This might be a weird outcome of the inability of large groups to process nuance. Groups seem to struggle with the idea that things can be done one way in one place and another way in another place - and struggle in a way that individuals seem not to.

Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a challenge is "centralise power, then do things my way". Never mind that power is difficult to coerce, rarely does things your way and any mistakes made are standardised and amplified accross an entire country.

I recall in the early days of the COVID crisis where the US banned working COVID tests (I forget if it was the CDC or some other government body) in favour of their own faulty one, which totally scuppered any chance of controlling the disease. Foreseeable outcome of the strategy. But despite that sort of thing being easy to pick, groups don't argue for parallelism in an emergency.

Large groups cannot “process” anything; individual humans do that. Maybe what you mean is simply that humans act tribally, and most of the traditional tribe proxies (clubs, churches, etc.) have weakened or died off in modern society so we are left only with borderless ideologies as tribal allegiances.

>Large groups cannot “process” anything; individual humans do that.

That's too reductionist. Ultimately "humans" do it, like ultimately atoms do chemical interactions, but there are absolutely "group dynamics", they have been studied quite a lot, and an "individual" in a group context can operate totally different (and has different options, tradeoffs, etc) than an individual alone.

A very basic example: a human can forget X.

A group, on the other hand, has a collective memory (institutional memory), and even if an individual forgets, it takes many individuals forgetting to erase something.

Groups absolutely have an emergent consciousness, whether it is based on consensus or tyranny. Even a "human self" is ultimately a symbolic, higher-order complex formed from separate, often competing cognitions. In a very similar way, a group forms a mind and thinks, even if only one person is calling the shots: your conscious awareness will likely tend towards the cognitions created by your core beliefs, but that doesn't mean the others aren't there. They're just less conscious.

No. Groups process things, but you must frame your question in terms of things you can measure about a group.

An individual is a system; using your own logic it is inappropriate to talk about how a human feels. One must talk about each individual neuron and cell.

That's a very reductive take on what OP said. We're talking about social science, not biology here, so the individual is the atomic unit. Individual=Indivisible.

You can talk about tendencies across a group, but cognition is inherently done on an individual level, even accounting for network effects.

OTOH if what you're saying is that large groups of people can tend to share the same psychoses, well, that's a totally different statement.

>We're talking about social science, not biology here, so the individual is the atomic unit.

Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group.

In particle-terms, a single atom can't be a crystal.

Or a living organism.

But there are absolutely things that happen at the level of crystal forms or living organisms, etc, that don't happen at the single atom level.

>You can talk about tendencies across a group, but cognition is inherently done on an individual level, even accounting for network effects.

Only in a crude understanding of cognition.

> Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group.

Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual. Population, for instance.

The crystal analogy, again, isn't helpful because we're talking about social science, not physics.

>Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual

An individual cannot exhibit groupthink without a group. They also can't have in-group bias without a group. Both important properties in group dynamics.

Roles and positions within a group are similar to the "crystal example" as well, with groups forming particular patterns under specific pressures, patterns impossible to the individual (e.g. an individual is not a "protest march" or a political party).

Collectivism, by definition, requires the use of force against people who aren’t complaint with the “collective”, so it requires violence.

It’s a lot easier to commit violence against people when you can outsource it to someone else, so collectivism requires a strong, central authority. The less local that authority is, the less culpable we can convince ourselves we are when it goes wrong. The reason we keep building these large, dysfunctional political systems is because taking responsibility is hard, and most people don’t want to put in the effort.

You can absolutely have voluntary collectivism where you simply do not do things unless everyone agrees upon them. This works best in small or medium sized groups and probably does not work for large groups, but your post reads like you think collectivism always necessitates violence and that simply isn’t true.

And what do you do if someone disagrees with the crowd? How do you force him without coercieon? (hint those two words are synonyms).

>> And what do you do if someone disagrees with the crowd? How do you force him without coercieon? (hint those two words are synonyms).

I think as the parent poster was saying, this is possible with smaller groups. I think the best example would be townships in the US. Different townships decide on the level of tax and investing (especially into school systems.) Then, individuals self-select themselves into groups by choosing where to live.

I have friends upset about how not all schools are "top-tier" schools. I quote "top-tier" as it is in the eye of the beholder what that means. The thing is, not everyone wants their kids to have 5hrs of homework a night. Nor does everyone want to pay 20k+ in annual property taxes. Some would rather home-school or send their kids to private or parochial schools.

People often achieve this by joining a township that agrees with their appetites in spending and other political choices.

Alright. It is a township then. I refuse to go by the collective will. What happens next if violence is not an option and private property is respected?

In general, you have the same three choices you have in any other situation where you don't like what's going on: loyalty, voice, or exit.

In the first, you decide to accept the general will in order to maintain your individual credit, hoping that by cooperating on this occasion you encourage people to encourage with you later. Alternatively, you can protest the decision, hoping in doing so to encourage your fellow townspeople to change their mind, or to raise the reputation cost to them of proceeding down that route. And if you don't like that either, you can leave (highly visibly or otherwise).

Not all collective decision-making processes are coercive, either, FWIW. There are systems built on unanimity where your issue doesn't even arise: if you dislike the decision of the other group members enough then you can veto the decision. This creates other issues (and doesn't scale very well) but it does happen.

Look. It is a very simple question. The township has a 1 promile property tax. I never pay it and refuse to leave my property. What happens next?

You guys wrote 5 walls of text just dodging the easiest question on Earth.

You never leave your property and live a happy life in solitude there until you die of boredom or starvation. Everybody is happy to not have to interact with you anymore.

Now stop bringing up absurd examples. Just living in a state exposes you to state violence, e.g. for not obeying the (tax) law.

If you wanted a realistic example of non-violent society, there are only few, mostly small remote tribes in deep jungle. Not surprisingly, those are very collectivist societies. The standard response to repeated badly non-conforming behavior in such societies is eviction from the community. Yes, that can be done non-violently.

I think the person meant about how the few options available actually come to existence: how are they come to be the ones that would allow the person to pick one over the other? Is it common sense, is it because it was decided this way.. How?

I think there are a lot of options. Across US states, counties, and townships, for example, there is a full spectrum of political positions literally w/r/t how money is collected (or not) and spent (or not)

I gave you an answer. You can suck it up, complain, or leave. And yes, those choices are unpleasant.

If this was supposed to be a 'actually it all comes down to the threat of violence' gotcha then, sure - if you insist on your property rights, don't pay your taxes and then decide to fight the bailiffs you're going to have a bad time. Sorry.

You did not answer - you listed my options and I was asking for the reaction of the collective. Because I know that functional illiteracy is becoming a serious problem, I'll do my best to help you: "How exactly are they going to limit my options to those, what are they going to do specifically?"

Specifically, the township would put a property tax lien on your property. Eventually, the liens would pile up and your property would have so many liens you'd have no value left in your house. Then the township would take you to court to enforce their right to collect the judgements. At that point, you'd most likely be forced to move out. The township would sell your home to recover the tax liens and judgements. A sheriff would forcibly remove you from your home in such cases.

