And what was your plan, exactly? Are you calling for an end to the First Amendment? People shouldn't be allowed to assemble and express political preferences unless it's done the way you prefer? How would you enforce that, exactly?
Vote for those "unlikable" third parties, of course.
"That they won't win" is certainly one issue, as people don't like to throw their votes away. But "these people are generally loons" is the more typical rationale. Parties that are absolutely obsessed about weed, or communism, or destroying intellectual property, or disarming the military, etc., don't fail because we have a "two party system," they fail because very few rational people would ever want to give such parties control of the government.
You just described the Democrat and Republican parties. The difference between them and the typical third party, is that they have much better propaganda and much more money to throw around to spread that propaganda, hence the common but wholly delusional concern about "loons". That concern didn't stop party voters from nominating Obama or Trump, did it?
You don't need to destroy something, you need to actually create something. How is that not obvious to you?
Because it's not true. Your proposal is so highly leveraged against you that it would take immense time, political capital, and of course, huge, enduring support from the public probably over the span of decades. It's not going to happen in the face of the current powerful two party system just as it hasn't happened since the formation of the US more than two centuries ago.
The only way to change the party structure is to change how the candidates are selected IMHO.
Without leverage on the parties who would block that, it's not going to happen. I consider strong third parties necessary to getting a better election scheme to happen.
Nah, the idea of self-determination here is applied to the country as a whole. Specifically meaning, outsiders (like the United States) should let them be, instead of trying to impose our own ideals of government on them.
Why? Will they do the same for us when they ascend to superpower status?
That's like saying "I think it's unsportsmanlike to hold a football. I think American Football should only be played with one's feet!" You'll just lose. Over and over again when your opponents use their hands. Handicapping yourself does nothing but work against your interests. It doesn't change the game. It doesn't change the rules... it just makes a fool out of you.
My view is that you have had a couple of centuries to demonstrate this works. And that there's a good chance that some clueless version of you will be saying similar things in another two centuries. There's no future in playing a rigged game.
It amazes me how people (including three posters in this thread so far) keep trying to claim that playing within the rules works, when it's gotten us to this point. Sorry, your argument came broken.
What is the only way to have both the "right of self-determination" and keep order and harmony? Why it's a democracy. First, there's no formal way to register approval of a government except via a fair election or something equivalent to that. China never has had that. "Right of self-determination" then is just a story governments like to tell to placate some portion of the oppressed population.
And if your informal register of approval is "we haven't had a civil war yet" or even "disagreement with your leaders is treason", then you aren't really supporting order and harmony since there is no peaceful outlet for grievances or disagreement.
The two concepts you mentioned here only have meaning together when the citizenry of a region have a say in the government and politics of the region.
She is the status-quo. In international matters, we do not fear her, because we already know how the USA under the Clinton empire family works.
Trump is, potentially, a lot *worse*
And the obvious rebuttal is a) she is a really lousy status quo, and b) Trump has been kicking around for a while too. He's just as much a known quantity since he's been kicking around a while and has made a lot of noise for a long time.
much of the world is ready to declare it is the start of the apocalypse if he wins (which will pave the way for right-wing extremists everywhere).
Ever think about the dynamics of why that happens rather than just worry about it? If there weren't so many "right-wing extremists" and they weren't heavily marginalized by society, then all the "paving" in the world wouldn't create a problem.
Or maybe it's only a problem because you're not the one exploiting the discontented?
The Roman senate eventually gave up their autonomy willingly because they were tired of the civil wars.
I think it more accurate to say that the members of the Senate who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic in expressing their tiredness (or whatever propaganda excuses they really used at the time), ended up on the wrong side of Augustus Caesar.
And somehow I doubt the Chinese Communist Party will go gently into that good night for the sake of a calm succession (especially given their brutality while putting down the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989). The viewpoint you describe is only relevant while the Party is not threatened.
It also doesn't mean that you have to bring it up in every conversation.
I disagree. The viewpoint you discussed doesn't actually exist except as a propaganda fabrication by an oppressive government to remain in power.
