non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
3mo ago
I've liked the groups I attended. Intelligent, friendly, and surprisingly not that socially awkward.
non_radical_centrist
4mo 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
4mo ago
It being bipartisan is probably exactly why it got little coverage. The media did write about it, but the stuff that reaches front pages and gets spread all over social media is the stuff that people actually share. Ragebait gets way more clicks than good news.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
Hanson throws a lot of crazy ideas out there. I think to have a really high number of good ideas in absolute numbers, you've also got to have a lot of stinkers in absolute numbers, so I don't hold his worst ideas against him as long as he doesn't start constantly shouting about them
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I agree on House to House. It was the first military biography I listened to but tbh not that good. Also it was weird how he went on about "We are America's warrior class"- not a perspective most veterans actually have these days. Especially since it doesn't mesh well with the existence of very numerous support military jobs like logistics and communications that are absolutely crucial for military success but aren't that warrior-y.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
No, it's pretty fast for me
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I meant a non-nuclear ICBM. Or any other sort of explosive strike that kills hundreds that's very difficult to defend against.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
International law is not binding. If Timidland decides not to join Moralland, there are no nation police who'll arrest them for violating their contract. All that is hurt is their reputation. How badly their reputation is hurt depends on the scenario; I think few people would accuse Timidland of really violating their alliance if they didn't come to the aid of Moralland there.
But if the people of Timidland consider themselves bound by honour to help, or would want Moralland to help them if the situation were reversed, then they should go and help.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
Having a much larger military can be necessary to decisively win an asymmetrical war. Say Iran started lobbing ICBMs into NATO capitals. You can lob ICBMs back with little difficulty, but that might not actually get them to stop, maybe they're happy to take lots of losses if it means they can hurt the Western devils. If NATO actually wants to protect as many of its citizens as possible, they'll need to actually invade Iran in that scenario. And that'll take a very large military to win an offensive intercontinental war with a regional power.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
Hosting billions of videos is expensive. Most companies can't turn that into something actually profitable. It's debatable if Google even is getting anything nearly worth its investment.
non_radical_centrist
4mo 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
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
Your pinks party does sound rather leftist after that one paragraph. If you added another paragraph with what the Pinks would actually do about it, I think they'd sound a lot less leftist, since any sort of enforcement mechanism would be a hierarchy. I don't think the party that suggests throwing people in jail for trading poems would be recognizably more leftist than a party that is willing to just stick to currency abolition but otherwise lets people live free.
Your framework also doesn't work well for comparing parties that are different amounts of leftist on different issues. Lets say there's a country of Examplestan, in which everyone is a fervent follower of Examplestani Leftism. They all work hard to make Examplestan a better place, they don't use any currency and simply ask for goods and services but never ask for more than they need, no one ever coerces anyone or creates any sort of hierarchy within Examplestan. However, they think every human outside of Examplestan is less than a worm. They don't expand past their borders, but anyone who enters Examplestan from the outside is either shot dead or enslaved because of their ethnic impurity. Is Examplestan far right or far left?
You've already said your model fails at describing how far right parties are, at best it can try to calculate how not-leftist a party is. But it also cannot accurately assess any party which are left on some issues and right on other issues, since it can't asses the issues they're right-wing on. Which is many parties.
Where would it place something like Ba'athism? Or Peronism?
In my model, you simply would not try to compare them to Democrats or Republicans or Stalinists or Nazis, at least not in an international context. You can try to guess where a Peronist or Stalinist or Ba'athist would fall if you brought them into the context US election, or brought the US parties into the context of a specific foreign election, but you couldn't compare them in a purely international context. If you do compare them in an international context, that goes outside my model.
