non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
I think the difference is that the elites aren't going to be banning large homes and meat, they're just trying to price in externalities as appropriate. The conspiracies are embarrassing because the have the vibe of "The elites hate us and we should angrily riot to resist them". The better response would be try to come up with other more acceptable solutions that price in externalities.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
Someone needs to put their foot down.
Are you defending people's right to discuss which governor you'd most want to have sex with in the workplace? I don't think that's ever been an acceptable topic. You could probably get away with it in small workplaces where you're joking with friends and it'd never leak, but I think it'd pretty much always cause controversy if it was leaked.
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
I believe men are innately vastly more competitive than women. A man who trains for 50 000 hours will probably beat a woman who's trained for 5 000, even if she has a biological advantage.
The fact that women show up in the top ranks of ultra-endurance competitions at all, where as for the vast majority of other competitive events the top ranked woman will often be ranked like #203 or somewhere thereabouts, I think is strong evidence they have a real biological advantage.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I have a somewhat alternate theory to the standard HBD concept, one that may not be original but I haven't seen before, although I haven't delved the HBD forums much.
The standard HBD argument is that different races have different IQs, and that is the primary factor leads to all sorts of different outcomes. Instead of IQ causing so many differences, which I think might be true but is a lesser factor, I think different races are domesticated to different degrees. I read the book The Goodness Paradox about a year ago, and it was about how while humans kill each other in vastly larger scales than any other animal, we're also much less likely to try to tear each other's faces off in the woods than any other animal. The author first divides violence into two categories: reactive and pre-mediated. Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot. Other violence is reactive, like someone punches you or even just insults your mother and you hit back before you even think. The author presents a simple answer: That there is a relatively straightforward evolutionary process through which animals are domesticated, and domestication leads to much lower rates of reactive violence. The mechanism is that the animal is essentially forever childlike mentally. But not just mentally, also physically; that's why dogs look like wolf cubs, and domesticated foxes have converged on similar traits like floppy ears.
I think black people are similar, in that they are a more "adult" human. They tend to be physically bigger and stronger. I often see black women called masculine, and that is the explanation for why they're less attractive and do worse on dating apps- but I think it makes more sense to call them more adult(whatever the opposite of neotony is). Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine. And east Asian women by contrast, a race widely considered more on the high end of genetics by HBDers, tend to be more neotonous, with smaller secondary characteristics and young looking faces. And their men tend to be smaller and less physically strong. So I think it's quite plausible that that domestication mechanism, while probably not the sole factor, is a sizeable one in making black people have such higher rates of crime and east asians such lower rates of crime.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
The Holocaust killing millions is very well documented. I'm more of a mistake theorist than a conflict theorist, so I wouldn't call people who say the Holocaust killed 5% of what it actually did are necessarily evil, but I would say they're likely mentally ill(like Kanye) and/or have made some very poor decisions in which sources they want to trust.
The question of when information should be censored is not an easy one in my opinion. Especially because we can never really be sure when information is true or not; even in mathematics "proofs" that are widely accepted can be much later shown to be false. So all information, from the planet being round to evolution to covid policy to the holocaust would be kept open to debate in an ideal society. But in an ideal society then also on the easily answerable questions like the planet being round everyone would quickly come to the right answer, and for even trickier questions like covid policy everyone would quickly dismiss the stupid information like that vaccines are being used to implant microchips.
But we do not live in an ideal society, and if you let debate spread unhindered, you'll get a lot of people believing flat out wrong stuff. And that flat out wrong stuff can have harmful effects. For example, in the 14th century, the belief that Jews were related to the spread of the bubonic plague led to massacres of Jewish communities. I think with the benefit of hindsight, most modern people would agree that if they had the magic power to censor the belief that Jews spread the black plague(and there wouldn't be any butterfly effects through the timeline), they would, since that information was very harmful.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I'm reminded of that case of the guy restraining the addict on the subway who was making everyone uncomfortable.
