The vast majority of humans are wrong about many, MANY fundamental things. The fewer of them controlling outcomes the better. Compulsory voting only makes sense if you think the number of smart informed people who don’t vote out of laziness outnumbers the number of idiots who don’t vote out of laziness.
I think the majority of people who don’t vote out of laziness are neither extremely smart nor extremely stupid, neither extremely right-wing nor extremely leftist, neither extremely gay nor extremely straight, etc. That’s the point, they’re not extremists.
I know that the lazy moderates aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but I also know that once they’re out of the picture there’s much less ballast to keep the radical lunatics in line. To use a specific example: I think that the Tea Party does a better job of convincing their lazy supporters to vote than either of the major parties do, and if we accept that logic then the inescapable conclusion is that the Tea Party’s influence is being inflated by America’s non-compulsory voting system.
It’s not just the dullards who aren’t voting, either. I think you would be shocked at how smart and well informed you have to be before you actually decide you care enough to vote. Just look at Konkvistador—surely LWians and their ilk are the people we want MOST to vote?
To use a specific example: I think that the Tea Party does a better job of convincing their lazy supporters to vote than either of the major parties do, and if we accept that logic then the inescapable conclusion is that the Tea Party’s influence is being inflated by America’s non-compulsory voting system.
You do know tea party activists are actually above average on nearly any stat you’d care to name? Education, political knowledge, …
Just look at Konkvistador—surely LWians and their ilk are the people we want MOST to vote?
Well sure! Any plan on a revolution to make sure only we vote? Because otherwise a very eloquent Church pastor or Harvard professor can single-handedly bring more voting power to bear than we.
You do know tea party activists are actually above average on nearly any stat you’d care to name? Education, political knowledge, …
It’s weird, I had considered using that same fact as an argument for MY side of this debate, but I cut it for the sake of brevity. To be clear, are you suggesting that the Tea Party is a good influence on American (or world) politics? Sure, they’re smarter than the average American, but clearly being slightly smarter doesn’t translate to a similar increase in sanity. Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic. I could mention a whole swathe of examples of how despite being smarter, the Tea Party is also far more radical and morally objectionable than Americans on average, but I’ll just link some articles because I have class in half an hour and want keep this quick. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/05/10_fictious_tea_party_beliefs.htmlhttp://pewresearch.org/pubs/1903/tea-party-movement-religion-social-issues-conservative-christian
The reason we want to raise average voter IQ is because we think this will make the voters saner on average, but in the case of the Tea Party this clearly hasn’t happened. This is exactly why I brought them up—these people haven’t been motivated to vote by an appeal to their intelligence, or there’d be a hell of a lot more of them and their policies would be different. Rather, they’ve been motivated by an appeal to their fear and anger and radicalism. You can’t get lazy moderates to the voting booths by whipping them up into misguided fury, but you CAN get lazy radicals like that, so by making voting non-compulsory you hand people like Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, etc, a much greater proportion of the votes than they deserve. You don’t have to be smart to realise the Tea Party is wrong, just sane. Conversely, you don’t have to be dumb to be insane.
It’s weird, I had considered using that same fact as an argument for MY side of this debate, but I cut it for the sake of brevity. To be clear, are you suggesting that the Tea Party is a good influence on American (or world) politics?
I can’t speak for Konkvistador but I certainly do.
Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic.
What you mean is that you disagree with him on a lot of issues, for each one consider the possibility that it is you who is being a lunatic.
Wow, 6 of the 10 “fictitious” beliefs appear to actually be true (Edit: I suspect you disagree but debating them here might run even for afoul of the taboo against politics, or not whatever). As for the other 4 I don’t have enough information to assign probabilities either way.
Which 6? I know very little about any of these issues, but my priors on how politics work in general (mostly successful-politicians-are-never-too-radical and they-always-maintain-status-quo) make it difficult to score any 6 of these as being probable.
2 through 7, although now that I read it again 10 is at least partially true, i.e., the Tea Party is in fact a genuine grass roots movement.
I know very little about any of these issues, but my priors on how politics work in general (mostly successful-politicians-are-never-too-radical and they-always-maintain-status-quo)
And yet the political status quo today is different from what it was 50 years ago and very different from what it was 100 years ago.
I would be interested to see your supporting evidence for 2, 4 and 6. Don’t feel that you have to argue them, I won’t argue against them, but if you could link me to some sources or something in the spirit of educating me I would be appreciative.
Really? Someone voted this down? I was expecting to take a pretty big karma hit for expressing explicit political opinions on here, but this post didn’t even offer anything that could be disagreed with, let alone fallacious reasoning. I was honestly and humbly asking for more information. I’ve lost 23 karma points today. 22 of those losses I wouldn’t have minded, but this one is just nonsense. Did somebody just go through and downvote everything I’ve ever said or something?
Did somebody just go through and downvote everything I’ve ever said or something?
You may have a stalker. As far as I can tell, there are a small number of people using the voting system against persons they dislike rather than against low-quality comment content.
