Political Systems and Societies (Foundation side thread)

No, this is just silly. I live in a multiparty state in Scandinavia, there is ~10-15 parties at any given time and it's the same here as well with two major factions and incredible hard for outsiders to get in and do something. Lets compare the US with a Scandinavian democracy:

United States' democracy
The US has libertarians, neocons, populists etc within the republican party and likewise the democrat party has greens, socialists, unionists etc in it. Each faction within the party decides for itself where to run its candidates and each faction has its own funding sources.

Once the candidates are elected they can choose to follow their faction as they wish on voting issues with the risk of being thrown out of course. The party itself is always very careful about what it claims as public policy however the various factions will be loud via their candidates think e.g. Ron Paul as a loud candidate for his faction.

If your faction politics are far outside the norm, you can't enter either party so you're kept out of the political process in that way however you can run as a third party and get a little votes maybe a couple of representatives too and it has happened in the past but what happens is just that the Republicans and the Democrats refuse to work with those "outsiders".

Scandinavian democracy
Each faction has its own party and funding sources, individual candidates are rarely allowed to stand outside of the faction's policies and members are quickly expelled if they do stand outside on key issues.

Each faction becomes a part of a bigger voting block usually just referred to as "red block" or "blue block", each block is usually led by the party with most candidates(similar to the Republicans/Democrats in the US, most candidates = control over the party generally) and they throw out factions(parties in Scandinavia) from the block if they are not considered kosher.

Someone could potentially start his own party and get enough votes on his own to get in but when this happens, that person is kept outside power. You can look at e.g. the Swedish Democrats or even in Germany with the AfD for inspiration on how that works, basically all the other parties simply reject working with the "outsiders".

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There is no real major difference between these systems, formally they may be set up differently but in practice they work in exactly the same way, it's just details in legalities that makes it more practical to operate a faction within a party or a party as a part of a voting block.

No, my question was whether you only read those philosophers or whether you also read those who disagree with them for various reasons. My earlier statement about false pattern recognition comes into play here: if you only read works derived from each other, you start seeing the patterns described therein everywhere. But you also get incrementally worse at seeing the imperfections, the many many ways in which the pattern (like any pattern) does not apply. That's just an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche.

Yes, that is exactly my point. They simply assume there has to be an "ought" and when they can't find it, they resort to one that cannot easily (if ever) be proven or disproven. Perhaps, instead, such an "ought" quite simply does not exist at all to begin with.

Eh, I'll concede that it's a matter of debate what kind of work exactly it is. But it is a text about "how to be an effective (and ruthless) autocrat" from an author who, as far as I know, was otherwise primarily fascinated with the example of Rome's old Republic, a system that specifically refused to have a singular long-term ruler. The idea that it would be satire is not my own. It suggests that he was essentially mocking the rulers of his time by exaggerating his own observation of their behaviour in a serious tone, thus not formally insulting anyone.

Oh. Okay. Massive miscommunication, then, and one I can assure you will happen elsewhere: the words "liberal" and "conservative" have long been (ab)used in the US to refer to political affiliation with either party.  Unfortunately, this has even spread across the world a bit. If you use the words (correctly) people will usually (incorrectly) assume you got them from there. I agree that this is unfortunate, but also a notable source of, well, miscommunication. You'll likely be understood correctly more often if you avoid using them... somehow.

And this contrast is exactly what I am referring to: many-party democracies have shifting blocks and coalitions. One faction might ally with another after one election and then be in opposition to it again after the next. No one in the US has that luxury. The blocks are almost entirely rigid, because they cannot reform after an election, because they are each only a single party that cannot ever split up without risking to never win an election again. Likewise, no small party can actually ally itself with a larger one, because it is winner-takes-all: they have already won and don't need any help from a party that has not won and thus has no seat at the table in the first place.

Yeah, as lighton said, you specifically picked two parties that are known to be a go-to address for anyone who can broadly be categorized as "racist". At least in Germany, you can not really ally with AfD because the majority of voters that aren't already voting for them anyway are strongly opposed to them and cooperation would mean you lose them by association. Beyond that, it is similiarly unlikely that they would want it because their voters are largely people who hate all the other parties on principle.

Besides, Germany has at least two notable parties that are younger than the swedish SD and currently part of local and national governments. The Greens in Sweden are also not much older than SD and, far as I can tell, doing just fine.

