Why Political Parties Fail Once in Power
In a Democracy, part of winning popularity is communicating what your electorate want to hear – that’s why they vote for you. In this way, you assess what people want, and respond by re-communicating those values back to the people. This tactic however no longer works once in power. Once in power, the people’s reactions will be based on your own actions, so it is no longer possible to assess opinions without the party in power actually committing to an action. Hence, while before being elected it may have been possible to position itself effectively on saying what people want to hear, it is different than doing what people want done. And, if you spend all your energies in reacting to reactions at your own actions, very little will get accomplished.
Not Doing Bad Doesn’t Make You Good, It’s Moral Non-Existence
I read a lot of internet perspectives where a person commits an amoral act and people respond with outrage. Sadly, I think this outrage is about as far 99% of people go, though their outrage is eagerly shared everyday of their lives. In many people’s minds, it seems that expressing outrage is enough to make a person “good.” However, I disagree. The evaluation of someone’s morality should be based on how they’ve tried to help people, not on their angle of perception – which is what most the internet seems to focus on. Simply weighing in on what’s right or wrong doesn’t make a person moral, because besides the intellectual exercise it doesn’t help anyone, and so in my mind doesn’t make that act a reflection of virtue or vice, rather, moral non-existence.
The Evil Individual vs. The Evil Organization
The critical difference between people and organizations are their scaling. An individual who advances through wicked means, let us say earns 30% more from his energies, will at the end of his life have earned 30% more than a good person. The gain is linear. An organization however is not limited by the energies of one person because it can expand. Thus, the evil that caused 30% gain one year might scale to 60% the next as the organization grows. It’s important to understand this scaling component to appreciate that an evil organization is infinitely more dangerous than an evil individual.
Solving Problems with the Original Problem
I wanted to discuss a common way I see people approach solving problems and why they never really seem to solve them. In the bottom issue I used racism as an issue since it seems to be a hot topic, but this really covers anything. So for example in racism energy goes into trying to fix racial disparities as a means of combating racism, meaning the way to fix being racially persecuted is to balance it with racial preference. The problem is that there never really is an idea of when balance is achieved, and whenever you approach that threshold, there will be blow-back and then the other people will try to compensate for their persecution. This works in the same way for violence and other types of conflict. Basically, more of a bad thing doesn’t resolve a bad thing, if you’re really looking for peace.
Fascinating YouTuber: ABillyRock (Ron Paul Supporter)
This is the first video I’ve seen that actually defends the 1% without being simply dismissive, so I thought I’d share it because of its uniqueness. This led me to another video of her which talks about how she became interested in policy, and I think many go through a phase where one question leads to a snowball to answer many more.
Worker Unions: Change to Useful?
At a theoretical level, I’m not a fan of unions which can change wages based on the cost of them striking. However, I think if laborers self-organized into groups where there was a minimum level of quality and communicated this with employers, that group’s workers would be more valuable because there would be less risk on the employer’s part. That is, the workers have self-filtered lower quality ones from higher. For employers it’s difficult to judge the quality of an individual before working with them, so reducing the risk of getting a bad laborer (reducing costs) could be transferred as higher wages. This might not fall under the typical definition of a union, but I think its a very viable way that quality workers can improve their wages in a win-win way.
Bearable Browsing of YouTube: Access Old Interface
I watch a lot of YouTube videos. One thing YouTube did a while ago is change the interface to pretty well take out all features to sort by likes, comments, and views. Maybe they did this to reduce gaming of the system, regardless its an awful interface. Luckily you can still use the old interface at the link http://www.youtube.com/charts/. Without this old interface working I would have stopped watching YouTube a long time ago.
