Ask Vosem Anything

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

What is the post-Soviet dream?

[Deep Dixieland Senator, Muad'dib (OSR MSR)]

Who is your favorite non American politician?

[MarkD]

~~~~

FlyingMongoose and MarkD -- I'll get to your questions, but both of them seem like things where I'll want to cite particular sources, so I'll put a bit more effort into those. (Political Lefty's question overlapped with MarkD's a bit, but that's one where he's just asking for an opinion so I felt more comfortable shooting blind off the top of my head for a bit).

It's been over two months, and I believe you forgot about the question I asked you here. Do you have the opportunity now to get around to addressing my question?

[All Along The Watchtower]

What's your greatest fear at this moment?

[Continential]

What do you like and dislike about being a software engineer?

[Torie]

As a former Pub, and quite a loyal and informed one I think back when, with a self perceived well developed and compassionate mind, with familiarity with the law, just why are you still a Pub, and more "right wing" under the hood than on it, as you describe it, while I abandoned the party without I think changing my fundamental beliefs much. Assuming you are somewhat familiar with my rantings, just why and how do you think we are wired differently. 

By the way, other than the Cleveland Heart Clinic literally saved my life, if perhaps only for a bit, but now for almost 3 years, I love Cleveland. I think you are fortunate to live there. It is one of the most underrated cities in America, and by far superior to what else Ohio has to offer.

[TML]

Do you think our government would be better functioning with proportional representation instead of first-past-the-post?

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Who do you think will run for Governor of Illinois on the GOP side in 2026, and do you think Pritzker will run for a third term?

[Vosem]

Those of you who are asking more complicated questions, that I want to give an essay-length answer to -- I'm still going to do that at some point. This post is for the shorter questions.

~~

What's the best hamburger in all of Ohio? 

Well, before COVID the best hamburger in Ohio could be found at Brazenhead in Grandview, Columbus. Unfortunately COVID sent them out of business, so that's not an answer I can give. The best burger I've had in Cleveland was at Heck's in Ohio City, and the best one in Columbus at Thurman's Cafe (both pretty basic answers, but I guess that's OK). Not sure which one I'd be comfortable calling "best in Ohio", but I will say Thurman's feels pretty unique for a burger joint. (It's well-known at this point though and you're best either making reservations or waiting for a while, and the best hamburger place in Ohio, or anywhere else, is going to be underground enough that 'needing to make reservations' will definitely be out of the question).

(the answer is Jolly's in Tiffin)

I've never even been to Tiffin, but my current closest work friend did a BA and an MBA there, so I'll have to ask her about this.

Have you read much Nabokov? Your post-Soviet background and strongly liberal-capitalist views remind me of him, to the point that I sometimes picture you as a younger version of him.

Not really, and basically nothing in Russian. I've looked at a copy of his translation to English of Eugene Onegin; the introduction he writes explaining the work's importance to an English-language audience, and the concept of an Onegin stanza, is quite good, but the actual translation is (famously) an intellectual exercise in how difficult it is to translate anything exactly, with Nabokov preferring word-for-word translations and copious footnotes explaining anywhere a Russian connotation -- or even just association -- might be different from an English one. I've started a copy of Pnin that my family owned, perhaps at an age when I was too young to appreciate it (maybe circa 9th grade?), but I abandoned it maybe a quarter of the way through after finding the work's atmosphere miserable. My understanding is that this was intentional.

I had a (female) friend in high school who was obsessed with Lolita, and read it multiple times, and so it's always been on my to-read list; it's maybe the most prominent work in the English language written by an author of Russian origin and seems amazingly famous for a book about such a taboo subject. But it's not a topic I feel much interest in reading about, and having opened Pnin I feel like I'm likely to encounter a similar vibe in Lolita.

I've never been super-familiar with Nabokov's political views; I know that he was a White Russian emigre and that growing up in Russia he was nevertheless raised with English as a native language (!), which has always struck me as a fascinating anecdote. I'm always up for taking reading recommendations, but I will say that the general impression I have of Nabokov is not that of an author I would enjoy.

What is the post-Soviet dream?

Да мы с вами ещё так будем жить, что наши дети и внуки нам завидовать будут.

What's your greatest fear at this moment?

An interesting one. I think my greatest fear at the moment is a fear of plateauing; 2022 was an incredibly productive year for me (I finished law school, learned to code well enough for that to pay me better than becoming an attorney, and got into somewhat better shape; at this point every year since 2019 has seen me in noticeably better shape after 12 months than at the start), and it bothers me that my goals for 2023 seem much more modest (there are some specific subtopics in computer science I want to learn, but beyond that there isn't much that's specific). I'm far enough off the beaten path that it feels to me like if I'm not moving and making progress, then I might be permanently stuck where I am. Also, I've pretty much had the same friend group in Cleveland since mid-2018 or so, and while I like them I feel a little bit novelty-starved.

Once I start looking for a new job (probably early 2024, because it's supposed to look bad to have an entry on your resume of under 'rounds to 2 years'), it'll probably be somewhere other than Cleveland (actually most likely NYC, in spite of the expense), because at that point I'll desperately need a change of pace.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Are W*sterners in ushankas engaging in cultural appropriation?

[Vosem]

