Prepare yourselves for the ultimate bastion of free speech!
Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
Looks like it.
Even if they did that much, that gives "maintain the supply chain" far more pomp than it deserves. The government hires subcontractors. The supply chains are maintained by workers, but the government can pay in to use them.
Why yes, letting citizens write their own constitutions is good democracy.
You're not wrong, though you somehow have absolute conviction in your half-baked ideas.
That's the thing though, it's not actually that well established.
For that, specifically, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, because I think people are overall more practical than that.
I will quote you from earlier in the thread where you said people don't know that silicon is used in electronics and would stop importing it. You did say something that dumb.
Do you think people don't know these things because they're lazy, or because they've offloaded the work to others? I would contend (and have been) that politicians don't know these things either, on any level, until someone speaks up and says they need fossil fuel catalysts or whatever it is. That's the thing, politicians being regular people are no better equipped to know these things than any other person. What you've actually been arguing this whole time is that in a direct democracy, nobody would ever speak up about the needs of the industries they work in.
It's not actually. I mean that in the literal "find me a job requirement" way. It is ideal that they know what they're doing. They tell people they know what they're doing. But the actual job requirement is to be popular, and maybe participate in votes (mind you not meaningfully participate, but literally just be present). But people who are elected to throw a wrench into government, purposefully not understand anything of value, and actively impede each and every function of the government you say is important are technically fulfilling their jobs just as well as a hard working and intelligent bureaucrat.
Lol, I've seen screenshots. It's Twitter with different colors. I'm also half tempted to join up, assuming they ever get it running properly, just to see how long it takes before the e-begging for donations starts.Prepare yourselves for the ultimate bastion of free speech!
Love how they call posts on it "truths" tho. Is that some newspeak word game meant to force other media into writing headlines like "Trump truthed today that ..."?
Oh, before you do jump in, be sure to employ every security measure you can first like zero personal details, effective VPNs and whatever else available, as the main consistent trait shared between these newfound "freespech" social medias is astonishingly poor/amateur data protection, most likely due to the heady mixture of aging idiocy and low-effort conmen who are ideologically drawn to try creating these grifts. Tho am probably preaching to the choir here, but just in case I'm not.
Like I said, just tempted. Most likely won't because I find actually using social media boring af. And even then, burner account by name of Johnny Deere.Oh, before you do jump in, be sure to employ every security measure you can first like zero personal details, effective VPNs and whatever else available, as the main consistent trait shared between these newfound "freespech" social medias is astonishingly poor/amateur data protection, most likely due to the heady mixture of aging idiocy and low-effort conmen who are ideologically drawn to try creating these grifts. Tho am probably preaching to the choir here, but just in case I'm not.
It really seems like an attempt to further legitimize the idea that (conservative) opinions are just as valid as objective truths. See "alternative facts" for another example.
This is likely because you're failing to actually read the posts of those who disagree with you. In your mind you've so established the correctness and righteousness of your own beliefs that you don't try to properly understand reasoning contrary to them; you just fill in conveniently disposed with strawmen instead.
If you don't pay attention to the words we've written, perhaps.
The government hires suppliers and couriers, and legislates regulations for their work. It forms contracts (covering questions like minimum levels and surpluses) and ensures compliance.
So yeah, the majority of the work on the ground is carried out by contracted companies. I don't know about you, but I would not want to hand all the power into the hands of private entities.
*Vote on their own constitutions and suggest amendments, but yes! It is. Glad you agree that the forms of direct democracy I've endorsed are not "meaningless" as you claimed before.
Whereas you have absolute conviction that it'll work out peachy. A complete restructuring of all political responsibility, and abolishment of political authority, on a scale never accomplished or even seriously attempted in human history. I'd say your making the larger leap of faith there.
OK, fair enough, let's put aside the bystander effect. Still, the human unwillingness to take responsibility is clear. We've just had a global plague, exacerbated endlessly by huge swathes of the population being unwilling to adapt even minor behavioural traits, or prioritising their comfort over the safety of others. Every time I take public transportation, more than 50% of passengers ignore the compulsory masks, and almost nobody bothers to distance anymore.
Alright. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Well, think about the specifics of why that example was used. Think about the specifics of how we actually obtain resources that are relatively obscure.
Legislators (such as MPs) almost never have to get involved in specific trade deals for ongoing resource requirements like that. But the cabinet does. It'll form contracts to ensure reliability for things like that.
If that kind of thing is nobody's job any more, I don't have any faith it'll get done. And I absolutely do not want to rely on the businesses themselves to do it. They're currently forced to comply, by oversight and contract. Give them free reign and profit runs wild.
