| > The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it ... political ideals aren't real. They don't matter. > people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists ... have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code. Interesting observation, and yeah, it definitely smells like Marx. But I'd say it's too early to reach a conclusion like that. It's not unusual for mainstream philosophical ideas of X'th century to have little impact on the real world until well into X+1'th century or even later, and that's under favorable socioeconomic circumstances. Similarly, programming language theory debated on the Haskell lists tends to "trickle down", after a while, into various other languages and frameworks. 10 or 20 or 30 years later, someone writes a PHP framework that is indirectly inspired by some of them. It takes time, that's all. I'd be very surprised if political ideas developed in the 1990s, for example, came to fruition anytime before 2090 or so. And the same applies to the neoreactionary ideas of the 2000s. Even if they're as promising as their advocates say they are, it's going to take no less time to port them to the real world. So I don't think your impatience is justified. > a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone Ah, the usual baseless romanticism about the past. This is what I find the most disagreeable about neoreactionaries. If you want to build a better future, leave your unrealistic notions of history at the door. > b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so. Did you actually go back in time and ask them whether they really enjoyed it? Or are you just trying to force everyone else to be "free" (hello, Rousseau) regardless of whether they want to be? I don't have any problem with a bunch of consenting adults who want to build their own country in the middle of an ocean. It's their money and their own lives to spend as they see fit. But I don't think anybody has the right to drag a single non-consenting person into a copy of Plato's ideal city. Most people are just fine being comfortable serfs in an industrial society, whether you like it or not. And that's what really prevents the speedy implementation of any political philosophy, whether yours or mine. As I see it, you're not really trying to fix this issue, but merely rewrite history to make it look like a non-issue. It's a fascinating intellectual exercise, but good luck getting your rewritten history merged into Upstream Reality. |