I like this part: “The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk.”
I think another way to slice this is, if you think of the Overton window shifting along the axis of time, the “accidental moderate” does not shift their opinion by the same factor as the ends of the window shift. The “accidental moderate”, in fact, shifts their opinion independent of the shifts of the window.
I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.”
Additionally, by even defining two types of moderate, there is a sense that the word “moderate” means something already. I don’t know, I feel like there could be a better word, maybe if you think of it as a graph there’s a graph-related term, but it’s not coming to mind!
> I think another way to slice this is, if you think of the Overton window shifting along the axis of time, the “accidental moderate” does not shift their opinion by the same factor as the ends of the window shift.
You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're an accidental moderate, you run the risk of involuntarily changing party affiliation.
> I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.”
"Moderate" means "restrained" or "mild" as opposed to "extreme" or "severe" and has nothing to do with splitting the difference between whatever you think the extremes are. As a side note, a lot of people seem to not really know where the extremes actually are, and falsely attribute ideas to people. Deliberately splitting the difference is a tactic, something done to avoid seriously offending any part of the audience in order to keep viewership and readership numbers high. It also does horrible things to the facts when one side is right and one side is wrong and the news feels the need to pretend everyone has an equal claim to being correct.
> You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're an accidental moderate, you run the risk of involuntarily changing party affiliation.
I think this is interesting because it's been exactly the opposite for me and many of the people I know. At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus to the point that we've unintentionally found ourselves being Republican now. I.e. the midwest Trump vote.
The white working class part of their coalition, which tends to more socially conservative, are not a focus of the party anymore. It used to be a bedrock part of their strategy in the Midwest. At least that is the perception - forget for a moment if a) it’s actually true, that they’ve dropped focus, or b) that voting block was ever a permanent part of that party’s coalition or merely on borrowed time.
This is part of a generalized development in Western politics though - it even explains why Brexit and Boris Johnson won in the UK. The "left" is now explicitly the party of managerial, globalizing crony capitalism, pushing for maximum openness and free mobility for all factors of production - not of the working classes with their petty, localized concerns, or of traditional "business" classes with their long-time appreciation for economic diversification and the value of free markets. Some people might want to map this to ethnic stereotypes of some sort, or posit that it's the outcome of some kind of intentional conspiracy, and of course this would be quite incorrect. Nonetheless the shift was very real.
Your position is that the UK Labour party, led by life long socialist and eurosceptic Jeremy Corbyn, who's manifesto proposed nationalising several industries, is "explicity the party of globalizing crony capitalism"?
In a strong field this might be the weakest political take I've read in the last month.
Jeremy Corbyn is only one player out of many in the British Labor Party. He's a pretty divisive figure for other reasons, and many Labor supporters are even starting to acknowledge this.
In fact, if anything positive can be said about the shift towards favoring globalizing crony capitalism, is that it happens to be somewhat less divisive than the old-fashioned Marxist alternative that Corbyn favors. As strange as it may seem, this was very much a shift towards intentional moderation.
Increased focus on racial and sexual minorities to the exclusion of working-class interests (which has been going on for decades), spilling over into outright contempt of lower- and middle- class whites (which has mostly become prominent in the past 10-15 years).
You've got that all wrong. The former didn't happen and didn't spill over into the latter, the Democratic Party abandoned working class interests (not just “white working class”) pretty sharply after Clinton's election. It didn't really accelerate on the other fronts, it just didn't back off of them as hard because racial/sexual/etc. equality is compatible with the center-right neoliberal capitalist economics that became the focus of the new dominant faction of the Party.
OTOH, there's evidence that that faction of the party is losing dominance to one focussed on working class interests again.
Not being from the US I don't know how Democrats view this, but in general, yes, it seems to me they are somewhat in conflict. Diversity activism tends to pit working class members against each other. Meanwhile, the rich don't have to care either way, except to occasionally be seen as backing the more popular view.
There's only so much time, attention, and energy. If your focus is on, say, trans rights, you're not spending that time focusing on working-class economics.
And even if you can do it all, there's only so much attention the voters have. If all they hear about you is on trans rights, they don't perceive you doing anything about their economic problems.
The Democrats' central message used to be "we care about the working people". Now their central message is "we care about illegal immigrants, minorities, and trans people". If your biggest problem is that you have no money because you have no job, that doesn't resonate.
More: As the Democrats become dominated by the coastal elites, the party has too many people leading it who don't even know about the working-class problems in the middle of the country.
The population of the United States is dominated by the coasts. The GDP of the United States is dominated by the coasts. The tax base of the United States is dominated by the coasts.
> Are you saying that as the Democrats became distanced from working-class issues, the republicans got closer to working-class issues?
I don't know that the Republican actually got closer to working-class issues. In the last election, though, they at least got to the point of talking about such issues, in the same election that the Democrats didn't bother to do so.
So if I were a working-class minority person, whose major pain point was economics, in the last election I still might vote Republican, because they at least were talking about the thing I cared most about, even if the Democrats were talking about my secondary issue.
R said that they will bring back working class jobs and give them something to be proud of. R also said that they will limit low skill immigration which will help reduce competition for working class jobs. R said that they will reduce taxes for working class people (and they even increased taxes for better paid workers, so it is not like they just reduced it overall).
All of these are typical leftist talking points, Democrats just left those votes on the table and R just swooped in and took them.
> If your focus is on, say, trans rights, you're not spending that time focusing on working-class economics.
This is a bizarre statement since most trans people I know are either working class, precariat, or working poor. The trans rights they want beyond extremely basic anti-discrimination protection are things like easier access to university and universal health care. These are things that benefit all workers, not just trans people. (Three of the Google employees fired for union organizing were trans! Don't try to feed me some line that there's some conflict between trans rights and workers' rights. The claim is just some shit-stirring by capital for its own ends.)
It is also a bizarre statement given the indifference or even slight hostility to trans rights by DNC frontrunners (Biden, and previously Clinton). The DNC doesn't care about trans people, and trans people know it. To the extent they support the party, they do so uneasily, outside the DNC, and for largely economic reasons.
Time spent on anti-descrimination policies is inherently time not spent on economic issues. There will always be policy focus opportunity cost. I can totally understand why working class people in the heartland who have never met any LGBT person, let alone someone trans or someone non-binary, would think that focusing on equality efforts for them is not a high priority issue and that legislators should focus on economic issues affecting many more people. People mostly care about what is affecting them and people they know.
> Time spent on anti-descrimination policies is inherently time not spent on economic issues.
Can you give anything close to a concrete example of this?
Even ignoring the indivisibility of the economic and social spheres (ask a black person if the CRA was an "economic issue" - ask a trans person if whether they can safely pee at work is an "economic issue"), and that it's not a zero-sum game (for example, the heightened scrutiny required by transphobia tends to cost more resources), I can't imagine there's enough meaningful work to "saturate" 100% of some candidate's time with economic issues. And as mentioned, the people who are furthest left and most vocal on economic issues are often the people furthest left and most vocal on civil rights. Conversely, people who spend a lot of time talking about how social issues should not be such a big deal (Peter Thiel, for instance - Paul Graham also, albeit with a much smaller platform) are the same who lean right economically.
How many examples do you need to see this is a false dichotomy? How many examples did you see to convince yourself it was a dichotomy at all?
> I can totally understand why working class people in the heartland who have never met any LGBT person, let alone someone trans or someone non-binary
I am not sure you know what those words mean ("any ... T person, let alone someone trans" is nonsense), but also, we're talking about people who live in Nebraska or Ohio, not hermits. We are long past any plausibly deniability to not even know a gay person - if you don't know any, it's because you're actively trying to avoid them.
> Can you give anything close to a concrete example of this?
Sure, although I feel like your response is largely due to an uncharitable reading of my post. Whether someone can use a specific bathroom has an impact on a tiny percentage of the US population; pretty much only trans or non-binary people. Sure it's still economic in some contexts and it was incorrect for me to insinuate that it was totally social, but it is not economic or social policy that affects the vast majority of the population. Tax policy, immigration, trade policy, regulation, worker education, general schooling, government grants and investment, etc matter to far more people. Time spent on niche issues is going to appeal to fewer people by definition, and I could see people getting angry that legislative time is being spent in this manner while broader economic issues appealing to more people remain unsolved. Personally I feel that supporting those communities is morally important, but I understand why other people believe it takes a lower priority relative to economic issues affecting them personally.
> I can't imagine there's enough meaningful work to "saturate" 100% of some candidate's time with economic issue
People are clearly signaling through their voting that grossly insufficient time is being spent on economic issues. Key problems remain unsolved.
> I am not sure you know what those words mean ("any ... T person, let alone someone trans" is nonsense)
That statement implies I am referring to lesbian, gay, or bi people. I don't see what is unclear about that based on my wording. The concept of being trans is more of a logical leap for a straight person than the concept of being bi, gay, or lesbian for pretty obvious reasons. I don't think this requires further explanation.
> We are long past any plausibly deniability to not even know a gay person
You have very clearly not been to large swaths of the United States. Many, many, many people have never met an openly LGBT person. Even more are not friends with one in a close enough manner to have the types of honest, informative discussions to cut through popular misconceptions.
> if you don't know any, it's because you're actively trying to avoid them.
Yes, a large number of people intentionally self segregate into communities where other people are like them. They still get to vote.
> > Can you give anything close to a concrete example of this?
> Sure, [a bunch of broad non-specific examples]
OK.
> You have very clearly not been to large swaths of the United States.
Grew up in WI, close family / friends in MI, MN, NE, IA, and IL, dated a boy from TN and a girl from WV, but sure, tell me how there's no gays in the midwest.
Bathroom example is a specific example; there was a huge uproar about bathroom rights in North Carolina I want to say about 5 years ago, and it resulted in national media attention and subsequent legislative attention in many states. Further you didn't contradict anything else I said or any of the other basic claims I've been making. Sorry political reality and the concept of self-interest make you unhappy.
> Grew up in WI, close family / friends in MI, MN, NE, IA, and IL, dated a boy from TN and a girl from WV, but sure, tell me how there's no gays in the midwest.
Last I checked there were more than 8 states in the United States. Further, your response doesn't invalidate what I said in any way. You are an n of 1 and we are talking about tens of millions of people in there states. Just because you met a LGBT from a state doesn't mean that everyone else from that state met them or any other LGBT. Please point out where I said there were no gays in the Midwest.
> there was a huge uproar about bathroom rights in North Carolina
So because the republicans passed a law positively discriminating against trans people (and doing a bunch of other weird shit - this was not a well-planned bill), and people are sick of the social issues, they... voted republican?
Not to mention the economic fallout of HB2 was brutal - despite its short life it cost the state thousands of jobs and millions of dollars.
Again we see things aren't really in tension - the democratic position was less political work, greater economic benefit, and justice. The "political reality" is that republicans started a fight by stripping rights, then got to play a fake victim.
> it resulted in national media attention and subsequent legislative attention in many states.
That attention was primarily passing more transphobic legislation. What were we supposed to do? "Well, I guess you can keep taking our rights away one by one, because the economic issues are more important!"
There's no more productive conversation to be had concerning your views on sexuality in some mysterious, isolationist states. They're simply unmoored from reality.
Democrat [poltiicians] represent the ruling class just as much as Republican [politicians] do (evidenced by the fact that except for a few exceptions such as Bernie Sanders they go about fundraising in the same way: primarily from large donors). Given that, taking a more moderate stance regarding minorities is one of the few ways to differentiate themselves in a way that looks good to their base. In their ideal world 5 CEOs still own 95% of the country's wealth, but 3 of them are black, and maybe one's a lesbian.
> At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus
Clinton was elected on explicit Third Way positions nearly 30 years ago. If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. What you're noticing is the democrats finding a new base a decade after losing their working class supporters, through a combination of Third Way politics, the Republican Southern Strategy. The GOP saw this coming and stoked / capitulated to increasing racist elements of the party during Obama's presidency. This is the only major change in the past decade.
(Well, the democrats aren't really that smart - it's not so much they're finding a new base as they're left with the ones the new GOP ideology intentionally excludes. As a party, they are doing a terrible job mobilizing this!)
I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest. We've had heavy hispanic immigration for twenty years and they've all been fairly well integrated.
I would guess what actually happened to the older people I know is that they grew up in union jobs at factories that got sent to Mexico after NAFTA went through.
Unions lean heavy Democrat. When the union fails you, I think that leads fairly directly to losing faith in the Democratic party.
Further, the insistence by many within the party that the only reason someone would want to leave the Democratic party is that they're racists really doesn't do them any favors.
I agree that NAFTA is one major inflection point, but it supports 25 years ago, not your 10-15. I mean, I'm in full agreement that the democrats as a party have abandoned anything but the neoliberal project - I just also think if you expect anything but isolationism and racism out of the GOP - neither of which is good for the working class - you've fallen for their big lie.
> I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest.
I didn't say "Southern racism", I said "Southern Strategy", which is a specific GOP maneuver to pick up white working-class voters from the 50s onwards, as they calculated it would be better to give up the black and civil-rights focused voter base they were already losing, to pick up the white working-class, primarily agricultural, voters alienated in the South. They used existing racism, but they also stoked it. It was extremely effective (to the point you can even use "Southern racism" as a shorthand and "everyone knows" what you mean). While they mostly couldn't predict a similar opportunity in more industrial labor in the north 2-3 decades later, they definitely didn't miss the chance when it arose - and again, they've used existing racism, but also heightened it in places it was previously marginal.
> I agree that NAFTA is one major inflection point, but it supports 25 years ago, not your 10-15.
Things take a while to have an impact. The factory my dad worked at for 25 years didn't go to Mexico until 2007 [1]. Manufacturing in the area really didn't start moving to Mexico until the financial crisis. Whether as a result of the crisis itself or just a convenient side effect, I don't know.
> I didn't say "Southern racism", I said "Southern Strategy"
I know the Southern Strategy. My point is that people in the northern states are much less motivated by racism than you imply. You can choose to believe that or not, but I firmly believe that its true.
> If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda.
You think that Democrats have not moved in the past 10-15 years? You think that the idea that they have is merely Republican propaganda? I think you haven't been paying attention.
Or maybe you were paying too much attention. 15 years ago, AOC wasn't even old enough to vote. Were there Democrats in the House who held the same positions 15 years ago? Perhaps so. They didn't have the press attention that AOC gets, though. So they may have been there, but in the eyes of the public they weren't "the position" of the Democrats. Instead, they were fringe.
Now AOC gets as much press coverage as Nancy Pelosi (maybe more, before impeachment). To the average person, AOC and people like her now represent the Democratic Party. That's a massive shift, at least in perceptions, if not in actual position.
And I think the actual position has shifted, too. There are considerably more of the farther-left people like AOC, both in congress and running for president. The median Democratic officeholder position has shifted left. (Or so I strongly suspect. I assert it without statistical evidence.)
I'm trying to understand how you see Republican positions changing over time as well. From the perspective of policy or cultural issues. If I grant your point about how the last 15 years has seen a resurgent left, something that I'm stoked about, could you explain a little about how you've seen the republicans change over 10 to 20 years?
Republicans just lowered taxes for the working class and increased it for the management class. How is that typical capitalist right wing? It was basically tailor made to hurt the coastal elites since only there do a significant number earn enough to get the extra taxes.
Honestly? I see Republicans unable to explain their own positions, perhaps because they don't understand it themselves. I see them stumbling around, too often not operating on principle or thought, and sometimes stumbling into saying things that manage to win an election.
It's unfair to say that that's all Republicans. But it's some of them, and it fits the one that collects all the press at the moment...
Your entire post is about AOC, who has spent less than two years in office. My statement was about the (non-)events in the democratic party 25-30 and 10-15 years ago. The "AOC as a bogeyman" talking points are a transparent attempt to derail the discussion along the lines the GOP wants.
I agree we've seen a shift in the democratic party - not yet in its leadership - in the past 2-4 years (beginning with Sanders, its first major electoral effects in the 2018 midterms). What does that have to do with what happened 10-15 years ago?
What did happen 10-15 years ago is Obama's election. Obama's politics do not place him in the left of the democratic party, and in some areas he's firmly in the right part.
So what's the objection to what happened 10-15 years ago, but not 30 years ago? To put it more bluntly - What's the biggest difference between Obama and Bill Clinton? One hint: it's not any political policy.
And why, if the objection is supposed to be about support for the working class, is what's happening in the past 2-4 not good? The return to labor rights as a central plank of the party should be drawing people back if that's the reason they left, but apparently it's not.
True, the topic of AOC runs through my post, but that's not what it's about. It's about the change in the position of the average/median Democratic politician.
And I'd say the change has happened at least somewhat in the Democratic leadership - in many of the presidential candidates, even if not in the House and Senate leadership.
And I'd argue that this change was going on before, but you didn't see it, because of Obama. He, in one person, was the face of the Democratic party, and that hid what was going on underneath. As you say, Obama was not on the left, and because he was the public symbol of the party, it was easy to not see the left growing.
