Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Sensitivity training as a totalitarian tool. I love it!

A lot of the people who complain about "totalitarianism" are simply ideological minorities who don't like the majoritarian consensus and seek to delegitimize it.

View on HN

...ideological minorities who don't like the majoritarian consensus and seek to delegitimize it.

What's wrong with that?

There's a difference between disagreeing with the majoritarian consensus, and trying to paint it to be the result of illegitimate process just because you disagree with it.

...but it is the result of an illegitimate process

You are clearly a government plant spewing lies!

Naw, just kidding. But that would be a deliciously ironic way to interpret your comment.

There may be some hypothetical situation in which there could be such a difference, but in USA politics right now, your suggestion amounts to a vapid, lame attempt to curtail discussion. There are very few controversial policies that haven't arisen through all manner of illegal, unethical, and otherwise corrupt (what is your word, "consensus"?) processes, on all sides. If something exists in the current environment, then of course it arose at least partially through "illegitimate process", and it's certainly apropos to acknowledge the specific factual circumstances of that.

Elsewhere on this page reference is made to the "democratic" way we elect legislators and certain law enforcement officials in the USA. Polls repeatedly show clear majorities for the legalization of marijuana use, possession, and distribution. Yet somehow we still have (poor) people going to prison, and (not poor) LEOs and attorneys paying off their mortgages, due entirely to marijuana enforcement despite this wonderful process of consensus?

I guess you should just hope you always find yourself on the "majoritarian" side, if in fact you don't continuously censor and mold your own thoughts to ensure that.

> suggestion amounts to a vapid, lame attempt to curtail discussion.

No, claiming that any popular policy you disagree with must be the product of illegitimate factors or influences is an attempt to sidestep the essential process of establishing majoritarian consensus.

> Polls repeatedly show clear majorities for the legalization of marijuana use, possession, and distribution.

Marijuana is a bad example for your position, because:

1) The consensus reached the point of favoring marijuana legalization just in the last few years (http://www.gallup.com/poll/165539/first-time-americans-favor...). As recently as 2005, the Gallup poll showed that Americans were against marijuana legalization almost 2:1. And unsurprisingly, now that the consensus has shifted, you're seeing real movements all across the country to legalize marijuana.

2) The polls are still based on a random sampling of people, instead of a sampling of likely voters. People under 30 favor legalization more than 2:1, but people over 65 still somewhat oppose legalization. Guess which demographic is more likely to vote? It's not really a fault of the process if younger people don't care to participate.

Look, I get it, you're very committed to this amorphous concept of "majoritarian consensus", but you shouldn't expect everyone else to be on board. Right here, we've learned majoritarian consensus implies acts that were legal for the first 150 years of the USA and will also be legal tomorrow, just happen to mean long prison terms today. Oh well, sucks to be us! That is indefensible, yet it is what your theory commits you to defend.

Indeed, the essence of "majoritarian" thought seems to be caprice. Why did the prohibition of substances other than alcohol not require an analogue to the 18th Amendment? Again, sucks to be us! Oh well!

> implies acts that were legal for the first 150 years of the USA and will also be legal tomorrow, just happen to mean long prison terms today.

It was legal for a long time for private parties to discriminate against racial minorities as well, but majoritarian consensus eventually made that illegal. Adulterating food products wasn't illegal but now is legs, most financial crimes didn't exist, etc. Society's views evolve over time and the structure of the law should keep pace.

> That is indefensible, yet it is what your theory commits you to defend.

What's indefensible about it? Why shouldn't people be allowed to structure their society the way they want? What makes you think that the structure people want won't change over time?

The alternative is to bind people to fixed rules that they can't change, as if they're handed down from God.

What's the alternative process? You, me, and Rayiner probably don't have a lot of macro-level public policy differences, but we differ from the current state of consensus in the US. Should the US instead impanel us as Philosopher-Kings?

Obviously we need to bring back poll tests to prevent the sheeple from voting and ruining things for the rest of us.

