General Politics Thread

To add to the nonsense of the quote, Theresa May was listed as a "fascist"!

About Trump and being far-right, the reason why I don't put him there is because he changes stances day-to-day, and doesn't really seem consistent.

Also, the far-right gains I feel might be overstated. The FN have been a force in France for quite some time, the Af D didn't win any state elections in 2016, the VVD only gained 5 seats in Netherlands, and lots of the other far-right parties in Europe (Golden Dawn, Sweden Democrats) don't have much influence.

edited 8th Sep '17 11:18:38 AM by WhatArtThee

Given how she keeps appearing to want to usurp/override the authority of Parliament there's an argument to be made for her being at least severely authoritarian.

Yanking a conversation over from the US Politics thread, Protagonist said:

>The state is not intrinsically evil. In fact, I'd say that states are usually good, simply because at the end of the day civilization depends on its existence. After all, it was the Pharaohs who got the Pyramids built.

Since we're talking about how much of a threat coercive State power is/isn't, the view that the move from tribalism to centralized states being a net good is actually not so universally believed.

Right off the bat, if we're talking Ancient Egypt, they were an absolute theocratic monarchy. The coercive power of the state permeated all aspects of life; Egypt was thoroughly a command economy. People worked on the pyramids during the farming off-season because they were conscripted; during the farming season they were told what to plant when and how much. And while the pyramids were impressive feats they were ultimately an act of power posturing; the Pharaohs showing off they were great, powerful and rich (and sometimes bankrupting the state to show it).

In general, early agrarian civilizations were authoritarian because the relied on centralized planning. The benefits of the agricultural revolution we now know to be a mixed bag at best; people worked longer under harsher conditions, had less varried diets and crowding people together promoted more disease (and that's before you get into the heavy stuff like war, slavery, etc.). The benefit was that they could generate a surplus to sustain them through lean years. There's also the fact that once you build a system like this that people come to rely on, tearing it down leads to worse consequences than what the fate of the people would be if they'd never adopted it at all.

I consider the move from centralized state from tribalism to be a clearly good because it allowed for progress, the potential for science and industry to allow our species to seize control of our environments and the planet as a whole. This progress has continually increased the standard of living for our species (admittedly over a relatively short period of time). On a personal level without this progress I would likely be dead in that I have urinary issues that without modern medical technology would almost certainly kill me (or make my live hellish enough that death would be preferable).

edited 13th Sep '17 12:10:26 PM by Fourthspartan56

We did get all that eventually but there was a whole lot of "worse" before it got better. I did say it was mixed blessing rather than bad tho.

edited 13th Sep '17 12:14:24 PM by Elle

It's not a mixed bag if all the unique good parts are intrinsic to having moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture and larger civilisations.

But many of the bad things are intrinsic to the shift too.

We saw a similar thing in the shift from agriculture to factory industry. Industry has gotten us a lot of net positives but it required people to give up a lot of autonomy, be faced with demands to work for longer hours under worse conditions and an overall decline in health and well-being.

Exactly, sure there were bad things but they for the most part existed in tribal societies too. The good that civilization (and by extension the state) offers is wholly unique to it.

edited 13th Sep '17 12:23:24 PM by Fourthspartan56

... and all of the downsides can only be addressed by: A) relinquishing all the benefits, or B) as a society, working to remove them. They are not intrinsic to large societies. An inability to support the benefits of one (science, industry, resource security...) is intrinsic to tribal societies. You're viewing them with rose-tinted glasses.

edited 13th Sep '17 12:25:58 PM by RainehDaze

I wouldn't call the state evil, nor would I say its good; it's been necessary to varying degrees since the emergence of settled societies composed of troupes vastly larger than Dunbar's number, but I am generally not in favor of increasing state power without exhausting other options, because of the self evident downsides that emerge from greater reliance on coercion to maintain a functioning society. It is important that the exercise of state power be restricted to very well defined sets of circumstances as much as possible; the dramatic reduction in arbitrary exercises of state power has been one of the most positive aspects of liberal democracies.