Was Obama to the left of Clinton? I could accept "no" as the answer. But was the median Democratic politician during Obama to the left of the median Democratic politician during Clinton? To me, it appears that the answer is "yes".
I don't think that abandoning the working class is something that just happened in the last 2-4 years. I could even argue that it happened under Clinton, but he had the political savvy to hide it. It was probably there, and growing, under Obama. It became glaringly apparent under Hillary, when she had no interest in even talking about the working class, and Trump did. That's what changed in the last 2-4 (let's call it 3) years - Trump stole what the Democrats thought was "their" issue, so solidly "theirs" that it didn't even need to be mentioned.
This political perspective is completely incoherent. Democrats have shifted rightward since WWII, along with every other political group in the country. Former Democrats who become Republicans because they feel the party has shifted out from under them are creating excuses to mask their own changing opinions.
> Former Democrats who become Republicans because they feel the party has shifted out from under them are creating excuses to mask their own changing opinions.
To me, this is the incoherent view. Of course the voter base has changing opinions. It's completely to be expected that over the course of decades political alliances will shift.
The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones. So we vote red.
People like to bemoan the fact that America has a two party system, while many other places have a parliamentary system with many parties. The fact is America just handles its coalition building at an earlier step. There is no single "prototypical" Republican or Democrat. There are many factions throughout the country that weigh the political winds and throw their weight behind the group they see as most likely to benefit their own particular concerns.
None of this should be nearly so divisive a topic as it clearly is. The post I replied to noted that there were a bunch of "Rockefeller Republicans" who shifted and become Democrats.
I replied that a similar thing had happened around me, only in the opposite direction. Blue collar Democrats from the 70s-00s, found that after the financial crisis, the political winds pointed them to the Republican party.
> The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones.
I agree that the Democratic platform has moved, but it moved rightwards. The Republican platform has also moved (considerably more) rightwards. If your political positions were once aligned with the Democrats but are now better aligned with Republicans, your personal opinions have necessarily moved dramatically rightwards, and your new alignment has nothing to do with the shift of the parties.
The above has this quote, which sums it up nicely:
> Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.
I think this is a good summary of why meeting in the middle is a poor excuse for balance. The average isn't the ideal middle, as almost nothing fits the average.
Exactly. This is especially true in the context of contemporary US Politics, where the average between the Democrats and Republicans is way right of the political center.
In any case, I guess it all comes down to this:
“A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied”
> I like this part: “The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk.”
I can think of one possibly valid reason to do that: When you first begin to accept the foundational beliefs of some ideological group, you initially haven't had time to think through the logical implications of those beliefs. Tentatively adopting that group's set of secondary beliefs could make sense while until you have time to think things through yourself.
yes, the terminology is certainly confusing. "accidental moderate" seems intentionally "moderate on average", as in some reversion to the mean kind of claim, but is opposed to an "intentional moderate", who seems to fall into moderation by default.
what's left unsaid, but i find more thought-provoking, is the notion that, as with the fringe ideologues, you can safely ignore the "intentional moderate" since they don't add to the conversation (because they don't think deeply about politics).
intellectual independence seems integral to why his "most impressive people" are impressive in the first place--they delve deeper into questions/challenges to form their opinions rather than adopting them wholesale from others.
I'm intrigued by how this analysis fits in with increasingly 'tribal/team politics' - do intentional moderates try to appease every team?
Thinking out loud, I think this piece misses that aspect of team-seeking behavior. I know people who will recognise a good point against their side but will strive to ignore it because it works against their sense of loyalty to the team. I increasingly believe there are relatively few people who don't want/need that sense of identity.
[edit: the article doesn't really talk about sense of belonging, which I think is inherent in a lot of this discussion]
Indeed. I think a more useful definition is someone who does not exclude either side, from the set of people whose needs politics should address. Let's call that an 'ethical moderate'.
Left and right could be thought of as differing in whose behavior they think needs to change, to improve the world: the wealthy and connected, or the poor and disconnected. The more hardline you are, the more you think that that behavior doesn't just need to change, but is reprehensible and deserving of exclusion from consideration.
So you can be an 'ethical moderate' without necessarily holding centrist opinions. It may be that this means it should be named something else, but I think it's a useful way of thinking.
Well, not holding position X merely because X is the [conservative | liberal | Democratic | Republican | left | right] position might be considered "moderate", in one sense of the word. Holding position X purely because tribe Y holds it makes you a committed (ie, not moderate) member of tribe Y.
The small child at the top with the horn and red jacket is framed as Good, despite embarking on an illegal foxhunt at the end of which a fox will be killed with dogs. The "lawyer killing a fox with a baseball bat after it attacked his chickens" story immediately below is framed as Bad.
As the tweet says, you have to know the team loyalties for this framing to make any sense.
(The Telegraph is of course not any kind of moderate)
People can be true to a team and end up chauvinist; or they can be true to an idea and end up ideologues.
The point about extremists getting their opinions in bulk is a solid one. I'm not so sure intentional moderates is a well-defined category. It's what most "balanced" media strive for, but it's more like rubber banding in a video game race - the media have incentives to ensure an exciting, tight race, it improves their viewership, so they try to find the dead centre.
I think what PG calls intentional moderates are simply not that interested. Also, I think accidental moderates can end up fairly extreme in the end, because tribalism is ultimately a very strong draw and critical thinking is tiring.
I got a bit confused by the terms, but it just landed. The intentional moderate has the intention to be moderate on all issues whereas the accidental ends up in a the center when you consider the whole range of issues.
Somewhere in there maybe is a different idea about 'tolerance'. The first might have a 'Live and let live'-position. The other actually believes plurality of lifestyles is a good thing. Somewhere along those lines ;)
Group thinking should of course always be questioned, but I do not believe it is useful to equate any form of moderation with cowardice. Especially in the modern political climate.
We’ve been short of billionaires willing to share their opinions about why we should consider the incredible increase in concentrated wealth and the resurgence of monopoly business practices as “moderate” while the idea that maybe we should, you know, consider doing something to stop that, as “extreme” and “far left”.
There’s a couple tells in the article. But here’s a pretty clear one:
> Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates
You can just map “impressive” to “rich” and “accidental moderate” to “uninterested in increased taxation or regulation in their own life despite their otherwise disparate political views” and the whole thing comes into focus pretty clearly.
There are plenty of impressive folks who aren't especially rich. And plenty of rich folks who support increased taxation or regulation, especially as a means of keeping competitors at bay and securing their own monopoly business practices.
Isn't it possible that by posing a question that supposes the post you're questioning redefines something, you've created a case of the negative type of redefinition you're implying is happening?
In case you didn't read the top comment, the redefining was in the text and quite literal, not something that had to be supposed or inferred:
> You can just map “impressive” to “rich” and “accidental moderate” to “uninterested in increased taxation or regulation in their own life despite their otherwise disparate political views” and the whole thing comes into focus pretty clearly.
I do see a difference, and the piece I quoted seems to me to be the latter: redefinition.
I say that, in part, because substituting those meanings changes the perceived message of the piece. If the rest of the essay reasonably supported that reading, I might well agree that this was interpretation, analysis, or even clarification. However, it seems as though the original comment is working backward from pg's identity to decide what opinions it's possible for him to have, in the commenter's view, and then covering the message of the essay (whatever you think of it) with one of the commenter's pg-possible opinions.
Personally, I'd prefer that commenters of this view argue against the essay directly, since I think there are a lot of things to say in that regard.
If you believe reading meaning into a text is redefinition - saying a text is trying to redefine things when the text doesn't use that precise word, is also redefinition.
The definition of "impressive" does not change, it's you who believes the author didn't use the correct word, based on reasons that have nothing to do with the article.
Since neither one of us can read the author's mind, it's not a productive avenue of discussion. A text should always be taken at face value. Otherwise, we'll be no longer discussing the text, but each other's imagination.
Ok so for redefinition to happen, a definition needs to change.
> it's you who believes the author didn't use the correct word, based on reasons that have nothing to do with the article.
>
> Since neither one of us can read the author's mind, it's not a productive avenue of discussion. A text should always be taken at face value. Otherwise, we'll be no longer discussing the text, but each other's imagination.
I'm confused now because you seem to be saying I think the author didn't use the correct word - but I never said that in my text, so you haven't taken my text at face value.
Yes let’s always take texts at face value, regardless of context.
There’s no reason to point out that your relative who says everyone in his life is conspiring against him is addicted to meth.
There is no reason to notice when an essay opposing increased mall security was written by someone who’s been convicted of shoplifting dozens of times.
And we must never point out that a person advocating for the political status quo, and against shaking up the established order, has accumulated billions of dollars in private wealth.
In those situations, it's appropriate to point out potential biases or agenda from the author, but it is not appropriate to reinterpret their words based on a mental model one has of the author.
That model is likely to be flawed and incomplete, but even worse, it makes the text subjective. Two people, reading the same text, won't agree what it said. That prevents honest discussion.
And interestingly, CPLX seems to be doing exactly what the article talked about. PG said something, and CPLX wouldn't listen to what it actually said, because it came from one of those rich people, and they couldn't possibly have anything honest and true to say. This is CPLX not actually considering PG's opinion for what it is, but for how it fits in CPLX's already-existing framework.
I mean I think he’s being honest. He’s saying that he is looking at a system in which he’s literally amassed billions of dollars and doesn’t see any reason for sudden changes. He’s just not interested in exploring how those two facts interact.
What I am hopefully pointing out is that he could be doing a better job of trying to understand why people who are literally living in misery and despair might be seeking more radical change. The fact that some of his decisions may have directly let to the misery of some of those people makes this conversation complicated.
It’s relevant that the greatest political problem in society right now is people hoarding vast amounts of resources, and that he’s literally doing that. Of course he doesn’t have to agree that this is in fact the greatest problem today, but he could at least note that many of the people he’s supposedly analyzing do believe this.
He’s almost certainly capable of having a more nuanced discussion that recognizes his own position and perspective, but is choosing not to do that. This isn’t an academic treatise it’s a personal essay about his own subjective impressions, and he’s leaving out the most important aspect of his own lived experience.
> The fact that some of his decisions may have directly let to the misery of some of those people makes this conversation complicated.
I'd like to see how you think that PG's decisions directly lead to the misery of those living in misery and despair. In the absence of a logical flow of cause and effect, I'm going to assume that you're blowing ideological smoke.
> It’s relevant that the greatest political problem in society right now is people hoarding vast amounts of resources...
I seriously question whether that's the greatest political problem in society right now.
Banal masturbatory liberalism: a greater enemy than authoritarianism. “Look upon my works, you lesser men. I sit atop my perch, passing judgment on all those who pursue their beliefs with any passion. Righteousness I confidently disdain, ridicule all who act upon their beliefs, no matter how scientific or otherwise demonstrable they may be in their truthfulness. I am uninterested in Truth, and Justice in all her forms can be raped out back for all I care.
“No, the most important thing — more than reproducibility, an understanding of history, or political science — is to refrain from excitement, and to believe myself and those like me to be superior to those who succumb to passions. The child in Asia working 14 hour days to make shirts? They are not able to see clearly. The mother who had her children ripped from her arms at the Texas border? Moderation is the best remedy. The firefighters in Australia fighting apocalyptic infernos, uncompensated and unrespected by their Prime Minister? Why, they are just too close to the situation.”
This is the most infuriating thing I have ever read. PG suffers from never having had a gun held to his head, either literally or figuratively, and believes that this makes him more worthy of being listened to, rather than less.
The privileged always think so.
So, PG: go fuck yourself. Tell us the benefits of moderation when hospitals charge us into bankruptcy for procedures others in the world receive for tens of thousands of dollars less. Tell me how moderation helps the young black man who was murdered by a cop for no reason whatsoever. Tell me how moderation helps the pregnant mother of three who is prevented from seeking an abortion. Tell me how moderation will save humanity from the extinction level event that is climate change.
Fuck you, you capitalist piece of shit. You sit atop your economic pile, and think that gives you special insights into the sufferings and tribulations of humanity. But we see. All you are doing is propagating the system that has allowed you to maintain that perch, and calling anyone who challenges it an extremist. It is what the capitalist class has always done, and what they will always do.
This is a very American perspective, occasionally a bit flippant (dismissing 100+ years of Marx-influenced intellectuals in politics and economics as “not smart” is definitely not smart, particularly after 2008) and overall mediocre.
There is a lot of stereotyping, and it doesn’t account for the interest axis, i.e. the fact that a lot of very smart people simply do not care for organised politics in any way, shape, or form.
More importantly, it lacks knowledge of consensus mechanics beyond Overton, which is why it struggles to get to grip with the right side of the spectrum - which is, historically speaking, the most consistently successful side, at least in the short or medium term when any new political issue arises. Dismissing that as “I don’t know” shows embarrassingly poor subject knowledge.
So uhm, this piece could have been written by a 16-year-old trying to move his brain for the first time. That it comes from a much older and experienced person, somebody who holds a number of smart positions on other topics, to me is a signal that such person has done very little effort to actually study this particular field in depth.
Maybe it’s an attempt at showing that one can be not-smart about certain topics? If that were the case, I don’t think we really need it - Twitter and Facebook remind us every hour of every day that it is indeed the case.
It's PG's habit of using his own arbitrary measures of intelligence as a proxy for worthiness, and where these measures of intelligence are usually a function of the ability to make money.
> OP: In the 20th century, a lot of very smart people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects Marxism involves.
In 40 years, the USSR, whose economy was about the size of Brazil's in 1917, and who waged a civil war and repelled two waves of invasions (the first of which included an invasion by the USA after WWI) - this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth, to where it could repel an invasion by continental Europe, then launch the first satellite, man on space, moon probe and whatnot. For a country that Lenin considered to be in a holding action waiting for revolution in the west. I find that impressive.
The western anti-Marxists went through an array of nonsense in the 20th century - "The End of History", the idea that Keynesian or monetarist or whatever remedies would smooth out the business cycle.
Marx predicted worsening economic crises like in 2000 or 2008, with accompanying unemployment, overproduction and a falling of profits. Lenin predicted an unquenchable and self-destructive drive for imperialism.
The best argument for Marxism isn't the USSR - it's China. They've actually managed to turn into a modern, mostly-developed country, though the process is most likely far from complete. The USSR was a dismal failure by comparison.
BTW, they're even launching their own space satelites, men in space, moon probes and whatnot lately.
But the way China turned into a modern, mostly-developed country was to turn away from what Marxism said about how to run an economy, and turn back at least part of the way to capitalism. What they kept from Marxism (or at least the Soviet Union) is the one-party dictatorship. So not that great an argument for Marxism after all.
So uhm, this piece could have been written by a 16-year-old trying to move his brain for the first time. That it comes from a [billionaire founder of a private equity firm with a large platform], somebody who holds a number of smart positions on other topics, to me is a signal that such person [is engaged in an intentional effort to influence public opinion].
If it is, it’s a poor effort - if anything because it’s absolutely not original. You can see the array of similar sources posted in this thread as proof... when you are rehashing something that even Chris Rock has said, you are not influencing anything - unless the attempt was to keep the debate fundamentally frozen in place, which does not need help.
I don't think 2008 validates Marx. OK, he predicted worsening economic crises. So have a number of others, many of whom are not even close to Marxists. Does 2008 validate them, too? If not, why not? And if 2008 validates such contradictory positions, then being validated by 2008 doesn't mean very much.
The progressive dissociation of financial markets from real economic activity was the primary cause of 2008 - it’s the existence of credit derivatives that made it possible to crash the world economy. That’s very much a marxist prediction come true.
As a British moderate conservative, the differences between US and UK (arguably European) politics are fascinating. What moderate means is so different. For reference I’m a lifelong conservative voter that grew up under Maggie Thatcher.
We do have a middle of the road Liberal Democrat party, but to my mind they maintain their position in the middle ground by dodging the hard issues. They are intentional moderates in that respect and I just don’t trust them to tackle really tough issues effectively. So I’m a moderate conservative because the Conservative party is generally an effective party of government that often leans moderate for practical political reasons. Often enough that I’m ok with it, cripplingly badly thought out referendums aside.
Looking at the US political landscape there’s no question in the 80s I would have been a Reagan Republican, but gradually over the last few decades my respect for Republicanism has collapsed. It’s turned itself into a radical ideology that doesn’t even seem conservative, or concerned at all with things conservatives everywhere usually obsess over. The democrats have recently lurched left in response though, so while I found myself, to my own bemusement, generally cheering on Democratic candidates and presidents in the last few decades, now I’m worried they’re ‘doing a Corbyn’ and indulging in outlandish and fantastical economic policy positions that are always a temptation for the left. That leaves me in the wilderness in US political terms.
