richlind33: [1] OK, let's say scientific methodology as articulated by Aristotle, since modern science is to a considerable degree corrupt, given that it serves the interests of those who fund it.
[2] It's very clear to me that social justice philosophy is completely at odds with traditional Western thinking, hence the efforts to mandate enforced diversity, equality, and now, equity. But something else is also very clear: there is no mention of the globalist financial order that controls most of the wealth in this world.
Most people don't think too deeply about these things, for obvious reasons, but if you do you see very quickly that the only possible outcome is what I'll call an equality of poverty. So I ask you, do you really think that is something worth fighting for?
Fighting for an equality of poverty? That's not a very catchy slogan. ;)
[1] Aristotle was intelligent. Many others have contributed, a non-exhaustive list of (natural) scientists (in no particular order) would include Leonardo, Euler, Descartes, Darwin, the Bacons (Francis and — no relation — Roger, though no one knew what he wrote to the Pope for half a millennium and by then Francis had pretty much re-discovered it), but also consider the important contributions of the decidedly non-scientific, like Shakespeare's improvements to Modern English.
Then of course more recently the rent-seeking naked fraud of
junk science has polluted the scientific method. And politics. (Think arch-villain
Lysenko.)
Human haecceity is based on symbolic cognition, which is based on a not-gate logic (the "self" is "not-other").
The worst politics gives people a reason to hate "the other", whoever they deem it to be. Jewish scapegoating is a species of this, but so is a
mahram: the Saudi gender
Apartheid that infantilizes women by insisting they have a male guardian at all times. An exploitable underclass is an effective way to provide a better life for the others.
It was the French Revolution where this category became a (socioeconomic) group (all aristocrats are scum), but not until Lenin (a twentieth century Trump with simplistic answers to complex and intractable human dilemmata) built a totalitarian system based on "fairness", coöpted by Stalin, who fomented antipathy to enormous conclusion of extermination (individualists / whomever-I-don't-like-today are the enemy of the people; kill all enemies).
As the Soviet system demonstrated, if money is no longer the means to differentiate people in society, then power and its hierarchy is the inevitable consequence. Trotsky thought communism would only work if the entire world was yoked under the one system. Until that Marxist utopia, where everyone is equal, the system instead creates a stratified society of power emminating from the Politburo outwards and downwards.
It's easy to whip up class envy and avarice; much harder to construct useful policy; difficult to sell slow, plodding progress to the young and impatient who want results now.
Obviously equality of outcome is ludicrous (as Pol Pot demonstrated with Kampuchea) but equality of opportunity might be obtainable.
Capitalism (you keep what you make) and Socialism (to each what they need) are poles on the modern economic axis.
Historically, socialists have been slowly undermining the liberal democratic structure with sophism. In 1962, a group meeting in Britain decided that the definition of poverty was wrong (statistics clearly showed that more people owned washing machines and televisions, and outside lavatories were disappearing fast), and so decided to redefine poverty as a percentage of the community (those earning less than 60% of median wages). Poverty, which had been decreasing steadily since the end of WW2 was recreated as an eternal and relative part of society. The OECD, and others, swallowed the new definition. (James Bartholomew, who coined the phrase "virtue signalling", writing in
The Weekend Australian, 8 Dec., 2018, p.21.)
Currently, socialists target the very rich, mesmerized by big numbers.
The Economist, just last week, noted that, over the last 40 years "… In [the United States of] America the average income of the top 1% has risen 242%, about six times the rise for middle earners. …", but then also noting:
… American income inequality fell between 2005 and 2015, after adjustments for taxes and transfers. Median household income rose by 10% in real terms in the three years to 2017. A common refrain is that jobs are precarious. But in 2017 there were 97 traditional full-time employees for every 100 Americans aged 25–54, compared with only 89 in 2005. …
[
Millennial socialists chip away at the virtues of liberalism, published in
The Weekend Australian, 16 Feb., 2019, pp.17&24.]
The ethical question is: as offensive to everyone else as it may be that some people have more money than they can ever spend, is this an acceptable price for lifting EVERYONE out of poverty? Socialism always undervalues risk-taking. What is the incentive to risk hard currency, if not to make more? Why should anyone expend discretionary effort, especially when everyone can be given what they need? (Even those "unwilling to work", as Ocasio-Cortez's suddenly-removed New Green Deal manifesto wished.)
Another statistic (from a television interview I saw a few weeks ago) confirmed the socioeconomic mobility of the Australian liberal democracy, where 93% of the poorest 50% earn more than their parents.**
Capitalism has raised more people out of poverty than any other system. Socialists always fixate on big numbers.
Ocasio-Cortez has posited a 70% tax on the wealthiest in order to fund her massive centrally-planned public spending Green New Deal. Unfortunately, even if people didn't actively minimize tax* this probably would result in about $12bn, or less than ½% increased revenue for the fed.
As the article concludes:
…
Millennial socialism …[,] like the socialism of old, suffers from a faith in the incorruptibility of collective action and an unwarranted suspicion of individual vim. …
The late
Dr Karl Popper, who said about social engineering: "The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good." (Popper,
The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1971)
[2] Popper explained why socialism is doomed: "It is the difference between a reasonable method of improving the lot of man, and a method which, if really tried, may easily lead to an intolerable increase in human suffering. It is the difference between a method which can be applied at any moment, and a method whose advocacy may easily become a means of continually postponing action until a later date, when conditions are more favorable. And it is also the difference between the only method of improving matters which has so far been really successful, at any time, and in any place, and a method which, wherever it has been tried, has led only to the use of violence in place of reason, and if not to its own abandonment, at any rate to that of its original blueprint." (
loc.cit.)
Pretty much the only consistent attribute of people taken as a whole is the desire to NOT do what they are told. (Wachowski red-pill truculence :)
So the more an oligopoly tries to control everyone else, the more difficult it becomes. (The tighter you grip, the more who slip through your fingers, to paraphrase George Lucas spouting philosophy through Princess Leia.)
=
* Strategies might include substituting company benefits instead of wages, or even flight from high-taxing jurisdictions, like the tax exile Rolling Stones before 1979, when Thatcher reduced the top tier of taxation from 83% to 60%, whilst increasing consumption tax to 15%.
** "Not only is income inequality not rising, our best guess is that it is actually falling," economist Roger Wilkins (University of Melbourne) Australian Social & Economic Outlook Conference, 12 Oct., 2018.
References
The concept of not-other as self discussed discursively in Dr Terrence Deacon,
Symbolic Species (1997).
Douglas Hofstadter wrote some mind-bending stuff on genetics and not-not logic (protein production increased by not-stopping it, or rather reduction by RNA coded not-stopping the not-stopping of it) in
Goedel, Escher, Bach (1979).
Edit: hypertext links and extended characters don't mix. :|
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon Popper quote from wiki:
en.wikipedia . org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science)