Of course any society has made and will make mistakes; that is the human condition. The USA seems to have a particular myth associated with its mistakes: that we're always getting better, that our system ensures problems get solved. Yet, there are more black men incarcerated right now than had been enslaved at any moment in our history. (Drug prohibition is a pillar of that edifice of injustice.) We stage elaborate, deadly pantomimes of "war" for no other purpose than the transfer of funds to defense contractors and thence to PACs. We give foolish, short-sighted bureaucrats carte blanche to search innocent citizens, their records, and their communications. What's the reason? Young people don't vote??!? Can we be serious? "Inverted totalitarianism" may be inaccurate or even silly, but at least someone is actually trying to figure out what the problem is.

A Panglossian defender of the status quo has ample opportunity to poke fun at us nuts who complain about it, especially if our complaints don't display due deference to the way things are. I don't actually have a "concrete" proposal, other than "all this bullshit? let's have less". I guess what I'd appreciate would be if the defenders were to take a slightly more nuanced, dare I hope critical, look at these institutions and processes that apparently require so much defense.

Drug prohibition is less a factor in American incarceration than domestic violence is.

And, yes: "young people don't vote" is in fact the reason that drug prohibition is the factor that it is. Sorry. How do you rationalize your way past that? Young people are overwhelmingly outcompeted in the US by old people.

That first sentence is difficult for me to parse. Do you mean we should ignore unjust drug incarceration because women and children? Do you mean that the scandalous racial disparity in incarceration is due to a similar disparity in domestic violence rates? Do you mean that the historically- and globally-exceptional incarceration rate in the USA is due to similarly exceptional rates of incidence or punishment of domestic violence? Actually it's not easy to check the "domestic violence" category against the "drug crime" category, since BJS is committed to keeping drug crime statistics separate from other crime statistics.

The fact that young people don't vote is not a contingent circumstance, it is part of the system. However it's pretty far down the list of embarrassing injustices in the USA.

Too late to edit, I remembered this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/16/pot-drug-possession...

Summary: lots of arrests for pot possession and LEAP says: "more people were arrested for marijuana offenses alone last year than for all violent crimes combined."

And...

The system should be viewed as illegitimate (read: as a system to be peacefully turned to dust or forever changed) by those who find deep ethical fault with it. You're alluding to conscientious objectors negatively. They are one of the few groups of people who have ever pushed progress through the ages on this planet. Of course, you're entitled to love the status quo to the point of making it legitimate in your mind every step it takes. Those who ethically disagree with the current oligarchical model for issuing laws that govern the fate of the world do, indeed, disagree.

I view "majoritarian consensus," which the US doesn't actually have, as only a small step above monarchy. It's a very low bar to set for laws of any serious consequence. To be so presumptuous and selfish as to give one small body the right to govern over vast regions of territory would have to, on an ethical level, require approaching systems models that use near full consensus.

Disagreement is the only necessary factor for a person wanting to delegitimize something mentally. In the mind of an objector, there is no more legitimacy in a dictator's brutality, or in an oligarchical republic's brutality (e.g. imprisonment for nonviolent crimes), other than the reality of the sword that backs the decree. Lest the world become lemmings, may people continue to find illegitimacy as they search their minds and hearts.

You're misunderstanding my use of "legitimate" in this context. I don't mean "legitimate" in some broad moral sense. I mean "legitimate" as in being consistent with the accepted rules of the system. Many people who decry the U.S. government don't express fundamental disagreement with the principles of the system. They instead claim that the consensus is inconsistent with those principles.

Fair enough. It'd be more explicit in context with the words "consistent" or "inconsistent." Legitimacy is generally a duality between claims and personal consent. I immediately associate legitimacy by legal frameworks as a whole rather than the laws produced.

No doubt, many people who object to certain laws believe the system is "broken" without appreciation that the system is fixed and 'well-oiled.'

You know Mussolini was a populist.

Fascist!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com