So I can’t support the Republicans because they are immoral jerks who are selling out democracy, undermining the rule of law and sold out on their international security position for partisan posturing long before Trump showed up. And I can’t support the Democrats any more because they are indulging in crazy leftist economic fantasies.
As a British former moderate conservative who's abandoned the party, though in truth I feel the party has abandoned me, I see a UK conservative party that has followed a very, very similar transition. Moderate conservatism has just been kicked out of the party. It's now a radical ideology captured by libertarian think tanks in American image -- and several of them funded by the US. The conservative party is now the ERG party or Way Forward party.
There is no space in the party for a Dominic Raab, Ken Clarke or Michael Heseltine, or One Nation policies -- once the bastion and bedrock of post-war conservatism, or even being in favour of a mild exit deal with the EU. Just dogmatic pursuit of blind, disproven policies for the benefit of a tiny minority such as the joke of austerity, closure and gutting of services many former Conservatives actually built and developed in former decades. For all her dogma on the Poll Tax, Thatcher could listen and understood the scientific advice, privatisation of many services that were eventually sold off were, to her, beyond the pale. She had her limits too, she did not and could not understand society, and people within it.
Thatcher's first set of ministers contained Whitelaw, Lord Carrington -- possibly the last high ranking UK politician of any party with an innate sense of ethics and standards, Heseltine, Pym, Prior and many others I forget, who wouldn't be welcome in today's party, let alone get a ministry. Plenty to bring some balance to cabinet, to moderate the extremism of the mad monk who invented Thatcherism -- Keith Joseph. Of course Joseph was the creator of one of those first extreme libertarian think tanks, the Institute of Policy Studies.
One Nation Conservatism, and moderate conservatism is dead. There's a radical party that uses the same name. They even adopted a bunch of US Republican voter suppression tactics in this election, page 48 of the manifesto. Promoting the suppression of democracy as policy aim! Gerrymandering constituency boundaries, picture ID to vote in a country that requires no ID -- knowing full well that hits the poor and minorities hardest (Who might well not be inclined to vote Tory), politicising the Judiciary. No, the Conservative party of yore no longer exists.
I think we’re heading in that direction, but it’s such a recent shift in direction that hopefully it’s just a contingent reaction to the outcome of the referendum. I’m a remainer, but I think once we’re out if the E.U. the party will re-centre itself on its basic priorities.
Mistakes always happen in politics, if you’re not making mistakes you can’t be doing anything worthwhile. Austerity went too far, but fundamentally had to be done. Leaving the EU Is a mistake, but given the referendum the party had to commit itself to delivering what it promised. That’s my take anyway.
Not so recent, it's been a steady transition since the silliness under Major with the rebels over Maastricht. Labour were almost as split at the time.
My problem is they've become a party of international finance, hedge funds and so on. No longer is a conservative MP or Lord the former exec of a successful FTSE company, or something in the city, which of course is now mainly US. The policies benefit international finance not Britain and the British, candidates are selected accordingly. Rees Mogg being perfect example.
I can imagine a Churchill, Macmillan, Heath or even Heseltine or Thatcher putting through the environmental parts of Labour's manifesto -- that's good One Nation Conservatism without the parts remaking capitalism. No one since though. Thatcher fully believed the science, and made a UN speech in 89, and many others, calling for world climate action way beyond anything that's actually happened. Churchill did so much to create the European Court of Human rights and Convention.
The referendum campaign basically promised no deal was not possible, so yes they should deliver what was promised. Though allowing a referendum without supermajority so we're forever stuck at 50:50 was madness. Austerity was dogma from day one -- no one overspent, it was a global banking bubble, but gave an excuse to push libertarian shrinking of government. Yet QE was full on Keynes, just this time for the benefit of international finance, not the country. Every event kicks the fringe to the centre, and remakes the party a little further off centre.
That's my take. Internet politics is of course mostly futile, have a peaceful and prosperous New Year. :)
IMO, in the US the "coservative" movement is misnamed. It seeks not to conserve, but make radical change to both government (shrink it significantly) and culture (change mainstream values, cultural output). They're trying to push for extraordinary change and are willing to take extraordinary measures to get there.
Ironically, the closest thing we have to "true" conservatives here are self-fashioned centrists, who generally are interested in preserving the status quo, making small changes in one direction or another depending on how society is going, being generally vigilant against too much change.
That's the Reagan/Thatcher monetarism/neoliberal transition. Prior to that the conservative parties generally were small c conservative, seeking to preserve the status quo, make small adjustments with evidence, and make no change for change's sake.
It's a view that has almost completely ceased to exist among the conservative parties of the world.
Well, the conservatives want to conserve, not the current status quo, but the status quo of, say, 1950. To get there from here, we'd need to make some drastic changes to the current status quo.
And that's not inherently an insane approach. If we've been going in the wrong direction for the last 70 years, the most useful move is to go back to where we were.
Now, in practice, it's not that simple. You can't just go back. You don't even want to just go back; parts of 1950 we do not want to return to. And you don't have the people you had 70 years ago, or the expectations, or even the societal values.
But I think this explains why a conservative could want to radically shrink (or, rather, de-grow) government, and still legitimately remain a conservative.
”Well, the conservatives want to conserve, not the current status quo, but the status quo of, say, 1950. To get there from here, we'd need to make some drastic changes to the current status quo.”
They don’t want that. Otherwise they would support tax increases and lower salaries for CEOs. They want to go back to a mythical past that never existed the same way they are Reaganites that would call the real Reagan a RINO.
Of course. They want the 1950s, not as they were, but as they imagine them. In the same way, the liberals want, say, Sweden, not as it is, but as they imagine it.
Off topic: Can you explain to me (a US person who doesn't understand UK politics) why the Liberal Democrats did so poorly in the last election? In my limited understanding, it seems to have been tailor-made for them to do well, with both the Conservatives and Labour looking extreme.
Their new leader performed particularly poorly in electioneering, and associated with this they nailed their election colours to "Bollocks to Brexit", and repealing article 50 legislation. i.e. Under us, Brexit is not happening, regardless of referendum, calls for second referendum or rerun with more honest campaign rules or what have you. Last, I think (I'm guessing) there was a good degree of everyone being beyond sick of this, and vote Tory so we're out and it's over and done with. Of course leaving is just the start of a 10x longer period of trying to negotiate with everyone, and make things like import/export work again, preserve NI peace etc... Brexit will continue to be the story of the coming decade -- all of it. Our famously resilient and politically neutral civil service is already deeply damaged by it.
Minor reasons are a lot of very amateur hour election leaflets with faked graphs, pretend newspapers that made them look like the Liberals in the 1970s once again -- intellectual, worthy, and utterly irrelevant. They also split the anti vote in more than one constituency.
US politics has devolved into a series of ideological purity tests. Neither the bigoted, dated ideas of the GOP or the magical, fairy dust ideas of the progressive Dems have anything to do with actually solving problems. Most US voters are forced to hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils.
I have to say... the only political candidate trying to solve problems pragmatically is Andrew Yang - and that's why he's my guy.
Even if you think his solutions are horrible, you have to admit he's bringing new ideas to the table and focused on measuring the right metrics and solving problems.
UBI might seem like a pipe-dream but when you break it down it's way more realistic than "amazing government jobs for everyone" or "break up the big companies into little pieces."
The economy is shifting due to automation and the exploitation of workers through the on-demand gig economy. We need major changes and big ideas. I want someone who innovates and uses data to back up his political stances - so Yang has my vote.
I completely agree with you on Andrew Yang. I don’t think UBI works in practice but he is the only candidate realistically talking about underlying problems instead of just symptoms.
I’d probably go for Yang too, but it would be a near impossibility for him to win the nomination. I’d love to see him as a VP pick but he doesn’t really bring the “votes” that a typical VP candidate would. At the very least, I hope he’s offered some type of cabinet position (ideally heading up a new Department of Technology).
> So I can’t support the Republicans because they are immoral jerks who are selling out democracy, undermining the rule of law and sold out on their international security position for partisan posturing long before Trump showed up. And I can’t support the Democrats any more because they are indulging in crazy leftist economic fantasies.
Bang-on 100% accurate. It's a bunch of immoral jerks versus a bunch of fantastical hooey.
Add to that a difference in rhetorical style: Republicans skirmish aggressively and keep their commentary "on message," while Democrats tend to virtue signal and use identity politics to galvanize their followers.
To quote the comedian Chris Rock (from his "Never Scared"):
"Anyone that makes up they mind before they hear the issue is a fucking fool, OK? Everybody… No, everybody’s so busy wanting to be down with a gang – “I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal.” It’s bullshit. Be a fucking person. Listen. Let it swirl around yo head. Then form yo opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, OK? I got some shit I’m conservative about, I got some shit I’m liberal about. Crime, I’m conservative. Prostitution, I’m liberal. "
"If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels"
It reminds me of how fatuous Nassim Taleb can be, certainly. That quote basically deletes any historical context and actual belief held by those groups. It reduces the actual differences that they have to a bumper sticker level of depth.
Not trying to be insulting or anything, I just don't find it that helpful, and I'm also not particularly a fan of Taleb.
Consider https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... for another take on political centrism/general tribalism. A bit (err, quite a lot) lengthier but it gets to some interesting ideas about the inevitability of tribes. Stephenson's Seveneves also comes to mind as a book-long meditation on the same topic.
There is a significant qualitative difference between ideologues (left or right) and, to use Graham's terminology, 'accidental moderates' or the 'intentional' ones.
Ideologues assume that there is a single version / source of the truth whether it is a religious text, or a secular one (Marx, Hayek, etc). 'Intentional moderates' are not monist (as are idealogues), but to the contrary triangulate. If anything, intentional moderates reject the notion that there is an objective position.
Accidental moderates - idealised - are actually just being reasonable and weighing different considerations, thus arriving at a considered position.
Intentional moderates may not necessarily be cowards. To take an exampe: most people are ignorant of economics and so their position on, say, the interest rate is not an informed one.
Intentional moderates use a centrist heuristic in the belief that the reasonable answer is somewhere between the two extremes. There is nothing wrong with this; one cannot expect voters to be experts or even well informed on all the posible issues of government.
> Whereas an accidental moderate's opinions will be scattered over a broad range, but will, like those of the intentional moderate, average to about 50.
I think this describes my own political opinion to a tee. I agree with some stuff on the left, some stuff on the right and the moderate/centrist opinion on some others, and it probably equals out as centrist.
Still, I'm not sure I'd say this is a rare thing by any means. Indeed, I suspect a large percentage (maybe even majority) of the population has beliefs from all sides/corners of the political spectrum.
It's just that the current voting system in places like the US and UK encourages everyone to band with 'one side or the other', and groups a bunch of people/groups that likely disagree in many cases together as one party.
Plus given most people's mixtures of said beliefs are different to others, your average politician/party ends up having to appeal to a certain 'tribe' in order to get elected, since the percentage of people who 100% agree with a certain mix of beliefs is too small to get anyone a majority.
WRT. the perceived amount of "accidental moderates" being small, I don't think it's just because of voting systems. I see two other factors.
1) When you speak up on some issue, people tend to immediately pigeonhole you into a drawer with a political affiliation label on it. I've been called an illuminati NWO supporter by some, a Marxist by others, roughly in the same time, just because I voiced my opinion on two different topics.
2) "Accidental moderates" are not a uniform group. I'll bet that you and I have plenty of differences of opinion - on one issue, I'll be leaning left and you'll be leaning right, on another issue, it'll be the reverse. So once someone wants to leverage group support for one of their positions, they essentially have to sign up with one of the extreme, well-defined groups, that support that particular position. And while internally, they're still an "accidental moderate", to the outside, they just look like another partisan.
I agree with your general take, but I want to expand on what I think you were getting at with (1) some. Polarizing issues is a very real phenomenon where by disagreeing on one issue your positions on other, entirely unrelated positions is assumed. I've had people assume I was pro private-prisons because of my view of tax rates, or assume I was against marijuana legalization because of my views on second amendment rights.
The problem with polarizing issues is that it acts to reinforce the tribal mentality. The truth is that most people have relatively complex opinions when they get to genuinely think about them and they almost never fit in clean political tribes. Yet it's to the benefit of a given group to try and lump-sum everyone in or out of it.
In our current political system the accidental moderate seems left out. How do they choose the right candidate when the campaign system is wholly based on ideology? Sure, accidental moderates may have great opinions, but how does one put those in action in the current political climate within a political framework. They would seem to be best living outside the system, with no label defining the political affiliation or ideology, while the moderate is free to be wooed by the right or left choice of any given election.
> How do they choose the right candidate when the campaign system is wholly based on ideology?
They don't. Perhaps that is why the voter turnout is so low everywhere.
For instance, myself, I cannot in good conscience support any of the political parties that exist in my country. I agree with each of them on few points, and strongly disagree on most.
I'm not convinced there are any intentional moderates. Isn't this just one big straw man? Noticeable lack of specifics, not even historical figures. Honestly it comes off like "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why".
I think there's definitely something to the idea, but I wouldn't carve up the world into These People and Those People. If anything, we're more like calico cats and we all exhibit both behaviors simultaneously. Yes, I think the Overton windows "centers" some of our views, but I can't consciously tell you which ones without thinking about it first.
>I'm not convinced there are any intentional moderates.
Well, I know tons of those. People in journalism, and other high profile public related posts, are often such. They don't want to offend any side, and reap the benefits of both. Some politicians are also like that. I know people in media personally who have more extreme positions in private talks, but their public opinions are carefully calculated to advance their career.
>Noticeable lack of specifics, not even historical figures. Honestly it comes off like "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why"
Why do people on HN think everything is a big science paper? The post is observations about society, from someone who has lived in one for 5+ decades and paid some attention. It's not some sociology paper or nation-wide poll results. It's like people can't think without polls and figures, or have relegated their opinions to the "experts" and their stats...
While "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why" is a bit too dismissive, your dismissal of a desire for factual data is disturbing.
One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience. This is true even if they have a sharp mind, decades of experience, and the best credentials.
The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia.
>While "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why" is a bit too dismissive, your dismissal of a desire for factual data is disturbing.
I find the over-reliance on second hand ("factual") data, charts and figures, disturbing.
People have to learn to observe, think, and understand themselves.
Not just passively consume pre-made charts and statistics (which are the easiest thing to manipulate). And learning how to spot BS statistical claims wont help when the raw data can be themselves cherry-picked, manipulated, and diced in tons of ways.
Not to mention that live experience is 360 (if one tries), where data will always paint less than the whole picture. One could arrange for great "official" charts and figures for every country -- and most countries do. Unless one gets on the field and talk to the people on the street and the workplace, and try to check the reality in various situations, they can have a totally BS picture painted for them by the statistics and "factual data".
>One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience.
Well, you're not 10000 people. You're just one, like everyone else is. In the end, whatever you're fed or read or watch, you have to make up your mind for yourself.
>The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia.
Nor should fact checking and bias analysis start and begin with data people are handed down from official or other sources. Those can range from perfectly accurate to badly compiled to totally and mischievously misleading (for saving face, incompetence, for profit, etc).
If you lived in USSR, would you trust the official data, or you would try to balance things and do direct observation?
You shouldn't blindly trust "facts" and "figures" anywhere else either...
You keep saying charts and figures. Repeatedly, ad nauseum. As if that's what I was getting at. Quit talking about them, that's not relevant to this discussion.
Comparing two data points will always yield better results than having just one. Data points don't have to be literal points on a graph. They can be discussions with people.
>You keep saying charts and figures. Repeatedly, ad nauseum.
Actually I've said the exact phrase twice in this subthread. And considering its the main subject of the subthread (whether those IMO are enough/mandatory or not) it's not really surprising.
Perhaps you don't want like to hear it, so you're extra annoyed anytime I mention it, which makes you overcount? Maybe you need some charts and figures of how many times I said that expression.
>Comparing two data points will always yield better results than having just one.
Which is neither here nor there. A single person could collect 1000s of data points by observation, talking to different people, etc.
You don't need a team to do that, or some official citation.
There could be bias in said person? Sure. Same way the team/paper could have bias, be non-reproducible crap, be written to make some government body look good, be written to make someone money, etc.
It's almost as is critical thinking by the person receiving the single person's anecdote or the, can I say it, charts and figures, is still required.
PG's essay isn't presenting itself as a scientific work presenting a theory. It's just one man's opinion. But 'arh68 above seems to be interpreting it as if it was such a scientific work.
Graham's sale of Viaweb essentially exits him from the society most of us live in; he achieves a level of wealth that lets him ignore most aspects or truths he finds inconvenient (good or bad, small or large). As he's now writing in absentia for over 20 years, I don't think we should assume he knows anything about how the world works for most people today.
Well, it is christmas, so I am at home with family and relatives with many different opinions and life experiences and to navigate that jungle I have to confess, yes, the last few days I was an intentional moderate. Also at work.
> Intentional moderates are similar to those on the far left and the far right in that their opinions are, in a sense, not their own. The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one's opinions in bulk.
