Jiro
2d ago
Getting the government to force someone to give you money counts as knowing how money works.
Jiro
2d ago
Covid is an example of how a publicly funded healthcare system cannot be trusted to tell you what counts as triage. They have no skin in the game, no incentive to make decisions that actually maximize health. If your father dies, they don't even get upset.
Jiro
3d ago
The idea is that overburdening the health care system risks other people's lives, so you're actually still comparing your life to lives, not your life to an amorphous system.
Of course, even this version can be criticized in the way that socialism in general can be criticized.
Jiro
4d ago
Would you accept a rollback on trans issues, gun control, immigration, and other right-wing issues in order to get allies against climate change? Because that's the problem. Climate change is urgent when it comes to "you have to give up something" but is suddenly not so urgent when it comes to "we have to give up something".
Jiro
5d ago
Let’s imagine some white CEO stammering to the minority police officer,
If the arresting officer has a thick Latino accent, he is a working class minority police officer.
There's also the question of whether someone has relatives back in China who can be threatened--that isn't going to disappear if they lose Chinese citizenship.
I don't see why citizenship even matters here. Nobody cares that someone in the US can vote in China; they care that they may be an agent for China's government. Getting US citizenship doesn't prevent that. If anything, getting US citizenship makes it worse because the agent can't be deported.
Jiro
10d ago
If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is
While most people hated school, they did so for different reasons. Rationalists hated school for reasons that are strong enough that becoming adults won't change their mind--bullies, incompetent teaching, they already know what's being taught, etc. Normies hated school for reasons such as "I can't play video games if I have to study for an exam". Adults don't agree with those reasons.
For the vast majority, who hated school for normie reasons, school is not a downside, even if it was at the moment they were actually attending school. The view that even from an adult perspective school is bad is weird.
Jiro
11d ago
Unfortunately the same mechanisms that are used to suppress these things for good reasons are used to suppress them for bad reasons, and it's impossible to tell them apart.
Germany, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced countries in Europe
The Soviets were treated in the media as one of the most advanced countries in the world.
I'll suggest the conflict theory explanation instead: The average person doesn't think Communism is very bad because decades of leftist media propaganda has tried to minimize any bad things that Communists did from at least the 1960s until Communism died out. And even afterwards, they never tried to stir up hysteria about Communists being around every corner like they did with fascists.
Normies do not exist
You just said that right after a section which said "most people are affected by emotional impact, not logical arguments like you guys are". That's pretty much "normies exist".
Acting like a rationalist is weird. Being convinced like a rationalist would be convinced is doubly so.
Jiro
12d ago
You could probably get the same by using classical spy work
At some point, which they've long passed, making spying easier in effect grants the spies new capabilities, even though they "already could do that". (This applies to domestic spying too. The NSA could send out an agent to surveil any target that is caught up in Echelon, but surveilling everyone makes things so much easier that there's no comparison.)
Jiro
12d ago
If most people cannot even comprehend the ECP, how is democracy anywhere near a reasonable regime?
Because they can comprehend things like "I shouldn't be lynched", and voting for "I shouldn't be lynched" is inextricably tied to voting for how the government acts on the market.
Jiro
13d ago
2nd edition: "Alignment shows the general behavior of the average monster of that type. Exceptions, though uncommon, may be encountered."
Jiro
14d ago
Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope.
No, they weren't. "Always __ evil" was a 3rd edition exclusive, and didn't apply to orcs anyway. Anyone who says this, particularly using the exact phrasing "Always Chaotic Evil", is probably quoting TV Tropes or imitating a meme copied from TV Tropes.
Jiro
19d ago
There are systems in place that prevent politicians from calling each other foreign traitors, paedophiles and fraudsters and then having everyone credulously believe them, guaranteeing their victory.
The "system" that prevents this is the "everyone" part. A politician who calls a scientist a fraudster under your system doesn't have to convince everyone--he just needs to convince the police and a judge.
Human wisdom is surely capable of distinguishing between imperfection, negligence and fraud.
No it isn't. That's why I gave that example.
