If Mort Divine ruled the world

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Joke from a Venezuelan bartender:

An Englishman and a Frenchman are at a museum, admiring a Renaissance work depicting Adam, Eve, and the apple in Eden. The Briton observes that Adam sharing the apple with his wife shows a particularly British propriety. The Frenchman, unconvinced, counters that the pair’s obvious comfort with their nudity clearly marks them as French. A passing Venezuelan, overhearing, remarks candidly, “Sorry to intrude, caballeros, but these are obviously Venezuelans: they have nothing to wear, practically nothing to eat, and they are allegedly in Paradise.”
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https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/soviet-humor-protest-venezuela

These life-under-Marxism jokes, known as anekdoty to Russians during the Cold War, became an increasingly vital outlet for criticism during the period immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet system. The genre has changed little since those days, but it has travelled, seamlessly transcending culture and geography to underscore certain commonalities of revolutionary Marxist systems (scarcity, triumphalist propaganda, bungling government bureaucracies) and, sometimes, to highlight the amalgam of cleverness, patience, indignation, and despair with which people respond to such conditions.

That these are features of life in today’s Venezuela is incontrovertible. Even the usually Panglossian government media no longer seems to deny Venezuelans’ hardships, having shifted from the official line that the C.I.A. is carrying on a “media war,” aimed at bringing down the revolution with lies, to the idea that the C.I.A. is carrying on an “economic war,” aimed at toppling the government through manufactured scarcity and fake lines full of agents provocateurs. The Venezuelan economy relies excessively on petrodollars, and the country’s government has been funnelling oil rents into imports of the food, medicine, and other basic goods that it is incapable of producing internally. Having neither diversified economically nor saved much during years of high oil prices, Venezuela was already in recession even before those prices collapsed last year. Loath to admit defeat and officially devalue its fixed currency, or to abandon popular subsidies such as penny-priced gasoline, the government has remained mostly solvent by printing money to cover its domestic obligations, enforcing onerous price controls, and being increasingly tight-fisted with access to foreign currency. This has come at the cost of stratospheric inflation and harrowing shortages of basic goods. The appeal of Soviet-style humor in the face of such problems is obvious.
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Brand's interview with Peterson was actually decent, probably because Brand interjects way less than I expected, and because it wasn't an interview just having Peterson rehash his book and normal talking points. Peterson's characterization (which Brand accurately summarized) of Right and Left political treatment of the problem of inequality was pretty accurate: The Left fails catastrophically and the Right doesn't care, and both get it wrong.
 
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From The Chronicle of Higher Ed: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Arguments-That-Harm-And/242543

Resonates with a workshop I attended earlier this week about addressing potentially offensive or uncomfortable views in the classroom (the article is behind a paywall, but here's a substantive chunk--for context, she's writing about philosopher Peter Singer, who defends infant euthanasia in certain cases):

People worry that grappling with offensive views gives those views undue legitimacy. But in the case of someone like Singer, the views have legitimacy whether or not I choose to engage with them. To state the obvious, the arguments of the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University are going to matter whether or not I pay attention to them. But, more important, Singer’s views already have legitimacy because people will continue to think about disability in ways directly relevant to his arguments regardless of whether progressive academics decide those arguments are simply too offensive to be discussed. (After all, as Singer himself wryly notes, the sales of Practical Ethics tend to increase whenever there are calls to "no platform" his talks.) Even Singer’s views on infant euthanasia aren’t a dystopian thought experiment. At least one major European country (the Netherlands) openly practices infanticide in some cases of disability.

Another reason sometimes given for not engaging with views like Singer’s is that doing so creates inequality in academic spaces. If we openly debate the value of disabled lives, for example, it creates a burden for disabled and caregiver academics that simply doesn’t exist for academics unaffected by disability. This worry strikes me only partly correct. Yes, debating the value of disabled lives does make things harder for disabled and caregiver academics, and that inequality isn’t fair. But it’s not quite right to blame Peter Singer. The idea that disabled people are lesser or defective is part of everyday reality for disabled people and caregivers — often under the surface, often cloaked in politeness and smiles — whether or not Peter Singer discusses it openly.

It’s true, though, that within academe we have the ability, much more than most, to shield ourselves from uncomfortable and prejudiced ideas. We can create contexts in which no one has to be directly confronted with the claim that they matter less, or that they are less valuable. I think such contexts can be enriching and important. But — and here I speak only for myself, since much of this is dependent on personal and professional circumstances — I think they shouldn’t be the only professional contexts I work in. As a full professor, I have a remarkable amount of social privilege compared with most disabled people (large percentages of whom are unemployed and live below the poverty line). I have about as much job security as a person can have, I make a good salary, I have great benefits. As academics, we tend to justify this cushy social position by appeal to our social value — we aren’t just educators, we’re people who think hard thoughts and try to change minds and change culture.

Given all this, it’s hard for me to justify the idea that I shouldn’t engage with Peter Singer. Do Singer’s views make me uncomfortable? Yes, deeply so. But probably not as uncomfortable as they make people living with spina bifida in the Netherlands, given the Netherlands’ policy on infant euthanasia in cases of severe disability.

And unlike others more directly affected, it is literally my job to think and talk about difficult ideas. The discomfort and hurt when dealing with views like Singer’s are real. But if I’m unwilling to take on a measure of discomfort, given how much privilege I have and how little I have to lose, then I’m not sure I’m using the privilege of an academic life the way I ought to be.

The value of struggling with Singer’s ideas doesn’t negate the real and material costs, but it does offset them. And in a piece of utilitarian reasoning that Singer himself would approve of, to me the trade-off seems worth it. Prejudice is often held subtly, implicitly, or without much reflection. By giving us clear and well-defined arguments, thinkers like Singer lay bare the case for views which many people hold. Once that case is laid out, it’s much easier to begin the work of pointing out its flaws.
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