Well, no, not at all. People on the left and on the right tend to have a worldview and attitude that is the foundation of their stances on issues. It is not a coincidence that support for welfare spending, tolerance of theft, illegal immigration, fat acceptance, and decrying of objective standards in education all come from the same side.
They don't. Edit: Not in the sense that they're scrambled up. Party lines can be drawn differently, specific policies can be different. In the same sense, policies differ at different times in history, too. Edit II: I note your question presumes there are universal far right and far left attractors -- that's not anything I meant to imply.
It'd be a stretch to say political opinions are for the most part a result of internal reasoning and self-formed world view, rather than indoctrination by a social group that suffers hard from confirmation bias. People are, overall, NOT good at thinking critically, and tend to accept the paradigm to which they have to most exposure. They tend not to reach outside of their bubble for clues about what could be wrong with their paradigm. It's more work.
It's not reasoning, it's basic values. People are made differently. That's why there are political differences between men and women, weightlifters and runners, straight men and gays, and dynamic typing and static typing fans. And you can trace the common reasoning in the baskets of political views. This isn't like some difference between communists and people who would be communists if it weren't for Econ 101. It's differences in regard to questions like whether you're willing to accept that some people will have a worse lot in life. And is moderation in the pursuit of justice a virtue or not?
The moderates are the people whose opinions are most formed from indoctrination.
Basic values come from the world around you, from your parents, from everyone around you that you interact with as you grow up. You aren't born a runner. Kids are formed into people. Most often they turn into people with similar basic values and in turn, political opinions. There are a lot of ways values can be applied. It's only for for the most part that people don't deviate in their application because they aren't thinking that hard, just imitating others and being a conduit for preformed ideas.
>the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.
I don't think you can reduce political arguments to who is "right" and who is "wrong". Politics and moral questions are not mathematical problems. We fundamentally don't all agree on what the final outcome (of a society, of life) should be. Maybe 99% of us can agree with something like "happiness" or "peace", but those are way too vague and the devil's in the details.
When PG says that the left and right are equally "wrong", he's suggesting that they are both trying to arrive at THE solution, but just taking different paths. I don't think this is fundamentally true and if you view political struggle from this perspective you're going to miss the full picture.
It is indeed true - the extreme left and right (along with the religious extremists of any religion) all believe that they have the One True Solution, and have historically been ready to murder millions who they believe stood in the way.
So yes, both the extreme left and the extreme right are not only wrong, but morally repugnant.
The whole point of classical political liberalism is of how to get multiple incompatible ideas of what is the good life (broadly understood) to coexist peacefully. Without it there is only tyranny or chaos.
That's a pretty big simplification of politics over the last century and a half.
For example, let me grant you that Nazi Germany and the Soviets were equally bad for the sake of this question, would that mean that we and our allies were moderate? Do the proxy wars that we fought/are fighting all over the world factor into an ideological spectrum?
The reason that I'm asking a question instead of just going all "what about-ism" is I really would like top understand why people think the way they do. Not trying to start an argument.
1. Just because we don't agree on the answer doesn't mean that there is no correct answer. If there are no correct or incorrect policies then there is no need to vote.
2. There is strong agreement on lots of things:
95 percent disapprove of people using cell phones in movie theaters. (Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel Poll, 2014)
97 percent believe there should be laws against texting while driving. (The New York Times/CBS News Poll, 2009)
96 percent have a positive impression of small business. (Gallup Poll, 2016)
95 percent believe employers should not be able to access the DNA of their employees without permission. (Time/CNN/Yankelovich Partners Poll, 1998)
95 percent support laws against money laundering involving terrorism. (Washington Post Poll, 2001)
95 percent think doctors should be licensed. (Private Initiatives & Public Values, 1981)
95 percent would support going to war if the United States were invaded. (Harris Survey, 1971)
96 percent oppose legalizing crystal meth. (CNN/ORC International Poll, 2014)
95 percent are satisfied with their friends. (Associated Press/Media General Poll, 1984)
95 percent say that “if a pill were available that made you twice as good looking as you are now, but only half as smart,” they would not take it. (Men’s Health Work Survey, 2000)
98 percent believe adults should watch swimmers rather than reading or talking on the phone. (American Red Cross Water Safety Poll, 2013)
99 percent think it’s wrong for employees to steal expensive equipment from their workplace. (NBC News Poll, 1995)
95 percent think it’s wrong to pay someone to do a term paper for you. (NBC News Poll, 1995)
98 percent would like to see a decline in hunger in the world. (Harris Survey, 1983)
97 percent would like to see a decline in terrorism and violence. (Harris Survey, 1983)
98% would like to see an end to high unemployment. (Harris Survey, 1982)
95 percent would like to see an end to all wars. (Harris Survey, 1981)
95 percent would like to see a decline in prejudice. (Harris Survey, 1977)
95 percent don’t believe Magic 8 Balls can predict the future. (Shell Poll, 1998)
96 percent think the Olympics are a great sports competition. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution Poll, 1996)
> If there are no correct or incorrect policies then there is no need to vote.
If there were correct or incorrect policies, there wouldn't be any need to vote. If politics was a science or a math, we wouldn't need to vote. We be able to test or prove the correct answer. The reason we vote is precisely because there is no correct answer in politics.
There is a why science and math doesn't work by consensus or a vote.
>If politics was a science or a math, we wouldn't need to vote.
There are all kinds of questions with best practices, right and wrong answers. There are better and worse ways to aggregate agricultural statistics, for instance. And we don't think of that in terms of a left and right, it's just something that's administered by a department. And no one thinks that that's because of single-minded ideological extremism that only permits one view, or that the approach needs to be replaced with a polarized one stretched between two competing ideologies in order to represent healthy discourse.
There are a range of views where there are right answers, things are polarized that shouldn't be-- climate change for instance, where the debate has been hurt by moderates insisting on a need to treat all sides as equally legitimate. And moderates have absolutely no underlying theory about what makes those examples different. Those examples entirely defeat the concept of moderation as an overarching political principle.
That's the real problem with moderation- it's expressed as an aspirational principle that's independent of any on the ground engagement with arguments or facts. It's not something that is arrived at on a case by case basis from examination of facts, which to my mind would be the valid reason for arriving at moderation, or any political belief. If someone said we should replace all agricultural data with randomly generated numbers, that could polarize agricultural statistics, and then moderates would enter that debate chiding both sides as extremes that need to listen to each other.
> There are all kinds of questions with best practices, right and wrong answers.
Best practices doesn't mean right or wrong answers. Also, most of the questions in politics is about values and perspective and biases and self interest. These don't have any right or wrong answers.
> There are better and worse ways to aggregate agricultural statistics, for instance. And we don't think of that in terms of a left and right
What does agricultural statistics have anything to do with voting? Besides agricultural statistics, like all statistics, can be skewed, manipulated and cherrypicked when it comes to politics. And the same statistic can be viewed differently by different people.
> There are a range of views where there are right answers, things are polarized that shouldn't be-- climate change for instance
This has to be the most naive point any could make. And the only people who believe like you do in black or white are the "single-minded ideological" extremists that you probably rail on about. Ignoring the fact that climate science is in its infant stage and we have yet to find a single acceptable model of climate modeling and we are constantly being told that previous climate predictions were too optimistic or pessimistic every other day. Ignoing all that, lets assume climate science is a mature and trustable science. So what is the solution for climate change? Should we just kill off 7 billion people? Should we shut down the internet? So we end global trade?
> where the debate has been hurt by moderates insisting on a need to treat all sides as equally legitimate.
No. The debate has been hurt by ideological extremists like yourself who have a messianic belief that they will save humanity. Unfortunately for people like you, there are actual grown ups who don't listen to 16 year teen girls for scientific and geopolitical information.
> That's the real problem with moderation
The real problem of moderation and looking at all sides and facts is that it prevents extremist ideologues from taking control.
It's strange how climate change extremists ( on both sides ) always bring something that has nothing to do with climate science into the discussion. "There is a why science and math doesn't work by consensus or a vote.". What does that have to do with your comment?
Eh this essay is a bit off to me. The issue with modern US politics, or our politics in general I guess, is the tendency for two groups to emerge, one of which everyone generally has to belong to somehow.
Most people are pretty rational about most issues when you discuss them individually, but you end up with a few ''foundational''-- and unquestionable --ideas that people have to fall exactly on one side or the other. I won't name any specifically but I think everyone knows some of these immediately. So you have individually rational persons who have to congregate on either one side or the other, and these issues end up being the deciding factor of which group you must join, dividing many people who otherwise agree on a lot of stuff, perhaps without even realizing it..
It's pretty similar to religious fracturing to me now that I think about it. Groups who agree on everything except one or two ideas and that makes all the difference.
Very rare are the persons who fall heavily to one side of everything.
> First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
This is the problem with the "intentional" moderates: their position isn't a coherent one, it's instead pure unwillingness to engage. I understand people being conflict-averse, but it can lead to being backed into a corner by the people who are not afraid of conflict.
It may be an unpopular view, but I disliked this quote ever since I saw it. There is value in order. In particular, there is value in order over justice, when justice is pursued with scorched earth tactics that risk leaving everyone worse off, even those that were meant to be helped.
To use a perhaps extreme example: there's lots of injustice happening right now in China, and not a lot can be done directly to fix it. Are the people seeking justice willing to risk a nuclear war with China just to force changes? Would that help anything?
I worry about this, because I see that quote (along with an abuse of Popper's paradox of tolerance) thrown around a lot these days, by people who I don't at all trust to be of good will. The times we're living in are of great potential, but they're also incredibly fragile. Too much pressure, too much disruption, and the civilization may break down - which means not just rolling back a good thousand years of progress, but also leaving the next hundred or thousand generations stuck in these conditions on a thoroughly broken planet. You can't just reboot a technological civilization. Which makes me think that there is a solid argument to be made for minding the order, and not jumping to extreme action in pursuit of justice.
EDIT: I suppose this may be the "accidental moderate's" answer to the complaint about "intentional moderates". It's not about unwillingness to commit, or being extremely conflict-averse, or trying to appeal to all sides of the issue. It's about refusing to engage in actions - or call to actions - that lead to too much of collateral damage.
> To use a perhaps extreme example: there's lots of injustice happening right now in China, and not a lot can be done directly to fix it.
Well, that's fundamentally the tradeoff that China (and quite a lot of the other Asian states e.g. Singapore) have made; their ruling class picked stability over freedom, and hoped that the economic growth would keep everyone happy while at the same time preventing organisation outside the party.
I agree that needlessly destabilising situations is bad, but also that very large injustices can persist in the name of stability. It's not a simple problem.
Yes, and I'm not totally comfortable with their trade-offs. I feel they're on the side of "too much order, too little justice". So this already establishes a ceiling along some dimensions.
> I agree that needlessly destabilising situations is bad, but also that very large injustices can persist in the name of stability. It's not a simple problem.
My point exactly. And I bring this up because I see the MLK quote you pasted, along with Popper, used to rally people to actions seemingly promoting justice, but in practice just turning people against one another, and overall making things worse. I don't like seeing either of the quotes being used as a glorified "if you're not with us, you're against us" line by people extreme in their views.
You seem to have missed his point, though, that calls for moderation and tolerance from an oppressing party are often just a means to defend an unjust status quo, and by extension, unjust power. I'm sure there are plenty of Chinese who wish Uighurs and Hong Kong protestors would just calm down and understand that civil order is more important than "justice." But doing so will never work out well for those aggrieved parties.
To use another example more directly relevant to MLK, if African Americans had to wait until it was convenient and comfortable for the white establishment to tolerate and accept them as equals, and the civil rights movement only ever worked within the bounds of the law, they would still be picking cotton. Maintaining order for its own sake without regard for the justness of the society being defended is tantamount to fascism.
I get that point very much ($deity knows I had it explained to me a lot in other discussions). You present very good examples.
But the point I can't ever seem to get across is this - action is meaningfully different than inaction, regardless of what is the status quo. It's the action part that's risky. Action has a price, and it's worth considering how high it is in a given case, before jumping to keyboards or bayonets.
> I'm sure there are plenty of Chinese who wish Uighurs and Hong Kong protestors would just calm down and understand that civil order is more important than "justice."
I think there's also plenty of Chinese who wish their own government backed down and let Hong Kong go its own way. And as a westerner, while my heart is with Hong Kong on this one, every time someone proposes that maybe the US should get involved I start wishing either of the sides involved just gave up, because quite frankly, none of this is worth the price of a nuclear war.
> To use another example more directly relevant to MLK (...) [if] the civil rights movement only ever worked within the bounds of the law
By "order", I don't mean "the law" (and I don't think MLK meant it either). In the MLK era, the Civil Rights Movement achieved their goals without plunging the country into a civil war. They've treaded the line between justice and order well.
The point I'm trying to get across is that there are situations that are less like civil rights movement, and more like asking US to threaten China with nukes to get them to back off on HK. That the potential collateral damage may outweigh the gains. That doesn't mean abandoning pursuit of justice - only being mindful of the importance of preserving some order when deciding what to.
Because, once the dust settles and the justice has been won, it would sure be nice if there were people left to enjoy that justice.
>It's the action part that's risky. Action has a price, and it's worth considering how high it is in a given case, before jumping to keyboards or bayonets.
I agree completely. I don't think most would disagree with this.
>The point I'm trying to get across is that there are situations that are less like civil rights movement, and more like asking US to threaten China with nukes to get them to back off on HK.
I think you're conflating your fears about a specific, and in my opinion unlikely, doomsday scenario into a general slippery slope argument against the dangers of disruptive justice. Most such movements don't even have a theoretical capacity to pose an existential threat to civilization, so in most cases, the risk is arguably worth the reward.
> I think you're conflating your fears about a specific, and in my opinion unlikely, doomsday scenario into a general slippery slope argument against the dangers of disruptive justice.
Yes, I kept repeating the one example I used, but I worry about all issues that could plausibly lead to a civilization-ending war. Of which there are many, including all kinds of problems created by worsening state of the planet's climate. But I also worry about things that could lead to local wars (including civil wars), and history says that regular politics, even identity politics, can find a way to turn into bloodshed.
There is already bloodshed, but right now it just happens to not be yours.
The point of MLK’s quote, in my opinion, is that moderates can always find reasons to maintain status quo especially when the issues at hand are not deemed personally impactful. People are being harmed, but because they are not me or look like me it’s not worth risking potential upset.
> There is already bloodshed, but right now it just happens to not be yours.
No, there isn't. At least not in the examples mentioned.
What you mention is one point of MLK's quote, but my point is different: not everyone who doesn't want to join the fight against status quo is such moderate without a personal stake in the outcome. Some are people who very much care, and have a stake, but decline involvement because they see the proposed means to involve too much collateral damage; the cure to be worse than the poison.
There is no ambiguity about who MLK was talking about so it’s not a direct analogy. Until we talk about specific actions and potential consequences this discussion is so vague as to be meaningless.
Many of the current fights for social justice in the US face the same indifference as the last century’s civil rights movement. People who stand to lose nothing simply can’t be bothered.
People are being harmed. There are people (let's be charitable and assume that the set does not include TeMPOral) who want to do nothing, because they aren't among the people being harmed.
Then there's a second set of people (let's be charitable and assume that the second set does include TeMPOral) who see the harm, and care about the harm, but are unsure how far to go toward fixing it, because the wrong action (or too much of the right action) can do more harm than good, even to the people you are trying to help.
And then you have the problem that the first set of people are trying to sound very much like the second set of people (and maybe even to convince themselves that they are the second set of people).
Rhetorically, it seems like the reason MLK discussed white moderates was because he knew they would be the first white people to warmly accept black civil rights, put justice above order, fight for tense peace, and accept an accelerated timeline for freedom.
The same principle is why you can say "I expected more from you" to friend or family member and that simple comment spurs an improvement in behavior. They actually care, a little bit at least. We don't eloquently express our lofty expectations when it comes to our enemies. Only our friends, allies, and teammates.
Right and left are arbitrary constructs necessitated by a first past the post voting system. Change the electoral system and you will see much more diverse and meaningful party affiliation.
>The effect of a system based on plurality voting is that the larger parties, and parties with more geographically concentrated support, gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties with more evenly distributed support are left with a disproportionately small share.
Yes, many election systems result in more parties than FPTP. But left and right still have salience within those.
In fact, you can look at how each politician votes (without explicitly coding votes as left or right). This itself forms a space equal to the number of votes taken. But that vote space can be projected into a much lower dimensional space that captures most of the information about the vote space. If you go so far as to collapse it into a one dimensional space, that corresponds to the traditional left/right axis, and this holds through both history and internationally. The second issue is a bit more varied, but most of the time the left/right axis dominates whatever that second dimension is. Look up DW-NOMINATE for more info.
DW-NOMINATE was developed by US political scientists to study the US House and Senate. Higher dimensionality is present internationally, and I believe that attempting to reduce those dynamics to a left/right spectrum limits our understanding of politics.