Presumably, you could buy another home in the same township, and go thru all the above processes again. OR you could choose one of the original options given by a parent post:

1. Go to town hall and influence decisions

2. Exit township, find one that you agree with

3. Bear with it and stay in the township.

" A sheriff would forcibly remove you from your home in such cases."

So, this is your "non-violent" collectivism?

Thank you very much. This is all I needed to hear.

So, violence?

Well, for starters, you may lose important local services.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39516346

This is perfectly alright and waaaaaay more libertarian than collectivist.

You will starve as people refuse to provide you food, or allow you to use collective infrastructure, unless you leave. Your property will then become collective property.

"Not all collective decision-making processes are coercive, either,"

The process is not coercive, but the product is. Laws tend have punishments and are enforced through various levels of force or violence.

Depending on the scenario, potentially nothing. There are certainly times and topics where people can break from the collective, with no hard feelings or repercussions on either side.

In rural areas, this is typically how it works. Laws are more of suggestions, and unless you are causing a big problem for someone you are likely to be left alone.

While the “ism” suggests an ideology rather than an attribute of a real world society, what you describe is the essential balance every society needs to strike between the group and the individuals, and so you find jail and fines as coercion across a wide variety of countries and systems.

As a native English speaker myself, I urge you to get into etymology and understand socius and collective and community and thereby inoculate yourself against a weird strain of anti logic parading as American political discourse and often used by folks who know better sponsored by the federalist society and Cato institute and such… typically for lowbrow crowd appeal.

No society, by definition, is free from a collective aspect.

Please, answer the simple question. I refuse to go by the collective will and there could be no violence involved. What happens next?

I cannot believe that you went on insulting large groups of people while being unable to answer a simple 6 words question.

P.S. I speak relatively fluent Latin, so the etymology play made me chuckle a bit.

you will become pariah until you leave or change your mind?

If Pariah means the collectivist people not trading or communicating with you and no violence then I am OK with that.

Now, could you explain how this is collectivism and not voluntaryism?

If you define collectivism is group activity enforced by violence vs voluntarism being group activity not enforced by violence then this entire discussion is a word game and a waste of time.

You can have voluntary collectivism. This is where everyone works to find agreement with the group as a matter of course, but only proceeds if that agreement is found. You might find this kind of management in a collectively owned business for example.

I’ve heard a lot of smears about Federalist Society but “lowbrow” is a new one. I’ll have you know we drink our tea with our pinkies in the air. :D

> How do you force him without coercieon?

You’re missing the point. You don’t force anyone. If someone doesn’t want to do the thing, you don’t make them. You find a different way to accomplish your goals.

It would be possible to simply give up on the collectivism if someone disagrees and can't be persuaded otherwise. This of course limits where such collectivism can be found, but examples of this kind of collectivism do exist.

Another hint: coercion is not necessarily direct violence.

Capitalism is almost completely coercive and controlling, but direct violence is mostly reserved for minorities and for war adventures in distant countries.

At home it's coercive through financial violence (especially income restriction and forced debt), extreme economic apartheid, and overt and covert behaviour modification narratives in the various media.

"The crowd" is very much not in charge of any of this, but is persuaded that it is.

Arguably all of this is better than a more overtly dictatorial system where any form of dissent attracts direct violence. But it's not necessarily less coercive - just less obvious. And more efficient.

You can scale that back and have collective systems which rely on a tradition of consensus. It's not even all that unusual on a smaller scale. Teams/groups make decisions, some people disagree, but when consensus is reached everyone works towards the same goals even if they have misgivings.

This works if you allow feedback, goal monitoring, and resets so the system is responsive and self-correcting. But it also requires all participants to be rational, reasonably intelligent, non-sociopathic, and capable of adult decision making.

Which is why it doesn't work at scale. Only about half the population - at best - has those abilities, and as soon as your group includes at least one sociopath they will destroy that dynamic and replace it with a toxic one which relies more on coercion than consensus.

How can someone force you to take debt? Can you give one example when someone was punished physically for refusing to take debt?

Unconscious people being taken by an ambulance to the hospital. The falsely accused needing legal representation and to pay a bail bondsman to get out of prison.

Do those examples work for you for people being physically punished for refusing to take on debt? Because I'm also happy to include sick people who need medical care and people who need money for food/heat/shelter/clothiers as being punished physically for refusing to take on debt by being deprived of those things

Punishment goes beyond physical means. You have the choice between poverty, or debt, which is definitely a form of coercion. Coercion is the use of a power differential to make someone act against their interests, physical force is not necessary.

Humans are collectivist by nature. It's why we've survived for so long and formed societies. People have to be taught to be divided which is why so much work has to be put into keeping things that way (ideology, class, race, ethnicity).

Violence comes in when one small privileged group wants to maintain power.

It's the same with any system. Private ownership requires the use of force against people who aren't complaint with the idea that they shouldn't own things instead, so it requires violence.

Also, by definition, anarchist collectivism has no strong central authority. People who aren't compliant probably shouldn't be living in an anarchist collective in the first place, but choice of social/economic system is sadly not granted as an option. In so much of the world today, people are forced to live under capitalism, like it or not. And people claim that this is "freedom"

“Small government types” are a fraud. That stuff is just chum for the masses.

Wedge issues like guns, abortion, etc are designed to break traditional democratic constituencies from the herd. Catholic priests were leaders of socialist revolutions in Latin America. In the United States, some catholic bishops were in favor of child separation due to abortion.

I think you’ve got this backwards. Social and cultural issues—different people’s conception of how to preserve freedom, when life begins, how to socialize their children, God, etc.—are always important to people and always have been. What precipitated the independence war that created my country was a language movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language_movement

It’s the insistence on ideological uniformity on these fundamental issues that creates the “wedge” between people who might otherwise cooperate on relatively mundane economic issues.

That's a Republican narrative, not really backed up by any sound historical analysis. Whereas creation, nurture and development of wedge issues is a standard right wing tactic across the world. Be it love-jihad in India, miscegenation in USA, jewish hatred in nazi Germany or recognition of Ahmediyas as muslims in Pakistan. It incentivizes voters to vote on ideological lines while ignoring/ letting politicians/wealthy industries get away with looting public monies and resources, legally or illegally.

Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India. Because these were never nurtured and developed as wedge issues by BJP. Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians. Absolutely no one gives a shit about abortions or who does what, (except for the government preventing female infanticide). Whether right/left wing they consider abortions as personal business of the woman/man involved. This topic has not been nurtured as a wedge issue because it doesn't align with the BJPs wedge issue- presence of muslims/Christians in society.

I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections .

Are there any legitimate wedge issues in your opinion, or is just everything artificially made up?

Your take feels very cynical, along the lines of "religion is opium for the masses". In this view, people are dupes stringed along by Machiavellist figures, who cannot possibly have strong feelings about various topics themselves.

Gun laws may not be very relevant in India, but neither are caste-related topics in the USA. This is normally called a different culture.

There are legit issues, and wedge issues aren’t necessarily bullshit.

But the right-wing playbook is the same everywhere, frame these issues in a way to maximize fear and link that fear to nostalgia of a better past. In the US guns are big. In Russia there’s an appeal to the bygone Soviet era where all Russian speakers were under one flag.