As far as this intersects with hate speech, I'm already in favor of moderate expansions to US hate speech laws to more comprehensively cover violent rhetoric/threats (which would include explicit and some implicit threats like "you deserve rape", calling for genocide and so on), but don't favor throwing people in jail without evidence of a credible threat, in part because it's not a solution for antisocial behavior I'm very fond of in the first place. I'm not sure if other people are in favor of jailing people for hate speech alone, but the fact that I'm being debated with in the first place suggests the answer is yes.

edited 13th Sep '17 1:05:37 PM by CaptainCapsase

Some forms of hate speech do deserve rather more than a slap on the wrist, yes.

Especially if something horrible happened and a direct link to your words can be made to the resulting loss of health, life and/or property. Calling for somebody to be murdered and them getting that way according to your suggestions? Yeah.

Better yet, getting shut down before anything regrettable happens. After is shutting the door after the horse has bolted. <_<

edited 13th Sep '17 2:12:45 PM by Euodiachloris

So when some teenager texts a classmate to kill themselves, and a few days later they do, they should go to jail? They will most likely never be able to vote, hold a job, go to college, and may very well just flat out kill themselves down the line, or become a far more dangerous criminal than the one you threw in prison. For every genuine threat you find this way, you'll have dozens of Internet tough guy who, while likely not particularly pleasant people, are probably going to be far more dangerous coming out of jail after how ever many decades they're thrown in there than they were going in. Alternatively, if you're talking about cases where you established there was intent to incite violence, that's already illegal in regards to individuals in the United States, and is in fact an excellent example of a credible threat beyond the individual in question planning on committing a crime.

edited 13th Sep '17 2:35:54 PM by CaptainCapsase

That's if one is using a US style prison system that focuses on punishment over rehabilitation, that's not a given and not a valid reason to avoid punishing people properly.

In your example I'd say a lot would depend on the impact that the individual message had, suicides generally occurs when a straw breaks the camels back, not when one specific thing pushes an otherwise okay person to end their life.

The State secures civilization and privileges aka "rights." I suppose it's archaic now but I always liked the old conception of the State as an organism. To me, it makes perfect sense and can easily be applied to the talk of hate speech. Hate speech is a cancer and those who spread it are a cancerous tumor. You don't bargain with a tumor, you cut it out.

edited 13th Sep '17 3:45:51 PM by Nikkolas

Since we segued on to this thread from the US politics thread, I'd assume we are discussing this in the context of the United States, where imprisoning someone basically destroys their life. Though in the American context, most of these proposals are complete non-starters to begin with.

People aren't tumors.

edited 13th Sep '17 4:03:48 PM by CaptainCapsase

I'd say we're discussing it in the context of a hypothetical future US where such laws could come to pass, such a US would hopefully also have moved to a better prison system as well.

Considering you'd need to ammend the bill of rights to make European style speech policing anything but unthinkable, it's very unlikely unless the US suffers a coup, a civil war, or very serious constitutional crisis that results in the complete collapse of the US political system.

edited 13th Sep '17 4:12:20 PM by CaptainCapsase

So I think I brought this up in the Philosophy Thread or somewhere 'cuz I didn't know this thread existed.

Do any posters here have any sort of "alternative ideas for government"? Canb e Socialists Monarchists, whatever. Something just notably different from the modern Western idea that "nothing is better than our liberal democracies!"

We have this discussion actually. The latest proposals being Council Democracy, best explained by DeMarquis but summarized here and a scaled up version of Athenian Democracy (albeit the main assembly is chosen by sortition, not self-selection).

edited 16th Sep '17 6:09:20 AM by CenturyEye

Sortition was the main selection method in the Athenian democracy (I think some offices, like strategos, were filled differently), so that's not a difference. The main difference would be that the pool of citizens was much narrower in ancient Athens.

For magistrate offices (the equivalent to a bureaucracy in effect), sortition was the main method, with election—and even then not election as we know it—filling in a very narrow subset of offices, like treasurers.

The ekklesia that made decisions though was filled by whoever showed up, up to the limits of the assembly place, about 14000 for the 4th century. (Only the first 6k got paid though). I don't remember the 5th century's.

On the AI run government it interests me because AI by their very nature would be significantly more efficient then humans and presumably would be free of the biological flaws that are regrettably part of being human.

The fundamental question for that system is "how do you decide who is the most qualified?".

I've thought about ways around that and short of something dystopic like everyone being raised by the State it seems insurmountable (hence why I am merely interested in Technocracy instead of actively supporting it).

A government run by the likes of Facebook algorithms is not one I would want.