Notice that Eugine_Nier’s comments have also been voted down en masse. My guess is that at least one person thought that the whole discussion was too close to partisan politics for LessWrong and downvoted all the comments in the thread.
I think that a good policy would be to move this kind of discussions to the monthly Politics thread. (By which I mean not only that Stuart’s original post should have been on there, as someone else said, but also that when a discussion like this one about the Tea Party emerges organically in a non-politics post, a moderator should move the whole subthread to the Politics thread).
Haha, and now the evidence request comment has been voted back up to zero but the one asking why the original was downvoted has been downvoted. Prediction: this post will also be downvoted.
Ah well, whether or not someone out there dislikes my contributions to it, this thread has been worthwhile because it has provided me with important data-points. The most important data-points are always the ones that surprise you. Data-point: some members of Less Wrong are Glenn Beck fans.
Honestly I’m getting tired of people gasping in a horror at the idea that in a readership of hundreds, a single person downvoted them. I also get downvoted. I don’t always feel those downvotes are deserved. Sometimes those comments get upvoted back to zero or beyond, sometimes not. I don’t keep complaining about every single downvote that I feel is undeserved, wasting time and space.
I’ve not downvoted you, but speaking generally I’m very likely to downvote people complaining about downvotes.
Your annoyance has been noted. Keep in mind, though, that I had asked a question in an attempt to see things from Eugine_Nier’s point of view, and that at the time I made the complaining post I hadn’t gotten an answer yet, but had been down-voted for my trouble. It’s poor practice for the community to punish people who make an effort to examine the evidence against their strongly-held opinions, and it’s in my best interests to rail against community behaviour that gets in the way of my own learning. I certainly don’t make a habit of whingeing about every loss of karma that seems unjustified to me—if I thought the loss of karma was deserved then I wouldn’t have made the post in the first place—but I reserve the right to kick up a stink if I think people’s down-votes are obstructing rational process. And, of course, I’m willing to cop any further karma loss that I take as a result as having been sacrificed for a worthy cause. So, go ahead down-voting complainers if that’s what makes you happy, but I’d respectfully like to tender the suggestion that occasionally complaining is the right thing to do.
Well obviously this depends on what one means by “death panels”, this article for example provides a decent argument.
4) Obama is going to take away our guns.
This one is hard to score since I suspect he’d be pushing this much harder if the Tea Party didn’t exist.
6) Fascism is a left-wing phenomenon.
You can start with this article by Eric Raymond, also read the comments.
Edit: Note this statement will depend on what one means by “left-wing”. I interpret the statement to mean “the most natural cluster in thing-space that includes movements generally called ‘left-wing’ also includes fascism.”
Edit: Note this statement will depend on what one means by “left-wing”. I interpret the statement to mean “the most natural cluster in thing-space that includes movements generally called ‘left-wing’ also includes fascism.”
The thing is that AFAIK fascism never described itself as left-wing. It sometimes describes itself as a third position, a mixture/improvement of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, but whenever it actually chose between the two it preferred to describe itself as right-wing.
It tends to be treated as “left-wing” only by those people who define left/right only by the criterion of statism—a treatment which really isn’t the historical usage...
It tends to be treated as “left-wing” only by those people who define left/right only by the criterion of statism—a treatment which really isn’t the historical usage
That part in bold should be nominated for understatement of the year.
I’m actually reading Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society right now, playing the game ‘record all instances where he criticizes conservatives or libertarians’ - so far 0.
Last night, I thought I could at least chalk up his criticism of Naziism & Italian fascism as instances 1 & 2, except he immediately launched into the standard argument that ‘no, actually those are socialisms don’t you see’. Oy vey.
Sowell is one of the best intellectuals in American conservatism right now, but that’s also clearly where he makes his home, which is disappointing from a LW perspective. The two books by him that I like best are Knowledge and Decisions and A Conflict of Visions. The first is, if I remember correctly, an updated explanation of Hayek’s insights, although the second ~60% of the book is spent on ‘historical trends’ and is probably about as biased as you would expect. The second is explicitly about politics, but its first chapter is tremendously insightful. (The latter sections of that book are basically more detailed repetition, and again I would expect the examples to be solidly conservative-leaning.)
You’ve definitively solved the issue of the political orientation of Nazism by merely noting the word “Socialism” in its title, just like a stereotypical American conservative does, without even the need to know anything about Otto and Gregor Strasser or how the left wing faction of the Nazi party was defeated, expunged and purged.
I was responding to the claim I quoted. If you’re going to intentionally misinterpret anything I write, I don’t see what the point of continuing this discussion.
The claim you quoted said “left-wing”, it didn’t say “Socialist”.
And the parts that you didn’t quote mentioned that fascism did sometimes describe as a mixture of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, just like “National Socialism” included the word “National” to appeal to right-wing nationalists, and “Socialism” to appeal to left-wingers.
