Some US states do not have partisan voter registration, so choosing “no party” does not necessarily mean someone would not register by party if that option were available.
Prismattic
Karma: 3,112
I vaguely recall believing when I was young that there were no real bisexuals, just gays in denial about it.
I used to think acne was unrelated to diet (other than perhaps via direct facial contact with grease).
When law enforcement first started being equipped with tasers, I thought this was a good thing, because they would use nonlethal force on occasions where they would previously have used firearms. It turned out that police continued to use lethal force as before, and instead used tasers in situations where they might actually have talked people down in the past.
I was convinced in 2008 that Obama was going to be good for civil liberties. I don’t think I need to discuss in any detail why that was wrong or how I got convinced otherwise, since the reasons should be pretty obvious.
I also made this mistake (although, to be fair, on the issue of torture, Obama genuinely was an improvement.)
My current belief is that, rather being grossly mistaken about the character of the former Constitutional law scholar/sponsor of a bill requiring videotaped confessions, I was grossly mistaken in underestimating the corruptive influence of the concentrated power of the executive branch/national security apparatus on anyone who wields it. I no longer think real reform will come from any President of any background; if reform is ever to happen it would require the legislative branch to actually prioritize reigning in the executive branch.
I think you might be underestimating the amount of money in politics that comes from large organized contributors who give money to both parties for purposes of making the system in general beholden to them rather than favoring one ideology over the other.
For example, I’ve noticed a ramping up lately of propaganda against those horrible people called “billionaires.” I would call today’s billionaires the early adopters of future living standards, assuming that we continue to have exponential economic growth.
I don’t think this is a good example of the broader phenomenon you are describing. When people criticize the very wealthy, they’re primarily making a criticism about relative, not absolute standards of living. I.e. “It is a sin to have so much when others have so little.” I wouldn’t say this is the only criticism, because I have seen, for example, criticisms of people owning mansions when they have small families (since it creates enormous upkeep costs and the unused rooms have basically no value except as a positional good). But that’s the exception; I don’t think anyone would consider owning a Maserati immoral (at least on grounds of wealth rather than environmentalism) if there weren’t also people struggling to pay for basic necessities.
I live my with my children but not with a partner or spouse, so I’d want to see even more family arrangements, since I don’t think single parenthood is unusual enough to be lumped in with “other.”
I agree with this, but just wanted to note that typhoid fever and typhus are distinct diseases (with typhoid being misleadingly named).
Alternative metaphor:
Throwing the steering wheel out of the car while playing a game of chicken = clever. Throwing out the steering wheel AND cutting the break fluid tube—less clever.
As I have mentioned before the polling data on partisan affiliation is worthless, because most so-called independents are lying about their actual behavior.
I also have the general impression that in the past few months there has been an uptick of uncharitable tinman-attacks on progressivism by libertarians in the LW comment threads. Curiously, there seems to be less overt hostility between reactionaries and progressives, even though they’re much further apart than libertarians and progressives (although this might be because the more hostile Nrx were more likely to exit after the creation of Moreright).
Because I hadn’t seen it.
I find the implied accusation of bias amusing. I’ve actually tweeted at Matt Yglesias once to complain about the quality of an article on Vox.
I would argue that this summing, not averaging exposure. There’s a difference between saying “You should read both GreenNetNews and BlueCast” and saying “To save time, read GreenNetNews on odd-numbered days and BlueCast on even-numbered days”.
Well, taking those specific examples as non-rhetorical: PETA, the Catholic Church, and Infowars are various kinds of insane in ways that extend beyond ordinary political mindkilling, so I’d be unlikely to recommend them. Al-Jazeera English is actually pretty good as a news source, but its website is an adjunct of being a broadcast news source, which is less helpful from a time-investment perspective. I predict that a center-left news source will provide coverage on a broader range of issues than a far-left news source, but your mileage may vary.
The center-left source is also most likely to compensate specifically for the coverage holes in a center-right source. That still isn’t averaging their factual claims.
The US “left” is considerably to the right of the European left, and LW has a broad international readership, so I think just saying “left” would be more confusing (“liberal” would even more confusing, given the dispute between libertarians and progressives over who is the legitimate heir of 19th century liberalism). But yes, in this case, I meant progressive in the sense of “mainstream center-left.”
I’m not arguing that the views should be averaged, but that the combined sample of news stories will be less likely to suffer from politically motivated selection bias. A libertarian/fusionist source is likely to devote more coverage to, say, stories of government corruption and less to stories of corporate wage theft or environmental degradation; a progressive source to do the opposite. All of those stories might be important (in general or to sixes-and-sevens in particular), so the combined news feed is in that sense better.
I’d argue that height privilege (up to a point, typically around 6′6″) is a real thing, having nothing to do with being good at sports. There is a noted experiment, which my google-fu is currently failing to turn up, in which participants were shown a video of an interview between a man and a woman. In one group, the man was standing on a footstool behind his podium, so that he appeared markedly taller than the woman. In the other group, the man was standing in a depression behind his podium, so t that he appeared shorter. The content of the interview was identical.
Participants rated the man in the “taller” condition as more intelligent and more mature than the same man in the “shorter” condition. That’s height privilege.
That’s in the bailey, because of “enjoyed by a majority group.”
I don’t wish to get into a mindkilling debate about this here, but for sixes-and-sevens benefit, I’ll note that Instapundit is a highly ideological libertarian (alternatively, in the view of many progressives, a partisan Republican pretending to be a libertarian). If you use him as a news source, you should balance with a progressive source.
ETA: This advice holds even if you are skipping narrowly political articles and reading about crises/disasters, etc., since ideology informs what kinds of crises people consider salient.
I already mentioned the A.D.A. to Ialdabaoth, but fighting a discrimination case probably takes more money than he’s looking to raise to move, as well as being psychologically exhausting.
I’m done, but my ruler isn’t good enough that I’m super confident in my digit ratios; I would have preferred one less significant digit (no pun intended, but I’ll take it anyway).