In the US, the gun argument is the most transparent. Gun marketers evoke (mostly bullshit) memories of how great great grandpa fed the family shooting turkeys with his flintlock, then fought some redcoats for freedom. Then they hard pivot to why you need a concealed carry pistol to stop wild Mexicans from raping your daughter. It’s a really effective argument because it links the gun, crime, immigration, abortion, etc. Then after you spend this money, the liberals are gonna take your guns, so buy more.

The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues. Progressive voters care about everything, but the get out the vote machines are more moderate.

To add a counterpoint - it seems to me the main reason the democrats are antigun is that is where most of their funding comes from. When you take money from Bloomberg or Soros you agree to be antigun. This is not something that is controversial to say, Bloomberg and Soros are very proud of it. They directly inject vast sums of money into local elections to force in anti-gun candidates, and they have been very successful at it.

Despite your own personal viewpoints guns are very popular in the United States among both parties.

> the main reason the democrats are antigun is that is where most of their funding comes from

From a perspective of a country where gun controls are far stronger, this idea that democrats are "antigun" seems hilariously partisan. Democrats only seem to be proposing modest gun controls compared to Republicans.

What do you define as "most of their funding"? What percentage of Democrat funding comes from Soros or Bloomberg?

Agreed. Urban democrats drive the anti-gun stuff. I’ve belonged to the same gun club since I turned 13.

I had a weird upbringing. One side of my family was big in county republican politics, the other were unionists and involved in democratic politics. Nobody talked about any of this crap growing up.

What did change is crazy people become prominent starting around Obama times. People I’ve known for years are now difficult to talk to as they have been pulled into a world of paranoia and crazy.

> The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues.

That’s not true. About half of Black people oppose same sex marriage, about the same as republicans. But they go along with white liberals on social issues in exchange for getting their support on civil rights issues. But, for example, they voted in favor of California’s 2008 ban on same sex marriage. (Back then, they overwhelmingly opposed same sex marriage.) There’s a fair argument that what pushed the referendum over the top was very high Black turnout because Obama was on the ballot.

Similarly, Muslims mostly vote Democrat and support same sex marriage… for other people: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres...

Non-whites vote democrat for different reasons than whites. For them, issues like civil rights, immigration rights, religious freedom for minorities, etc., are often dispositive of other issues. And insofar as many are immigrants, they don't feel ownership over the broader culture. My parents vote Democrat and view these social and cultural issues as being between white Americans. That works both ways--if Democrats supported outlawing abortion they might have some "population control"-type objections, but really wouldn't care because they'd never accept abortion in their own circle anyway.

Remember that all voters are people but not all people are voters.

When you look at the older voting population, numbers skew different.

If these “wedge issues” are manufactured and inconsequential, I’m sure democrats would be happy to go along with the republican positions on abortion, etc., these issues so we can focus on the important economic issues, right?

> Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India.

I said social and cultural issues are important to people—the specific social and cultural issues that cause disagreement obviously different between countries. Guns are a flashpoint in America because there are lots of people like my wife whose family history involves guns. Her ancestors fought in the American revolution and used guns to secure independence. They used guns when crossing the continent to settle the frontier. They used guns to protect themselves and hunt long before there was police officers and grocery stores anywhere nearby. All of this stuff is part of their cultural identity.

Obviously that specific issue isn’t relevant in India because it’s been fully settled for thousands of years. But the conflict between Hindus and Muslims similarly involves cultural identity.

> Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians.

So your example of how cultural and social issues aren’t important to people is to point out the conflict between Hindus and Muslims? Don’t you see how that parallels the conflicts in America between Christians and secularists?

And if you think religion is an inconsequential “wedge issue”—I’m sure those Muslims and Christians will be willing to conform to what the Hindus want, right?

> I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections.

Yeah but why did they do that? It was because East Pakistan was a different cultural and ethnic group (Bengali) than west Pakistan. Bangladeshi nationalism was sparked by the language movement, where Bengalis began to think of themselves as a distinct people with a different culture and language.

Careful now, you’ve read too many real books to be commenting on HN.

What did you study?

My mom edited an anthology of books on the Bangladeshi independence war. It takes up an entire row on a shelf at home. I lament I can’t read Bangla script but I’ve picked up a bit by osmosis.

What are these books?

Issues trivial enough for your opponent to disarm by ceding them without society harming consequences make poor wedges. A maximally appropriate wedge is one in which you take a harmful extremist view and present it as righteous without dealing with the results of actually fully getting your way.

Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position. We already have long since arrived at the compromise position of making it vastly more expensive and challenging by forcing people to travel substantial distances to few clinics with substantial expensive resources to get services their insurance wont cover to mostly take a few pills. This helpfully leaves them open to public shaming and rebuke.

We also make darn sure that this doesn't occur beyond what we deem viability even though a beings ability to survive outside the womb is an artifact of present tech and doesn't measure any reasonable objective benchmark under pain of prison.

They by any measure got what one would consider substantially their way along with a sharp per capita abortion rate decrease.

It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate. In fact it would even be harmful to conservatives because it would drastically increase turnout if indeed it could be achieved over the will of the people.

"We also make darn sure that this doesn't occur beyond what we deem viability even though a beings ability to survive outside the womb is an artifact of present tech and doesn't measure any reasonable objective benchmark under pain of prison."

This is an interesting topic. The two questions I have, seem to be difficult for people to answer and have them be consistent in other areas of our law and culture.

1) What defines a human life from a logical perspective?

This one seems difficult. For example, you seem to think that if one cannot survive without medical treatment that they don't count as a life or are not worth protecting, yet this is inconsistent with our laws on things like duty of care to special needs individuals, children, or incapacitated people.

2) When is it acceptable to take, or not save, a life?

This is definitely and interesting topic.

I would say that it’s human life at or shortly after conception. It’s alive, it’s a distinct organism, and it’s genetically human. If we found a blastocyst on Mars we’d say “human life found in Mars!” It’s in a stage of the human lifecycle where it’s completely dependent on the mother, but that doesn’t negate either the human part or the life part.

So I think the real debate is over when it’s acceptable to kill a human at an early stage of development. That is fundamentally a moral compromise, in the same way that e.g. the law of self defense is a moral compromise. Nothing in science says a fetus has a “right to life” just as nothing in science says anyone has a “right to bodily autonomy.”

I think partisans and ideologues try to take this issue to extremes based on principle, but I think most people (especially mothers) have a mushy view. They know miscarriages happen naturally in the early weeks and so support some abortion right. They support exceptions for life of mother or fetal abnormalities even in later stages. But for they’ve also seen ultrasounds showing something that looks a lot like a baby at 15 weeks and aren’t ideological enough to think you should be able to kill that without a really good reason.

Here's the funny thing about abortion laws. The Democrats have had a majority multiple times since Roe v Wade or even Casey and they have consistently failed to codify Roe into law. Why? Because they really like the money they get for threatening a woman's right to choose, too.

Democrats have indeed codified Roe into law in states where they can. Federal law doesn't really work that way though, which is probably why Roe was recognized through penumbras of the constitution or however they would say it. It all gets a bit silly and pompous when we take it to the priests of the law in funny robes, but the practical results of Roe were an almost perfect compromise and undoing it does not seem like a good idea to me.