If you want to make a rebuttal to my actual claim, find a place where Nazism or Fascism describes itself as “left-wing”—just left-wing, not “a response to both left and right” or “a synthesis of both left and right”, or indeed “National Socialist”.
I guess I don’t see how to properly interpret 3. Is it that Obama is a muslim AND a socialist AND a facist (which is how I took it). The first is very unlikely to be true given Obama’s record of attending Jeremiah Wright’s service.
I can see three or four that are vaguely disputable:
Obama did lower taxes for 95% of working Americans, but perhaps he raised the total amount of tax revenue the the government takes in? Maybe the Tea Party were never claiming that he would raise taxes overall, but were instead claiming that the areas in which he would raise taxes would cause a lot of harm? I can see someone defending either of these theses.
Perhaps Eugine_Nier actually does believe that global warming is a hoax.
He almost certainly does think that the Tea Party is a grass-roots movement. I can mount an argument against this but at the end of the day it depends what your criterion for “grass-roots” is. I think this one was the weakest one on the list and I wouldn’t have put it there if I was the author.
I guess maybe you could add the one about the Washington march—although the number of people who attended is a matter of fact, not opinion, perhaps the argument could be mounted that the 70000 figure excludes people who should count towards the tally, or was taken during a lull in proceedings. The rest, though? If there are Birthers on Less Wrong then… Well, that would be a disappointing discovery. We’re supposed to be good at weighing up evidence.
If there are Birthers on Less Wrong then… Well, that would be a disappointing discovery.
Frankly, the whole Birther thing reminds of how, back in the day, debates about whether a prince was actually the king’s son served as proxies for debates about whether the prince would make a good king. I think this explains why both sides seem to be much more sure of their position than the evidence warrants. (Although most of the “birthers” whose blogs I read don’t claim to know for sure that Obama wasn’t born in the US)
As for the matter of fact, I don’t know where Obama was born However, it is interesting that until he went into politics, Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya.
The link you gave doesn’t say “Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya”, it says that Obama’s literary agent said Obama was born in Kenya. In fact the very link you gave even offers a further link from an earlier 1990 interview that says clearly “He was born in Hawaii”
So, I’m downvoting this, as even a cursory examination of the links you gave indicate your statement to be inaccurate and misleading.
Frankly, the whole Birther thing reminds of how, back in the day, debates about whether a prince was actually the king’s son served as proxies for debates about whether the prince would make a good king.
You are being unreasonably generous to Birthers. If they wanted to discuss Obama’s qualifications and abilities then they would be discussing them explicitly. A crown prince has the lawful right to take the throne when the reigning monarch died—one of the few ways to get rid of a bad prince was to have him declared illegitimate. If Obama is a bad president then he can be voted out, no need to invent spurious reasons for his disqualification. Birthers are manufacturing doubt about Obama’s birthplace and then demanding balanced coverage of both sides of the story. That’s also what you’re doing in the last paragraph of your post: “I don’t know the truth, but I find it interesting that...” You have all the evidence you need to come to an informed opinion. Balanced coverage would be reporting the fact that he was born in Hawaii and has the birth certificate to prove it.
This strikes me as an excuse to avoid looking at the evidence being presented.
No, the evidence is the birth certificate. I’ve looked at it. Saying “I don’t know, but I find it interesting...” is offering innuendo in the place of evidence, since you seem to believe the birth certificate is real, which means the “born in Kenya” claim has to be incorrect.
Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic.
What you mean is that you disagree with him on a lot of issues, for each one consider the possibility that it is you who is being a lunatic.
Let me be very clear, I’m not calling Beck a lunatic solely on grounds of his policy. His policy is radical and I disagree with it, but that isn’t my main piece of evidence, it’s the cherry on the top. This is my main evidence:
This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture....I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.
–on President Obama, July 28, 2009
I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. … No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus—band—Do, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.
–responding to the question “What would people do for $50 million?”, “The Glenn Beck Program,” May 17, 2005
Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization...And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did. That’s what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing].
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” May 1, 2007
So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. … Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. … The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening.
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” March 9, 2009
I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen a half-monkey, half-person yet.
– May 18, 2010
They [Democrats in Congress] believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.
– June 9, 2010
The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be ’What the hell you mean we’re out of missiles?″
—Jan. 2009
I can’t be bothered writing up a summary of his conspiracy theories, but it’s worth googling his Caliphate theory. That is, google it if you don’t believe his other theory about how Google is part of a separate but equally evil conspiracy.
Wait, did I just get punk’d? Was this a serious reply that I responded to? I’m genuinely wondering, I’m not trying to make fun of you. Poe’s Law and all that.
Forgive me, I should have been more careful with the wording of my thesis.
Either Glenn Beck is actually unbalanced, or he is doing a fairly good job of pretending to be mad for ratings, in which case the character he plays is a crazy person. Either way, the “Glenn Beck” persona is still a beacon of the Tea Party and I think that is good evidence that the Tea Party is irrational.
