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Re: A rant about politics

Smokey wrote an essay denouncing politics that’s pretty interesting.

It get a lot of things right, and we’ll get to that, but there are some core pillars that’s a little off.

I am not a fan of politics, never have been.

First of all, what is politics?

Politics arise when a group bigger than a single person needs to make a decision of what to do or how to handle a specific situation or type of situations.

Politics are about:

what decisions do we need to make together, vs what is left on the backburner for future meetings, or left for everyone to decide for themselves?
what do we actually decide to do?
how do we make it so that those decisions are followed?
and, just as importantly, how do we answer those previous questions themselves?

These questions are unavoidable for any group. This is politics.

I want you to know right now that it’s fine to hate dealing with that stuff, to want to stay out of it, to want to be all “I’ll be in my room, let me know when you’re done”. 100% legit.

It’s like on a boat: you have some people wanting to go one way and other people wanting to go the other and if you feel like you just wanna stay out of that conversation, because you don’t care about where we go, that’s fine. There’s this “participation hype” in politics that I don’t get behind. Not everyone needs to be into politics.

If you do care about where we end up, but you don't wanna deal with the people already quibbling about it so you just hunker down, then we as a society have a problem. People are not getting represented or heard.

So it’s fine to want to stay out of politics, healthy even, but, the group as a whole does need politics. That’s why a rant against politics doesn’t make sense. There’s a lot of problems with how politics (and economics) are currently being conducted, and we’ll get to that, but we can’t live completely free from politics.Being adrift on a boat without steering is fun and all but there are waterfalls and malströms that we don’t want to fall over. Climate change being the big one.

Thats because people aren’t interested in genuine heartfelt discussion and idealogical compromise, theyre interested in pointing fingers, playing with scapegoats and strawmen.

Yes, that’s a huge problem.

Grown ass adults acting like children who would rather play the blame game with the polar opposite of their ideaology and say “this type of person is the reason for all the worlds problems! Look at how (insert political group) is to blame for our suffering! If only that country adopted Y economic system!”

Market capitalism does have a couple of problems. I think of them as “bugs”, since it is, in some sense, software (but for interactions, for how transactions are conducted, rather than for electronics).

One is that the rich gets richer at a faster pace than the poor does, causing ever-widening wealth- and power gaps. It often does so off the backs of the workers themselves.

The other is that transactions often have problems and costs unaccounted for, such as pollution, or using up limited resources.

I usually talk about these two problems separately:

Exploitation

Externalities

But they are also intertwined.

There’s a “leak” where the costs of burning fossil fuels are not accounted for or paid for as part of transactions; it’s “external” to the transaction. Our system is set up to exploit that leak to create wealth.

Just like a combo in a game. “Oh, there’s this card that gets me 20 mana in one turn and this other card that converts mana into damage? Burn, baby, burn!”

Channel

Blaze

Systems, all systems, benefit those who exploit the loopholes, both those who deliberately do it and those who sorta end up doing it.

Planned vs evolved behavior

Now, we on the left can not start to get smug about this because we’re not sitting very pretty. A lot of our own ideas have the same externalities vulnerabilities or have—as history shows us—been exploitative. Like it or not, shitshows like the USSR and the CCP were both originally presented as left-wing projects!

The political well has been poisoned beyond recovery, there are no intelligent, fair, and well thought out discussions anymore only shit flinging and slander campaigning.

Politics as it’s being conducted today is poison, yes. But we need to change that or we’ll die.

There is no coming to a common understanding or compromise, one side has to ‘win’ and the other ‘lose’ like a sports match.

It’s important to note here that the truth is not “somewhere in between”. We can’t compromise between 2+2=4 and 2+2=5, we can’t say “OK, it’s 4.5, let’s ship it”.

Exploitation and externalities are huge problems, made urgent by climate change.

Conflicts around policy are driven by cleavage points. Some of these, it’s good to respect. Cities vs countryside is a good example of where compromise would be great. We need both. Cities are efficient for resources like electricity and heating and distribution, while the countryside is better for growing plants safely, away from polluting traffic and construction. The needs and concerns of urban vs rurals sometimes do clash and it’s not a good idea for the urbanites to just be able to outvote the rurals.

There are other cleavage points where compromise is a bad idea. We can’t be like “Oh, we need to compromise between the KKK and black people, how about lynching, but not on Sundays?” That would be beyond fucked up!

There are also political issues that aren’t really cleavage points, its just illusory. Climate change is the perfect example. I know some try to set themselves up as the comfiest sobs on the cinder, but the armageddon they’re brewing will harm them too.

We need to fix it, for everyone’s sake.

Cleavage (politics)

The best part is that this is all acording to plan. Powerful organizations and old money families at the very top of the economic food chain are the ones who really call the shots, and not one of them benefit from the common civilians being well educated and tolerant of eachothers various contradictory beliefs, we might just collectively begin to recognize and do something about the centuries of power games and resource exploitation that has left our world in desperate condition which our children and their children will surely suffer for. We might see the real problems with the world instead of just pointing fingers at eachother.

This is politics!

I know, I know, words can mean different things in different contexts and if you’re railing against the typical news channel talking head political discourse, I’m right there with you, that’s a huge problem.

Yes, there are a lot of “wedge issues” that we’re fighting about instead of addressing the fundamental problems of our economic and political systems. Wedge issues that the owner class brewed up to get votes instead of being all “vote for us, we’ll make the rich richer”.

Calling back to my previous discussion on planned vs evolved behavior, I’m not onboard with this depiction of how deliberate this behavior is. It’s not all shady deals in smoke-filled rooms. New money is just as bad as old money. I’m not shooting the messenger here, but a lot of this worldbuilding ultimately comes from antisemites using it to further their own goals. It’s a wedge issue too.

It doesn’t matter the economic or ruling system, the aggresively greedy and power hungry will always find ways to poke holes into whatever system you happen to pick over time.

It’s true that exploiters will want to exploit any system but there’s a question of degree, and of opportunity.

Economically, we have a system that actively rewards exploitation, that’s actively bleeding out through externalities. It’s pretty imperative that we patch the system, or replace it.

But no, the politically minded will keep tearing eachother to shreds over every little difference in their positions. social issues, blaming this person or that economic system or so and so inequality for all of the problems with the world. A never ending discord between two sides literally engineered to never get along.

This part just ain’t right.

It’s not literally engineered. The opposite is true.

Systems can have systematic outcomes and market capitalism rewards exploitation and concentrated capital, and that’s what happened. That’s what we need to figure out a way to fix.

Update

There’s a new episode of Alt-Right Playbook out: > Fascism begins by stealing targets from the left. They focus on elites—corrupt businessmen, weak-willed politicians—subtly shifting focus away from leftist critique of systems to types of people, but sooner or later they settle on something unchangeable: Race, gender, ethnicity, religious background.

There’s a new episode of Alt-Right Playbook out

Teireisias also added:

[Quoting Paxton]: “It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics“ was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics.”

Please be careful not to fall into that trap.