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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#201

Post by zbrozek »

We’ve never had so few rights over our own property, and so many over that of others.

I feel this acutely as I have waited years to be allowed to change a leaky roof. It's still not fixed.

I've also been waiting a month for a permit to fix an existing fence. I don't even know why I should need a permit for that at all.

Yet I can show up to a planning meeting and complain that I don't like the applicant's proposed landscaping, causing them three months of delay and the accumulation of huge additional expense.

It's ridiculous. I can hardly stomach doing basic repairs like this. Building something like a brand-new dental office seems unimaginably difficult.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#202

Post by ZeroGravitas »

thrown_22 wrote: post #197
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #156

This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism. I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists. But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want. Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorship…

You're not supposed to use that word because Mussolini used to kill political prisoners by feeding them caster oil until they died from diarrhea.

That's not all they did though:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism/Opposition-to-parli...

> Mussolini, a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano) before World War I, became a fierce antisocialist after the war. After coming to power, he banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war economy in the mid-1930s, Mussolini allowed industrialists to run their companies with a minimum of government interference. Despite his former anticapitalist rhetoric, he cut taxes on business, permitted cartel growth, decreed wage reduction, and rescinded the eight-hour-workday law. Between 1928 and 1932 real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Mussolini admitted that the standard of living had fallen but stated that “fortunately the Italian people were not accustomed to eating much and therefore feel the privation less acutely than others.

> In the political discourse of the fascist right, economic problems related to large disparities of wealth between rich and poor were treated as problems of social status and class prejudice. Rather than attacking upper-class wealth, fascists attacked upper-class snobbism.

> Fascist movements criticized parliamentary democracy for allowing the Marxist threat to exist in the first place. According to Hitler, democracy undermined the natural selection of ruling elites and was “nothing other than the systematic cultivation of human failure.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, maintained that the people never rule themselves and claimed that every history-making epoch had been created by aristocrats.

That last one could have been inserted into the current article and fitted perfectly.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#203

Post by jameshart »

quadcore wrote: post #64
jameshart wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t mean to twist your point; I’m just putting some statistical information out there that I think suggests a more hopeful picture than your assertion that a random kid in 1950 had pretty good odds of a positive outcome compared to a modern kid having ‘very little’ chance of being happy. I don’t think it is fair to gloss over the large number of people who were children in the 1950s for whom their chances of happin…

your assertion that a random kid in 1950 had pretty good odds of a positive outcome compared to a modern kid having ‘very little’ chance of being happy. Didnt say a random kid. I said a kid randomly air dropped with no resource nor parenting. I didnt say what kid. I actually dont think he'd end up easily okay today, I could be wrong. Anyway my point was more about illustrating the complexity of society today compared…

Wow. So let’s unpack that a little more shall we? A kid with no parenting in the 1950s? Maybe they’d find their way into the care of the Catholic Church, where approximately 1 in 10 of the priests were abusers. Or perhaps to a residential school like the ones Canada where 1900 kids wound up in unmarked graves.

Can you please be more specific about what ‘complexity’ in the modern world you feel would contribute to it being so much harder for a kid to survive?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#204

Post by michaelwww »

systemvoltage wrote: post #72
michaelwww wrote: post #62

I think we can all agree that we would like less regulation on us when we are trying to do something, but I wonder how much less regulation we would accept on others who are trying to do something we don't like? I don't think many want to live in a world with no regulation, because some idiot would dumping old cars in the river by our house. I don't know if we're over-regulated or that the world has become more compl…

Those regulations can stay. If you ever worked on a complex highly regulated space such as architecture/construction; there are lot of things that get piled up that make no sense whatsoever even diving into the history and context of why it was written. For example, Oregon's gas pump law (you cannot fill your own gas), I remember diving into the actual law and reasons behind it said something along the lines of "Beca…

I lived in Oregon for awhile and it was commonly said that this was a make work program for reformed felons trying to turn their lives around, like a starter job out of prison.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#205

Post by DocTomoe »

gentoo wrote: post #137
spoonjim wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge which is fewer than the number of people who jump off of it every year.

what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction

To give a few comparison numbers:

In Switzerland, arguably the world's experts in tunnel-boring, one death per tunnel kilometer is considered acceptable (and it is often less than that).

The much easier Channel tunnel has had around one death per five kilometer.

The Japanese Akashi Kaikyo Bridge prominently has had no construction deaths, which was considered extraordinary at the time. The Humber Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge before Akashi Kaikyo, did cost four lives.

Construction is a dangerous business. You operate heavy machinery. You move large amounts of heavy material. You deal with power tools. Death is always a possibility - and that's something we IT folks tend to forget in our clima-controlled environments with our cozy desks and expensive chairs.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#206

Post by Joel_Mckay »

It took many years to understand this idea persists in our culture:

"God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. " (1 Corinthians 2:2-5)

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#207

Post by kaashif »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #156

This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism. I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists. But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want. Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorship…

Democratic control over things that affect everyone and benefit everyone is necessary to avoid e.g. free rider problems, pollution.

Democratically restricting other people's rights, to the extent that people are not allowed to e.g. subdivide a house into a duplex, all because it would reduce the voters' property values, is immoral and counter productive.

Certain rights should not be subject to democracy to the same extent as other laws. When a country comes up with a constitution enumerating rights and makes amending those rights very difficult, that's saying that those rights should be (to some extent) removed from democratic control.

But you are absolutely right, when people talk about reducing democratic control, they often secretly mean giving power to technocrats rather than returning power to the people.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#208

Post by lultimouomo »

The article argues that building stuff it's complicated because some people want to ponder and analyze too much, hindering innovation and depriving people of good things.

I think you could very well take the opposite position: builders have inflicted plenty of bad on humanity - greenhouse gasses, lead in fuels, deforestation, and so on. Why shouldn't we infer that we need more pondering, analyzing, regulation, to save humanity from the next builder-created plague?

I do not subscribe either of these position, but I think the article does nothing to sway me towards the first.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#209

Post by grnmamba »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #156

This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism. I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists. But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want. Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorship…

Fascism is when the state stops blocking projects. The less projects get blocked, the more fascist it is.

And when no projects get blocked, then it's national socialism.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#210

Post by cdavid »

The talk over regulation is a bit of a red herring.

A lot of those phenomenons can be explained by the Baumol disease. See e.g. "why are the prices so damn high" https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/wh...

> In approaching this question I had some ideas in mind. I assumed that regulation, bloat and bureaucracy, monopoly power and the Baumol effect would each explain some of what is going on. After looking at this in depth, however, my conclusion is that it’s almost all Baumol effect. That conclusion radically changes one’s evaluation of price increases and decreases over the long run and it changes what, if anything, one might try to do to address such price changes.

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