591–600 of 602 posts
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It may be elitist but it is not irrelevant in this case. The question being asked is, literally, which side is less likely to even know what the EU is.
When it comes to politics, intelligent and rich people have proven themselves just as capable of blunder as the simplest common man. Just switch the ignorance for a sincere belief in things that aren't true.
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No, we don't remember. It might have to do with the fact Hitler wasn't ever elected for anything. Neither has NSDAP ever had a majority before they took power.
majority had nothing to do with this. You're just trying to deflect the issue. They had the plurality and hitler was their man
I'm strangely moved by this whole thing. It's a pretty decent status check on where we are with democracy ATM. I'm not against democracy, but I do think we need to pay attention to what it can & can't do. On one hand, this has been a model of democracy. A primary election agenda and referendum. The phrasing of the question was simple, clear and unbiased. The "will of the people" won over the will of the ruling struct…
My favored election procedure works like this: Every citizen takes a standardized test when they reach the age of majority, preferably Raven's matrices. This test would be used for scholastic and career purposes, aside from government. A representative body of 150 people is randomly selected from those in the top 0.1 percent every N years. The IQ test filters for intelligence, obviously. Random sampling serves as an…
Also, even granting that IQ tests are as reliable as you assume, you still need to justify a few things:
- Why do you assume the comparative advantage of these extraordinarily IQ people is to spend time as a representative, rather than in academia, science, business, non-elected positions in government, etc? I'm not convinced that the 0.1% most intelligent people make a particularly better voting body than the top 1%, or for that matter the top 15% percent, which certainly includes the majority of our elected representatives today.
- It's been argued that rationality and intelligence in the sense measured by IQ tests are not particularly closely correlated, so I'm not sure why extreme quickness of thought should be privileged in particular for representative positions. Related to that, there seem to be a large number of high-IQ cranks that I wouldn't want to trust the fate of an entire nation to -- for example, Mencius Moldbug.
- Do you have any particular reason to believe that the high IQ members of this body would vote for the good of the entire nation, rather than in their own interests (granted, you've already privileged them with your proposal to use IQ tests pervasively in society)? 0.1% of the US is 320,000, and though your mechanism might prevent the small number of representatives at a given time from enriching themselves to Third World-dictator standards, I don't see any reason they wouldn't grant all 0.1% highest IQ people a $1m per-annum -- it would only cost $320b/year, less than 10% of the 2016 federal revenue.
This mostly sounds like a technocratic wet dream to me -- you could have Robin Hanson rule the U.S with no opposition at all.
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When there are "people in charge", them being misinformed is the least of one's worries. The bigger problem is that they are very well informed about how their actions affect their own interests.
Actually being misinformed is the top worry. That's why we have intelligence agencies.
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I know the point you are trying to make but India wouldn't have been better off economically under British Empire. British decimated the Indian economy http://www.thehindu.com/2005/07/10/stories/2005071002301000.... As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent…
> India's share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in 1700, almost equal to Europe's share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952. Not sure how useful this statistic is - it's including the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the early 1700's. British company rule is usually dated around the mid-1700's, with the British Raj starting in the mid-1800's. We're also looking at percentage…
A State is the same as a company, except worse - they have an army and a monopoly on violence. After a war, when a king takes over, they tried to integrate with the new people, marry into them and in this way eventually begin to rule them. That began to change when people’s skin color was drastically different. The term Colonists was invented to convey how race got into the mix. The British were never a Raj (kings), they never ruled over India in the traditional sense of the word. They were colonists - they colonized and decimated the Indian economy.
Forget the economy, they decimated the population:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#Scholarly_opin...
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Oh we do, it's just you're called out as racist when you point it out.
See, that kind of comments don't contribute anything to the conversation. All you're doing is portraying yourself as a victim and hijacking the issue back into the bullshit "are we too pc" debate again, which quite frankly most people are already sick of.
If you hang a Swedish flag outside of your house you are automatically deemed a racist by your community. ANY semblance of pro-sweden is viewed as unfair by the immigrant community because they aren't swedish, because they aren't included. They've create a culture of everyone is a victim, citizens and immigrants.
It's really a fucked up situation. A situation I hope never comes to the US.
