guesswho
3yr ago
That make sense.
I would love to see the Democratic Party Mayoral Candidate vs. the Chicago Democrats Mayoral Candidate on the general election ballot.
guesswho
3yr ago
Honestly, I am of the opinion that the party should choose the candidate that they want representing them on the ballot
And then the voters get to choose who will represent them through the actual election.
I understand the logic that we have a tow party system, and in 'safe' districts a majority is always going to vote for whoever their party puts on the ballot, so that's the 'real' election in these districts.
But I'm willing to dabble in a little accelerationism here and hope that, if the party keeps putting up people that 'their' voters hate, maybe those voters will wise up and actually elect an independent candidate that actual shares their values, eventually.
Also, I really really want approval voting,which would let things like this actually work.
guesswho
3yr ago
Of course, imbedded within that is they wanted to savagely deny that right to blacks held in chattel slavery. Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis
That's not 'likewise', though.
It's pretty normal for both sides of a war to say they want to kill the people on the other side. That's sort of what war is. Many Israelis express the inverse sentiment.
Modern US wars are supposed to be more 'humanitarian' than that and it's tacky for us to express such sentiments, but. It's pretty normal war rhetoric, and war is about hating the other country you're fighting.
Whereas horrible oppressing and torturing your own citizens, in fact rather than in rhetoric, as a matter of course and a matter of enduring policy rather than as a temporary contingent reaction to an ongoing event like a war, is a qualitatively different thing.
First of all, war rhetoric tends to end after the war; policy like this may be permanent.
Second, even if the most bleeding-heart of liberals would like a world without borders where morality doesn't depend on nationality, the standard reality is that governments have duties and obligations towards the proper treatment of their own citizens that trump how they treat the citizens of other nations (to say nothing of the citizens of enemy nations during war). It's still nice for governments to not commit too many war crimes against enemy citizens, the UN will call them meanies if they do it a lot, but they're inherently a bad government if they do the same to their own citizens who they have authority over and obligations towards.
My question then is whether the right to self determination is properly thought of as as a right?
For people? Sure, it's one right among many, depending of course on what you even mean y the vague term.
For governments? Governments aren't people, they don't have rights.
There's a sense in which, even if 49% of the people in your democracy disagree with a policy, it is still interfering with their freedoms for some foreign country to come in and change that policy to what they would want instead. Yes, in a democracy, there is some connection between the self-determination of the state and the self-determination of the people.
But it's a tenuous link at best. Just gesturing at the individual's right to self-determination is not sufficient to justify states doing anything they want as an absolute right.
Especially when what that state is doing is taking away the right to self-determination form many of it's own people! At that point the link isn't just tenuous, it's basically just rhetorical.
So for example they would not support American whites creating their own ethno-state enclave.
A question that progressives sometimes get asked is 'how can you be so against white separatists but still associate with black separatists?'
One answer is 'As we understand the situation, in the US at at least, most black separatists are talking about going somewhere new and founding a black-only community, and most white separatists are talking about expelling everyone else from where they already live, or just oppressing them until they leave.'
If people wanted to start new white ethno-state somewhere else, with no non-white citizens so no one is being oppressed, I would think they are very stupid and tacky, but I wouldn't have an extremely strong moral objection.
guesswho
3yr ago
Right now I'm still at the stage of 'inherently trust the abilities of pirates to stay a step ahead of authorities, be slightly annoyed by having to look up the new fix and install it every 6 months'.
This strategy has held more or less true for my entire life up to this point. It is possible that in another month or year we'll the the tipping point where Google has a such a stranglehold on every digital thing in the world that they can actually succeed in ending this trend, but my priors are heavily against it.
(and note, I'm saying I believe there will be 'some solution', not that it will be adblockers forever - maybe something with VPNs or third-party/crowd-based hosts or etc, who knows)
guesswho
3yr ago
I dunno, I would agree that they're blown out of proportion, but I'd also argue they're at least somewhat newsworthy.
Again, it's really really salient to me that I can control my diet and exercise to avoid heart disease and I can not associate with mentally unstable people with guns and not drive drunk/always drive defensively and etc. to protect myself from a lot of known risks that kill a lot more people than this every year. Generally speaking, anything where there's clear and well-known methods I can look up to limit my risk, I fee may be very important, but not newsworthy.
Whereas things that just kill you out of the blue for no reasons as you're going about your day, or especially that kill a lot of people at once, feel newsworthy to me as an unexplored risk that I don't have much control over mitigating for myself. It feels to me like that makes it more of a topic of public conversation and public policy because I can't reasonably take personal responsibility to avoid it.
You probably just have different intuitions about what makes something newsworthy, which is totally fine. I'm just saying how it feels to me, I don't know how generalizable it is.
guesswho
3yr ago
Sure, public policy is difficult and complicated.
I was talking about the structure of the overall system, not the details of a specific policy.
I didn't say 'woke people', and I don't know precisely who you would or would not include under that classification.