As even RBG realized, Roe is not built on the best doctrinal foundations. Read Reva Siegel on her preferred path.

> Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells

I used to believe this too because of America’s awful science education. It wasn’t until I went to the ultrasound appointments for my first kid that I realized how incorrect that was.

A 13 week fetus, which under Roe can be killed for another couple of months still, has a face, hands and feet, finger prints, etc. They can suck their thumb and have other human baby reflexes.

> which some folks believe have been animated by ghosts bestowed upon them by folks imaginary friends isn't a tenable position.

Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.

Also, I hate to break it to you, but the whole fixation with personal conscience, individual self determination, and the equal dignity of every individual—ideas that animate American social liberalism— also come from Protestant Christianity. Nobody is making amoral utilitarian arguments for or against same-sex marriage.

> It would be politically impossible for the liberals to give them any closer to absolute victory without mutiny of the electorate.

Incorrect. Over 65% of Americans would support making abortions illegal in all or most cases after the first trimester: https://apnews.com/article/only-on-ap-us-supreme-court-abort.... The public opinion is basically closest to the Mississippi law that’s up before the Supreme Court: 15 weeks with exceptions for health of mother and baby. Incidentally, highly secular countries like France, Denmark, and Finland have settled on 13-14 weeks as well.

But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?

People in California believe that all Americans including those who are unfortunate enough to live in Mississippi ought to have rights as well. In addition your poll doesn't quite say exactly what you think it does.

It actually doesn't say that most people believe abortion ought to be illegal after the first trimester. What it actually said is that 38% believe that it ought to be illegal in most cases. This is overwhelmingly the people who believe that we are violating the magical ghost that their god hath breathed into even a lump of cells. Also notably this is virtually the same demographic that literally believes the earth is 6000-10,000 years old.

Of the 61% who believe abortion should be legal 44% believe the first trimester ought to be the line. Another 12% think the second trimester ought to be the line and another 44% think birth ought to be the line.

There are two questions. Ought abortions happen outside extraordinary circumstances and where do we draw the line. If we have discerned that a woman has a right to an abortion it makes no sense to average or combine the people who think the line is at zero and the people who think the variable has a value and use that to set policy. Firstly because the average of undefined and an integer is undefined and secondly because that is a fucking terrible why to deal with something that actually has a scientific answer that being basing it on birth rendering it an independent person or brain development such that the fetus goes from having never been conscious in the first place to something more akin to sleep.

>Sure, if you wave your hands and say that your side is obviously right about the issues at the heart of a political dispute, you can make any issue seem manufactured. You should go to India and tell the Hindus and the Muslims that they’re both wrong about their “imaginary friends” and that their dispute is a manufactured triviality.

Take it from the child of an Ahmedi who left Pakistan in 1986. When _you’re_ the wedge issue, you don’t have many other choices.

Exactly right. The wedge issue in India right now is not "imaginary friends". Its literally "Muslims should not be allowed to attend university and run businesses " vs "they should be allowed ".

Muslim shops are being vandalized and burnt all over India https://twitter.com/meerfaisal01/status/1513541836756848644

Neither fingers nor sucking them make you human. What's in your womb at 13 weeks is much stupider than the mouse in a trap in your basement or what's on your sandwich.

Almost all the neocortical prenatal brain development takes place in the third trimester. Electrical activity exists at 13 weeks but it's incapable of consciousness.

It's simply ridiculous to tell a women who unequivocally is an actual human to subordinate her body to the preservation of a less than mouse if she doesn't want to.

The simplest solution is to declare a person a person if it survives birth or is liable and intended to.

It's only complicated if we make it so

These same people are only too happy see kids separated from parents and kept in cages. The non stop propaganda has lined them up to be deeply Christian, hate immigrants, blacks and the poor, distrust vaccines, trust ivermectin, love guns, hate abortions, hate green energy.

The OP is not deceiving anyone when he says that watching an ultrasound made him change his mind on abortions. This is just a narrative trick that presents the " human life begins at conception" belief in a very dramatic fashion. OP probably made up his opinion much earlier when he decided which tribe/ingroup he is going to sign up for, and will support all of the Republican platform right think one way or another.

The artificial creation of the wedge issues is so absurdly obvious that it sometimes defies belief that people don't recognize it. A reply to an apparently benign business question "is usps actually losing money" will immediately reveal the person's voting choices with 99% accuracy. People are asked to sign up for a tribe in their formative years and then they simply take down notes from the propaganda and assume rigid positions. Propaganda was invented to convince the American people that joining world war 1 was necessary. It has never left us, since.

https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-...

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/si...

The real issues facing the country are absurd health care costs, dropping life expectancy, unavailable urban housing and ridiculous student loans. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in solving the problem. Who really has the time to worry about other people's abortions and guns in the middle of all of this.

While Republicans are absolutely nuts, Democrats can be forced by massive public pressure to make at least some minor moves to address these problems - thanks to Bernie. But they will do it in a way that their corporate brethren are not hurt in the least bit.

Consider the price cap of 35$ on insulin. It doesn't mean that the insulin manufacturers profit will drop. Merely that everyone else's premiums will increase so that corporate profits aren't hurt. Bush shafted Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices too.

> But more to the point: if abortion is a manufactured wedge issue, why do people in California care so much about what laws people in Mississippi choose to govern themselves?

Rephrasing - if X is a manufactured wedge issue then why is it a wedge issue? I think you manufactured an unintended tautology!

Uh, maybe it had something to do with West Pakistan robbing East Pakistan blind of foreign exchange too?

That was an important thing yes. But Bangladeshi nationalism has its roots in the language movement: https://m.theindependentbd.com//post/259643

> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.

I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could, if it chose to).

If you weaken the power of the federal government (which ironically is what i interpret "increased federalism and localism" to mean), who deals with the titans?

> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon.

An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence. Regulatory capture is much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured.

Regulatory capture is indeed a problem. But it's a hand-waving assertion that it's "much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured."

This sort of claim seems to me fundamentally rooted in some specific ideas about large human organizations, specifically of the governmental kind. One of the key ideas it requires to be true is that the corruption endemic to small-scale institutions (think your local mayor, perhaps (depending on your state) even your governor) will automatically apply to much larger scale institutions (such as those administered by the federal government).

I'm not going to deny that this could be true - it clearly could. But the change in scale, the change in mechanisms of influence that are required, the change in the possible side-effects of such corruption being uncovered ... these all point in the opposite direction, in my opinion.

Amazon and Walmart are not the victors in a game of regulatory capture. They are the beneficiaries of the election of senators, representatives, presidents and the appointments of judges who explicitly do not believe in much regulation. Even so, they are subject to more oversight than one of my local ranching families in NM, who can get a (former) governor to re-route millions of dollars in state & federal funding to a road they would prefer.

Corruption at all levels is far more "endemic" to large organizations than small ones. It's also less visible, because size correlates with a lack of transparency.

Don't agree. Corruption "at all levels" requires coordination and/or a common stance towards it. Finding that in an organization of 3 people is not always so hard; finding it in an organization of 30k people is almost impossible.