Then you write the following:
So that is the problem the Chinese government needs to solve. Keep order and harmony, because for the vast majority of people, it's better than chaos. (Look at what happened in Egypt recently when they had their new government.....lots of violence, then nothing really changed. Replacing Mubarak was probably a mistake, but some people paid for it with their lives).
With a different form of government, unscrupulous men can start a campaign of lies, and build a following, and if he's convincing enough, even make it into power as president. But all this will happen without real violence (that is, violence does not lead to power and political enemies don't need to 'disappear'), and the system is designed with power balances to prevent things from getting too messed up, even with a lousy president.
The very narrative you repeated (of being concerned about order versus chaos) is an example of a "campaign of lies". Funny, how this viewpoint is so concerned about rival parties causing trouble by spreading lies (or perhaps rather inconvenient truths). That's such a refined and elegant hypocrisy.
Obviously not. Instead, I'd send in special operative, phantomfive to kick ass and restore democracy to the Far East. Assuming phantomfive is done with his emo moral relativism?
Just because there are evils out there beyond our current ability to fix, doesn't mean that we need to pay them respect.
let's leave aside which is 'right' and 'wrong' for now, and concede them the right of self-determination
No, let's not. Let's note instead that exercising the right of self-determination would require the sort of communication and social unrest that is supposedly bad under their "chosen" form of government.
This is not accidental. An effective parasite is hard to eliminate from a host. And at the human level, we see plenty of examples of this, here, a variety of authoritarian governments that insert themselves into every aspect of life, creating both a dependent class of citizen who supports the government merely because that's where their benefits come from and a large cost to remove the government.
Didn't say it wouldn't happen anyway. The point is having "at will" increases distrust and reduces loyalty between employers and employees, and that is not friendly to employment.
It doesn't. The employer now has greater distrust of the employees, especially after it picks up a bunch of bad seeds that can't be fired.
Maybe Trump has offered a better deal to Putin than Clinton has. Or Putin is just thwarting Chinese or European machinations. If you really can't think of other possibilities here, then you aren't thinking about this at all.
Don't naively think reciprocal means "dollars", note that my post mentions "barriers" not "balance of trade" (i.e. dollars).
I was naively thinking this was a selfish and futile attempt to protect developed world labor from reality. You know, I still think that is the case. The developed world doesn't need additional barriers, it needs economically healthier societies that among other things treat their employers better.
Likewise what you think of as "capitalism" - given that the USA (and other) governments have repeatedly stepped in to prevent capitalist monopolist oligarchies forming (the railway and oil robber-barons being one example) or break them up when they've managed to establish a toehold(**). There's a new set emerging which have managed to get further than than the last few times, but the reality is that unfettered capitalism leads to abject misery for most and lack of progress for all.
Or create them. There's a centuries long history of government-created monopolies. The railway and oil robber-barons are such examples since strike breaking and market cornering was routinely done with government assistance. I note that many of the examples you gave later on are monopolies due to government interference. AT&T is a particularly notorious example.
(****) the biggest risk associated with atmospheric CO2 spikes and methane breakouts levels isn't ocean level rises. It's anoxic dieoffs resulting in the extinction of pretty much every land animal larger than 40kg.
Unless, of course, your assertion is wrong. Then it's not. That's the problem with asserting things without support from reality. They can be right, they can be wrong.
(*) Communism requires a surplus of production and of labour, such that there isn't enough actual work for people to do. This is close to what we now have in western countries - which without adequate backstops in place leads to large amounts of un(der)employment and the political need for "make work" schemes(***)
(In the old days unemployment used to be hidden by hiring people into government service or moving them workseeker to sickness allowances. These options are frequently less available thanks to the breach of the social contract that started with Ronald Reagan's welfare slashing efforts in California in 1970 and gathered pace with California's voting in of proposition 13. That malaise has spread far and wide since then, with the rich getting richer and the poor increasingly being systematically disenfranchised through institutionalised racist and classist policies.)
That's a funny way to say that the US and other countries are competing poorly with cheaper labor from the developing world. The obvious point to make in all this is that labor remains valuable. If there's not enough work to go around, then it's because of systemic failures of the society, not because we've achieved some wonderful state of economy where a few people can do all the work.
