US Politics - All He Wants for Christmas Was His Two Dead Sheep

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

26 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

"People are who know stuff are authoritarian cause they recognize and tell you when you do stupid stuff." is an interesting argument, since trying to poison people against "intellectuals" is itself a very authoritarian method.

Here's the problem.  How is knowing more stuff helpful if you are dismissed by the people you are trying to help because of the manner in which your knowledge is presented (as Ormond so interestingly pointed out above)?  Are you going to compel people to do what you tell them to do based upon your knowledge?

[Centrist Simon Steele]

9 hours ago, mormont said:

Who is more qualified to know if smoking is bad for me? Me, or someone well educated? 

Obviously, the latter. If you're arguing that somehow, all voters are experts in social policy and economics, you're arguing an absurd position. That doesn't mean I don't have the right to choose to smoke or that voters don't have the right to choose policies that are not in their interests. But it is daft to argue that voters always know what policies are best for them. 

You understand that standing for workers is the origin and the definition of socialism? This is like complaining that I used to stand for home cooking but now I spend all my time in the kitchen making meals from scratch. It's gibberish, and it can only come from an uncritical acceptance of 'socialism' as a buzzword rather than a word with an actual meaning in the real world. 

What I'm taking away from this, Mormont, is that voting for Republicans is as deadly as smoking. I agree.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

8 hours ago, Squab said:

Totally false. This is the root of authoritarianism. Even the smoking example, i choose what is best for me, not your idea of what you think is best for me. Total upper class snobishness at its apex. And the reason you keep getting surprised by losing.

I understand that is where it began. Today it is more “from those who have to those that need”. In reality it means everything costs more and the company i work for is looking to move elsewhere. But go ahead and tell me more about how i dont actually know whats good for me

Wut? Smoking is bad for you. You can still smoke. But it will kill you. This is total Republican science denial nonsense.

If you're advocating for Republicans, you don't know what's good for you.

Edit: Honestly, everyone, this is the prime example of why "moving to the center" is a losing strategy. You're not gaining any votes. People have made up their minds no matter how bad Trump is. If people stay home because of something like medicare for all, despite seeing the above sentiments all over the place, then there's nothing we can do.

[Rippounet]

11 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Here's the problem.  How is knowing more stuff helpful if you are dismissed by the people you are trying to help because of the manner in which your knowledge is presented (as Ormond so interestingly pointed out above).  Are you going to compel people to do what you tell them to do based upon your knowledge?

That's a fantastic question, and one we might have to answer soon because of global warming.
In fact, it's why I predicted some form of "eco-totalitarianism" emerging in the next decades (I'd bet on 50 years +/- 12) in another thread.

At some point survival of the species will trump individual freedom. This won't actually be authoritarianism: individual freedom was never meant to put other people in danger, and every individual has some level of responsibility toward fellow humans. But of course to individualists it won't feel that way.

OTOH, let's not put too much blame on "the manner in which knowledge is presented" :  many people are perfectly fine with their ignorance because knowledge would contradict their beliefs. In recent years, both traditional media (Fox News) and social media have somehow comforted hundreds of millions by telling them that their ignorance does not mean they are wrong. Hence ignorance is now seen as a virtue if it is combined with confidence and a number of abstract "values" (mostly nationalism and "traditional" beliefs, combined with a twisted sense of meritocratism), that's how people elected a man who's probably the dumbest president in US history, someone who can barely talk as well as an 8-year old.

The current era will be fascinating for future historians - assuming humanity survives. We're reaching the moment when we realize that not only are democracy and ignorance mutually exclusive, but political responsibility means citizens have to be educated, whether they want to or not, because any large group of individuals that are disconnected from reality has the potential to endanger the entire species.

And yes Scot, I am well aware of the pitfalls of such thinking...

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

53 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

I'm not sure this is accurate.  What issues are really even up for debate?  It's not like I'm going to change my mind about much either.  I'm not going to be persuaded that climate change isn't real, that universal healthcare is a bad idea, or that abortion should be illegal.  It's tough to accuse the other side alone of bad faith when we're not going to move much on entrenched issues either.

But you came to those conclusions because you have a reasonable set of facts. The science on climate change is conclusive. We can debate what to do about it, but denying it is not a good faith argument. And we have data that shows universal healthcare is more ideal and that it could in the long term lower our overall healthcare costs. Abortion is a bit trickier, but there’s no way to discuss the issue if the other side just screams, “YOU’RE A BABY MURDERER!!!” We can’t accomplish much if we can’t generally agree on the facts, and to me it’s unmistakably clear which side is not interested in doing that.

[Guest]

45 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

"People are who know stuff are authoritarian cause they recognize and tell you when you do stupid stuff." is an interesting argument, since trying to poison people against "intellectuals" is itself a very authoritarian method.