And I think trying to model them in an international context is a flawed endeavor doomed to fail, personally. There's a reason why people argue about whether Peronists and Ba'athists are far left or far right or if you need to bring a political compass in it whatever- I don't think it is possible to compare parties in an international way. I think people intuitively use the principles I've laid out when modeling domestic politics, without consciously knowing what those principles are. And people try to apply the same principles to international politics to come up for a label for Ba'athists or Peronists, but they can't draw an intuitive conclusion and start disagreeing with each other and even themselves about where such parties fall. They start making up rules like yours and try to calculate how anti-hierarchy a party is in sum, or a right-libertarian might say the more pro-freedom a party is in sum the more right-wing they are, or they might use some other model. Whatever set of rules they use, it doesn't work well, because it's an impossible to task.
Like we agreed as a guiding principle, any definition should match how people actually use the terms left and right. If people call the same party both left and right, then it's impossible for any definition that assigns each party to a single point on a line to function. I don't know whether people inside Argentina call Peronists left or right, but whatever they call Peronists inside their country, I'm sure it's internally consistent, although perhaps only for a single election and are not consistent across time even within Argentina. Same with Ba'athists in Syria.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
Yes, they'd both support those policies, yet they would never actually pass a bill together with those policies. That disconnect from the extremes supporting the same positions but never actually working together is the core point I'm making.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
Even if it were accepted that the reason Bob has more money is because he was born more talented than Alice and his labor is therefore more valuable, that is not Alice’s fault, and she should be made equal to Bob.
Maybe you'll just dismiss this as another "left as an exercise to the reader", but let's say we forget money, and directly consider exchange of services. Let's say Alice really want a servant, like the previous scenario, but her society has abolished currency so she has no money to pay Bob with. She can still pay with services or goods she crafts herself. Maybe she's a brilliant poet that can write a poem that can move Bob to tears in five minutes, and Bob happily embraces being her full time servant in exchange for one such poem a day. Would leftists somehow try to shut down that moneyless hierarchy too? You can replace "poem" for anything too- maybe she cooks excellent meals, maybe she has a green thumb and can grow far more produce than any other individual, maybe she's a brilliant engineer who can design and build an entire house by herself.
And of course, once you allow for that sort of hierarchy, you by necessity allow for much more complex ones. Perhaps Alice pays Bob with a fraction of her own labour, and also employs a couple other people like Charlie and David the same way, all of them pledging 8 hours of their days to her. But she then has each of them use 4 of those 8 hours to do services for another 3 even less productive people to get those 3 people to do her 8 hours of service a day- and so on until she has a network of hundreds working for her. All voluntary, all without money or even necessarily any private property at all, yet without a doubt a hierarchy.
My characterization of “pure leftism” is just a theoretical ideal — a single point in political space, useful for evaluating how leftist a particular position is. The fact that leftism, beyond a certain extreme, is probably unworkable in the real world is not a criticism of the measurement system.
My point is that that single point in theoritical space is non-existent. Unless you mean the point is just how much people pledge themselves to the idea of "no hierarchy" with no relation to how anti-hierarchical they are in real life or even how hierarchical their utopian vision is. In which case I think that is a coherent measurement system to compare parties by, but also a pretty useless measurement system that doesn't tell you anything practical. Why should anyone care how much lip service a party pays to "no hierarchy"?
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.
I think these are useful observations that do mean something. People often do use left/right as boo lights. But they also use them as meaningful terms. Calling someone "far right" or "far left" wouldn't be an insult if they didn't have real meaning. There's a reason why libertarians want to convince you that Hitler was actually a leftist, and why progressives want to convince you Bernie is a centrist in Europe. My model gives a framework to ignore those people without losing the utility of the terms "far right", "right", "centrist", "left", and "far left" to describe how willing a party is to cooperate with other parties quickly.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I mean, look at the Knesset. I am not an expert in Israeli politics, but Wikipedia describes Ra'am as "an Islamist and conservative political party". They sit on the far left, but apart from ethnic concerns would probably belong right of the center -- where none of the Zionist parties would have them in a coalition.
(Of course, another anomaly would be the dirty trick when labor tried to form a coalition with the ultra-orthodox, but you can argue that the fate of that attempt is mostly proof that cutting out a middle party on the political spectrum does not work.)
