= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Argency comments on Any existential risk angles to the US presidential election? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (213)
I would be interested to see your supporting evidence for 2, 4 and 6. Don't feel that you have to argue them, I won't argue against them, but if you could link me to some sources or something in the spirit of educating me I would be appreciative.
Really? Someone voted this down? I was expecting to take a pretty big karma hit for expressing explicit political opinions on here, but this post didn't even offer anything that could be disagreed with, let alone fallacious reasoning. I was honestly and humbly asking for more information. I've lost 23 karma points today. 22 of those losses I wouldn't have minded, but this one is just nonsense. Did somebody just go through and downvote everything I've ever said or something?
You may have a stalker. As far as I can tell, there are a small number of people using the voting system against persons they dislike rather than against low-quality comment content.
Notice that Eugine_Nier's comments have also been voted down en masse. My guess is that at least one person thought that the whole discussion was too close to partisan politics for LessWrong and downvoted all the comments in the thread.
I think that a good policy would be to move this kind of discussions to the monthly Politics thread. (By which I mean not only that Stuart's original post should have been on there, as someone else said, but also that when a discussion like this one about the Tea Party emerges organically in a non-politics post, a moderator should move the whole subthread to the Politics thread).
Haha, and now the evidence request comment has been voted back up to zero but the one asking why the original was downvoted has been downvoted. Prediction: this post will also be downvoted.
Ah well, whether or not someone out there dislikes my contributions to it, this thread has been worthwhile because it has provided me with important data-points. The most important data-points are always the ones that surprise you. Data-point: some members of Less Wrong are Glenn Beck fans.
Honestly I'm getting tired of people gasping in a horror at the idea that in a readership of hundreds, a single person downvoted them. I also get downvoted. I don't always feel those downvotes are deserved. Sometimes those comments get upvoted back to zero or beyond, sometimes not. I don't keep complaining about every single downvote that I feel is undeserved, wasting time and space.
I've not downvoted you, but speaking generally I'm very likely to downvote people complaining about downvotes.
Your annoyance has been noted. Keep in mind, though, that I had asked a question in an attempt to see things from Eugine_Nier's point of view, and that at the time I made the complaining post I hadn't gotten an answer yet, but had been down-voted for my trouble. It's poor practice for the community to punish people who make an effort to examine the evidence against their strongly-held opinions, and it's in my best interests to rail against community behaviour that gets in the way of my own learning. I certainly don't make a habit of whingeing about every loss of karma that seems unjustified to me - if I thought the loss of karma was deserved then I wouldn't have made the post in the first place - but I reserve the right to kick up a stink if I think people's down-votes are obstructing rational process. And, of course, I'm willing to cop any further karma loss that I take as a result as having been sacrificed for a worthy cause. So, go ahead down-voting complainers if that's what makes you happy, but I'd respectfully like to tender the suggestion that occasionally complaining is the right thing to do.
Well obviously this depends on what one means by "death panels", this article for example provides a decent argument.
This one is hard to score since I suspect he'd be pushing this much harder if the Tea Party didn't exist.
You can start with this article by Eric Raymond, also read the comments.
Edit: Note this statement will depend on what one means by "left-wing". I interpret the statement to mean "the most natural cluster in thing-space that includes movements generally called 'left-wing' also includes fascism."
The thing is that AFAIK fascism never described itself as left-wing. It sometimes describes itself as a third position, a mixture/improvement of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, but whenever it actually chose between the two it preferred to describe itself as right-wing.
It tends to be treated as "left-wing" only by those people who define left/right only by the criterion of statism -- a treatment which really isn't the historical usage...
That part in bold should be nominated for understatement of the year.
I'm actually reading Sowell's Intellectuals and Society right now, playing the game 'record all instances where he criticizes conservatives or libertarians' - so far 0.
Last night, I thought I could at least chalk up his criticism of Naziism & Italian fascism as instances 1 & 2, except he immediately launched into the standard argument that 'no, actually those are socialisms don't you see'. Oy vey.
(It's really not a good book so far.)
Sowell is one of the best intellectuals in American conservatism right now, but that's also clearly where he makes his home, which is disappointing from a LW perspective. The two books by him that I like best are Knowledge and Decisions and A Conflict of Visions. The first is, if I remember correctly, an updated explanation of Hayek's insights, although the second ~60% of the book is spent on 'historical trends' and is probably about as biased as you would expect. The second is explicitly about politics, but its first chapter is tremendously insightful. (The latter sections of that book are basically more detailed repetition, and again I would expect the examples to be solidly conservative-leaning.)
I wrote a short review explaining what I disliked enough that I didn't bother finishing: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/417975794
Thanks! :)