He killed the homeless guy. I'm sympathetic to the issue of nuisances on subways, but the right solution isn't literally killing them. From the Wikipedia page, it seems like he didn't choke the guy for less than 5 minutes. Depriving the brain of oxygen will start causing permanent damage after 1 minute, and will just about always be lethal by 5 minutes.
non_radical_centrist
10mo ago
LOTT wouldn't have been harmed if they did some basic fact checking to check if the story was real. The hoax wasn't that elaborate. And good journalistic practice really would be to not publish anything that hasn't been reasonably confirmed, not just not publish anything that has holes in it
https://old.reddit.com/r/PoliticalCompassMemes/comments/sjeplg/which_way_lib_right/
This meme contains more wisdom about politics in it than most books about politics do. It displays 5 starving children about to be run over by a trolley, a metaphor for how every day many, many people die from circumstances that are both preventable but out of those people's control. There is a rich man capable of saving them, but for whatever reason he doesn't want to. He didn't cause their doom, but he has the ability to stop it. Maybe he has a reason behind not wanting to save them, like he's really busy and a second of his time is worth thousands of dollars, or maybe he's a sadist who enjoys watching people die, but regardless he's not the one who put them on the tracks. Then there's you, with a gun, which gives you greater power than even the richest man if he doesn't have a gun. This is a metaphor for state power and how its individuals like us that ultimately control the state with its monopoly on power. You can force the rich person to save the children. Using force on an innocent person is normally very wrong, but is it justifiable to save even more innocents?
And this isn't just a hypothetical with no true real world comparison. There are many, many rich people out there whose wealth the US could tax or otherwise seize, and spend that money on saving real lives. Most of the affordable lives to save are outside America, but there are even American lives that could be saved if a portion of Bezos' wealth was seized.
Now today I personally believe that generally US taxes are high enough that any social benefit from even higher taxes is offset by the negative effects on the economy. But I do very much think that the optimal taxes are much higher than 0, and that going full libertarian would result in a lot of people suffering who could be helped if billionaires had a bit of their yacht money taken away.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
They might not, but He does. They just decided to highlight the foot washing because they personally thought it was most valuable to highlight. Even if you think it didn't deserve to be highlighted, doesn't mean it was theologically incorrect.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
Donald Trump is guilty of winning the 2016 election, and for this crime he will be hounded by Democrats until the end of his days. The crime of winning in 2016 was the rationale for the Russia collusion hoax, it prompted the Mueller investigation (which produced nothing actionable), it was the reason for his first impeachment (not the appropriate anti-corruption measures he was taking against his likely 2020 opposition), and it is the reason he was indicted last week.
Donald Trump very clearly and purposefully often said outrageous things to get in the news cycle. He intuitively understood the toxoplasma of rage and harnessed it. Other politicians occasionally say the wrong thing and the sound bite follows them around(Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables", Gary Johnson's "What's Aleppo?"), and they're always constantly watching what they say to try to avoid that. Donald Trump put something new out there every week on purpose. A couple of his policies were a bit more extreme than other Republicans(border wall, Muslim ban), but not that much I think, especially when you look at how they were actually implemented. But what makes him different is that he purposefully said things and framed his words in a way to make himself sound outrageous. I think you can only get so upset when you try your best to make half the population outraged, and then they stay angry at you. Personally I think the left should be the bigger person and not prosecute Trump over tiny, irrelevant stuff. But I think it's dumb to pretend it's because Trump just doesn't fit the coastal elite stereotype. It's because he says things in the most inflammatory way possible, and he doesn't stop. Pre-Trump, politicians would insult and mock their opponent a couple times an election cycle. Trump would tweet out some new mean(and funny) nickname every day.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
I don't think there are any easy solutions here. What do you think should be done if the mother doesn't want to abort but the father wants to just ditch both the mother and child? What should be done for mothers who put their own career to the side to focus on taking care of the home and children, but they find out their husband has been cheating on them? I don't think there are easy answers for those. Maybe family courts as they are are too biased towards women, but I think there is no good alternative.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
Personally I've only ever skimmed bits about the Twitter Files, I don't use Twitter directly very much, and nothing of the bits I've seen about it shocked my worldview. It mostly seemed like "The US government politely asked Twitter to moderate certain content, the Twitter staff thought about it and agreed it'd be a good idea". If there was some sort of under-the-table-deal going on where Twitter received billions or other compensation for secretly pushing US propaganda, that'd be a lot worse. I don't think it reflects well on Twitter, but I don't think it's fundamentally any different than the censorship every website does.