And I'm guessing we can assume then that Republicans will promote their newfound "go-with-yer-gut" epistemology across the policy spectrum because "experts" who "know stuff" are fascist beta-cucks trying to assert global world dominance over the heroic alpha red-pillers? That's good to know. I'll keep it in mind when I'm getting my $199 flash sale shoulder replacement surgery from the new doc that set up shop next door in the house for rent.

Oh, wait...what's that? Republicans don't actually believe that, and have no intention of getting rid of "experts" like business titans and makers and John Galt, and that they're simply employing that tactic on hot-button cultural issues to sway low-information non-experts to vote for them and then have no intention of actually following through? 

Color me disappointed.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

33 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

That's a fantastic question, and one we might have to answer soon because of global warming.
In fact, it's why I predicted some form of "eco-totalitarianism" emerging in the next decades (I'd bet on 50 years +/- 12) in another thread.

At some point survival of the species will trump individual freedom. This won't actually be authoritarianism: individual freedom was never meant to put other people in danger, and every individual has some level of responsibility toward fellow humans. But of course to individualists it won't feel that way.

OTOH, let's not put too much blame on "the manner in which knowledge is presented" :  many people are perfectly fine with their ignorance because knowledge would contradict their beliefs. In recent years, both traditional media (Fox News) and social media have somehow comforted hundreds of millions by telling them that their ignorance does not mean they are wrong. Hence ignorance is now seen as a virtue if it is combined with confidence and a number of abstract "values" (mostly nationalism and "traditional" beliefs, combined with a twisted sense of meritocratism), that's how people elected a man who's probably the dumbest president in US history, someone who can barely talk as well as an 8-year old.

The current era will be fascinating for future historians - assuming humanity survives. We're reaching the moment when we realize that not only are democracy and ignorance mutually exclusive, but political responsibility means citizens have to be educated, whether they want to or not, because any large group of individuals that are disconnected from reality has the potential to endanger the entire species.

And yes Scot, I am well aware of the pitfalls of such thinking...

I've heard many people bemoan the ignorance of the masses who vote.  And I must assume one of the pitfalls you note is barring people from voting based upon knowledge which has been frequently abused in many different contexts.

[Jace, Extat]

12 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I've heard many people bemoan the ignorance of the masses who vote.  And I must assume one of the pitfalls you note are barring people from voting based upon knowledge which has been frequently abused in many different contexts.

I'm starting to lean towards a technocracy. Inevitably the powerful scientists and engineers who run our government will warp education and admissions standards so that their own offspring are the only viable candidates for replacement, but democracy wasn't no good anyways.

[Rippounet]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I've heard many people bemoan the ignorance of the masses who vote.  And I must assume one of the pitfalls you note are barring people from voting based upon knowledge which has been roundly abused in many different contexts.

Yes and no. I am convinced that we need more democracy, not less of it.
The key is education - it has always been education. If people can't realize the consequences of their actions on their own, they must be taught.
And if people no longer trust other people then other means have to be found. We're supposed to be living in an information age after all.
How do you deal with a 3-year old who refuses to do what is good for them? You explain things. If that doesn't work, you show them. Forcing them is sometimes necessary, but good parenting means avoiding that as much as possible. What you want is for the kid to become responsible, because eventually they'll have to take decisions on their own.
We just need new ways to explain and show people what the consequences of their decisions are, so that we become more responsible collectively.
Parents deal with that on a daily basis, surely humanity can find a way to deal with its own stubbornness.
At first it may look like propaganda or brainwashing. That's the pitfalls I'm thinking of. We're already at the stage where distrust of intellectuals is widespread for ideological reasons (both sides having their share of guilt in this). That's what we'll have to work on: ways for intellectuals to regain or protect their authority.
We'll have to go back to epistomological debates to construct new ways of teaching -and learning- and we'll have to do it fast.
We'll have to question the ways we approach reality itself, because obviously there's something wrong with the way we do that today.
Maybe some form of super-consequentialist education, I dunno, I don't have the answers to everything, I tend to focus on asking questions in the first place. More educated people than me will know which philosopher to read to build something different. The history of human thought is a wondrous tool box after all.
Authoritarianism is like forcing your 3 year-old to do something they don't want to. At the end of the day you actually know best what's good for them (well, most of the time anyway). But it's only an ultimate recourse. It's better for everyone if they can figure things out on their own.
So instead of undemocratic regimes, I'd rather shoot for undemocratic ways of regulating information flows. You don't tell a 3 year-old that the Earth is flat or that knives are harmless. Perhaps it's time we stopped letting people play with information for stupid reasons.
You may say that's only a different form of authoritarianism. It is. But you have kids, and I'm pretty damn sure you taught them that knives can be sharp and dangerous. My 3 year-old wouldn't listen so he learned that the hard way. I'd rather humanity didn't.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