Are W*sterners in ushankas engaging in cultural appropriation?

Only if they're wearing them on their heads. Any other part of the body is fine.

As a former Pub, and quite a loyal and informed one I think back when, with a self perceived well developed and compassionate mind, with familiarity with the law, just why are you still a Pub, and more "right wing" under the hood than on it, as you describe it, while I abandoned the party without I think changing my fundamental beliefs much. Assuming you are somewhat familiar with my rantings, just why and how do you think we are wired differently. 

By the way, other than the Cleveland Heart Clinic literally saved my life, if perhaps only for a bit, but now for almost 3 years, I love Cleveland. I think you are fortunate to live there. It is one of the most underrated cities in America, and by far superior to what else Ohio has to offer.

Thank you for the compliments regarding Cleveland -- although (as mentioned earlier) I think I will probably leave it is a city I have come to identify with a lot. When I was at Washington University I met a linguistics student who was able to identify me as being from the west side of Cleveland purely based on my accent, which I found deeply impressive since English is not even my native language and I mostly learned to speak it in Illinois and New York. At this point I'm Cleveland enough to be heard.

Your first question is a little more difficult to answer. We come from different generations and different cultures (you have probably been reading my posts long enough to know this, but I am a native Russian speaker born shortly after my parents got off the plane), and we have different sexualities and different tastes (my understanding is that you built a career as an attorney, whereas I considered this very seriously but ultimately recoiled from it). We might just be different people.

I think I am more committed to the project of creating a better country by limiting the government's activity, possibly because I am wired more ideologically (my not-that-long-ago ancestors were very committed Bolsheviks), possibly just as a reaction to being descended from immigrants from eastern Europe, possibly because my family to some extent came to the United States to assimilate into the American right. I think you are somebody with much more respect for the system as it actually exists and a small-c conservative mindset, and particularly after Trump became prominent people like this have become much more welcome in the Democratic party. I think most of our positions on the actual concrete issues of the day are pretty similar, but they come from different worldviews 'under the hood' and so permit us to have different partisan alignments.

What do you like and dislike about being a software engineer?

I like that professional culture is informal, that it is possible to learn new skills on your own time, that you are (generally) judged based on what you know and your results rather than on office politics, and that after you have not-that-much experience it is possible to expect a great level of freedom to work remotely. I like that the profession is very mobile, so that I can essentially live anywhere and still do what I do, and becoming more so; the team of people I work with is mostly remote, and they are based all over the United States.

The answer for disliking might come off as a bit hackneyed, but I sort of dislike how un-diverse it is; although my view is that we should not force workplaces or careers to be diverse, and that this isn't really a strength, it can nevertheless be a bit stultifying that software engineering in the First World often comes across as a monoculture, and you rarely meet people who are substantially very different. What I mostly mean here is that I dislike that it is overwhelmingly male, though there are certain other hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it similarities that software engineers in the United States tend to have. ('Nerdy' is insufficiently specific for what I am going for; at this point in 2022 basically any information-work profession will be nerdy to some degree.)  I don't think this is something we should change through government policy, or anything, but it can be sort of frustrating.

Who do you think will run for Governor of Illinois on the GOP side in 2026, and do you think Pritzker will run for a third term?

I think Pritzker will probably run for a third term; he wants to be President and it is unlikely he will get to run in 2024. He won't be seriously challenged in a Republican midterm; in a Democratic midterm he may be, but if he is this won't be apparent until summer 2026 or so, much as it wasn't apparent Quinn would get a serious challenge until summer 2014. I think Illinois has fairly serious problems in the long-run -- Chicago is not growing and the state is probably likelier than any other in the US to see a serious failure to meet pension obligations -- but I doubt those will be visible as soon as 2026.

Do you think our government would be better functioning with proportional representation instead of first-past-the-post?

I like mixed-member proportionality, where some seats are allocated proportionally but others continue to be first-past-the-post. This has had some problems in New Zealand, since you've seen a business establishment seize control of major-party lists, but it seems like the best system that exists.

More controversially -- I don't think I've ever persuaded anyone of this, IRL or on the Internet -- I like a voting system of my own invention (although possibly someone else has described it before me), reverse instant-runoff voting, where instead of eliminating the person with the fewest first-choice votes, you eliminate the candidate with the most last-choice votes, and so on until only one candidate is left standing. (This system has a flaw in that it would tend to reward obscurity, so I think it could only work if paired with very strict ballot-access laws, or alternatively if there were runoffs between the regular instant-runoff winner and the 'reverse instant-runoff winner' -- a choice between the person the community likes most and the one it dislikes least. I'd support maybe half of the U.S. House being elected using this system, and half using proportional lists.

I think Top Two primaries are a step in the right direction, and an example of something the Left Coast does right.

