Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Put another way, the most attractive presentation of American liberalism that I know is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not radicalism, not Marxism, but FDR/JFK/apple pie and patriotism liberalism. (Less overtly, the same spirit is also made attractive in Carl Sagan's Cosmos.) Without agreeing with that vision, I can still admire it, and share some of its ambitions, including the Promethean values in TNG that help it to appeal across the political spectrum. Perhaps significantly, Gene Roddenberry (and maybe Carl Sagan) was the type who could at least recognise the value in different visions of the world, even if he thought that American liberalism was superior.
As I see it, the distinctive spirit of American liberalism is self-actualization. Tolerance, multiculturalism etc. are valuable not so much in themselves, but insofar as they enable people to pursue their higher and often idiosyncratic goals. Moderated by a stronger concern for negative freedom and/or tradition, self-actualization is also something that is important in American libertarianism and American conservativism, so there is a lot of room for cohesion among these value systems. That's why both liberal visions like TNG and conservative 80s action movies can appeal across the mainstream US political spectrum. And something like the Rocky series has cross-political appeal, even though there is a lot of political/philosophical themes where there could be controversies: the films have themes that are bound by a self-actualizing vision of "Do it yourself, for yourself, by sorting yourself and your relationships out" that almost all Americans enjoy.
The problem is that many cultures of the world do not share this vision, and the idea that you can have American liberalism among any cultural group is an item of faith rather than knowledge.
(Incidentally, I'm not American. View this as an alien's interpretation of your culture.)
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
It gets even more annoying when they talk about e.g. fandoms as "communities."
Other examples: the "African American community", the "gay community," the "trans community". These are categories, not communities. They have no unified voice, nor interests, nor (non-trivial) location. The "international community" is also a metaphor at best.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Is the Palace just some oasis sheltered from the rat race that envelopes other parts of Britain?
No, there are some rat-infested places in Britain (like the City and Westminster) but in general people value their families, communities, and leisure (except they say "leh-jur" rather than "lee-jur"). The aristocracy is an elite, but it's different from e.g. the Washington Policy elite. It's into longstanding loyalty, implicit agreements that span decades or centuries, predictable norms etc.
If you want to get a bollocking from a sociopathic woman in return for a 0.5% chance of becoming a high ranking political figure and a 99% chance of being forgotten by your employer in 10 years, you work at Downing Street, not Buckingham Palace. If you want a guaranteed heartfelt handshake with the kindly monarch (who fondly remembers you dressing them when they were just 3 or 25 years old) when you are old and grey, you work at Buckingham Palace.
This kind of loyalty culture is one reason why even republicans I know who joined the army often become at least moderately royalist, because military-types also tend to like the idea of stable customs, long-term bonds, and implicit agreements.
"Communist" is already a win for the left. She was a Stalinist, joining the pro-Stalin CPUSA in 1936, around the time when many more humanitarian communists left. She stuck with the Soviet Union through the show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Iron Curtain, the 1956 revelations about Stalinism, and the Invasion of Hungary.
And for all her support for the Soviet Union, she had the gall to be piqued when the ACLU didn't want a literal Stalinist in their organisation in 1940, whose organisation was defending the use of the Smith Act against Trotskyists, suggesting that the "Rebel Girl" had a high tolerance for hypocrisy as well as bloodshed.
Here is a list of the changes. Roald Dahl could have written a whole book of short essays about each individual change and how it's retarded:
https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds_of_changes_made_to_roald_dahls_books/
Ironically, they didn't race swap Charlie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Factory#Race_and_editing
Anyway, I can accept that new cultural products will tend to be terrible, for reasons including wokeness, but when it comes to the glories of the past, I think of us in the position of Irish monks in the Dark Ages: unable to produce, but duty-bound to preserve. So pushing back hard against this sort of thing (or indeed Puffin's past decision to put a sexualised image of a child on a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cover, on the grounds of giving it "adult" appeal, about which they have never repented, as far as I know) makes sense.
Time for sensitivity readers to modify problematic parts of Orwell?
By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. (Syme, explaining Newspeak to Winston in "Nineteen-Eighty Four".)
there is a vigorous subculture focused on videos of pedophiles
Suspected pedophiles at that. Rationalists rightly complain about bad reasoning by juries, but vigilante gangs are probably even worse, and much better armed.