Sanity check: Google searchers aren't necessarily voters. The UK had a massive (72.2%) turnout, which still leaves 13 million potential voters at home [1]. I think it's reasonable that those least-likely to vote on this issue also might be a large contingent of those who don't even know what the EU is. Moreover, Google searchers aren't necessarily in the electorate. They might be kids, etc. 1. http://www.telegraph.co…
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Medicare pricing structure are heavily subsidized [indirectly] by commercial insurance plans -- this is one of the reason many providers hate taking Medicare patients. If the govt. just gave people vouchers and the Medicare system dissolved, those people would receive much less care (measured in dollars of care consumed per dollar of insurance purchased.) That might be a good idea. In fact, it is very likely a good i…
That would have other benefits. The reason health insurance in the US is so expensive and complicated is exactly because of how commercial plans fund medicare. If we stopped doing that hospitals could publish actual prices for procedures - same price for everybody, insurance or not. Then people could actually shop around and healthcare costs would drop. But today prices have to be secret and impossible to understand…
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>They don't want to deal with change Brexit is a pretty massive governance change. Everyone blames old people for its success, so I'm not sure why the narrative is that "old people won't vote for changes". I think it's less that older people are hostile to change as much as they've seen enough political opportunists and fraudsters that they have some firmness to their opinion (and again, this is a good thing). As Bre…
> Brexit is a pretty massive governance change. The people voting for Brexit want to stop the changes their seeing to their country. Brexit itself is a massive governance change, but the people going for it see it as the option to stop the change they see in the streets around them. > internet = copyright issues Bollocks. If that's all you think the internet means to people, intellectual property, you need to open yo…
I'm sure Brexit supporters would argue this is a mischaracterization, but even if it's true, it proves that they're not afraid of change per se. They're willing to make a massive change to the country's governmental structure and role in the region in order to prevent other changes that they perceive as negative from occurring. They simply have a different evaluation of the situation than yourself. This is called a "disagreement".
>Bollocks. If that's all you think the internet means to people, intellectual property, you need to open your eyes considerably wider.
I was addressing the major fields of law that impact the internet, which is a) tech access laws like the CFAA and b) copyright/IP law. I guess your comment here indicates that you were thinking along the lines of net neutrality (already the law) and municipal internet/increased ISP competition (which is a complex issue that varies by locality and doesn't really represent a major, large-scale legal conundrum; it's mostly just legwork and local politics to resolve). Everyone wants improvement in that area too, but to my mind, it's minimally important compared to tech access and intellectual property, and it's certainly much more fractured since it's highly dependent on local politics.
>our societies are far wealthier (fiscally and socially) and far more equitable than ever before, largely due to progression
This is a non-sequitr and far too airy to really rebut. To the extent that changes associated with socially progressive politics have been beneficial (and I would argue that such changes are scant), it's not due to the fact that the positions were supported by social progressives, but that the position was reasonable and important. You act like this is inherently the same thing, that anything under the banner of progressivism is automatically just and important. That doesn't make any sense, which is becoming increasingly obvious as progressives have begun to run out of reasonable things to protest.
>the world changes anyway, and you have to adapt to change
Sure, some things change, and many things don't change. People today are biologically very similar to people from 5k years ago; on an evolutionary timescale, that's a miniscule difference, so the things that were logical and biologically compatible 5k years ago are probably pretty similar today.
It's not that people are afraid of change itself; it's simply that people understand that changes aren't always for the better.
>If it weren't for progressiveness, we'd still have slaves, women wouldn't be able to vote (or work, really), Africa and Asia would still be colonised, anti-semitism would still be the norm of polite society, so on and so forth.
You've essentially redefined "progressive" as "positive" and saying "anything good is progressive". Your statements here are not remotely reflective of reality. Every positive change is not automatically the work of social progressives. Slavery in particular drew fire from people of all ages and economic classes; the lines were not what you're trying to imply here.
>'Target audience'. You can have a lot of other members in your audience.
Yeah, I addressed this. This is another issue with getting definitions backwards, something you seem to be doing a lot. Fox News's target audience is not "old people", it's "conservatives". There are a lot of conservatives in all age groups, despite the media's attempts to make them invisible. Old people are overwhelmingly conservative, not because they're afraid of change, but because they recognize a lot of the proposed changes are not beneficial.
This boils down to simple political disagreement, and you're trying to generalize it over every demographic that's more likely to belong to your political opponents. Many would call this "ageism"; may want to watch it before your progressive brethren catch wind.