Scholiaster
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User ID: 840
Scholiaster
1d ago
I’m not asserting a link between turnout and quality, though there may be one. Indeed, Public Choice Theory suggests that for certain policies democracy and majority voting is no guarantee of quality.
Scholiaster
1d ago
The middle drops when the parties rely on negative campaigning to energize their (more extreme) base at the expense of the middle, who are usually already annoyed by politics. Negative campaigning affects partisans differently than non-partisans. When the middle drops out, the party that is marginally more effective at turning out their base win.
Scholiaster
2d ago
The Median Voter Theorem states that a majority rule electoral system will elect the candidate preferred by the median voter. However, if the middle drops out and doesn’t vote, the candidates can easily be more extreme than preferred by the broader populace.
Scholiaster
2d ago
Voting is a Prisoner’s Dilemma, where if everyone cooperates (by voting) the politics are sane and geared after the medal voter. But one’s vote is so insignificant, it is more beneficial to not waste one’s time and defect by not voting. However, if too many people defect, the parties polarize and scare the median voters away from the pools, and polity goes bouncing from extreme to the other. Compulsory voting, as in Australia, solves the PD.
Scholiaster
1yr ago
What we’re seeing now in the media is a concerted campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court now that it is solidly red team. Yes, the “plaintiff shopping” aspect is a non-issue to anyone who has been paying attention, but now it’s convenient to mention because the Supreme Court is not making the “correct” rulings anymore.
I’ve seen twitter comments (granted) making a big deal of Alito’s fishing trip, suggesting that his vote on the student loan case was due to being bought off by the interests of the super wealthy, as if his lengthy jurisprudential track record wouldn’t make predicting his vote on it an obvious no-brainer.
Now that the Court has a solid majority on the right, we’ll see more attempts to lower the esteem of the Supreme Count in the public, until, of course, it flips again back to making the decisions the PMC likes.
In the long view, the rising and falling perceptions of the Supreme Court would make an interesting study of where legitimacy of our public institutions come from. We’re in a time of change.
Scholiaster
1yr ago
I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:
Politics are an important influence in schools; as Paulo Freire stated in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act” (p.19).
There are a number of things wrong with the quotation in the PDF. First off, the source material (though not your own quotation!) misspells the author as “Friere.” Second, the cited book is not in the bibliography. Third, the language in the quotation (English) is wrong. It should be Spanish, as this work was first published in Spanish translation in Mexico.* Finally, the statement is too pithily set forth to be the author’s own words (in whatever language).
In other words, it has all the hallmarks of an apocryphal quotation.
Its existence is perpetuated by the academic need to hang every insight with clout in the field, no matter how banal, on a academic theorist. Feire’s writings basically make this point, albeit in a roundabout form that is rather inconvenient to quote properly. More careful academics will not attribute this phrase as a direct quotation (as does the author in the PDF). Interesting, this paraphrase is not original to the PDF author, so it cannot really be unquoted either. Thus, it is not surprising that the paraphrase gets misrepresented as an actual quote and this apocryphal citation gets cribbed from source to source, because it efficiently does the academic work it needs to do.
Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.
It’s not “two seconds” to check a source: you’ve already spent more time on it than that. And it still has not been checked. No one has pulled up the 1968 original edition, which doesn’t seem to be online and does not seem to be stocked in North American academic libraries. So how is an academic to handle it? Well, most would check the edition they do have at hand to find a page they can cite and, failing that, they assume that their peer-reviewed source got the cite to the inaccessible edition correct and they simply reproduce that. They might get more skeptical if the quotation seemed wrong, but it does encapsulate what the guy is trying to say.
Plus, the sentiment seems to assume that critical theorists’ writings are found in a single source (“the damn source”). Actually, it’s a confusing mess. Their publication histories are inevitably complex, being reprinted and republished multiple times, in multiple editions, multiple languages, and even multiple (discordant) translations. Most academics just cite the reader or book they have in their personal libraries. In this situation, differences are sure to happen and they are tolerated, because it’s a pain to check whether a quotation in some other edition is correct. And it’s tolerated because these critical thinkers stand for their ideas more than their words. There’s no citational archeology to find the original statement in the original edition and the original language. It’s not the Bible.
- Or so Wikipedia tells me.
Scholiaster
1yr ago
Done right, Georgism is a massive tax cut which is why it won’t be adopted at scale, even though it is among the least economically distortive of the taxes. The hard part of Georgism does not lie in taxing the land value of property: that is already happening with property taxes which count both land value and improvements. The hard part of Georgism lies in getting governments to not tax the improvements when the incentives are aligned against it.
Georgism will also change the culture from that homeowners to renters, possibly long-term neutral, but it will fly in the face of the headwinds from both parties of promoting homeownership.
Usually it’s with policies with concentrated benefits for a few and diffuse costs for the rest, like rent control, occupational licensing, NIMBY, the list goes on.
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