I agree that Beck has a tendency to use let’s say “evocative rhetoric” that would certainly not pass muster on LW.
This president I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture....I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.
What exactly is so “lunatic” about this quote? Yes, the reasoning isn’t up to LW standards, but that’s true of nearly all reasoning outside LW.
I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. … No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus—band—Do, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.
He is by no means the only public personality to fantasize about killing a prominent member of the opposing political faction.
I don’t think we came from monkeys. I think that’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen a half-monkey, half-person yet.
I disagree with him, but you may want to read this before deciding that this is obviously “lunatic”.
I can’t be bothered writing up a summary of his conspiracy theories, but it’s worth googling his Caliphate theory.
Near as I can tell, this theory stripped of the flowery language boils down to the prediction that the Muslim spring uprising will result in theocratic Islamic governments that will attempt to impose Islamic theocracy on the rest of the world to the best of their abilities. Well, in light of recent events this prediction is looking increasingly probable.
Wait, did I just get punk’d? Was this a serious reply that I responded to? I’m genuinely wondering, I’m not trying to make fun of you. Poe’s Law and all that.
Let me guess, this is the first time you’ve been in a discussion with someone whose political views are vastly different from your own.
Nothing’s wrong with being radical. I’m radical myself on many issues. But his policy is radical and I do disagree with it, so it appears to me to be radically wrong. I am making the case that readers should agree with me on this point.
What exactly is so “lunatic” about this quote? Yes, the reasoning isn’t up to LW standards, but that’s true of nearly all reasoning outside LW.
I think the suggestion that the President has a deep-seated hatred for white people is ludicrous. If you have any serious evidence that Obama is concealing a burning emnity towards people of European descent then I am willing to weigh it against the evidence I have already seen to the contrary, but at the moment it seems so unlikely to be true that I struggle to imagine how a person could seriously believe it without suffering from some severe cognitive handicap. Thus: it seems like the sort of thing only a lunatic could believe.
He is by no means the only public personality to fantasize about killing a prominent member of the opposing political faction.
Sure, I’m certain plenty of people fantasize about killing their political opponents, but how many of them actually suggest on television that they would like to do so? I’ve seen Chuck Norris do it, I’ve seen Glenn Beck do it. I’m sure there are others, but again, I think that telling the nation about how you would enjoy staring into a man’s eyes as you choked the life out of him is not the sort of thing a sane, rational person would do with sincerely.
I disagree with him, but you may want to read this before deciding that this is obviously “lunatic”.
I agree that not believing in evolution doesn’t make him insane, just radically incorrect. Perhaps that particular quote was poor evidence for the “lunatic” thesis.
His Caliphate theory predicts that hardcore socialists and communists will work together with Muslims to overthrow Israel, capitalism, The West, and any other stable countries. He posits a conspiracy.
Let me guess, this is the first time you’ve been in a discussion with someone whose political views are vastly different from your own.
No, I often engage in political debate. I enjoy it! I am an active member of a minority political party, I attend a University full of intelligent people with varied opinions, I have a wide circle of friends from a range of backgrounds, many of whom disagree with me quite strongly. I have had this exact conversation dozens of times. The fact that you consider it a possibility that I have never encountered someone who disagreed with me is bizarre to me. My assumption was that you are in the same position. I asked if you were joking because I was surprised to find a Glenn Beck apologist in one of the most rational forums on the internet, and I didn’t want to look silly if it turned out you were being sarcastic.
I’ve seen Chuck Norris do it, I’ve seen Glenn Beck do it. I’m sure there are others
All the celebrities fantasizing about killing Bush.
His Caliphate theory predicts that hardcore socialists and communists will work together with Muslims to overthrow Israel, capitalism, The West, and any other stable countries.
Well, to a large extent hardcore socialists and communists are working together with Islamists.
I asked if you were joking because I was surprised to find a Glenn Beck apologist in one of the most rational forums on the internet
The fact that you were surprised to find a Tea Party supporter here is precisely why I wondered whether you’ve had any previous experience with people who aren’t on the left.
My assumption was that you are in the same position.
Given how dominant the left is at universities this a much less likely statement.
All the celebrities fantasizing about killing Bush.
I count a professed desire to assassinate Bush as a mark against the sanity of whoever professed it, too. More people doing it doesn’t make it saner.
The fact that you were surprised to find a Tea Party supporter here is precisely why I wondered whether you’ve had any previous experience with people who aren’t on the left.
It is my experience with people who aren’t on the left that made me surprised. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will struggle to find people outside the US (from either side of politics) who don’t think that the Tea Party are wingnuts. That said, by the wonders of the internet I have spoken to a number of Tea Party supporters, as well as reading the work of Tea Party leaders. My experiences did not dispose me to expect to find a Tea Party supporter here.
My assumption was that you are in the same position.
Given how dominant the left is at universities this a much less likely statement.
What I meant was “I assumed you had had plenty of discussions with people who disagreed with you politically, too.” I’m not implying that I’ve changed that assumption, either, just that I was surprised you didn’t reciprocate it.
