You clearly have some fundamentally irreconcilable beliefs about elitism and it would be enlightening to see what those are, and what it reveals about temperamental conservatives vs. temperamental liberals.
There are a couple of ideas there worth addressing, perhaps in a future essay or my next book. Most of the essay, though, appears to be willfully fraudulent (e.g., misattributing quotes to me as if I'd written them). I could not debate someone so profoundly dishonest.
Fair enough. I'm a paid subscriber to both of you because I find value in both your writing, and get excited to see the ideas come up against each other. Here's what I'd be interested to see you write about:
1. Lived experience. You both seem to agree that it's epistemologically weak when the wokes start going on about "as a black queer indigenous woman with fibromyalgia..." DLA accuses you of fetishizing the lived experience of the elderly (because they have lived longer), and separately of the poor (because of the hardships they have suffered.) I'd be interested to know if you see this as a different concept from lived experience, or that it IS lived experience and it's sometimes good to value lived experience.
2. Luxury beliefs vs. DLA's McGenics concept (deepleft.substack.com/p/mcgenics). These seem to be the same phenomenon with a different framing: elites non-deliberately don’t align their prescriptions for themselves and their family with their prescriptions for others, the result is to suppress non-elite reproduction. DLA says this is good actually, because it makes the surviving population more elite. What do you think/is he evil for this/does it come down to irreconcilable beliefs about the value of life.
"The Luxury Thesis leads to a “labor theory of truth.” Since the educated youth are lazy, impulsive, psychopathic, selfish, violent, and privileged, their ideas can be dismissed without an argument."
Holy non sequitur Batman!
And the article goes downhill from there, one non sequitur after another. This is all driven by a bigger error: the conflation of the idea of Luxury Beliefs with ephebiphobia.
I'm not sure what Luxury Beliefs has to do with ephebiphobia. At all. The logical mistake seems to be as follows:
Rob Henderson discovered* the concept of Luxury Beliefs.
Rob Henderson is an ephebiphobe.
Therefore, Luxury Beliefs are really a form of ephebiphobia (does not follow).
*Feel free to substitute a verb of your choice that might be more accurate.
The "link" the author tries to make is that "poverty" is correlated with youth (and, therefore, progressivism) and "luxury" with old age (and, therefore, conservatism), therefore any "luxury lies" would have to come from conservative old farts. To quote: "If strife and struggle produce truth, while luxury produces lies, then truth is to be found in the struggling youth, while lies are developed in the luxury of retirement and old age." WTF?
Personally, I think ephebiphobia is real in a day and age where the boomers have had the sociocultural whip hand since they were young, and maintained it into their old age. But, again, nothing to do with Luxury Beliefs--another topic for another day. Ditto for conservatism's appeals to authority and tradition.
One disproof of his thesis that young=progressive (OK, you can accuse me of making non sequiturs here if you like) is that the young are not always progressive; witness the persistent libertarianish conservatism of GenX, started in youth and continued as GenX has aged. It's still too early to look at GenZ similarly, but the trends are already there. The author kicks a big own goal about GenX right here: https://deepleft.substack.com/p/gen-x-the-most-powerful-generation . The fact that he had to write that article as some kind of hot take disproves it to some extent. The author doesn't leave any good breadcrumbs about what generation he is in, but he appears to be a Millennial; he's got too much hate for GenX (especially its right-of-centeredness) and doesn't speak like GenZ.
In short, he's trying to Pepsi Generationalize progressivism; that is, make progressivism seem cool and hip and the province of the young to put his thumb on the scale in favor of progressivism generally, and he has enslaved a weak-tea criticism of Luxury Beliefs to serve that end.
The real question is why women would attribute verbal mistreatment to "mansplaining" when it might not be the case. This is probably extensible to other misogynistic acts.
You should debate DeepLeftAnalysis! He wrote this about you: deepleft.substack.com/p/against-the-conservative-longhouse
You clearly have some fundamentally irreconcilable beliefs about elitism and it would be enlightening to see what those are, and what it reveals about temperamental conservatives vs. temperamental liberals.
There are a couple of ideas there worth addressing, perhaps in a future essay or my next book. Most of the essay, though, appears to be willfully fraudulent (e.g., misattributing quotes to me as if I'd written them). I could not debate someone so profoundly dishonest.
Fair enough. I'm a paid subscriber to both of you because I find value in both your writing, and get excited to see the ideas come up against each other. Here's what I'd be interested to see you write about:
1. Lived experience. You both seem to agree that it's epistemologically weak when the wokes start going on about "as a black queer indigenous woman with fibromyalgia..." DLA accuses you of fetishizing the lived experience of the elderly (because they have lived longer), and separately of the poor (because of the hardships they have suffered.) I'd be interested to know if you see this as a different concept from lived experience, or that it IS lived experience and it's sometimes good to value lived experience.
2. Luxury beliefs vs. DLA's McGenics concept (deepleft.substack.com/p/mcgenics). These seem to be the same phenomenon with a different framing: elites non-deliberately don’t align their prescriptions for themselves and their family with their prescriptions for others, the result is to suppress non-elite reproduction. DLA says this is good actually, because it makes the surviving population more elite. What do you think/is he evil for this/does it come down to irreconcilable beliefs about the value of life.
"The Luxury Thesis leads to a “labor theory of truth.” Since the educated youth are lazy, impulsive, psychopathic, selfish, violent, and privileged, their ideas can be dismissed without an argument."
Holy non sequitur Batman!
And the article goes downhill from there, one non sequitur after another. This is all driven by a bigger error: the conflation of the idea of Luxury Beliefs with ephebiphobia.
I'm not sure what Luxury Beliefs has to do with ephebiphobia. At all. The logical mistake seems to be as follows:
Rob Henderson discovered* the concept of Luxury Beliefs.
Rob Henderson is an ephebiphobe.
Therefore, Luxury Beliefs are really a form of ephebiphobia (does not follow).
*Feel free to substitute a verb of your choice that might be more accurate.
The "link" the author tries to make is that "poverty" is correlated with youth (and, therefore, progressivism) and "luxury" with old age (and, therefore, conservatism), therefore any "luxury lies" would have to come from conservative old farts. To quote: "If strife and struggle produce truth, while luxury produces lies, then truth is to be found in the struggling youth, while lies are developed in the luxury of retirement and old age." WTF?
Personally, I think ephebiphobia is real in a day and age where the boomers have had the sociocultural whip hand since they were young, and maintained it into their old age. But, again, nothing to do with Luxury Beliefs--another topic for another day. Ditto for conservatism's appeals to authority and tradition.
One disproof of his thesis that young=progressive (OK, you can accuse me of making non sequiturs here if you like) is that the young are not always progressive; witness the persistent libertarianish conservatism of GenX, started in youth and continued as GenX has aged. It's still too early to look at GenZ similarly, but the trends are already there. The author kicks a big own goal about GenX right here: https://deepleft.substack.com/p/gen-x-the-most-powerful-generation . The fact that he had to write that article as some kind of hot take disproves it to some extent. The author doesn't leave any good breadcrumbs about what generation he is in, but he appears to be a Millennial; he's got too much hate for GenX (especially its right-of-centeredness) and doesn't speak like GenZ.
In short, he's trying to Pepsi Generationalize progressivism; that is, make progressivism seem cool and hip and the province of the young to put his thumb on the scale in favor of progressivism generally, and he has enslaved a weak-tea criticism of Luxury Beliefs to serve that end.
The real question is why women would attribute verbal mistreatment to "mansplaining" when it might not be the case. This is probably extensible to other misogynistic acts.
What does the commentariat think?