FishFace

It leads to fascist takeover of democracy.

But you need evidence, or a strong argument, to determine cause and effect here. Sure, there’s a scenario you can imagine in which intolerant views are shared, proliferated, spread among the population, gain support, gain votes, gain power. But there are many liberal democracies in the world, and most are still holding onto their liberal democratic principles. The USA is heading for fascism, which is certainly terrifying, but what about the UK? What about France? All the other countries? Even the far right in these countries is forced to be circumspect in their intolerance due to public opinion, and their probes in the direction of fascist rhetoric and policy are weak at worst.

And if you want to couch this as a “paradox” then you end up with the “paradox of democracy” (it’s possible for people to vote for the removal of democracy). What you’re saying is not that we need to resist fascism because fascists are violent and a risk to people’s lives, but that we should resist fascism because they might be too convincing and get people to vote for them - and hence arguing that we should be less democratic in order to prevent their gaining power. So maybe you do think that’s a paradox. But in practice the way democracies solve this is by banning parties which are a threat to democracy and by having a high bar to do so because otherwise that will be wielded against all sorts. It would certainly be wielded against people who “oppose capitalism” (this we know from history).

Once again, we find that there’s a route through the “paradox” which neither capitulates entirely to fascists, nor capitulates entirely to the anti-democratic, illiberal tendencies of their most extreme opponents.

There are laws that try to prevent this, but those laws are weak and the legislature is captured.

And so we get to what I said originally: the “solution” to the so-called paradox is to have strong laws, for example a hard-to-modify constitution, which guarantee people’s rights. The formulation doesn’t have to be explicitly legal in nature to have a legal solution.

Shh!

It’s a good idea to have some part of the benefits system make an attempt to work out whether people are cheating it. It’s a really bad idea to make that the focus of the whole system.

Thanks yourself, I have a similar view of your position :)

I am undecided on collectivism versus individualism, and have been conflicted since a young age. As I get older I suspect both can produce good societies and bad societies and that, while I actually tend towards collectivism being the ultimate ideal, I don’t see inconsistent approaches as being particularly viable, which is where current western collectivist politics tends to sit - there’s no point, for example, in introducing rent controls. Either collectivise housing completely or work within the system to improve housing provision. Ultimately I think there are small advantages of (well-regulated) privatised housing (better choice), and small advantages in (well-managed) nationalised housing that are more significant, and that since the differences are fairly small, it’s not worth trying to push through a poorly managed middle-zone in the hope of achieving the ideal when that looks unlikely.

This was a digression but it was easy to explain and is similar to my thinking on other things…

I’ve heard this, but I’d like to know what I’ve been eating over time. I never hated sprouts - I had them boiled (briefly!) as a kid in the 90s, when I guess this variety hadn’t yet proliferated? I like sprouts more now but have always attributed this to cooking them differently - fried or roasted, but occasionally simmered in a curry.

I have come to like more pop music over time too. What I found though is that I don’t tend to attach much to music unless it has something unique to it, so have found myself going for bands like Pixie Paris which is very poppy but still a bit different.

Indeed.

Yep, it’s a big problem in audio and other subjective areas, because you have no way of knowing what the anonymous reviewer’s point of reference is, and most professional reviewers’ reference points are not suitable. It’s worse too, because purchaser-reviewers self-select into their category, so you expect most people to be satisfied with the subjective aspects of a product they’ve purchased, even though most people would not be satisfied with a random cheap product. This is all not helped by the fact that, in audio when differences are so minute, virtually no-one is conducting blind reviews so confirmation bias probably accounts for huge amounts of the final score. Sure, any professional reviewer is going to be able to identify a bum product that costs thousands, but I bet most of them will rate an identical product more highly if they’re told it costs 10x as much and comes from a fancier brand.

I’ve ended up crowdsourcing my recommendations from places like reddit where people tend to make tiered recommendation lists so you at least know they have the goal of producing the best products at each price level.

From the user’s perspective it’s not about “reach”; it’s about simply having people to interact with. If you go to a thread on reddit there’ll be hundreds or thousands of people to talk about it with, and there’ll be active communities for all kinds of niches. If you want to avoid reddit - whether because of privacy issues or site policy or mods or whatever - you have to deal with the fact that everyone else is sticking with reddit.

Comparing huge multinational countries which serve every country to the half of countries with the smallest energy usage is not terribly illustrative.