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How many divisions does the Pope have?

— Joseph Stalin, missing the point

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Pre-Liberal Idea – “Kings rule by divine right, and the peasant rabble cannot rule themselves!”
Pre-Liberal Truth Environment – “It’s right because the king, or the priests, or the nobles said so. And you’re not allowed to say differently!”
Modern Liberal Epistemology – “Actually there’s no evidence that kings are inherently smarter or better than anybody else, we can actually sit people down and test their performance on various relevant tests about self-governance and organization. And also we can look at history and the record of different arrangements. Therefore people can govern themselves, at least no worse than a king could.” Bam. Easy.

Pre-Liberal Idea – “With phrenology, we can measure the shapes of people’s skulls, and determine what kind of person they are – good, bad, honest, criminal, moron. Conveniently this corresponds to our group being the smartest and best! Also stupid people should be sterilized.”
Pre-Liberal Environment – “People are biologically determined, and observable causal factors aren’t necessary to link two phenomena together. Also, what is a representative sample? We don’t care!”
Modern Liberal Epistemology – “You don’t actually have a systematic way of determining any of your variables. Also, even if this was even slightly scientifically or statistically valid, which it’s not, that doesn’t mean you could say specific things about individuals, nor about how they should be treated, nor about their rights.” Basic empiricism. No problem.

Pre-Liberal Idea – “Women are so emotional and childlike, they could never hold the sorts of jobs or responsibilities that men do, and their freedoms should be limited because they are not capable of the correspondent responsibility. And they cannot be educated into adult thinking.”
Pre-Liberal Environment – “It’s fine to assume something can’t ever happen even if we’ve systematically prevented it from happening! We don’t know what selection bias is!”
Modern Liberal Epistemology – “We actually let women have education and responsibilities and ran this social experiment, so to speak, and it turns out that they can be educated and responsible in basically the same way as men can be. The pre-liberal idea didn’t even try for evidence on this one.” Pre-Liberalism got rekt.

Basically every single time the Big Lurching Monster of Liberalism turns its giant Eyeball of High Standards for Evidence to one of these issues, it turns out that rights-relevant, systematic human differences are statistically undetectable, individual characteristics cannot be effectively predicted by the classic categories of human division, and all this pseudo-scientific, take-it-on-faith, don’t-look-behind-the-curtain nonsense just disintegrates. From geocentrism to witch-hunting to gender essentialism, it has historically always yielded under the piercing gaze of the Monster.

And then the Monster turns its Eyeball on something that would be very nice to think for some people. It would back them up, and look bad for their enemies (who after all, are the Monster of Liberalism’s enemies!). And all of a sudden this belief or fact disintegrates. And the calls ring out – “Put a blindfold on the Monster! Don’t let it look over here, only over there, where bad ideas are! Don’t let the Monster look at our things!”

But why should we do that? The Monster has a *very* good record, after all. It seems to basically always do good things for humans. It has been blindfolded so much throughout history, it seems a bad idea to start doing that again.

“Well if you won’t stop making it look over here, I’ll poke out its Eyeball! We don’t need the Monster anymore! We never did!”

But the Monster of Liberalism got us to where we are, and its powers are not diminished! I hardly see how-

“Down with the Monster! Boo! Damn you, Monster-lover!”

(And this is where I start to wonder who liberalism’s enemies actually are.)

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Neo-Nazis fight nasty.

Do they? I have neo nazi commentators on my blog. They know more about genetics and darwinism than the average progressive and engage in civil fact based discussion with me when I compare to them to communists. They cannot be trusted to be civil to my Jewish commentators, but neither can I trust my Jewish commentators to be civil to them – though perhaps the Jews have better excuse for incivility.

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