Where as Santos is a pretty big deal because of how blatant it was. US Congressman is an important position, Santos is probably easily within the top 0.1% of most powerful people in the world. But he only got there through several dozen blatant, outright lies, not even just massaging the truth. Plus there's a decent chance he's connected to some sort of criminal enterprise given how much money he's gotten without explanation, which makes things even worse.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
Do you have absolutely no empathy for someone in west Africa dying of malaria? If it cost you a mere penny to save their life, would you do it? EA is trying to save lives in the most cost effective way possible, and last I checked the most effective way to save lives was buying bed nets to prevent malaria.
If there was already an abundance of bed nets and it'd cost millions to save a single more life even in the most efficient way possible, where as they could open a local art museum that served thousands for just $10k, they'd probably start donating to local art. But right now art is already pretty well funded, and people dying of malaria are relatively underfunded. Although EA has certainly done a lot to change that and I think they have more money than they know how to spend. You could probably post an essay to their website about why donating to local art is the most moral thing to do if you can write out a clear argument for it.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
My prediction about DOGE from six months ago seems to have come true.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1249/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/268523?context=8#context
My prediction is that early on Musk will run into the incredibly thick red tape that normally prevents massive cuts in government, try to cut through it anyway because that's what he's used to in the private sector, and it results in some sort of lawsuit or other scandal.
It's particularly sad because this was a great opportunity for real reform. They just needed to focus on doing it through Congress passing laws to reform stuff, or altering overly stringent requirements independent agencies have made. Just trying to fire excess government employees is pointless as long the law says you need to first fire employees with under 2 years of tenure instead of firing based on actual merit. Otherwise you're doing nothing to get rid of layabouts and just get rid of any productive new hires you have.
non_radical_centrist
5mo ago
Putin used that cultural and language similarity as an excuse to invade and kill Ukrainians. I think artificially exaggerating the cultural and language differences so Putin has less of a cassus belli and ends the war, and doesn't pursue future ones, is very valid.
non_radical_centrist
10mo ago
Harris will show how well she can deal with a full volume Trump off-script. She doesn't have to beat him, but she has to perform in an environment and format that she is notoriously bad in. She has to put on her best performance ever for a tie. Again, woe to the campaign staff.
Trump's pretty bad at debate too. People considered him to have lost most of the debates he was in.
I think as long as Kamala keeps tacking to center she'll be fine. People are taking Trump seriously as a threat. There's little sense of "Ugh we're stuck with a centrist when we wanted Bernie" this year because no primary meant Kamala felt inevitable. That means the left wing of the party has less influence, and Kamala's free to appeal to the swing voters who really matter without risking mutiny.
But ultimately I agree, I feel like this debate will be consequential. I'm holding all my prediction market bets until the debate happens.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think a reified debate format is possible. Take this interview:
https://youtube.com/watch?si=zc3iAibHgxxf6gir&v=fPQ9uA_M1Eg&feature=youtu.be
In it, Tucker Carlson pushes back against a member of the media who said that Tucker's head was in the sand about the Assad regime being responsible for gas attacks. Carlson comes off increasingly hysterical as the debate goes on, as the media member stays calm and lands good points. That sort of debate is absolutely possible, if Biden behaved like that guy and had cool and factual responses to Trump, he could've knocked it out of the park. Instead, Biden flubbered on abortion that should've been an easy popular issue for him, and didn't press Trump on stuff like Ukraine that he has no plan for beyond asking Putin to pretty please stop the war.
I do think verbal debates are over hyped and in an ideal world they would write oppositional essays to each other, and the media would do honest fact checking to explain context on any misleading statements in the essays, and we could have actually trusted experts to summarize the most important take aways. But obviously even that is too boring for most voters.
At the very least it might be interesting if both candidates had to provide their sources to the opposition ahead of time like how lawyers have to tell each other which witnesses will be involved ahead of time. That way debunkings can be prepared for bogus sources.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I'm not at all convinced that that "pair bonding" is a super significant phenomenon. I think it's quite likely that instead those stats reflect that women who want varied sex will have multiple partners before marriage, and then will also desire varied partners after getting married, leading to her divorcing or leading to her cheating which leads to divorcing. Especially since a lot of women who don't have sex before marriage come from cultures where divorce is socially unacceptable.
