The first is someone who is thoughtful. The latter is someone who lacks conviction and unreliable- you can't really know what you get when you vote for them.
The constant threats to society that engage many, such as Gay Marriage (remember all the rushed state bans?), Sharia Law (remember that being outlawed?), Critical Race Theory (remember that?), or now Youth Transexual Treatment, are designed to engage a demographic to vote for a politician, they are not true societal threats, and they are also discarded soon as they stop working well and another potential engagement strategy arises.
Also on many other non-hot topics a lot of politicians have opinions that align with their major donors. So again, they are slow to change their opinions if the money continues to flow.
So politics are not good studies of how people change their minds.
You can add various types of music to that list. UK ban on raves https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/section/63 with "repetitive beats"; more recently "drill" music.
Still going strong is anything can be "grooming". And your child can be taken from you if you look away from them even once.
I really like the last one -- images of professional gangs having difficulty snatching that child because the mom is going to stop a professional gang.
Thinking better than dummies is not hard, but thinking without error is a lot harder than it seems. I think if more people started thinking in terms of both relative and absolute comparisons the world might improve. If you only think in relative terms, you are living in a dream world of sorts.
I'm not asking that everyone think better, just that they think. Especially in a day where everyone has a camera and there are child snatching clowns all over the place -- just a little bit of skepticism goes a long way.
Questioning a wild claim out of nowhere isn't the same as thinking something isn't dangerous. It's thinking a claim has no basis.
Take the cinnamon challenge. Literally millions of people doing this. Then the claim comes up it is killing people. Yet these claims don't have any names or actual news articles that aren't in a circular reference. It may or may not injure you, but with millions or 10's of millions doing it, if people are dying there would be evidence of that.
All those Prius's with sudden acceleration -- and when everyone calmed down, the fix was floor mats and not cosmic rays. The real answer is that it was bad driving because all the brakes still worked perfectly well and if you press both the car stops. It was bizarre watching this play out after watching the same stupidity from the Audi 5000 in the 80's.
Another problem: people thinking this is what's happening, when it is actually not.
> I'm not asking that everyone think better, just that they think. Especially in a day where everyone has a camera and there are child snatching clowns all over the place -- just a little bit of skepticism goes a long way.
Using specific, maximally absurd examples to prove one's broad beliefs may not be optimal thinking.
> Questioning a wild claim out of nowhere isn't the same as thinking something isn't dangerous. It's thinking a claim has no basis.
Where "thinking" = heuristics.
> Take the cinnamon challenge...
There is not shortage of instances of people thinking genuinely poorly, but there is also no shortage of instances of people using such instances to predict broader instances, and predictions about reality tend to be considered to be reality itself (as a consequence of evolution, culture, etc).
Has there ever been a moral panic that turned out to be true? The closest I can think of is maybe the teetotaler/prohibition movement. Alcohol truly does cause a great deal of harm to society.
Not having been alive in the late 1800s and early 1900s I can't speak to if it was really viewed as a moral panic similar to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s that I got to experience.
It was a long simmering issue that was very hard to elevate such that action was taken. I would argue it was very much akin to the multi-decade struggle for LGB rights. Long slog with slow progress, but eventually reaching success.
As in, if you had found out the satanists were real, well it wouldn't have been a moral panic anymore.
Consistency could also be a guard against pure power politics. Usually people get elected by appealing to some constituency, but it is uncomfortable to just say “I’m here to appeal to X demographic!” So, they try to express the interests of those demographics in terms of principles. Holding them to those principles when they don’t work in the interest of their chosen demographic can result in some pretty strong rhetoric at least.
They are capitulating their position and acknowledging that the population they seek to represent does not agree with them.
They may still personally believe differently (who knows) but they are putting the opinions of the population in front of their own.
What is unfortunate is that in politics we rarely see a politician talk about situations where they were wrong or made mistakes and they much prefer to turn the page and stick with their talking points of their new idea.
I think there's well developed political science and strategic reasons for this. I sometimes say to myself that I'd take another look at some politician I previously disagreed with if they actually offered real apology and regret, but maybe that's not really true.
The first is a bit more dangerous as you’re trusting them to make the best decision in the circumstances: which is better but easily second guessed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QpS2Am51Wo
"John Kerry, whichever way the wind blows."
Dick Cheney has a great number of sins to answer for, and this is one of them.
If their job is to be representative of the people in their community and those people have a popular opinion, that doesn’t seem to strike me as wrong necessarily.
Your view seems to be the inner state doesn't matter - they still represent the will of the people they represent.
morkalork's position seems to be that if someone lacks conviction and is unreliable then a problem may be they get elected then switch to represent the interests of a donor more than the electors.
When someone shifts their positions to whatever happens to be popular it comes off more like someone who's motivated by gaining power rather than trying to improve the lives of their constituents
Not all popular opinion is created equally. People want leadership, & coming off like one's thoughts on policy is "what does polling say will make people like me?" isn't strong leadership
1. Representation is representation of interests, not of people - what is in your best interest may not be the same thing you think you want
2. Representation doesn't mean you need to hold the same opinions, representation is symbolic by definition.
If it were as simple as "well they're not giving the people what they want, get them out of office!" we wouldn't need a politician as the middle man we could just simply vote on legislation directly
1. It signals that the candidate has a lack of interest in doing the actual job. In fairness, you may share the same lack of interest. It is certainly the easy way out, but nobody ever said that democracy is easy. If you really don't want democracy there are better options than trying to pretend.
