Liam Bright Profile picture
Sep 13, 2020 6 tweets 1 min read Read on X
More than one person in the recent past has called me a "moderate" This perturbs me! I'm sceptical of representative democracy and the parliamentary road to socialism, I want to end private ownership of the means of production and democratise all facets of the economy...
... and I am at the least pretty sympathetic to pacifism, open borders, and prison abolition. It's extremely fair to say that I am a highly ineffective agent at actually generating radical change - I'm a comfy bourgeois academic! - so if people saying I'm a moderate meant...
... I'm functionally no threat to the powers that be, then, like, fair, stings a bit but I'd have to own that. (I think a great many self-described radicals are in this sense moderates, so I'm in good company!) But I think people rather meant that I was moderate in my opinions...
... and this I think is just not true. My ideals, if even partially realised, would represent a near total overthrow of the present order of things. I think the impression I am moderate in this sense is driven by two things: 1. my toned-down affect and understated aesthetic...
... and 2. I am not invested in the squabbles-about-bourgeois-etiquette (do we capitalise the "B" in black!? should you read White Fragility!?) that constitute the emotional core of the culture war for many people. These are, I think, not good guides to political preference.
(trying out a new thing where when I am feeling really sad rather than bothering my friends with random apologies instead I write whiny self pitying threads on things that don't matter)

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More from @lastpositivist

Nov 4, 2023
There's lots of leftists, so there can be lots of individual instances of a thing and it still be fringe in terms of proportions. This makes it easy to pick lots of bad cases and present what is rare as common. But I genuinely think woke-segregationism is actually common alas...
... like the thing where people take on board some vague versions of anti-colonial thought, anti-racist ideas, etc, and sort of put them together and end up endorsing ethnonationalism and a To Each Their Own mentality that discourages cultural blending....
... Some stuff people allege about the left I think is propagandistic. I really don't think, for instance, there is a widespread desire to massacre Jewish people or ban mathematics teaching: though lots of instances of anti-semites and anti-intellectualism on the left are real...
Read 4 tweets
May 21, 2023
A thing that seems true *to a casual outside observer like myself and which may well be totally false don't get mad just reporting vibes* about anthropology. Modern repenter orientated anthropology seems structurally more like Lévy-Bruhl than, like, Taylor or Evans-Pritchard...
... Cultural anthropology reacted to its previous imperial criminality by adopting theses and practices meant to prevent such in future. However part of how this is been achieved is affirming and celebrating fundamental unlikeness of different culture groups thought patterns...
... In this way it seems like the nearest parallel in pre-woke (for want of a better term, which I'm sure anthropologists have for their own history) cultural anthropology is Lévy-Bruhl's prelogical mentality stuff, only now with the valance made much positive....
Read 6 tweets
May 20, 2023
It's a real misunderstanding of science (alas one a bit too popular with business leaders and politicians) to think that it is able to produce and refine such technological marvels because there is something distinctively or directly practically minded about doing science.
Much of scientific work at its best has been driven by idiosyncrasies, abstract or abstruse concerns, philosophical or even theological and mystical visions. We wouldn't get more if we turned those people to useful industry work, we'd just know and ultimately be able to do less.
But I think what makes this work is a cultural and institutional situation (a precarious one I do not think we necessarily manage well) which allows - encourages or even requires - the more practically minded to read and engage with the ideas of those people. That is vital.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 24, 2023
Re the conservative intellectual tradition I think I'm moderately well read. Crudely one can divide at least two (actually rather opposed) wings from each other. A Libertarian stand and a Burkean stand (Von Mises is plausibly kinda both - it's a crude distinction don't worry)...
... in philosophy at least one of the major libertarian thinkers is basically canonical - Nozick - and another is, if not quite there, certainly often read - Hayek. Contemporary libertarians are not unknown in the field, I think Jason Brennan is even a major figure nowadays....
... But the Burkean tradition much less so. People only read Burke in aesthetics. Chesterton and deMaistre and Oakeshotte are neglected, Hume is obviously well read but not for his politics. We don't read Booker T Washington and we don't pick up on these elements in AJ Cooper...
Read 6 tweets
Feb 7, 2023
I actually find this article interesting. Not really for the first order content (did you know a retiring scientist writing at Quillette thinks all this SJ stuff is a bit silly?) but for what I think it evinces. ...

quillette.com/2023/02/07/the…
... my take is that an *enormous* amount of intra-academic culture war stuff, especially on generational lines, comes from leftover and still strongly felt grudges from the late 80s-early 2000's Science Wars. I think academics who were around for that still feel it deeply...
... And since younger academics barely have it in their frame of reference at all it often leads to talking past each other. There were moves in this piece which are inexplicable if one doesn't know of the Science Wars and the sort of things that were bundled together then. ....
Read 4 tweets
Feb 6, 2023
A long thread on a recent paper I really like. It's about slurs, it's by @philoso_foster, and it's available open access at the link below. I'll quickly (so no doubt inadequately!) summarise what it is about, then say why I like it.

philarchive.org/rec/FOSBQC
... Foster is concerned with a popular belief among people who theorise about slurs. The idea therein is that slurs tend to have a "neutral counterpart", i.e. a purely descriptive way of picking out the same group, and then super-impose on top of this a negative connotation....
... So, say, the idea is the meaning of "boche", when used in its WW1 slur sense, is something like "German {derogatory}". The main rival view has it that rather than it just being a connotation on top of the neutral counterpart the slur actually builds insulting content in....
Read 16 tweets

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