at it...

I realize this was probably supposed to be an Edge-Lord comment, but let's not become a left leaning reflection of those MAGA idiots.

Great way of putting it.

While Bernie Sander lost the opportunity to become president, the position he's in now is arguably one of the most advantageous he could be in under present circumstances, short of becoming Senate majority leader.

All of this screams of someone who was taken in by an Authoritarian Cult of Personality... Predictable fear base response that Authoritarian figures cultivate; that they're the only one who can save the country from nefarious forces. You're being manipulated my dude.

That's just factually incorrect on Don Beck's part (Beck's a analysis of Gorbachev, not the quote). By the end of his Presidency in 1991 he was pretty clearly a Social Democrat who was pushing market reforms and trying to establish more of a mixed system in Russia, similar to the Social Democracies of Western Europe. As to Don Beck, he was clearly a Conservative guy in some respects, and his analysis was likely due to personal biases on his part. Also Beck is apparently a Trump supporter now, so let's not put him on a pedestal...

I'll also point out that he deserves more credit than any other Individual for ending the Cold War, which was a great accomplishment for the entire world. He was well and truly deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 1990, and more than anything else this should be looked at as his crowning achievement.