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.
C. Alice, who is able-bodied, lives for another year; while Bob, who has no legs, dies this afternoon. D. Alice dies this afternoon; while Bob lives for another year.
The procedure prefers C over D as well. It is not clear to me that this is obviously the right answer. The procedure is asserting that saving Alice's life is more worthwhile than saving Bob's, by dint of Alice having legs.
A stronger signal comes from the age/life-expectancy of Alice and Bob. But all other things being equal, and in the highly artificial situation that only one of Bob and Alice would be saved, it seems more reasoanble to pick the more functional than the less functional. Your intuition is the cases are equal, what would you propose as a way to allocate one life-saving in the case you have two equally valuable lives to save? If this is the worst criticism of my proposal, then it is way better than I expected it to be!
It seems to me that such a procedure will — given constrained resources — prefer to maintain the health of the healthy rather than ameliorate the condition of the sick and disabled. While obviously we do not want a medical decision procedure that goes around allowing people to become disabled when it could be avoided (as in A and B), I don't think that we want one that considers someone's life less worthwhile because that person has already become disabled.
What if you thought of it in terms of being able to afford to keep 1,000,000 people healthy for the same cost as ameliorating the miserable lives of 100,000 compromised individuals, and we don't have enough resources to do both. I have heard of people having babies whos quality of life sucks, which kids will die at young ages, and spending 1,000,000 of public money a year on medical care for these poor creatures. It may not seem fair, but when resources are finite, choices will be made. How would you propose to make those choices if every life is equal in worth?
A stronger signal comes from the age/life-expectancy of Alice and Bob. But all other things being equal, and in the highly artificial situation that only one of Bob and Alice would be saved, it seems more reasoanble to pick the more functional than the less functional.
"All other things being equal" was not part of the proposal I was critiquing, though.
Other factors which have at various points been used to decide whose life is more important include sex, race, social class or caste, wealth (or willingness to pay for treatment), religious belie...
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.