There's also the question of malicious actors. You not only need the ability to distinguish between those, you need the ability to distinguish between those when faced by a hostile actor who is deliberately blurring them. You may know what negligence is, but if some politician looking for a scapegoat pointed to imperfection and said "that's negligence", would you be able to prove the politician wrong?
Jiro
20d ago
In the past I've made this sort of argument and been rebuffed by some people on the grounds that if we imposed very severe punishments then people would just double down on lying and blaming others to escape liability. Plus it would disincentivize people from taking up important roles.
Remember the scientists convicted of manslaughter for earthquake predictions? If you severely punish scientists for harming someone, you're going to get tons of cases like this. A lot of scientists don't have political connections and therefore are easy scapegoats. Don't think "well, we could have been able to catch these scientists who really were responsible for lives" but rather "what else would we be enabling, by making it easier to catch these scientists?" (Yes, they were exonerated later, but the point still stands.)
Also, pretty much anything you do on a large scale involves lives. Approve a drug a little late and lives are lost if people couldn't get the drug. Approve a drug a little early and lives may be lost to side effects or displacing better drugs from the market. Support cars that run on fossil fuels and get dinged for all the lives lost to pollution or global warming. If you punish scientists for things that they do on a large scale that cost lives, you will no longer have scientists, because everything on that scale costs lives if you do it wrong and no human is 100% perfect.
If you had to ask "does it really help", it was not with candor.
Things that people do involve tradeoffs. If the doctor doesn't properly communicate which measure has which effect, the patient can't properly decide the tradeoffs. Taking a walk outside is low on the scale of burdens, but it still isn't free, and implying that it helps with the patient's condition when it doesn't is dishonest, even if the doctor admits it when questioned.
Jiro
23d ago
If you go back to the 1980s, we didn't have the modern Internet, and that's drastically going to affect how popular culture gets spread around the world. Japanese culture in the 1980s had spread as much as could be reasonably expected in a pre-Internet world.
Now that we do have the Internet, spreading culture is much easier. If Chinese culture has spread only as much with the Internet as Japanese culture spread without the Internet, Chinese culture is really doing badly.
What usually happens is that a hundred people expressed their right not to associate and the employer fires the person anyway.
Jiro
25d ago
we can be reasonably confident that the modern 2nd amendment movement centred around a politically-active NRA loosely aligned with movement conservatism was founded by people who thought that gun culture was good because it enabled Jim Crow, not in spite of it.
The NRA was created by Union officials who thought pro-Union forces needed better training. You are describing a Michael Moore-style history which is the opposite of actual history.
Jiro
27d ago
"Typical human beings are not distracted by such things, so I think you're not sincere about it".
You're basically claiming that the slope is slippery, but it's not actually going to slip towards any particular thing.
It is slipping towards a category. Many things are in the category. Republicans losing their license is one thing in the category, but not its entirety. You'd also need multiple slippery slopes all failing to get to the point of taking away the licenses of Republicans, but that does not mean that each individual slope isn't real. Republicans would need to be seen as evil enough that it's okay for the law to stop them. Freedom of speech and association would have to end. You could claim something similar for not being allowed to drive into the wilderness, but the principles that would be violated by that are a lot weaker, if they exist at all, than the principles violated by not letting Republicans have licenses.
I'd also expect "taking the wilderness away" to not immediately happen in its full form, while the pot of water with the frog boils over. Self-driving cars could first be limited to not run into protests, or the police could be given discretion to stop them when crimes are involved. Once that's established, the next step might be to keep them out of busy traffic if congestion would be too strong, or some other similar restriction that isn't just "can never go there". Cars may be commandeered by the government to take suspects to the police station, maybe even just for questioning. Police will get warrants to exclude someone from being allowed to have any vehicles go to their house. Cars will be kept out of the wilderness in nighttime hours when, you know, the wilderness isn't patrolled, and away from top-secret government areas. By the time you get to "can't go to the wilderness at all" it'll be a minor step.
This of course can happen for Republicans as well.
Biden was metooed in 2020. It made no difference.
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