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[PTTG??]

We need a new level of involvement against global warming. I'm not sure what, since we clearly need scientists to remain working, but we need people to see this as an effort comparable to WWII, or even greater.

Government can't agree over a slab of concrete at the moment.

Man, forget the government. The pro-malthus crowd is constantly agitating on the grassroots level, arguing that it's not a problem to the least informed people. Brand names are the only thing that work, so let's focus on that. Make the concept memorable, advertise it, package it. Then when people go to vote, they'll remember that it exists.

They did that with abortion. In ten years, most evangelicals went from not caring about it to abortion being the defining life-or-death struggle of our time. We need to drop the honorable bullshit and actually solve the problem.

[Kagus]

Oh right, https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/family-behind-oxycontin-called-addicts-criminals-while-pushing-pills/
We are 18th century China now.

You know, I was only moderately troubled by the earlier headlines about an opioid company developing an anti-opioid addiction medicine.

Seeing that Sackler's holding the patent, and getting an insight into the extent of his greed (I think that the word "philanthropist" may not be entirely applicable in its classical sense here)... Well, my trouble-o-meter bounced up a couple notches.

[Akura]

We need something to unite humanity.  To make them see beyond their own petty politics and greed. 
We need an alium invasion a huge disaster that would kill millions in a very short period of time in one of the top modern countries and clear signs that such a disaster will repeat itself elsewhere, in another of the top modern countries.

Edit: Anything less would result in either further fracturing as world actors bent on hegemony take advantage of the new reality and/or they double down on shoving their own heads in the dirt, singing lalalala muh profits/power.

Would this work?

[SaberToothTiger]

Nah, greenhouse-grown coffee would survive even if wild coffee died out.

[bloop_bleep]

Oh right, https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/family-behind-oxycontin-called-addicts-criminals-while-pushing-pills/
We are 18th century China now.

At least the 18th century Chinese realized what was happening at some point.

[McTraveller]

WTF New York health laws.  Setting up for Supreme Court I assume...

[Trekkin]

WTF New York health laws.  Setting up for Supreme Court I assume...

You mean the Reproductive Health Act? What's so objectionable about it?

[McTraveller]

You mean the Reproductive Health Act? What's so objectionable about it?

Maybe just a bad name.  The act doesn't have anything to do with reproductive health really, although it has aspects that are related in corner cases to health (and I do mean corner cases... the vast minority).  The thing that concerns me isn't the issue itself (although I do have my opinions on that topic, which are available in my post history), but the deeper philosophy that underlies it:

It's almost the reverse of a quote I re-experienced recently. The quote is "One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up."

The "reverse" I'd phrase as "One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that if something is acceptable in some situations, it must be made acceptable for all situations."  This law (and others like it) purport to give people freedom, which they do by making fewer things illegal or otherwise restrictive, but they also tend to result in condemnation of people who do not approve of the things which are now allowed by law. 

But even in that there is the danger of subjectivity. What I means is that sometimes most people think it is good to condemn people who do not approve: for instance, many would argue that we should not only accept, say, women's suffrage but also approve of it - so we (rightly?) subtly (or not subtly) coerce the population to eliminate disapproval of women's suffrage.  Same thing for race rights, or gender rights.  But we don't use words like "eliminate disapproval of women's suffrage" we say "we have progressed as a society."

Maybe it's work stress, or maybe it's the cognac, but that latter bit saddens me... when there's difficulty in separating out "progress" from any other form of massive cultural peer pressure.  Or basically - if you can coerce the population for progress, what's to stop it from regressing? And that's not even getting into what is progress versus regress in the first place (that's probably best for the philosophy thread).

[Trekkin]

The "reverse" I'd phrase as "One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that if something is acceptable in some situations, it must be made acceptable for all situations."  This law (and others like it) purport to give people freedom, which they do by making fewer things illegal or otherwise restrictive, but they also tend to result in condemnation of people who do not approve of the things which are now allowed by law. 

Unfortunately, the mechanics of abortion leave people on both sides of the debate little choice: either abortion is freely available to everyone, available to no one, or everyone accepts that the wealthy and privileged have a greater ability to terminate pregnancies than everyone else -- and you'd be hard-pressed, I think, to find any serious political bloc arguing that only, say, white people should be able to get abortions.

See, every check we put in place carries an opportunity cost, since now someone seeking an abortion has to be checked for whatever criterion and the provider has to have the ability to check for it and so on and so forth. This means it takes longer, which adds incidental costs in terms of transport and lodging and all the rest of it; it also discourages new clinics from opening, particularly in the case of ambiguous criteria subject to reinterpretation by people with a different agenda, which effectively restricts access. There's also just a straightforward chilling effect. If, for example, we allow abortion only in cases of rape or incest, we now have to ask intrusive and unpleasant questions of everyone seeking an abortion. Anti-abortion advocates are well aware of this; it's why they have devised all the theatrics with sonograms and waiting periods and (blatantly false) statements by providers and increasingly absurd architectural requirements of clinics. If abortion is impossibly convoluted, that's almost as good as it being illegal, if the goal is to eliminate abortion in practice.