No it doesn’t. It only requires a small group to agree to be corrupt.

As the organization increases, you are more likely to find people who can band together to collude to corrupt some small corner of it. Number of corrupt candidates increases, number required does not.

Amazon only needs to lobby one federal legislature’s members and only need to battle one federal regulatory body. If all of the power were at the state levels, it would have to scale that up 50x.

There can be corruption at all levels without coordination.

Example: greed.

There is such a thing as unorganized corruption. Example, in lots of third world countries where their infrastructure and systems are so bad it breeds corruption. No need for a top down version of it.

But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction.

Yes, I agree that you can see examples in some parts of the world and in some time periods (including today) where even uncoordinate corruption is very damaging to a society. But - and this is important given the context in which I started talking about this - it does not appear to be a pathway to regulatory capture nor the formation of giant corporations in the sense that was proposed up-thread, in which a powerful "federal" organization is used to enable such organizations to exist.

> But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction.

Greed won't direct an organization in a unified direction, but that just exposes a vulnerability where an outside party can exploit the greed at an individual level to direct the organization in a unified direction of its choosing.

Maybe only a unified direction towards dysfunction lol

But yes in the context in which you have laid down you are correct I believe.

"Corruption "at all levels" requires coordination and/or a common stance towards it."

No such thing is required beyond the common stance of 'venal self-interest' regardless of organizational mandate. Without checks and balances (and penalties) you can get a loosely coupled "corruption" at all levels with little effort.

Even if we take this as true small, local governments are still large in aggregate and suffer the same problem. Fighting small town corruption is a trope for a reason. If anything decentralisation makes organisations less transparent (e.g. cell organisation for crime/spies/terrorists) because there is no common means to look into them.

British local government is notoriously corrupt and very few Brits pay much attention to it in comparison to national politics (partly because it’s not reported on in major news outlets). See for example Private Eye’s “rotten boroughs” column. So that would be one counterexample.

The corruption is so endemic in large organizations it becomes a necessary quality to even be a possible participant. This is very up front and visible in US federal government.

When I worked as a consultant at Home Depot's headquarters, they often sent out emails from the "Orange Voice" pushing employees to lobby their members of Congress on various bits of legislation and issues. What was very clear was that Home Depot absolutely hated each state having its own set of laws. Even worse were local laws. They wanted there to be just one government for them to lobby for their issues and when one state requires them to have some operational quirk such as customer accessible price scanners with printers attached, the first instinct is to find a way to get the feds to find a way to make that state requirement go away.

That's different and understandable. Everyone wants to have to comply with one set of regulations instead of one set of regulations plus fifty more additional sets of regulations (or more with counties/cities) that require additional effort to comply with and ensure the correct ones are complied with. Just the additional labor costs for lawyers must be real. Add to that the need to have special cash registers for one state, or other changes, and it gets pretty expensive. Hell, Home Depot would probably rather one national sales tax (regardless of whether it's higher or lower than the current national average) over the complexity of the current sales tax code. Just for the operational simplicity.

Good point but look at the fate of community broadband. That’s a battle being fought, and often lost, in statehouses.

That would be a good theory if we didn't see a global rise of massive corporations. If we for a moment cynically argue this as a question purely of lobbying spend: Once your corporation makes profits measured in billions, it is relatively easy to have a large lobbying spend across many different governments.

One answer here is a huge number of small governments. At the level of one for each largeish city, to make lobbying spend prohibitively high. That sort-of works, in that it creates incredible amounts of friction. It, however, also hobbles trade and innovation to an incredible degree.

I don't see that as a good answer. Neither, I think, is one humongous centralized government - while it has the resources to outspend corporations, it concentrates inordinate power in a small number of hands. And if you're willing to assume that corporations will use money to solve problems (because that's kind of their whole point), there's a very small step from there to just buying a sufficient set of politicians.

You need regulations somewhat unified to enable commerce at anywhere close to the level the world currently experiences. You need a decentralized system to deal with power concentration. This is an inherent tension that I can't see how to resolve in the face of corporations that are essentially the peers of nation states.

Regulatory capture doesn't seem like it applies to Walmart... How regulated is discount retail?

wages, social security, labor laws ... it's a bit harder to pin down, maybe this is all "just" lobbying?

the first and third vary widely by state regulatory regimes. only the second is actually consistently applied by the federal government.

> An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence.

Very well said

> An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence.

I don't see what evidence there is of that. How does Walmart (specifically, since it was mentioned) benefit from federal government regulations in a way that gives them an advantage over other brick and mortars?

> one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist.

Is bigger government more able to do this? It already has the power it needs -- the legislature can outlaw undesirable corporate behaviors, the justice department can pursue litigation (including antitrust litigation), and federal courts can rule against unlawful behavior by these companies. I don't see how bigger further enables any of these goals.

The problem I see is that lobbying and corporate hobnobbing with government elites in Washington creates a friendship and unity between corporate elites and government that ought not to exist. (Exhibit A: Ajit Pai)

A merely bigger government concentrates unjust power at the top: power to dictate more of our lives and increase bureaucracy, not power to enact justice and protect liberty.

We need a better government, not a bigger one -- a government that enforces justice without corporate favoritism, enacts the will of the people through representation, and upholds and protects the US constitution.

Beggar thy neighbor policies require higher level coordination to escape. E.g. tax competition between states to attract large companies, which not only reduces public funds but also disadvantages smaller local companies, is hard to prevent without agreements between states, or policies at a superstate level.

Replace taxes with permission to pollute, or worker rights, or other regulations, if you don't see a problem with tax competition. The point is that competition in practice reduces the sovereignty of the population of smaller government units.

Agreed, and I'm not suggesting regulation of multi-state (or multi-national) corporations ought to fall to individual states in the US.

You need a government with enough heft to take on a corporation that has decided to ignore the law. If you think you can get heft via "better", go for it. History doesn't give me much reason to be optimistic.

"The problem with corruption, inefficiency and stupidity in government is corruption, inefficieny and stupidity, not government."

> You need a government with enough heft

Governments have the monopoly on the use of legitimate force on their territory (and the means that go with it). Isn't that enough heft to go after any corporation?

> You need a government with enough heft

Could you elucidate what you mean by "heft"? Sometimes I think people want a feeling of power over them (or others) without a clear sense of the mechanism or implications of that power.

It could be any of:

    - more taxes
    - more government employees
    - more laws
    - more law enforcement
    - more bureaucracy
    - more regulations
    - more enforcement of regulations
    - more military power
    - more domestic espionage
    - more foreign espionage
    - martial law
    - less democracy

I'd argue that having a better government does not imply more heft, but more efficiency and justice, without sacrificing democratic election and separation/limitation of powers.

Some of the most efficient governments in the world also lack proper separation and limitation of powers, which degrades personal freedom. Democracy that leads to freedom is an extraordinarily tough balancing act; early US founders recognized that and publicly called on almighty God to help and aid them in their efforts.

I don't understand how you can come to this conclusion? A small country is dependent on good relations, foreign investors and on and on and on. Even at best, the small country gets limited clout. What can a small country do against a multinational company or against the WTO etc etc

They can make an economic union and together make an ultimatum against the company. See EU, it works without creating a large centralized country like US did.

