471–480 of 653 posts
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Your primary point is "the study harmed participants, and Gates is responsible" But your own report contradicts this, and finds the deaths unrelated. You also argue that Gates is suspect, because HPV vaccine trials were only done in India. This is also false, I sourced that already in the previous response, you did not comment on it. You keep coming back to the same Indian Parliamentary committee report, which explic…
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It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their o…
Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw. I just don't think we live in anything resembling that society and I'm not sure whether such a society is possible once you reach a certain population size. I think it's a nice idea, but I'm not sure how we get from here to there
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If that happened, it would be classed as assault in the UK - is it the same in America? And, if so, is Gates likely to be investigated by the police?
With a bunch of specific exceptions, violence is handled by the states, so it depends on the state in which it occurred. My best guess is that it's some kind of criminal offense in all 50.
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We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, but that should be expanded into more roles and duties. That's one way to make society truly democratic. In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on poll…
> We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, ...and even there, it's terribly corrupted. There are all kinds of bizarre ways that people are excluded from juries which bias the result. One commonly-cited example is that people who report moral objections to capital punishment are excluded from being empaneled on a federal jury, under the pretext that because capital punishmen…
Easiest out from jury duty ever, and if the judge want's to be a bltch and force me on anyway, well, let's just say that if the law is immoral than the defendant is going to walk.
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Your primary point is "the study harmed participants, and Gates is responsible" But your own report contradicts this, and finds the deaths unrelated. You also argue that Gates is suspect, because HPV vaccine trials were only done in India. This is also false, I sourced that already in the previous response, you did not comment on it. You keep coming back to the same Indian Parliamentary committee report, which explic…
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We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, but that should be expanded into more roles and duties. That's one way to make society truly democratic. In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on poll…
> We really only practice it in one instance in modern democracy and that's jury duty, ...and even there, it's terribly corrupted. There are all kinds of bizarre ways that people are excluded from juries which bias the result. One commonly-cited example is that people who report moral objections to capital punishment are excluded from being empaneled on a federal jury, under the pretext that because capital punishmen…
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But aren't most HOA horror stories based on people who'd been running them for years if not decades, and only end happily when someone replaces those entrenched in power with new people?
There are equally many HOA horror stories where it functions reasonably for years and then new leadership shows up and turns it into a nightmare.
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If that happened, it would be classed as assault in the UK - is it the same in America? And, if so, is Gates likely to be investigated by the police?
What a bizarre turn of events that would be if THIS was the thing that got investigated.
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> Why is that only a problem for democracy? Because democracy at least pretends to give power to the people. Except letting a few individuals wield enough wealth and power to buy media, politicians and judges is completely antagonistic to the basic ideals of democracy, and not many realize this (yet). > I’m not aware of any system that [...] Liberal democracy is better than feudalism, I see no reason why our systems…
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Erm... sure, but I don't see what that has to do with my comment? Transitions between political systems are rarely pleasant and are usually motivated by crisis.
> And don’t underestimate the portion of population that yearn to be peasants.
I don't buy that. People learn submission, it is not inherent to the human mind.
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It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their o…
Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw. I just don't think we live in anything resembling that society and I'm not sure whether such a society is possible once you reach a certain population size. I think it's a nice idea, but I'm not sure how we get from here to there
If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.
If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.
OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.
(OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)