The BlueSwan Basement of Absurd & Ignorant Posts VIII

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

tax cuts can help spur economic growth

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Any argument that considers states as meaningful and independent entities is still colossally stupid. We're at a point with mass communication, mass culture, nationalized politics, etc. that there's no reason to consider states as truly independent collections of constituencies rather than some arbitrarily binned groupings of people. Put another way: we're at a point where most states have a large amount of variance within their constituencies, to the point that the differences among states are becoming meaningless so long as you know a person's education level, race, and gender. There isn't much difference in the political leanings or the between Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport Iowa, or between Fairfax County, VA and Prince George's County, MD, between Wendover, Nevada and West Wendover, Utah, etc. But the current representation system we have treats ridiculously them as totally separate political entities. So, any type of system which tries to do some fair weighting of "states" as if they had some sort of meaningful political identity is trying to weight something which isn't well defined enough to be meaningful. Keeping a system of political representation which is based on trying to balance out some weird political variables that don't really exist is horrible and indefensible when it creates massive inequalities in other ways, e.g., giving the 40 million people of California as much political representation in a major body of Congress as a state that's almost 1/80th its size.

I don't really care about the Connecticut Compromise. It's a product of a bygone era with incredibly different political needs and realities, and its mere existence isn't a sufficient argument for why it should continue to be followed. It's telling that all arguments in favor of incredibly biased systems of proportionment are justified by arguments that are ultimately "this is the way it is", or "this is the way it was", without ever giving an argument for why that is right or desirable.

Basically this and everything Solid and AndyHogan have said in this thread: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=308408.msg6570518#new

Damnit! You found and exploited my debating weak point - passive-aggressively quoting me in the bad-posts thread without addressing any of my arguments. This has always been my rhetorical Achilles heel - it's why I was no good in my high school debate club.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Any argument that considers states as meaningful and independent entities is still colossally stupid. We're at a point with mass communication, mass culture, nationalized politics, etc. that there's no reason to consider states as truly independent collections of constituencies rather than some arbitrarily binned groupings of people. Put another way: we're at a point where most states have a large amount of variance within their constituencies, to the point that the differences among states are becoming meaningless so long as you know a person's education level, race, and gender. There isn't much difference in the political leanings or the between Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport Iowa, or between Fairfax County, VA and Prince George's County, MD, between Wendover, Nevada and West Wendover, Utah, etc. But the current representation system we have treats ridiculously them as totally separate political entities. So, any type of system which tries to do some fair weighting of "states" as if they had some sort of meaningful political identity is trying to weight something which isn't well defined enough to be meaningful. Keeping a system of political representation which is based on trying to balance out some weird political variables that don't really exist is horrible and indefensible when it creates massive inequalities in other ways, e.g., giving the 40 million people of California as much political representation in a major body of Congress as a state that's almost 1/80th its size.

I don't really care about the Connecticut Compromise. It's a product of a bygone era with incredibly different political needs and realities, and its mere existence isn't a sufficient argument for why it should continue to be followed. It's telling that all arguments in favor of incredibly biased systems of proportionment are justified by arguments that are ultimately "this is the way it is", or "this is the way it was", without ever giving an argument for why that is right or desirable.

Basically this and everything Solid and AndyHogan have said in this thread: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=308408.msg6570518#new

Damnit! You found and exploited my debating weak point - passive-aggressively quoting me in the bad-posts thread without addressing any of my arguments. This has always been my rhetorical Achilles heel - it's why I was no good in my high school debate club.

Your argument about the states is quite absurd. New York is not the same as California and Georgia is not the same as Texas. There is still very much a state identity for each state. Also assuming certain groups are going to vote the same way for the rest of history is absurd. If you look at history you can see that different groups have voted differently over time and I fully expect that to continue. I'm 100% sure that the Democrats will win back the senate at some point. If you look at the current trends you're favored to win the Senate back over time.

Thanks for providing an actual argument, and I don't mean that snarkily.

