[village-idiot]

I think it goes beyond NIH, although NIH certainly part of the problem.

I think the moment political theory is mentioned, the response is basically that politics are gross and we should do better than that. This appears to stem from the idea that politics and all the negative aspects of it stem from some location other than people haggling over limited resources. This thought process is both ridiculously naive and a highly ineffective way to go about running a community.

This thought process is not unique to engineering. You see it all the time in various utopian projects on both the left and the right. The idea that you can escape the grossness of political processes to a land of total freedom from capital/tyranny (left & right respectively) is extremely popular, and extremely silly. Time and time again we see these movements immediately recreate the problems they decry because the problem was people all along.

[airstrike]

You put it much more eloquently than I ever could. Thanks and couldn't agree more...

[claudiawerner]

[flagged]

[village-idiot]

> This only serves to express your view (or rather, ideology) that we're living in a post-ideological world in which battles are no longer fought over beliefs but only material access to resources.

I said no such thing. I also note the use of ideology as a subtle dig, as if I’m some extremist.

> This is only valid as a pretty bad caricature of Marxism, in fact.

The idea that my post was anti-Marxist exists only in your own head.

> The left not only opposes capital but tyranny too.

I know this is probably shocking, but a one sentence summary wasn’t intended to be a complete explanation for an entire system of political thought.

> If you've read any leftist works after the year 1920

I’m not sure where accusing someone of being poorly read is an acceptable debate tactic, but it’s not one here. Stop.

> you'd know that most of them deal with various 'gross' ideas.

The hilarious thing is that I’m encouraging people to engage with these ideas, and you’re attacking me as if I’d said the exact opposite.

> What you're saying seems to imply we must abandon (i) any and every plan towards a better society (ii) any superindividual critique of totality, because both are doomed in failure due to the human condition. This is known as the 'human nature' argument against social projects and it's not very convincing.

What you imagined to be your grand coup de grâce is rather soiled by completely misunderstanding my original point.

At no point did I say that improvement is impossible, that’s an obvious and shoddy strawman of an argument. My point is that politics comes from humans, thus any attempt to completely eliminate politics is doomed to failure. This is an encouragement for people to engage with political systems and political theory in order to improve our existence.

[claudiawerner]

My point on ideology wasn't to say that ideology is extremist, rather it was to say that we are all ideological. Ideology in popular speech seems to mean something extremist, because we figure outselves to be free of ideology: rational, economical etc. - but these are ideologies in themselves. You and I are both steeped in ideology and that's not a bad thing. The bad thing is thinking we are free of it, or the world works as if it's free of it, or that societies don't perpetuate themselves through Establishment ideology.

I also didn't want to imply you're poorly read, or that you should be well read on something as arcane as 20th century leftist theory, I only wanted to bring your attention to the idea that the left doesn't shy away from grossness in any future society.

The question is never of eliminating politics in the most general sense, it's to eliminate current politics in a constantly revolutionary fashion. Communism is a political movement, for instance, and the very existence of the party shows that they don't want to get rid of politics - they only want to move away from bourgeois democracy which supports (and is supported by) capital. Not even the anarchists deny the role of politics. But the idea that politics is merely a disagreement about resource allocation is ideological (and this time I do mean it in a bad sense).

[village-idiot]

Most of that’s pretty reasonable, but you’re talking about something completely unrelated to the point I was making.