What would be more convincing is instead of stats about divorce, since that's distorted by women who're socially unable to divorce even if they'd want to, is stats on how much women who haven't had previous partners like their spouse.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I’m going to do a write up of how I think education curriculum should be reformed. For context: I went through highschool in Ontario, Canada. The way it worked was from kindergarten to grade 8, we’d have a set curriculum every kid in the grade followed, with lots of english and math classes, some science classes, history, geography, French, and gym, and one each of art, music, and health classes a week. Then starting in grade 9, which is highschool, we are given two elective choices, where we choose a minimum of one between art, drama, and music, and the second may also be a general technology course or a general business course. Each year of high school there are more electives choices offered and fewer mandatory courses, with the priorities of what the school system requires us take being the same as elementary school. There were also choices between more difficult and easier options for some classes like math, english, and science as well. Universities and colleges would also require higher level math and sciences for STEM programs too, and there is a standardised literacy test needed to graduate.
I think a lot of people when talking about school want to just add more requirements without thinking about what to cut. It’s very easy to say “all kids should learn to program” or “all kids should have PE every day”, but if you’re adding you either have to keep kids there longer, or cut something. First, I think the elementary school program is basically good, I wouldn’t change anything there. Maybe take a little of time out of science and add it to more PE.
For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
There will be extra emphasis on making sure every single person who graduates is literate and numerate. I wouldn’t really require anything else to hand out a highschool diploma, but if they can’t do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, they don’t get the diploma. They’re stuck in adult night classes until they can or they give up. Ontario high schools also require 40 hours of volunteer community service which I like and anywhere else that doesn’t have that should implement it.
It might be a good idea to have a class on how to get the most out of AI too because it’s looking like that’s becoming an ever more important skill, but it’s changing so fast I don’t know.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
I think some people here can have perfectly good conversation and analysis about sexuality and dating. Others are clearly incredibly biased against women and have a massive chip on their shoulder.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I'm not sure about the ratios myself, but it's for that sort of reason I want to increase Congressional salaries. No one is in Congress for the money, pretty much everyone competent enough to be a federal politician could be making more money in some other job. To some degree that's inevitable- the public sector will never match the sort of spending in the private sector, nor should it. But if we want very competent people to be leaders, we should at least try to pay them half of what they'd get in the private sector instead of a quarter. And I think if being a Congress member was a better job to have, people would be less willing to risk that career by being corrupt.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/congressional-pay?r=62ico
What do people really mean when they talk about “left” and “right” politics?
The terms “right” and “left emerged from when in the French revolution, the group that sat on the right side of the Constituent Assembly were aligned with religion and the king, and the group that sat on the left side was aligned with democracy and secularization. The left-right spectrum has since endured, despite how often many of the parties we call “far right” have nothing to do with monarchism, and many of the parties we call “far left” are authoritarian and anti-democratic themselves. Many people have tried to create consistent frameworks to explain why party A is on the left and party B is on the right, but none that I have seen have actually consistently worked. Some people have tried to rectify the errors by adding more dimensions- such as “horseshoe theory” adding a vertical dimension so that the far left and far right loop back to being similar, the political compass that has an authoritarian axis which which separates right-libertarians from right-authoritarians and same with the left, or even the 8-Axis compass which like the name suggests has 8 different dimensions. In Part 1 of this comment I will explain my theory, and in Part 2 I will point out the many failure points of alternate theories.
Part 1
I think none of those theories really properly explain the left-right spectrum, and they all have flaws at capturing what the common person means when they talk about left-right. When trying to determine rules that capture the popular conception of the left-right spectrum, your definition should align with how it’s actually used. If your definition tries to say the Nazis are far left, or that the Democrats are center-right, it automatically fails as a definition of the popular conception. If you have to say, “Uh, akshually, Party X falls here on the spectrum”, then you are automatically wrong, because the popular conception is the ultimate arbiter of truth, not your definition. Your definition is just a map that is trying to capture the territory. Maybe your definition could still be useful as some other type of political spectrum model that identifies some parties as authoritarian vs libertarian, or good vs evil, or whatever, but it doesn’t work for capturing them as left vs right as popularly conceived.
