Based Camp: Were Progressives Good/Benign Before They Went Woke?

​Welcome to our robust discussion, 'Redefining Progressivism: A Dialogue Between Malcolm and Simone'. In this episode, we delve into the evolution of progressive movements from the eighties and nineties to the present day. Our intention is to identify the core values that shaped these movements and to examine how they have evolved or deviated from their initial principles.

We discuss the interplay between progressivism and conservatism, the goal of removing emotional pain in current movements, and the ways in which this aim is influencing societal norms. We also examine the role of Christianity in shaping ideas about equality and how these ideas have been integrated into both progressive and conservative philosophies.

Our discussion ranges from the impact of standardized testing in schools to the Healthy At Every Size (HAES) movement, from the influence of the internet on societal ideologies to the growing acceptance of polyamorous relationships. Through it all, we keep coming back to one central question: What was the true objective of the progressive movements of the past and how does it differ from today's progressivism?

This video is a must-watch if you're interested in exploring societal and cultural changes through the lens of political ideologies. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon for regular updates on our engaging and thought-provoking discussions.This is a terrible AI transcript of the episode:

 Hi, Malcolm. Hello

Simone, my wonderful wife. It's beautiful to be here with you today.

I'm glad to be talking. What are we gonna talk

about? So on a recent podcast you had brought up something where I disagreed with you, and whenever we disagree on something, we like to hash it out so that we can get on the same page with the topic.

So we both agree that right now progressivism in the far left has been eaten by this. Super virus that has hollowed out the old predominant ideologies and just wears them like a skin suit. And we agree that this super virus is primary objective or like the objective ideological function of it.

It's to remove in the moment emotional pain from people. That's what it optimizes most of its decisions around. So those two things being agreed, where we disagreed was the movements that it ate, what the progressive movements were in the eighties and nineties, before the age of the internet, before the supervisor arose, what was their real objective and what were they optimized around?

This. Yeah, I, my, my position and the general impression that I'm under is progressivism is the move fast break things approach, whereas conservatism is the, hold on, wait, things are okay the way they are. Let's not. Let's not change things so quickly. And so I don't see progressivism as inherently bad.

I can see it as risky, obviously, because things do break when you move fast and when you're not careful. But it is just one philosophy and ultimately both progressivism and conservatism must work in concert because if you don't have advancement, if you don't have people moving fast and breaking things, you don't.

Deal with new existential threats, you don't advance. But if you only advance, if you only try new things and constantly change, you both lose a lot of value collectively and a lot of efficiency. And also subject yourself to maybe more existential risks than you're building solutions too, if that makes sense.

Do you have a differing definition of these things? I

do. Yeah, so I think the progressive movement always. Had an aesthetic element to it that contained what you're talking about and has always professed to care about that for a long time. It's professed to care about that. But I think we need to remember that, something could be called the Patriot Act and be totally unpatriotic, right?

Like just cuz something professes something doesn't mean it doesn't. And I think that when we're talking about

When we talk about conservatives, modern or even older conservatives, they'll often say that their movement, one of the big things they care about is small government, right? And yet they almost never do anything that actually makes the government smaller or that really, de consolidates executive power or that, and so just because a movement says, and a lot of members believe that this is something that they do, I don't think that we should take that to mean that's actually what they're optimizing around. So when I look around progressive policy pushes in the nineties, in the eighties They all really seem to me, based around optimizing equality, specifically equality of outcomes, and the more equality you had, the more equality you had in the way people were treated, in the opportunities people had access to in sort of everything, the better.

And this is not what it optimizes for anymore. An example of how much it doesn't optimize for equality now can be seen an insane thing to has said recently. So as a lot of people, they might not agree with our original premise that it's been eaten and now it does something entirely different.

So if you look at what progressivism does now, so you have Simone's vision of progressivism and my vision of progressivism, and we can talk about why each of those visions might be negative in some ways and we can get to that. And I think that the equality drive is actually. A pseudo communist drive and that it's driven with the long-term plan to a communist like society, but or very socialist like society, like as close to communism as you can get.