>Poole and Rosenthal note in Chapter 11 of Ideology and Congress that most of these analyses produce the finding that roll call voting is organized by only few dimensions (usually two): "These findings suggest that the need to form parliamentary majorities limits dimensionality."
I think this 2D representation is definitely better. The two axes are Social (Authoritarian -> Libertarian) and Economic (Left -> Right)
https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
This can also be predicted in terms of realpolitik. If the power of nations tends to consolidate along predictable lines, then the political question at any moment is reduced to a left-right "rate of reform" along each axis, with the furthest right positions being near-zero rates of change, but all viable positions serving the purpose of ensuring power for the stakeholders. This makes the right tend to automatically converge onto a mythologized moment in the past where their power is greatest - rights of kings, supremacy myths, and so on, while the left goes in a spectrum of directions but must ultimately form a singular coalition in order to gain power. Thus the prevailing tendency of left-right politics is also one of leaps forward from the left and gradual slides back from the right as the coalition breaks down. The new consensus is different from the old, but it's also typically not the most ideologically left one, since it emerges to compromise with the present realities, and the more radical you go, the more it resembles blood-in-the-streets revolution, which is a huge roll of the dice.
The developed world as a whole seems to be approaching one of those "great leap" moments today as more and more issues have fallen into partisan extremism, motivating the search for a new consensus.
Sure there may still be a right left axis, but it wouldn't be condensed into the "main" axis, and people and candidates would form a nice bell curve rather than one with two humps.
In the absence of first past the post voting (and its tendency to force people into parties to avoid losing to people who do [1], and for those parties to coalesce into two dominant, equally balance parties), there is still a polarity of, say, liberal and conservative. At least in the original meanings of the terms, which has to do with whether you go toward new things or prefer traditions.
But under FPTP, right vs left encompasses a lot more than that.
And more importantly, FPTP doesn't allow for middle ground. If you are in the middle, you can't get elected, because neither party would nominate you.
If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different. Yes there would be people on the extremes, but most people -- those elected, as well as regular citizens -- would tend be "accidental moderates."
And more importantly, FPTP doesn't allow for middle ground. If you are in the middle, you can't get elected, because neither party would nominate you.
I'm not sure that's true, at least in the UK, when one of the established two parties moves to the centre ground they tend to win. Moving away from the centre ground is how they lose.
The typical pattern is starting at the edge during the primary then shifting to the center during the general. Making it back to the center is indeed a good path toward success, but makes commitments during the primary much less credible and give the impression that the candidate is just saying what will get them elected. Overall this is terrible for voter trust in elected officials.
> [FPTP voting causes] those parties to coalesce into two dominant, equally balance parties
California has FPTP voting and is completely dominated by Democrats who have a super majority in the legislature and the Governorship, and can pass any legislation they want without a single Republican vote or amendment. That's been the case (with a brief stint by Arnold) for multiple decades.
Tell me again how FPTP voting necessarily results in two equally balanced parties? I'm not seeing it.
> Interestingly, this is strong evidence that Califorinia Democrats have no desire to implement universal health care
Universal healthcare can't work on a state level because of the free rider problem: people from red states could go to California for free healthcare anytime, while never paying taxes into the system. Californians would end up paying for healthcare for the entire US, which is unsustainable.
It works in Canada because Canada doesn't let sick Americans immigrate. But as a US state, California has no power to keep out sick red staters.
> California has no power to keep out sick red staters
How does Massachusetts manage it then? They don't have the power to keep out those "sick red staters", and yet the entire state has healthcare (by law).
Sounds like special-pleading to me. If a wealthy Blue state like Massachusetts can do it, then California can do it. I expect more from my representatives, not "sick Republicans in other states are stopping us!"
How do you think Massachusetts healthcare laws differ from California? They both have Obamacare which most people would say is not the same as universal healthcare.
Massachusetts has the lowest rates of uninsured residents in the United States at 2.8% [0]
California is 2.6x higher at 7.8% [1], is not improving, and is a much bigger state numerically, so we're talking about ~3 million uninsured people. Prior to Obamacare, California was at a dismal 16%. And note: CA had Dem supermajority rule for years prior to Obamacare's implementation, and can easily pass the healthcare legislation it's constituents want and deserve. They, unlike Massachusetts, have chosen not to.
Massachusetts has less uninsured because they go beyond the bare minimum provided by Obamacare. California Democrats can, and should, do more.
How specifically do the Massachusetts laws differ?
Remember Massachusetts' median income is around 30% higher than California, so it's possible even with identical governance the state with higher median income would have better outcomes.
> California has FPTP voting and is completely dominated by Democrats
That's a fairly recent phenomenon (California was a Republican stronghold in Presodential elections until 1992, and longer for state executive elections.) And the tendency toward balance that is asserted for FPTP is national; subordinate jurisdictions aren't expected to follow it even by people who adhere to the theory.
> who have a super majority in the legislature and the Governorship, and can pass any legislation they want without a single Republican vote or amendment. That's been the case (with a brief stint by Arnold) for multiple decades.
No, it hasn't; Democrats have only had supermajorities since 2012, and Gray Davis (1999-2003) was the only Democratic governor between Jerry Brown (term ended in 1983) and Jerry Brown (term starting in 2011.)
> And more importantly, FPTP doesn't allow for middle ground. If you are in the middle, you can't get elected, because neither party would nominate you.
Median voter theorem claims a mathematical proof of the opposite, that FPTP has both camps having a dominant strategy of appeal to the median voter. Both your assertion and median voter theorem fail in practice; the latter because it ignores issues of salience, distribution of views (unimodal vs. multimodal), turnout and mobilization effects, etc., and yours because, well, it ignores much of the same things, but assumes different generalities about them consistently hold.
> If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different.
Actually, the vast majority of US voters, even those that self-identity as independents, are highly partisan — the median voter is probably a reasonably strong partisan of whatever party has the current turnout advantage, which is essentially what FPTP elects.
Right and left are arbitrary constructs necessitated by a first past the post voting system. Change the electoral system and you will see much more diverse and meaningful party affiliation.
Diverse, yes. Meaningful, maybe. Look at Israel right now. 17 parties with seats in the Knesset, none with over 30%, and, after two elections, still no agreement on Prime Minister. Third election coming up.
> after two elections, still no agreement on Prime Minister. Third election coming up.
Parlamentary systems without the option to call re-elections is an attractive alternative. The politicians just can't keep asking people's opinion until they get the answer they want.
Then there will have to be compromises, and even the smaller parties can get some of their important causes through.
Smaller parties have gotten plenty in Israel, sometimes to the point that supporters of the larger parties feel they have less voice than whichever small party holds the balance of power at that moment.
Or, as in the current situation, there is simply no agreement, and they go months without a government. It's not clear that an inability to call re-elections would improve Israel's situation; they could be stuck for years with no government.
The situation in Israel only exists because there are multiple layers of opposition at play, the "moderates" are hardly different politically than the conservatives, they just dislike it's leader, where they are unwilling to form a coalition with any of the arab parties in order to form a government.
I agree that parliamentary systems make it difficult to form a government, but I disagree that those 30 parties are less meaningful than major parties in the US or UK. Each one represents a unique community within Israel, reflecting the diversity and disunity of the nation itself.
Also I would argue Netanyahu failing to form a government two times is a good sign for Israel. That man is divisive and harmful.
But not as tightly coupled as in FPTP systems. There's a greater variety of platforms under proportional representation. European countries have Christian democratic parties, which are mildly socially conservative coupled with mildly economically liberal. They have Liberal parties that actually win seats, which would be roughly equivalent to being mildly libertarian in an American sense. They have far right nativist populist parties that are xenophobic yet are pro-social safety net. They have more single issue groups like animal rights parties, and stronger green parties. They also have populist movements that attempt to appeal to the politically apathetic by being post-partisan, such as the 5 Star Movement in Italy.
Overall their adherence to the left-right dichotomy is less rigid than in the U.S.
It never occurred to me that people would tailor their political views to try and be "moderate". The whole idea feels kind of dirty to me, your political views should be your honest opinion.
I don’t know that I’d call myself a moderate, but my honest opinion is that many strongly held views disturb me precisely because they tend to be so strongly held by those who seem to hold them, rather than being wrong in themselves, or because they require their adherents to brook no opposition. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I believe that people who say they have all the answers can safely be assumed to be wrong about a great many things, and strong political ideologies are, in essence, claims to have all the answers.
I’m open to a lot of ideas, and I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with policies that are way outside the Overton window, but I think what feels dirty to me is holding political opinions so strongly that it makes our fellow humans the bad guys.
Not OP, but as a thought experiment, I tried to think of some things that are un-discussable because of one side or the other.
Maybe universal healthcare, completely gov't paid? That's socialism to the right -- can't try that.
On the other side, maybe ending hate crime legislation? Or striking down Roe v. Wade, and letting each state be their own experimental ground? Ending minimum wage?
A party of the right nationalising a business, considering it, talking openly about it. It was the UK Conservative party who nationalised Rolls Royce, almost immediately sold off cars, and kept Aero Engines a while. Otherwise they'd no longer exist as the RB211 engine had broken them.
Larger government. State ownership does not guarantee incompetent or inefficient. The right used to believe in many of the things that have become unthinkable. The Tories also wanted to improve services, built social housing, added libraries and social care. Pre war UK used to permit the various cities around the UK to form municipal corporations. They were used for power generation, water, rail and tramways among other things, and mostly worked very well indeed -- with the city getting service and income, but being quite hands off from the modern perception of centralised control. See also the various towns and cities that have put in their own broadband, far better than the private sector offer, in more recent years...
Clean Air Act UK was brought in by the Conservatives in 1956. The right used to be much more amenable to environmental and health regulation. Well regulation in general. Now they avoid, neuter and talk down regulation, and slim down the bodies who once oversaw said regulation.
Specific, I think, to the UK, the astonishing degree of centralisation brought in since 1974. Nearly all of it under the Tories. Yet Labour is perceived as the party of state control. Neither party talks of giving real power back to the regions and cities, they both mostly talk against it.
There's other examples on the left, and probably similar examples the other side of the Atlantic.
People tailor their political views to fit the groups preferences on either the right or left, so why not in the middle? It's a matter of wanting to please people and fit in, either within their political tribe or, for "intentional moderates", it's a matter of wanting to fit in everywhere, which is pretty futile unless you say different things to different people.
I can imagine earnest reasons for being intentionally moderate. Wanting to be a mediator, trying to fight back against extremism and partisanship from both sides.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadI think another way to slice this is, if you think of the Overton window shifting along the axis of time, the “accidental moderate” does not shift their opinion by the same factor as the ends of the window shift. The “accidental moderate”, in fact, shifts their opinion independent of the shifts of the window.
I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.”
Additionally, by even defining two types of moderate, there is a sense that the word “moderate” means something already. I don’t know, I feel like there could be a better word, maybe if you think of it as a graph there’s a graph-related term, but it’s not coming to mind!
You can see this with the Republicans who turned into Democrats once the Republicans shifted far enough right that there were no more Rockefeller Republicans and Bill Clinton ran as a Democrat. If you're an accidental moderate, you run the risk of involuntarily changing party affiliation.
> I just don’t know 100% if I’d use the term moderate as the it’s not necessarily true that all views will equally weight a view left of center with a view right of center (or vice-versa), and moderate could be perceived as synonymous with “average.”
"Moderate" means "restrained" or "mild" as opposed to "extreme" or "severe" and has nothing to do with splitting the difference between whatever you think the extremes are. As a side note, a lot of people seem to not really know where the extremes actually are, and falsely attribute ideas to people. Deliberately splitting the difference is a tactic, something done to avoid seriously offending any part of the audience in order to keep viewership and readership numbers high. It also does horrible things to the facts when one side is right and one side is wrong and the news feels the need to pretend everyone has an equal claim to being correct.
I think this is interesting because it's been exactly the opposite for me and many of the people I know. At some point over the past ten or fifteen years, the Democrats switched their focus to the point that we've unintentionally found ourselves being Republican now. I.e. the midwest Trump vote.
In a strong field this might be the weakest political take I've read in the last month.
In fact, if anything positive can be said about the shift towards favoring globalizing crony capitalism, is that it happens to be somewhat less divisive than the old-fashioned Marxist alternative that Corbyn favors. As strange as it may seem, this was very much a shift towards intentional moderation.
OTOH, there's evidence that that faction of the party is losing dominance to one focussed on working class interests again.
Are these actually in conflict? Are they also not part of the working class? What sort of policies do you think should have been enacted against this?
And even if you can do it all, there's only so much attention the voters have. If all they hear about you is on trans rights, they don't perceive you doing anything about their economic problems.
The Democrats' central message used to be "we care about the working people". Now their central message is "we care about illegal immigrants, minorities, and trans people". If your biggest problem is that you have no money because you have no job, that doesn't resonate.
More: As the Democrats become dominated by the coastal elites, the party has too many people leading it who don't even know about the working-class problems in the middle of the country.
Could you explain that in terms of the policy that they adopted or is it a response to Dems adopting minority rights issues?
What I mean to say is that if they are both bad in the same way on working class issues, what is it about minority rights that would make you vote R?
Genuinely trying to understand here...not trolling.
I don't know that the Republican actually got closer to working-class issues. In the last election, though, they at least got to the point of talking about such issues, in the same election that the Democrats didn't bother to do so.
So if I were a working-class minority person, whose major pain point was economics, in the last election I still might vote Republican, because they at least were talking about the thing I cared most about, even if the Democrats were talking about my secondary issue.
All of these are typical leftist talking points, Democrats just left those votes on the table and R just swooped in and took them.
This is a bizarre statement since most trans people I know are either working class, precariat, or working poor. The trans rights they want beyond extremely basic anti-discrimination protection are things like easier access to university and universal health care. These are things that benefit all workers, not just trans people. (Three of the Google employees fired for union organizing were trans! Don't try to feed me some line that there's some conflict between trans rights and workers' rights. The claim is just some shit-stirring by capital for its own ends.)
It is also a bizarre statement given the indifference or even slight hostility to trans rights by DNC frontrunners (Biden, and previously Clinton). The DNC doesn't care about trans people, and trans people know it. To the extent they support the party, they do so uneasily, outside the DNC, and for largely economic reasons.
Can you give anything close to a concrete example of this?
Even ignoring the indivisibility of the economic and social spheres (ask a black person if the CRA was an "economic issue" - ask a trans person if whether they can safely pee at work is an "economic issue"), and that it's not a zero-sum game (for example, the heightened scrutiny required by transphobia tends to cost more resources), I can't imagine there's enough meaningful work to "saturate" 100% of some candidate's time with economic issues. And as mentioned, the people who are furthest left and most vocal on economic issues are often the people furthest left and most vocal on civil rights. Conversely, people who spend a lot of time talking about how social issues should not be such a big deal (Peter Thiel, for instance - Paul Graham also, albeit with a much smaller platform) are the same who lean right economically.
How many examples do you need to see this is a false dichotomy? How many examples did you see to convince yourself it was a dichotomy at all?
> I can totally understand why working class people in the heartland who have never met any LGBT person, let alone someone trans or someone non-binary
I am not sure you know what those words mean ("any ... T person, let alone someone trans" is nonsense), but also, we're talking about people who live in Nebraska or Ohio, not hermits. We are long past any plausibly deniability to not even know a gay person - if you don't know any, it's because you're actively trying to avoid them.
Sure, although I feel like your response is largely due to an uncharitable reading of my post. Whether someone can use a specific bathroom has an impact on a tiny percentage of the US population; pretty much only trans or non-binary people. Sure it's still economic in some contexts and it was incorrect for me to insinuate that it was totally social, but it is not economic or social policy that affects the vast majority of the population. Tax policy, immigration, trade policy, regulation, worker education, general schooling, government grants and investment, etc matter to far more people. Time spent on niche issues is going to appeal to fewer people by definition, and I could see people getting angry that legislative time is being spent in this manner while broader economic issues appealing to more people remain unsolved. Personally I feel that supporting those communities is morally important, but I understand why other people believe it takes a lower priority relative to economic issues affecting them personally.
> I can't imagine there's enough meaningful work to "saturate" 100% of some candidate's time with economic issue
People are clearly signaling through their voting that grossly insufficient time is being spent on economic issues. Key problems remain unsolved.
> I am not sure you know what those words mean ("any ... T person, let alone someone trans" is nonsense)
That statement implies I am referring to lesbian, gay, or bi people. I don't see what is unclear about that based on my wording. The concept of being trans is more of a logical leap for a straight person than the concept of being bi, gay, or lesbian for pretty obvious reasons. I don't think this requires further explanation.
> We are long past any plausibly deniability to not even know a gay person
You have very clearly not been to large swaths of the United States. Many, many, many people have never met an openly LGBT person. Even more are not friends with one in a close enough manner to have the types of honest, informative discussions to cut through popular misconceptions.