It's not absurd to point out that treating state boundaries as hard boundaries of political interest is meaningless. You point out that states that are far apart are going to be politically different, which of course there is some evidence for (although your average voter in a place like Salem, Oregon is going to vote similarly to the average voter in a place like Annapolis, Maryland, and ditto for a voter in Ontario, Oregon and some tiny-ass place on Maryland's Eastern Shore). But consider the opposite side of that: places that are close together but are in different states will be much more similar to each other than they will be to many places in their own states. There are some developed parts of the Kansas City metro area where a single, four-lane road separates Missouri from Kansas. Are you really going to tell me that a voter on the MO side of the road is more similar to a voter in a place like Lebanon, Missouri than he/she is to a voter on the other side of the road (and likewise for a KCKS voter and a place like Colby, Kansas)? Of course not - that's absurd. But because states are so coarse-grained, those types of voters get lumped togethar according to which side of a state line they live on when there's no reason to assume they have similar interests. This is why lumping together states as if they have some sort of uniform, common interest is naive at best. And why try to preserve a system to explicitly balance the competing interests of certain types of states if the underlying assumption about whether or not states have common cause is flawed?

Another similar example of the banality of the idea of an political interest of a state is the fact that you can easily change the outcomes of political elections for the representations of millions of people by simply abosbing/jettisoning counties from certain states. This doesn't apply to the Senate per se but if you gave Toledo to Michigan, Trenton to Pennsylvania, and Waukegon to Wisconsin you would have changed the outcomes of the 2016 Presidential election. Are you really going to make the argument to me that each of those places are so culturally, economically, politically, etc. out of step with their neighboring states? No - it just goes to show how incredibly arbitrary and unstable it is to have national systems of representation that are based on binnings that were arbitrarily set in the 1800s.

The "interests of a state" was a meaningful phrase in the 1780s because the states were smaller and sparsely populated and because the economies were less diversified and much less interconnected than they are today. But because of transformations in the economy, ways we communicate, and ways that political coalitions operate, it's no longer meaningful to say that states have some sort of uniform political interest. Even many of our own House districts (which are smaller, more compact, and much finer grained) don't have what you could consider a common political interest. I won't speculate too much on what would be a superior system of representation to the Senate, but I will say that our current system 1) has way too few representatives, and this applies to both the House and Senate, and 2) a system which is more flexible in allowing its political boundaries to change (gerrymandering in the House shows this is not a perfect solution).

I don't really care about whether or not Democrats will be able to win back the Senate in 2060. If you follow the "Veil of Justice" approach then it doesn't really matter who is being disadvantaged by a system like this. But it is worth noting that the "average state" (i.e., average political unit which gets represented in the Senate) is something like +6% more Republican than the average voter. There's no reason for having one of our most powerful elected institutions set up to allow systematic bias against the average voter if the main value the system is trying to embody is fair representation?

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

James did respectable against MI institution Stabenow in a D+7 wave year. Against bland and relatively quiet Gary Peters in a very close presidential race, he could pull it out

Stabenow is not a Michigan institution (or anywhere close, for that matter).  She’s a lowkey generic D who barely campaigned.

Someone who has been in office since 2000, and regularly wins in landslides is not an institution

Correct, Carl Levin was an institution.  Stabenow is no more an institution in Michigan than Sheldon Whitehouse is in Rhode Island or Rob Portman is in Ohio.

Senator Ted Strickland agrees

The fact that you think that’s why Strickland lost just shows how little you know about Ohio politics.  Also, nobody here even knows who Portman is (his name recognition is about 28% IIRC).

Strickland won in a democratic election. Democracy is an institution. Therefore Strickland is an institution.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

It's a friggin' sheep, you guys. Chill.

But something something Cheeto Hitler bad!

What part of "endangered species" don't you two geniuses understand?

Yes, let us devote our energy and outrage to the all-important issue of preserving the existence of the Central Asian mountain sheep, on which all else depends.

You are such a closed-minded fool if that is the way you think about the preservation of animals species on our planet.
They have a right to exist also. We have destroyed many habitats making it difficult for them to survive and live; yet alone just shooting them outright, like Orange Moron Jr.
There is no room for discussion with you on this entire topic (thread). Just exit and stay out.

An animal's only value is in the utility it provides to humans.

That is an objectively correct statement.

I really hope this is either ironic or a purposeful addition to this thread.

I know you're still in college but hopefully you've taken a philosophy class or at least a critical thinking class and can discern why this statement is ridiculous.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

An animal's only value is in the utility it provides to humans.

That is an objectively correct statement.

I really hope this is either ironic or a purposeful addition to this thread.

I know you're still in college but hopefully you've taken a philosophy class or at least a critical thinking class and can discern why this statement is ridiculous.

Excuse me? Sorry, but vegetarian philosophy isn't philosophy. Please don't tell me that you are actually under the impression that there is some kind of philosophical consensus that animals have rights. Descartes is one example. There are others.