I'm sure they would speak up. But without the ability to take your request to someone whose actual job it is to fulfil that requirement, they would need most of the population to recognise the requirement. And they'd have no greater platform or clout than anyone else. So perhaps for things most people know we need, they'd pass. Not so the rest.
I agree that much greater safeguards are required.
Though those individuals are a minority, even in Parliament. People like Nigel Farage derive their power not from their legislative power, but rather from their ability to convince and mobilise a large portion of the electorate, through being loud and maintaining a constant high profile. Hence why Farage's party never had any relevant legislative power, but nonetheless managed to mould the narrative on Brexit in his image. And that would surely have even greater impact in a direct democracy, where convincing a big chunk of people is all you need to do.
I have read. You two just vastly overestimate what government bureaucrats do. They're not useless, but they're not the foundation of society either.
That is handing power to private entities. That's literally how western liberal democracy works. They're not ensuring any supply chain, they're paying other people to do the logistics of actually maintaining the supply chain.
*Write
I'd disagree, considering where we are now on the verge of collapse.
Misinformation is rife, and there are uneven societal expectations across the world that would in fact be challenging. I admit this. I also just say that taking some of these people who are clearly not good for leadership and giving them a big megaphone does not help. Now people of authority who should be listened to are repeating the lies that lead to people doing that.
This is where delegation comes in. You don't give someone blanket authority over trade, but it is alright to hire/appoint/whatever a negotiator to work a deal. It's actually fine.
If you put in safeguards against the kind of misinformation that sways populations, it works equally as well in direct democracy. Further, a lot of that power they have comes from their positions of authority. Even if Farage is fringe politically, he has more of a political voice than his constituents and can tie them together with multiple unrelated policies into an all-or-nothing raft. People might agree with Farage because of his idea of Brexit, or they might say they do because they support Farage on some other (probably stupid) policy. Sometimes it's not even stupid policies or ideas. Trump is an idiot, but he is sometimes correct about a surface level issues that lends him credence when he says dumb shit. With no excess political power tied to individuals, you don't have to mold your politics around a broad policy that you may only agree with on a few points.
Scratch beneath the surface and oh look more grifts held up by more scurrying creatures.
I won't give many props to DT, but his ability to find the most batshit grifts in existence is impressive
Contracting a company to fulfil a contract that you negotiate with them, legislating to regulate them, and then holding legal power to force them to comply with the terms, is a damn sight different from trusting them to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, with zero oversight.
As was pointed out already, the constitution drafts were written by elected representatives. And no, the fact they weren't career politicians does not change the fact they were elected representatives.
Either way, that was the less important part of the reply. I'm glad you've acknowledged that the forms of direct democracy I endorsed are not "meaningless" like you said before.
Yeah, people have been decrying how we're on the 'verge of collapse' for a few millennia now, though, on-and-off.
Still, neither of us is endorsing the current forms of democracy in place in (say) the US, UK, France or Germany.
Some are (such as Trump, or Bolsonaro, on the Covid topic). They will tend to be figures arising from deeply unrepresentative democracies, in dire need of the safeguards I've been advocating from the start.
Yet others have fulfilled the role to a much more effective degree. Forming scientific advisory groups (government-appointed), and legislating for lockdowns/restrictions or funding vaccine research. These have sometimes been lockdowns which were deeply publicly unpopular at the time, but were absolutely necessary to save countless lives. And vaccine research, too, has been publicly funded. And yeah, that's specific amounts of money going to specific places due to direct decisions of elected representatives. And I'd be hard-pressed to find a single person in 100 who would know how much needed to go where.
It's not because that elected representative was inherently superior. It's because he had been hired to do a job, and had access to those advisory groups that most people don't.
Who hires/appoints? The population at large, through an election?
Is it just that we're electing people for much smaller, specific jobs, rather than ongoing positions?
This is the thing: Farage doesn't have constituents. He's not an MP. He was an MEP, for a while, that's all. There's no formal authority giving his words weight. He's a broadcaster.
And sure, ok, you can safeguard against misinformation... but most of what rabble-rousers and conmen like Farage come out with is just opinion. Blustered, exaggerated opinion. In a world without political authority, that kind of man becomes a king. Convincing the man on the street is all he's good at, and in direct democracy, it would be all he would need to do.
That's certainly a way to do it, among others.
Ah yes, no political power at all. I also can't help but notice "MEP, for a while", is 20 years in an elected position, is it not? Even if he wasn't winning many elections outside of his MEP seat, that doesn't mean he doesn't have greater political authority than the guy on the street. And coming at me with "this man with limited political power can guide national policy in an electoral system" isn't really the hot take I think you think it is.
