Specifically on Venezula, they have lots of ****ing oil and we aren't going in there and liberating the oi... I mean country like our last two bros.

Vox's Sean Illing's conversation/debate with Ben Shapiro about this book. Looks interesting.

At the beginning Shapiro says something that I heard echo in the Ezra Klein interview and I think is a similar idea with a lot of conservatives is that they're a "culture first" kind of person when it comes to solving problems. That is that the main culprit in the problems in the society are largely because the culture is bad and we need to create a good culture to solve the problems (I assume as opposed to simply increasing material that a socialist/Marxist might propose)

But I've heard this but I've never seen anyone kind of concrete A->B->C example, it's always, the culture is a problem, we need to promote the right kind of culture, ???????. I guess I've mostly just heard the failures of this approach aka the failure to promote marriage, the failure of promoting abstinence and never heard an example of "all else being equal we promoted Y and we got X change". The times I have heard of a change it's always tied back to changing a person's material position, AKA single mothers have too much welfare so they don't have to get married, let's cut off the welfare.

I guess I feel like I'm missing a whole corpus of work or that conservatives just have the approach without actually having evidence that it works.

The best examples that come immediately to mind of cultural change connected to changes in material outcomes are probably various civil rights movements, and the connection between the success of those movements and consciousness raising efforts, which I think are efforts aimed at changing culture.

But I think you're right that it doesn't make sense to ignore material conditions and explanations. I would say that maybe you suggested a reason for conservatives to be traditionally wary of those kinds of arguments (the connection to Marx) but then "cultural Marxism" is also a popular bogeyman? I think you could also view the preference for cultural/individual-choice arguments over material condition arguments as a demonstration of the fundamental attribution error?

And it's probably a mistake to expect anyone's evaluations to be driven entirely by some well-thought-out philosophical/principled stance in any case, and I think there's so much complexity that regardless of whether you choose to think of yourself as a "material-conditions-first" kind of person or a "culture-first" kind of person you'll find examples that seem suggestive of the importance of your preference, because they clearly both matter and interact in complicated ways.

Culture first is vague enough to be unoffending while being poignant enough to resonate on an emotional level. Shapiro specifically is talking about his strict interpretation of the Jewish faith, but this way he doesn't alienate southern Christian conservatives that might have some overlap with his views, but probably actually have a vastly different culture.

The rest is just people being driven by emotions and how they feel about things rather than logical conclusions or statistical evidence.

I would agree if this was an interview with a normal person, but supposedly Shapiro is an intellectual so I would assume his thoughts a bit more ironed out than a normal person.

I guess I would compare it to Suzzer's Taleb quote. I was going to post how, if you squint, you can see what Taleb is talking about, and how you can trace back that thinking to Mises, Hayek and the anti socialist reactionary movement that wanted to remove the worker and his sacrifice from the center of the society like the socialists wanted and replace it with the entrepreneur. You can trace that thinking from them through the job creators rhetoric, and see it in the GOP's vision for the economy where the workers (who in this view and you can see in Taleb's quote are a kind of small minded lemming) should be grateful for being in the presence of the entrepreneur from which everything we have flows and as such should be given certain, almost aristocratic, privileges

I guess my point is there's a whole lot to dig into from that simple thing and the GOP has a thick explanation of their economic worldview. Even Shapiro's thing about how science can't find objective truth without religion I can identify as coming from Alvin Plantinga while this "culture first" thing just seems to be a "just so" explanation of how things should go without much to back it up. That wouldn't be a problem is Shapiro just said it once or he was the only one, but a lot of conservatives seem to say the same thing, but there doesn't seem to be any body of work backing it up, right or wrong.

Yeah but to hold up Trump as an example of any of that is just beyond ludicrous on its face. He's a huckster born with a silver spoon who loses other people's money. All he's ever succeeded at is being famous.

Warms my heart. Maybe I should go read them again. (I know that was not your intention.) Obviously you're not trying to put this in a good light, but damn, you do state it well.

Is that really how you view entrepreneurs? Don't get me wrong, I've been involved with a couple of fairly small tech startups and gotten to know several entrepreneur types, and I generally liked them and very much prefer working in startup land. I can't imagine thinking that I ought to feel more thankful for them than they ought to feel thankful for me, though :P

I believe inventors (some of whom are entrepreneurs) made our lives better. More than anyone else, by far. I don't know what those you were involved with did, but to the extent they improved our material lot, then, uh, they improved our material lot.

That said, just to clarify, because of how I put it above, I should add that I think political thinkers are in a similar position, but for improving our societal/political lives.

Oh, reading Hueh's quote again, no I don't think we should be grateful to be in their presence or that they should be given privileges - aside from the money they earn, which certainly results in privileges, but not political, etc.

I'm just most grateful to inventors. Edison, Tesla, etc. But there are many others who make small advances and all of them stand on the shoulders of those before them, and some may even take credit for the work of others, but at the core, they make life better.

cool, thanks for clarifying.

https://thinkprogress.org/texas-lawm...-3477dd646b53/

The anti-equality record is exactly what? The CEO opposing gay marriage?

If the first part of this said "based wholly or partly on a person's belief", and not action, I think it would be a good principle and consistent with our general way of thinking about religious freedom.

But adding "action" (in a very general way) sort of highlights the conceptual problem with religious freedom laws. I don't see how it's feasible to essentially waive laws for people based on their sincere religious objections to those laws. That is, if anti-discrimination law were to forbid religious Christians from acting in certain ways, then I don't think there should be a "religious freedom" exemption from complying with those laws.

On the other hand, it's not clear to me that the San Antonio council really has a legitimate basis for rejecting a Chick-fil-A location. It's not clear to me that the company has actually violated any anti-discrimination laws. I would guess the company can succeed in suing the city if the basis for rejection is more about their beliefs than any concern with the company actually doing something illegal.

AFAIK no one's been fired from a Chick fil A for being LGBT.

Reboot of Party of Five

Since most of my posts are getting deleted, could I just post all my replies itt instead?

Pretty sure stuff gets deleted here too.

Wonderful website you guys have here. Hey, did anyone figure out how to play a pair of eights yet?

Thanks!

Minraise pre, re-evaluate on the flop.

I was just kidding, it's terrible.

Thanks!

Rude!

Dude, switch channels and watch the 1984/Lord of the Flies mashup by Exilepolitics. It is fascinating.