I was addressing the claim that animals having no value (saying nothing about rights) other than their use to humans was an objective claim, which it obviously is not.

I'm not particularly interested in arguing about whether or not animals have rights (which is, of course, a separate question than their value) because it's... wait for it... a subjective claim.

And for the record nobody said anything about a philosophical consensus about animal rights. You're fighting a strawman.

e: there also isn't even a consensus in the vegetarian community about animal rights... I'm a vegetarian but not because I think eating meat is inherently immoral.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

An animal's only value is in the utility it provides to humans.

That is an objectively correct statement.

I really hope this is either ironic or a purposeful addition to this thread.

I know you're still in college but hopefully you've taken a philosophy class or at least a critical thinking class and can discern why this statement is ridiculous.

Excuse me? Sorry, but vegetarian philosophy isn't philosophy. Please don't tell me that you are actually under the impression that there is some kind of philosophical consensus that animals have rights. Descartes is one example. There are others.

I was addressing the claim that animals having no value (saying nothing about rights) other than their use to humans was an objective claim, which it obviously is not.

I'm not particularly interested in arguing about whether or not animals have rights (which is, of course, a separate question than their value) because it's... wait for it... a subjective claim.

And for the record nobody said anything about a philosophical consensus about animal rights. You're fighting a strawman.

"Value" is a human concept and it is subjective to each individual person. This is indisputable. It then stands to reason that "value" can only be applied to animals inasmuch as humans decide it does. If we've decided that we value Mongolian mountain sheep a certain amount, then that's how much value they have. So the value that any item (including an animal) possesses is contingent upon its utility to humans, whether that utility comes in the form of meat, hunting for sport, or cuddling with on the couch.

If the claim is that animals have no intrinsic value is an objective claim because value is not "objectively" defined, then, nice try, but... nah. Your argument is basically "that's just, like, my opinion, man."

By the same logic the claim "abortion is good" is an obJeCtIvE fAcT because "goodness" varies on an individual basis.

If your argument is that only humans can evaluate value and therefore only things that are valuable to humans can be valuable, then your argument is incredibly circular.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

An animal's only value is in the utility it provides to humans.

That is an objectively correct statement.

I really hope this is either ironic or a purposeful addition to this thread.

I know you're still in college but hopefully you've taken a philosophy class or at least a critical thinking class and can discern why this statement is ridiculous.

Excuse me? Sorry, but vegetarian philosophy isn't philosophy. Please don't tell me that you are actually under the impression that there is some kind of philosophical consensus that animals have rights. Descartes is one example. There are others.

I was addressing the claim that animals having no value (saying nothing about rights) other than their use to humans was an objective claim, which it obviously is not.

I'm not particularly interested in arguing about whether or not animals have rights (which is, of course, a separate question than their value) because it's... wait for it... a subjective claim.

And for the record nobody said anything about a philosophical consensus about animal rights. You're fighting a strawman.

"Value" is a human concept and it is subjective to each individual person. This is indisputable. It then stands to reason that "value" can only be applied to animals inasmuch as humans decide it does. If we've decided that we value Mongolian mountain sheep a certain amount, then that's how much value they have. So the value that any item (including an animal) possesses is contingent upon its utility to humans, whether that utility comes in the form of meat, hunting for sport, or cuddling with on the couch.

If the claim is that animals have no intrinsic value is an objective claim because value is not "objectively" defined, then, nice try, but... nah. Your argument is basically "that's just, like, my opinion, man."

By the same logic the claim "abortion is good" is an obJeCtIvE fAcT because "goodness" varies on an individual basis.

If your argument is that only humans can evaluate value and therefore only things that are valuable to humans can be valuable, then your argument is incredibly circular.

Bad analogy. This would be more akin to saying that "goodness" is a human concept and therefore abortion can only be considered to have the quality of "goodness" when viewed through a human lens. I think it's pretty apparent that in a world with no humans, the question of whether or not abortion would be "good" would be pretty moot-- not only because there would be no humans to have abortions, but also because there would be no humans to determine whether or not something has the quality of "goodness." Yes, goodness is subjective, but that's not the argument I'm making here. I'm saying that human value judgments like "good," "bad," "right," "wrong," "valuable," and "non-valuable" literally cannot exist without a human judge to make them.

So, to be clear (yes or no answer would be fantastic) your argument about the objectivity of animals having no "value" except their value to humans depends critically on the fact that only humans are able to discern value?