Sadly that's how it usually works. Like what is the UK going to do if Novo Nordisk goes under for some reason?
It makes a world of difference based on your argument.
Glad to know climate change is just one of those things that happens, no worries.
That seems to be all of them, from what I can tell.
Give people access to those advisory groups and suddenly that's not a problem anymore. What you've really been arguing this whole time is that elected representatives are better at listening to advisors, which is also laughable.
EDIT: Sorry about the triple post, the Escapist wasn't having any of my posts apparently :V
Remember when Trump put in 300 judges around the country over the course of his administrationYes, this is happening in conjunction with Trump, Bannon, Flynn and a major amount of GQP influencers pushing their followers to sign up to for candidacy in not only these positions but every other position of power over future electoral planning and supervision. Whatever perceived notion of democracy people have right now is currently under a process of being stolen from right under them under the guise that it was already stolen...it's the peak of the republican strategy hitting its logical end point: gaslight/project upon the opposition to justify their own bad behaviour they were already indulging in to give the impression it was the opposition who forced them into it. Pure abusive relationship tactics applied on a national political scale. It cannot be understated how concerning this is for future elections.
Trump Is Pushing QAnon Candidates Into the GOP Mainstream
Trump is backing a number of candidates who’ve openly pushed QAnon’s wildest theories. By endorsing them, he’s mainstreaming the extremist movement.www.vice.com
‘Down the rabbit hole’: Arizona GOP goes full fringe
Republicans have reacted to the state’s leftward drift by stocking the 2022 ballot with conspiracy theorists and extremists.www.politico.com
It's already happening
Are we forgetting that Twitter Jack sits in an oxygen tent lined with foil to block out the signals of the real world for hours a day?
I'm pretty sure a lot of social media CEOs are nuts. Hell they San Fran Tech area was the one that saw "Raw water" explode in popularity at one point.
Since you're hellbent on misinterpreting this, a more precise definition of whether a criticism "stuck":
That criticism had an articulable, specific outcome on the acceptance, peer review, publication, defense, retraction or lack thereof on either the study, or its authors.
In which case there was precisely one, and I specified it.
Which were bunk, I discussed that already.
Which were also bunk.
An astute reader might have noticed I already mentioned the Lancet study had 12,000 respondents across 1,849 households in 47 clusters, that those clusters were weighted by conflict intensity across Iraq, and that "criticisms" about the labor distribution by surveyors were also bunk.
The PLOS study had 11,000 respondents across 2,000 households in 100 clusters.
And of course, either is sufficient in a country of an estimated 28,000,000 population at the time.
Once again, name them rather than retread ground I not only broached, but also covered already. I'm not here to do your job, meet your burden of proof.
You keep saying it's about consistency whilst ignoring the inconsistency of PLOS findings in contrast with literally every other outlet to have estimated Iraqi mortality rates, pre- or post-invasion, whether those estimates came from state, supranational, non-government, or civilian academic actors. For consistency between pre- and post-invasion mortality rates to matter in the first place, the methodology has to be justified and consistent with that of other sources.
PLOS literally found that Iraq had a mortality rate on par with that of the highest-developed western liberal democracies, superior to that of other countries in the same region with drastically higher levels of economic development, when the country was under UN sanctions and already in the midst of a globally-recognized humanitarian crisis due to them.
That calls their methodology itself into question. Consistency in a suspect methodology is meaningless.
The Lancet study did use consistent standards to determine their pre-invasion mortality rate and post-invasion mortality rate.
Yeah, it kind of all boils down to whose estimates of mortalities due to UN sanctions as the baseline by necessity, wouldn't it.
You either stand by the criticisms of the Lancet study, or you do not. Hell, you are either aware of what the criticisms of the Lancet study were in the first place, or you are not.
The criticism of the Lancet study was that they under-estimated the pre-invasion (i.e. under UN sanction) mortality rate. Even though they actually didn't; the mortality rate they found in pre-invasion Iraq was consistent, if not explicably higher (sanctions) to other countries in the region. Its estimate of the post-invasion mortality rate was never in question, as it was entirely consistent with that of less-developed countries and countries in armed conflict.
Most of eastern Europe, but particularly Balkan states -- in peacetime -- have mortality rates higher than what the Lancet study found during the Iraq invasion, insurgency, counter-offensive, and civil conflict.
As you yourself note, the deviation in pre- and post-invasion mortality rates is what matters. Ergo, the criticism is the Lancet study over-estimated excess deaths as a result of the conflict, because they under-estimated mortality rates before it. Which is a bullshit argument, "the Iraq invasion couldn't have killed that many, because they were already dying to UN sanctions".
Did we warp back to 1967 when I wasn't looking?