Anonymous asked:
When I link an article and praise it, I am linking and praising the article, not everything that the author has ever said. And yes, he said that. He’s in good company: 70% of Americans say we should cut off welfare to people who test positive for illegal drugs. This is not quite Caplan’s exact position but it’s pretty close - it’s the position that welfare should not go to ‘undeserving’ people and that addicts are an example of undeserving people.
Do I disagree with this 70% of Americans? Profoundly. Do I think they are the equivalent of neo-nazis? No. Do I think that it is healthy, productive, or even possible to try to advance political discourse and share different perspectives while avoiding praising anything written by anyone who holds this position? No.
It is basically impossible to have any kind of interaction with anyone outside your bubble if you are opposed to ever reading anything written by anyone who has elsewhere supported a very harmful policy. I want the world to be better, and it will not get better if I refuse to interact with anyone who isn’t already perfect, and so I’m not going to refuse to do that.
But there’s a limit, right? Even if Hitler wrote a brilliant denunciation of Stalin I would consider myself morally obliged to find someone else’s brilliant denunciation of Stalin. Even if the KKK had a really great point about leftist classism I would want to find someone who talked about leftist classism without thinking the solution was ‘murder black people’. The way I personally draw this line is “has this person directly participated in violence, or channelled their resources and support to people directly participating in violence, or deliberately taken up a mantle with a violent history for the purpose of terrorizing political enemies into silence”?
I don't know if that’s the perfect way to draw the line but I do think the right place to draw the line is definitely not somewhere that puts 70% of the country on the ‘too evil for anything they say to merit praise or enjoyment’ side.
People who disagree with me about whether addicts deserve food stamps are wrong. I want them to lose the argument and I want society to operate on my principles rather than theirs. But I think it is outrageously inappropriate to compare people who want to deny food stamps to addicts and who argue for this position by writing a blog post about it to neo-nazis.
(The thing that makes Nazis bad is not just that they have evil opinions about who is worthy of welfare! The thing that makes Nazis bad is that they are willing to enforce this with violence and that they want to overthrow democratic states and replace them with authoritarian genocidal expansionist militaristic ethnostates! If you miss this thing about Nazis you are missing something incredibly unspeakably important!)
I saw Bryan Caplan talk about poverty and walked away being like seriously FUCK that guy so much
If he had talked about anything else I probably would have walked away thinking “what a chill dude”
I don’t really have a point, I just wanted to express my views on Bryan Caplan and his abhorrent opinions on poverty