Bloggers From The United States

"Liberal values like tolerance and individual freedom are prized most intensely when they are denied: People who live in brutal dictatorships want the simple freedom to speak, associate, and worship as they choose. But over time life in a liberal society comes to be taken for granted and its sense of shared community seems thin."

"The more progress that has been made toward eradicating social injustices, the more intolerable the remaining injustices seem, and thus the moral imperative to mobilizing to correct them."

"The limits of this strategy were evident as the century drew to a close. The Marxist left had to confront the fact that actual Communist societies in the Soviet Union and China had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships."

"The Left’s identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy... The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over the rational examination of issues in the outside world and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation that may force one to abandon prior opinions."

"Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up."

"The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military."

"Neoconservatives believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support. …"[W]ar" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world."

"No regime—no “socio-economic system”—is able to satisfy all men in all places. This includes liberal democracy. This is not a matter of the incompleteness of the democratic revolution, that is, because the blessings of liberty and equality have not been extended to all people. Rather, the dissatisfaction arises precisely where democracy has triumphed most completely: it is a dissatisfaction with liberty and equality."

"Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy."

"It is in the very design of democratic capitalist countries like the United States that the most talented and ambitious natures should tend to go into business, rather than into politics, the military, universities, or the church. And it would seem not entirely a bad thing for the long-run stability of democratic politics that economic activity can preoccupy such ambitious natures for an entire lifetime. This is not simply because such people create wealth which migrates through the economy as a whole, but because such people are kept out of politics and the military. In those latter occupations, their restlessness would lead them to propose innovations at home or adventures abroad, with potentially disastrous consequences for the polity."

"While we do not, for now, have to share Nietzsche’s hatred of liberal democracy, we can make use of his insights concerning the uneasy relationship between democracy and the desire for recognition. That is, to the extent that liberal democracy is successful at purging megalothymia from life and substituting for it rational consumption, we will become last men. But human beings will rebel at this thought. That is, they will rebel at the idea of being undifferentiated members of a universal and homogeneous state, each the same as the other no matter where on the globe one goes. They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery—the life of rational consumption—in the end, boring. They will want to have ideals by which to live and die, even if the largest ideals have been substantively realized here on earth, and they will want to risk their lives even if the international state system has succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war. This is the “contradiction” that liberal democracy has not yet solved."

"The form that a future left-wing challenge to our present liberalism may take could be considerably different from those with which we are familiar in this century. The threat to liberty posed by communism was so direct and obvious, and the doctrine so discredited at present, that it is hard to see it as anything but totally exhausted throughout the developed world. A future left-wing threat to liberal democracy is much more likely to wear the clothing of liberalism while changing its meaning from within, rather than to stage a frontal attack on basic democratic institutions and principles. For example, almost all liberal democracies have seen a massive proliferation of new “rights” over the past generation. Not content merely to protect life, liberty, and property, many democracies have also defined rights to privacy, travel, employment, recreation, sexual preference, abortion, childhood, and so on. Needless to say, many of these rights are ambiguous in their social content and mutually contradictory. It is easy to foresee situations in which the basic rights defined by, say, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were seriously abridged by newly minted rights whose aim was a more thoroughgoing equalization of society."

"There is an unquestionable relationship between economic development and liberal democracy, which one can observe simply by looking around the world. But the exact nature of that relationship is more complicated than it first appeared, and is not adequately explained by any of the theories presented up to this point. The logic of modern natural science and the industrialization process it fosters does not point in a single direction in the sphere of politics, as it does in the sphere of economics. Liberal democracy is compatible with industrial maturity, and is preferred by the citizens of many industrially advanced states, but there does not appear to be a necessary connection between the two. The Mechanism underlying our directional history leads equally well to a bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one. We will therefore have to look elsewhere in trying to understand the current crisis of authoritarianism and the worldwide democratic revolution."

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

"I like and admire Larry very much. I actually think his role in the early days of Wikipedia is under-appreciated."

"Wikipedia is so ironic. We wanted to give a voice to the voiceless, but what emerged was one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history."

