> Tacitus or Voltaire are variously credited with the notion that in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.
The actual source of this quote is a literal Nazi who was using this quote to claim that Jewish people run the world.
It is also a silly idea. It is considered rude to make fun of autistic people at work, but autistic people clearly aren't running the world through some secret cabal.
The political orientation of a thought is orthogonal to an honest evaluation of its accuracy. Call it a broken clock fallacy if you will. The statement was about criticism of the powerful, which is different from ridicule of the relatively weak.
The concept seems facially valid to me although incomplete in that it seems to have an assumption of singular power rather than many different power domains. Taken further, an hallmark of power, prestige, might be defined as those things which seem so natural that criticism would not occur to the larger portion of people.
I'm not sure it was about criticism of the powerful. Jewish people don't run the world via a cabal. The original statement was arguing that because denying the Holocaust is socially disastrous and often illegal that Jewish people must therefore secretly be in charge of the levers of society.
Biden is currently one of the most powerful people on the entire planet. Yet people happily chant "f--- Joe Biden" in public, put stickers saying this on their cars, and put up signs on their lawns saying this.
>>>> . . . in any epoch, to know who is in power, ask who you may not criticise.
> I'm not sure it was about criticism of the powerful.
Are “the powerful” not “who is in power?” The comment of the g-g-g-parent did not mention the Holocaust or any other act of genocide. Unless there is some anti-Semitic hidden message the statement is nearly a banal platitude.
Also, your Biden analogy is as flat as your example of workplace ridicule of people affected by autism. A contrary example might be that the jeers of crowds are allowed for so long as they are not truly threatening or subversive. In the lead up to Biden’s election the news of his son’s laptop was suppressed. Effective criticism is not allowed.
> Unless there is some anti-Semitic hidden message the statement is nearly a banal platitude.
There is. The original quote is from an actual literal Neo-Nazi who used this statement to argue that Jews secretly run the world because Holocaust denial is ostracized.
An alternative interpretation of the apparent contradiction about Biden is that the U.S. President isn't actually all that powerful, but more of a figurehead.
You are going to start racking up all sorts of interesting "apparent contradictions" if you go down this route. One would experience some pretty intense social ostracism if one loudly criticized interracial couples. But I find it hard to believe that interracial couples actually run things. Ditto orphans, the disabled, and yes, Jewish people.
Down this route is the precise conspiracy that the original Nazi who spoke these words was pushing.
The original idea here is that because denying the Holocaust is social suicide and illegal in some nations, Jewish people must secretly actually run the world.
>The actual source of this quote is a literal Nazi
This is called the Genetic Fallacy, it is completely irrelevant who said anything as long as that thing is true and/or useful. Nobody owns words. Aristotle supported slavery, you don't interrupt every logic lecture with "You know the source of those funny terms is a literal slavery supporter?" do you?.
>It is also a silly idea. It is considered rude to make fun of autistic people at work
This common retort completely misses the point, voltaire's rule of thumb is just that, it's a heuristic, an extremely good one for detecting and finding hegemonic ideologies, but not an algorithm. A necessary but not sufficient condition.
The kind of offense is also different, nobody rages at you and assembles a mob because you made fun of an autistic person, at most you will get a cold stare and get ignored. Voltaire was talking about a different kind entirely of "Not allowed", the familiar hysteria coming from the fanatically religious when you speak ill of their idols, he was probably speaking about the church, but the wisdom is just as relevant to the new religions.
I'm well aware of the Genetic Fallacy. The post I was responding to was falsely attributing the quote to other sources. "Hey, somebody else said that" is relevant information. Discussion of fallacies is also largely worthless in ordinary conversation since we aren't actually making formal deductive arguments. It is completely reasonable for people to reason through other means than pure deductive logic.
And further, my post did not stop there.
> voltaire's rule of thumb
It is not Voltaire's rule of thumb. We just discussed this.
>The post I was responding to was falsely attributing the quote to other sources.
My point is that is irrelevant, it's the equivalent of correcting a misspelled comment in an open source repo and calling it a contribution, it is indeed, but a very minor one that makes little to no difference.
You also didn't clarify that the quote doesn't belong to voltaire, you simply stated that the other quote paraphrasing it is from a Nazi.
>"Hey, somebody else said that" is relevant information.
Only if you don't want to discuss the thing that is being said itself by vaguely referencing the heretic who said it and implying that discredits the thing being said in and of itself.
>Discussion of fallacies is also largely worthless in ordinary conversation since we aren't actually making formal deductive arguments
It's the exact opposite in fact. Fallacies are literally called "Informal Fallacies", they are coined to give names to common sloppy reasoning tactics and rhetorical tricks in informal everyday conversations and arguments.
They are worthless in formal deductive arguments because they are completely dependent on content and have no syntactical forms, unlike - say - deductive arguments like "If P Then Q, P, Therefore Q". Their usefulness is entirely in this kind of conversation where charged emotional words gets thrown left and right.
>And further, my post did not stop there.