~~~~

I will still get to the remaining questions at some point, yes I know some of them have been pending for months

[All Along The Watchtower]

What political party would you vote for in Israel, and is your answer different from what it would have been in the past?

[Vosem]

What political party would you vote for in Israel, and is your answer different from what it would have been in the past?

Probably Beiteinu nowadays; they seem to strike a good balance of being firm on the terrorism question, secularist, broadly capitalist insofar as that is a thing in Israel, and appealing to speakers of minority languages (since I am post-Soviet myself there is some cultural overlap explaining why I like them). I had soured on them a bit in the mid-2010s, and recall that I supported Kulanu in 2015 since Kachlon was willing to throw bones to a deregulationist agenda, but in turning against Bibi in the post-2019 climate they've shown an appealing resolution in supporting the general maintenance of Israeli democracy.

This question is really hard to answer before the 1990s, because it would've depended on from which country and when I would've arrived in Israel, and anything other than 'FSU in the 1990s' would make me a very different person. Israel also has political divides on which it is hard to map the opinions I care about most; as this forum has occasionally discussed, Likud is pretty unique in being a mainstream center-right party which is not anti-socialist. When I read about the close elections in 1977 or 1981, I'm fascinated substantially because it's tough for me to tell which side is more appealing. (If I had to guess, probably one of the center-right General Zionist or Liberal parties in the 1950s/1960s, and then eventually Likud out of a general frustration with the establishment by the 1970s. But it is hard to say).

Who is your favorite non American politician?

This is an impossibly broad question! I think the major political party closest to my views is probably ACT in New Zealand, but David Seymour is simply too minor of a figure to be the answer here, and Roger Douglas too uninspired.

The politician I quote most frequently -- even though I don't really like his politics -- is Viktor Chernomyrdin, who developed a number of very useful Russian-language aphorisms that don't translate that well into English. (The American equivalent that I like quoting is Yogi Berra, who had a similar flavor to the way he talked).

Anyway, my final answer is probably colored by just having answered an Israeli question above, but I'm going to say Ayelet Shaked, because she's hot.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

You've mentioned before in my mosh pit threads that you've been in one before...for which bands? And what's the last band you saw?

[Kamala's side hoe]

That said, it’s hard to take him seriously when he subscribes to what is essentially the right-wing version of Marxism; that is, a quasi-religious, millenarian belief that his ideology will inevitably prevail, and desperately shoehorning everything into that framework.

