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13: it depends what "diversity" is code for; I can think of at least three different meanings i.e. "diversity of opinions", "racial diversity per se", and "skimming off the top of ROW's IQ pool". The first is mostly a strength under capitalism because it maximises efficiency at generating alternatives; the second is a weakness because racial animus lowers societal trust; the third is a strength, at least selfishly, for obvious reasons.
28: The adversarial justice system requires that criminal defence lawyers exist. So if this statement is true, you kind of have to accept one of the following propositions:
"This system is fine, but it can't work without bad people" (this raises issues of "if society requires these bad people's badness in order to do good, are they really bad people?")
"The adversarial justice system is bad" (this isn't clearly false - there are benefits and drawbacks - but it's such a big proposition that it really kind of subsumes your original point).
"Criminal defence lawyers should exist but should all suck at their jobs" (a trial that always ends in conviction seems dominated by skipping the trial and proceeding straight to imposing sentence).
29: You can't stably privatise the police force and army; if you try, soon there will be a coup d'état, after which the police force and army will again be connected to government. A government with no monopoly on force is not much of a government.
There are also things like market failures or externalities that are fairest when done coercively (the fire brigade has a classic free-rider problem where if I refuse to pay for the fire brigade, they will still usually prevent fires from reaching my house due to all the people nearby who have paid for it). There are technically ways a labyrinthine system of free contracts can in-practice implement this coercion (in this case, the homeowners of an area all sign a contract that they will pay for the fire brigade and won't sell their homes to anyone who doesn't enter into the same contract), but in many cases it's less paperwork to have one such contract - the social contract - and run it through government.
42: I agree with proposition #16, and that's basically where the "AI is dangerous" thought comes from. If IQ is power, then something with IQ 10,000 (whatever that means) is powerful indeed - and if that something thinks Earth would be a better place without humans (much as, say, humans think Earth would be better off without malarial mosquitoes), the default outcome is that we go the way of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger when men showed up. This is really the core point; most of the argumentation in practice centres on a bunch of... well, the nasty word would be "cope", that attempts to carve out some sort of reason this general argument shouldn't apply.
45: I live in Australia. Australia hasn't polarised nearly as badly as the USA has; it's commonly conjectured that this is because we have compulsory voting and IRV, which forces our two largest parties toward each other via the Median Voter Theorem (you can only win in the centre, because extremists on your side are already forced to vote for you) and thus doesn't leave a lot to get polarised about. I think you're probably right about the marginal effect of slightly increased vs. decreased turnout from what the USA currently has, but this local dependence reverses when you get very far from that.
52: With the obvious exception of "doing MMA to people without their consent or some genuine cause", sure.
61: On the margin you certainly have a case, but the optimal amount of such regulation is importantly nonzero. With zero, you get bosses imposing hazards but not telling workers/customers about them, which generally means you don't get to have nice things.
The existence of competent, good-faith
criminalsuspect defense lawyers forces the system to only bring to trial those suspects they can reasonably expect to convict. Those lawyers are there to protect the citizenry from overzealous policing, badly motivated judges, win-hungry prosecutors and easily swayed juries.Calling them criminal defence lawyers is accurate; they practice criminal law (the law that deals with crimes) as defence attorneys.
I am also aware of why they exist; like I said, there are benefits to the adversarial system. With that said, inquisitorial systems don't always result in a police state.
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The US also has the median voter theorem applying. But the primary process ends up pushing more extreme candidates to the fore, and then you try to paint the other side as extreme to persuade the median voter to go for you.
With voluntary plurality voting, policies that appeal to the base may increase turnout or increase the percentage that vote for you instead of wasting it on a third party; this breaks the MVT.
IRV + compulsory negates that; those far from the centre are forced to preference you as long as you're one micron better than the other guy.
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