I'm talking about major media outlets and politicians and the like who were using 'white supremacy' for a while. They make concessions to conservatives all the time
guesswho
3yr ago
What you're calling 'the constant drumbeat of urban violence' is just the normal stochastic process of people who know and interact with each other sometimes being violent towards each other (plus a semantic fence drawn around a part of that phenomenon for rhetorical reasons).
We can talk about whether those rates are too high or too low, and what policies could change that number, sure.
But it's not really newsworthy because it's mostly normal stuff that happens everywhere (at different rates) in one form or another. And people know how it works, what their risks are like and where teh danger comes from, how to avoid it, etc..
Incidents like this are newsworthy because they're unusual, unexpected, spectacular, and can happen out of nowhere to just about anyone simply going about their day.
guesswho
3yr ago
So crime or inequality are apparently caused by capitalism even though they existed before capitalism.
Just to note, the same outcome can have different causes under different circumstances.
EG flooding can be caused by torrential rain or by tsunami, but it wouldn't be wrong for someone in a torrential rainstorm to say that the rain is causing the flooding they are currently experiencing.
guesswho
3yr ago
I disagree pretty strongly, 'woke' is applied by someone to almost everything non-conservatives do or say these days, and 'capitalism' can mean anything from 'any form of trade or private property' to 'a system with a specific ruling class of capital-owners that is distinct and privileged from workers'.
I do expect that you may personally have extremely clear definitions of those terms in your head, and be in a filter bubble where most people use the words that way pretty consistently.
However, I think this state of affairs is true for most of the people who use all those other terms, as well, and they have equally good reason to think their words are fairly clear and consistent.
guesswho
3yr ago
I sort of disagree, I think they usually have a specific and constrained meaning to the people saying them.
The problem being that the people they're being said to are often hearing a different meaning, and the people they're being said about have a vested interest in making sure that they have no reasonable meaning at all.
So conversations break down into people talking past each other, either accidentally through divergence of perspectives and filter bubbles between people on the same 'side', or through intentional malicious misinterpretation (either immediate, or mediated through 'elites' pushing the narrative of confusing definitions) between people on opposite 'sides'.
It's true that, if you listen to 5 different people using these terms, they might be using them to talk about subtly or not-so-subtly different concepts, and they might not all apply the same term to the same situations. It's true that, on the macro scale, that makes it seem like they have no specific or coherent meaning.
But I think it's a thought-terminating error to jump from that appearance of incoherence on the macro level, to assuming that individual people who use them are not trying to say anything specific or meaningful or insightful or useful, and are just spouting random sneers.
Usually the individual does have something cogent they're thinking and trying to convey with the term, even if the state of the culture war makes it hard to convey these types of ideas effectively. You'll fail to learn something if you look at this difficulty and place the error in the mind of the speaker, rather than the sorry state of the language and culture.
Ideally, this is where we start asking each other to taboo our words, to make communication more clear.
guesswho
3yr ago
I think it was more an issue of conceding to right-wing complaints about 'individual bias' and 'systemic inequity' both being refereed to with the same word ('racism'), and trying to actually separate the two by calling individual beliefs that one race is superior or individual efforts to intentionally favor one race 'supremacy' instead of 'racism'.
Which of course didn't work at all to mollify conservatives who claimed to hate how the same word was being used to refer to different things. What they actually hated was just being smeared in general; the fact that the terms used to do so were being used confusingly was never more than a 'gotcha'.
guesswho
3yr ago
I mean, I also don't blame individual parents trying to privilege their own kids at the expense of other people's kids.
I don't blame people for acting rationally under situations of conflicting interests or coordination problems, in general.
That's most of the reason we need a government and public policy in the first place, to try to push situations like that towards global optima that can't be found from individuals acting in their personal interest.
guesswho
3yr ago
A function mirrored by terms like 'woke' or 'socialist/communist' on the right.
I think that we should not be so quick to throw out the useful-definition-of-the-term baby with the misuse-by-cynical-activists bathwater in each of these cases.
It's true, on the one hand, that 'racist' gets used inconsistently and imprecisely by activists on the left to smear opponents or apply 'the worst argument in the world' to things they dislike.
It's also true that there are a specific set of well-defined and useful meanings of the term, that are used honestly by many serious people and are important tools in the intellectual toolbox for anyone who wants to discuss these topics.
In general, if we threw away every term or philosophy or position that was misused or misapplied by cynical activists, there wouldn't be anything left to talk about in the Culture War Thread at all.
guesswho
3yr ago
You are very much giving a 'Motte'/steelman version of 'racism' that bears little resemblance to the actual concept in practice, and bears more resemblance to other more appropriate words such as 'kinship'.
In practice, racism obviously is not just positive feelings/actions towards your kin, but (centrally) negative feelings/actions towards others, including everything from mistaken beliefs about their attributes and capabilities to denying their fundamental human rights and dignity to slavery/mass murder/etc.