(This thread is maybe not the ideal place for this discussion but) to be clear I am not that confident that my ideology will prevail. I think that free and open democracies do tend towards something very much like it over time, which I know is a really unusual belief here, but there are reasons to think that our societies aren't going to remain free and open democracies. Especially the case if you subscribe to climate-change or AI catastrophism, both of which strike me as non-ridiculous.

How do you think government responses along “climate change catastrophism” lines will steer Western liberal democracies away from being free and open? I understand why you’re ideologically opposed to policies motivated from a green-left paradigm, but I’m interested in the details and mechanisms.  

[No War, but the War on Christmas]

If you could pick a favorite 'Progressive Democrat' who would it be if any?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Anyway, my final answer is probably colored by just having answered an Israeli question above, but I'm going to say Ayelet Shaked, because she's hot.

Taste in women continues to be one of the only things you and I genuinely have in common.

That's not a question, so how about this one: favorite Russian/broader Eastern European foods?

[Vosem]

MarkD, Ferguson: I will respond to you guys. Since I've now been putting this off for, like, most of a year, I'll sketch out the responses I intend: for MarkD I will try to cite primary sources from the 18th century indicating that the distinction between substantive and procedural rights did not exist then; much like some of the other amendments, it was not initially incorporated, and so laws from the 18th-19th centuries at the state level which violated the Fourth Amendment's substantive rights would then have been permitted. (But I would like to sketch this out in more detail). Ferguson: I intend to provide polling data showing that support for various welfare programs has generally declined since the mid-2000s, and that comparing referendums to polling data suggests that the support that exists is severely underestimated. I will then provide some general theoretic points about why this is what we should expect over the very long run.

You've mentioned before in my mosh pit threads that you've been in one before...for which bands? And what's the last band you saw?

I've been in a mosh pit exactly once, for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in Chicago last October.

I don't see live music that often. I was offered free tickets to Bonnaroo this summer, which was tempting, but the same weekend I had already committed to an online-tech-libertarian thing, so I had to pass. (You can freely let this color your judgment of me).

If you could pick a favorite 'Progressive Democrat' who would it be if any?

Well, I'm not sure I'm understanding the question correctly, but I guess Desmond O'Malley, the founder of the party.

Anyway, my final answer is probably colored by just having answered an Israeli question above, but I'm going to say Ayelet Shaked, because she's hot.

Taste in women continues to be one of the only things you and I genuinely have in common.

That's not a question, so how about this one: favorite Russian/broader Eastern European foods?

It would be easier to answer least favorite: I hate anything that has mayonnaise in it, which is a much larger category of Russian than American foods. That said, I grew up eating beet borscht and while I hated it then it reminds me of childhood now. Past that would have to be various sweets, particularly zefir marshmallows or any baked goods with poppy-seed filling.

I don't know if Georgian food counts as eastern European, but (...assuming a sufficiently non-sedentary day), I might be able to eat khachapuri and kharcho every day until I die. Khinkali are also the best variant of pan-Asian dumplings I've ever tried. (My paternal grandfather was basically a weeb but for Georgian culture, so this is kind of passed on.)

That said, it’s hard to take him seriously when he subscribes to what is essentially the right-wing version of Marxism; that is, a quasi-religious, millenarian belief that his ideology will inevitably prevail, and desperately shoehorning everything into that framework.

(This thread is maybe not the ideal place for this discussion but) to be clear I am not that confident that my ideology will prevail. I think that free and open democracies do tend towards something very much like it over time, which I know is a really unusual belief here, but there are reasons to think that our societies aren't going to remain free and open democracies. Especially the case if you subscribe to climate-change or AI catastrophism, both of which strike me as non-ridiculous.

How do you think government responses along “climate change catastrophism” lines will steer Western liberal democracies away from being free and open? I understand why you’re ideologically opposed to policies motivated from a green-left paradigm, but I’m interested in the details and mechanisms.  

I think if there actually is some sort of terrible catastrophe, like a global war or some kind of radical acceleration of climate change (or a rapid-onset AI apocalypse), that this would tend to strengthen Western authoritarianism, much as COVID did. The general mechanism here is that responding to many modern challenges is very difficult without using authoritarian means (I think the government struggles to respond to technological changes, which causes norms to develop where things are permitted which might otherwise actually be banned if it were more efficient), and in the context of a crisis the government would be motivated to create new organizations or radically restructure existing ones (much as the military was restructured during WW2, or NASA was created during the Space Race), which might be much more effective at implementing authoritarian measures.