How I think the left-right spectrum works is that it captures which parties are willing to cooperate with each other. For example, say we have this spectrum of parties elected to a parliament: Communists(far left), democratic socialists(left), liberals(center-left), conservatives(center-right), nationalists(right), fascists(far-right). A pretty standard spread going from the far left to far right. But why are the fascists far right while the communists are far left? Both groups have many similarities- they both want to abolish elections, both want to nationalize many or all industries under government control, both want to repress free speech. My thesis is that they make up opposite ends because they are the last parties that would be willing to positively cooperate in the parliament. On any bill that parliament passed, if the fascists and communists both vote yes, I guarantee that every party between them will also have voted yes. The far left and far right may have similarities, but you’ll never actually see them vote together on a bill like “Introduce new corporate taxes to fund the military” unless every party between them also voted yes. Maybe there will be some bill that the entire parliament from far left to far right cooperates on like a bill banning murdering puppies, meaning both the far left and far right vote yes together on it, but always all the more moderate parties will be voting yes too. But that rule only applies to positive cooperation- they might negatively cooperate against a bill from the centrist parties. For example, perhaps all the centrist parties want to pass a bill that will enable the nation to take out a large loan from the World Bank- but both the communists and fascists don’t like that sort of international debt to foreigners, and both vote against the bill. That sort of negative cooperation that is characterized by preventing action is allowed, and is even common, according to my theory.
This does not just apply to the farthest left and farthest right- it applies to every party in the parliament. The liberals and the communists will not cooperate positively on something unless the democratic socialists also cooperate positively. The liberals and democratic socialists cooperating positively does not guarantee the communists will also cooperate positively- it just enables it as a possibility. My theory is not about distance between parties either- for example, it’s not impossible in my theory for there to be a communist, socialist, liberal, conservative coalition, despite the conservatives being far closer to the nationalists and even the fascists than they are to the communists.
In more formal logic, you can express it as, If two parties vote yes together on a motion, Then every party between the two parties on the left-right spectrum will also vote yes on the motion. It can also be worded as “All parties that vote together on a motion form a continuous line of neighbors on the political spectrum”. In the real world, it’s useful to call a party “far left” or “center right” or what have you in order to describe which other parties they’re most likely to cooperate with. And whether a party is left or right is entirely relative- in the early 1800s Prussia, someone calling for a constitutional monarchy might be a radical leftist, but today would be a radical rightists, for example. Also, you can fairly easily predict which parties someone will be more willing to cooperate with even before they're elected- that lets you call a candidate who has never actually been elected far right or far left, by imagining who they'll be more likely to vote with.
Now, I was a bit extreme in my language above- you can probably find some examples of the right and left cooperating without centrists. Whenever I said guarantee, it was an exaggeration. Political science doesn’t have “hard” laws like how physics does after all. But examples of the left and right positively cooperating without centrists also cooperating are extremely rare, far more rare than you’d expect given how some parties on both extremes have seemingly very similar policies. For example, left libertarians and right libertarians both hate police, or nationalists and socialists both want the government to control economic industry. Yet you will not see such parties cooperating to pass bills on those topics at the same time as centrist parties vote against those policies. And on the other side, parties that you might think have relatively little in common like libertarians and conservatives often manage to find a lot of common ground to cooperate on. Also, this only applies to domestic politics. It can have some influence on geopolitics- I think governments generally prefer cooperating with other governments who are on a similar place to them on the political spectrum. But it’s not a requirement for cooperation like how it is domestically. As one example, the far left Soviets and far right Nazis cooperated to partition the relatively centrist Poland between them.
The phrase “It’s impossible to prove a negative” is untrue, it is often possible to prove negatives. But, sometimes it can be extremely hard to prove negatives. To prove that more extreme parties don’t positively cooperate with more moderate parties, I’d have to dig through all the records of voting history and just empirically show it doesn’t happen. I don’t have tools to do that and don’t particularly care to, but I invite everyone to present counter-examples- they probably exist, but I expect they’ll be generally quite rare. The closest I found was in 2015 the Greek far left and far right cooperating against the EU who wanted Greece to repay its debt, but even that from what I read looked more like negative cooperation where they just together refused to cooperate with the EU as opposed to work together to accomplish new things.
Part 2- Other theories
This section is less important but I want to elaborate on how I disagree with other positions.
I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right. For example, it doesn’t explain libertarians, who tend to be Republican but are fiercely anti-police. Or how leftists want a strong(hierarchical) government that will control speech to ban hatred. The hierarchy theory of left vs right fails to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
Next, horse shoe theory. This theory states that along the extremes, the parties become more similar to each other, becoming increasingly authoritarian. Again, it doesn’t adequately explain libertarians, such as Milei in Argentina. He’s in many ways extreme and farther right than most politicians, but he’s farther right in a economic way, where he supports liberalization of markets, not in a way where he wants to consolidate all government power in his personal hands. He’s not far right in the sense that he’s a nationalist he promotes chauvinistic Argentinian superiority either- in fact he’s talked about how he’s considered converting to Judaism and has a lot of respect for Israel, something very different from the anti-Jewish stance many others on the far right take. Horseshoe theory fails to explain to explain how the terms are used in the real world.
