Thread by @GreeneMan6

Some are criticizing my recent conversation with Dr McManus but I learned a lot. I want to do an "After action Thread" with the main points. I will tag @MattPolProf as courtesy but this thread will be the last thing I have to say in the matter. 🧵

Lesson 1: Libertinism not Socialism is what drives the left.

Haidt was wrong, care/harm values are a pretense. The left is driven by antinomian, (what they call "emancipatory") values. Including those things which would cause harm to both the collective and the individual. 2/🧵

Lesson 2: The academic left is the woke mob's "clean-up crew". "friend-enemy" leads, theory follows.

It's obvious that people like McManus are embarrassed by wokies. Still, they never cross a woke line, and their solutions are designed to funnel more power to woke-groups. 3/🧵

You can see this clearly in the discussion about the rules of conversation where any expression of disapprobation is illicit EXCEPT the disapprobation directed at things righties believe. It's an appeal to open discourse concealing pure Schmidtian friend-enemy politics. 4/🧵

Lesson 3: The left's pretense of being compassionate relies on a set of unexamined facts about the nature of humanity and politics. 5/🧵

At the core of Matts's worldview is a weird agnosticism about human nature. Somehow we don't know addicts don't get themselves off drugs, social media pornography and hook-up apps prevents pair bonding, and think the only solution to an birth-decline is more entitlements. 6/🧵

Here "not necessarily" is a great tool. Because ANY statistical reality, no matter how obvious, apparent, or manifest in the data does not NECESSARILY LOGICALLY hold. Therefore, there is always an ACADEMIC reason to dismiss it! 7/🧵

In place of wisdom, or even a basic understanding of how society works, how human nature works, we get a confusing jumble of hand-waving. What fills the gaps and question marks? Antinomian Libertinism. 8/🧵

Lesson 4: The pretension of being "socialist" relies on unexamined solutions.

This starts with not coming to terms with the flaws of democracy, how hackable it is, how it descends into chaos when not controlled. But it goes further. 9/🧵

A key part of the modern progressive political game is a set of "pseudo-solutions" that are marketed as "well-evidenced". For Matt, this was Union membership and things like needle exchange clinics open to drug use. Do I oppose these things in principle? No. But I smell BS. 10/🧵

For the Unions being a solution to cancel culture. Does this sound remotely plausible? I have been part of Unions and they were MORE woke than the employer. And they have EVERY incentive to get rid of political dissidents since it would consolidate their ideological power. 11/🧵

And for the decriminalization of drugs with open clinics. This is a pilot program from 10 years ago in Vancouver, BC. If this worked so well why wasn't it expanded by the sympathetic progressive government? I guess they just aren't doing LEFTISM hard enough! 12/🧵

Likely, the pilot program was started with a cohort of "best case" patients they knew wouldn't abuse the system. They got good results initially, but when they expanded it to those with criminal tendencies their model stopped working, which is why it was not expanded. 13/🧵

But pseudo-solutions aren't supposed to FIX the problem, they are just supposed to SOUND like they COULD fix the problem. Real solutions don't sit around unopposed and unexpanded for decades while the problem they are designed to address gets worse. 14/🧵

Lesson 5: Righties are nails in search of a hammer, lefties are hammers in search of nails. For the left theory is the driver, for the right reality is the driver. Push versus pull systems. 15/🧵

The most important lesson I learned was just how bizarro-backward Matt's thinking was to my own process. Matt starts with a theory, with the vision he wants to advocate. I start with values and a problem I want to solve, actually solve. 16/🧵

You can see this is the way that Matt fires off bibliographies and pre-history for this ideas which he thinks are very important. I don't care. I want the basic answer, the value-based reaction, the moment of decision. How does this intersect with reality. 17/🧵

To a large extent this is the core weakness of the left presently. It is entirely the product of academia. And the modern approach to academic politics misunderstands its own subject matter which is organic, radically personal, and spiritual. 18/🧵

The only thing that creates synthesis, solutions, and growth is a experience with the real world, valuing actual things, rather than the theory of something that MIGHT come into existence later. 19/🧵

McManus may understand right-wing (real) politics more clearly when (God-willing) he has children. Before anything else, You need a people to fight for. And I say this, myself, not currently having a people.

Just a thought. 20/🧵