Correct, it continues on to a naive misunderstanding of the quote.
>It is not Voltaire's rule of thumb.
I think you established that quite satisfactorily already, you can move on to other points.
Ok. Let's discuss the "merits" of this quote then if you insist.
Which groups can you "not criticize" in the US? Or, at the very least, criticizing which groups will generate the most backlash? I have my own perspective on this list, but I'm very interested in hearing yours. And then I'm interested in hearing you describe how these groups in particular are "in power."
I can never answer this question from a personal experience because I don't live in the US and never have, but I can give a noisy estimate from my experience of the (quite US-dominated) internet and global media ecosystem.
Here are groups you're not allowed to criticise on the internet without being held to much higher standards than most things :
- Gays
- Transgender people
- 'Progressive' ideas in general, which includes the above two as special cases but also things like feminism and racial minorities.
Those ideas are 'in power' in the sense that they are the semi-official ideologies of the public-facing institutional machinery of western countries: The EU and Euro-American news corporation will worry about the bigoted treatment of lgbt individuals even as an entire country of millions is threatened with an invasion, the UN has specialized bureaucratic organs for "Empowering Women" but not so for men, "Kill All Men" is a funny ironic joke you can make on twitter but "Kill All Women", or even the much milder "Good Morning I Hate Women", is a big bomb to blow anywhere, reddit admins - regardless of the subreddit - will routinely lock or delete any thread that even mentions that trans people are not the coolest thing since kittens were invented. I can go on and on.
But the quote isn't about "ideas" being in power. It is about people. I think it is plain to see that gay people and transgender people are definitely not "in power" in the west in any special way. For somebody to believe this is to believe a wild conspiracy based in no facts whatsoever. And I think this is a pretty compelling argument for why the quote is horseshit.
Unless there is some actual secret shadow government operated by women, gay people, and transgender people, the existence of "Kill All Men" as a joke on Twitter is a rather intense indictment against the merits of the quote.
So in addition to being originally coined by a Nazi to argue that Jews secretly control the world, the quote is idiotic on its merits.
>But the quote isn't about "ideas" being in power. It is about people.
False distinction, people are machines inhabited by ideas, just like how programs inhabit computing machines. Ideas can't be in power, just like programs can never actually be "ran". Both are electromagnetic patterns in the physical medium of some computational architecture (mammalian brains/Von Neumann processors), "Ideas In Power" was a metaphorical shorthand by me, what's in power are people inhabited by those ideas, and the obvious result is that they mount strong resistence to any opposition and make it quite costly to criticize or make fun of their ideas.
>I think it is plain to see that gay people and transgender people are definitely not "in power" in the west in any special way.
They are, in the sense that their identities and thought patterns motivate and emotionlly charge people in institutions ranging from the white house to mega corportations to do things they might have otherwise not done, sometimes to the detriment of the institutions.
Your implicit argument seems to be:
- for a person to be in power, he/she/it has to wear funny clothes and be
referred to with funny titles.
That's a very naive view of how power works. The catholic pope in the middle ages was never directly in charge of more than a small principality's worth of land and people (although he did wear funny clothes and was referred to with funny titles), yet he had immense power that spelled the downfall of the byzantine empire, demarcated the whole world between 2 other empires, and ignited a series of civil wars that killed millions. That's because his "Ideas were in power", i.e. the papal way of thinking and typical thought patterns inhabited people of immense power and motivated and charged them to behave and say as the pope behaves and says.
Ideologies essentially assemble people believing in them into super-organism, just like an ant colony can be a force to be reckoned with while an individual ant is a trivial organism; In the same way, one can say that gays, transgender people and feminist women/men are in power but none of them - individually - necessarily holds any special power.
(Note the 'feminist' modifier on women, it's quite disingenuous to equate women with feminism, one is an ideology, the other is a natural subset of humans whose vast majority haven't even heard of the ideology or care enough about it's first world problems).
>Unless there is some actual secret shadow government operated by women, gay people, and transgender people
That's quite a funny cartoonish version of the argument that you have constructed for yourself right here, the "secret" and "shadow" modifiers also serve no meaningful role other than to evoke a general vague sense of ridicule.
It almost never works like that, when communism were in global supremacy in the 1950s and the 1960s it wasn't a secret shadow government that controlled the world behind the scenes, it was a bunch of (sometimes contradictory) ideas that inhabited various powerful people and motivated and charged millions to live and work and die. Communism was in power. You were allowed to criticize Stalin or Lenin in plenty of times and places, in fact in some of those times and places you were even suspect if you didn't criticize them, but you were never allowed to criticize the Ideas in power, which were all a variant of communism.
The quote never actually says that
- The people in power are a single monolithic entity that is omniscient and
omnipotent
- The people you aren't allowed to criticize are the same as the people in
power
Which seems to be 2 implicit assumptions you keep making. It's most obvious interpretation is "When there are disproportionate costs to criticizing some idea or group or lifestyle, that idea or group or lifestyle is that of people who have dominion over you in some way or another". This is almost tautologically true: People in power will not be pleased to see anyone criticizing something they believe in.