> if you don't know any, it's because you're actively trying to avoid them.
Yes, a large number of people intentionally self segregate into communities where other people are like them. They still get to vote.
> Sure, [a bunch of broad non-specific examples]
OK.
> You have very clearly not been to large swaths of the United States.
Grew up in WI, close family / friends in MI, MN, NE, IA, and IL, dated a boy from TN and a girl from WV, but sure, tell me how there's no gays in the midwest.
> Grew up in WI, close family / friends in MI, MN, NE, IA, and IL, dated a boy from TN and a girl from WV, but sure, tell me how there's no gays in the midwest.
Last I checked there were more than 8 states in the United States. Further, your response doesn't invalidate what I said in any way. You are an n of 1 and we are talking about tens of millions of people in there states. Just because you met a LGBT from a state doesn't mean that everyone else from that state met them or any other LGBT. Please point out where I said there were no gays in the Midwest.
So because the republicans passed a law positively discriminating against trans people (and doing a bunch of other weird shit - this was not a well-planned bill), and people are sick of the social issues, they... voted republican?
Not to mention the economic fallout of HB2 was brutal - despite its short life it cost the state thousands of jobs and millions of dollars.
Again we see things aren't really in tension - the democratic position was less political work, greater economic benefit, and justice. The "political reality" is that republicans started a fight by stripping rights, then got to play a fake victim.
> it resulted in national media attention and subsequent legislative attention in many states.
That attention was primarily passing more transphobic legislation. What were we supposed to do? "Well, I guess you can keep taking our rights away one by one, because the economic issues are more important!"
There's no more productive conversation to be had concerning your views on sexuality in some mysterious, isolationist states. They're simply unmoored from reality.
Clinton was elected on explicit Third Way positions nearly 30 years ago. If you think something changed in the past 10-15, you're falling for GOP propaganda. What you're noticing is the democrats finding a new base a decade after losing their working class supporters, through a combination of Third Way politics, the Republican Southern Strategy. The GOP saw this coming and stoked / capitulated to increasing racist elements of the party during Obama's presidency. This is the only major change in the past decade.
(Well, the democrats aren't really that smart - it's not so much they're finding a new base as they're left with the ones the new GOP ideology intentionally excludes. As a party, they are doing a terrible job mobilizing this!)
I would guess what actually happened to the older people I know is that they grew up in union jobs at factories that got sent to Mexico after NAFTA went through.
Unions lean heavy Democrat. When the union fails you, I think that leads fairly directly to losing faith in the Democratic party.
Further, the insistence by many within the party that the only reason someone would want to leave the Democratic party is that they're racists really doesn't do them any favors.
> I think Southern racism has very little to do with the Republican shift in the Midwest.
I didn't say "Southern racism", I said "Southern Strategy", which is a specific GOP maneuver to pick up white working-class voters from the 50s onwards, as they calculated it would be better to give up the black and civil-rights focused voter base they were already losing, to pick up the white working-class, primarily agricultural, voters alienated in the South. They used existing racism, but they also stoked it. It was extremely effective (to the point you can even use "Southern racism" as a shorthand and "everyone knows" what you mean). While they mostly couldn't predict a similar opportunity in more industrial labor in the north 2-3 decades later, they definitely didn't miss the chance when it arose - and again, they've used existing racism, but also heightened it in places it was previously marginal.
Things take a while to have an impact. The factory my dad worked at for 25 years didn't go to Mexico until 2007 [1]. Manufacturing in the area really didn't start moving to Mexico until the financial crisis. Whether as a result of the crisis itself or just a convenient side effect, I don't know.
> I didn't say "Southern racism", I said "Southern Strategy"
I know the Southern Strategy. My point is that people in the northern states are much less motivated by racism than you imply. You can choose to believe that or not, but I firmly believe that its true.
[1] https://globegazette.com/news/imi-cornelius-to-close-mason-c...
You think that Democrats have not moved in the past 10-15 years? You think that the idea that they have is merely Republican propaganda? I think you haven't been paying attention.
Or maybe you were paying too much attention. 15 years ago, AOC wasn't even old enough to vote. Were there Democrats in the House who held the same positions 15 years ago? Perhaps so. They didn't have the press attention that AOC gets, though. So they may have been there, but in the eyes of the public they weren't "the position" of the Democrats. Instead, they were fringe.
Now AOC gets as much press coverage as Nancy Pelosi (maybe more, before impeachment). To the average person, AOC and people like her now represent the Democratic Party. That's a massive shift, at least in perceptions, if not in actual position.
And I think the actual position has shifted, too. There are considerably more of the farther-left people like AOC, both in congress and running for president. The median Democratic officeholder position has shifted left. (Or so I strongly suspect. I assert it without statistical evidence.)
It's unfair to say that that's all Republicans. But it's some of them, and it fits the one that collects all the press at the moment...
I agree we've seen a shift in the democratic party - not yet in its leadership - in the past 2-4 years (beginning with Sanders, its first major electoral effects in the 2018 midterms). What does that have to do with what happened 10-15 years ago?
What did happen 10-15 years ago is Obama's election. Obama's politics do not place him in the left of the democratic party, and in some areas he's firmly in the right part.
So what's the objection to what happened 10-15 years ago, but not 30 years ago? To put it more bluntly - What's the biggest difference between Obama and Bill Clinton? One hint: it's not any political policy.
And why, if the objection is supposed to be about support for the working class, is what's happening in the past 2-4 not good? The return to labor rights as a central plank of the party should be drawing people back if that's the reason they left, but apparently it's not.
And I'd say the change has happened at least somewhat in the Democratic leadership - in many of the presidential candidates, even if not in the House and Senate leadership.
And I'd argue that this change was going on before, but you didn't see it, because of Obama. He, in one person, was the face of the Democratic party, and that hid what was going on underneath. As you say, Obama was not on the left, and because he was the public symbol of the party, it was easy to not see the left growing.
Was Obama to the left of Clinton? I could accept "no" as the answer. But was the median Democratic politician during Obama to the left of the median Democratic politician during Clinton? To me, it appears that the answer is "yes".
I don't think that abandoning the working class is something that just happened in the last 2-4 years. I could even argue that it happened under Clinton, but he had the political savvy to hide it. It was probably there, and growing, under Obama. It became glaringly apparent under Hillary, when she had no interest in even talking about the working class, and Trump did. That's what changed in the last 2-4 (let's call it 3) years - Trump stole what the Democrats thought was "their" issue, so solidly "theirs" that it didn't even need to be mentioned.
To me, this is the incoherent view. Of course the voter base has changing opinions. It's completely to be expected that over the course of decades political alliances will shift.
The entire point of what I said is that the political opinions of the Democratic party moved in a direction that did not match that of my general demographic. Now that opinions have shifted, we find that our interests are better served by Republican talking points than by Democratic ones. So we vote red.
People like to bemoan the fact that America has a two party system, while many other places have a parliamentary system with many parties. The fact is America just handles its coalition building at an earlier step. There is no single "prototypical" Republican or Democrat. There are many factions throughout the country that weigh the political winds and throw their weight behind the group they see as most likely to benefit their own particular concerns.
None of this should be nearly so divisive a topic as it clearly is. The post I replied to noted that there were a bunch of "Rockefeller Republicans" who shifted and become Democrats.
I replied that a similar thing had happened around me, only in the opposite direction. Blue collar Democrats from the 70s-00s, found that after the financial crisis, the political winds pointed them to the Republican party.
I agree that the Democratic platform has moved, but it moved rightwards. The Republican platform has also moved (considerably more) rightwards. If your political positions were once aligned with the Democrats but are now better aligned with Republicans, your personal opinions have necessarily moved dramatically rightwards, and your new alignment has nothing to do with the shift of the parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Broder
http://pressthink.org/2010/06/clowns-to-the-left-of-me-joker...
The above has this quote, which sums it up nicely:
> Journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to… Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
In any case, I guess it all comes down to this:
“A good compromise is when both parties are dissatisfied”
-Larry David
I can think of one possibly valid reason to do that: When you first begin to accept the foundational beliefs of some ideological group, you initially haven't had time to think through the logical implications of those beliefs. Tentatively adopting that group's set of secondary beliefs could make sense while until you have time to think things through yourself.
It's not true. An ideologue has committed to a single idea or system of ideas.
Acquiring in bulk and picking and choosing is the antithesis of an ideologue.
what's left unsaid, but i find more thought-provoking, is the notion that, as with the fringe ideologues, you can safely ignore the "intentional moderate" since they don't add to the conversation (because they don't think deeply about politics).
intellectual independence seems integral to why his "most impressive people" are impressive in the first place--they delve deeper into questions/challenges to form their opinions rather than adopting them wholesale from others.
Thinking out loud, I think this piece misses that aspect of team-seeking behavior. I know people who will recognise a good point against their side but will strive to ignore it because it works against their sense of loyalty to the team. I increasingly believe there are relatively few people who don't want/need that sense of identity.
[edit: the article doesn't really talk about sense of belonging, which I think is inherent in a lot of this discussion]
Left and right could be thought of as differing in whose behavior they think needs to change, to improve the world: the wealthy and connected, or the poor and disconnected. The more hardline you are, the more you think that that behavior doesn't just need to change, but is reprehensible and deserving of exclusion from consideration.
So you can be an 'ethical moderate' without necessarily holding centrist opinions. It may be that this means it should be named something else, but I think it's a useful way of thinking.
The small child at the top with the horn and red jacket is framed as Good, despite embarking on an illegal foxhunt at the end of which a fox will be killed with dogs. The "lawyer killing a fox with a baseball bat after it attacked his chickens" story immediately below is framed as Bad.
As the tweet says, you have to know the team loyalties for this framing to make any sense.
(The Telegraph is of course not any kind of moderate)
The point about extremists getting their opinions in bulk is a solid one. I'm not so sure intentional moderates is a well-defined category. It's what most "balanced" media strive for, but it's more like rubber banding in a video game race - the media have incentives to ensure an exciting, tight race, it improves their viewership, so they try to find the dead centre.
I think what PG calls intentional moderates are simply not that interested. Also, I think accidental moderates can end up fairly extreme in the end, because tribalism is ultimately a very strong draw and critical thinking is tiring.
Somewhere in there maybe is a different idea about 'tolerance'. The first might have a 'Live and let live'-position. The other actually believes plurality of lifestyles is a good thing. Somewhere along those lines ;)
http://www.thirteenvirtues.com/ https://www.quotes.net/mquote/770097
We’ve been short of billionaires willing to share their opinions about why we should consider the incredible increase in concentrated wealth and the resurgence of monopoly business practices as “moderate” while the idea that maybe we should, you know, consider doing something to stop that, as “extreme” and “far left”.
There’s a couple tells in the article. But here’s a pretty clear one:
> Nearly all the most impressive people I know are accidental moderates
You can just map “impressive” to “rich” and “accidental moderate” to “uninterested in increased taxation or regulation in their own life despite their otherwise disparate political views” and the whole thing comes into focus pretty clearly.
> You can just map “impressive” to “rich” and “accidental moderate” to “uninterested in increased taxation or regulation in their own life despite their otherwise disparate political views” and the whole thing comes into focus pretty clearly.
I say that, in part, because substituting those meanings changes the perceived message of the piece. If the rest of the essay reasonably supported that reading, I might well agree that this was interpretation, analysis, or even clarification. However, it seems as though the original comment is working backward from pg's identity to decide what opinions it's possible for him to have, in the commenter's view, and then covering the message of the essay (whatever you think of it) with one of the commenter's pg-possible opinions.
Personally, I'd prefer that commenters of this view argue against the essay directly, since I think there are a lot of things to say in that regard.
What changes about the definition of "impressive" if I think someone uses that word to refer exclusively to rich people?
Since neither one of us can read the author's mind, it's not a productive avenue of discussion. A text should always be taken at face value. Otherwise, we'll be no longer discussing the text, but each other's imagination.
Ok so for redefinition to happen, a definition needs to change.
> it's you who believes the author didn't use the correct word, based on reasons that have nothing to do with the article.
>
> Since neither one of us can read the author's mind, it's not a productive avenue of discussion. A text should always be taken at face value. Otherwise, we'll be no longer discussing the text, but each other's imagination.
I'm confused now because you seem to be saying I think the author didn't use the correct word - but I never said that in my text, so you haven't taken my text at face value.
There’s no reason to point out that your relative who says everyone in his life is conspiring against him is addicted to meth.
There is no reason to notice when an essay opposing increased mall security was written by someone who’s been convicted of shoplifting dozens of times.
And we must never point out that a person advocating for the political status quo, and against shaking up the established order, has accumulated billions of dollars in private wealth.
That model is likely to be flawed and incomplete, but even worse, it makes the text subjective. Two people, reading the same text, won't agree what it said. That prevents honest discussion.
All models are incomplete - that's why they're models.
What I am hopefully pointing out is that he could be doing a better job of trying to understand why people who are literally living in misery and despair might be seeking more radical change. The fact that some of his decisions may have directly let to the misery of some of those people makes this conversation complicated.
It’s relevant that the greatest political problem in society right now is people hoarding vast amounts of resources, and that he’s literally doing that. Of course he doesn’t have to agree that this is in fact the greatest problem today, but he could at least note that many of the people he’s supposedly analyzing do believe this.
He’s almost certainly capable of having a more nuanced discussion that recognizes his own position and perspective, but is choosing not to do that. This isn’t an academic treatise it’s a personal essay about his own subjective impressions, and he’s leaving out the most important aspect of his own lived experience.
You might even call that omission intentional
I'd like to see how you think that PG's decisions directly lead to the misery of those living in misery and despair. In the absence of a logical flow of cause and effect, I'm going to assume that you're blowing ideological smoke.
> It’s relevant that the greatest political problem in society right now is people hoarding vast amounts of resources...
I seriously question whether that's the greatest political problem in society right now.
“No, the most important thing — more than reproducibility, an understanding of history, or political science — is to refrain from excitement, and to believe myself and those like me to be superior to those who succumb to passions. The child in Asia working 14 hour days to make shirts? They are not able to see clearly. The mother who had her children ripped from her arms at the Texas border? Moderation is the best remedy. The firefighters in Australia fighting apocalyptic infernos, uncompensated and unrespected by their Prime Minister? Why, they are just too close to the situation.”
This is the most infuriating thing I have ever read. PG suffers from never having had a gun held to his head, either literally or figuratively, and believes that this makes him more worthy of being listened to, rather than less.
The privileged always think so.
So, PG: go fuck yourself. Tell us the benefits of moderation when hospitals charge us into bankruptcy for procedures others in the world receive for tens of thousands of dollars less. Tell me how moderation helps the young black man who was murdered by a cop for no reason whatsoever. Tell me how moderation helps the pregnant mother of three who is prevented from seeking an abortion. Tell me how moderation will save humanity from the extinction level event that is climate change.
Fuck you, you capitalist piece of shit. You sit atop your economic pile, and think that gives you special insights into the sufferings and tribulations of humanity. But we see. All you are doing is propagating the system that has allowed you to maintain that perch, and calling anyone who challenges it an extremist. It is what the capitalist class has always done, and what they will always do.
There is a lot of stereotyping, and it doesn’t account for the interest axis, i.e. the fact that a lot of very smart people simply do not care for organised politics in any way, shape, or form.
More importantly, it lacks knowledge of consensus mechanics beyond Overton, which is why it struggles to get to grip with the right side of the spectrum - which is, historically speaking, the most consistently successful side, at least in the short or medium term when any new political issue arises. Dismissing that as “I don’t know” shows embarrassingly poor subject knowledge.
So uhm, this piece could have been written by a 16-year-old trying to move his brain for the first time. That it comes from a much older and experienced person, somebody who holds a number of smart positions on other topics, to me is a signal that such person has done very little effort to actually study this particular field in depth.
Maybe it’s an attempt at showing that one can be not-smart about certain topics? If that were the case, I don’t think we really need it - Twitter and Facebook remind us every hour of every day that it is indeed the case.
In 40 years, the USSR, whose economy was about the size of Brazil's in 1917, and who waged a civil war and repelled two waves of invasions (the first of which included an invasion by the USA after WWI) - this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth, to where it could repel an invasion by continental Europe, then launch the first satellite, man on space, moon probe and whatnot. For a country that Lenin considered to be in a holding action waiting for revolution in the west. I find that impressive.
The western anti-Marxists went through an array of nonsense in the 20th century - "The End of History", the idea that Keynesian or monetarist or whatever remedies would smooth out the business cycle.
Marx predicted worsening economic crises like in 2000 or 2008, with accompanying unemployment, overproduction and a falling of profits. Lenin predicted an unquenchable and self-destructive drive for imperialism.
BTW, they're even launching their own space satelites, men in space, moon probes and whatnot lately.
I'm not familiar with this event?