(Even more generally, one of the reasons that guns are an important issue is that they are simply very easy to home manufacture with 21st-century technology. Stopping people from 3D printing weapons is going to require a surveillance state, and so inasmuch as 'we need to stop people from accessing guns' is a lodestar of politics in much of Europe, those places will tend to become more authoritarian, and less free and open. Something very similar goes for narcotics; I think we can agree that the consequences of the War on Drugs have been much more authoritarian governments. The more that government goals and policies in the West resemble the War on Drugs in their logic, the more we can expect these societies to act in authoritarian ways. But I expect the US will mostly continue moving away from this, except in the event of some sort of terrible catastrophe).

In general, a big part of the reason that I'm confident my ideology wins over time is the long-term failure of institutions; institutions which are locked in some sort of competition can develop patterns which work, but institutions which are not tend to accumulate rent-seekers over time. Thus, over the long run most "universal" public healthcare systems stop being so universal, as the wealthy or people willing to prioritize specific needs leave first, followed by those less wealthy and those with less specific priorities, and so on and so on (I believe statistics show this for Scandinavia, at least); something similar is happening to public schools in the United States. In the absence of a government response, the institutions to which people flee are private ones. However, in the presence of a catastrophe of some kind, one could imagine public institutions being radically strengthened.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Do you find AOC attractive despite her politics? Who do you think is the most attractive member of Congress?

[LabourJersey]

Boxers or briefs?

[Alcibiades]

Thoughts on Robert Nozick’s political philosophy? (I used the search by user feature, and it seems you have never once mentioned him on this forum, which I must admit is surprising for a poster who evidently spends a lot of time thinking about libertarian ideology — in the view of many, including mine, Nozick is doubtless the preeminent libertarian thinker.)

[Vosem]

Thoughts on Robert Nozick’s political philosophy? (I used the search by user feature, and it seems you have never once mentioned him on this forum, which I must admit is surprising for a poster who evidently spends a lot of time thinking about libertarian ideology — in the view of many, including mine, Nozick is doubtless the preeminent libertarian thinker.)

An interesting question! I spoke to someone about a month ago (this was at a vaguely libertarianism-associated event, and not randomly in public, as sometimes happens to me) who was deeply enthusiastic about seasteading as a practical idea for reforming world governance, and was also very enthusiastic about Nozick's works. I think this alignment gets to why I don't find Nozick particularly interesting (though I am by no means against him).

I read (probably more-so skimmed) Anarchy, State, and Utopia sometime in middle/early high school when I was generally reading a great deal of political philosophy, and it did not strike me as a particularly unique or perceptive work at that time, though it received a large amount of praise. Many of the most-celebrated arguments, like the analogy of taxation to slavery (or the observation that someone like a sports star could become very wealthy through obviously consensual agreements with many individuals), have since been repeated so many times that they are clichés and will persuade no one. Nozick is often seen as refuting Rawls, but so far as I can tell they are simply talking past each other:
- Rawls says that inequality should only be tolerated if it provides some benefit to the most disadvantaged people in society. (My answer here would be that fighting inequality routinely results in horrific consequences for the most disadvantaged people in society; the benefit is freedom from efforts to fight inequality, which always result in some degree of impoverishment in practice.)
- Nozick replies that inequality is the result of voluntary transactions, and that even the most disadvantaged people in society have some interest in freedom, so that the benefit is freedom. This strikes me as sort of true, but not really a refutation; the theory can fit comfortably within Rawls' ideas.

I think more generally that sweeping moral theories are not the most interesting ways of interacting with politics. The political system evolved to have certain capabilities as a result of human history, and was not designed ex nihilo by moral philosophers. Morality should be considered when we think about what kind of society we want to progress towards, and we can think about slippery slopes as a reason not to engage in certain actions (Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen, for an example no one would disagree with), but there is not a literal social contract out there to be interacted with; Rawls and Nozick would be more interesting if they wrote 'lower to the ground', about how the actual political questions of the 1970s should be interacted with. (I know Nozick was one of the founders of the Libertarian Party, but while I have some attachment to that organization it really isn't a practical solution to anything).

