Socialists and Scientific Authoritarianism

These days, many democratic socialists are culturally authoritarian.
That is to say, they’re for leftist identity politics and political correctness.
It wasn’t always like that.
A couple of decades ago, democratic socialists tended to be culturally libertarian, or at least arguably more culturally libertarian than neolibs and neocons tended to be.
Still there are some democratic socialists who are either against, ambivalent or apathetic about identity politics and political correctness.
Some of these democratic socialists identity as socially libertarian.

However, many of these same democratic socialists, who reject or are indifferent to identity politics and political correctness, are in favor of some scientific or, I don’t know what to call it, safety and security authoritarianism?
For example, they’re in favor of lockdowns, mandatory masks, social distancing, quarantining and vaccines, gun control, mandatory helmets on bikes, seatbelts in cars and prohibiting indoor smoking.
Some are in favor of banning fossil fuels and meat for the earth.
My question to them is, how can you be favor of all that, and still identify as a social libertarian?
If there is a pandemic, wouldn’t the more libertarian thing to do be for the state to strongly encourage and recommend social distancing and so on, rather than enforce it?
For the state to help vulnerable population groups voluntarily isolate?
These are the kinds of measures democratic socialist Sweden is taking, instead of forcing people to wear masks and so forth.

My other question is, how far would you take your scientific, health and safety authoritarianism?
Should alcohol be prohibited because people who drink tend to be more abusive?
Or because they might drive, or kids might get a hold of their booze?
Should those who abuse their bodies be last in line to receive treatment because they did it to themselves?
When self-driving cars become available and more safe, should we ban human-driving?
Should we ban conspiracy theories, religion and superstition?
Is mass surveillance a good idea?
Mandatory RFID chips?
Pre-crime?
If so, why?
If not, why not?

Yes, let’s trade all freedom for absolute security, no more autonomy or self responsibility.

Unfortunately, the trade off of metaphysical certainty by physical uncertainty, made the present a foregone conclusion decades , if not a century ago!

Interesting discussion. It sounds like your initial question boils down to, why did some small subsection of some smaller subsection of democratic socialists appear to adopt a policy contrary to their old one? Is that the gist?

This is the problem with political labels: they become meaningless if the definition consistently changes, and often to be the exact opposite of what it represents. Then you’re left with what we have today: people throwing labels around that have lost all meaning, each label subjective to one’s own biases and judgments depending on what time period or location one lives in.

Democrats are Republicans. Liberals are Conservatives. Neos are Leos.

What’s the point anymore?

I am generally behind the critique in the OP, but…
I’ll focus on one issue dear to my heart. I do like a lot of freedom, for myself and others. But I am so fucking glad smoking is being pushed out of most places. My parents smoked. I can’t bear that shit. I am old enough to remember when there was smoking on airplanes. I would spend the whole time sick. But hey, I’d be willing to allow for smoking if I get to cook up some fart smelling shit and just seep it out in restaurants bars airplanes. And if I can bring a fairly high decibel recording of someone chewing on tin foil or sex sounds to the restaurant. We got used to smoking so this really rather terrible smell that most organisms recoil from unless they get habituated or mentally override that with marketing ideas and it was ok to create this and only this kind of unpleasant sensory experience for everyone else in all sorts of spaces. 50 years ago, yes, you could smoke in restaurants, say, but if you burped over and over’, loud, they’d throw you out. You hit yourself on your forhead with a hammer, even if the (second hand) blood doesn’t get on my kids, you’ll get thrown out.

If it was easier to get and hold jobs, I could even see letting the market, now, after years of people moving away from cigarrette, determine how, say, a bar or night club would do. I think people are used to breathing well in places where before they did not have any other experiences. Back then you could say - ok, we’ll let the market decide. People who want smokeless bars go there, people who want bars with smoking go there. Everybody happy. But given the bizzare mind control situation things were in back then, only the smoking bars would have survived. Which means that a job market that did not require much education meant you were somewhat of a smoker, whether you wanted to be or not. People working in those places would not be able to hop over the smokeless working places.