But if we go back to the Maining claim that we made at the beginning, which is that progressivism today, isn't that anymore? So when we look at something like the recent fight in California which was to have kids like not take tests or remove the amount of testing that kids get because some kids get bad grades on tests and that hurts their feelings.

So let's remove this saying that's hurting people's feelings. Now, obviously, In the long term, if you remove testing that testing was primarily motivating. The kids who didn't have parents who were motivating them, the rich kids parents still send them to s a t prep. They're still sending their kids to, to forced environments where they are in some way, socially or economically or emotionally.

Punished for not continuing to achieve, to not continuing to do well. Whereas when you have less socioeconomically advantaged people often they don't have as much time to spend on their kids in those ways. They don't have as much time to engage those kids on those things. So the people who are vastly, disproportionately hurt by removing things like that are going to be the economically less fortunate.

So you are increasing inequality, but removing in the moment suffering. And you see this across the board, Again, I always come back to the Hayes movement as being a great example of this, but I really think it is the healthy and every size movement saying that it is, bigoted to teach or published research that shows that it might be unhealthy to be severely overweight.

That causes in the moment emotional pain and therefore it is bad regardless of whether or not it is true and might help people in the long run. That's just you then rework what is true and what is being communicated. To be the thing that hurts people less.

  Another area where you see this progressive. Policy of not at all being like, what progressives used to be is these drug programs, where they're giving hard drugs to people on the streets really at high levels because not having your drug when you want it causes emotional pain.

Therefore, it is evil. Therefore, we should give it to people, even if it causes more long-term suffering and exasperated it's social inequality caused by things like mental disorders.

 And you can see this in, polyamory, like the social movements that you see today, right?

I want sex now , right? And I might have some set of rules, but all of those rules I have with my partner are based around removing emotional pain for me and the partner while doing whatever I want.

All right, but I'm gonna push back on your premise around equality. I think that the old objective, yeah I don't think that's what progressivism is really about.

I think that equality maybe correlates more highly with Christianity. That's like a concept that. Was introduced with Jesus and the New Testament. And it's all about like now the, the meek shall inherit and the all you know, this is about, that's where victimhood became cool.

That's where helping the poor became cool. That's where helping everyone became like a desirable and virtuous thing. And I think that Christianity. Or like pro religion groups have isolated oh, sorry. Sorry. Osci. Isolated between progressivism and conservatism. So I think that there's a lower correlation between equality, which I very much like connect with Christianity and conservatism or progressivism.

And I think more of it has to do with who is in favor of changing things and who is not in favor of changing things. There has been time when the Catholic church and then broader Christianity has been very pro change. And there have been times when it has been very anti-change. So I don't agree with what your like basic argument

 I really find the point you just made very fascinating and I do agree that you're right that before Christianity, and this was actually a really interesting thing, if you study the history of like early Christianity, the idea of looking was reverence on the less fortunate in society was not really done.

There, there was very little cultural precedent for doing that, at least within the traditions in those geographic regions. And this is something you can actually see Romans talk a lot about in the early Christian tradition is they saw it as. Really interesting the way that Christianity did that and potentially even morally superior to their existing Pagan practices as to why Christianity does that.

I suspect it's because their original, like the progenitor of it all, was somebody who, was suffered who was down trodden and that they showed their dedication through suffering. And of unraised suffering in the moment. And that is why for a long time after this, and if you're not familiar with the early Christian Church, the core thing you would do to be cool in the Christian Church was to become martyred.

That was the highest act of devotion. And then when the Roman government became Christian started freaking out about this because they could no longer do the key thing the instate, right?

And so then what? That's when the monastic tradition started. So they would, they'd just get, they got fed up that they couldn't get themselves killed. So they'd just walk into the desert and then say, okay, I'll live this sort of life of suffering, but this elevated this life of suffering, which really elevated the poor, which is really philosophically interesting. But I don't know. I actually think both the progressive, the communist and the conservative faction, I love the conservative factions.

Like you guys aren't the Christians. And then the Christians say you guys aren't the progressives. They're like, you guys aren't the good Christians. And the truth is that Western civilization has been so inundated in Christian values for so long. I actually think both perspectives are different parts of the Christian kaleidoscope and represent different.

