"challenge"!

[arisrabkin]

So I'm up in Benicia, visiting ramik,greatmanly, and emmerific watching the sun set behind the Carquinez bridges. It's good.

When I was in SF a while back, I picked up a copy of "Challenge: Revolutionary communist newspaper of the internatinoal progresive labor party [sic]". I think I've said this before, but I'm astonished how anachronistic it feels. Their mission

Comments

[catamorphism]

It only takes one person to pass out the "chemtrails" flyers, and it only takes one person to run a newspaper.

That said, I'm a bit confused about how "fairly powerful mathematical machinery" is meant to resolve ideological disputes.

[arisrabkin]

The mathematical machinery actually lets you prove statements with nontrivial ideological consequences. For instance, you can show that division of labor, under some fairly reasonable assumptions, increases net human happiness. You can dispute the assumptions, but a proof has a certain amount of intellectual heft that requires real response, not just ignoring it.

[catamorphism]

Er... I'm sure you can show that division of labor influences some metric that somebody could argue is a proxy for human happiness, but arguing the relationship between the operationalization of happiness and the actual subjective happiness is still a matter of ideology. As is the assumption that maximizing "net human happiness" is the right criterion (we're not all utilitarians).

[arisrabkin]

Yes. I don't disagree with any of that. But there's enough "there" there that it's disorienting not to even acknowledge it or respond to it. My complaint isn't that "capitalism is inarguably true"; it's that "you really do need to make an argument".