einhverfr

The original point was in-depth discussion of things like dietary restrictions necessarily come to political questions. The counter-argument seems to be "don't discuss anything in depth."

> How is it a betrayal of anything or anyone to vote for the better of two viable options (according to your own opinion)?

How do you weigh two options when one has a record of imposing very long-term harms (PRWORA has now been on the books for almost 30 years and if you remember her response to Sanders' accusation she helped round up the votes for PRWORA, it was to defend the law) vs a more acute set of insecurities?

That's the choice between measles (orange, fast-spreading, kill you or you recover) and polio (not orange, slower spreading, you might not ever fully recover). So I am not entirely sure from the perspective of being married to a non-American who was the lesser evil except to say they were both genuinely horrifying.

Theres a second very important point here as well. If the issues that matter to my family (for example, full inclusion in the protections of the working classes -- even we knowledge workers are working class) are not on the table, withholding my vote may be the only way to get them on the table at all, and voting for someone who has actively worked against those interests is a betrayal of that.

It's also very easy to fire someone in the US compared to many other countries.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc77gn1 for starters.

If we understand Liberalism to be a social philosophy tradition starting with Hobbes, being further developed in various forms through Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, John Rawls, etc. and seeking the liberation of the individual from culture, community, and family then for various the social Liberalism of the democrats (which seeks particularly to liberate people sexually from community judgments and rules) is closely connected to the efforts by the GOP to do the same for people in the business area. They are based on a common view of what it means to be human, a particular view of what freedom is, and so forth.

These assumptions are not really so fundamentally shared outside North America. So in both Sweden and Denmark, society looks a lot more like it did structurally to Aristotle than to Hobbes -- strong family households joining together in local communities to address common issues. Those local communities joining together into larger and larger units to address common needs until you have the overall kingdom. These places are less individualist and more localist.

Growing up in small towns in the US, I can also tell you that this Business Liberalism is most heavily a force politically in the urban centers of the GOP. Rural politicians don't tend to push it in the same way.

I think the bigger issue is that Google is publicly traded.

And what happens when you have a global company setting itself up as the gatekeeper of information and of ranking information by truth value? What of such disagreements then?

By the way I agree that we should lead by example but I don't know how you can get beyond the fact that different evils are so different they cannot be directly weighed off each other.

For example how do you weigh the draining of capital by foreign companies agains the purported benefits of liberating people from family and family business expectations (which my wife by the way definitely does not want to be liberated from)?

Because to vote for someone defending PRWORA would be a betrayal of what my family went through. It was at that point vote third party or stay home. I think if I had it to do over again I would vote third party.

So the individualist seeks authority to impose individualism globally through, for example, treaties like TPP etc? Or am I missing something?

Yeah. In one of the worse incidents in Germany, to the credit of Germans, the majority of adults in the around came to my kids' defense. I tell them to try to be thankful for the culture of being helpful, but it was a hard thing for them.

For a long time my oldest hated Germany after that. I actually feel bad because both of being part of the Berlin tech boom that is causing rents to rise really fast (and price many Germans out of the city) and also for the fact that refugees are being used to undercut wages (I know of too many cases of refugees being paid under minimum wage to ignore that dynamic).

But that doesn't excuse ranting at my kids as they are walking down the street.

As an aside, I came to Gandhi's views on nationalism while living in Indonesia. Gandhi was a genius there and his views on the rightful place of nationalism have shaped a continent for the better.

I am not sure that's the assumption behind it, but I do agree these things are products of assumptions.

I have ideas for how I would organize a company if I had a blank slate. However, usually if you start getting investment, the discussions get more restricted.

Fair enough but it still does not reach a fair cross-section of society.

Why on earth are we at war with Estonia???

Oh wait. Nevermind.

The larger issue is that if we accept a correct scope of work to be including someone's sense of social justice, then what happens when you now have a lot of people from very different cultures perhaps with very different views of cultural topics such as gender.

If we accept that culture influences politics, then cultural diversity means necessarily political diversity does it not?

In what sense allowed?

And to Alphabet's defense, if it is exclusively aimed at disruptive behavior then that's fine. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

By the way, I don't have a problem drawing the line at disruptive political debates. However, I don't trust companies to evenly apply such rules.

