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Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

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Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#71

Post by dariusj18 »

davvolun wrote: post #66
dariusj18 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is sometimes someone has to choose the least bad option. Sometimes there aren't any solutions that more than half a constituency are happy with, but not choosing is an even worse option. You can see this happening right now with Brexit IMO.

> Sometimes there aren't any solutions that more than half a constituency are happy with Which is part of the reason why most democracies in history are representative democracies; they represent the interests of their constituents, not their constituents personal choices. A representative should properly make the decision that, in their view, presents the best possible result for their constituency, not "what their…

That doesn't change the issue that sometimes there are no "good" options to choose from. It takes a rare politician to doom their career by choosing something unpopular.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#73

Post by dondawest »

ceejayoz wrote: post #31
dondawest wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No apparent reason? What about the “rape rooms”?

Presumably most of the several hundred thousand dead civilians weren't managing those.

I agree. The “rape rooms” did not justify the war. My point was that the war had APPARENT reasons, not valid reasons. There were no valid reasons.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#74

Post by flixic »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #68
flixic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what the solution is. Neither do I but I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world. Politics spill out to other areas. It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests. I don't know what the solution is but this is the meta pro…

> I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world. Go further back. The Civil War could be viewed as large-scale tribalism. After that, there were regional and ethnic tribalisms. The World Wars pushed us into a bigger tribalism - the US became one giant tribe. (It still had the smaller tribalisms, but they became less i…

I really like this deconstruction! Never thought about it this way but it makes a lot of sense.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#75

Post by xyzzyz »

dariusj18 wrote: post #70
rayiner wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history...

So the source for that appears to be http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm "Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008 AD" but I can't find the methodology used. It is definitely an interesting spreadsheet to look through.

Maddison is garbage source for anything pre 1800s, FWIW. His all "data" before 1800s is completely made up. See http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Book_Reviews/...

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#76

Post by dang »

coupdetaco wrote: post #72
dang wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it a lot and we ban accounts that do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

HN is turning into reddit

Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html all the way to the end? and please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Re: Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism

#77

Post by davvolun »

dariusj18 wrote: post #71
davvolun wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes there aren't any solutions that more than half a constituency are happy with Which is part of the reason why most democracies in history are representative democracies; they represent the interests of their constituents, not their constituents personal choices. A representative should properly make the decision that, in their view, presents the best possible result for their constituency, not "what their…

That doesn't change the issue that sometimes there are no "good" options to choose from. It takes a rare politician to doom their career by choosing something unpopular.

"More than half the population is happy with" is not the same as "good."

I fully believe in (representative) democracy, and with an extremely complicated issue like Brexit it needs dedicated politicians researching the issue and, ultimately, selling a solution to the public. I'm not deeply in tune with the parties in the U.K., but my general feeling has been that Labour has no fucking clue what to do, so all of the U.K. is just jumping into a yawning bottomless pit for no good reason.

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