I once spoke to a guy who was a cleaner in the West, but who came from a Taliban-heavy part of Pakistan. As well as being very smart and friendly, they were a repository of horrific stories about coming from a place that (we agreed) was very similar to Medieval Europe. Once, he came back from the West and he was going to see his family. He was travelling on a train at night, when several men with handguns sat down with him and started questioning him: "Why are you wearing Western clothes?" "Why do you look so rich?" "Are you an unbeliever?"
Eventually, they started questioning him about specific parts of the Qur'an. Only his madrassa education, which had involved otherwise useless mechanical memorization of particular passages (without attention to the meaning) saved him from being taken to a dark spot by these men and killed, with no hope that they would ever be even punished for their actions by the local "police".
He also once came across a (probably) dead body in the street at night. Rather than report the killing or see if the man was still alive, he ran away as fast as he could. Why? If he was the person who found the body, then the man's family would consider him as a suspect, and possibly come after him/his family. So the body presumably rotted in the summer heat until a policeman or a member of the man's family saw it.
Harlequin5942
15d ago
I grew up in a relatively conservative community. There was one boy who, at age 4-ish, liked to dress in girl's outfits when we played dress-up games. He also liked some "girl's" toys, e.g. Polly Pocket. He was also fearful of competitive sports and tended to make friends better with girls rather than boys (I was an exception).
As often happens, he's just gay. He often finds it easier to identify with women and empathise with them, perhaps because he has more of a lady-brain (who knows?). People in this relatively conservative community generally ignored it, reasoning "He'll grow out of it," and they were right, since he is (99%) a typical adult guy these days.
The same thing happened with a girl in my neighbourhood, who just turned out to have a very active imagination as a child. She's now married to a man, with kids etc. She had a very religious family, who treated it as a game (like a child who decides that they are a dinosaur) and within a year she had forgotten even that she used to insist that she was a boy.
Kids are weird. Sometimes, it's because there is something deeply different about them. It's hard to know why, so it's best to enjoy the ride (within sensible boundaries e.g. keeping them from sexual experimentation) and offer them love throughout the process.
"She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling."
This passage is modified to:
"She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck."
The sorts of thinkers that a child should be reading - in the revised editions, at least, where Elizabeth Bennet is an engineer ("Better than Brunel, they say!") Jane Bennet is a badass lawyer, and Georgiana Darcy is Black. Jane is rewritten to have more sass, while Elizabeth is rewritten to stop being so mean. Mr. Darcy is rewritten to be a better role model for men: modest, empathetic, and socially competent. The story is about how Elizabeth and Jane can have Pride, while Mr. Darcy enjoys lessons from them about the importance of not having Prejudice.
The Oakleys are a queer collective of artists who are travelling to California to escape the prejudice of dumb rednecks. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea will be the Wise Latinx Woman and the Sea and of course she successfully brings the fish back in the end, because women can be just as good fisher-persons as men and other genders.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.
"If you like to keep warm, you can jump in a bonfire."
Having lived in quite a few European countries and knowing British history in some detail, I would put it this way: the UK had a period of great comparative success across a huge range of fields (prior to about 1945) where European countries they didn't outperform economically (France, Germany) were outperformed militarily/diplomatically, and the UK developed a fairly "laissez faire" type of imperialism that had some definite advantages over Belgian rapaciousness, French assimilationism etc.
The UK had a period of relative decline in 1945-1979. This was only relative (this was a period of mostly solid growth) and with some exceptions (UK unemployment rates were low in this period, even compared to e.g. the US).
The UK had a concerted and successful effort to combat relative decline from about 1979-2007. This took different forms, e.g. Thatcher had great confidence in Victorian institutions, practices, and values; Blair had a huge love of America (especially Clintonian America) public service modernisation, and wanted the UK to lead the EU into a modernist, progressive, American-style supra-state; Major was somewhere in between, with a strange sort of quiet iconoclasm in favour of "ordinary people" that ranged from the clever (getting rid of stupid regulations on everything from employment agencies to service stations) to the absurd (the "Cones Hotline").
