Why do these people use the word democracy to propose changes that are oligarchy?
Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
61–70 of 504 posts
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#62> Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obliga…
> Yet anonymity/pseudonymity is incredibly valuable
> Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized/proprietary social media algorithms
I feel like I'm seeing a pattern here, something like "Hey, it's not that simple. Your solution ignores important tradeoffs. So here's my simple solution that ignores different tradeoffs."
Basically I'm objecting to any use of the word "just" in thorny social issues like this. I think that all of this is hard and none of this is obvious.
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other…
I don’t think there is any way to reconcile those things. If your primary concern is protecting individual rights in every corner of the country, you need centralization. And frankly you probably need to limit democracy as much as possible—which is what we did in the last several decades by having the Supreme Court take over many issues that other countries have decided by legislation. But there’s no limiting princip…
No I mean this specific statement: "Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state."
During the period in the US where power was most abused by bureaucrats and executives, they were also extremely local to the people they were wielding that power against.
I'm not trying to figure out some personal-freedom-vs-collective-justice conundrum, I'm asking a very concrete question about whether the quoted statement is even true. In one highly notable case affecting tens or hundreds of thousands of americans and lasting for nearly a century, that wasn't the case. That calls the assertion into question, I think.
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#64This journalist really wrote an entire article about facebook. Why is an essay needed to descibe obvious behaviour that everyone sees and can intuitely understand with their eyes. "In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse." ???? People didn't get stupider in the last decade. There is access to more information…
> Why is an essay needed to descibe obvious behaviour that everyone sees and can intuitely understand with their eyes.
Because we disagree on the assertion on what everyone can see and understand with their own eyes.
> There is access to more information and education then ever has been.
It's also getting harder and harder to discern malicious disinformation from legitimate information, particularly among those that aren't as technologically literate. The last 6 years have shattered the utopian dream of the internet bringing the world together through shared information. For example, many people still believe that the Newtown massacre, one of the most heinous crimes committed in my lifetime, was a government hoax. This is the opposite of enlightenment.
> We are slowing coming towards ultimate prosperity.
We are reaching levels of wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. I'd love to know what metrics you're using to come to that conclusion. The middle class in America is eroding at an alarming rate and more as more people fall into financial insecurity.
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#65Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time: > Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. Something I think we o…
> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.
I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could, if it chose to).
If you weaken the power of the federal government (which ironically is what i interpret "increased federalism and localism" to mean), who deals with the titans?
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#6640 years of austerity in the west. Life span actually decreasing. Desperate people act out.
The west hasn’t seen proper austerity yet, just barely warming up.
Maybe soon.
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other…
I don’t think there is any way to reconcile those things. If your primary concern is protecting individual rights in every corner of the country, you need centralization. And frankly you probably need to limit democracy as much as possible—which is what we did in the last several decades by having the Supreme Court take over many issues that other countries have decided by legislation. But there’s no limiting princip…
To reinforce giraffe_lady's point:
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.
That can happen. But what also did happen is that the bureaucrats and executives with power of your life were also very much under the influence (and in some cases, direct control) of local (and non-local) wealth. That influence/control can be very hard or impossible to tackle with only local politics (history has shown this to be clearly the case, many, many times).
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#68This article is 100% wrong. Russia's misinformation campaign against the U.S. is 100% the cause of our current national discord. Our entire culture has been maliciously and actively poisoned by a proven state sponsored attack on the U.S. and Western Europe. Everything in the past decade needs to be re-evaluated and filtered through the lens of Russian disinformation. Day in and day out, for over 10 years, the Russian…
The problem with the country is that the bulk of it has retreated into paranoid fantasies.
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#69Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time: > Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. Something I think we o…
> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other…
Institutions are error correction. If more than a certain threshold percentage of the population is straight up violently racist, no amount of quality institutions can recover signal from that noise.
Suppose x% of people will vote to convict a black man no matter the evidence, and the remaining 1-x% have a y% chance of erroneously voting to convict irrespective of race. At what value of x do you expect 2/3rds of wrongful convictions to be black?
Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid
#70Meanwhile, red/blue partisanship has declined and more independent (non-partisan) voters emerge. The article is blowing smokes up where the sun doesn’t shine. Meanwhile, http://www.stevenwwebster.com/negative-partisanship-rabid.pd...
I don't think it is safe to say that more independents means less partisanship. If people are going independent because they see themselves as somewhere between Rs and Ds, then sure. But if they go independent because they think the Rs are not right enough, or the Ds are not left enough, then that is only an example of magnifying partisanship.
I view the "independent" label to actually just mean "my party isn't part of my identity." Most "independents" consistently vote for one party, they just aren't married to it in principle.