2. Even if you buy into the mandate presented during an election campaign, it is going to be woefully out of date before it can be executed on. The state of the world is constantly changing. Which means you still have to put in the work to oversee the employee you hired, buying you little if you thought #1 would be a shortcut.
In the UK there's "supposed to be" a commitment to following a party manifesto, and voting for a party is deemed to be a mandate for the manifesto.
Not really binding in most cases, but it is part of the constitution. https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/salisbur...
I.e. it would be more proper for a candidate to pursue a platform they were elected on but which they no longer personally believe in than it would be for them to get elected on platform X then pursue platform Y. One obvious reason is that you actually can't know whether they changed their mind X -> Y or whether they knew X had a higher chance of election than Y. In either scenario, their mandate is for X, not Y, and they ought to be somewhat beholden to that. Of course not beholden against all new information, compromises, or circumstances. All of this wiggle room and the individual's propensity for wishy-washiness is considered during the election and is, in fact, part of the mandate. Some people prefer a candidate who has shown willingness to compromise, others do not. Again, in either case, candidates are expected to behave similarly to how the electorate expected them to behave.
Point (2) is a valid one. The modern world changes very, very quickly and this is indeed a problem for democracies, but it's a problem only because all of this^ is true. We could simply elect tyrants (not in the pejorative sense) and they can react reflexively to the changing world, but that's not really how democracies work. This dynamic is exactly why crises (a fast-changing world) push democracies toward tyranny.
Yes, but the election is merely the hiring process. Democracy takes place when you visit your hired representative on the regular, to keep them informed of where you are at with the changing state of the world. That does not mean the employee has only one boss, but it also doesn't mean you can just disappear and never speak to your employee again. I mean, you can, but don't expect favourable results. They are certainly not mind readers.
If you don't want to put in the hard work of staying on top of your employee, that's fine, but if you are not going to engage in democracy why keep up the facade? Certainly, if you are going to sit back and not participate, interests will go towards those who do (e.g. lobbyists).
The dynamic you're describing (people with more time or money being "heard more") is an antidemocratic bug, not a feature. And yes, I'm aware that this is the reality, "if you want X you have to go fight for it" etc. etc; that's not what we're talking about here.
If there is a bug, it is people being too lazy to show up to speak to their employee. No doubt it is easier to show up when you have more resources. Most things in life are easier when you have more resources. But that brings us back to questioning: Why keep up the facade if you don't want to participate in democracy? There are other systems. Democracy is not the be all and end all. It can work well when the people are ready to put in the hard work, but if all you can muster is casting a ballot (if you can even manage that), why bother?
A person who can camp out every single day in the lobby of a leader shouldn’t have greater say in the direction of society than a person who is working 12 hours per day in a factory.
To the extent that they do, it’s exactly a bug!
At this point I’m not even sure what you’re arguing. Seemed to go from “democracies aren’t about mandates” to “people with more free time have more influence” to “in any world where people with free time have more influence (all of them), democracy isn’t the right system?”
Sounds to me like just a convoluted argument for “I don’t like democracy.” Which, fine by me!
The electorate's opinion is not static. In fact, the matters the electorate will be interested in largely won't even be apparent during the election cycle. There is simply no way for a representative to know what the electorate is thinking without speaking to them. Which is why their job is exactly that.
> To the extent that they do, it’s exactly a bug!
They don't have greater say, but they do have a say by being willing to show up. The factory worker who doesn't find the time to speak to his representative certainly will not have a say. There really isn't much way around this. The hired employee is certainly not a mind reader.
> At this point I’m not even sure what you’re arguing.
What leads you to b believe that I am arguing? What is the value proposition in arguing? Sounds boring.
> Sounds to me like just a convoluted argument for “I don’t like democracy.” Which, fine by me!
Strange that you would attribute feelings to the words on the page. What in this suggests like or dislike towards democracy – or anything for that matter?
Party A has a say, Party B does not, yet Party A does not have more of a say than Party B?
Will leave it at that logical incoherence. Have a good rest of your week!
Those who haven't said two words to their representative certainly don't have a say. How could they? Quite literally, you have to say something to have a say.
Lobbyists are just another layer of representatives for those who have chosen to pay to have someone show up instead of showing up themselves. The factory worker can equally assign a representative to talk to the lower-tier representative on their behalf if they find going to the factory is more important.
Of course, you can opt out of the democracy and let others dictate your life. I did question why one would want that, though.
Polling is much better, at least if it's done in a professional, non-corrupt manner. But now we have two problems.
I don't participate in democracy because I believe the whole thing to be a facade itself, an illusion. Sure, it exercises the will of the people more than exactly zero, and has served us reasonably well historically (at least on a relative basis, according to the flawed methodologies by which we measure / hallucinate such things), but on an absolute scale how good is it really?
I think it would be interesting if some way could be found to enable people to be curious about such things. Perhaps a good start on that would be to first investigate why people are currently not able to be curious about this, because it seems very counterintuitive and it is plausibly quite harmful.
>Certainly, if you are going to sit back and not participate, interests will go towards those who do (e.g. lobbyists).
For now, but it would be a shame if a movement of some sort materialized with the goal of putting an end to this little party.
You'll get that person. And politics that follow daily polls.
That's almost like direct democracy, except that there's no guarantee that the peoples oppinion will be considered in all cases.