> this country under Stalin had enormous economic growth
Ironically this is the same argument used by capitalists and colonialists when they claim that a huge body count or deliberate famine was "worth it".
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/fact-america-actu...
So uhm, this piece could have been written by a 16-year-old trying to move his brain for the first time. That it comes from a [billionaire founder of a private equity firm with a large platform], somebody who holds a number of smart positions on other topics, to me is a signal that such person [is engaged in an intentional effort to influence public opinion].
We do have a middle of the road Liberal Democrat party, but to my mind they maintain their position in the middle ground by dodging the hard issues. They are intentional moderates in that respect and I just don’t trust them to tackle really tough issues effectively. So I’m a moderate conservative because the Conservative party is generally an effective party of government that often leans moderate for practical political reasons. Often enough that I’m ok with it, cripplingly badly thought out referendums aside.
Looking at the US political landscape there’s no question in the 80s I would have been a Reagan Republican, but gradually over the last few decades my respect for Republicanism has collapsed. It’s turned itself into a radical ideology that doesn’t even seem conservative, or concerned at all with things conservatives everywhere usually obsess over. The democrats have recently lurched left in response though, so while I found myself, to my own bemusement, generally cheering on Democratic candidates and presidents in the last few decades, now I’m worried they’re ‘doing a Corbyn’ and indulging in outlandish and fantastical economic policy positions that are always a temptation for the left. That leaves me in the wilderness in US political terms.
So I can’t support the Republicans because they are immoral jerks who are selling out democracy, undermining the rule of law and sold out on their international security position for partisan posturing long before Trump showed up. And I can’t support the Democrats any more because they are indulging in crazy leftist economic fantasies.
There is no space in the party for a Dominic Raab, Ken Clarke or Michael Heseltine, or One Nation policies -- once the bastion and bedrock of post-war conservatism, or even being in favour of a mild exit deal with the EU. Just dogmatic pursuit of blind, disproven policies for the benefit of a tiny minority such as the joke of austerity, closure and gutting of services many former Conservatives actually built and developed in former decades. For all her dogma on the Poll Tax, Thatcher could listen and understood the scientific advice, privatisation of many services that were eventually sold off were, to her, beyond the pale. She had her limits too, she did not and could not understand society, and people within it.
Thatcher's first set of ministers contained Whitelaw, Lord Carrington -- possibly the last high ranking UK politician of any party with an innate sense of ethics and standards, Heseltine, Pym, Prior and many others I forget, who wouldn't be welcome in today's party, let alone get a ministry. Plenty to bring some balance to cabinet, to moderate the extremism of the mad monk who invented Thatcherism -- Keith Joseph. Of course Joseph was the creator of one of those first extreme libertarian think tanks, the Institute of Policy Studies.
One Nation Conservatism, and moderate conservatism is dead. There's a radical party that uses the same name. They even adopted a bunch of US Republican voter suppression tactics in this election, page 48 of the manifesto. Promoting the suppression of democracy as policy aim! Gerrymandering constituency boundaries, picture ID to vote in a country that requires no ID -- knowing full well that hits the poor and minorities hardest (Who might well not be inclined to vote Tory), politicising the Judiciary. No, the Conservative party of yore no longer exists.
Before long we'll be back to buying votes.
Mistakes always happen in politics, if you’re not making mistakes you can’t be doing anything worthwhile. Austerity went too far, but fundamentally had to be done. Leaving the EU Is a mistake, but given the referendum the party had to commit itself to delivering what it promised. That’s my take anyway.
My problem is they've become a party of international finance, hedge funds and so on. No longer is a conservative MP or Lord the former exec of a successful FTSE company, or something in the city, which of course is now mainly US. The policies benefit international finance not Britain and the British, candidates are selected accordingly. Rees Mogg being perfect example.
I can imagine a Churchill, Macmillan, Heath or even Heseltine or Thatcher putting through the environmental parts of Labour's manifesto -- that's good One Nation Conservatism without the parts remaking capitalism. No one since though. Thatcher fully believed the science, and made a UN speech in 89, and many others, calling for world climate action way beyond anything that's actually happened. Churchill did so much to create the European Court of Human rights and Convention.
The referendum campaign basically promised no deal was not possible, so yes they should deliver what was promised. Though allowing a referendum without supermajority so we're forever stuck at 50:50 was madness. Austerity was dogma from day one -- no one overspent, it was a global banking bubble, but gave an excuse to push libertarian shrinking of government. Yet QE was full on Keynes, just this time for the benefit of international finance, not the country. Every event kicks the fringe to the centre, and remakes the party a little further off centre.
That's my take. Internet politics is of course mostly futile, have a peaceful and prosperous New Year. :)
Ironically, the closest thing we have to "true" conservatives here are self-fashioned centrists, who generally are interested in preserving the status quo, making small changes in one direction or another depending on how society is going, being generally vigilant against too much change.
It's a view that has almost completely ceased to exist among the conservative parties of the world.
And that's not inherently an insane approach. If we've been going in the wrong direction for the last 70 years, the most useful move is to go back to where we were.
Now, in practice, it's not that simple. You can't just go back. You don't even want to just go back; parts of 1950 we do not want to return to. And you don't have the people you had 70 years ago, or the expectations, or even the societal values.
But I think this explains why a conservative could want to radically shrink (or, rather, de-grow) government, and still legitimately remain a conservative.
They don’t want that. Otherwise they would support tax increases and lower salaries for CEOs. They want to go back to a mythical past that never existed the same way they are Reaganites that would call the real Reagan a RINO.
Their new leader performed particularly poorly in electioneering, and associated with this they nailed their election colours to "Bollocks to Brexit", and repealing article 50 legislation. i.e. Under us, Brexit is not happening, regardless of referendum, calls for second referendum or rerun with more honest campaign rules or what have you. Last, I think (I'm guessing) there was a good degree of everyone being beyond sick of this, and vote Tory so we're out and it's over and done with. Of course leaving is just the start of a 10x longer period of trying to negotiate with everyone, and make things like import/export work again, preserve NI peace etc... Brexit will continue to be the story of the coming decade -- all of it. Our famously resilient and politically neutral civil service is already deeply damaged by it.
Minor reasons are a lot of very amateur hour election leaflets with faked graphs, pretend newspapers that made them look like the Liberals in the 1970s once again -- intellectual, worthy, and utterly irrelevant. They also split the anti vote in more than one constituency.
Even if you think his solutions are horrible, you have to admit he's bringing new ideas to the table and focused on measuring the right metrics and solving problems.
UBI might seem like a pipe-dream but when you break it down it's way more realistic than "amazing government jobs for everyone" or "break up the big companies into little pieces."
The economy is shifting due to automation and the exploitation of workers through the on-demand gig economy. We need major changes and big ideas. I want someone who innovates and uses data to back up his political stances - so Yang has my vote.
I’d probably go for Yang too, but it would be a near impossibility for him to win the nomination. I’d love to see him as a VP pick but he doesn’t really bring the “votes” that a typical VP candidate would. At the very least, I hope he’s offered some type of cabinet position (ideally heading up a new Department of Technology).
Bang-on 100% accurate. It's a bunch of immoral jerks versus a bunch of fantastical hooey.
Add to that a difference in rhetorical style: Republicans skirmish aggressively and keep their commentary "on message," while Democrats tend to virtue signal and use identity politics to galvanize their followers.
"Anyone that makes up they mind before they hear the issue is a fucking fool, OK? Everybody… No, everybody’s so busy wanting to be down with a gang – “I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal.” It’s bullshit. Be a fucking person. Listen. Let it swirl around yo head. Then form yo opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, OK? I got some shit I’m conservative about, I got some shit I’m liberal about. Crime, I’m conservative. Prostitution, I’m liberal. "
"I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will."
It reminds me of how fatuous Nassim Taleb can be, certainly. That quote basically deletes any historical context and actual belief held by those groups. It reduces the actual differences that they have to a bumper sticker level of depth.
Not trying to be insulting or anything, I just don't find it that helpful, and I'm also not particularly a fan of Taleb.
Ideologues assume that there is a single version / source of the truth whether it is a religious text, or a secular one (Marx, Hayek, etc). 'Intentional moderates' are not monist (as are idealogues), but to the contrary triangulate. If anything, intentional moderates reject the notion that there is an objective position.
Accidental moderates - idealised - are actually just being reasonable and weighing different considerations, thus arriving at a considered position.
Intentional moderates may not necessarily be cowards. To take an exampe: most people are ignorant of economics and so their position on, say, the interest rate is not an informed one.
Intentional moderates use a centrist heuristic in the belief that the reasonable answer is somewhere between the two extremes. There is nothing wrong with this; one cannot expect voters to be experts or even well informed on all the posible issues of government.
I think this describes my own political opinion to a tee. I agree with some stuff on the left, some stuff on the right and the moderate/centrist opinion on some others, and it probably equals out as centrist.
Still, I'm not sure I'd say this is a rare thing by any means. Indeed, I suspect a large percentage (maybe even majority) of the population has beliefs from all sides/corners of the political spectrum.
It's just that the current voting system in places like the US and UK encourages everyone to band with 'one side or the other', and groups a bunch of people/groups that likely disagree in many cases together as one party.
Plus given most people's mixtures of said beliefs are different to others, your average politician/party ends up having to appeal to a certain 'tribe' in order to get elected, since the percentage of people who 100% agree with a certain mix of beliefs is too small to get anyone a majority.
WRT. the perceived amount of "accidental moderates" being small, I don't think it's just because of voting systems. I see two other factors.
1) When you speak up on some issue, people tend to immediately pigeonhole you into a drawer with a political affiliation label on it. I've been called an illuminati NWO supporter by some, a Marxist by others, roughly in the same time, just because I voiced my opinion on two different topics.
2) "Accidental moderates" are not a uniform group. I'll bet that you and I have plenty of differences of opinion - on one issue, I'll be leaning left and you'll be leaning right, on another issue, it'll be the reverse. So once someone wants to leverage group support for one of their positions, they essentially have to sign up with one of the extreme, well-defined groups, that support that particular position. And while internally, they're still an "accidental moderate", to the outside, they just look like another partisan.
The problem with polarizing issues is that it acts to reinforce the tribal mentality. The truth is that most people have relatively complex opinions when they get to genuinely think about them and they almost never fit in clean political tribes. Yet it's to the benefit of a given group to try and lump-sum everyone in or out of it.
People tend to believe whatever they hear.
They don't. Perhaps that is why the voter turnout is so low everywhere.
For instance, myself, I cannot in good conscience support any of the political parties that exist in my country. I agree with each of them on few points, and strongly disagree on most.
I think there's definitely something to the idea, but I wouldn't carve up the world into These People and Those People. If anything, we're more like calico cats and we all exhibit both behaviors simultaneously. Yes, I think the Overton windows "centers" some of our views, but I can't consciously tell you which ones without thinking about it first.
Well, I know tons of those. People in journalism, and other high profile public related posts, are often such. They don't want to offend any side, and reap the benefits of both. Some politicians are also like that. I know people in media personally who have more extreme positions in private talks, but their public opinions are carefully calculated to advance their career.
>Noticeable lack of specifics, not even historical figures. Honestly it comes off like "I met a guy, didn't like him, I think this is why"
Why do people on HN think everything is a big science paper? The post is observations about society, from someone who has lived in one for 5+ decades and paid some attention. It's not some sociology paper or nation-wide poll results. It's like people can't think without polls and figures, or have relegated their opinions to the "experts" and their stats...
One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience. This is true even if they have a sharp mind, decades of experience, and the best credentials.
The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia.
I find the over-reliance on second hand ("factual") data, charts and figures, disturbing.
People have to learn to observe, think, and understand themselves.
Not just passively consume pre-made charts and statistics (which are the easiest thing to manipulate). And learning how to spot BS statistical claims wont help when the raw data can be themselves cherry-picked, manipulated, and diced in tons of ways.
Not to mention that live experience is 360 (if one tries), where data will always paint less than the whole picture. One could arrange for great "official" charts and figures for every country -- and most countries do. Unless one gets on the field and talk to the people on the street and the workplace, and try to check the reality in various situations, they can have a totally BS picture painted for them by the statistics and "factual data".
>One person's experience, no matter how broad for an individual, is still just one individual's anecdotal experience.
Well, you're not 10000 people. You're just one, like everyone else is. In the end, whatever you're fed or read or watch, you have to make up your mind for yourself.
>The principles of fact checking and bias analysis should not be relegated solely to academia.
Nor should fact checking and bias analysis start and begin with data people are handed down from official or other sources. Those can range from perfectly accurate to badly compiled to totally and mischievously misleading (for saving face, incompetence, for profit, etc).
If you lived in USSR, would you trust the official data, or you would try to balance things and do direct observation?
You shouldn't blindly trust "facts" and "figures" anywhere else either...
Comparing two data points will always yield better results than having just one. Data points don't have to be literal points on a graph. They can be discussions with people.
Study historiography or journalism.
Actually I've said the exact phrase twice in this subthread. And considering its the main subject of the subthread (whether those IMO are enough/mandatory or not) it's not really surprising.
Perhaps you don't want like to hear it, so you're extra annoyed anytime I mention it, which makes you overcount? Maybe you need some charts and figures of how many times I said that expression.
>Comparing two data points will always yield better results than having just one.
Which is neither here nor there. A single person could collect 1000s of data points by observation, talking to different people, etc.
You don't need a team to do that, or some official citation.
There could be bias in said person? Sure. Same way the team/paper could have bias, be non-reproducible crap, be written to make some government body look good, be written to make someone money, etc.
It's almost as is critical thinking by the person receiving the single person's anecdote or the, can I say it, charts and figures, is still required.
>Study historiography or journalism.
Oh, the irony.
Graham's sale of Viaweb essentially exits him from the society most of us live in; he achieves a level of wealth that lets him ignore most aspects or truths he finds inconvenient (good or bad, small or large). As he's now writing in absentia for over 20 years, I don't think we should assume he knows anything about how the world works for most people today.
> and paid some attention
Extremely questionable based on his other essays.
Sure. On the other hand, it gives him access to a part of society most of us don't live in.
Well, no, not at all. People on the left and on the right tend to have a worldview and attitude that is the foundation of their stances on issues. It is not a coincidence that support for welfare spending, tolerance of theft, illegal immigration, fat acceptance, and decrying of objective standards in education all come from the same side.
The moderates are the people whose opinions are most formed from indoctrination.
I don't think you can reduce political arguments to who is "right" and who is "wrong". Politics and moral questions are not mathematical problems. We fundamentally don't all agree on what the final outcome (of a society, of life) should be. Maybe 99% of us can agree with something like "happiness" or "peace", but those are way too vague and the devil's in the details.
Just because we cannot guarantee certainty or outcomes doesn't absolve us from the moral responsibility to try.
When PG says that the left and right are equally "wrong", he's suggesting that they are both trying to arrive at THE solution, but just taking different paths. I don't think this is fundamentally true and if you view political struggle from this perspective you're going to miss the full picture.
So yes, both the extreme left and the extreme right are not only wrong, but morally repugnant.
The whole point of classical political liberalism is of how to get multiple incompatible ideas of what is the good life (broadly understood) to coexist peacefully. Without it there is only tyranny or chaos.
I think the point is that different people will try different things, often opposing each other.
For example, let me grant you that Nazi Germany and the Soviets were equally bad for the sake of this question, would that mean that we and our allies were moderate? Do the proxy wars that we fought/are fighting all over the world factor into an ideological spectrum?
The reason that I'm asking a question instead of just going all "what about-ism" is I really would like top understand why people think the way they do. Not trying to start an argument.
2. There is strong agreement on lots of things:
95 percent disapprove of people using cell phones in movie theaters. (Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel Poll, 2014)
97 percent believe there should be laws against texting while driving. (The New York Times/CBS News Poll, 2009)
96 percent have a positive impression of small business. (Gallup Poll, 2016)
95 percent believe employers should not be able to access the DNA of their employees without permission. (Time/CNN/Yankelovich Partners Poll, 1998)
95 percent support laws against money laundering involving terrorism. (Washington Post Poll, 2001)
95 percent think doctors should be licensed. (Private Initiatives & Public Values, 1981)
95 percent would support going to war if the United States were invaded. (Harris Survey, 1971)
96 percent oppose legalizing crystal meth. (CNN/ORC International Poll, 2014)
95 percent are satisfied with their friends. (Associated Press/Media General Poll, 1984)
95 percent say that “if a pill were available that made you twice as good looking as you are now, but only half as smart,” they would not take it. (Men’s Health Work Survey, 2000)
98 percent believe adults should watch swimmers rather than reading or talking on the phone. (American Red Cross Water Safety Poll, 2013)
99 percent think it’s wrong for employees to steal expensive equipment from their workplace. (NBC News Poll, 1995)
95 percent think it’s wrong to pay someone to do a term paper for you. (NBC News Poll, 1995)
98 percent would like to see a decline in hunger in the world. (Harris Survey, 1983)
97 percent would like to see a decline in terrorism and violence. (Harris Survey, 1983)
98% would like to see an end to high unemployment. (Harris Survey, 1982)
95 percent would like to see an end to all wars. (Harris Survey, 1981)
95 percent would like to see a decline in prejudice. (Harris Survey, 1977)
95 percent don’t believe Magic 8 Balls can predict the future. (Shell Poll, 1998)
96 percent think the Olympics are a great sports competition. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution Poll, 1996)
(source How To Monroe 2019, by way of https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-win-an-election/)
If there were correct or incorrect policies, there wouldn't be any need to vote. If politics was a science or a math, we wouldn't need to vote. We be able to test or prove the correct answer. The reason we vote is precisely because there is no correct answer in politics.
