Comments on: Quote notes (#90)

By: scientism

scientism — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 17:10:25 +0000

@Hurlock I think it’s a stretch to call what progressives promote “values.” Actually, most modern moral philosophy is nihilistic; consequentialism is best viewed as devising ways to live together without right and wrong, rationalist deontology is similar. Yes, philosophers often present themselves as providing foundations for morality, but that’s an incoherent project anyway. Frequently they explicitly claim that “traditional” morality is “wrong” (or oppressive or mere opinion or metaphysically implausible or whatever) and they’re trying to replace it. If you remove the illegitimate use of the word “traditional”, then they’re simply trying to replace morality with an amoral system of living together.

By: Mark Yuray

Mark Yuray — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 23:19:54 +0000

Zubrin is a liberal Westerner just like [virtually] all Westerners are liberal Westerners. I can substitute “liberal” for “modernist,” “progressive” or whatever word you want to use for the hook-line-and-sinker types of the Kali Yuga. His rant about how Russia is going to destroy “freedom” and establish “tyranny” and “evil” is indistinguishable from proggy talk (despite the theological dress-up), not us pointing out the insanity.

By: Hurlock

Hurlock — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:38:48 +0000

I don’t see them liberating anyone from any meaning. I don’t see them liberating anyone from anything. Their rhetoric is indeed very often one about ‘liberating’ us from evil meaning. Liberals may like to pretend they are liberating, but their ‘liberation’ ends up simply creating new progressive norms, which happen to be virulently oppressive, and putting them in place of the old. What liberals do is use nihilism against meaning they don’t like and then supplant that meaning with their own.
Actual nihilism would in fact tend to scare progressives.

By: Hurlock

Hurlock — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:24:30 +0000

I think moral nihilism is the topic at hand here.
That switch they do, is the key. At most you can call liberals inconsistent nihilists which still doesn’t make them actual nihilists. Liberals use nihilism as a tool against ideologies they dislike, but at the same time they act as if that doesn’t apply to their moral values which are apparently absolute. So for example a liberal appears nihilistic towards traditional values and he might indeed employ nihilism as a tool to deny the truth value of those values, but on the topic of his own progressive values the liberal is unmistakeably deontological.
An actual nihilist would look and sound very differently from the present day progressive. The funny thing about that is that actual nihilists are extremely rare, to be almost impossible to find. Most of what you will see today are wannabe hipster nihilist and let’s not confuse actual consistent nihilists with them. Progressive are in the hipster nihilist category. They see nihilism as a tool to destroy anything they don’t like, so they use it, but their understanding of the actual philosophy of nihilism is probably in the negative.
Of course progressives obviously don’t care about consistency and lack of contradiction, otherwise they would have dropped their religion a long time ago.

By: Xoth

Xoth — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 12:04:04 +0000

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 01:11:23 +0000

scientism,

Can you define ‘meaning’?

By: Peter A. Taylor

Peter A. Taylor — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 00:53:54 +0000

Which kind of “nihilism” are you talking about? Wikipedia distinguishes among
(1) Epistemological, (2) Existential, (3) Metaphysical, (4) Mereological, (5) Moral, and (6) Political nihilism.

If “nihilism” means no objective basis for morality (morality is grounded in subjective human values rather than something objective, outside of human society), “liberals” (i.e. progressives) may very well be “nihilists”, at least when they’re talking about multiculturalism, and how everyone who disagrees with them is objectively wrong. But as Handle likes to point out, they inconsistently switch into “moral scientism” whenever it suits them, pretending that their moral tastes are objectively right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_nihilism

By: Izak

Izak — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 22:53:44 +0000

The terms aren’t really new, he’s basically sustaining the theorizing on the land/sea dichotomy done by Haushofer and Carl Schmitt and some English guys before them. There’s no particular way for land powers to do things — I guess that was a hasty simplification on my part — but the orientation of land powers, in terms of their source of wealth and geospatial placement, leads them to have value structures more or less at odds with mercantilist nations.

By: Hurlock

Hurlock — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 21:37:33 +0000

Lesser Bull

The terms Dugin is using are ‘new’ although his general theory seems like a well-known historical fact. Indeed you can divide nations along those lines not only in the modern world, but in the medieval and ancient one as well. Although in the modern era such a division is most mature and obvious. A small correction though, I think in more recent ages it was the Dutch who were the first cosmopolitan maritime commercial sea power in opposition to big land empires and then it was England (in fact under an obvious Dutch influence) and then the US.

Although I am still not exactly sure what the “land way” of doing things looks like, as it seems to me that the ‘land’ nations have some very stark differences among themselves. In contrast the ‘sea’ nations have seemed much more alike each other through history. Indeed it seems that most of the commonalities between some ‘land’ nations are contained in that they are not ‘sea’ nations.

By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 21:22:17 +0000

Those are Dugin terms, I think but he’s not the only one to see them as significant. Mahan was basically in the Land/Sea tradition too. The idea is that there are continental agricultural/industrial volkish land powers that seek empire and there are offshore-balancer commercial cosmopolitanish deracinated sea powers that seek a kind of free trade mercantile hegemony. The UK and then the US are the seapowers, whereas the land powers were first the French, then the Germans, then the Russians.