I can’t tell and I’m genuinely asking: are you suggesting we empower government to dispatch force against a private corporation? As in, the imaginary paperwork construct we all agree upon being an actual thing and accordingly empower with agency and a noun and a stock symbol? You want to park an Abrams in front of that thing and aim?

(On reflection, what’s interesting about my question here is how it’s simultaneously metaphorical and literal through absolutely no effort of mine. The idea itself made that happen, rather oddly.)

This phrase is frequently misunderstood, because people treat it as a truism about government, rather than the method by which to identify the government. It is not the case that the officially recognized government has a monopoly on violence. Rather, whichever group has a monopoly on violence is itself the government. If multiple groups can use violence, then there is no monopoly, and therefore no overarching government.

Who limits liability of (certain types of) companies? The government. Maybe it should stop doing that and we could see if we still need all that heft?

What if the inefficiency, corruption and stupidity is due to the very nature of government?

You need to change the incentives of the federal government (specifically the congress) to be in more in favor of localism. In 1900, senators were (at least partially) still appointed by state legislators and the local political parties held far greater control over their nomination process. Those mechanisms had their own issues with corruption and were replaced by more democratic processes, but they made members of congress far more beholden to local interests (particularly state and local elites.) In turn, you saw a lot more distrust of large national institutions and legislation to limit them. Almost all banks used to be local, for example, because of legislation strictly limiting branching.

So to answer the question of "who deals with the titans" the answer is "the federal government, but they do so because they are beholden to state and local governments/institutions/elites."

I'm not sure I see a path from where we are to making federal representatives more responsible to state institutions (my repeal the 17th amendment campaign never having gained much traction), but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

You'll have to forgive me. I live in a small population state (NM). I trust my local politicians far less than I trust the 3 or 4 we send to DC. When I lived in a larger population state (PA) the situation wasn't much different.

The distrust of large national institutions is, IMO, a result of more than a century (or two!) worth of campaigning by the capital class to try to limit the belief in the virtues of the federal government. I consider the mere existence of this campaign (both overt and covert) to be another piece of evidence that the capital class regard the power of a strong federal government as a threat to their wealth and power. I also find it notable that I never hear anyone arguing for a stronger state government, but not odd because it fits with the general theme: rich people should be left alone to do whatever they want with the assets they control.

I've said many times here on HN that back in the 1960s there was widespread interest in a part of what was then called "operations research" that focused on how to improve the behavior of large human organizations whether they were governments or private. Sadly, that interest faded, and now we just accept private organizational malfunction without saying much, and government organizational malfunction by repeating conservative, "small government" tropes.

I have to agree. While I do think for most government local institutions are better... the federal government has done more for freedom and prevention of abuse than my state certainly has.

Living in the south it's very apparent that a weak federal government was a bad thing. Civil rights have to be mandated top down, history is the proof.

And I believe there is still sufficient party interest and government design to protect "state's rights". Most federal programs are state/municipality implemented. Sure, the feds might stick rules to how money can be used, in order to prevent abuse, but that's a good thing.

' ... federal government has done more for freedom and prevention of abuse than my state certainly has. '

Maybe reframe that to be federal constitution and courts.

Wanting a powerful federal government to take on Walmart and Amazon seems like burning your house down because it has mice in it. Yeah, you might have some work to do to get the mice under control, but you don’t need to give up your house to do it.

I don't see how that analogy fits unless you think government is dangerous by definition and cannot provide any sort of services or protections for its people. Weakening the federal government in the face of these large multinational corporations because you're afraid of the government flavored corruptions seems more akin to "burning your house down because it has mice in it" from where I stand.

Much like chemotherapeutics, I do think government is inherently dangerous to the people but also serves a critically important useful purpose. Accordingly, it should be carefully applied when needed and in the right dose and not applied systemically to every life situation.

>No state government can take on Walmart

What does this mean? Could a state not pass laws and then force Walmart to comply with those laws while operating inside the state?

The EU seems to be fining big tech quite a bit.

Do you think individual US states wouldn't be able to organize like that?

> Do you think individual US states wouldn't be able to organize like that?

Isn't that what a federal government is?

a federal government is a single body of policy which states opt into (more or less permanently). one read on GP is that we don’t need something this rigid for every coordination problem. time-limited and domain-limited agreements to which only some (large) subset of states agree could, possibly, accomplish the same things — perhaps with less political backlash in the process.

for example, state AGs band together in such a process pretty frequently.

>a federal government is a single body of policy which states opt into (more or less permanently).

I'm unclear as to why you're implying that the EU doesn't fit this definition, because the EU can be literally described under those terms.

EU membership is more fluid than US membership. and i’m not an expert on it, but my understanding of its origins is as an economic partnership first (promote a unified currency and compatible border regulations between member states). AFAIK the EU can’t declare war and has more limited funding/taxation options (e.g. rather than an individual income tax, the closest it can accomplish is a tax applied at the level of the member nation, and limited to 1.4% of GNP). that said, the US as a federal institution also started small and gained greater powers over time, so maybe this won’t be as significant as i assumed.

as for litigation, i thought it was the individual member states that were suing Big Tech. i thought the only role the EU itself played here was that of explicitly stating the conditions under which members can do such things.

I do not.

With the highly mobile nature of society, the federal government should mostly be about ensuring the application/protection of federal rights through the country. Then the local can set the laws that work best for them.

The tough part is that additional laws restricting actions tend to interfere with the laws preserving freedoms. So the two tend to be at odds with each other and result in circuitous and controversial judicial reasoning to determine if the restriction violates a right or freedom.

> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon

Why not? You can’t ban a specific company from operating but if you want them to act or stop acting in a certain way pass a law. If Australia can make Amazon pay Goods and Services Tax so can any of the states. Oh wait, they did that already.

If they want to target a specific company for actions or inactions that are not generally illegal they can amend the constitution to make bills of attainder legal.

> Why not?

Because the value of a large company, rich in either jobs or donatable cash or both, is too significant to most states to risk losing, and going up against them does risk that loss.

By contrast, large US-founded companies are extremely unlikely to quit operating in the USA if the federal government takes actions they do not like.

California literally dictates the emissions standards for the US car market. Single states are already making multi-nationals comply with their rules and are much smaller than the federal government.

Do the numbers check out here? How does Amazon compare to Standard Oil divided by the relative sizes of the federal government? I’d guess that Rockefeller comes out way ahead.

> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.

How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other factors but top-down power was important in the weakening of those structures.

I'm not necessarily for centralization, nor do I think our current system is good or has us on a healthy path by any means. I'm just not convinced stakes were lower in the early 20th century.

I don’t think there is any way to reconcile those things. If your primary concern is protecting individual rights in every corner of the country, you need centralization. And frankly you probably need to limit democracy as much as possible—which is what we did in the last several decades by having the Supreme Court take over many issues that other countries have decided by legislation.

But there’s no limiting principle to the above. You’d have more protection of individual rights in Europe if France could overrule Poland through undemocratic organizations like the ECHR: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... That would probably trigger devastating political consequences, however.