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will struggle to find people outside the US (from either side of politics) who don’t think that the Tea Party are wingnuts.
I’m perfectly aware of this, that’s why I considered you never having encountered a Tea Party supporter before a reasonable possibility.
I don’t understand why you think dumb people with no interest in politics will keep things more moderate rather than voting for whichever extremist aligns with their poorly thought out notions. Again, it doesn’t matter if smart people are the people we want most to vote if increased voting causes them to be more outnumbered by the people we want LEAST to vote. It’s also not just smart people I care about, it’s smart people who share my views. If the base rate for people to be similar to me is 1 in a thousand, and 200 out of a thousand are people I hate, and the rest are neutral, then increased percentage of people voting causes WAY more people to vote for things I hate than it does people to vote for things I like. Even if out of that 200 you claim 150 of them already vote so that doesn’t matter, I still think the remainder of lazy people with opinions I hate still hugely outnumber those of people whose opinions I like.
It’s also not just smart people I care about, it’s smart people who share my views.
What’s wrong with stupid people who share your views? In a binary election, they could easily form more than half the electorate.
I’m honestly undecided this time around. My gut tells me the increased entertainment value of candidate A over candidate B outweighs their minor policy differences...
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57347634/poll-nearly-8-in-10-americans-believe-in-angels/
The vast majority of humans are wrong about many, MANY fundamental things. The fewer of them controlling outcomes the better. Compulsory voting only makes sense if you think the number of smart informed people who don’t vote out of laziness outnumbers the number of idiots who don’t vote out of laziness.
I think the majority of people who don’t vote out of laziness are neither extremely smart nor extremely stupid, neither extremely right-wing nor extremely leftist, neither extremely gay nor extremely straight, etc. That’s the point, they’re not extremists.
I know that the lazy moderates aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but I also know that once they’re out of the picture there’s much less ballast to keep the radical lunatics in line. To use a specific example: I think that the Tea Party does a better job of convincing their lazy supporters to vote than either of the major parties do, and if we accept that logic then the inescapable conclusion is that the Tea Party’s influence is being inflated by America’s non-compulsory voting system.
It’s not just the dullards who aren’t voting, either. I think you would be shocked at how smart and well informed you have to be before you actually decide you care enough to vote. Just look at Konkvistador—surely LWians and their ilk are the people we want MOST to vote?
You do know tea party activists are actually above average on nearly any stat you’d care to name? Education, political knowledge, …
Well sure! Any plan on a revolution to make sure only we vote? Because otherwise a very eloquent Church pastor or Harvard professor can single-handedly bring more voting power to bear than we.
It’s weird, I had considered using that same fact as an argument for MY side of this debate, but I cut it for the sake of brevity. To be clear, are you suggesting that the Tea Party is a good influence on American (or world) politics? Sure, they’re smarter than the average American, but clearly being slightly smarter doesn’t translate to a similar increase in sanity. Glenn Beck himself is definitely smarter than most Americans, but he’s never let that get in the way of being a frothing lunatic. I could mention a whole swathe of examples of how despite being smarter, the Tea Party is also far more radical and morally objectionable than Americans on average, but I’ll just link some articles because I have class in half an hour and want keep this quick.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/05/10_fictious_tea_party_beliefs.html http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1903/tea-party-movement-religion-social-issues-conservative-christian
The reason we want to raise average voter IQ is because we think this will make the voters saner on average, but in the case of the Tea Party this clearly hasn’t happened. This is exactly why I brought them up—these people haven’t been motivated to vote by an appeal to their intelligence, or there’d be a hell of a lot more of them and their policies would be different. Rather, they’ve been motivated by an appeal to their fear and anger and radicalism. You can’t get lazy moderates to the voting booths by whipping them up into misguided fury, but you CAN get lazy radicals like that, so by making voting non-compulsory you hand people like Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, etc, a much greater proportion of the votes than they deserve. You don’t have to be smart to realise the Tea Party is wrong, just sane. Conversely, you don’t have to be dumb to be insane.
I can’t speak for Konkvistador but I certainly do.
What you mean is that you disagree with him on a lot of issues, for each one consider the possibility that it is you who is being a lunatic.
Wow, 6 of the 10 “fictitious” beliefs appear to actually be true (Edit: I suspect you disagree but debating them here might run even for afoul of the taboo against politics, or not whatever). As for the other 4 I don’t have enough information to assign probabilities either way.
Which 6? I know very little about any of these issues, but my priors on how politics work in general (mostly successful-politicians-are-never-too-radical and they-always-maintain-status-quo) make it difficult to score any 6 of these as being probable.
2 through 7, although now that I read it again 10 is at least partially true, i.e., the Tea Party is in fact a genuine grass roots movement.
And yet the political status quo today is different from what it was 50 years ago and very different from what it was 100 years ago.