It is indisputable that Nozick has influenced me strongly: the 'right to exit' as the most important right is something I have repeated often and which I think originates with him. But I think the people who are most enamored with Nozick are those actively trying to build alternative societies that they would like better for people to exit to, and while I think this idea is very romantic and -- well -- utopian, it doesn't seem like one that has made an enormous amount of progress in recent decades, and I would be surprised if it does in my lifetime. Nozick is an author for those who enjoy moral theories more than policy debates and, well, I post on Atlas Forum.

(I would appreciate more questions from this direction, though, because 'why don't you cite Nozick more often' was actually something I needed to stop and think about, and probably only somebody on Atlas, where there is an enormous archive of my thinking going back a decade, would be able to notice this.)

Do you find AOC attractive despite her politics? Who do you think is the most attractive member of Congress?

Yeah, I think so. Probably the most attractive member is Luna, who is both in somewhat better shape and also seems more strident. (Also, IDK if you've seen my signature, but women with guns are hot.)

Boxers or briefs?

I wear boxers.

There is no such thing as dog-whistling of any kind -- racial or otherwise -- from anyone -- conservative or otherwise.

I'm convinced at this point that he's doing an elaborate bit. I don't think anyone could actually be this stupid.

I can give a lengthy evo-psych answer here if you'd like, but I developed this opinion sometime during or immediately after the 2016 election, when I noticed (what seemed to me like) similarities in the particular ways that American liberals and Eastern European 'populists' (think Orbán/Putin) tended to dismiss the ideas of their opponents: while the phrase 'dog-whistle' is peculiarly American, there is an insistence that their enemies can't actually hold the ideas they claim to, and instead really believe (some much more sinister thing, in the US usually racism). In both cases these ideas seemed easily refutable, since when American conservatives/Eastern European liberals come to power they don't actually institute racism or give up national territories or whatever, but the belief that these are the 'real' beliefs seemed very strong. Looking at historical examples of radicals, it seemed to me that they almost always ran on their real beliefs (eg, Hitler) or, when they did flip-flop, it was in ways that the public approved of (Roosevelt did not campaign on the New Deal in 1932, but I must admit it was popular when enacted).

After a while, I could not think of a single example in any country speaking Russian or English or Spanish where you could understand a politician's platform better by viewing it through their opponent's lenses rather than their own. I admit that belief in dog-whistles is very cross-culturally widespread and I am deeply in a minority here, but I think that this belief emerges because it gives people a reason not to consider arguments against their own side. After all, you will never consider American conservatism if you think everyone who propounds it is lying to you and has a set of things in which they actually believe. (This is exaggerated by rival political factions often considering different things important: in some ways 'who cares' is a more alienating answer than 'I disagree strongly'. I think this explains the 1960s-era coalition between black voters and segregationists in the same party, who at least agreed on what the important issues of the day were, while many 1960s-era Republicans thought the whole thing was a sideshow and the most important issue was fighting communism in Southeast Asia.)

Anyway, I don't believe dog whistles are real. (Incidentally, in my experience while this opinion is uncommon within the Republican Party it is pretty common among people who speak 3+ languages and usually have opportunities to see cultural parallels that others don't see. Although of course people I meet in real life are selected in all sorts of ways.) I will happily change my mind if you can provide an actual one, in any language which I speak or have some experience reading. So far I have thought this for ~6 years or so and no one has been able to do this.

When a Republican politician says something like "people in this suburban town don't want public transit because it will bring in crime from the city", what they're actually saying is "they don't want to see Black people". That's a dog whistle.

I don't believe you would think this if you were familiar with societies that are not racially stratified where people make exactly the same complaints about public transit going to poor and crime-ridden areas. (In the US, too, it actually isn't the case everywhere that high-crime areas are disproportionately black: I don't know that Portland has any majority-black areas but this exact complaint seems very common in their politics.)

