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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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That's the difference between socialist and libertarian approaches I guess. A Libertarian seeks to reduce the scope of consequences of decisions to the maker of them. A Socialist seeks to increase the scope until everyone is affected including the people in power so they are forced to make decisions that are good for everyone else too. Or like everyone is forced to talk about it and make decisions that are best for everyone, because everyone's in the scope.

I guess that dichotomy works, but it seems over-necessary. It seems to me more like the rational vs. bizarro choice, poltical sensibilities aside. Consider these scenarios:

  1. A local high school is unhappy with the prom planning decisions made by the responsible faculty.

    Option A: Force the responsible faculty to attend the prom as guests with their spouses as their own 'date' night

    Option B: Give the student council some decision making power in prom planning

  2. The town council has a committee to plan road expansions that will affect a local neighborhood, and there have been some complaints.

    Option A: Force the town council to move to that neighborhood.

    Option B: Hold a public forum with input from the neighborhood members / have a representative join the committe.

  3. You and your friends are planning on dinner and drinks and debating where to go. Some folks plan to eat at home.

    Option A: Force everyone to eat at the restaurant chosen.

    Option B: Don't count the folks eating at home in the vote for where to go.

I guess you could frame all of these as Socialist vs Libertarian, but it looks more to me like obvious path vs. comically absurd.

In the real world, the argument tends to be that the decision makers with no skin in the game are pulling all triggers available to them to ensure that they retain sole decision making authority, so it really looks like

Option A: Force the responsible faculty to attend...

Option B: Force the responsible faculty to surrender some of their decision making power in prom planning to the students. (They claim that this will be the doom of the prom and seem like they might even go so far as to deliberately do their job badly, just to be "proven right" about this)

Or, looking at the valence of your choices, comically absurd vs. obvious (I hope.)

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