Talk:Luxury belief

Un-encyclopedic, shallow, biased

This is not an encyclopedic article. It's based on nothing but a bunch of opinion writers (including Henderson himself) shallowly using a concept that may or may not have empirical basis as a smart-sounding weapon against beliefs they don't like.

One academic paper is mentioned in passing as a fig leaf for the whole thing, and that one is paywalled so it's impossible for most readers to judge whether it's represented accurately.

I'm on vacation but I'll try to take a stab at improving it when I get home. 2001:1C02:2C0E:5800:C091:EBE:FD39:2A5C (talk) 07:43, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

The article is about the concept "luxury belief." Whether you feel threatened by it is of no consequence to Wikipedia. I do agree, however, that the article needs examples of such beliefs. Thesmallfriendlygiant (talk) 04:55, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

There's a history of this kind of rhetoric. I've added the pejorative categories and made some changes to the lead. I think we can agree that there's no such thing as a "luxury belief". It would be like saying limousine liberals actually exist. It's not real. The right has a history of creating these terms to distract and deflect from criticism. Viriditas (talk) 21:37, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Proposing deletion

I agree with the previous two talk page entries, this is not an encyclopaedia article, it is effectively just a summary of a 2019 magazine article.

Encyclopaedias - including Wikipedia - are tertiary sources, they cover established concepts and cite a mixture of secondary and primary sources on a topic. In this case, this article is effectively a secondary source which summarises and adds minor context to a primary source, which is not encyclopaedic. The reason for this is the lack of notability of the topic covered, which has not become established enough to garner a body of secondary analysis that would allow a proper encyclopaedia entry to be written from.

I suggest as a first step nominating this article for deletion due to the above. Moving forwards, if the topic covered by this article gains traction and becomes more established, then I would suggest recreating the article once it is possible to write a proper tertiary article.

I have accordingly added a deletion proposal tag to the article Williamxoxo (talk) 22:01, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

I've added some more secondary sources that I hope make a stronger case for including this article. Arbor to SJ (talk) 01:47, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Usage

This term has currency within the conservative and right-wing "intelligentsia" as a kind of thought-terminating cliche or rhetorical propaganda, but doesn't really exist outside that framework. I'm currently using it in an article about an essay, whose author dismisses criticism of their work by those holding luxury beliefs, but it troubles me because by using it I am implicitly accepting that it has some kind of legitimacy when in fact it does not. This article should probably be more appropriately categorized as "Right-wing rhetoric" or "conservative philosophy" because outside that subgroup, it is no different than a newer and updated form of limousine liberal. Viriditas (talk) 21:17, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I should be clear, I don't believe "luxury beliefs" actually exist outside of right-wing belief systems. In practice, this is a term used by conservatives to dismiss, distract, and deflect criticism from their regressive ideas. For an example of how I encountered it: Marc Andreessen posted an essay promoting all of the most popular conservative and libertarian talking points about technology, saying technology should not be regulated and controlled but allowed to develop and progress without constraint to make the most people wealthy and bring happiness to the most numbers of people. Critics contended that the opposite appeared to be true. Andreessen's investments, for example, according to TechCrunch, had in part, contributed to wage slavery and poverty for workers while concentrating wealth for a very small number of people. In response, Andreessen argued that he was a self-made man who came from poverty, and the people who were criticizing him were guilty of holding luxury beliefs since they attended better schools than him and came from wealthier upbringings. I'm having trouble seeing how the term "luxury belief" is anything other than a conservative talking point. Viriditas (talk) 21:27, 19 October 2024 (UTC)