I skipped October and November owing to election season.

I commend you on this! Up voted.

Hypothesis: Academic philosophy (and the humanities in general) is useful as a means of gainfully employing people who otherwise would be predisposed to starting radical social movements.

(Limited) Evidence:

• May 1968 protests, which exploded once the university was shut down by the government.
• The June Fourth Incident.

Counter-evidence:

• Limited evidence that engineers are more likely to be radical Islamic terrorists.

As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.

I am in a polygamous implicitly patriarchal relationships with two girlfriends with whom I'd like to start families. I consider dominance play an important part of my sexuality. Ask me anything.

My position may change in the future without notice. I'm sharing this because I think most people's political positions on related matters are strongly governed by self-validating rationalizations and such information is relevant to trying to gauge when someone is engaged in motivated cognition.

In Britain, the government has just introduced Police and Crime Commissioners, who are elected to provide civilian oversight of the local police force - like an American sheriff. Turnout for these elections was very low - just 15%, which has led to the media describing the PCCs as a failure.

I am not so sure. Voter ignorance has been repeatedly demonstrated, but it has also been shown that voters in low-turnout elections are much higher information. This is intuitively plausible - the person who can be bothered to vote in the local council election is much ... (read more)

I recently realized that I probably can't pass the ideological Turing test for a mainstream pro-Multiculturalism position (I think I can pass a Libertarian pro-Multiculturalism position). Thus I would very much appreciate some appropriate material to read and consider on the subject.

I posted the following proposition on my Facebook, and I was surprised how much pushback I got about it. I wonder how LWers will respond.

Every adult human being should have the right to live in a (perhaps small) society that reflects his or her values.

So ardent communists should have the right to live in a communist society, libertarians should have the right to live in a lightly governed society, devout Muslims should have the right to live in a society governed by Sharia law, devout Christians should have the right to live in a society where adulte... (read more)

Some thoughts on the fiscal cliff negotiations and Schelling points (I intend to keep this limited to political strategy, not taking sides on substantial policy questions):

The way Congress Republicans have been approaching the negotiations has perplexed some observers. The basic point is, the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. Republicans want to extend all of them, but they are powerless to do it, controlling only the House. Democrats want to extend only those for "the middle class" and let those for "the rich&quo... (read more)

I’m gonna explain game as simply as possible for the skeptics and slow learners: Treat beautiful women as you would treat ugly women.

--Heartiste

What is the empirical evidence on how tax rates on the rich affect society? I'm finding it really hard to find unbiased sources, they seem to either say there is no issue of capital flight and decreased productivity, or that any attempt to ta the rich is evil and/or will entirely collapse the economy. Neither of which seem plausible.

A talk by Paul Gottfried on How the Left Conquered the Right

In the comment section of a recent blog post Henry Harpending makes an argument that keeping busybodies busy with harmless stuff like trying to close the acheviment gap (and such efforts mostly have empirically been shown to be useless or at the very least vast misallocation of resources) is good for us:

I don’t see any problem at all with this. Concern with “closing the gap” sucks energy from people who would otherwise pursue causes that lead to bullying and pushing people around, like gun control or right to life or eugenics. Gap closing does cost us a

Preposition: Despite both reactionary and communist obsession with the Right-Left axis, throughout modern (post-Berlin Wall) Europe, political forces are best (most predictively) divided NOT between Left and Right, but rather between those forces that look up to Brussels, vs those forces that look up to Moscow. Independent-ist forces exist, but they're largely irrelevant as by nature they are isolated and thus weak.

Example: 2012 elections in Greece saw both the far-left and the far-right parties rise to far greater electoral heights than before. Did Greece... (read more)

Zizek (yet again) on revolutionary violence and why it's, like, totally cool.

Damn, the resentment to "austerity" programs in Europe is really spilling over to internet comments. I was just reading Rock Paper Shotgun, when...

British LWers, is it like what they say? Are the would-be dismantlers of the welfare state... (EDIT) bringing in really unpleasant consequences for innocent people?