Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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.

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

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.

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

New political position:

Reactionary Caplanism

"You say second "class citizens" like it is a bad idea to have more than one kind of legal status for a resident in a country and scale benefits of those to create good incentives."
"I agree it is an outrage! Deporting illegal immigrants engaged in productive work is almost as terrible as giving them the right to vote."
Limits on immigration are an unjustifiably crude method of discrimination, we need to open borders and legalize better less centralized means of discrimination.
Some stereotypes are bad which is why we should aim to develop and keep updated on the most accurate and instrumentally useful stereotypes.
The problem isn't multiculturalism, the problem is democracy. Austro-Hungary and Singapore show this is the case.
Western nations moving in a more multicultural authoritarian directions, eroding fiction such as privacy and freedom of speech to maximize wealth of the upper classes is admirable in intent if misguided. It will in the long term reduce quality of life. If they become authoritarian rapidly enough they may avoid populist backlash and other hits to stability but it won't bring prosperity, since the incentives of the Brahmin and their epistemology on related issues are all messed up.
If it is ok to trade freedom for diversity and a little bit of extra wealth, why not trade it for diversity and lots of wealth?
Corporations aren't people friend. This is precisely why it might be a good idea to trust them with absolute power.
Immigration makes native voters more right wing, but mostly in stupid and unproductive ways. Also you only have so many native voters and a practically an unlimited supply of third world immigrants, eventually it will cause the politics of Western countries to shift sharply towards the left because that is how the new majority will most effectively extract rent from market dominant group now in the minority.

This is not my current position but it seems reasonable assuming genuinely utilitarian ethics. I wonder why it isn't more popular.

Corporations aren't people friend. This is precisely why it might be a good idea to trust them with absolute power.

Give absolute power to several UFAIs and hope that they dutifully compete for everyone's labour, and graciously don't cooperate against troublemakers? Um... have you ever read much about the history of the labour movement in the West? Have you heard, say about the labour struggles in China right now? Have you wondered what a megacorporation with a 100% secure source of rent would act like?

I hardly understand how this'd be supposed to work ... (read more)

3drethelin13y

Immigration would be much better if we approached the issue of "How much do immigrants cost us vs how much do we benefit from them" and made laws in light of this, instead of approaching it from the moral difference between "This is our home and we shouldn't let strangers in" or "Freedom means allowing anyone to join us".

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

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