Rather than touching a system which relies on labor failure in order to operate, how about we make employment easier so that we can get back to doing useful stuff?
(***) If you start with the notion that a basic allowance will allow creative types to flourish, accept that some people will piss it against the wall and somehow address the raging anti-intellectuallism that's destroying the USA and other countries so that people _want_ to learn, then there's a lot of mileage in it.
Unless, of course, that sort of policy has the opposite effect and encourages more raging anti-intellectuallism. For example, I steer you towards the example of protest culture which has as examples of anti-intellectualism: sloganeering, naked pursuit of self-interest, disturbing and irrational mob behavior ("snapplause" for speech that the mob likes, shouting down of speech the mob doesn't like), careers consisting of tilting at imaginary windmills, and pointless disruptions of parts of society unrelated to the grievance at hand. Having a basic income would of course, make this annoying hobby more prevalent.
I think one of the greater turn offs of Communism is just how much reason has to be fucked up in order to embrace the system. In the real world, such systems are comparable because they manifest in all three of your "dimensions". There's no mileage to be gained from your gobbledygook.
A brief critique would include a) society and political dimensions are not independent, b) when you say "a way of organizing society", you automatically introduce a political dimension, and c) in reality, we already have manifestations of capitalism and communism which both competed with each other and were quite comparable to each other.
Basically if you would define the terms more sharply you could have a combination of any of those variations in the economic dimension, society dimension and political dimension.
But there would be no point to doing so since no one else would share your choice of definition nor would such division of definitions illuminate a real distinction, assuming you have a higher life goal than labeling "american" thought as a mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
And what was your plan, exactly? Are you calling for an end to the First Amendment? People shouldn't be allowed to assemble and express political preferences unless it's done the way you prefer? How would you enforce that, exactly?
Vote for those "unlikable" third parties, of course.
"That they won't win" is certainly one issue, as people don't like to throw their votes away. But "these people are generally loons" is the more typical rationale. Parties that are absolutely obsessed about weed, or communism, or destroying intellectual property, or disarming the military, etc., don't fail because we have a "two party system," they fail because very few rational people would ever want to give such parties control of the government.
You just described the Democrat and Republican parties. The difference between them and the typical third party, is that they have much better propaganda and much more money to throw around to spread that propaganda, hence the common but wholly delusional concern about "loons". That concern didn't stop party voters from nominating Obama or Trump, did it?
You don't need to destroy something, you need to actually create something. How is that not obvious to you?
Because it's not true. Your proposal is so highly leveraged against you that it would take immense time, political capital, and of course, huge, enduring support from the public probably over the span of decades. It's not going to happen in the face of the current powerful two party system just as it hasn't happened since the formation of the US more than two centuries ago.
The only way to change the party structure is to change how the candidates are selected IMHO.
Without leverage on the parties who would block that, it's not going to happen. I consider strong third parties necessary to getting a better election scheme to happen.
The obvious rebuttal is the rise of the Tea Party movement. By throwing numerous elections they got their goals included in party platforms.
Nah, the idea of self-determination here is applied to the country as a whole. Specifically meaning, outsiders (like the United States) should let them be, instead of trying to impose our own ideals of government on them.
Why? Will they do the same for us when they ascend to superpower status?
That's like saying "I think it's unsportsmanlike to hold a football. I think American Football should only be played with one's feet!" You'll just lose. Over and over again when your opponents use their hands. Handicapping yourself does nothing but work against your interests. It doesn't change the game. It doesn't change the rules... it just makes a fool out of you.
My view is that you have had a couple of centuries to demonstrate this works. And that there's a good chance that some clueless version of you will be saying similar things in another two centuries. There's no future in playing a rigged game.
It amazes me how people (including three posters in this thread so far) keep trying to claim that playing within the rules works, when it's gotten us to this point. Sorry, your argument came broken.
Thus the party we least liked, A, is the winner.
So? I consider destruction of the two party system more important than voting for someone I dislike a little less.
and concede them the right of self-determination
and
Keep order and harmony
What is the only way to have both the "right of self-determination" and keep order and harmony? Why it's a democracy. First, there's no formal way to register approval of a government except via a fair election or something equivalent to that. China never has had that. "Right of self-determination" then is just a story governments like to tell to placate some portion of the oppressed population.