I would be interested to see your supporting evidence for 2, 4 and 6. Don’t feel that you have to argue them, I won’t argue against them, but if you could link me to some sources or something in the spirit of educating me I would be appreciative.
Really? Someone voted this down? I was expecting to take a pretty big karma hit for expressing explicit political opinions on here, but this post didn’t even offer anything that could be disagreed with, let alone fallacious reasoning. I was honestly and humbly asking for more information. I’ve lost 23 karma points today. 22 of those losses I wouldn’t have minded, but this one is just nonsense. Did somebody just go through and downvote everything I’ve ever said or something?
You may have a stalker. As far as I can tell, there are a small number of people using the voting system against persons they dislike rather than against low-quality comment content.
These are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they can go together, the latter forming the basis for one possible sense of the former.
Notice that Eugine_Nier’s comments have also been voted down en masse. My guess is that at least one person thought that the whole discussion was too close to partisan politics for LessWrong and downvoted all the comments in the thread.
I think that a good policy would be to move this kind of discussions to the monthly Politics thread. (By which I mean not only that Stuart’s original post should have been on there, as someone else said, but also that when a discussion like this one about the Tea Party emerges organically in a non-politics post, a moderator should move the whole subthread to the Politics thread).
Haha, and now the evidence request comment has been voted back up to zero but the one asking why the original was downvoted has been downvoted. Prediction: this post will also be downvoted.
Ah well, whether or not someone out there dislikes my contributions to it, this thread has been worthwhile because it has provided me with important data-points. The most important data-points are always the ones that surprise you. Data-point: some members of Less Wrong are Glenn Beck fans.
Honestly I’m getting tired of people gasping in a horror at the idea that in a readership of hundreds, a single person downvoted them. I also get downvoted. I don’t always feel those downvotes are deserved. Sometimes those comments get upvoted back to zero or beyond, sometimes not. I don’t keep complaining about every single downvote that I feel is undeserved, wasting time and space.
I’ve not downvoted you, but speaking generally I’m very likely to downvote people complaining about downvotes.
Your annoyance has been noted. Keep in mind, though, that I had asked a question in an attempt to see things from Eugine_Nier’s point of view, and that at the time I made the complaining post I hadn’t gotten an answer yet, but had been down-voted for my trouble. It’s poor practice for the community to punish people who make an effort to examine the evidence against their strongly-held opinions, and it’s in my best interests to rail against community behaviour that gets in the way of my own learning. I certainly don’t make a habit of whingeing about every loss of karma that seems unjustified to me—if I thought the loss of karma was deserved then I wouldn’t have made the post in the first place—but I reserve the right to kick up a stink if I think people’s down-votes are obstructing rational process. And, of course, I’m willing to cop any further karma loss that I take as a result as having been sacrificed for a worthy cause. So, go ahead down-voting complainers if that’s what makes you happy, but I’d respectfully like to tender the suggestion that occasionally complaining is the right thing to do.
Well obviously this depends on what one means by “death panels”, this article for example provides a decent argument.
This one is hard to score since I suspect he’d be pushing this much harder if the Tea Party didn’t exist.
You can start with this article by Eric Raymond, also read the comments.
Edit: Note this statement will depend on what one means by “left-wing”. I interpret the statement to mean “the most natural cluster in thing-space that includes movements generally called ‘left-wing’ also includes fascism.”
The thing is that AFAIK fascism never described itself as left-wing. It sometimes describes itself as a third position, a mixture/improvement of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, but whenever it actually chose between the two it preferred to describe itself as right-wing.
It tends to be treated as “left-wing” only by those people who define left/right only by the criterion of statism—a treatment which really isn’t the historical usage...
That part in bold should be nominated for understatement of the year.
I’m actually reading Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society right now, playing the game ‘record all instances where he criticizes conservatives or libertarians’ - so far 0.
Last night, I thought I could at least chalk up his criticism of Naziism & Italian fascism as instances 1 & 2, except he immediately launched into the standard argument that ‘no, actually those are socialisms don’t you see’. Oy vey.
(It’s really not a good book so far.)
Sowell is one of the best intellectuals in American conservatism right now, but that’s also clearly where he makes his home, which is disappointing from a LW perspective. The two books by him that I like best are Knowledge and Decisions and A Conflict of Visions. The first is, if I remember correctly, an updated explanation of Hayek’s insights, although the second ~60% of the book is spent on ‘historical trends’ and is probably about as biased as you would expect. The second is explicitly about politics, but its first chapter is tremendously insightful. (The latter sections of that book are basically more detailed repetition, and again I would expect the examples to be solidly conservative-leaning.)
I wrote a short review explaining what I disliked enough that I didn’t bother finishing: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/417975794
National Socialism.
You’ve definitively solved the issue of the political orientation of Nazism by merely noting the word “Socialism” in its title, just like a stereotypical American conservative does, without even the need to know anything about Otto and Gregor Strasser or how the left wing faction of the Nazi party was defeated, expunged and purged.