>the quote is idiotic on its merits
Not the quote, the peculiar interpretation of it you have, which seems almost constructed to be easily refuted. The natural interpretation is so obvious as to be trivially true, which is to be expected of an aphorism.
> They are, in the sense that their identities and thought patterns motivate and emotionlly charge people in institutions ranging from the white house to mega corportations to do things they might have otherwise not done, sometimes to the detriment of the institutions.
This is an extremely strange definition of "in power." I donate a lot of money to the local food bank. This doesn't make it so that starving people are actually running my life.
>This is an extremely strange definition of "in power."
Is it? It's a rather straightforward one in my view, power is the ability to influence the real world. Do you have a simpler or more convincing definition?
>This doesn't make it so that starving people are actually running my life.
This is because donating your money is an entirely voluntary action to an inanimate object that only affects yourself. If you were donating the money of someone else, or if you were donating the time/work of someone else, then the starving people who benefit from those food banks would be indeed in power over you. They affect (through a complex indirect chain of cause and effect) the world so that you do things you have no good reason to do, that's power. But voluntarily donating is not like that, you have very good reasons to donate without being coerced, power only happens when you do things against your natural incentives, i.e. Coercion.
The actions against people criticising the "Sacred Cows" of western progressives are neither of the 3 things :
- They are non-voluntary as there is quite a bit of consensus-manufacturing and lobbying that those groups or groups affiliated to them engage in
- The actions are typically done to humans (firing, censoring,...) and affect a lot of people
Therefore, these Sacred Cow groups are actually in a lot of power, they bend the incentive landscape in their favor in a way that other groups do not. That's a very clear power differential.
>Feel free to keep your conspiracies to yourself.
I advise you to know the definition of words before using them. Conspiracies are unproven and unlikely non-falsiable stories about the world, the fact that you can't criticize the list of groups above is one you can trivially verify for yourself on any social media website.
> This is called the Genetic Fallacy, it is completely irrelevant who said anything as long as that thing is true and/or useful. Nobody owns words.
Is it irrelevant, though? I mean, there's a reason you haven't edited your post to say "Kevin Strom, a noted white nationalist[1], is credited with". (Or even just "Kevin Strom is credited with", with no reference to his politics at all.)
Notably, you're employing a fallacy as well -- "Tacitus or Voltaire" functions as an appeal to authority here. These famous people said this, it must have merit. A resistance to correctly attributing the quote suggests that the mantle of authority is the point.
(I don't care about debate fallacies, really. I just like to bring up when people complaining about them are employing their own. Petty, I know.)
Yes, it's as irrelevant as Aristotle's opinions on slavery is to his work on formal logic. The words bear no evidence whatsoever of the author's opinions, therefore it's fallacious and irrelevant to bring them up.
>there's a reason you haven't edited your post to say
Correct, and that reason is that I don't care. I'm entirely ok with quoting a white nationalist, I have quoted worse human beings.
>Notably, you're employing a fallacy as well -- "Tacitus or Voltaire" functions as an appeal to authority here.
I think you're overreaching here a little bit to fit my words to a fallacy rather than the other way around. I don't care one bit who said the words, you can attribute them to whoever you like, go ahead and attribute them to Einstein or Ghandi, that won't increase or decrease their truth value. It's a tautologically true aphorism, anybody can say it and it would still ring true.
>A resistance to correctly attributing the quote
No such thing, I immediately conceded that point when it became clear to me it's a misattribution, the reason I haven't back-edited the comment is that my comment doesn't depend on it, you can substitute "X" or "Santa Claus" for "Voltaire" and you would still get a comprehensible argument that you can either side with or oppose.
>people complaining about them are employing their own
Eh, I wouldn't say your rather stretched interpretation of my words are evidence they are an appeal to authority, sounds to me like you really just wanted to use the words "Appeal To Authority" in a sentence.
Regardless, if the mention of Voltaire annoys you, remove it from your mental cache of the comment and I will defend every single word of the resulting argument, provided you didn't remove or add any other thing.
>I don't care about debate fallacies, really
You should, they are convenient names for extremely common and sometimes-involuntary logical shortcuts that people take all the time which make arguments and conversations blurrier and less fruitful. Me naming a fallacy in an argument doesn't automatically mean that argument is invalid, it just means the argument defender wants to hide something (possibly from themselves), it's not a gotcha to catch your opponent doing then declare victory, it's a "code review" tool to make conversations clearer, more honest and consequently better.
It's also just a stupid idea. You "can't criticize" many groups of people who hold no real power. The quotation was devised solely to apply to criticizing "the Jews" (and by extension implying they "rule over you") and laundering it through Voltaire just puts the flakiest of intellectual veneers on top of this nonsense statement.
The actual source of this quote is a literal Nazi who was using this quote to claim that Jewish people run the world.
It is also a silly idea. It is considered rude to make fun of autistic people at work, but autistic people clearly aren't running the world through some secret cabal.