I think this is an excellent example of a case where you are prevented from thinking about whether you agree with Republicans on the question as posed ('should public transit go to high-crime areas?') because you have a predetermined script executing about what questions like this actually mean. I think if you were more familiar with cultures that are not the US this script would be likelier to trip itself up.

There is no such thing as dog-whistling of any kind -- racial or otherwise -- from anyone -- conservative or otherwise.

I'm convinced at this point that he's doing an elaborate bit. I don't think anyone could actually be this stupid.

I'm pretty sure his views themselves are dead-serious but his way of expressing them is hammed up for the cheap seats. I find it hilarious and infuriating by turns, which is why I have so much fun arguing with him.

A little bit, but it's more-so the case that I try to phrase things in ways that will avoid the 'well, can't you see...' phase of discussion, where people will present facts and arguments that I have heard a hundred times and insist that I simply have not considered them. There are more interesting discussions to be had if it is crystal clear where the contradictions are, and pretty often (as with Alcibiades, I think) they are either on very concrete factual questions (either you agree that lots of First World nations cut real social spending in the late 20th century and this resulted in general improvements to actual living standards, or you don't), or quite deep moral ones (I think that the consequences of considering inequality to be bad are such that doing so is very immoral, and in a very real sense evil, but I think few here agree with me, and most would find it being put that way very alienating).

I voted FF and stand by that, but I guess one pet peeve I have is that Vosem never explains how eliminating the social safety net will help poor people or why tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes. It's impossible to have a reasoned debate about that if we are only arguing from our own predispositions without any attempt at persuasion.

Sure: the argument is that the state, or any centralized entity, is a very poor manager of resources and very poor at creating innovations, because it is not subject to competition from any other entity, and we should instead want resources decentralized among many very wealthy people who can pursue independent agendas, because they will be likelier to compete in ways that result in real public gain. Most improvements to living standards under industrialism have not come from activism, but have instead come from technological improvements, resulting in cheaper food and more widely available medication. Tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes because the state will have fewer resources to prevent wealthy people from making investments which are much likelier to benefit the poor than state activity. I think human history very strongly bears this out.

Social safety nets are bad because they inevitably grow in size and take resources away from places where they could actually benefit people; public services in Europe have to ration healthcare much more than they do in the US, and the strain of supporting much greater public spending results in a population which is meaningfully less wealthy than it is in the US, with people subsisting on 2/3 of the income. I think this is disastrous and it is a scandal that the British population is not in the streets rioting and tearing the NHS down with their bare hands.

And again, with no disrespect intended, Vosem's political instincts are comically bad and nobody who runs on privatizing Social Security or Medicare will ever be elected president.

GWB already won! His plans to privatize SS were not really any different than contemporary Republican plans, and similar private-investment plans like 401(k)s have become much more common in the interim. I really don't think this is particularly a red line. (I think as public institutions inevitably become less effective over time because of the lack of competition, it will also not be a red line in European countries, though I think the US is so much wealthier that the large-scale shift towards tearing down these institutions will happen in the US first.)

Certainly a campaign along these lines would need to actually emphasize to the people affected that they would have more choices, be better off, and not actually lose anything in benefits, though. This is easy to argue with SS privatization because it would be true. With other kinds of social safety net drawbacks, there would have to be a careful understanding of reliance interests to make sure that people are not much worse off in the short-run. (A failure to do this happened in Russia in the 1990s, and while Russia today is far better off for having gone through that, the period is still widely considered a failure.) I think the experience of welfare reform in the 1990s, and US states which cut SNAP and similar programs in the 2010s to basically no backlash, provide templates for how to handle this, and I think it is easier in more mature democratic societies than less mature ones; people who have lived under authoritarian regimes are used to seeing 'providing social services' as the key task of governance, rather than 'fostering growth', since nobody talks in terms of growth, or 'providing justice', which is seen as a sick joke.

[PSOL]

What are your opinions of the current communist movement here and internationally? What are their strength and weaknesses and what are they doing well or uniquely?

[All Along The Watchtower]

What if Gorbachev had implemented shock therapy? Basically, create a USR (no Socialism anymore)? How do you reckon that timeline would have played out?

[Continential]

What’s it like growing up Jewish in Ohio and how big is the Jewish community in Ohio and what’s it like?