Triggernometry Day the Delusions Died

The left aere usually always wrong, about pretty much everything. And they’re often deeply immoral people too.

That feels like a generalisation comparable to generalising about most people on a political spectrum. (This may be leftist optimism showing in my hope that most of us are essentially good despite my core beliefs being more in line with Sowell.)

I am feeling politically adrift. I'd welcome good critiques of Sowell's unconstrained vs constrained and whether there's a blend within categories of Left and Right.

The unconstrained vision[edit]Sowell argues that the unconstrained vision relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially good. Those with an unconstrained vision distrust decentralized processes and are impatient with large institutions and systemic processes that constrain human action. They believe there is an ideal solution to every problem, and that compromise is never acceptable. Collateral damage is merely the price of moving forward on the road to perfection. Sowell often refers to them as "the self anointed." Ultimately they believe that man is morally perfectible. Because of this, they believe that there exists some people who are further along the path of moral development, have overcome self-interest and are immune to the influence of power and therefore can act as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society.

The constrained vision[edit]Sowell argues that the constrained vision relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially unchanging and that man is naturally inherently self-interested, regardless of the best intentions. Those with a constrained vision prefer the systematic processes of the rule of law and experience of tradition. Compromise is essential because there are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs. Those with a constrained vision favor empirical evidence and time-tested structures and processes over intervention and personal experience. Ultimately, the constrained vision demands checks and balances and refuses to accept that all people could put aside their innate self-interest.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions

I'm pretty sure there are sensible criticisms to be made of the right/constrained position, but who is making them?

Yes. As the judge in Mr Miller’s case, Mr Justice Julian Knowles, expressed it: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

In Scotland, I fear it's moving towards those very things as an aspiration, in the name of progression towards utopia.

I've never fully reconciled myself with what I learned from Giles Udy's Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left.*

I, too, would welcome a thorough going critique of the constrained position.

In January 1930, the New Statesman reported that dekulakisation was a "cruel experiment" involving "imprisonment and execution." Over the next two years, 1.8 million kulaks were arrested and deported to the North. Some 240,000 died. By 1931, 60,000 Russians had been arrested on religious grounds and 5,000 shot. The exact numbers may not have been known in the West, but the basic facts of Soviet mass murder, disenfranchisement, and slave labour were available to any literate Briton by the end of the 1920s.

More than a million people in Europe took part in "Prayers for the Persecuted" in 1930, effectively a mass protest again Russian barbarism towards the clergy. The Soviets’ use of unpaid prison labour to produce timber in the unbearable conditions of northern Russia was well documented and led many countries to boycott Russian timber in the 1920s. British sailors travelling to northern Russia saw the conditions with their own eyes, and numerous stowaways and escapees were able to provide the grim details. The evidence was there for those who had eyes to see.

Not everybody did. Timber made in gulags was illegal under the Foreign Prison-Made Goods Act of 1897 and the Labour Party had taken a strong stand against "sweated goods" when they were in opposition in the mid-1920s. And yet the Labour Party did not ban it once they were in power (the Conservatives finally did so in 1933), and many on the British Left refused to accept the evidence of brutality, starvation, and mass shootings long after the evidence was overwhelming."

https://www.acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2017/11/03/book-review-labour-and-gulag-russia-and-seduction-british

Sexual violence is a familiar and abhorrent tactic in warfare amidst the general horrors.

My belief for the longer-term is that climate and displaced populations forced out by extreme weather and uninsurable habitation areas may well make a nonsense of human conflict.

But it feeds into my concerns for greater poverty, social tensions and instability that will disproportionately impact children and primary caregivers (women).

I hope for a progressive utopia. At my core, I believe in management and containment of conflict at best.