Christian denomination values in different ways of relating to those values. And so I think it's wrong to say that the conservatives are the Christian influence side and the progressives aren't the Christian influence side. Um, However, you, me, I well, okay, but here's where I don't agree with you.

So when I look at the actual policy decisions that they were pushing they were pushing for a very specific and stupid kind of equality. And that is equality regardless of what you do, that you can. Dress anyway. Take any action, act in any way. Put any amount of effort into something, and you should still be socially treated the same and get the same rewards.

You should be able to not go to work and still get the same rewards as somebody who does go to work.

Whoa. No. That's. Position that is one progressive group that has made arguments like that. And again, like the, there are, that's, this is what I personally, cuz I'm gonna hold out like I'm trying to stand progressivism here.

Progressivism is about letting ideas out there, trying them, but it's not about enforcing them and it's not about forcing them on other people. It is, Hey, let's try this social experiment. Hey, let's try letting people dress whatever way they want. Let's, try and see what happens when women vote.

But they

never

had a fail state. That's the thing about social experiments, that they're supposed to have a fail state. Like we know if x Y happens,

progressivism and conservatism are about the next step we take. They're not about determining what, what fails or what succeeds. And in fact, a very progressive system would have a higher revolution, a higher Respond rate than like a conservative system because the progressive system would say, oh wow, we all just tried like being naked for a year.

That was dumb. Here's a new progressive idea. Maybe we should wear clothes. Cool, let's try it. Whereas would, I dunno. Did you see the

So there was an article like advice or something, and they're like, there's this cool new thing people are doing in San Francisco called Radical

Monogamy. But see, that's the progressive way.

The conservative way in San Francisco would be like, no, let's stick with polyamory. We know it works and let. Let's not go around changing things and progressivism

is, we tried this polyamory thing, let's give it another few centuries. Yeah, exactly.

And that's what I'm saying, like progressivism is great because it allows for greater adaptability.

I think conservatism is the also very necessary. Hesitation before doing something crazy so that you don't, end up hurting a lot of people. Because a point that you make about governance, for example is progressivism within governance models, especially on the state level, is incredibly dangerous because when you do something wrong, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people may die.

So there is a place for these things.

So here's how you convince me. Can you think of actual mainstream progressive policy positions? You have a window here, okay? You have the nineties to the fifties, all right?

And you've got progressive positions from that period, okay? I want you to find a single one. That was an actual policy position that they pushed for that couldn't be argued to primarily be about equality instead of just social accelerationism because what you are describing is social accelerationism and you get social acceleration like Calvin is tradition, which we're both from, is a very social accelerationist position.

They were always experimenting with new cultural practices,

gay marriage. What? Gay marriage. Gay marriage. That I don't think that's about equality. Hey, if it were about equality, then we would've animal marriage too. Alright. It like, this is for the gays. No.

What are you talking about? Come on. It with a hundred percent.

If you were about social change, you would have animal marriage. Gay marriage was saying this isn't hurting anyone, and it's not involving any and non-consenting entities, and therefore it should be allowed because equality explains the push towards gay marriage much, much, much more so than just social experimentation.

And in fact, I would bet that many gay proponents would find that quite an insulting reason to say why progressives were standing gay. Marriage was what? They just wanted social experimentation. They just wanted social change. No, they were fighting for equality. And anyone would've told you that?

Perhaps you're right. I hear, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's acknowledging that an old social institution, Was no longer relevant and allowing that social institution to evolve, that is to say marriage and conservative

change their practices all the time. So if you wanna talk about a big social change that happened during that time with the conservative antagonism towards abortion that just wasn't true before, like the fifties. And there was, were pro-abortion. Yeah, they were pro-abortion. In fact, there were surveys done and conservatives were much more pro-abortion than progressives. Really? Yeah. So the abortion thing only came about because they were trained to capture the Catholic voting block, which was always anti-abortion.

So I looked this up after recording and at the Republican national convention and Kansas city in 1976, the majority of the constituents there were pro-choice.

 But like evangelicals being anti-abortion, no, that was not a thing. Historically that was social experimentation. Now you look at the highly derived evangelical movements, they're constantly coming up with new social practices, like speaking in tongues or weird types of parades they do, or oh, now we're gonna talk with each other with these words, that.

