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Paul Profile picture
Paul
@paulcrider
2 subscribers
Mar 12, 2023 • 40 tweets • 11 min read
Okay, stream-of-conscious thread on liberalism, neoliberalism, politics, policy, and philosophy commencing here and going through the night. (There'll be long gaps and pauses) 🧵#NeoliberalShillBracket Liberalism is values, practices, & institutions. Usual stuff: representative government, now w/ high suffrage democracy, tho that wasn't always the case. I think at this point liberalism requires democracy and without it—whatever may've been once true—it's not really liberalism.
Mar 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Manne is one of my favorite philosophers but I really disagree with the thrust of this post, which is about the social context of aspiration. 🧵 If health and fitness, and professional development are middle-class striving, I guess I tend to see middle-class striving as a good thing, and something that doesn't *by necessity* have to be premised on exclusion and elitism. Image
Oct 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Dreher is right about this. Gender & sexuality are both more fluid for more people than either conservative doctrine or the "born that way" school have supposed. Gender & sexuality are socially construed. *Of course* normalizing LGBTQ identities leads to more LGBTQ people. What we have now challenges... It's remarkable that @roddreher thinks of himself as tolerant though. Characterizing a society with more LGBTQ people as "moral insanity", "Babylonian decadence", or the cause of "our dying civilization" is not tolerant. Maybe tolerance for him just means avoiding overt violence. But there's little reason f...
Sep 8, 2022 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
I think it's fair to be confused by all the definitions and vague boundaries of trans vs nonbinary vs genderfluid etc. The definitional overlap between trans and nonbinary arises precisely because we all want to avoid gender essentialism. 🧵 But to go from the regrettable-but-inevitable ambiguity of "transgender is an umbrella term" to "the medical establishment operates on kids to enforce gender conformity is a non-sequitur. It's also a conspiracy theory and basically a blood libel.
Apr 25, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Steady stream of these essays by "politically homeless" libertarians. This one by @ismurray. There is exactly one small-l liberal small-d democratic party and one antidemocratic white nationalist party in the US. I wish this choice weren't so difficult for libertarians. 🧵 The piece frets about regulating Big Tech, antitrust policy, and protectionism. Identity politics too, but I'll get to that. Look, I was a big @ewarren booster, but even I complain about her protectionism. But this is *inconsequential* compared to *preserving democracy*.
Apr 6, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Disappointing from @AmericanPurpose. There are no trans extremists. There are trans folks who want to live their lives. There is no "radical gender ideology" any more than there was ever a "homosexual agenda". It's a fabrication of the reactionary right to weaponize polarization. The piece is full of lies and misrepresentation. For example, "trans women are women" does not mean trans women and cis women must be treated the same in all contexts and that's never been the claim. Not even all cis women are expected to be treated the same in all contexts!
Apr 4, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
I look forward to digging into and being troubled by this, by @lastpositivist. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2022/04/why-i-… Okay I have read this and I have some comments. I appreciate that @lastpositivist affords left liberalism this honor. Also the point that many liberal-defying leftists are fairly assessed as actually left liberals. This seems especially true of many socdems and Black feminists. Image
Feb 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is an exquisite summary of "cancel culture", by @AOC. From this New Yorker interview, which was overall very good. newyorker.com/culture/the-ne…
Feb 11, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Sometimes I try to convince liberals that critical race theory isn't evil. One thing I think it's really hard for especially classical liberals to grok is that CRT folks are just not *beholden* to liberalism, as either a word or ideology. Short 🧵 So the Richard Delgado quote gets trotted out a lot to prove CRT is anti-liberal:

"critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”
Feb 10, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
.@jeanguerre is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists. Walls are static. Robot dogs (that can be armed) and other high tech, mobile surveillance technology can and will be used internally. Especially against Black communities and antiracist protesters.
Feb 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
"Classical liberals should think about structural racism like they do about crony capitalism: Once business interests manage to rig a system ... to obtain an unfair advantage over potential competitors, it becomes extremely difficult to dismantle it." theunpopulist.substack.com/p/the-good-and… .@shikhadalmia's UnPopulist continues to be the single most valuable institution for resuscitating classical liberalism. Here @fabiorojas lays out what classical liberals should take from critical race theory, as well as areas of legitimate disagreement. theunpopulist.substack.com/p/the-good-and…
Dec 6, 2021 • 13 tweets • 6 min read
I love this post pushing back on the common practice of confining liberalism. Rawls doesn't stand in for liberalism. Ideal theory, original positions, and social contracts have never been the only liberalisms in town. And liberalism has always had radical strains. THREAD .@nescio13 is replying to @OlufemiOTaiwo's recent review of @katforrester's book, pulling the quote below. First I want to say I enjoyed the review, and share many of Táíwò's thoughts on Rawls. I haven't read In the Shadow of Justice. My thoughts here expand on Schliesser's post.
Nov 30, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
If you must read Douthat's defense of forced birth, here's a chaser. I give an oft-neglected materialist case against fetal personhood, an argument from religious freedom of non-believers religious "moderates", and an argument from structural misogyny. liberalcurrents.com/the-misogyny-o… This from Douthat is simply absurd. It's not the feminists who are obstructing the kind of human infrastructure policies that facilitate greater female labor force participation and balancing work and family. Image
Nov 29, 2021 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
I've never read Kant, so I can't comment on @Tracinski's analysis, other than to glance at the Philosophy Twitter ratio. But this piece is worth a THREAD just for the lessons that can be learned about classical liberal discourse on social justice. 1/

discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2021/11/… The first point is that Kant is a weird villain to choose, since even in the piece it's clear that the issue in question is already present in *Plato*, not to mention Kant's own prompter, Hume. Q: Why Kant? A: Ayn Rand. More on this at the end of the thread. 2/
Oct 29, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Chatting with some neoliberals and it just seems very suspicious to me that billionaire wealth is uniquely dangerous to tax. Even apart from their general disagreement with me that reducing inequality is a legitimate policy goal, taxing billionaires is "just unworkable." 1/ If you tax billionaires via their unrealized capital gains, then you'll decrease the value of the companies they own stock in. I guess that means other stock holders would be made poorer? Seems suspicious to me, but unlike neoliberals I'm not an economist. 2/
Oct 19, 2021 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Okay THREAD on this.

First thing is, I mean it when I say "open borders". And I think people generally understand what it means: there should be a presumption in favor of freedom of movement with the purpose of legal residence and pathway to citizenship. A better analogy to "abolish the police" isn't "open borders" but "abolish borders", which some activists say. OB is a liberal pragmatic reform (that can still be achieved in stages). AB is a utopian, usually anarchist position that's incompatible with how our state functions.
Oct 16, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
There are so many remarkable things about this week's Lexington column in @TheEconomist defending Dave Chappelle. I think I'll number them. 1. The column has the form of yet another scolding of "the woke left" for #CancelCulture ...

economist.com/united-states/… ... but there doesn't seem to be much cAnCeLiNg in evidence. That is, except for the Netflix employees who were temporarily suspended for crashing an executive meeting in order to protest the show (free speech!). Lexington gives no details of any cancellation.
Sep 27, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Yes. Can we make this the slogan? #PurgeThePolice Abolish the police: No. A professionalized, bureaucratized police force is good, actually. And without that, it seems like sundown town-style local tyranny could materialize.
Jul 27, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This Krugman thread reminded me of a thread on natalism and liberalism I did not too long ago, riffing on a @JillFilipovic piece. Well here's the thread again so there's a preview.
Jul 12, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Good luck to the protesters.

The US embargo of Cuba is bad. The communists in power are far worse. Cubans should be free from both.
May 26, 2021 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
.@crookedfootball on the challenge the "citizenship premium" (rich world advantage) poses to rich world social democratic parties. Short THREAD. crookedtimber.org/2021/05/26/soc… Image 1. Migrant-friendly coalitions should stress the positive-sum angle of cross-border solidarity. The economic growth benefits of immigration are pretty ironclad. This is the absolute benefit Bertram identifies. There's still the relative standing to address ...