At the end of the day you have to make a decision about how much you care about democracy and self determination versus individual rights. I don’t think that in 2022 we are striking the right balance on that.

No I mean this specific statement: "Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state."

During the period in the US where power was most abused by bureaucrats and executives, they were also extremely local to the people they were wielding that power against.

I'm not trying to figure out some personal-freedom-vs-collective-justice conundrum, I'm asking a very concrete question about whether the quoted statement is even true. In one highly notable case affecting tens or hundreds of thousands of americans and lasting for nearly a century, that wasn't the case. That calls the assertion into question, I think.

To reinforce giraffe_lady's point:

> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.

That can happen. But what also did happen is that the bureaucrats and executives with power of your life were also very much under the influence (and in some cases, direct control) of local (and non-local) wealth. That influence/control can be very hard or impossible to tackle with only local politics (history has shown this to be clearly the case, many, many times).

How do you reconcile a strong federal government with the fugitive slave act, the Dred Scott decision or the Patriot Act? The federal government is just as capable of making terrible policy as the states. But whereas a person can easily escape a state whose policies they find to be reprehensible, (you could literally move to a new state over a weekend) escaping the USA is not really an option for most.

I'm not trying to? Could you reread the question I'm asking up there? It's a very specific one. At no point am I trying to argue in favor of increased centralized federal power or whatever.

I'm pointing out an abuse of local power that doesn't seem to fit with the assertion that local power is less subject to abuse.

Personally I think neither centralization nor decentralization are themselves limits on power, and other constraints must be found and imposed.

Institutions are error correction. If more than a certain threshold percentage of the population is straight up violently racist, no amount of quality institutions can recover signal from that noise.

Suppose x% of people will vote to convict a black man no matter the evidence, and the remaining 1-x% have a y% chance of erroneously voting to convict irrespective of race. At what value of x do you expect 2/3rds of wrongful convictions to be black?

Got nerd-sniped hard by this. The basic question is simple; given a random person in the population, what are the values of x and y such that the chance that they will give a wrongful vote are 2/3? Obviously, we can see that y = ((2/3) - x)/(1 - x). A simple enough graph shows that the racist population would have to be surprisingly high to fulfill that condition; even a 20% die-hard "convict on race" population would still require the other 80% of people to similarly erroneously convict almost 60% of the time.

It becomes more interesting when we consider juries. Juries, as far as I know (not being American), require unanimous agreement to convict. A jury consists of 6-12 people. To find out if a jury will convict, we have to find the probability of every single person in that jury wrongfully convicting. The formula now is y = ((2/3)^(1/{6|12}) - x)/(1 - x). At this point, either x or y have to be very high for 2/3 of wrongful convictions to be black. Even when x = 66%, y still has to be above 80% for the 6-member jury to convict wrongfully that many times. This is, of course, assuming this is a perfectly mathematical scenario and we aren't dealing with real humans who will vote to convict because everyone else is doing so.

The error, then, is probably more due to humans being likely to fold their convictions under peer pressure than merely a high percentage of them being rabidly racist. If people adamantly voted their conscience in juries, and refused to be swayed by the deliberation of their fellow jurors, we would have many more hung juries and many fewer convictions.

I'll snipe you a bit harder. In the event of a hung jury, the case can be retried (aka the distribution resampled). Practically though, no prosecutor wants to redo the same case over and over. So its safe to assume that 2 hung juries is as good as charges dropped.

I'm glad you enjoyed this problem, both as a riddle and as a neat demonstration of how a societal system can be better (more fair, just) than the underlying society that builds it.

Oh, you and your silly little math. /s

Really, though, things like this should be taught and demonstrated from k-12. A kindergartener can understand the cognitive dissonance when the Monty Hall problem is demonstrated, especially if an adult "cheats" repeatedly when they know the mechanics. After the big reveal, the kid knows the difference between 1 out of 2, and 2 out of 3. They'll play it smart by the time they hit third grade, and by graduation, they'll have an intuitive understanding of posterior probabilities.

Drug tests, statistical sampling used to validate polls, and misleading sales tactics would be neutered by a well informed, Bayesian thinking public.

Exponential thinking should be introduced early and feedback loops explained. If legislators could rationally deconstruct a problem such as racist false convictions they would be equipped to modify the systems they legislate to prevent or mitigate the damages implicit to reality-based statistics.

Prisons for profit would lose 80% or more of their fodder. The broken family, broken community cycle would be effectively ended.

> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.

I have read somewhere that for most of humanity's history city-states were the norm; modern nations are an exception in this sense.

Now, if we could have more federalism but at the same time spare the constant war state part...it could be a positive outcome.

And population. In 1900 California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Utah had like 2.5 mil people combined. 20 years earlier it was half that.

I don't think corporations had a smaller scope back then. Look up the Grange movement, trust busting and the progressive party. They were all responses to corporations having too much power, in fact control over many aspects of life and complete economic power over certain industries and groups of people. Government intervened, something which might not be possible right now.

Totally agree. Thinking social media is the cause of the current divide is naive. It's certainly a mean to make it evident. Perhaps a catalist. But it's certainly not the cause.

>The federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so did nationwide and multinational corporations.

This sounds wrong. see railroad workers in the western states or mining towns in western PA or West Virginia. People literally had to fight paid soldiers their employers sent to control their lives. I'd say that's pretty huge scope.

I often think what social media did was make people aware that people exist who live and think differently than they do.

And many people seem completely unable to process this.

I think this is close but I have an impression that local governance is poorly served by the internet. A lot of local news has collapsed, and people read severely centralized news from a few counties. The audience, therefore, of these sites in tremendous and heterogeneous, and they would rather focus on topics of common interest. So there may be nothing written whatsoever about your congressperson, but both Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi have ice cream scandals.

During the 2016 election, when I had my ballot, I tried to just Google everything on there. The most alarming thing I noticed was the absolute lack of any press on the House of Representatives candidates. I had nothing to go on except a short biography of each candidate (in one article), and one of them had a YouTube channel of little substance.

In practice, so many of America’s problems, and so many problems that Americans are very conscious of, are local issues over which the president has little to no control. Zoning, rent, real estate, roads, education, policing. Locally governed, locally funded, locally hired.

But the local press is gutted. For any of these topics, the audience is microscopic compared to “the president dumped feed in the Khoi pond”.

Here's an idea: the single-topic, short-lived political party.

Imagine a political party created to achieve one focused accomplishment, and then literally dissolved once it's been achieved.

The more bipartisan support the accomplishment has, the better. Say a political party whose primary focus is to get term limits for members of the US Congress, a topic with broad bipartisan support [1].

People of all political persuasions could join from across the country. The people in this party might differ in major ways, but they agree strongly on this one topic.

Maybe they sign a legal contract to bind them to both vote in favor of term limits if they're elected, and to elect to bring that up to a vote on the floor of US Congress until it's passed. Some consequence would have to exist I suppose. But with that would come the small, focused party's endorsement, and resources from its supporters.

Does such a thing exist? Has it ever?

[1] https://mclaughlinonline.com/2018/02/08/ma-poll-voters-overw...

You just described UKIP, the mostly-single-issue party that directly led to Brexit and mostly disintegrated afterwards.