They're always socially experimenting. What you are seeing here is progressives to defined a specific type of social experimentation, as good as progressive. And because you grew up in that environment, that was the only thing you saw. You saw all of the conservative social experimentation as intrinsically regressive when it wasn't, it was trying out new.

Things. All of these quote unquote conservative cults are like extremist conservative religious factions. That was social experimentation just as much as a hippie commune. Now here's a separate argument. If you look across cultures, you have cultures that are called

I wanna say accelerationist or derivative. And they change a lot, but you don't just see this in cultures. You see this with languages. So if you look at sp specific language groups as they've derived from Indo-European, some languages just for whatever reason, are really highly retained. They just don't change much.

They keep saying things the same, et cetera. Other groups that deviated from the same, cultural evolutionary tree at the same time, They just have a cultural tendency of changing really quickly in the way they say things and the speed they adopt, new words, everything like that. If you look historically actually the core differentiation here wasn't a.

Progressives versus conservatives. It was the Catholic and Orthodox versus the Protestant traditions. The Protestant tradition. Oh, it's derived the Protestant tradition. Tradition has always been a highly derived tradition with certain iterations of the Protestant tradition, specifically the Calvinist iteration being the most derived.

Iteration of the Protestant tradition. That's why when you look at the founders who were predominantly Calvinists, you would see them doing things like editing their Bibles to try to make them more like up to date with modern science and stuff like that. That was both highly derived, but a very conservative practice because they still really.

Followed this new social structure that they had created. And I would argue that conservatism today is still the same in terms of its long-term objective as conservatism in the nineties and eighties. And this is where you can see your course thesis falling apart, I think, is that it is about intergenerational cultural fidelity.

What they care about is their culture surviving into the future. Yet, if you're looking at the Protestant traditions specifically, the most fervent of the Protestant traditions, they're often highly derived cultural groups. Look at the Mormons, talk about a derived cultural group. They have very odd sorts of practices and,

and they do innovate.

They do adapt. It takes 'em a little while, but they adapt.

They do it ad Yeah. Yeah. And they do a lot more social experimentation than I'd argue progressives do. If you and their social technologies are really cool, like we can get into Mormon dating and stuff like that.

Like they've developed some pretty interesting social technologies, but let's actually talk about that. So let's talk about how a single word works, just as an example of a derived and newish social technology. What they do is the single people

who are, so just to provide a little bit of context Like at a, in a on Sundays, different waves of people will go to church services and a singles ward would meet at a certain time, like maybe at 8:00 AM when like the rest of all of the families in that general area would meet at 10:00 AM single people.

And yeah, then it's, yeah, it's a church service followed by activities afterward they hang out, they go to lunch. Yeah, but hold on.

It's not just activities. So what they would do is they would pair up, Usually people who were like dated are interested in each other in the ward to play mother and father of the ward.

And so instead of going back like you would if you were married and going to your home and then doing family day with the kids, you would do family day with the ward where this couple. Plays the role of mother and father and then hosts like an event, like a party, like a mixer for the other people in the ward in the same way that they would do for their kids, if they were older.

And it allowed them to try out relationships in a way that I think probably led to healthier relationships forming. So that's an example of a newish social technology. I don't know if it's that new.

 Okay. I looked it up after recording. And it appears that it gained prominence in the 1970s, but was invented in the 1950s. So yes, a very news social technology.

 It's more of a conservative tradition because that social technology was experimented with the idea of forming relationships and transmitting the culture onto the next generation. So it was towards conservative ends and not towards progressive ends, where when they experiment with new social practices, historically before they were eaten by the virus and now they're just like a ghoul wearing a flesh suit.

They were about maximizing equality.

Okay, hold on. I don't think it's about maximizing equality. I think it goes back to a different definition that you've given about both the present but also past difference between progressivism and conservatism with conservatism. Fighting for in intergenerational wellbeing and progressivism fighting for intragenerational wellbeing.

So progressivism optimizing around the wellbeing of people here and now. We don't really care about our grandchildren's grandchildren and conservatives. Arguing more in favor of. Now screw

our kids. Yeah. So the one big deviation from all this is global warming. Where does this fit into things for you?