But for those that think any issue like this should be left to the freedom of individuals I hope they spend some time being creative with scenarios. You may not mind smoke or may not be interested in bars, nightclubs and restaurants. Or care if people smoke on the subway or on buses or in schools. But perhaps there is something else that if people were allowed to do it everywhere, you would find it horrible, especially if you needed to commute, say. People fucking their pet lizards or wanking looking you in the eyes. I don’t know, consider it a creativity training exercise. I mean people inhaling smoke from carcinogenic unbelievably oddly treated at some point organic leaves is just something people got used to, so everyone overrode their bodies natural revulsion and sucked it up, literally and metaphorically. While asthmatics and people allergic and people like me for whom it just plain sucks.

We’d get used to people fucking their lizards in restaurants, and on the subway and moaning with ecstacy if there were ads for, you know, the lizard the independent, Marlboro lizard fucker cowboy on television and people could buy a new lizard with their daily rag at the newstand. It’d normalize. And there’s every chance as a habit, the lizard fuckers would outlive their smoking counterparts. It’d be win win.

^^^ Not a typical KT post with the rated R language and rated X content which has left me wondering if all’s well???

Yeah, the owners should have decided whether there was smoking allowed or not, rather than the government and at first areas were separated in places between smoking and non smoking. If the government required additional public safety perhaps better ventilation systems would have sufficed with the government incentivising cleaner air filtration systems in both smoking and non smoking areas so there was no crossover.

Unfortunately a lot of people will without question, especially if the scientific community or some technocrats tell them to.

Right?

We need more skepticism about the bio and physio sciences.

They can’t justify it, and they know it. The self-proclaimed “social elites”, the new Technocratic Autistic Nerds, who believe they are ‘superior’ to the average American, are no more hypocrites than the Social Democrats they are sleeping and in bed with. The thing is, they sold-out, and they know that too. They just don’t care. Because the negative consequences of their thoughts, actions, and speech no longer affect them and their elitist clubs. It negatively affects everybody else.

And if there’s an emergency, they grew so rich, they can fly to another country or private island, while their Strong-arm Street Thugs do their dirty work. When shit hits the fan, their Brownshirts in the streets will face the full retaliation and violence, while they are protected. And if you question/confront them, they will silence, DOX, deplatform, and deperson you. No job. No bank account. No social media. Etc.

It’s all a complete takeover of social, political, and technocratic power. That’s really the underlying motivation behind the “Biden” and DNCommunist representation. Everybody against them must fall under the flag of ‘Trumpism’, whether we like it or not.

Libertarians are now on the political ‘Right’, which means most of the political standards and measures are now inverted 180 degrees. Up is down. Left is right. Good is bad.

I disagree with you on most things, but this is actually a very good point in the greater context of this thread and the political movement of 2020.

Here’s the thing. We went from that, to “tolerating” liberal-leftist Riots in the streets, burning down businesses, and harrasment of strangers based on race.

So your point is ultimately invalidated by the fact that USA has gotten 100 times worse, not 100 times better.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mReqOT7JvKc[/youtube]

Owners should decide whether they should stay open during this SCAMdemic as well.

Government corruption and Totalitarianism have spread across USA, preventing people from living happy, healthy, and balanced lives. Government wants to spread its taint and corruption in every person’s home.

thehill.com/homenews/state-watc … hen-having

Fuck this Fascist government. The “Anti-fascists” are on the wrong side of history, a clever ruse by the DNC. They are the problem.

I think this summarizes the straw man many folks fall victim to relentlessly attacking.

While that is not my initial question, my initial question was:

Still, the question you raised is an interesting one, one I’ve been thinking about lately.
My theory is that progressivism, which democratic socialism is a part of, began as a subversion of many conservative values, and governance (blackness became equal to or greater than whiteness, femininity equal to or greater than masculinity, the working class equal to or greater than the upper class and so on).
Scientific authoritarianism barely existed when progressive subversivism arrived on the scene at the turn of the 19th century or so.

Progressive subversivism is a product of its times.
The people, including progressive subversives, have never fully lived under authoritarian technocracy before, so they don’t see the evils of it.
I think we will have to be subjected to its evils for centuries, perhaps a millennium before we begin to see it.
We’ve experienced the evils of religious and conservative totalitarianism.

People think it’s always unreasonable to question the scientific community.
And so those who mean to control humanity have taken note of that, and so they will impose a scientific dictatorship on us, and many or the vast majority of people will accept it, even beg for it, including many former progressive subversives, and former individual libertarians.

Right well, for me, they can’t have their cake and eat it, you can’t be in favor of lots and lots of scientific authoritarianism, and still identify as an individual libertarian or progressive subversive.
They’re authoritarians, they just don’t know it.