First of all, "greatness" is a word so vague it can mean just about anything to any given person. What I already said is that the things that had been "lost" (again, not really, because church archives) were mostly things that only make sense to maintain when you have the right kinds of cities and trade routes to support them; thus, it is not surprising they were "lost" for a while.

If you call yourself good, your grandfather great and your father pathetic... then well, you are still calling your father pathetic. And that, yes, is part of what the renaissance was about. The retroactive invention of the "dark times". The fact that they really did do a lot of amazing things may hide that, but doesn't change it.

It literally doesn't matter why they are kept outside of power, I'm simply explaining how it is done and.. it's the same in the US and in the Nordics, same methods are used. SD and AfD are "outsiders" because of perceived racism, OK.

This happens in the US too? It's just the factions that jumps, there is no press releases like with a party but informal coalitions are just as real as formal ones.

Here is four well known examples:

1. Neocons are Trotskyists who rejected Stalin and switched to the Republicans and is today instead pursuing the eternal revolution through wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Ukraine etc.

2. Libertarians flipflop between the two parties all the time. In the 70s, 80s and into the 90s they were largely democrats, today they are largely republicans.

3. The Black constituency used to be Republican, today it's Democrat after the "Jewish-Black alliance" during the civil rights era.

4. It also used to be women who voted Republican, today not so much.

Now you might say "Well Black, Jewish and Women" aren't political parties, well they kinda are.. take e.g. Socialistic Folkeparti in Denmark, that's a proxy party for "Women" with like 9/10 in the party being women.

It's not a matter of debate, if you've encountered someone who thought it was satire he would be wrong. The content is quite serious but written in a witty way for multiple reasons, one of those reasons would probably be to keep his head as you imply.

Never put down honest advice. That does not bring about an open discussion, but rather dismisses the other opinion without discussion

My point was this is again one of those unfortunate threads here where two parties are posting, but one side is not responding to anything said, but rather speaking past and refusing to consider the other's point of view. No progress will be made here.

Two phrases come to mind. Talking to a wall and Don't feed the trolls

Eh, I could have worded it less rudely. Sorry for that. I just really think that it is bad advice, and one that is starting to all too often be considered common wisdom.

No, you don't talk to people to change their mind. If you are having a discussion, the goal is to change your own. If it's a debate, then you want to change the minds of the audience. The only reason people traditionally ever conceded in that case was to save face in the eyes of said audience. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't seem to realize any of that and thus keep yelling at one another pointlessly (there are no faces to save anymore) and then blame it on the impossibility of it all when it doesn't go the way they want it to.

In my case here, I am simply trying to figure out the way Kanga thinks. At best there's some hidden wisdom in there. At worst, I still learn more about the way different people think differently. Only one way to be sure which one it will be. Kanga, one the other side, gets a chance to actually lay these things out for once.

The advice, I believe, you should actually be giving is not to get emotionally invested in changing someone else's mind; which I am not, this is merely a friendly-ish discussion.

Eh. I get what you are probably trying to say, but this line of discussion isn't going to go anywhere we want it to. Yes, the camps inside the parties used to be fairly flexible. It's become more rigid over the past few decades with the media landscape getting more partisan and practices like e.g. gerrymandering being constantly pushed to their limits. The libertarian camp tends to be a bit more flexible, but has been mostly associated with the GOP ever since Reagan. None of that really matters anymore, though, with the semantics we have by now managed to establish here.

Not sure about SD, but AfD is most certainly considered racist even by many of their own not exactly racist supporters, let alone the rest of the population. Or, to quote the Simpsons (about Fox News): "Not racist, but #1 with racists". But again, not really important here.

Actually, it is. But then again, the consensus today seems to be that "satire" is the wrong word. Out of curiosity, what do you think about the theory listed under "Deceit"?

Nothing, really. I was merely pointing out that many of the people in your list were using it. That's not very common among contemporary philosophers anymore. Though yes, I would question Bismarck in general on account of how he completely failed to properly account for his own eventual absence. But, once again, irrelevant here.

Sorting out semantics is always annoying, if for no other reason than the fact that you'll often have to sort out the semantics first before you can sort out the semantics...

Fair enough. But that still plays into my point that this is the kind of arrogance that is later also present in the ideas of Kant and others, even if it came a bit later.

Hold on... now we are using a christocentric perspective? Actually, what is your relationship with religion?