Yes, Elon, George Soros Really is Magneto
Introduction to Process Philosophy
Matth Yglesias is wrong about everything he says, which would make him Bizarro.
The entire political philosophy of George Soros comes from a book called The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper. The Open Society and its Enemies is a book about how the open society will always have enemies because most people are not as open as Karl Popper, George Soros, Magneto, or whoever you want to insert who follows this philosophy here, and additionally, the ideal of an open society is tragically doomed to never be realizable, and progress can never actually happen in reality. So all there is is a constant and not at all open struggle against those people who are not as open as them. They recognize that they must always lose, even if this is not a direct admission that they are secretly or not so secretly the villains.
Karl Popper is more famous in the context of politics for his idea of the paradox of tolerance, which is literally what the debate on X.com formerly known as Twitter as well as Substack was over. Popper’s paradox of tolerance states that if you tolerate every idea being expressed, eventually society will be overrun with ideas that don’t tolerate other ideas, like Nazis, so to avoid ending up as Nazis, you have to censor basically everyone you disagree with. JrEg made a much more lighthearted parody of this as the paradox of intolerance, which expresses the absurdity of censoring people to avoid censorship in the same way. Like in the Kant article, Big Brother has reared his ugly head again.
Despite JrEg’s passing comment about “hate speech,” this is why we absolutely cannot have any generic “hate speech” laws that aren’t about defamation, incitement, or other things that are generally illegal, nor should platforms ban it. The political philosophy of Karl Popper, like all of the variants of process philosophy (even Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism is a variant, since the idea of process philosophy is that the world is fundamentally made of atomic prehensions) are bipolar philosophies of intolerance in the name of tolerance and the most gratuitous violence in the name of pacifism. Bertrand Russell was the same and he told a group of scientists to not only build the nuclear bomb, but actually drop it on the Japanese after they were already surrendering.
Who cares what the writers of X-Men said, anyway, never mind what someone decided to extrapolate from what they said? Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare? Tolkien couldn’t give a theory of Tolkien.
So yes, Elon, George Soros really is Magneto.
The conditional apology to Elon Musk that inspired this introductory post to the process philosophy series can be found here:
