Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be • Hacker News Board

Re: Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be

#131

Post by mpf62 » Thu, May 27, 2010, 12:39 PM UTC

a-priori wrote: post #121

hugh3 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great political ideas come, not from committees or from random samplings of the uninformed or semi-informed masses, but from intelligent and forceful leaders who can think them through thoughtfully, who can articulate them in a way that resonates with people, and who can set out an agenda to carry them into effective action. Great leaders? Resonating with the masses? That sounds more like a primer on how completely a…

I agree. For a democratic system that is completely at odds with the US or UK one, take a look at Switzerland. While in most ways it operates as a republic, for their executive branch, they don't have one head of state. They have the Swiss Federal Council, which meets weekly, in secret, and has not been replaced since it was formed in 1848 (individual members have retired and been replaced in that time, of course). T…

The prohibition of minarets does not have anything to do with religious freedom. You can build as many mosques as you want and you are free to pray to anyone you like. It's only the minarets (the towers on top of the mosques) that most swiss people dislike because they just don't fit in the landscape. Of course, this prohibition is an overreaction (there are only a handful of minarets already and building restrictions are strict in general), but I can understand that people think that "Heidiland" isn't supposed to look like ... e.g. Istanbul.

Re: Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be

#132

Post by stcredzero » Thu, May 27, 2010, 2:28 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #123

tsally wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only coming up with a great political idea was as easy as writing a high quality encyclopedia article. Quantitatively there are several orders of magnitude more article authors than great political thinkers. If we place all activities on a continuum based on intellectual difficultly, there's a point where crowd sourcing stops working. I think it's pretty clear where political thought stands compared to writing enc…

"If only coming up with a great political idea was as easy as writing a high quality encyclopedia article." Coming up with a great political idea is probably pretty easy. The difficulty comes in convincing lots of people to make the sacrifices and compromises necessary to implement the great idea. That's why they call it politics, no?

What's so "great" about a political idea no one cares about?

Re: Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be

#133

Post by stcredzero » Thu, May 27, 2010, 2:30 PM UTC

mpf62 wrote: post #131

a-priori wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. For a democratic system that is completely at odds with the US or UK one, take a look at Switzerland. While in most ways it operates as a republic, for their executive branch, they don't have one head of state. They have the Swiss Federal Council, which meets weekly, in secret, and has not been replaced since it was formed in 1848 (individual members have retired and been replaced in that time, of course). T…

The prohibition of minarets does not have anything to do with religious freedom. You can build as many mosques as you want and you are free to pray to anyone you like. It's only the minarets (the towers on top of the mosques) that most swiss people dislike because they just don't fit in the landscape. Of course, this prohibition is an overreaction (there are only a handful of minarets already and building restriction…

So "Postmodernism" is really a conservative idea?

Re: Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be

#134

Post by stcredzero » Thu, May 27, 2010, 2:42 PM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #91

grellas wrote: post #75

Great political ideas come, not from committees or from random samplings of the uninformed or semi-informed masses, but from intelligent and forceful leaders who can think them through thoughtfully, who can articulate them in a way that resonates with people, and who can set out an agenda to carry them into effective action. None of this is easy to do and it takes exceptional people even to make a credible stab at it…

I see no real correlation between "great political ideas" and their source. You're just as likely to get terrible totalitarian, unworkable, incoherent, or simply misinformed ideas as good ones from any one source (e.g, Ayn Rand & co for an example of a series of well-formulated but relatively baseless ideas). Is it possible that there is no way to predict the quality of these sorts of systems (assuming non-triviality…

I find Objectivism and related ideas to be extremely internally self-consistent. (Which for me is a big component of being Well Formed.) But just because something is internally self consistent doesn't mean that it's such a good idea in a given context. The results a given system yields are dependent on the interaction of a number of interdependent social, cultural, and economic systems. (A communist revolution could be a great idea in the face of a corrupt system, but turn out to be a horrible idea over time. Capitalism could result in tremendous wealth generation in one time and place, but in tremendous repression in another.)

This idea should be extended to programming languages and computer systems. The success of Unix, C, Perl, PHP, iPhone OS and many other examples of technology is highly dependent on their interaction with pre-existing user communities and technological infrastructure.

Re: Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be

#135

Post by stcredzero » Thu, May 27, 2010, 2:45 PM UTC

pavs wrote: post #70

jerf wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"After reading some of the comments on their website I have hard time distinguishing trolls from republican talking points." Look, can't we come together under the banner of mutual brotherhood and fraternity and agree that Internet trolls can't be held against any political view? Can't we all come together and agree that whatever our differences, at least we can look down our noses at that lot? Do you really think it…

I think you misunderstood me. I abhor all politicians and all forms of fixed political ideology, whether its the liberal, the conservative the libertarians or what not. Any ideology that encourages you to blindly follow a self-imposed moral, with disregard to rationality and reason, or the needs of the present day, is not my cup of tea. But even those ideologies have extremsist, and if you were to actually listen to…

I abhor all politicians and all forms of fixed political ideology

Political ideologies are imperfect mental tools. Their relevance is highly contextual to a given time and place. Perhaps many politicians become corrupted by this notion, and they forget that there are actually fundamental principles at work in reality. (And perhaps this is why scientists are so bad at politics?)

Re: Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be

#136

Post by illumin8 » Thu, May 27, 2010, 5:19 PM UTC

notauser wrote: post #95

illumin8 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quit linking to insane blog posts and pretending it comes from an official DNC website. Anyone can create a blog at my.barackobama.com. It's like blogspot. Unfortunately, there is no mandatory mental health screening required to purchase an Internet connection or a computer.

I think you mean 'fortunately'. A few trolls is a small price to pay for something approximating anonymity and freedom.

Yeah, I was being sarcastic. I love the internet, even with it's psycho insane trolls... :-)

Re: Republicans' new Web site not exactly what they hoped it would be

#137

Post by mpf62 » Fri, May 28, 2010, 7:44 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #133

mpf62 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prohibition of minarets does not have anything to do with religious freedom. You can build as many mosques as you want and you are free to pray to anyone you like. It's only the minarets (the towers on top of the mosques) that most swiss people dislike because they just don't fit in the landscape. Of course, this prohibition is an overreaction (there are only a handful of minarets already and building restriction…

So "Postmodernism" is really a conservative idea?

Probably not in general, but concerning architecture I would tend to say yes. Isn’t it an important part of “postmodern architecture” to melt premodern/traditional designs with modern ones? So, conservative ideas/values seem to have some influence.