And if your informal register of approval is "we haven't had a civil war yet" or even "disagreement with your leaders is treason", then you aren't really supporting order and harmony since there is no peaceful outlet for grievances or disagreement.
The two concepts you mentioned here only have meaning together when the citizenry of a region have a say in the government and politics of the region.
Not to a democracy. And two changes of leadership is not a long track record nor is 1989 a long time ago.
She is the status-quo. In international matters, we do not fear her, because we already know how the USA under the Clinton empire family works.
Trump is, potentially, a lot *worse*
And the obvious rebuttal is a) she is a really lousy status quo, and b) Trump has been kicking around for a while too. He's just as much a known quantity since he's been kicking around a while and has made a lot of noise for a long time.
much of the world is ready to declare it is the start of the apocalypse if he wins (which will pave the way for right-wing extremists everywhere).
Ever think about the dynamics of why that happens rather than just worry about it? If there weren't so many "right-wing extremists" and they weren't heavily marginalized by society, then all the "paving" in the world wouldn't create a problem.
Or maybe it's only a problem because you're not the one exploiting the discontented?
might work for fooling lazy magnetometer reader or one without "big data" processing capability
It'd fool me. But then I'm neither a major world power or trying.
Yes, seriously.
The Roman senate eventually gave up their autonomy willingly because they were tired of the civil wars.
I think it more accurate to say that the members of the Senate who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic in expressing their tiredness (or whatever propaganda excuses they really used at the time), ended up on the wrong side of Augustus Caesar.
And somehow I doubt the Chinese Communist Party will go gently into that good night for the sake of a calm succession (especially given their brutality while putting down the Tienanmen Square protests of 1989). The viewpoint you describe is only relevant while the Party is not threatened.
It also doesn't mean that you have to bring it up in every conversation.
I disagree. The viewpoint you discussed doesn't actually exist except as a propaganda fabrication by an oppressive government to remain in power.
Then you write the following:
So that is the problem the Chinese government needs to solve. Keep order and harmony, because for the vast majority of people, it's better than chaos. (Look at what happened in Egypt recently when they had their new government.....lots of violence, then nothing really changed. Replacing Mubarak was probably a mistake, but some people paid for it with their lives).
With a different form of government, unscrupulous men can start a campaign of lies, and build a following, and if he's convincing enough, even make it into power as president. But all this will happen without real violence (that is, violence does not lead to power and political enemies don't need to 'disappear'), and the system is designed with power balances to prevent things from getting too messed up, even with a lousy president.
The very narrative you repeated (of being concerned about order versus chaos) is an example of a "campaign of lies". Funny, how this viewpoint is so concerned about rival parties causing trouble by spreading lies (or perhaps rather inconvenient truths). That's such a refined and elegant hypocrisy.
The Chinese are building expertise at noise dampening. It's an easier problem to dampen the noise of a battery/diesel sub than it is a nuclear sub.
Bullshit.
and unseen by the west, via the new DEEP canal.
It's not deep enough for that. Sorry, one doesn't sneak a sub through a canal with satellite and human int coverage.
Obviously not. Instead, I'd send in special operative, phantomfive to kick ass and restore democracy to the Far East. Assuming phantomfive is done with his emo moral relativism?
Just because there are evils out there beyond our current ability to fix, doesn't mean that we need to pay them respect.
let's leave aside which is 'right' and 'wrong' for now, and concede them the right of self-determination
No, let's not. Let's note instead that exercising the right of self-determination would require the sort of communication and social unrest that is supposedly bad under their "chosen" form of government.
This is not accidental. An effective parasite is hard to eliminate from a host. And at the human level, we see plenty of examples of this, here, a variety of authoritarian governments that insert themselves into every aspect of life, creating both a dependent class of citizen who supports the government merely because that's where their benefits come from and a large cost to remove the government.
The market penalized the shareholders of the companies. And coincidentally, they were the ones making the bad decisions.
As to the "workers", nothing will come of this particular spike in the price of Nintendo.
