How To Keep Voters With You Forever, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Duverger's Law

[maradydd]

So I'm a bit late to the game with this trifecta of links, and maybe what I have to say has already been said elsewhere, but what the hell:

How To Keep Someone With You Forever -- a concise guide to some extremely effective techniques for stringing someone along in a shitty job or relationship by placing them into a "sick system". There's some

Comments

[jsl32]

you know those four rules in the first link are basically how infants (and to a lesser extent children under age 5) work, right?

[maradydd]

Oh, totally. Maturation is all about learning how to interact with other people. The thing with children is that they do grow up over time. The behaviours described are dysfunctional in adults and organisations composed of adults.

[maradydd]

Addendum: if memory serves, someone pointed that out in the comments to that post, as well. It was observed that if your species is going to have helpless newborns (and not, like, keep them in a pouch or something) it is probably adaptive for parents to be willing to run themselves ragged caring for said infants -- and this tendency can be exploited by an unscrupulous or ignorant adult.

[jsl32]

yeah, i just found that out reading the comments, hah!

it is worth noting that non-industrial cultures do things like keep the infants in pouches and in a number of other ways try to minimize the demands one infant can make on one (maternal) parent.

[whswhs]

I looked around at the five-values site for a while, and found that, first, the people who are doing that survey have noted "libertarian" as a possible separate category, and second, they note that an interest in the universalizable moral principle of liberty may be a sixth general moral norm separate from the other five

[heron61]

I looked around at the five-values site for a while, and found that, first, the people who are doing that survey have noted "libertarian" as a possible separate category, and second, they note that an interest in the universalizable moral principle of liberty may be a sixth general moral norm separate from the other five.

Hmm, I'd not encountered more than brief mentions of adding liberty onto the value list, I'd love to see more data. I'm guessing that adding that dimension would be a useful way to separate right and left libertarians from one another and to distinguish left-libertarians from progressives. I hope someone pursues this data.

[whswhs]

I'd be interested to see it. Of course my own perspective is not one of "values" but on one hand, one of class analysis (starting from Rothbard's basic idea that the two fundamental classes are those who profit from the political system and those who pay for it), and on the other, one of discourse modes. But any approach that sees libertarians as a distinct group worth understanding in its own terms has merit in my view; I know libertarians are a comparatively small group, but I don't feel any great sense of belonging when I interact with conservatives, which is where a lot of people place libertarians.

[heron61]

I know libertarians are a comparatively small group, but I don't feel any great sense of belonging when I interact with conservatives, which is where a lot of people place libertarians.

I found reading about the history of anarchism to be exceptionally illuminating for understanding libertarianism and libertarian ethics and ideals. From what I've read, the 70s split between right and left libertarianism in the US had a lot to do with the current perception of the allegiances of libertarians.

[michiexile]

I now want to spend more time with the World Values Survey, and see if those 5 axes are somehow intrinsically there and findable with our topological methods. Curses! ever more and more research projects I don't spend enough time on!

[maradydd]

Or, for that matter, might there be a way to discover additional axes?

[heron61]

and their fieldwork indicates that "liberals"1 value two of these dimensions most highly (fairness, harm/care) while "conservatives" value all five (the other three being loyalty, authority, and purity) about equally.

I've seen several studies about this, and they all said that conservatives valued loyalty and purity more than fairness or harm avoidance.

The simplest reciprocal statement of a moral standard in the harm/care dimension is the old libertarian saw, "Your right to swing your fist stops at my nose,"

I'm impressed at how different our view on harm avoidance is. I see this particular moral dimension very differently - for me it's at least as much about what we owe to other members of our society and what we are obligated to do for them, and not merely our responsibility not to actively harm others. Of course, for me both fairness and harm avoidance are intimately tied in with John Rawls "veil of ignorance"

For that matter, is there a perception among some conservative constituencies that they're being thrown under the

[whswhs]

That's the trouble with the harm/care dimension: It conflates "inflict harm on others" with "refuse to grant benefits to others." That in itself is flatly contradictory to libertarian and Objectivist ideas on the subject, and thus prejudges the ideological issues-and makes it difficult to categorize libertarians and Objectivists, who are dead set against "inflicting harm" but think that if you don't protect "refusing to grant benefits" you are yourself inflicting harm. At a deeper level, equating the two is much more a European than an American way of looking at the issue.

[heron61]

At a deeper level, equating the two is much more a European than an American way of looking at the issue.

That's an interesting and perhaps quite accurate way of putting it - yet another reason I find the US to be a difficult nation to live in.

[whswhs]

Yes, well, conversely, I haven't experienced living in Europe, but I find what I read about European customs deeply unappealing, and sometimes actively evil. And yet there are people who want the United States to adopt the European model, or to be more like Europe. I suspect that my reaction to that would be somewhat comparable to your reaction to American customs. If that makes sense to you

[paka]

That's always been the problem with the Dems. The everyone-to-the-left-of-Nixon nature of the Democratic party makes them uncomfortably inclined to compromise, and all you need is the Republicans doing something - anything - to force Democrat posturing into basically being reactive. Even the best reactive policy out there doesn't look half as good as being proactive.

I would suggest that we are losing our shit about where Obama and the Democrats have failed. But the truly repressive nature of the Republicans keep us voting for these gobblers and cutting them more slack than they deserve. Using abuse as an analogy, it's not that we keep crawling back to the boyfriend who hits us when he's drunk, it's more like we keep crawling back to the boyfriend who hits us when he's drunk because the alternative is the boyfriend who hits us all the time, rapes us, and then tells us he wouldn't need to do that if we were better behaved. Theoretically a parliamentary democracy should be less prone to America's two-parties-only problem, but you see

[whswhs]

Conversely, I supported the Republicans this time, but with feelings of deep suspicion-because I think it all too likely that they'll get to Washington, and compromise with the Democrats, and say that one government program or one deficit or one earmark can't hurt, and then we'll be back where we were, saying, "At least they're not Democrats." Two-party systems aren't fun for either side, partly because of the "race to the middle" that Anthony Downs described half a century ago.

[heron61]

I honestly remain baffled at why libertarians vote for Republicans. Shrub clearly proved that limited government isn't what the GOP is going for, and these days the in thing for the Republican Party seems to be paranoia and bigotry. For better or worse, limited government isn't remotely on the current agenda for either party, do you really find the Republican version of big government more appealing?

[whswhs]

I voted for the Democrats in 2008, on the theory that the Republicans had screwed the pooch and deserved to be thrashed. I'm not pleased at all with what the Democrats have done, neither in the abstract nor in its personal impact on me. I thought that a really drastic loss might either start the Republicans on a path to extinction, allowing a new party to replace them, or less likely, get them to see the error of their ways and move away from their massive social conservative agenda. I actually thought it likely that the Democrats might end up splitting into a party for the traditional Democrats and a party for the independent voters that Obama had brought on board