41 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Yes and no. I am convinced that we need more democracy, not less of it.
The key is education - it has always been education. If people can't realize the consequences of their actions on their own, they must be taught.
And if people no longer trust other people then other means have to be found. We're supposed to be living in an information age after all.
How do you deal with a 3-year old who refuses to do what is good for them? You explain things. If that doesn't work, you show them. Forcing them is sometimes necessary, but good parenting means avoiding that as much as possible. What you want is for the kid to become responsible, because eventually they'll have to take decisions on their own.
We just need new ways to explain and show people what the consequences of their decisions are, so that we become more responsible collectively.
Parents deal with that on a daily basis, surely humanity can find a way to deal with its own stubbornness.
At first it may look like propaganda or brainwashing. That's the pitfalls I'm thinking of. We're already at the stage where distrust of intellectuals is widespread for ideological reasons (both sides having their share of guilt in this). That's what we'll have to work on: ways for intellectuals to regain or protect their authority.
We'll have to go back to epistomological debates to construct new ways of teaching -and learning- and we'll have to do it fast.
We'll have to question the ways we approach reality itself, because obviously there's something wrong with the way we do that today.
Maybe some form of super-consequentialist education, I dunno, I don't have the answers to everything, I tend to focus on asking questions in the first place. More educated people than me will know which philosopher to read to build something different. The history of human thought is a wondrous tool box after all.
Authoritarianism is like forcing your 3 year-old to do something they don't want to. At the end of the day you actually know best what's good for them (well, most of the time anyway). But it's only an ultimate recourse. It's better for everyone if they can figure things out on their own.
So instead of undemocratic regimes, I'd rather shoot for undemocratic ways of regulating information flows. You don't tell a 3 year-old that the Earth is flat or that knives are harmless. Perhaps it's time we stopped letting people play with information for stupid reasons.
You may say that's only a different form of authoritarianism. It is. But you have kids, and I'm pretty damn sure you taught them that knives can be sharp and dangerous. My 3 year-old wouldn't listen so he learned that the hard way. I'd rather humanity didn't.

Okay, but how does "education" help if the people "educated" don't buy into the "education" they are receiving?  That's part of the problem we are running into today.  People who went through schools that taught them that the world is a globe moving around the Sun orbiting our Galactic center of mass are now claiming that they've been lied to and that the world is flat and the sun is a tiny disk a couple of hundred miles in the air. 

If you allow those who are educated but just don't agree with what they've been taught to vote how did the education help?  To be clear I absolutely don't think we should bar anyone from voting I'm just trying to figure out how your plan works if everyone is still allowed to vote?

What do you mean by saying "Perhaps it's time we stopped letting people play with information for stupid reasons"?  What, specifically, are you proposing?

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I'm starting to lean towards a technocracy. Inevitably the powerful scientists and engineers who run our government will warp education and admissions standards so that their own offspring are the only viable candidates for replacement, but democracy wasn't no good anyways.

You clearly haven't read enough science fiction written in the 1950's, showing the consequences to societies controlled by scientists and technos.

Anyway I no longer have an a iota of patience for the endless calls for me to be more sympthetic and understanding of the perspectives of so-called red state, rural, white, displaced, left-behind, blahblahblahs.

Why does no one ever suggest any of them try to understand the perspective of, o, say, Native Americans (who tend to often live in rural regions), African Americans (who also often live in rural regions), people hustling to work on long commutes in urban areas to jobs that don't pay enough to keep up with their obligations and without a bonus for the 15th year in a row, the academic adjunct racing from one class to another in three or more different educational institutions, without a single benefit, including unemployment pay, the "personal assistant" to some exec, which for women of color in particular, used to be a fine stepping stone up the ladder, but those jobs are being rapidly digitized out of existence, the nurse practicioner who spends almost all of his working day touching the keyboard and not the patient, the teacher who has to pay out of his own shrinking pay packet any supplies for kids and who is hated by rural parents for having such a cushy life with three months of vacation (which summer break is expected to spent getting yet another degree at her own expense to keep her job) and on and on and on.

 

[sologdin]

be more sympthetic and understanding of the perspectives of so-called red state, rural, white, displaced, left-behind

you don't, unless running for office in one of those places, in which case you need to put on a theatre of sympathy for their pro-life politics while you cut taxes for the employers who have fired them and abolish regulations for the industrialists whose pollutants cause their kids to die of pediatric malignancies.