Elizabeth Warren would be center-right in Europe.

Bernie might be center-left depending on country.

Two orders of magnitude would put them at a million employees?

>The American political spectrum is way bigger than the political spectrum in most European countries. There's a lot more potential for deep disagreement in the US when people talk politics.

Ummmm....

The entire American political spectrum fits in the center-right of most European countries' political spectrums.

When was the last time you saw a political discussion between a Socialist, a Social Democrat, and an old-school Christian Democrat?

Here's how I describe American politics to Europeans:

In the US we have two political parties. We have the Democrats which you know as the Liberal party.

And then we have the Republicans which you know as the Liberal party.

Yes, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would be in the same party in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, etc.

> Whether one sees a distinction between these two concepts may align with one's position on the spectrum between individualist and authoritarian. Or maybe not, I really don't know...

If so, then we would assume that people who see a distinction there would also see nothing wrong with different countries having different political orders, for example stronger gender roles, procreation being tied to marriage, and marriage being tied to household business? We might assume that authoritarians would want to stamp out such variations and individualists would assume that different cultures can organize things like marriage and business differently?

But that doesn't match our observations I think, so it has to be something different. Either that or everyone is secretly an authoritarian when it comes to disagreements regarding social order and ethics of relationships or when we decide to be because it is "really important."

It's almost like Google wants to track and deliver advertising.

Almost like they have some financial interest in determining user behavior so they can deliver more targeted ads. Almost like they are an adware company.

Nah, can't be that. That would be like a conspiracy or something......

>Sure you can. You can have an attitude of tolerance, of acceptance, and embrace different opinions/stances. Judge a little less, worry a little less about what others do.

Completely agreed on that point. In fact that's how politics should be discussed.

But if we consider politics to be "what should we do as a society?" then you can't avoid political discussions in those topics still, right? You can only seek to discuss such topics tolerantly and maturely, I think.

What do you mean by political then? How is it separate from ethical?

A few ways the wars have affected my life:

1. I was commuting between Sweden and Denmark when the refugee crisis (people fleeing our efforts at proxy civil war in Syria, and our efforts at direct war in Iraq and Afghanistan) caused the Swedes to have to close their borders. This was not controversial. Migrationverket could not house the number of refugees who showed up and so refugees were sleeping on the street in Sweden in November. This lead to hours of lost time every day and eventually the loss of a contract that lead to the commute, and eventually after that, to a stagnation in my work (I left Sweden for Germany in part for that reason). You would see whole families with nothing trying to get somewhere they would have some sort of chance.

2. My kids have been subject to some harassment due to the fact that they are mixed SE Asian/White, and therefore could probably pass for Afghan. This was true in both Sweden and Germany.

3. Now the lines to get things like work permits or blue cards renewed are getting longer and longer (because of capacity shortage in civil servants) which means that when I go to get this renewed, I need to plan six months to a year in advance. A large problem here is the fact that the refugees are impacting the immigration service departments. Its to the point I am considering giving up US citizenship for German citizenship just to get around that problem.

There are of course more. Not getting into the amusing problem Sweden has with hand grenades and plastic explosives (organized crime gangs scaring each other late at night by setting off bombs and grenades, though I suppose that's better than drive-by shootings).

It is protected discussion under the US Constitution since Yates v. United States hamstrung sedition prosecutions over the government going after dissidents, particularly Communists.

Mind you I sat the last election out because I was so thoroughly disgusted with Hillary's anti-immigrant record and Trump's promise to try to be even worse (and while he is trying, I am not sure he is succeeding as bad as it is, and it is very bad). I have no love for either. But it is protected speech.

Living in Europe and being a bit closer to the war zones, I can tell you it has affected my life in a large number of ways. It is a big reason why a lot of my voting in the US is for whoever seems more anti-war (within reason).

I will admit to having avoided arguing with one of my colleagues about whether it is irresponsible to have more than one child in the current state of the world (he thinks it is, and I have three kids).

Its worth noting my colleagues and I have very different political views when we talk over lunch but I find it very insightful to see different views and we are all on good terms over it all. And I think we do think about eachother's views and we do try to build common ground, so frankly I find it healthy.