thomblake comments on Open Thread, October 16-31, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (271)
The fact that government isn't as good as it says it is, or that progressive ideas aren't fully consistent doesn't mean that either are fully dispensable, nor is it particularly clear that people who want to eliminate government have to stop any minor involvement they have (like voting) in order to achieve that goal.
He's reminding me of Michael Vassar's observation that geeks want explicit language in a way that most people don't. The fact that what government is and does isn't a good match for the way government is usually described isn't a good reason for eliminating government.
His point that people generally don't know anything about governing is salient, but does he have any experience running something more challenging than a solo blog?
To my mind, democracy still has the advantage that it makes it clear to politicians that there's a limit to how badly they can get away with treating the public.
He cheats a little on the the communists vs. Nazis numbers-- 6 million is just the Jews murdered by Nazis. Another five or six million Roma, homosexuals, criminals, etc. were killed in the death camps, and some 25 million (very rough estimate) were killed as a result of the Nazi side of WWII. I have no idea whether Japan would have started its war if Germany hadn't been its ally.
This being said, I agree that communism has a worse record than Nazism, but a better reputation. However, in the US and Europe, there are violent neo-Nazis but (unless I've missed something) little or nothing in the way of violent communists, so it makes sense to be more concerned about Nazis.
My problem with him is the general problem with radicals-- he needs to offer better arguments that what he's suggesting will be reliably better than the current set-up. Speaking of Nazis and Communists, it's possible to make things a lot worse because your theory sounds so attractive.
It was amusing to see that Mencius Moldbug, Dark Lord of the Convoluted Sentence, is a pretty average speaker.
Probably. They didn't have anything like a formal military alliance until the Anti-Comintern Act of 1936, but the war in East Asia arguably started in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria.