On Priesthoods

There’s plenty of room for reasonable discussion and questions, even about human rights. Are all human rights individual rights, or are there collective human rights (peoples’ rights)? Are there limits to free speech, and if so, what are they? Are liberties more fundamental than rights that require taxpayer expenditure? Is paid holiday really a human right (UDHR art. 30)? Does the expansion of the concept of human rights weaken fundamental human rights?

> The only ideology that should be unquestioned is human rights.

Why should an ideology that’s obviously derivative of Christianity be treated as beyond question and not Nietzscheanism or Wahhabism?

Fascism didn't oppose religions.

So I'm not muslim but I am a leftist in a conservative religious tradition.

The thing you might be missing is that sincerely religious people, including converts, don't necessarily "shop around" for a religion that aligns with their other beliefs. If you, somehow, come to believe that god is the one true god and muhammad was his last prophet, then you are going to become muslim. You don't have any other authentic choice.

For some beliefs you have options, eg if you believe jesus died for our sins but are flexible about the rest there are a lot of churches you can sincerely participate in. But if you believe in for example apostolic succession culminating with the bishop of rome well then you're going to be catholic.

I don't want to get into an evaluation here of who does and doesn't convert sincerely, or what are the valid sources of these beliefs or whatever. Pretty much every religious person has personal beliefs that are in conflict with the teachings of the religion. There are a lot of different ways to handle that contradiction but it's a fundamental part of the experience of belief.

> it seems (from outside, as a European) that the loudest voices, at least on the political right, are also the most religious

It's good that you recognize you're getting an outsider, biased viewpoint... because as an American, I can't square this with my experience at all.

If we were talking about 25+ years ago, then yes, the Republican party had a strong connection to a Christian base of voters and religious influence on policy was significant. Today though, it's an utterly insignificant special interest group. I doubt any religious group would crack the top 100 most influential lobbying groups, unless you count Israel but that feels distinct from religion.

The Democrats are essentially anti-religion, other than a vague desire to be inclusive to diverse religions. The Republicans are able to make a little political hay because of this ("War on Christmas" type stuff) and sometimes various elements of vices (drugs, prostitution, gambling, porn) or other ethical concerns (death penalty, abortion, assisted-suicide, ending life support) are influenced by religious beliefs.

Look at the fact that Donald Trump just won the popular vote and a decisive victory across broad demographics. His connection to Christianity is about as strong as any politician's connection to whatever regional food dish they eat for a photo-op one night on the campaign trail before moving on to appeal to the next city by doing their local cultural thing.

There is a certain style of libertarian writing, and I include the author as well as the mercatus center posse as often using this syle, that I find quite off putting. It often feels like the primary purpose of most of their writing is to show how they are smarter than everyone else. This manifests in a writing style that is extremely confident and declarative which is an effective mask for the hollowness and one sidedness of their ideas.

I'll cherry pick just one example from this article. The author in one sentence dismisses the entire field of psychoanalysis. Yet I can't help but notice that his entire blog sure looks like he is unconsciously carrying out his own psychoanalysis in public. You can also see it in the grievances against the medical profession where he has to use his blog to guard against feelings of inadequacy because he didn't get into a top medical school or residency. But he gets to play it both ways because the fact that he writes these outrageously long, fluff filled pieces, that draw a large following he can then use as proof that he is actually in fact smarter than the people who previously rejected him.

I have some similar chips on my shoulder so I quickly recognize these patterns of behaviors in others. And perhaps I am misinterpreting him, but every single time I read one of his posts I am left with the main takeaway being that I am supposed to be impressed by his intelligence.

Other red flags in this piece include the references to the stupidity of the average person (again in implicit contrast to his penetrating intellect) as well as the lazy generalizations and vacuous statements about amorphous concepts such as wokeness along with the bizarre suggestion that wokeness somehow conquered most priesthoods even though the counterexamples are far, far too long to list. I'll leave it with one though: actual priests in the US can hardly be said to be woke even though their own sacred texts are far more aligned with progressive economics than consumer capitalism.

I think he just grew up, frankly. I've never had a blog, but I'm fairly similar intellectually and dispositionally to Scott and have followed him a long time and I've seen the same thing happen to me. When I was younger and in school, I'd go deep into rabbit holes and investigate them very thoroughly, mostly dispassionately, trying to have as little bias as possible, maybe come to conclusions, maybe not. But having a full-time job I'm reasonably senior in, a family, and needing to stick to some regular exercise routine to stay functional and healthy as middle age otherwise ravishes me, there is simply not the time or mental energy to do those things any more.

My reponse has been different, though. I just don't care any more. I have had no personal interaction with any person or institution that seemed woke in nearly a decade and I have no opinion about it, probably because I'm not in school and stay off the Internet except for Hacker News every few days. I haven't voted in two decades and avoid culture war nonsense.

But Scott is a terminally online person, has built a brand, and is being paid lots of money by Substack to keep churning out these think pieces. So he has to keep doing it, but he's also a middle-aged man running a private psychiatry practice with a wife and two young kids. There is no way he has the time or mental energy to devote to this stuff that he had 15 years ago. He has accumulated knowledge and wisdom and is still a hell of a writer with a very good understanding of how to present statistics to a lay audience, but he's probably also forever going to be mentally stuck in 2007 when Ron Paul seemed to every professional-managerial class 25 year-old man in America to be the most intellectual honest, exciting thing we'd ever get. He's becoming the poor man's version of Andrew Sullivan or Megan McArdle for the kind of people who only listen to bands that aren't popular.

I suggest you could simplify that to:

- find an interesting topic

- ignore reality

- declare victory

Or possibly to:

- ignore reality

- declare victory

On their face a lot of these might be bad things, but my criticism is precisely that this "brand" of wokeness that he describes is an oversimplification on a lot of issues.

For example, let's take the claim that COVID vaccines were being prioritized by race instead of age. This is a big claim, in Australia for example I remember people from ethnic groups were considered priority; I don't recall them being prioritized over old people however so it's definitely an argument that I think needs to be treated with seriousness. Where was this, what were the reasons given for it, etc. I do recall certain races being more likely to have more serious reactions to the virus than others; there's socio-economic factors to consider as well (for example, black people tend to live in poorer neighborhoods, we could look at number of people per household, etc.).

So, although I appreciate the effort of actually giving some examples, my main point stands. We ought to contextualize and give a fair reading as to why these decisions are being made, provided that these examples are a fair representation of the modern scenario to begin with. Instead of simply labeling them as "woke".

I think there's a big reaction against diversity that fails to account the reasons, logical, philosophical, ethical that are behind it and why these people think we should have more of it.

I feel like if you want to have these kind of discussions it's more helpful for everyone to actually give proper respect to the opponent's arguments and strong-man their arguments when you take them down. As other posters have pointed out, it seems as though he is making a strawman and then writing a whole essay about it.

> You have effectively gone out immediately after reading the article and proven the article's larger point.

You must misunderstand my position, because I don't really disagree with the article overall - it seems plausible to me. Just that it uses an over-complicated explanation for one of its points.