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:
Counter-evidence:
If it did serve that purpose, it would do so with high volatility. Social unrest is dependent on macroeconomic factors such as unemployment and recession. Assuming humanities degrees are commercially less desirable than the alternatives, you'd be handing a lot of free time to a bunch of revolutionaries at the worst possible moment.
There seems to be a pretty heavy correlation v. causation problem here because your two primary examples are situations where the shut downs occurred in part because everything else was already falling apart a fair bit.
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.
Do you manage your time with particularly elaborate Excel macros?
(I know someone with similar tastes who is in a similar situation - one loved one pregnant by planning, the other at around the same time by accident. I think he spends his entire life [edit: apart from working the day job] just being dad.)
I'm confused. What does this have to do with politics?
Of all the subjects discussed on lesswrong, the subjects related to sex are the most political in style and motivation. If I recall, this applies even to your own contributions on that subject.
"Politics" doesn't mean "Obama et al".
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 ...
I think you imply that people with such traits are somehow more entitled to their vote. Is this what you meant?
I can't speak for OP, but I can give my reason to think such a thing.
First off, democracy isn't a terminal good. People having a say in how the government is run is supposed to produce better goverment, not be an end in itself. As such, words like "entitled" are the wrong ones to use here I think. Better to ask what is the value, from a consequentialist perspective, of certain people having or not having the vote. The vote is a trust that you place in people to select good government on your behalf, not a right that they deserve.
If you can agree with that (which I'll admit is rather radical), then the interesting question becomes whether civic-minded responsible homeowners would make a better decision than the population at large. It some sense, it seems likely. In another sense, the sanity waterline is so low that even the political opinions of most responsible 10% of the population are unlikely to be correllated with what would actually be good.
For various reasons I no longer believe in democracy.
So your position is that the least harmful government we know of is democracy with no one left out of the process. That's reasonable. My history and poli-sci knowledge isn't good enough to say what might be lurking in "that we know of". However, there seems to be rather strong mechanisms by which especially democracy becomes disfunctional and corrupt.
That's the reasoning behind my admittedly loaded use of "entitled" here: I believe we have a responsibility to make sure everyone gets a say, because otherwise we end up abusing the ones who don't.
Ok, but it's confusing to mix normative and empirical/instrumental discussion together. Mixing them signals muddled thought, which makes it harder for people to interpret charitably. Try to seperate them as much as possible.
"The majority will tyrannize any minority without political clout, therefore we should make sure nobody is lacking in political power" is a much more useful statement than anything involving "responsibility" "rights" "enitled" etc. (mind you I think it's wrong, but it's at least composed of empirical predictions and instrumental suggestions that can be interrogated cleanly.)
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.
William Bradford in “Of Plymouth Plantation”
...All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop then they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much debate of things, the Governor (with the advise of the chiefest amongst them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to them selves ; in all other things to go on in the general way as b
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...
I sympathise with your sentiment, but I do think you should expect pushback, because such a notion is obviously problematic. I'll just pick a few of the obvious issues:
1 Incompatibility
It is generally not possible to make different values compatible in this way just by splitting off into smaller societies. Values aren't just abstract, they are moral claims about real things. For example, if my value is that I have the right to retain my inherited feudal rights as Duke of Redland, but the serfs of Redland don't agree, we have a problem. It's not just that I want to live in a generic feudal society, it's that I place moral value in the specific history and laws and inheritance rights of Redland, which I view as just and legitimate. So we need some kind of arbitration decision as to which kinds of values get implemented, and which don't. There is nothing stopping communists from setting up their own little communes, and indeed many have. But they also want possession of already existing wealth, which is always going to be contested.
2 Outsiders
I'm living in my little society, you're living in yours, each one reflecting our conflicting values. But our societies still have to interact. T...
The good old SPLC now protects us not just from pick up artists but anarcho-capitalists! I suppose I should say fight the good fight or something like that? I do wonder who is next.
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...
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.
The Optimistic Doomsayer, a good interview with John Derbyshire
John Derbyshire famously claimed "we are doomed," but as he reveals, his rejection of utopia, wishful thinking, and pretty lies doesn't entail gloom but a sober, empirically grounded conservatism.
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...
Out of curiousity, does anybody here oppose right to work legislation?
I specifically ask in view of the fact that unions donate money to political parties (well, a political party, and its candidates; less so the other), and that agency agreements effectively force employees, as a condition of employment, to donate money to a political party.
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?
I skipped October and November owing to election season, but opening back up:
As Multiheaded added, "Personal is Political" stuff like gender relations, etc also may belong here.