For various reasons, I mostly blame Brown and subsequent UK politicians, and of course the UK voters to whom they pander. For example, the UK has a great edge in financial and business services. UK business services are one area where the UK still does great, partly due to language, partly due to regulation, and partly due to agglomeration in London/South-East England. What do UK politicians and voters love? MANUFACTURING. Steel. SHIPBUILDING. It's like a tall, scrawny but fast kid wanting to play rugby and set weightlifting records rather than basketball and netball - admirable, but stupid. So the UK overregulates and taxes its financial sector (as well as the occasional kick to its oil sector) and then wonders why its economy underperforms.
Similarly, the UK voters hate paying taxes at the levels of European countries. So they have the opportunity to e.g. save more of their own money for retirement, taking advantage of the huge long-term gains that private investment can make relative to pay-as-you-go state pensions. But they also want state pensions at European levels (no Boomer left behind) so politicians have introduced an unsustainable pensions uprating scheme that has meant that, despite significant spending cuts in some areas (welfare, education etc.) and despite tax rises to about peacetime highs, the UK public finances are still shit. This is not how a serious country deals with an ageing population.
And there's the UK national religion, the NHS, a healthcare system designed to save the UK Labour party from the wrath of doctors in the 1950 election, which voters think (a) should be improved, (b) should not be changed, and (c) should not cost them personally any more in taxes or fees. I suppose there are some religions with more absurd origins and principles...
Scotland is the beak of the UK ostrich: deepest into the sand it has buried itself.
I have lived in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, Italy, Greece, and other places. These countries all have their own chronic problems and a similar lack of ambition in dealing with them. For me, it just stands out more in the UK (and more recently in the US) because the Limeys used to have some leaders and an electorate who were serious about tough changes. For all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was about the closest the West has come to a Lee Kuan Yew figure: someone who really thought, "If a policy is too popular, then we are being too careful."
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
as many of the congregation begin to understand the perspectives being espoused, and will leave the church for a more traditional one
And they tend not to preach. Christian denominations that grow and survive tend to go out to the scummiest, grimiest places you can imagine, and preach a Christian message of God's forgiveness and love to people who hate themselves and are destroying themselves. Not coincidentally, that's a lot of Jesus's strategy in the New Testament.
Whether out of primness or excessive agreeableness, a surprising number of Christians are unwilling to do that, and they tend to be those that are dying out most rapidly. Relying on curious people coming to church or children sticking to their parents' faith is a losing strategy in the modern world.
Harlequin5942
4mo ago
But to make it worse, DC is filled with people who have open contempt for the residents of "flyover states". They devote all of their energy to social signalling and fail at their actual jobs.
This is an important point. When you're part of an elite that has captured the institutions, then your rise can be very disconnected from your performance. Ursula von der Leyen was caught plagiarising her PhD, she was a failure as German Ministry of Defence, and thus became President of Europe.
Yet she was born to parents in the first Brussels elites, attended the right educational establishments, and she was skilled at being an ostensibly conservative politician who did/said what the German centre-left wanted.
She now fails upward in things like the EU's covid vaccination programme (where she apparently forgot that Northern Ireland and Ireland share an open border when she was threatening the UK with sanctions for having a more successful programme and thus embarassing the EU - she dropped the threats when someone smarter in Brussels told her that they'd just been negotiating for most of the past 5 years to keep that border open) and a future leadership position at the UN or IMF is something she is "earning."
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
"Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans? Let's work on some of your other mental health issues and then revisit this."
One of the most sensible things that Jordan Peterson said recently was pointing out that body dysmorphia is normal among women with mental health issues. So, if society links body dysmorphia closely to transgenderism and doctors put zero inquiry into whether the dysmorphia is symptomatic of the woman's other mental health problems, then overdiagnosis of transgenderism among women will result.
Anecdotally, detransitioning does seem to be more common among ex-transmen than ex-transwomen, but I don't have stats. The common pattern seems to be "Autistic or otherwise unusual woman develops depression/social anxiety/socialising issues as an adolescent, starts transitioning, maybe develops dysmorphia AGAIN (now wanting to be a woman) and detransitions, often with permanent or long-lasting damage to her body." Both before and after she started transitioning, the real problem was her socialisation and mental health challenges, not that she was in the wrong body. You can't solve such issues with surgery, but that is the impression that many such women are getting.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I can't think of how that could actually be true.