I posted the polling data way upthread, but there's surprising agreement between the types of abortion that actually happen most commonly and the types that enjoy the most widespread public support: a majority actually favors access to abortion under 20 weeks, and some 90%+ abortions happen then. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to construct laws that effectively make abortion only as accessible as we appear to collectively want; either sufficiently tight statutory restrictions differentially drive disadvantaged people from obtaining legally permissible abortions or overbroad access allows abortions for which there is not majority support. It comes down to a question of which unpleasant outcome we collectively prefer, but it's difficult to cast a public debate in those terms.

[PTTG??]

That's all naval-gazing. In republican-held states, they throw up arbitrary and abusive hurdles that have nothing to do with the 20-week limit, (such as mandatory and degrading lectures,) or else shut down all but one or two abortion clinics. And this isn't just a matter of lawmakers ignoring the public will; how often do extremist churches harass clinic staff and patients? There's a strong contingent of Americans who want abortion completely banned in all cases, and natural miscarriages treated as potential murders.

I address this next part not at someone who's had a long day and is drinking coniac and just blathering in a politics thread, and rather at the broad class of martyrs to lost causes on the internet. Antivaxers, fascists, Lysenko-ists... this is for you:

Going back to what McTraveller said, the line between acceptable discourse ("how should we effectively protect voting rights and ensure the system is reliable?") and unacceptable discourse ("should we disenfranchise people for arbitrary reasons?") is not fine. It is a big, fat, glow-in-the-dark line, actually. More broadly, after massive wars and industrialized genocides, we've proved that not only is disfranchising people for arbitrary reasons a bad idea for ethical reasons, it's also a losing proposition for the existence of states.

To continue to debate women's suffrage, or nonwhite's suffrage, is as damned stupid as arguing that a flat earth be taught in schools, on top of the idea's inherent evil.

Just because an idea has broad support doesn't mean that people are censoring the alternative. Nobody's censoring the pro-sticking-forks-in-light-sockets movement. Continuum didn't stop printing because it was censored for arguing that HIV doesn't cause AIDS; the whole staff died of AIDS because they didn't believe it was connected to HIV.

The argument that people are being coerced to ignore the benefits of NAZI-ism or Electric Universe theory or Chemtrails is, at its heart, an excuse for showing up unarmed at the battle of wits. If everyone was really ignoring you, you'd be winning right now, not soundly defeated. Sometimes the feeble argument is dressed up as "this is something THEY don't want you to know," which is dumb for most ideas because then it becomes a conspiracy theory involving every learned person on the planet.

All that aside, it's damned hypocritical to whine that nobody's giving you a platform to whine about not being able to disenfranchise other people.

[wierd]

Here's the deal--

They aren't thinking that educated people are actively conspiring.  They think that educated people have been mis-educated.  What they fail to comprehend, is that a mis-educated person cannot properly engage in useful furtherance of knowledge.  (A statement arrived at from a false postulate is itself logically false.)

By "mis-educated", I mean "Has been spoonfed an indoctrinated view".  Hilariously, this is no different from the nazi education batteries, which explicitly set out to mis-educate concerning "aryan superiority", which did exactly that.

Much like we would view such "adolph hitler schools" with contempt as malign misuses of an educational aparatus, these individuals view the modern educational system with similar malignancy. 

Again though, the objective reality that such mis-education would result in woefully substandard academics, which would fail to advance the state of the art (while other nations continue to produce proper academic scholars, by having a proper CV), combined with the same-said woeful inadequacies of their own graduates from the institutions they have managed to co-opt, never really sinks in.  Backfire effect in full force.

[Trekkin]

That's all naval-gazing. In republican-held states, they throw up arbitrary and abusive hurdles that have nothing to do with the 20-week limit, (such as mandatory and degrading lectures,) or else shut down all but one or two abortion clinics. And this isn't just a matter of lawmakers ignoring the public will; how often do extremist churches harass clinic staff and patients? There's a strong contingent of Americans who want abortion completely banned in all cases, and natural miscarriages treated as potential murders.

I did mention those hurdles specifically as examples of how laws can have impacts tangential to their explicit aims, and predictably enough that it can be harnessed for political purposes, as part of what forms the upper bound on how specifically laws can be tailored toward intermediate social ends, and therefore why apparent legislative extremism can sometimes be necessary even in pursuit of moderation. We just don't have infinite precision here.