Progressive subversivism is anti-hierarchy.
Science is inherently hierarchical.
It places experts over laymen.
Reason over intuition.
Reductionism over holism.
Determinism over freedom.
Controlled observation and experimentation over uncontrolled.
High tech drugs over letting detoxing, herbs and whole foods be your medicine and so on.
Science is actually a form of conservatism, not in every sense but in some important ones, but whereas conservatism is mostly confined to the spiritual, social and ethical realms, science is conservativism’s mostly biological and physical, but also social manifestation or wing.

I’m not anti-science, but I’m not pro-science either.
I take from science what makes sense to me and discard what doesn’t.
Science should exist alongside other ways of thinking on a roughly equal playing field, it shouldn’t be given a near total monopoly.
I’m a populist, I put individual liberty on the one hand, and democracy and democratic courts on the other ahead of science.

Christian values, conservative values, and scientific values aren’t the same, just similar in that they’re hierarchical, or at least more hierarchical than individual libertarianism, and proper progressive subversivism, I guess, maybe, maybe not, maybe they’re all hierarchical in their own way, anyway it’s not that important to me.

I think of science as inherently ideological.
Science isn’t value-free, it’s a value system.
Again, experts over laymen, reason over intuition, what they consider to be healthy and sane over unhealthy and insane, and so on.
Science isn’t an alternative, but one of many competing value systems, along with Christianity, conservatism, individual libertarianism, populism, progressive subversivism and so on.
For Christianity, Christ, as revealed by the bible, is the truth.
For conservatism, tradition is the truth.
For individual libertarianism, the individual determines truth for themselves.
For populism, the people determine truth for themselves.
For progressive subversivism, all truths are equal, equality, if anything, is the truth.
For science, experts conducting controlled experiments is the truth.
Depending on where you derive your truth from, that will likely have implications for your politics.
If science, rather than the individual, or the people, or all truths being equally valuable (progressivism) or nonvaluable (nihilism) is your ultimate truth, then you cannot claim to be an individual libertarian, you’re a scientific authoritarian.

In what set of circumstances? For example, in America science and scientists by the thousands are employed by the government to sustain the military industrial complex. In order to to sustain a war economy in which millions of jobs are at stake. But what results by way of the armaments manufactured, bought and sold by the military is either in sync with the material laws of nature or they are not. There is no ideology here. And even the value judgments that are employed revolve by and large around “show me the money”. Value at the very heart and soul of capitalism.

Science and scientists either function to sustain this particular political economy or they don’t.

Okay, but what are you talking about here? The ends that science and scientists come to embody through the particular jobs that are performed to achieve and then sustain this or that government policy? How are those policies not rooted in political prejudices rooted in the lives that individuals live?

Is there a way for philosophers to dispense with ideology and come up with the most rational policies that a government – any government – are obligated to pursue?

What then of the arguments I make about the existential juncture that is identity, value judgments, conflicting goods and political power?

Given what specific set of circumstances? And how do we go about dispensing with the “isms” in order to arrive at something in the general vicinity of the objective truth? Truths that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to accept.

Exactly. And how is this not going to be profoundly and problematically embedded out in particular worlds understood in particular ways by individuals indoctrinated as children given any number of vast and varied historical, cultural and circumstantial contexts?

As a moral nihilist, I suggest it’s not a question of moral and political value judgments being equally valuable or nonvaluable, but of being rooted subjectively in the arguments I make in my signature threads.

And that the objectivists among come to insist that only their own assessment of what is valuable – true – counts.

I understand where you’re coming from, I don’t smoke and I hate it.
I have sinusitis and I can’t stand to be around the stuff for long either.
Personally I’m glad it’s banned, altho I’m not sure how I feel about it morally.
Anyway my point was not to say we should never ban nonviolent behavior, rather if someone thinks many of our basic freedoms should be taken away or severely curtailed, whether on scientific grounds or not, then they cannot be a libertarian.
I think some people think it’s only authoritarian to take freedom if it’s on unscientific grounds.
I don’t see it that way.

I haven’t commented on this thread because the OP is just too obviously true and other threads need more attention.

Awww, you’re too kind.

Good points, you’re right.

It’s important to separate science the business, hobby or interest from scientism and technocracy the ideologies.

I was overreaching.