[sologdin]

This is the root of authoritarianism. Even the smoking example, i choose what is best for me, not your idea of what you think is best for me. Total upper class snobishness at its apex.

cute when the cappies put these words in rightwinger mouths but the rightwingers think they're their own words, a chorus of heroic individualists who just coincidentally all happen to believe the exact same self-serving cliche.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Okay, but how does "education" help if the people "educated" don't buy into the "education" they are receiving?  That's part of the problem we are running into today.  People who went through schools that taught them that the world is a globe moving around the Sun orbiting our Galactic center of mass are now claiming that they've been lied to and that the world is flat and the sun is a tiny disk a couple of hundred miles in the air.

Ultimately there's no magical solution to such complex problems.
However, just as it's easy to demonstrate that knives are dangerous, anyone can also demonstrate that the Earth is round. I would assume that people who decide that they no longer believe the Earth is round were only told of the fact rather than having performed experiments proving it. In this case, I would assume a bit of empirical evidence would have nipped the craziness in the bud.
Scientific experiments are one of the best things about middle-school ; in actuality, many experiments can be performed even earlier.
You might say that it's harder for socio-economics. But is it, really, if you think hard enough about it? Field trips and internships could demonstrate quite a few things. Poverty and wealth are both very real. Political decisions have consequences that can be observed. It's not impossible to study most government activities performed on a daily basis and understand their cost. It's also perfectly possible to observe the workings of a few essential industries (agriculture and energy especially).
And that's just using empiricism. Rationalism can also be taught.
In our age, abstract knowledge can easily be found on the internet. Education could be entirely focused on understanding reality, and the practical side of knowledge in order to develop individual agency and responsibility. I'm not even sure it would necessarily require more means and resources, it might well be all about didactics.
Integrating such knowledge into wider abstract frameworks to compare theories and ideologies would then be the cherry on the cake, in the final years of high school as well as first years of college.
Generally speaking, ignorance and craziness don't appear out of the blue, they are failures of education.
They're also a strategy. Public education has been underfunded and teachers underpaid for decades in the US. I can't say for certain that education will help at this point, but it's an absolute certainty that lack of education doesn't.
It's a repeated truism that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. A symptom of what? I don't think it's absurd to posit his election could be the result of a decades-long strategy to destroy American public education.
It's interesting what you get by typing "neo-liberalism" and "education" in google...

Edit: I'd missed that bit.

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What do you mean by saying "Perhaps it's time we stopped letting people play with information for stupid reasons"?

Well, there was once something called the fairness doctrine in the US... Maybe the FCC could get its teeth back for starters.

[Squab]

6 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I have no idea why you're arguing with a ultra right libertarian from Australia who wants kids to be able to work in coal mines and have sex with adults if they choose to, but please continue, it's super entertaining. 

What now? Such an unhealthy obsession with kids must make you a Biden fanboy. Apart from being an Australian who leans more libertarian than liberal, the rest is malarkey.

Anyone who makes baseless accusations like that is probably projecting. Im actually surprised its ok to post that shit

[Squab]

Lol, the responses range from how do we talk to the dumbasses to who cares about the dumbasses with some insults thrown in. One of you even said they read a book about someone who was speaking to dumbasses once. Its almost like you took below literally. 

16 hours ago, Squab said:

Who is more qualified to know which party is the more worker friendly? The workers themselves? No, It'll be someone well educated who has studied the policies and even visited one of these areas once. And because the worker is dumb a low information voter, all we need is the right messaging next time.

[Jace, Extat]

"It's"

 

@Squab

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

If you can solve that problem you've hit it out of the ball park.  Both my parents are Trump supporters.  My mother will still call me to see what I think about things.  I think she thinks I'm talking down to her when I explain that, yes, Constitutionally the House can call what ever it want "high crimes and misdemenors" so long as it can muster a 2/3's majority to vote in favor of such.  She wants to talk about the lies told about Trump but never wants to talk about Trump's lies.  It is the danger of being in an information bubble.  

If I was in your shoes I’d (i) ask if she thinks that and if so explain why it isn’t so and (ii) challenge her on only wanting to discuss one side, even if that’s difficult and makes you both uncomfortable.

[Zorral]

The first article of impeachment has been passed.

It's been hours of every time tuning into the live coverage, all I hear are rethugs howling in their horrible hectoring voices about Space Force, crucifixion, coup, destruction of democracy. Plus fatuous slow downs and stunts and blockages such as resolutions to make it go on longer. Not to mention trying to pass resolutions to impeach Dems or execute them or whatever.  Lies lies and damnable lies and more more more of them. All in those horrible hectoring voices.

My chapeau is doffed in honor of Pelosi, Schiff and the Dems for enduring it this long, and now more hours to go.

[Fragile Bird]

Second one done!