I was responding to the claim I quoted. If you’re going to intentionally misinterpret anything I write, I don’t see what the point of continuing this discussion.
The claim you quoted said “left-wing”, it didn’t say “Socialist”.
And the parts that you didn’t quote mentioned that fascism did sometimes describe as a mixture of both left-wing and right-wing ideas, just like “National Socialism” included the word “National” to appeal to right-wing nationalists, and “Socialism” to appeal to left-wingers.
If you want to make a rebuttal to my actual claim, find a place where Nazism or Fascism describes itself as “left-wing”—just left-wing, not “a response to both left and right” or “a synthesis of both left and right”, or indeed “National Socialist”.
Nationalism is not limited to the right. Depending the time and place nationalism can be either right or left wing.
Thanks! :)
I guess I don’t see how to properly interpret 3. Is it that Obama is a muslim AND a socialist AND a facist (which is how I took it). The first is very unlikely to be true given Obama’s record of attending Jeremiah Wright’s service.
Unless Wright is also a muslim, I suppose.
I was interpreting the slashes as ORs.
I can see three or four that are vaguely disputable:
Obama did lower taxes for 95% of working Americans, but perhaps he raised the total amount of tax revenue the the government takes in? Maybe the Tea Party were never claiming that he would raise taxes overall, but were instead claiming that the areas in which he would raise taxes would cause a lot of harm? I can see someone defending either of these theses.
Perhaps Eugine_Nier actually does believe that global warming is a hoax.
He almost certainly does think that the Tea Party is a grass-roots movement. I can mount an argument against this but at the end of the day it depends what your criterion for “grass-roots” is. I think this one was the weakest one on the list and I wouldn’t have put it there if I was the author.
I guess maybe you could add the one about the Washington march—although the number of people who attended is a matter of fact, not opinion, perhaps the argument could be mounted that the 70000 figure excludes people who should count towards the tally, or was taken during a lull in proceedings. The rest, though? If there are Birthers on Less Wrong then… Well, that would be a disappointing discovery. We’re supposed to be good at weighing up evidence.
Frankly, the whole Birther thing reminds of how, back in the day, debates about whether a prince was actually the king’s son served as proxies for debates about whether the prince would make a good king. I think this explains why both sides seem to be much more sure of their position than the evidence warrants. (Although most of the “birthers” whose blogs I read don’t claim to know for sure that Obama wasn’t born in the US)
As for the matter of fact, I don’t know where Obama was born However, it is interesting that until he went into politics, Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya.
You may have just disqualified yourself for a Bayesian...
The link you gave doesn’t say “Obama himself claimed to be born in Kenya”, it says that Obama’s literary agent said Obama was born in Kenya. In fact the very link you gave even offers a further link from an earlier 1990 interview that says clearly “He was born in Hawaii”
So, I’m downvoting this, as even a cursory examination of the links you gave indicate your statement to be inaccurate and misleading.
You are being unreasonably generous to Birthers. If they wanted to discuss Obama’s qualifications and abilities then they would be discussing them explicitly. A crown prince has the lawful right to take the throne when the reigning monarch died—one of the few ways to get rid of a bad prince was to have him declared illegitimate. If Obama is a bad president then he can be voted out, no need to invent spurious reasons for his disqualification. Birthers are manufacturing doubt about Obama’s birthplace and then demanding balanced coverage of both sides of the story. That’s also what you’re doing in the last paragraph of your post: “I don’t know the truth, but I find it interesting that...” You have all the evidence you need to come to an informed opinion. Balanced coverage would be reporting the fact that he was born in Hawaii and has the birth certificate to prove it.
This strikes me as an excuse to avoid looking at the evidence being presented.
Birthers were claiming that the certificate was fake. That was at about the point I stopped paying attention.
No, the evidence is the birth certificate. I’ve looked at it. Saying “I don’t know, but I find it interesting...” is offering innuendo in the place of evidence, since you seem to believe the birth certificate is real, which means the “born in Kenya” claim has to be incorrect.
Let me be very clear, I’m not calling Beck a lunatic solely on grounds of his policy. His policy is radical and I disagree with it, but that isn’t my main piece of evidence, it’s the cherry on the top. This is my main evidence:
–on President Obama, July 28, 2009
–responding to the question “What would people do for $50 million?”, “The Glenn Beck Program,” May 17, 2005
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” May 1, 2007
–”The Glenn Beck Program,” March 9, 2009
– May 18, 2010
– June 9, 2010
—Jan. 2009
I can’t be bothered writing up a summary of his conspiracy theories, but it’s worth googling his Caliphate theory. That is, google it if you don’t believe his other theory about how Google is part of a separate but equally evil conspiracy.
Wait, did I just get punk’d? Was this a serious reply that I responded to? I’m genuinely wondering, I’m not trying to make fun of you. Poe’s Law and all that.
Quotes on a tv show that achieves ratings based on sensationalism aren’t great evidence for the sanity of the main character.
Forgive me, I should have been more careful with the wording of my thesis.