"[From concluding remarks on results from multiple search engines.] Look at it this way. Among the responses to searches on politically charged topics such as "Ukraine" and "gay marriage," there are boatloads of relevant pages, from a wide variety of sources, that I would want placed higher than just these. Why on earth should we constantly see Wikipedia, New York Times, Britannica, Vox, Pew, ABC News, CNN, etc., come up over and over and over again? I don't mean I want to see more of Fox, WSJ, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail. I mean, that wouldn't hurt, but that's not my point. I would like to see high-quality material (there is a lot) from the long tail of downranked websites. I saw the Epoch Times once, and the Federalist, Breitbart, and National Review never. There were very few relatively obscure websites."

"It is more than just a mob now. It is a mob in the sense that there is real internal political authority being wielded and no regularised fair, democratic way of determining who should have that authority. The arbitration committee elections are a joke. You cannot know, announce, reveal the identities of the most of administrators on Wikipedia... you don't know who those people are and if you don't know, there is no accountability. It is a self-contained system. If it just so happened that one of the leading administrators on Wikipedia is a convicted paedophile, sitting in prison right now, in some prison where they let prisoners use the internet, that does not make any difference because there is no way of finding that out. That bothers me. That does not make it a mob. What makes it a mob is the combination of lack of a fair democratic process of determining who those in charge would be and lack of a fair application of rules, there is no rule of law in Wikipedia. They try to make it look like there is since they keep citing these alphabets soup of acronyms which is short for policies, but the way in which these policies are applied is arbitrary."

"The bias that they (Wikipedia) now reflect, is that of the Globalist Left. Of the Establishment, with a capital E."

"If you are an admin, or if you just have a lot of pull because you are popular because you have a lot of views and stroke the right backs, if you are in the in-crowd then you have a lot more authority in the system. It is mob rule and it has been since I left. Although it was become more organised in many ways. There is a veneer of rather strict bureaucracy – a set of rules and functions applied in an arbitrary way. You can detect a pattern, but it’s a political pattern. Not a principled pattern."

"The best thing we can do basically is to supply alternatives and make them better and better and better."

"One thing that i would recommend, go to Everipedia, edit the article about the Delhi riots: that would be really interesting if you do that, once it is developed give me a link to it and I would be curious to see how the article differs from the Wikipedia article."

"False balance... according to which on some topics the facts are known and if you actually try to let people make up their own minds by themselves by presenting one side and then another side in a balanced fashion then you are committing the sin of false balance, and wikipedia has absolutely abandoned the neutrality policy by endorsing that journalistic canard."

"They seem not to realize that it is possible to dispute what the facts are, as if they were in all cases absolutely obvious."

"They have no class."

"There is no rule of law in wikipedia... but the way that the policies are applied is absolutely arbitrary."

"I actually think that the mechanisms just of people acting like jerks and driving off decent people who want a neutral reference, that's enough to explain the bias"

"Basically, the Left tends to invade open institutions, it's been their modus-operandi for the last hundred years. Basically, invading open institutions and subverting them, dominating them, and freezing out anyone who dissents their views. I can't tell you what the cause of the bias on Wikipedia is, I can only tell you that it's really obvious now. It used to be quite obvious 10 years ago, now it's just embarrassing... Now there is an official view about pretty much everything..."

"I wish they spend it in more sensible ways like they could be adding ... a feedback system for the public that does not require the public to actually interact with these insane wikipedians, that would be a start."

"It's mob rule and it has been basically since I left."

"It's become both opaque and centralized, centralized in the sense that the authority to participate in Wikipedia has been greatly restricted. You can be completely anonymous and even be a top-ranked Wikipedia user with administrator rights. So, they could be working for various corporations, various government spy agencies, maybe for criminal organizations."

"A lot of mainstream news stories are broken only in Fox News, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post—all of which are banned from use as sources by Wikipedia. Beyond that, many mainstream sources of conservative, libertarian, or contrarian opinion are banned from Wikipedia as well, including Quillette, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller. Those might be contrarian or conservative, but they are hardly "radical"; they are still mainstream."

