If you deploy your most defensible arguments in service of your least defensible intentions, you're in war mode. If you haven't declared war, you're arguing in bad faith. If you don't realize you're arguing in bad faith, you're some mix of stupid, ignorant, and in denial
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A vote is a chain of linked positions. Your vote is only as good as the weakest link it supports. You're always voting for the worst thing that could happen if your side wins, not the average thing or the best thing.
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Why is this? The 2 questions to ask about an action like voting are on the face of it symmetric. A) "What's the best thing that could happen?" B) "What's the worst thing that could happen?" Isn't it just optimism to vote based on the first question rather than the second?
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NO because there is a hidden asymmetry (quite apart from the asymmetry caused by best cases being generally lower probability than worst cases). Your idea of the best thing probably happens to YOU. Your idea of the worst thing probably happens to SOMEBODY ELSE.
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The population directly affected by usually a tiny minority who, if they vote at all, can barely even act as a swing vote. This means if you vote for the "best thing" you are playing lottery for yourself, and externalizing potential losses.
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More likely, they are entirely disenfranchised people like children, immigrants, people who might be bombed into refugeedom by your air force and then turned away from your borders by secret police who look like you etc.
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Seriously, compare the worst problems and best prospects in your life from anything a politician could do, to those of the most vulnerable to the consequences of your decisions (which remember, are very, very macro: how to use pools of taxpayer money)
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Much of this applies to everybody in the US. If you genuinely weighed Hillary v. Trump this way and concluded (say) that an unchecked militarist neocon agenda that might be pursued by H was the greatest risk and that Trump was all harmless fascism-theater talk, I respect that.
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One reason I am so openly partisan these days is that I don't think Trump supporters actually process in this "least worst" way. Their profile (people who never left hometown, live in homogeneous neighborhoods, have contempt for college) does not inspire confidence.
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To realistically assess "the worst that could happen to the most vulnerable people who could be affected by your decision" you have to have curiosity about the world beyond your borders. Because your tax dollars can buy airplanes that can bomb any point on the planet.
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The great risk of parochialism in globally consequential decision processes is the "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" effect. Great mindset for purely local decisions with no spillover effects. Terrible when you are structurally complicit in global ones.
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There aren't many ways to counterprogram parochialism in your thinking. It's not a question of intelligence, but input. The 3 known ways are education, travel, and seeking out interactions with people very unlike yourself. All three are driven by curiosity/openness to experience
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Guess what kind of people resist all 3 impulses? Guess how they act politically? In my processing, the greatest worst-case risk is simply having parochial people, contemptuous of the entire world beyond their horizons, making globally decisions consequential decisions.
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End of conversation
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