Inherently, I think that if something doesn't bias you towards inaccurately negative beliefs or unendorsedly negative actions towards members of an outgroup, it is non-central to call that something 'racism' (of the individualized type you are describing here, leaving aside systemic definitions).
guesswho
3yr ago
Was this whole thing just a marketing campaign by the Cork Tourism Board that got out of hand?
That makes about as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.
guesswho
3yr ago
I would be interested to know the actual reason for why things like this happen - like, for instance, is your local radio station copying content from some American station, and doesn't have the infrastructure to come up with their own content that month? Is the person in charge of programming at your local station just so culturally Americanized that this seems natural to them and they can't think of why it shouldn't be this way? Do they think that their audience is sufficiently Americanized that they'll be interested in this content?
Because yeah, this does seem pretty silly, but as an American I really have no idea how or why these things happen in other countries. I don't actually really want American culture to have this much influence around the world, including the cultural and political elements I like and agree with, a lot of it is so specific to our history or politics or other contingent factors that I wouldn't expect it to be useful elsewhere unchanged.
guesswho
3yr ago
I mean, not for nothing, but as I understand it these are mostly quite old office-dwelling people who have to be physically present and sitting upright and not asleep when each of these votes happen.
The strategy may be to literally wear them out, physically, mentally, and emotionally, until their strength fails or their will breaks and they either give in or go home.
guesswho
3yr ago
This kind of rhetoric won’t play very well with people who don’t already want to understand their enemies. Getting your enemies’ “necks under your jackboots” might be a figuratively correct description of what their motives are. However that’s not the way they think of it. It just sounds so oppressive when you put it that way.
Just sounds like a typical ironic joke to me.
Also, see my response here.
Also, OP is talking about the general case here. If you want to write into the law a separate clause for 'political candidates currently running for office and also on trial cannot be issued gag orders', that's something we could discuss (I'm against), but it doesn't really answer the general question we're discussing here.
guesswho
3yr ago
The hundred million people who will decry this gag order had already made up their mind about whether the trial is legitimate. Not much could happen to make their reaction any worse.
guesswho
3yr ago
Alright, I feel like I extremely reluctantly have to be the person to remind everyone that our legislative body was invaded by an angry mob and that a seated session of Congress which was counting electoral votes had to be evacuated in fear for their lives.
It is not unreasonable that the judiciary should think that there should be a trial over these and all the other actions actually at stake in this trial. If there were some dispassionate philosopher-lawyer who cared only for the letter of the law and it's enforcement, I would expect them to want to have a trial on these topics.
I'm not going to claim that the prosecutor or everyone at justice or etc. have no political motivations or desire for revenge or etc. at all, nor that everything is always 100% of the time being done in a perfectly professional and dispassionate way that has nothing to do with politics. Of course that's not true.
But, "The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign"?
No, that's a nice side benefit for some of the people involved. There's very plausible crimes being tried here, real things really happened in the real world.
guesswho
3yr ago
Your hypothetical didn't actually mention anything about a court case in which a judge could issue a gag order... I assume the idea is supposed to be that the court case is underway at the same time it's in the newspapers, and the protagonist will eventually be found innocent, but only after their reputation has taken a hit, and the reputational hit either won't be reversed by alter being found innocent, or too much financial damage will already have been done by then?
I guess what I would say is that 1. that sees like a really narrow case (most cases don't go to newspapers while they're happening, most prospective buyers probably aren't reading the local newspaper or googling your name, most rape accusations don't go to trial anyway, there has to be a big financial thing happening in between the time of the newspaper article and the time of the not-guilty verdict, etc), which doesn't make it irrelevant but means it should have less influence over how we design policy than the median case, and 2. I would hope a judge in that case wouldn't issue a blanket gag order, it seems like you could say a lot to protect your reputation without crossing the line on a conservative gag order, and as OP states gag orders are really quite rare anyway, and 3. yeah, there may have to be some trade-offs between corner-cases like this and making the system work in the median case.
That said, yeah, I take your point that sometimes you want to defend yourself in the court of public opinion at the same time you are defending yourself in actual court, and this creates a genuine conflict of interests between protecting the court proceedings and protecting normal speech-based liberty.
I think my intuition on this mostly falls on the side of 'being a defendant in a trial sucks in a lot of ways, especially if they're keeping you in jail during the trial or crippling your family with charges related to getting out on bond, so this isn't an extraordinary new type of burden compared to all the other ones. I'm open to the idea that we should reform the system to make it less damaging to defendants who have not been convicted yet, but if we are deciding to care about that then these super-rich and powerful guys worrying about their reputations are way down on my list under a lot of other defendants who need the help more urgently.'
Isn't this largely a regional thing, though, since housing markets in different areas go through regular bubble-and-burst cycles?
I couldn't have bought the house I have now 4 years after or 4 years before I bought it, because the only way I was able to buy it was sitting on a down payment for years until the local market went bust for a 16-month period.
More options
Context Copy link