Also, if you post a poll late in a politics thread, you'll disproportionately reach people who 1) are interested in politics and 2) didn't think the thread was a failure.
Is it just me or are far right wing geeks, as rare as they are, much more formidable and scary than far left wing geeks?
In terms of debate ability, or in general?
If in terms of debate, there's a selection bias at play there; left-wing is the default among geeks. Those who are out of the closet and on the right will have argued extensively with their fellow geeks and will have thought a lot harder about their beliefs.
John N. Gray, an essentially hopeless, anti-progressive, left liberal. Like M.M. or yours truly, he identifies "Universalism" (or just secular humanism in his words) as the direct and "true" philosophical heir of Christianity, but claims that it is useless, leads only to suffering and cannot break the cycle of history:
...Central to the doctrine of humanism, in Gray’s view, is the inherently utopian belief in meliorism, namely that humans are not limited by their biological natures and that advances in ethics and politics are cumulative o
All functioning societies have mechanisms for reducing income inequality. Therefore the only real questions are: 1) what are our preferred mechanisms and 2) how much redistribution is optimum.
Popular choices of mechanisms are non-government charity, tax policies (ranging from progressive income tax to no sales tax on food and clothing), welfare, and public education.
Popular choices of the optimum amount of redistribution are harder to characterize.
My particular political statement here: the government is uniquely efficient (potentially) at redistribut...
What are the positive and negative effects of income inequality, not "redistributing" income, etc.?
Most of the answers I've received on this issue veer far through the line of color politics and come out the other side spray-painted with logos and other such blatant advertising that the viewpoint in question is the only reasonable one. I'd like to get a rather straighter answer.
Government controlled healthcare is generally superior to private systems. *
Argument: The incentives of a government body that knows it will have to pay for the costs of future healthcare is radically different from private companies. They are more likely to take preventative measures to prevent future harms to a patient rather than waiting until the point where a condition is considered serious enough to be covered by insurance or bring people to an emergency room. They have incentives to make procedures cheaper and more efficient, and they also lack the ...
Ladies and Gentlemen and Other Folks, I am the first ever Moldbuggian Christian Progressive in the world, and I'm here to bring the Good News and the Sword!
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Some left-wing Christian sermons of recent times:
"The only church that illuminates is a burning church" - Slavoj Zizek
"Stop Teaching the Ethics of Jesus!" - Peter Rollins (Follow-up podcast: "Treating Ethics as a Failure that Succeeds")
"I pray the children of my enemies be dashed against the rocks" - Peter Rollins (that one isn't in fact ideological, just an int...
Apropos of nothing, opinion on the Breivik trial (sentenced to a mere 21 years with some possibility of extension, if you haven't heard):
Of course I think he ought to be killed. The thing is, Norway has no need to reinstate the death penalty just for him, then repeal it (like with Vidkun Quisling after the war; the Norwegian government in exile had reintroduced the death penalty in response to the occupation, then repealed it after executing him and several other collaborators).
Instead, Norway should've granted his request to be court-martialed, then the m...
Interesting reflection on the possible practical applications of Zizek's philosophy. Comes down to "Smash the current discourse first, especially liberal discourse." Hmmm.
Yes, yes, I've read the header; direct Blue vs. Green is frowned upon - but still, a redundant observation: Mitt Romney's "campaign" is almost phildickian in its dark hilarity. The post-hoc jokes alone are going to be worth a year of Bush. Yo dawg, we heard you like bread and circuses, so we put 'em in a circus, so you can lol while you lol...
(Note: I don't find the other guy any less sad, he's just more boring at this point.)
People who are pro-life in the abortion debate should also be pro- free birth control pills (those not requiring a co-pay).
If pro-lifers were more pragmatic, they would rank the issues that they care about from least-bad to worst. Most would agree that abortion is worse than pre-marital sex. Therefore, they should support efforts to eliminate the need for abortions (not just seek to eliminate the ability to have an abortion). As access to birth control reduces the likelihood of the need to have an abortion, free birth control pills would reduce the over...
A related outside view observation: Whenever a Green attempts to give the Blues tactical advise, no matter how well-meaning, the advise always seems to boil down to compromising on at least half the Blue positions.
Ah! If you mean "giving poor people more opportunities, thus leading to better use of human capital, increasing everyone's living standards,"
Thank you for figuring out what I was thinking! One of my many problems in any discussion is I can't figure out which things I need to state because there are other interpretations and which things I can leave unstated because everyone will quickly read it the same way.
This is the one I mean. I am fascinated by the progress human kind has made so far. I am interested in bringing that to new levels, and one way to do that is to use the pool of human resources we have ever more efficiently. Getting rid of arbitrary limits on what women or black people were allowed to do has been a great help in that goal. Avoiding a debilitating stratification may also be important.
do you have anything in mind when you refer to things that are better than, say, a public education system at providing poor people new opportunities?
Having raised kids, it seems unlikely to me that institutionalized public education for a nominal 6 hours a day (two hours work in 6 hours?) is all that need be done. Meanwhile, we observe that the more money a family has, the more they spend on advantages for their children. So while inexpensive or free public education is one good approach, another is just making poor families relatively richer generally. Which is most efficient? That is a discussion I think we should have, and i don't think the answer is trivial, or that there is even necessarily only one "correct" answer. But the ideal that "we should all get to keep all the money we make, and spend it only on our children if we want" is a point I disagree with, and what I wanted to argue against in my OP.
The captains of industry are generally from families that have given their children EVERY advantage. Of course it may be far from optimum to try to get to equality of
So yes, education is a great component of the kind of redistribution that I want. I suspect a more intact family doing more "enriching" activities together, not living in relative squalor, being able to teach "healthy choices" because price is not the only consideration when acquiring food, these may make generally redistributive policies efficient. Add to that our clear knowledge that marginal utility of dollars declines as you get more dollars, and we have a straightforward reason to choose progressive taxation to fund these things. (Note progressive income tax is not the only way to tax progressively, and income tax would not be my first choice of taxing, but that is another discussion).
With respect to education, in this essay about inequality (seriously read that whole thing) Paul Graham makes the point that improving access to education doesn't actually decrease inequality since while to makes the poor richer, it also makes the rich richer.
...There is of course a way to make the poor richer without simply shifting money from the rich. You could help the poor become more productive-- for example, by improving access to education. Instead of taking money from engineers and giving it to checkout clerks, you could enable people who would hav
In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.
If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.
Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.