"Jimmy Wales is right. We did originally adopt the neutrality policy to foster "a culture of thoughtful diplomatic honesty." In other words, the way to keep the peace among a radically diverse set of contributors is not to declare winners and losers. But that is only one reason we adopted the policy. There was another key reason: as I have explained, no one has a right to make up your mind for you, especially in an open, global project."

"It's harder to find a page where there *isn't* some glaringly obvious bias."

"There is a massive irony in the fact that Wikipedia is so extremely biased: it was started by someone who cares unusually deeply about neutrality (me), who developed and defended its neutrality policy at great length. Man makes plans, and God laughs."

"Compare how Britannica and Wikipedia introduce the traditional system of Indian medicine called Ayerveda. Britannica is respectful. Wikipedia has no fewer than four dismissive epithets in the first paragraph: "quackery," "pseudoscientific," "protoscience," and "unscientific."... Not long ago, this article would have been regarded as a deep offense against multiculturalism. ... It is not the role of an encyclopedia to tell people what to think or to cast aspersions on entire cultures. ... Wikipedia should make *no* claims on its own behalf about what is (effective) medicine; that is not the role of an encyclopedia. It can repeat research on that though. ... You assume that you can detect what "modern medicine," or other scientific or scholarly work, really is, i.e., whether it actually passes muster of the scientific method. ... If the systems of peer review is screwed up, you can't. Nor if medical research is tainted by filthy lucre from Big Pharma. The world is considerably more complicated than the silly children at Wikipedia think it is. Britannica at least understands that much."

"I have learned that the people probably angriest at Wikipedia are Hindus... I am happy to point out the obvious, namely, that Wikipedia is biased... What you *would* accomplish, however, is to persuasively expose the anti-Hindu bias on Wikipedia."

"I thought that the evidence against your claims about me would shame you into changing your behavior. But, five years since you started misrepresenting my role in the founding of Wikipedia, you're still at it."

"Wikipedia will be small, disreputable, and unimportant compared to CZ in a few more years. Uh, ;-)"

"Citizendium is based on the failings and unreliability of Wikipedia."

"Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise. As a community, far from being elitist (which would, in this context, mean excluding the unwashed masses), it is anti-elitist (which, in this context, means that expertise is not accorded any special respect, and snubs and disrespect of expertise is tolerated)."

"A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated."

"If the project was lucky enough to have a writer or two well-informed about some specialized subject, and if their work was not degraded in quality by the majority of people, whose knowledge of the subject is based on paragraphs in books and mere mentions in college classes, then there might be a good, credible article on that specialized subject. Otherwise, there will be no article at all, a very amateurish-sounding article, or an article that looks like it might once have been pretty good, but which has been hacked to bits by hoi polloi."

"I know Wikipedia is very cool. A lot of people do not think so, but of course they are wrong."

"Suppose that, as is perfectly possible, Wikipedia continues producing articles at a rate of 1,000 per month. In seven years, it would have 84,000 articles."

"Human beings are still fish."

"Faith is a vice pretending to be a virtue, its lies and errors and frothy nonsense deluding us and distracting us from action. There's no salvation in wishful thinking, only inertia. Faith is the enemy of reason. The one thing every single one of us here must be united in despising is faith. It's the barren refuge of the vacuous, the fearful, the frauds, and the obstacles to accomplishment."

"We're confronted all the time with evolving viruses and bacteria. The Red Queen really rules the biological world, and we have to keep running just to keep up pace with the changing microorganisms. Yet policymakers and the public deny vaccination, and evolution itself, and question the value of biomedical research. Maybe they don't believe in evolution, but the microorganisms trying to kill us are taking full advantage of it."

"What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail."

"If a scientist saw a cataclysm coming, say a meteor on collision course for earth in 2050, we wouldn’t be saying, “Hallelujah, physics is true, bring it on! Our faith in mathematics is strengthened!” We’d be trying to stop it. Which makes the Christian reaction puzzling. If I actually believed Jesus was coming to end the world, I’d be preparing by stocking up on timber and nails. They were pretty effective last time."