As a nation of laws we pass all sorts of them, and create new regulations, to govern how we live as a society.
How should we assess these laws and regs? There are generally two camps - we can judge them by the incentives and outcomes they create, or we can judge them by the good intentions that went into passing them.
Curious to know how people this
During the Biden admin, and before that the Obama admin, we were told that if we didn’t implement net neutrality there would be an internet catastrophe.
What ever happened there? Is that still an issue we should pursue?
As a nation of laws we pass all sorts of them, and create new regulations, to govern how we live as a society.
How should we assess these laws and regs? There are generally two camps - we can judge them by the incentives and outcomes they create, or we can judge them by the good intentions that went into passing them.
Curious to know how people this
Every time there’s a mass shooting my social media feeds fill up with comments like “Republicans care more for guns than kids lives” and “If Democrats were in control we could pass laws to end these tragedies.”
What is the law, precisely, that Democrats and liberals think would end gun violence?
Given gun violence occurrences aren’t uniform across races and ethnic groups, what would happen if the law resulted in arrests which didn’t tie perfectly to demographic ratios?
The theory is that societies have times when the elites will have a lot of kids, which they’ll educate in elite subjects at elite schools.
When they go out into the world, they learn their elite credentials don’t allow them to earn what they think they’re worth. When they can’t earn what they want, rather than blame themselves , the blame the system - in this case capitalism.
Think of Mamdani, Plattner, or the mayor of Seattle. All very richly born, and all of the failures in the real world. Mamdani has never lived on his own.
Marxism isn’t popular with working poor, but with urban professionals from the elites. These elites think society is broken and they want free stuff.
Does this sound like a reasonable theory?
One of the arguments against minimum wages is that they criminalize low skilled work. If someone is just entering the labor market, say a teenager, it becomes very difficult to find work because they don’t have skills worth $25/hr.
How should we think about this? Does this reinforce dependency on the state?
Looking at CNN, they’re reporting that Mamdani supported candidates had a sweep in NYC.
With the rise of the socialists, do you think this is a positive development? Do you think they have solid policy ideas that would work if implemented?
Is this the beginning of a leftward shift in America?
Or is the rise of the socialists a reaction to Trump, and not necessarily a long term trend?
With respect, how closely intertwined are your political views with your identity?
Do you maintain an understanding of your views such that you can be persuaded to change them if presented with a well crafted argument or new information? Do your views evolve over time, or are they based in core principles?
When someone challenges your views, do you feel it an attack on your personality and sense of self, or are your beliefs separate from your sense of self?
Thanks for the honest answers
Read a great article on MS Now about how liberals were turning away from BlueSky because it wasn’t representative of the real world, and was turning into a toxic echo chamber of left wing voices.
The conclusion of the article was that Twitter was actually a more civil place for liberals because the concentration of similar minded people on BlueSky caused the most extreme to surface, where they would be ignored as extreme in a broader setting.
Do you think Reddit has a left wing bias among its mods, and that this may lead Reddit to the same fate as BlueSky?