Because it's the one area where progressives actually take a long term mis perspective.

Don't you think it's one of those things that's arbitrary, like with the war in Ukraine, how in the United States, like it's almost. It's a little counterintuitive how we'll say Democrats and Republicans decided to support different angles on the conflict.

I don't think necessarily it had to be,

so I'll give you my answer to this. Okay. I think what's happening is the progressive institution has predominantly, when we talk about the super virus or where it really began to spread, It was at university campuses. Okay. And at that time, the conservative institutions, so a lot of people think of as conservative, as anti academic, but that really wasn't true.

If you go back to the conservatism of the seventies and eighties, there were a lot of conservatives in academia back then. But once the progressives had really captured the academic system as a means of replicating their ideology because they weren't having as many kids, so they needed to.

Proselytize somewhere, then the conservative institutions began to distrust anything that was coming out of academia. And global warming really requires a long an academic perspective. To judge how dangerous it really is. And so I think that what we're really seeing here is more a distrust of academia from conservatives and the progressive priesthood.

If they have a priesthood, which they do actually it's academics. That's the height of the, that's who tells 'em what's true and what's false, and the same way that, if you look at the older Catholic tradition and you wanted to go. Determine what was true and what was false, and we can go over a different video in this.

You go to your priest, right? And that was the core divide between them and the Protestants. The Protestants said, oh, you should determine this on your own. And obviously some Catholic traditions have different, but the progressive faction, when they're trying to determine what's true and what's false about the world, they say, Ask the experts, but what do they really mean by experts?

They mean people who have been accredited by this university system where you can be fired for saying something too conservative, right? That's not experts. That's just what's the progressive status quo? Which is really especially now, right? We really, it just makes it a priesthood. Yeah.

Yeah. Maybe you've convinced me a little bit, I guess growing up with progressive culture one wants. To believe that it's more well-meaning than it perhaps is, or Mel warmth.

Equality is well meaning if you don't think

about it. No. Yeah. If you don't think about it. But equality is a complete farce.

There is no such thing as equality. Explain

what you mean by that. That's them fine words to a lot of people

I know. But once you think about it, it explain. Yes. So this happened, I realized this upon reading a book called Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone, in one chapter, she describes a professor bringing a cake to a class and dividing it fairly or equally.

But then she describes all of the different ways in which the cake can be equally divided. And I'm not gonna give exact examples, based on. Who gets the best grades? Who's the hungriest? Who has the best, way to tolerate a glycemic load? Who really likes cake the most? Who she likes the best, who walked up first to get a piece of cake?

There are many d

ways to eat more divide. I don't like the examples used just easier. I think a better way to say it was, is it who? It's the hungriest. Who needs calories the most, like who's physically the biggest? Is it an exactly equal distribution? Is it to the people who have less access to cake at home?

Is it people who have less money so they couldn't get a cake in class as much? Yeah. So that there's, or people who got better grades. Yeah. Yeah. Or the people who got more cake last time get less cake this time,

yeah. Yeah. And depending on, Sort of who you are and where you stand in this and how much you want cake it might, an equal division of the cake might feel very unfair to you, very unequal to you.

And you could always manipulate

what equality means. This point. Yes.

And because you have to make a judgment call on what. How we define equal, and there is no one universal thing that you can use as criteria. It, there is no such thing as true equality. There is equality along one dimension and it's a very one dimensional way to think about things.

So yeah, if you base an entire political philosophy around equality, especially if that equality is not something that also is core to that, that political philosophy, if equality were defined in progressivism, as I don't I don't even know how it could be defined than

maybe what the reason it's not defined is because it's defined loosely, so everyone can believe that if things were divided more equally, they'd have more stuff they

would benefit.

Yeah. Yeah. What's really interesting about intersectionality as a concept is that it's like a moving goalposts for equality that enables people to cheat. It's like a cheat code for having things made more equal in your favor.

Yeah. Because it, it has allowed people to say I deserve more and I am more excluded and have a bunch of exclusionary labels. I think as progressivism began to be eaten by the virus, as it began to optimize ourself around removing emotional pain, it did begin to define this equality that it was trying to create.