So your theory is that FB understands nothing about social networks and has never heard of the Streisand Effect.
And I'd say the current story is supporting evidence for the claim that FB just might not understand social networks as much as it should.
Didn't say it wouldn't happen anyway. The point is having "at will" increases distrust and reduces loyalty between employers and employees, and that is not friendly to employment.
It doesn't. The employer now has greater distrust of the employees, especially after it picks up a bunch of bad seeds that can't be fired.
Maybe Trump has offered a better deal to Putin than Clinton has. Or Putin is just thwarting Chinese or European machinations. If you really can't think of other possibilities here, then you aren't thinking about this at all.
Don't naively think reciprocal means "dollars", note that my post mentions "barriers" not "balance of trade" (i.e. dollars).
I was naively thinking this was a selfish and futile attempt to protect developed world labor from reality. You know, I still think that is the case. The developed world doesn't need additional barriers, it needs economically healthier societies that among other things treat their employers better.
Likewise what you think of as "capitalism" - given that the USA (and other) governments have repeatedly stepped in to prevent capitalist monopolist oligarchies forming (the railway and oil robber-barons being one example) or break them up when they've managed to establish a toehold(**). There's a new set emerging which have managed to get further than than the last few times, but the reality is that unfettered capitalism leads to abject misery for most and lack of progress for all.
Or create them. There's a centuries long history of government-created monopolies. The railway and oil robber-barons are such examples since strike breaking and market cornering was routinely done with government assistance. I note that many of the examples you gave later on are monopolies due to government interference. AT&T is a particularly notorious example.
(****) the biggest risk associated with atmospheric CO2 spikes and methane breakouts levels isn't ocean level rises. It's anoxic dieoffs resulting in the extinction of pretty much every land animal larger than 40kg.
Unless, of course, your assertion is wrong. Then it's not. That's the problem with asserting things without support from reality. They can be right, they can be wrong.
(*) Communism requires a surplus of production and of labour, such that there isn't enough actual work for people to do. This is close to what we now have in western countries - which without adequate backstops in place leads to large amounts of un(der)employment and the political need for "make work" schemes(***) (In the old days unemployment used to be hidden by hiring people into government service or moving them workseeker to sickness allowances. These options are frequently less available thanks to the breach of the social contract that started with Ronald Reagan's welfare slashing efforts in California in 1970 and gathered pace with California's voting in of proposition 13. That malaise has spread far and wide since then, with the rich getting richer and the poor increasingly being systematically disenfranchised through institutionalised racist and classist policies.)
That's a funny way to say that the US and other countries are competing poorly with cheaper labor from the developing world. The obvious point to make in all this is that labor remains valuable. If there's not enough work to go around, then it's because of systemic failures of the society, not because we've achieved some wonderful state of economy where a few people can do all the work.
Rather than touching a system which relies on labor failure in order to operate, how about we make employment easier so that we can get back to doing useful stuff?
(***) If you start with the notion that a basic allowance will allow creative types to flourish, accept that some people will piss it against the wall and somehow address the raging anti-intellectuallism that's destroying the USA and other countries so that people _want_ to learn, then there's a lot of mileage in it.
Unless, of course, that sort of policy has the opposite effect and encourages more raging anti-intellectuallism. For example, I steer you towards the example of protest culture which has as examples of anti-intellectualism: sloganeering, naked pursuit of self-interest, disturbing and irrational mob behavior ("snapplause" for speech that the mob likes, shouting down of speech the mob doesn't like), careers consisting of tilting at imaginary windmills, and pointless disruptions of parts of society unrelated to the grievance at hand. Having a basic income would of course, make this annoying hobby more prevalent.
A brief critique would include a) society and political dimensions are not independent, b) when you say "a way of organizing society", you automatically introduce a political dimension, and c) in reality, we already have manifestations of capitalism and communism which both competed with each other and were quite comparable to each other.
Basically if you would define the terms more sharply you could have a combination of any of those variations in the economic dimension, society dimension and political dimension.
But there would be no point to doing so since no one else would share your choice of definition nor would such division of definitions illuminate a real distinction, assuming you have a higher life goal than labeling "american" thought as a mistake.