Either Glenn Beck is actually unbalanced, or he is doing a fairly good job of pretending to be mad for ratings, in which case the character he plays is a crazy person. Either way, the “Glenn Beck” persona is still a beacon of the Tea Party and I think that is good evidence that the Tea Party is irrational.
What’s wrong with being “radical”?
I agree that Beck has a tendency to use let’s say “evocative rhetoric” that would certainly not pass muster on LW.
What exactly is so “lunatic” about this quote? Yes, the reasoning isn’t up to LW standards, but that’s true of nearly all reasoning outside LW.
He is by no means the only public personality to fantasize about killing a prominent member of the opposing political faction.
I disagree with him, but you may want to read this before deciding that this is obviously “lunatic”.
Near as I can tell, this theory stripped of the flowery language boils down to the prediction that the Muslim spring uprising will result in theocratic Islamic governments that will attempt to impose Islamic theocracy on the rest of the world to the best of their abilities. Well, in light of recent events this prediction is looking increasingly probable.
Let me guess, this is the first time you’ve been in a discussion with someone whose political views are vastly different from your own.
Nothing’s wrong with being radical. I’m radical myself on many issues. But his policy is radical and I do disagree with it, so it appears to me to be radically wrong. I am making the case that readers should agree with me on this point.
I think the suggestion that the President has a deep-seated hatred for white people is ludicrous. If you have any serious evidence that Obama is concealing a burning emnity towards people of European descent then I am willing to weigh it against the evidence I have already seen to the contrary, but at the moment it seems so unlikely to be true that I struggle to imagine how a person could seriously believe it without suffering from some severe cognitive handicap. Thus: it seems like the sort of thing only a lunatic could believe.
Sure, I’m certain plenty of people fantasize about killing their political opponents, but how many of them actually suggest on television that they would like to do so? I’ve seen Chuck Norris do it, I’ve seen Glenn Beck do it. I’m sure there are others, but again, I think that telling the nation about how you would enjoy staring into a man’s eyes as you choked the life out of him is not the sort of thing a sane, rational person would do with sincerely.
I agree that not believing in evolution doesn’t make him insane, just radically incorrect. Perhaps that particular quote was poor evidence for the “lunatic” thesis.
His Caliphate theory predicts that hardcore socialists and communists will work together with Muslims to overthrow Israel, capitalism, The West, and any other stable countries. He posits a conspiracy.
No, I often engage in political debate. I enjoy it! I am an active member of a minority political party, I attend a University full of intelligent people with varied opinions, I have a wide circle of friends from a range of backgrounds, many of whom disagree with me quite strongly. I have had this exact conversation dozens of times. The fact that you consider it a possibility that I have never encountered someone who disagreed with me is bizarre to me. My assumption was that you are in the same position. I asked if you were joking because I was surprised to find a Glenn Beck apologist in one of the most rational forums on the internet, and I didn’t want to look silly if it turned out you were being sarcastic.
All the celebrities fantasizing about killing Bush.
Well, to a large extent hardcore socialists and communists are working together with Islamists.
The fact that you were surprised to find a Tea Party supporter here is precisely why I wondered whether you’ve had any previous experience with people who aren’t on the left.
Given how dominant the left is at universities this a much less likely statement.
I count a professed desire to assassinate Bush as a mark against the sanity of whoever professed it, too. More people doing it doesn’t make it saner.
It is my experience with people who aren’t on the left that made me surprised. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will struggle to find people outside the US (from either side of politics) who don’t think that the Tea Party are wingnuts. That said, by the wonders of the internet I have spoken to a number of Tea Party supporters, as well as reading the work of Tea Party leaders. My experiences did not dispose me to expect to find a Tea Party supporter here.
What I meant was “I assumed you had had plenty of discussions with people who disagreed with you politically, too.” I’m not implying that I’ve changed that assumption, either, just that I was surprised you didn’t reciprocate it.
I’m perfectly aware of this, that’s why I considered you never having encountered a Tea Party supporter before a reasonable possibility.
I don’t understand why you think dumb people with no interest in politics will keep things more moderate rather than voting for whichever extremist aligns with their poorly thought out notions. Again, it doesn’t matter if smart people are the people we want most to vote if increased voting causes them to be more outnumbered by the people we want LEAST to vote. It’s also not just smart people I care about, it’s smart people who share my views. If the base rate for people to be similar to me is 1 in a thousand, and 200 out of a thousand are people I hate, and the rest are neutral, then increased percentage of people voting causes WAY more people to vote for things I hate than it does people to vote for things I like. Even if out of that 200 you claim 150 of them already vote so that doesn’t matter, I still think the remainder of lazy people with opinions I hate still hugely outnumber those of people whose opinions I like.
What’s wrong with stupid people who share your views? In a binary election, they could easily form more than half the electorate.
I’m honestly undecided this time around. My gut tells me the increased entertainment value of candidate A over candidate B outweighs their minor policy differences...