Politics Discussion Thread September 2012

Multiheaded

The last thread didn't fare too badly, I think; let's make it a monthly tradition. (Me, I'm more interested in thinking about real-world policies or philosophies, actual and possible, rather than AI design or physics, and I suspect that many fine, non-mind-killed folks reading LW also are - but might be ashamed to admit it!)

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
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.
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.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

Quoth OrphanWilde:

Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
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.
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.
In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.

Let's try to stick to those rules - and maybe make some more if sorely needed.

Oh, and I think that the "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also belongs here.

For example the implicit assumptions that this only works in breaking down traditional hierarchies must result in progress for something like the left that has at the very least egalitarian pretences if not perhaps real preferences. To the contrary, I think one of its most adaptive feature is setting up new hierarchies, which may or may not be more egalitarian than the old ones.

Right; it often does. In particular - not a very PC thing to say? - the more generally intelligent and educated a group is, the more the chance that it'll move towards rather than away from left-wing ideals after traditional hierarchies within it are seriously weakened for some reason.

The sort of group currently most capable of living up to "liberty, equality and fraternity" is probably the intellectual class itself :) - and that's why nearly every radical left project with some serious theoretical background, like Leninism - for all the confused rhetoric about the innate decency of the proletariat - showed some awareness that it needs its massive indoctrination efforts to be accompanied by a plain ol' public education program, introducing patterns of thinking that are appropriate to modernity rather than a pre-industrial community, massively improving literacy to the point where the common man would enjoy just reading stuff (this actually kinda-half-succeeded in Russia, eventually, despite post-Soviet regress, and this is part of why it's so hard for me to condemn the Revolution)...

Of course, there wasn't nearly enough of such enlightenment, not least because of endemic corruption and fear of practical egalitarianism within the communist elites themselves.

However, what I meant here was not that the Left was playing this game properly or very wisely, but that it had many political and selfish reasons to try it while the established elites that the Left challenged had many political and selfish reasons to stay away from it.

P.S. here you need to taboo such use of the phrase "populist right": Napoleon was the "populist right" to the French Revolution and the Directory, yet he sustained the attack on traditional hierarchies, although in a more cautious way - while Sarah Palin is also described as being of the "populist right", yet uses her standing up for traditional hierarchies as a major selling point.

the more generally intelligent and educated a group is, the more the chance that it'll move towards rather than away from left-wing ideals after traditional hierarchies within it are seriously weakened for some reason.

What are your examples for this assertion? Why do you reject the idea of motivated historical revisionism? There are multiple pressures on any modern group to try to find a common core for fundamentally distinct historical movements that (1) won their conflicts and (2) the moderns like.