The Political Compass. Probably the best known way to plot parties relative to each other after the standard linear model and horseshoe theory. It was original created by leftists and was extremely badly calibrated to try to trick people into thinking they were on the left- placing Obama in authoritarian right but if you actually put Obama’s positions into the compass you’re placed solidly libertarian left, for example. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden is even more far right and even more authoritarian, further demonstrating their bias since by their measures Biden would almost certainly be farther left than Obama. But, ignoring its creators bias, could the actual model be useful if you just recalibrated it? Maybe for some purposes, but not as an objectively accurate model for placing parties. It misses too many axis. What’s more economically left, a Republican party that wants to enact higher tariffs or a Democrat party that wants to enact higher corporate taxes? Is a government that’s a dictatorship but operates with a very light hand more or less authoritarian than an extremely democratic government that controls everything its people does? Do ISIS, the Nazis, and Bismarck really all belong together in a similar space despite their obvious extreme differences?
The 8 Axis test. Similar issues to the political compass, although it’s a bit more fine tuned, at the expense of being more unwieldy. It still doesn’t solve where a party really falls if it falls at opposite extremes within the same axis- e.g an autocratic government that doesn’t get involved in people’s personal lives, or a Georgist government that wants an extreme 100% land value tax, but that’s the only tax. You would have to add even more axis to address every nuance, but then it becomes even more unwieldy, and it becomes entirely divorced from what people actually mean when they say “right” or “left”.
My theory solely describes parties as well. I think ideologies are something separate. Ideologies have a lot of connections to parties, but I think cannot be actually properly mapped to the left or right. For one, as I said earlier, the degree of left-right depends on context- an ideologies position in early 1800s Prussia is completely different than the same ideology’s position today. When people try to extend the left-right spectrum out of domestic politics, they usually do it by kind of guessing at “If that ideology/foreign party did have a member elected to my legislature, which domestic party would they be most closely aligned with?”, but that method breaks down in manner ways. Also, where a party falls on a left-right spectrum in many ways in practice is determined by the personal relationships of party members to the members of the other parties, and the sorts of aesthetics the party likes to use. For example, do they invoke protecting the working class or do they invoke protecting Christianity to justify shutting down immigration- the same policy, with merely different aesthetics, can put them at opposite ends of the left-right.
To measure how likely parties are to cooperate in absolute terms, not just relative terms, you need a different model than mine. I think Nate Silver’s triangle model of Socialism, Conservatism, and Leftism has a good ratio of simplicity to explanatory power. I think to be more accurate too, you could change it to a triangle where the corners are wanting Equality of Opportunity(liberalism), Equality of Outcome(socialism), and openly desiring Hierarchy(conservatism). But that’s getting into an entirely different discussion that I’m much less confident on than my core theory.
Do You think I’m Wrong? Prove it with one easy test!
Simply find examples of parties on opposite sides of the political spectrum cooperating to actively pass bills or do other positive work together, while centrist parties vote against it. You do not need many examples at all- obviously by any theory they should have little in common. But most theories do posit they do have a little common and therefore should cooperate a little- I assert they do not cooperate at all on positive actions.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I've never been a fan of condemning someone's solution without offering your own alternative.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I mean, apart from the likely impossibility of trying to change society as a whole?
I think we've come a hell of a lot closer to making porn not a black mark today than 50 years ago, I don't see why it should be impossible.
Just emptiness and depression
How does a law firm choosing to hire her without considering her Only Fans a black mark, and no judges or clients or juries holding it against her either, lead to emptiness and depression?
Why should an opoid addicted piece of white trash who was born to two parents who were white trash deserve American citizenship more than a Venezualen who fled socialism and crossed the Darien Gap just to participate in the greatest nation on Earth? That's purposefully inflammatory I know, but I do strongly believe that immigrants to America will rarely make natives lives worse, and often will in fact improve their lives through providing stuff like cheap farm labour. That's not an universal law, I look at Europe and see how terrible they are at integrating immigrants and wouldn't propose they open their borders because I don't think they could handle it. But immigrants are an amazing source of strength for America, one that should be harnessed.
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