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Comment by falien | Hacker News Reader

um, the idea is to bribe everyone to join something rather than only having the people who are especially motivated by a special interest. Its like giving everyone $100 just for voting regardless of who or what they vote for.

I can replace "Republican" with "Baby-eater" in a description of the GOP platform and it reads just fine too, that doesn't make it any more true.

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"I can replace "Republican" with "Baby-eater" in a description of the GOP platform and it reads just fine too,"

Well, I'd say that says more about you than Republicans. It does change the semantic content of the text, whereas my replacement doesn't. That's my point. Special interests bribe people too, or haven't your read the AARP literature?

Well, you probably haven't, but somehow someone with a vaguely similar name got crossed with mine and I started receiving solicitations from them. (I keep the fake solicitation membership card in my wallet. Fun gag to pull out at parties. At least while I'm still young enough to obviously not be a member.) Believe me, they don't really spend a lot of time laying out their political platform in that literature, a lot of which is rather more liberal than their base would really appreciate. They lay out all the benefits you get.

This is what I mean. Finding an actual difference in behavior between the "nations" and "special interest groups" is pretty hard. "Group of people of political interest where the group is kept together by benefits and collective action is taken on political matters both in and not in their direct charter"... if you rubbed out the word "nation" and asked me to fill in the blank, I'd write in "special interest group".

My point was that your substitution changes the meaning too. Special interest is a well understood term, and Nation in this context is defined. While its true in this scenario some special interests could end up being nations, nations are a superset of special interest nations. The difference I perceive in this terminology is between "special interest groups" and "interest groups". AARP is an interest group (and more, while they are a powerful lobbying group, that is only one of their stated purposes, just as a labor union's only function is not political lobbying). The tea part is an interest group filled with crazy people. Marijuana legalization groups, pro-life/pro-choice groups, and the american corn farming lobbying group are special interest groups. Interest groups have a wide swath of generally shared interests and views. Most old people share certain interests and AARP caters to those. In other interest areas old people's views/concerns are as disparate as the general population's. The AARP does not in general pay attention to those. By contrast a special interest group has a single or narrowly defined set of issues they care about, and they care a great deal about that tiny part of life.

Taking this into the context of the proposed nations. Some people care about a single issue enough to be single issue voters and join a special interest nation. The majority of people could find a community that shares their views on a wide swath of issues of varying priority to them.

I don't really think this idea would actually get the desired effect of having general interest groups be effective in counteracting special interest groups if they aren't already passionately concerned with the issue, but effectiveness is not an argument for/against underlying motives.

edit: oh, and I have seen AARP literature trying to inform members about political issues, as well as informing them of benefits of being a member. AARP shouldn't be trying to sell its members on any view, AARP is supposed to find out what its members care about and what can benefit them and lobby the government for those things.

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