Where equality is the people, the people who deserve the most are the people most susceptible to emotional pain, and this is why you have these emotionally fragile. They deserve so much special treatment when no sane culture would be like, oh yes, the emotionally fragile that is who should have the most resources and run society.

But within progressive culture, yeah, of course the emotionally fragile because it is their emotional fragility and their susceptibility to emotional harm, which means they mean more protection in a society where the core promise, the core thing that's getting people on board is we will protect you from pain.

So I will say that you have seen this transition, but I think yes, in nineties and eighties, progressive, and they didn't know what equality meant. And this is why those communist systems always fail. It's because they say, oh, we're gonna create equality. And then what happens just because humans are humans is that the groups in power within these systems end up defining equality in a way that favors them.

And if you're not in empowered, then you can't do anything but revolt. Create a new system and then inevitably in a few years you end up redefining equality to what favors you. And so that's the problem with equality is it is such a slippery concept. I think that we now have a progressive ideology that does define equality.

It does define who deserves more. The problem is it's just a really stupid definition. Even worse. It's a stupid definition cuz

Okay. How does it describe

equality? Yes. The people most susceptible to emotional pain deserve more. The what?

So the, the most mentally ill shall get all those.

Yes, yes, Yes. You have

seen this like, don't you understand I have ptsd d I can't handle this right now. And the problem is that some people really do have PTSD and we need to create special, things for them so that they don't suffer for no reason. But when you incentivize this, when you create a system where the people who feel emotional pain most easily, well then you created a system.

Where their entire social group, their entire society is constantly rewarding a lack of emotional control. Mm-hmm. And so within their groups, within their little governance structures, you constantly have these meltdowns. And this is bad for the individual in these groups because one, you're teaching an external locus of control, which like all of the research shows, it's just horrible.

And it makes you have lower your ability to control yourself emotionally. But true. When you reward people for a lack of emotional control, then they like a. Biological, like hardcoded level, lose the ability to control their emotions. And so this means that they experience a lot more pain over the long run.

Ironically, when you create an entire system, an entire ideology, an internal governance framework around a moving emotional pain, you cause infinitely more emotional pain. Yeah, and this is why since Pew started doing the research on this, Conservatives have always been happier than progressives always believe it's markedly happier, and it's because they do not have these systems that are rewarding them for feeling

bad.

Yeah. Yeah. That's uh, well then, I mean, where would you say that this version of progressivism emerged?

It didn't, this is a different video. Yeah we gotta talk about the virus in a different video, and I would love to

No. I'm not referring to the virus. I'm talking about the roots of progressivism, equality pro broadly as an intragenerational

wellbeing movement.

Yeah. Yeah. So progressivism as communism, as an equality maximizer. This came from communism. It came from communist groups. Oh,

and before that, there was no focus on so would you say, and communism rose around the industrial revolution, right?

Yeah. So if you look at things that my family fought for, like historically, right?

Like my family was never. Progressive family in terms of the ideology that was motivating them. They were always motivated by maximizing individual agency was in the system. But when they were in politics, you look a few generations back, big supporters of women's suffrage big supporters of stuff like shorter work weeks during the age of robber barons, trying to increase autonomy by. Being very workers' rights. I think you can be adaptive in what maximizes individual wellbeing and autonomy. While also saying that just trying to optimize for these things that the, that iteration of progressivism existed before.

The communist ideology really took over the Democratic party and made them into what they are,

and I think what you're describing is I think maybe more like my original definition of progressivism, like we're open to change and fixing things more quickly.

No, you don't think so. What I'm talking about is conservatism, all those things that I'm talking about.

I consider conservative ideas and they were conservative ideas. They were Republican ideas and a lot of people say the Republicans and the progressive switched, but they didn't Really, what happened is racism switched between the parties. That absolutely happened, but if you look at the policy positions that the various parties were having, what really happened is this.

Communist strain basically infected one of the groups and it became the Communist Party and had no sort of ties to its former self. Whereas the Republican movement did adapt to that. Like it reactively took positions that it hadn't taken before, but it maybe changed as much as the conservative and progressive movements did during the Trump era.

