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Your almost lyrical phrasing in this paragraph reminds me of Le Guin's description of Omelas. I can practically smell the drooz.
It's a lovely vision, but to answer, I'd need to know: What would you be willing to do to make it real? How many mistakes and how much damage are you willing to tolerate along the way? And perhaps, what other qualities of this society would you be willing to sacrifice, to gain the ones you describe? (Universal suffrage, for example?)
It seems that you're in favor of progress in a particular direction, but that you happen to differ with the locally dominant group of progressives about what that direction should be. That rules out being a radical or reactionary. I tend to associate progressives as moving more quickly toward a destination, and conservatives as pulling back and slowing the rate of change to prevent mistakes. But I suppose there's no reason why a conservative couldn't have a positive vision of the future that they're working toward, just in a slow and cautious way.
Couldn't agree more.
There is a basic, universe level quirk of math that, I think, does a great job of capturing the conservative mindset:
The relative loss-gain imbalance; If I have a 10% reduction in any starting quantity, what do I need to reclaim to get back to even? It isn't 10%, it's about 11% (roughly).
Recovering from a mistake or loss takes more effort than the magnitude of the loss itself. Therefore, massive changes happening quickly in any direction are a bad thing. I am some (rare) times empathetic to progressive policy intended outcomes but their proposed policy functions are simply too large, too fast and, therefore, the risk of a fuck-up is so large that I think, in many cases, it represents a society level threat.
Yeah. From some non-political fields, I can tell that my heart is progressive, but through bitter experience my head is conservative, if I stop to use it. It's very who-whom.
When I'm the one pushing for the changes, I've thought enough about them (of course I have!) that I feel confident that they'll be a net benefit. But I can't see what everyone else's life is like, and for any long term project, I need widespread buy-in from all sectors. If I overturn their world, I won't get that. And then, of course, if it's someone else trying to push their (poorly thought out, most likely) changes on me that I haven't had time to fully examine the consequences of, well, that of course is a problem. :-)
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"About as much as our current society is tolerating" seems like a reasonable answer. Your questions seems to assume the current system is making some sort of effort to avoid mistakes, but a cursory glance at the current state of affairs will tell you l that you could regularly ruin the lives of tens of thousands of people, and still come out on top relative to today.
While 2rafa fancies herself an aristocrat, I'm a pleb and proud of it, and I'd take that deal Ina heartbeat.
The whole democratic system is deliberately designed to minimize any chance the common people will have any kind of impact on policy, while insisting it is absolutely essential that they participate. At least spare me the humiliation of having to pretend I'm a part if the decision making process.
No, I'm being completely straightforward here, simply asking what 2rafa would prefer. (It's a shame that that's hard to get across, in text.)
Personally, I think the dominant progressive element in America is running amuck, and making changes that sound to them like good ideas, without any clue about whether those changes will be implemented effectively or have the desired results. By my own criteria, I'm much more conservative than they are, and that's not even considering that my ideal world is probably closer to 2rafa's than the woke ideal.
So would I. I was going to originally put in something about Heinlein-style restriction of voting to veterans. I'd also be in favor of instituting Singaporean caning instead of imprisonment or fines, at least for minor crimes.
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