Interesting! I didn't realize the group that started this was a political party which largely went away. But this approach was mostly adopted by the mainstream Tory party in the UK, correct?

> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state.

This statement is ambiguous. I see two obvious interpretations:

1. Differences in worldview are less important when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.

2. Differences in worldview are smaller when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.

I think #2 is true and #1 is false.

In Illinois there's a pretty major divide between Northern and Southern IL. A lot of people draw that line well north of Springfield.

I would say it broadly follows what some are calling the "Rural-Urban divide" - certainly the suburban areas are included. With some wrinkles of course. DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".

> DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".

Well, one of those towns has a 16000-student public research university with over 1000 doctoral students and participates in the management/operation of FermiLab. The other one is at the junction of two railroad lines, surrounded by farms and approximately the same population over the last 100 years. I would expect that they feel extremely different, and that's not a bad thing at all!

States can be very heterogeneous and divided. It largely depends on the topic. There is a lot of resentment towards the populated areas by those in the rural areas when it come to things like gun laws. Right now, they have a republican govenor who they might feel they can trust to veto certain things, but in general the rural areas feel their voice isn't heard on that subject and are instead subjected to the will of the urban area.

I would like to see the source where the MD governor has a 70% approval rating in urban areas. My guess is that many of those areas are ones that voted for him, not against him.

In rural PA, it's been a running a joke that the state should just have NJ annex Philly since it exhibits large political influence on the rest of the state and their wishes tend to align with the policies of NJ.

>What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution.

There are problems with Haidt's analysis and your proposed solution. The idea that society has become fractious because of technology masks a real division that has always existed among people. There's always been in-groups and out-groups which often fight each other with the in-groups usually dominating all levels of society within a given region. For example, in "red states" LGBT folks often have to keep their identity a secret or at very least pretend to bow to the dominant group which in theory gives them some protection. Of course, this is an illusion as many trans and gay/lesbian/bi folks find themselves murdered more so in hostile regions than not despite passing or hiding their sexual orientation.

What social media has done is give out-groups such as LGBT folks a means to voice their views, share their lives, and basically live as if the dominating groups don't have a say in living. This has basically made in-groups furious because in the past, a simple act of lynching would bring such out-groups to heel but now with the power of having mutual aid across the internet through GoFundMe, random meetups, and chat apps like Discord such acts of physical and structural violence don't stick as well. A family in a rural red state can't force their gay son to act straight when they can safely move out to another city even before the age of majority thanks to friends online paying for their bus ticket. No more can the local church lock down minorities in their community when they can up and leave thanks to social media connecting folks to others that have the means to help.

Essentially, society is breaking up because the means to unify via absence of freedom to flee local tyrannies and brutalities has been diminished greatly. It's not that people are experiencing the equivalent of the tower of babel from the Bible, it's that people are recreating their own colonial ventures to far away lands to avoid persecution much like religious minorities did when coming to North America. Instead, they're just fleeing to other states or countries with friends.

This is why one faction of conservatives "want to reduce [the federal government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Progressives see that notion as dangerous because they consider the government as an essential tool for solving serious problems that ruin the lives of real people. But their successes will be short lived if an expansion of government power leads to a long term disintegration of our country. Perhaps we would be better off just letting some problems fester instead of forcing government solutions.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grover_Norquist

Is reducing the federal government to that size not committing to the long term disintegration of our country? When you have states passing laws making it illegal for you to do something in another state that is perfectly legal within that second state, ala the abortion laws places like Idaho are trying to pass, how is the a cohesive nation?

You can frame it the same way too as states making things legal that are illegal in other states. But that's kind of the whole point of states, is for them to be different. It's not actually disintegrating the nation, it's providing choices. The problem comes when states use the federal government to attempt to override other states. If each state can just do their own thing and as a country we focus on prosperity, mutual aid and defense then our similarities bring us together more than our differences push us apart.

Each state is supposed to be different. Diversity is wealth. The disintegration is the forcing of everything to be the same.

I’m not talking about the states making things differently legal within their borders. I’m taking about things like the laws that make it illegal for you to get an abortion in another state where abortion is legal. It’s one state infringing on the rights of another state unless you view people as citizens of their states and not the country as a whole. That’s why I am asking how it isn’t breaking up a cohesive nation.

People literally are citizens of both their states and the country as a whole. For better our worse, the USA was intentionally structured that way with dual sovereignty.

Yes, but the states have a sovereignty that is equal to each other. They aren’t allowed to make conduct illegal that occurs in other states. Even if it was legal it’s not part of being a cohesive country.

The post I responded to originally implied that having the federal government enforce standards would lead to “The long term disintegration” of the country. I am pointing out that without the federal government enforcing standards we are already seeing states set up a long term disintegration of the country.

Aka, the largely ignored 10th Ammendment.

> a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.

And yet, it seems society has never been so much polarized. Seems a bit like the "hipster effect"

Completely agree I went from we should be two nations to federal govt should much less powerful one way to get started is remove federal tax and instead have states collect all taxes then pass it to federal government

But from the very basic metric of not wanting people to have bad things happen to them, when you see promoters of state powers intent on using it to tear down civil rights as fast as possible, strong state power in the current political environment seems like a major regression for many people in the country.

OK sure, some people want more local power. Why? Lower taxes? Or maybe because they don't like Oberfell or Casey.

It's important to look at consequences of changes.

Federal power can be used to eliminate civil rights just as easily as it can be used to create them.

Besides, the congress stopped expanding civil rights decades ago. Now it only comes from the Supreme Court, which is unaffected by more federalism.

Congress could vote tomorrow to cement abortion as a right, or gay marriage as a right… but they choose not too. The cynic in me thinks that they choose not to so both sides can continue to raise money fear mongering about the Supreme Court.

States follow the Supreme Court's rulings, that is less guaranteed in a situation where there is less balance of power. There is no physical force preventing states from ignoring rulings (and of course in practice they do ignore shit, but politics happens at the courts as well).

I agree 100% that Congress could cement abortion as a right tomorrow and should have a billion years ago. It's insulting to everyone that we have had to watch the degradation of rights through court rulings over time as congress shrugs its shoulders because they are afraid of having convictions.

But I still think that if states had more power, we simply would have less civil rights across the board. States can already pass laws and guarantee rights at a state level, and many simply choose not to.

It's all terrible right now, but I can only see things getting worse if you just say "let's have the states do stuff", based on the past ... I don't know, century of American history.

Just how I see things at the moment though, and I will freely admit I am biased to believe my theory and haven't tried to research much to the contrary.

I get what you’re saying.

But remember laws like DOMA that were passed not very long ago that were explicitly written to prevent states from expanding rights.

And almost all recent civil rights advancements have not come from congress but the courts. Since the Civil Rights Act, the trend is that congress and the executive narrows rights and the court broadens them.

> Besides, the congress stopped expanding civil rights decades ago. Now it only comes from the Supreme Court, which is unaffected by more federalism.

Supreme Court is not expanding civil rights.

> Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because our institutions were more distributed and more local.

Donald Trump always struck me as a character out of a western. Only in 'western' times he would have just 'owned' one town.