We're like, there was definitely huge party switches, like the protectionist became the non protectionist and like the populist became the non populist and the, all the people who were pro-war became the anti-war party. There was a huge party switch then. But fundamentally, mostly the people who were still on one party were still in the same party.

And yet our grandkids will say, don't, the party switched when Trump took power, which I think would make most progressives like, Cre. Like what? No, you can't say that. No one will say that in the future, but like it's so obvious that's gonna be the way people see things. You think so? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Interesting. I don't agree with that. I'm just saying that's what people will say. And so I think that we can mislabel this sort of quote unquote flip that happened with the parties when it really wasn't a full flip that happened with the parties. Okay. Have I changed your mind or not?

Uh,

A, a little bit. I, I think a lot of it might, for me be caught in the weeds of I, I would need to go through the history of go for it, you know what Yeah. What all these things stood for in the past. And I You

too, Too, you know I'm talking Yeah. Well, I love you, Simone. I love that we disagree about things and we make a point of trying to come to like, we haven't done this in a podcast before, where we like genuinely hadn't really talked through something before the podcast.

So now you guys are seeing how we try to align on issues in our relationship. And we'll keep talking about this until both of us come to a position where I'm like either you convince me or I convince you. So actually an argument she didn't make. Now that did convince me a lot because we did talk about this a little bit before the podcast and it, is it progressive?

As in before the virus was much more pluralistic in its aims. And that I am overly simplifying it. And that did actually convince me, and I do think that she's right, is these equality driven angles of progressivism were only some of the most dominant factions. But there were many different factions within the progressive movement before the virus that had many different objectives.

And that. Through that they were much more pluralistic and I'm overly simplifying them. And so I did change my mind based on that argument, which didn't come up in this podcast.

Do you think you're over simp simplifying them by? Saying that they were all fighting for equality, or are you still gonna hold that?

All of these, no, I'm just saying the predominant factions that had power to get things passed in the legislature and stuff like that. I think that they were fighting for equality more than anything else. I think that was their primary objective function, but I do also believe that it was a diverse party back then, and it is wrong to paint the progressive party circa.

Eighties, nineties, seventies, sixties, as one group in the same way that today I think that you can't really ideologically dissent without being expelled from the movement.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh and maybe I'm thinking also more about my original point that like I. Progressivism is more about being in favor of change and conservatism is not, because I think you made an interesting argument that a lot of conservative groups have been very innovative, but I think it, it can also equally be argued that the progressive movement, especially today, is so ossified.

It's so it, it is now like just swath and orthodoxy. And to talk

about what you mean there. Some people might be like, oh, I disagree with that. The turf movement historically. It would've had differences of opinions with other progressives, but it fundamentally would've still been allied was the progressive party.

And yet it has been, these are feminists. These are old school blank slate feminists. This is the reason they believe what they believe. If you actually look at they call themselves gender critical feminists, if you actually look at why they hold the positions they hold is because they believe in.

The older orthodoxy and the older orthodoxy was that humans aren't born with anything. The only reason we have gender is because we were raised to believe we have gender, right? And so they see anyone who is ossifying this idea of gender saying, oh no, gender is real as fighting for this completely.

Fictional in that it's not based on any sort of biological reality patriarchy and that we should move towards a completely genderless society. I think a lot of people don't like actually know what the gender critical movement is actually fighting for. And they believe this because that used to actually be the scientific consensus.

Before academics were like, oh no, there actually are like really systemic differences between the way men and women think. And we now know this and that. You can't just, raise a guy as a girl or raise a girl as a guy and most of the time have that turn out. Okay. Actually, you can there's been intergender studies on this.

I'm not saying what's true. I'm saying what is the political orthodoxy of the academic institution now. So we could get on that later. But thi this has been a fantastic conversation, Simone.

Yeah. I love talking with you about these things. Especially love when we disagree. Cause it gets really

interesting.

Yeah. That's where we're gonna come up with a new idea and we can, we have a new thing to talk about for a few days.

Oh yeah. Things are so much more interesting when one or both of us is wrong. Because then we become. Slightly more enlightened at the end, but only slightly. All right, love you.

Love you too.

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