Whether that's navel-gazing or a core tenet of how government actually exists is, I suppose, down to whether politics is an end or a means to an end.

Incidentally, before you go arguing against unacceptable discourse: people you don't like saying stupid and evil things can be a surprisingly rich source of information if you put their remarks in context. For an apolitical example, just so we don't get hung up on bashing Republicans, Flat Earthers aren't just idiots. They're believing their everyday experience over experts and scientific evidence, yes -- and understanding who's doing that and why, which they'll happily tell you if you ask them nicely, has ramifications everywhere from Trumpism to popular disbelief in climate change. If you just call them stupid and evil, they go home and say the same things around their kitchen tables where you can't hear them, now with an added veneer of being contrary to the elite liberal agenda. McTraveller is right in that we lose something when beliefs become so axiomatic we jump straight to asserting their self-evident truth and dismissing all dissent: we lose knowing how, in a tactical sense, to defend them.

[McTraveller]

Here's the deal--

They aren't thinking that educated people are actively conspiring.  They think that educated people have been mis-educated. 

Yeah, this is what I was intimating with the idea of "eliminating a viewpoint" - the stance of "you were educated wrong, and here is the correct way..." can be used for both good and ill.

As for the concepts from Trekkin and PTTG?? - I support the idea that laws have secondary effects, such as more stringent abortion laws becoming a class divide concern.  So in that sense I am actually for more lenient laws.  What I'm wary of is a different secondary effect: in making something more accessible, it can also make it more accepted.  For instance in the case of abortion, I agree we should have it be available and controlled for medical quality, but I fear that this has led to a shift in culture where abortion is an easily-acceptable choice for society. 

I mean, my own unrealistic utopia is a world where you don't need abortion laws because nobody wants one.  But because we don't live in that world, yes - make them safe and not something that can exacerbate economic situations.  But I don't like the idea of teaching people "yeah it's ok to do this if you don't want to have a kid or don't think you can support it or whatever."  I would rather it be seen, for instance, as a measure of last resort, not first or second - in that sense similar to the use of nuclear force.

[wierd]

I am just waiting for artificial womb technology to advance enough to fully sustain a developing fetus from fertilization to full-term.  To me, that will be the point where society has to wake up to the shit pot it has been stirring on this issue.

When that happens, many of the reasons to get an abortion will be completely negated;  Dont want it in your body? Sure-- we will put it in this little tissue filled pouch and feed it nutrient solution for the rest of its gestation. You dont suffer the effects of being pregnant, and the fetus does not need to be terminated. Got pregnant accidentally, but it is not medically safe for you to be pregnant? Same thing! We can put it in a little tissue lined pouch, and you walk out no longer in danger of being killed by the pregnancy. Hooray for science!

At that point, society has to come head to head with the "I want to terminate the pregnancy, not because it is exercising control over my body, but because I do not want a child. ANY kind of pregnancy, including artificial womb gestation, is undesired." as the reasoning for getting an abortion, and how it decides to handle that.  It gets even hairier, when the notion of "No, putting it up for adoption or into state custody are not options either, only termination" gets involved. 

Currently, such a future is VERY much a pipe-dream.  However, there have been advances in this direction over the past few years. 

I still long to see it become a medical reality though, if only because it would force society to approach this issue with more integrity, by preventing one set of motivators to be concealed by another, more socially acceptable one.  (Though in all honesty, such tech would permit male homosexuals to have children, as well as individuals that have had full hysterectomies, since gamete production from skin tissue is very close to being a real thing in humans.  It would be a miracle tech that would be a major game changer in reproductive medicine and reproductive rights.)

[Kagus]

Just so it's clear, nobody wants to have an abortion. For all the availability and accessibility the most liberal health systems give the procedure, it's still an incredibly difficult experience to go through.

People don't abort pregnancies because they want to have an abortion, they abort because the alternative is worse. It's still a decision that they're going to live with for the rest of their lives.



Anyways, on a much less important and much more interesting topic... What would happen if we actually implemented a lottery election system? I mean, ignoring the fact that it'd be impossible to implement while maintaining the level playing field the electoral college tries to maintain, just how fucked would things get?

Imagine every vote being a lottery ticket, so the more votes for a particular party/candidate, the higher the chances of a ticket for that party/candidate getting selected. However, each individual vote would still tangibly matter regardless of the majority (or the size of the party you're voting for), because it has as much a chance of being the deciding vote as any other.

It runs into issues with things like computers still not being very good at truly random selection, which some folks would care about, but let's just run with the hypothesis for a bit and see what else breaks.


One could make the argument that it would allow for governments run by minority extremist groups getting in a lucky vote, but the current system doesn't seem to be doing a very good job of defending against that either eh wot?