There is a why science and math doesn't work by consensus or a vote.
There are all kinds of questions with best practices, right and wrong answers. There are better and worse ways to aggregate agricultural statistics, for instance. And we don't think of that in terms of a left and right, it's just something that's administered by a department. And no one thinks that that's because of single-minded ideological extremism that only permits one view, or that the approach needs to be replaced with a polarized one stretched between two competing ideologies in order to represent healthy discourse.
There are a range of views where there are right answers, things are polarized that shouldn't be-- climate change for instance, where the debate has been hurt by moderates insisting on a need to treat all sides as equally legitimate. And moderates have absolutely no underlying theory about what makes those examples different. Those examples entirely defeat the concept of moderation as an overarching political principle.
That's the real problem with moderation- it's expressed as an aspirational principle that's independent of any on the ground engagement with arguments or facts. It's not something that is arrived at on a case by case basis from examination of facts, which to my mind would be the valid reason for arriving at moderation, or any political belief. If someone said we should replace all agricultural data with randomly generated numbers, that could polarize agricultural statistics, and then moderates would enter that debate chiding both sides as extremes that need to listen to each other.
Best practices doesn't mean right or wrong answers. Also, most of the questions in politics is about values and perspective and biases and self interest. These don't have any right or wrong answers.
> There are better and worse ways to aggregate agricultural statistics, for instance. And we don't think of that in terms of a left and right
What does agricultural statistics have anything to do with voting? Besides agricultural statistics, like all statistics, can be skewed, manipulated and cherrypicked when it comes to politics. And the same statistic can be viewed differently by different people.
> There are a range of views where there are right answers, things are polarized that shouldn't be-- climate change for instance
This has to be the most naive point any could make. And the only people who believe like you do in black or white are the "single-minded ideological" extremists that you probably rail on about. Ignoring the fact that climate science is in its infant stage and we have yet to find a single acceptable model of climate modeling and we are constantly being told that previous climate predictions were too optimistic or pessimistic every other day. Ignoing all that, lets assume climate science is a mature and trustable science. So what is the solution for climate change? Should we just kill off 7 billion people? Should we shut down the internet? So we end global trade?
> where the debate has been hurt by moderates insisting on a need to treat all sides as equally legitimate.
No. The debate has been hurt by ideological extremists like yourself who have a messianic belief that they will save humanity. Unfortunately for people like you, there are actual grown ups who don't listen to 16 year teen girls for scientific and geopolitical information.
> That's the real problem with moderation
The real problem of moderation and looking at all sides and facts is that it prevents extremist ideologues from taking control.
It's strange how climate change extremists ( on both sides ) always bring something that has nothing to do with climate science into the discussion. "There is a why science and math doesn't work by consensus or a vote.". What does that have to do with your comment?
Most people are pretty rational about most issues when you discuss them individually, but you end up with a few ''foundational''-- and unquestionable --ideas that people have to fall exactly on one side or the other. I won't name any specifically but I think everyone knows some of these immediately. So you have individually rational persons who have to congregate on either one side or the other, and these issues end up being the deciding factor of which group you must join, dividing many people who otherwise agree on a lot of stuff, perhaps without even realizing it..
It's pretty similar to religious fracturing to me now that I think about it. Groups who agree on everything except one or two ideas and that makes all the difference.
Very rare are the persons who fall heavily to one side of everything.
> First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
This is the problem with the "intentional" moderates: their position isn't a coherent one, it's instead pure unwillingness to engage. I understand people being conflict-averse, but it can lead to being backed into a corner by the people who are not afraid of conflict.
To use a perhaps extreme example: there's lots of injustice happening right now in China, and not a lot can be done directly to fix it. Are the people seeking justice willing to risk a nuclear war with China just to force changes? Would that help anything?
I worry about this, because I see that quote (along with an abuse of Popper's paradox of tolerance) thrown around a lot these days, by people who I don't at all trust to be of good will. The times we're living in are of great potential, but they're also incredibly fragile. Too much pressure, too much disruption, and the civilization may break down - which means not just rolling back a good thousand years of progress, but also leaving the next hundred or thousand generations stuck in these conditions on a thoroughly broken planet. You can't just reboot a technological civilization. Which makes me think that there is a solid argument to be made for minding the order, and not jumping to extreme action in pursuit of justice.
EDIT: I suppose this may be the "accidental moderate's" answer to the complaint about "intentional moderates". It's not about unwillingness to commit, or being extremely conflict-averse, or trying to appeal to all sides of the issue. It's about refusing to engage in actions - or call to actions - that lead to too much of collateral damage.
Well, that's fundamentally the tradeoff that China (and quite a lot of the other Asian states e.g. Singapore) have made; their ruling class picked stability over freedom, and hoped that the economic growth would keep everyone happy while at the same time preventing organisation outside the party.
I agree that needlessly destabilising situations is bad, but also that very large injustices can persist in the name of stability. It's not a simple problem.
> I agree that needlessly destabilising situations is bad, but also that very large injustices can persist in the name of stability. It's not a simple problem.
My point exactly. And I bring this up because I see the MLK quote you pasted, along with Popper, used to rally people to actions seemingly promoting justice, but in practice just turning people against one another, and overall making things worse. I don't like seeing either of the quotes being used as a glorified "if you're not with us, you're against us" line by people extreme in their views.
To use another example more directly relevant to MLK, if African Americans had to wait until it was convenient and comfortable for the white establishment to tolerate and accept them as equals, and the civil rights movement only ever worked within the bounds of the law, they would still be picking cotton. Maintaining order for its own sake without regard for the justness of the society being defended is tantamount to fascism.
But the point I can't ever seem to get across is this - action is meaningfully different than inaction, regardless of what is the status quo. It's the action part that's risky. Action has a price, and it's worth considering how high it is in a given case, before jumping to keyboards or bayonets.
> I'm sure there are plenty of Chinese who wish Uighurs and Hong Kong protestors would just calm down and understand that civil order is more important than "justice."
I think there's also plenty of Chinese who wish their own government backed down and let Hong Kong go its own way. And as a westerner, while my heart is with Hong Kong on this one, every time someone proposes that maybe the US should get involved I start wishing either of the sides involved just gave up, because quite frankly, none of this is worth the price of a nuclear war.
> To use another example more directly relevant to MLK (...) [if] the civil rights movement only ever worked within the bounds of the law
By "order", I don't mean "the law" (and I don't think MLK meant it either). In the MLK era, the Civil Rights Movement achieved their goals without plunging the country into a civil war. They've treaded the line between justice and order well.
The point I'm trying to get across is that there are situations that are less like civil rights movement, and more like asking US to threaten China with nukes to get them to back off on HK. That the potential collateral damage may outweigh the gains. That doesn't mean abandoning pursuit of justice - only being mindful of the importance of preserving some order when deciding what to.
Because, once the dust settles and the justice has been won, it would sure be nice if there were people left to enjoy that justice.
I agree completely. I don't think most would disagree with this.
>The point I'm trying to get across is that there are situations that are less like civil rights movement, and more like asking US to threaten China with nukes to get them to back off on HK.
I think you're conflating your fears about a specific, and in my opinion unlikely, doomsday scenario into a general slippery slope argument against the dangers of disruptive justice. Most such movements don't even have a theoretical capacity to pose an existential threat to civilization, so in most cases, the risk is arguably worth the reward.
Yes, I kept repeating the one example I used, but I worry about all issues that could plausibly lead to a civilization-ending war. Of which there are many, including all kinds of problems created by worsening state of the planet's climate. But I also worry about things that could lead to local wars (including civil wars), and history says that regular politics, even identity politics, can find a way to turn into bloodshed.
The point of MLK’s quote, in my opinion, is that moderates can always find reasons to maintain status quo especially when the issues at hand are not deemed personally impactful. People are being harmed, but because they are not me or look like me it’s not worth risking potential upset.
No, there isn't. At least not in the examples mentioned.
What you mention is one point of MLK's quote, but my point is different: not everyone who doesn't want to join the fight against status quo is such moderate without a personal stake in the outcome. Some are people who very much care, and have a stake, but decline involvement because they see the proposed means to involve too much collateral damage; the cure to be worse than the poison.
Many of the current fights for social justice in the US face the same indifference as the last century’s civil rights movement. People who stand to lose nothing simply can’t be bothered.
People are being harmed. There are people (let's be charitable and assume that the set does not include TeMPOral) who want to do nothing, because they aren't among the people being harmed.
Then there's a second set of people (let's be charitable and assume that the second set does include TeMPOral) who see the harm, and care about the harm, but are unsure how far to go toward fixing it, because the wrong action (or too much of the right action) can do more harm than good, even to the people you are trying to help.
And then you have the problem that the first set of people are trying to sound very much like the second set of people (and maybe even to convince themselves that they are the second set of people).
The same principle is why you can say "I expected more from you" to friend or family member and that simple comment spurs an improvement in behavior. They actually care, a little bit at least. We don't eloquently express our lofty expectations when it comes to our enemies. Only our friends, allies, and teammates.
>The effect of a system based on plurality voting is that the larger parties, and parties with more geographically concentrated support, gain a disproportionately large share of seats, while smaller parties with more evenly distributed support are left with a disproportionately small share.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
Yes, many election systems result in more parties than FPTP. But left and right still have salience within those.
In fact, you can look at how each politician votes (without explicitly coding votes as left or right). This itself forms a space equal to the number of votes taken. But that vote space can be projected into a much lower dimensional space that captures most of the information about the vote space. If you go so far as to collapse it into a one dimensional space, that corresponds to the traditional left/right axis, and this holds through both history and internationally. The second issue is a bit more varied, but most of the time the left/right axis dominates whatever that second dimension is. Look up DW-NOMINATE for more info.
>Poole and Rosenthal note in Chapter 11 of Ideology and Congress that most of these analyses produce the finding that roll call voting is organized by only few dimensions (usually two): "These findings suggest that the need to form parliamentary majorities limits dimensionality."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29
Static parliamentary majorities are not necessary in a presidential system.
The developed world as a whole seems to be approaching one of those "great leap" moments today as more and more issues have fallen into partisan extremism, motivating the search for a new consensus.
In the absence of first past the post voting (and its tendency to force people into parties to avoid losing to people who do [1], and for those parties to coalesce into two dominant, equally balance parties), there is still a polarity of, say, liberal and conservative. At least in the original meanings of the terms, which has to do with whether you go toward new things or prefer traditions.
But under FPTP, right vs left encompasses a lot more than that.
And more importantly, FPTP doesn't allow for middle ground. If you are in the middle, you can't get elected, because neither party would nominate you.
If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different. Yes there would be people on the extremes, but most people -- those elected, as well as regular citizens -- would tend be "accidental moderates."
I'm not sure that's true, at least in the UK, when one of the established two parties moves to the centre ground they tend to win. Moving away from the centre ground is how they lose.
California has FPTP voting and is completely dominated by Democrats who have a super majority in the legislature and the Governorship, and can pass any legislation they want without a single Republican vote or amendment. That's been the case (with a brief stint by Arnold) for multiple decades.
Tell me again how FPTP voting necessarily results in two equally balanced parties? I'm not seeing it.
Universal healthcare can't work on a state level because of the free rider problem: people from red states could go to California for free healthcare anytime, while never paying taxes into the system. Californians would end up paying for healthcare for the entire US, which is unsustainable.
It works in Canada because Canada doesn't let sick Americans immigrate. But as a US state, California has no power to keep out sick red staters.
How does Massachusetts manage it then? They don't have the power to keep out those "sick red staters", and yet the entire state has healthcare (by law).
Sounds like special-pleading to me. If a wealthy Blue state like Massachusetts can do it, then California can do it. I expect more from my representatives, not "sick Republicans in other states are stopping us!"
California is 2.6x higher at 7.8% [1], is not improving, and is a much bigger state numerically, so we're talking about ~3 million uninsured people. Prior to Obamacare, California was at a dismal 16%. And note: CA had Dem supermajority rule for years prior to Obamacare's implementation, and can easily pass the healthcare legislation it's constituents want and deserve. They, unlike Massachusetts, have chosen not to.
Massachusetts has less uninsured because they go beyond the bare minimum provided by Obamacare. California Democrats can, and should, do more.
[0] https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2019/08/20/uninsured-rates...
[1] https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/articl...
Remember Massachusetts' median income is around 30% higher than California, so it's possible even with identical governance the state with higher median income would have better outcomes.
That's a fairly recent phenomenon (California was a Republican stronghold in Presodential elections until 1992, and longer for state executive elections.) And the tendency toward balance that is asserted for FPTP is national; subordinate jurisdictions aren't expected to follow it even by people who adhere to the theory.
> who have a super majority in the legislature and the Governorship, and can pass any legislation they want without a single Republican vote or amendment. That's been the case (with a brief stint by Arnold) for multiple decades.
No, it hasn't; Democrats have only had supermajorities since 2012, and Gray Davis (1999-2003) was the only Democratic governor between Jerry Brown (term ended in 1983) and Jerry Brown (term starting in 2011.)
Median voter theorem claims a mathematical proof of the opposite, that FPTP has both camps having a dominant strategy of appeal to the median voter. Both your assertion and median voter theorem fail in practice; the latter because it ignores issues of salience, distribution of views (unimodal vs. multimodal), turnout and mobilization effects, etc., and yours because, well, it ignores much of the same things, but assumes different generalities about them consistently hold.
> If we had a electoral system that tended to elect the first choice of the median voter, things would be dramatically different.
Actually, the vast majority of US voters, even those that self-identity as independents, are highly partisan — the median voter is probably a reasonably strong partisan of whatever party has the current turnout advantage, which is essentially what FPTP elects.
Diverse, yes. Meaningful, maybe. Look at Israel right now. 17 parties with seats in the Knesset, none with over 30%, and, after two elections, still no agreement on Prime Minister. Third election coming up.
Parlamentary systems without the option to call re-elections is an attractive alternative. The politicians just can't keep asking people's opinion until they get the answer they want.
Then there will have to be compromises, and even the smaller parties can get some of their important causes through.
Have an elected parliament sit for at least two years, maybe four, will go some way in making them work out their differences.
Or, as in the current situation, there is simply no agreement, and they go months without a government. It's not clear that an inability to call re-elections would improve Israel's situation; they could be stuck for years with no government.
Also I would argue Netanyahu failing to form a government two times is a good sign for Israel. That man is divisive and harmful.
Most European countries have proportional voting systems, yet can anyway fairly well be characterized by the left-right political axis.
Overall their adherence to the left-right dichotomy is less rigid than in the U.S.
Graham's sleights of hand used to be better hidden.
The "far left" and "far right" are not fixed points in ideological space (even within a single country).
Ideas don't exist in continuous space.
I’m open to a lot of ideas, and I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with policies that are way outside the Overton window, but I think what feels dirty to me is holding political opinions so strongly that it makes our fellow humans the bad guys.
I am curious, what are some examples?
Maybe universal healthcare, completely gov't paid? That's socialism to the right -- can't try that.
On the other side, maybe ending hate crime legislation? Or striking down Roe v. Wade, and letting each state be their own experimental ground? Ending minimum wage?
Larger government. State ownership does not guarantee incompetent or inefficient. The right used to believe in many of the things that have become unthinkable. The Tories also wanted to improve services, built social housing, added libraries and social care. Pre war UK used to permit the various cities around the UK to form municipal corporations. They were used for power generation, water, rail and tramways among other things, and mostly worked very well indeed -- with the city getting service and income, but being quite hands off from the modern perception of centralised control. See also the various towns and cities that have put in their own broadband, far better than the private sector offer, in more recent years...
Clean Air Act UK was brought in by the Conservatives in 1956. The right used to be much more amenable to environmental and health regulation. Well regulation in general. Now they avoid, neuter and talk down regulation, and slim down the bodies who once oversaw said regulation.
Specific, I think, to the UK, the astonishing degree of centralisation brought in since 1974. Nearly all of it under the Tories. Yet Labour is perceived as the party of state control. Neither party talks of giving real power back to the regions and cities, they both mostly talk against it.
There's other examples on the left, and probably similar examples the other side of the Atlantic.