While the famous Political Compass test is a very blunt instrument, it is basically correct in distinguishing both a left/right axis and an authoritarian/libertarian one.
A good reason to be on the Right today, is that our current live options are Right-Liberty or Left-Authoritarian.
If you are a friend of freedom, you should be on the Right. The Left-Liberty faction has been eaten alive, and there’s no significant Right-Authoritarian wing.
The Free Right is where all decent persons should be today, fighting back against the Authoritarian Left.
The Free Right is where you can make a difference today. Of course it’s also just right, because the Free Right stands for Ordered Liberty, which is the only kind which is sustainable and worth having. The Left-Liberty faction stands for Disordered Liberty, which self-destructs.
And if you are on either of the Authoritarian sides, you should think very carefully whether your ends really justify Authoritarian means.
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Beds don't have ideas. They are artifacts — it is *always* a mistake to simply interpret Socrates as giving a "straightforward" exposition of "Plato's theory."
That doesn't happen.
That is not the way to read Plato.
The "mouthpiece" theory is unutterably dumb.
Eva Brann rightly begins her famous lecture "Plato's Theory of Forms" by noting than "every word in the lecture's title, besides 'of' is wrong."
The denial of Platonism in the broadest sense delivers us over to a metaphysics of construction, explicit in the moderns, but with the consequence that construction becomes deconstruction, since no standard or template is given by which construction must or should be guided.
The original Modernist hope or more accurately dream (Descartes) was that REASON could serve as the standard for CONSTRUTION—this is clearest in Kant—but reason or logos is "safe" only when held to a transcendent standard, the essences or natures of beings, the Platonic εἴδη.
Reason as λόγος, saying, most say something, and the standard by which it may be determined whether the λόγος is true or false, is not itself λόγος. This is found in not in saying, but seeing, in νόησις. But what is SEEN are the LOOKS of beings, viz. the εἴδη.
An adult having sex with a child not being wrong falls straight out of Kershnar's view that nothing is wrong. He is an error theorist: he holds that morality does not substantially exist in any meaningful way.
Kershnar's view that "there is no morality" is only half insane. His argument is, broadly, "Both consequentialism and Kantianism fail as moral theories; so there just is no morality."
The proper conclusion, of course, is "so virtue ethics is correct."
I can't analyze Kershnar's argument more deeply without taking a deep dive into it, but I can already identify some lines along which it is flawed. He argues in general from "various theories of X fail; so there is no X, or at least, we don't know whether there is an X."
The rationalism of the Enlightenment was an overcorrection of the overcorrection of the Reformation, which opposed faith to reason. Reason can understand even things which are irrational — but the Enlightenment demanded (impossibly) that those things themselves BE rationalized.
The Left is always asking the question "What plan should be imposed to achieve social justice?"
That's the wrong question in TWO ways: you shouldn't be trying to *plan* society and such things shouldn't be *imposed*.
Humanity cannot be rationalized.
We are indeed the animal with the logos, but although essentially constituted by reason, we are not reasonable creatures for that.
The dogma of "representation" undermines all merit-based institutions.
It is merely code for "let in those who are not qualified."
It isn't even clear what "representation" means here. It doesn't mean it in the way a lawyer represents a client, or an elected representation represents his constituents.
It appears to be ICONIC: "He is black. Therefore, in his LOOK of being black, he 'represents' all blacks."
This of course depends on the idea that "every member of a race is an icon of that race."