Yep, I'm going to resort to quoting Orwell:
In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. (Syme explaining Newspeak to Winston, in "Nineteen-Eighty Four")
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point...
This doesn't harmonise with your complaints about the intellectual laziness of others. "Putin is literally Hitler" and "Zelensky is literally Kim Jong-un" are both intellectually lazy takes.
Harlequin5942
10mo ago
It's akin to the restrictions created by Christianity: to some degree, they can make for a better story, but not when they become too tight. So C. S. Lewis could, operating within a fairly but not entirely stuffy kind of Christian ethos and worldview, produce great children's stories that appeal even to the unconverted, but hardcore fundamentalists are infamously bad story tellers.
This trend goes back about as far as human culture: Aristophanes was conservative in contrast to Socrates and Plato, but not entirely pious. He wouldn't mock Zeus, but he did mock Dionysus. Constraints, to some degree, are good for creativity - that's one of the secrets of good poetry - provided those constraints stay within constraints. Even great conservative films like Ben Hur or The Dark Knight have a pinch of deviancy in them, perhaps because it's hard for profoundly creative people to stay within orthodoxy in all respects. Also, even great children's stories make one think, and the compatibility of orthodoxy (whether conservative or progressive) with thinking is a matter of degree.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
On the other hand, it's amazing how the western mainstream media has reverted to parroting COVID-regime talking points again, after months of calling zero COVID insane. It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.
The media tends to (a) focus on problems and (b) suggest the simplest/vaguest possible solutions for these problems, such as can be condensed into a brief opinion piece, insinuation in an article, or editorial spin in a newcast.
So "zero covid is insane, China should open up" is an easy spin when China is doing zero covid and "letting covid rip is insane, China should be more careful" is an easy spin when it's not.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
The problem is that, at least on a social construct view of race, she's not black in Britain, but she IS American. She can self-identify as black if she wants, but one thing that almost everyone seems to agree upon regarding race is that it's not decided by self-identification.
Income tax rates have never been lower.
This is not true. It's true that they have been higher.
Obamacare was effectively a subsidy for large health insurance corporations—far from single payer that progressives really want.
Obamacare is one of your examples of conservatives winning, because it was a subsidy?
Unrestricted immigration continues to depress low-skilled wages.
Mass immigration is an example of conservatives winning?
You also deftly avoided social issues, where - apart from recently on abortion - conservatives have had a long, long rout. They can't even vote to get rid of gay marriage any more, while DEI is the official ideology of one institution after another. For all the culture war's early focus on higher education, you have to provide a DEI statement to even apply to teach at most US colleges.
I think it's possibly a factor, I don't think that it's the dominant factor.
GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa varies from the $400s (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic etc.) to $6500-9000 (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Botswana). That's higher than some European countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia). Let's rule out Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as examples of GDP being misleading, since their actual "development" in any normal sense is pathetic. Let's also exclude South Africa as only recently an African-governed society. That still leaves Botswana as a huge outlier. Botswana is (a) overwhelmingly African and (b) its most important resource is diamonds, which is very badly correlated with development elsewhere. So a lot of the variance between Africa and the poorer parts of Europe can be explained by other factors - including Botswana's relatively good economic, political, and social policies.
Africa is a basket case, but so was China until recently, despite high IQs. Additionally, the European or East Asian genetics for IQs have presumably not undergone any massive transformations in the past 500 years, but the discontinuity in the rate economic development with all of previous economic history is huge.
At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource. That can be good! For example, Norway has been able to turn its oil into extreme economic development. Venezuela has not. Countries with very limited natural resources have done well. Botswana has done well with a low IQ level by global standards, though IIRC Botswana's IQ is rising relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the better childhood nutrition that comes with development.
I don't know of good evidence that the full awfulness of Sub-Saharan African development needs to be explained by IQ, rather than historical factors (it's hard to imagine Liberia ever being a great comparative success when you know its history) or policy factors (Africa had the misfortune to become independent in the heyday of socialism, dirigism, and Cold War power politics that led even the democratic countries to support dictators).
"Predatory men, as has always been the case, are the risk to women"
says Nicola Sturgeon. Well, if this prisoner is not a man, then they're not a predatory man. If they're not a predatory man, then they are not a threat to women. If they are not a threat to women, then they should pass their risk assessment.