Ra'am working more closely with the left parties despite having more in common with the conservative parties from a naive view is exactly what I'm describing. My model accepts that as normal behaviour, whereas most models would need to add a bunch of epicycles to explain it away.
Per your "arranged by compatibility" argument, one of the first two options would be favored, covering as little as the political spectrum as possible. Even if you agree with me that the Greens really ought to be placed on the left of the SPD, an "Ampel" coalition would seem preferable.
I agree that this is a solid counter-example that goes against my model. But as you say, when you factor in voters eventually growing upset with the ruling coalition resulting in some real politik, it makes sense that the cost isn't worth the benefit for small parties. Did the FDP still mostly vote with the Grosse Koalition even if they weren't officially part of it, or did they do a lot of protest no votes?
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
Maybe Christians have to sadly stay in the far right category then. But would a type of Theist that believes in something nearly identical to Christian theocracy, with the tweak that they think God is just the spiritual union of all humanity's souls and that we are all equal in Heaven(and that everyone goes to Heaven), get to be called far leftist? Again, in the material world, their actual policies are identical to something like Byzantine Rome.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.”
In theory, maybe, but in practice this runs into many, many problems.
First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? I.e, take Stalinists who say they to totally remove hierarchy once capitalism is totally defeated, but until they have a very strict hierarchy with the Party on top. Are they more or less leftist than social democrats who want to remove most of hierarchy but are still okay with parents controlling children and the hardest workers having some more money than people on welfare, and who actually implement anti-hierarchical policies? It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.
Second- Removing hierarchies in practice
It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction. And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
The many documented examples of Senators Hawley and Sanders voting together against the center. Sometimes they're joined by Cruz, Warren, etc.
I acknowledged that as negative cooperation. It is common. I am saying postive cooperation is shockingly rare or even non-existent. Have Hawley and Sanders ever voted yes together on a bill that the centrists voted no on?
And Christians will tell you we'll be all equal in Heaven. Many democratic socialists who don't want a revolutions, just socialized control of industry, want a very hierarchical burearacracy that must be obeyed. Organized crime tends to be extremely hierarchical- are they all farther right than the Nazis? There are examples of parties all over the spectrum that don't fit the pattern of "less hierarchy = more left, more hierarchy = more right". Especially when you play fast and loose about artificial hierarchies vs natural hierarchies mean.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
That seems like a bit of a reach to me. Leftists don't usually want to abolish literally every hierarchy either. And it doesn't explain why authoritarian communists are on the left side of the political spectrum, since those states involve a very strict hierarchy.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
My theory does not apply to parties positions on policies, identities, or individual's positions on policies. You'd need another theory to describe all that. My theory is solely about how parties actually behave relative to each other, and what to label parties as a whole.
Political coalitions shift, maybe one day the socialists prefer working with the liberals, and the next they prefer the communists. But the core of my theory is that no matter have much coalitions shift, you'll never see a discontinuous coalition that excludes centrists while including both the right and left. At least not a coalition that ever actually ever passes anything.
It's not an unified theory of everything political. But I think it is useful. It solves whether a party should be called far left, center left, centrist, center right, or far right. That's an argument people often have, and I don't think anyone needs to argue about it anymore. And it makes the observation that parties across the political spectrum will be very reluctant to actually cooperate no matter how much they might agree on specific issues like gun control, which is something useful to keep in mind if you're an activist trying to work to transform public support for a policy to actually passing that policy.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I don't think I've had this problem on themotte, but I've definitely had it frequently on reddit. Sometimes it seems to be almost random, and in those cases I don't mind, I can accept the reddit hivemind being occassionally schizo. But often it'll be because I say something right-libertarian on a standard lefty sub. And while I certainly can understand redditors disagreeing with the vibe of the post, I'm left frustrated and unknowing what their actual disagreement is.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I think you might be able to do the police thing with some success. I'd be interested in some sort of affirmative action experiment where you vastly increase the amount of black officers in a city, and see if that offers any protection against racism accusations.
I got a star projector that puts pretty colours on my ceiling, it makes a much more aesthetic room imo.
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