So, it follows from her view that even though the prisoner should not be transferred to the women's prison, they should be.
Yvette Cooper just seems overwhelmed by the whole matter:
"It should be clear that if someone poses a danger to women and committed crimes against women, they should not be being housed in a women's prison"
I am pretty confident that Cooper has never been to Cornton Vale, though she may have been to other women's prisons given she's Shadow Home Secretary. She would know that there are a lot of prisoners who are dangers to women and who have committed crimes against women. Sexual crimes? Well, probably not convicted, but "crime" and "sex crime" are not the same thing. One of the main reasons to put female criminals in a prison is that they are dangerous to other women. One would hope that Cooper, if she is going to be Home Secretary, would know that already.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
The nerdy version of honking your horn at a hot woman on the street.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't think that the utilitarian case for Scandinavian social democracy is obvious. It may be correct, but there's a huge amount of hard work that you need to do to make the argument for it.
Let's leave Norway out, since if you have good governance plus massive natural resources per capita then you can have good conditions with a lot of bad policies. The opportunity cost matters a lot for utilitarians (remember, utilitarians are maximisers not satisficers) and you can't determine much about opportunity cost by comparing policies in countries that have massively different situations.
Sweden has low poverty, but also persistently high unemployment:
https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate
Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility, because it creates a sense of worthlessness: humans generally like to feel useful, which you can explain with evolutionary psychology as the fact that, in our early evolutionary environment, there were not kings and queens sitting around doing nothing - even leaders were expected to contribute towards hunting, shelter, child-rearing etc. People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.
Denmark has low unemployment, but a neoliberal rather than social democratic unemployment benefits system that pushes people into work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Denmark#Current_policy
Also, in terms of GDP per capita, there is a significant and persistent gap between Denmark and Sweden vs. the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Remember, utilitarians are welfare maximisers, not just satisficers. And the benefits of a higher GDP per capita are massive relative to the benefits of poverty reduction, if you make the assumption that a higher GDP per capita is a persistent gain over time, i.e. it benefits future generations, whereas poverty reduction does have a big impact on welfare but mainly for the present generation. Arguing from a broadly utilitarian perspective, the economist Tyler Cowen has argued that people massively underrate the benefits of economic growth, assuming that one also maintains long-term economic stability:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/
Arguably, welfare states not only undermine economic growth, but also long-run social stability. If I can enjoy healthcare, pensions, housing etc. in my old age without a high personal savings rate, then I am incentivised to save less and consume more over my life. It also makes less sense for me to have children, which were historically a way of investing in your old age, as they were expected to support you using their incomes. If I have fewer children, then I can still benefit from future generations, because other people's children will be taxed to benefit me as much as them. I can free ride on their parenting and spend the time/money that they spend on children on myself or on my own child or two. This is mitigated somewhat by subsidising parenthood in various ways (education spending, child benefits etc.) but overall there are big financial costs to raising children, especially more than two.
Like all social democracy, Scandinavian social democracy developed at a time of high birth rates and high personal savings rates. The economist Paul Samuelson explicitly made reference to this in his defence of American Social Security: sure, it's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that can never go bust, because each generation is always much bigger and more prosperous than the last! Social democracy has had a clash with reality in the past few decades and the question of its viability in an ageing society has not been solved. How do you make social democracy work with an exponential and structural increase in the numbers of people using welfare services but not contributing to them?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND?locations=SE
This problem is structural, in that higher life expectancies and lower birth rates mean that it will continue to accelerate over time. The baby boomers were an unusually big demographic group, in Scandinavia as elsewhere, but the pattern of generations being smaller and living longer is persistent.
This problem is aggravated by the stagnation in wealth-creation in European social democracies since 2007. Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007. So they have both a structurally persistent rise in welfare demands and a structurally persistent stagnation in their capacity to produce new wealth to meet those demands.
Scandinavia is like a bee hive that is still producing new larvae at an accelerating rate, but which has stopped producing higher levels of honey. The current solution is for the worker bees to work harder and eat less, but that does not seem like the kind of long-run stable social system that Tyler Cowen points out is important for utilitarians, since it requires that the worker bees work harder and eat less indefinitely. And, unlike worker bees, Scandinavian wealth-creators have the option of leaving to places like Switzerland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong etc., which let them eat money of the honey they create.
As the proportion of the population benefiting from the welfare state but not contributing to it explodes, how can social democracy survive? It will either have to go down the direction of authoritarian socialism, e.g. banning wealth-creators (workers and investors) from leaving the country to escape high tax rates, or more neoliberalism, e.g. a smaller, meaner welfare state. Thus far, the choice of social democrats has been the latter, moderated by high national debts to put the tax burden on future generations of wealth-creators, who can't vote yet - intensifying the welfare state Ponzi scheme, but not solving its long-run stability problem.
Of course, insofar as the US is socially democratic, it has similar problems, e.g. with Social Security. But that's not a case against right-wing policies, but the opposite! And US GDP per capita has risen at an astonishingly persistent rate since 2007. Note that I'm not talking about wages: what matters for the long-run viability of a welfare system is that wealth-creators are sufficiently incentivised (and not disabled by regulations etc.) to create wealth to fund the ever-increasing future liabilities of the system. For that, you need higher total incomes, not necessarily wages per se - from the point of view of public finance, capital gains tax revenue smells as sweet as payroll tax revenue. There are other problems with "wage stagnation" arguments that may come up at this stage of my arguments, but the whole issue is prima facie irrelevant for the reasons I've just given. And the US welfare system is arguably still too generous to be stable long-term, even with its higher economic growth relative to Scandinavia and other highly social democratic places, but again, that's hardly a utilitarian argument against right-wing policies!
Now, I don't strongly endorse the reasoning above. I can think of lots of social democratic responses. For example, importing worker bees from other hives without Scandinavia's demographic problems may at least prolong the sustainability of social democracy until medical technology enables healthspan to catch up with lifespan. The connection between welfare states, higher taxes, and economic growth is very murky: you can make the case that we don't know if it's Scandinavia's social democratic policies that are causing economic stagnation in Scandinavia and other social democracies viz. the US and other less socially democratic countries. Causal inference in social science is an extremely difficult matter. You can also argue that the utility benefits of a generous welfare state are so strong relative to the costs of unemployment and risks of long-run instability that Sweden's model is preferable to the US model. Or you could argue that social democracy + Danish-style labour market policies is the sort of social democracy that a utilitarian should want. I don't know how to estimate aggregate utility with a sufficient degree of accuracy to answer these questions - that doesn't bother me, because I am not a utilitarian, and even if I was, I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil, any more than being a hedonist is the best way of achieving maximal personal pleasure.
As stated at the start of this comment, I am not saying that there is an obvious utilitarian case against social democracy. I don't think that a social democratic utilitarian is obviously irrational. I am saying that there is not an obvious utilitarian case for social democracy, and that a right-wing utilitarian position is not obviously wrong. Both David Friedman and Peter Singer are utilitarians, and I have a huge amount of admiration for the intellects of each of them.
Harlequin5942
26d ago
giving myself any sort of self actualizing goal and getting busy is the best and most immediate cure.
And a lot cheaper than going to therapy. Even classically "useless" male coping mechanisms like chopping wood or fantasy football are cheaper, while potentially disproving negative thoughts like "I can never do anything right!" that people often experience when depressed.
Today, I passed a forest path that I cleared for a summer job as a teenager, when I was very depressed and almost crippled with social anxieties. Working on that path wasn't the whole story of how I got better, but it was one of the early moves in the right direction. Of course my work was sporadic, ill-organised, slow, and so on, but it was something where I made progress every day, received some positive feedback, and achieved something that looked impressive at the end.
Humanity 1. The NGO is "SOS Humanity", a German organisation.
The new Italian government is arguing that the host countries of these organisations should agree to take in some of the migrants who are being picked up at sea.
SOS Humanity argues that any migrant whose ship capsizes etc. and gets rescued by them has a right, under the law of the sea, to be taken to the nearest safe port. The incentive effects that this creates are obviously monstrous: you can go anywhere, provided you can do so unsafely. NGOs will make every effort to help you get into the country you want, provided that your boat sinks and the lives of e.g. your children are threatened...
It's like offering a child toys and candy every time they drink bleach.
The Italian government must be very careful, because the last interior minister who tried to reduce mass migration over the Mediterranean is now being prosecuted for "kidnapping" migrants and could face 15 years in jail for his actions as minister...
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