583 karma · joined May 25, 2021
The Supreme Court is superficially, by nomenclature, an Americanism. But I am yet to see any convincing argument that its jurisprudence has meaningfully been Americanised. It was in the Appellate Committee, not the Supreme Court, that in R (Jackson) v Attorney General Lord Steyn, Lady Hale and Lord Hope in obiter expressed some doubt as to the Diceyan notion of parliamentary sovereignty. The independence of the Appellate Committee was not new. It was, perhaps, rather casually treated (‘Prologue’, Stevens, The independence of the judiciary) and under-theorised. But no non-law Lord has tried to vote since the 1880s. Reference to judicial independence is hardly a novelty.
Have British jurisprudence and constitutional discourse been Americanised in substance? Perhaps, but you make no, and hardly even advert to, such an argument.
I don't think that generalising from one example is a good basis for public policy.
> cruel treatment of murderers and violent criminals
The whole point of Bukele’s approach is that it does away with due process to lock up actual criminals faster; but it is hard to see how that wouldn’t also involve locking up more innocent people than would be locked up otherwise. It’s very easy to make any policy look good by focusing on its least sympathetic victims, but that doesn’t really address the tradeoffs in question.
It’s plausible that very little should be asked of the bottom half, who contribute under ten per cent of emissions if we follow Oxfam’s methodology.⁰ That would exclude nearly everybody in the West, though. And I take it that people on HN do not mean the global middle class when they say ‘middle class’.
0: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
0: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-...
Who exactly has captured The Guardian, The Times, the Daily Mail, the Financial Times, the London Review of Books, and the BBC all at the same time?
> a non-representative electoral system
that can symmetrically benefit either side.
> feudal traditions of greed and contempt for the lower classes…extended to doctors and lawyers
You can just look these things up: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-.... Doctors and lawyers are still overrepresented. The class background of the new sort of Tory (Williamson, Dorries, Jenkyns) is hardly more aristocratic than the members of the professions that preceded them, even if some receive honours.
> The UK has literally become one of those third-world countries where oligarchs buy yachts and fast cars while the population starves.
This describes pretty much any moderately wealthy country in which hunger still exists. The situation might well be worse in the UK but to show that would require use of such difficult techniques as counting and research, rather than hackneyed repetition of old stereotypes.
> it’s the _royal_ post office
No it’s not. Perhaps you have confused the Post Office with Royal Mail.
> The royals don't keep going because their subjects think they're fallible.
The hysteria about Diana suggests otherwise.
This is also quite irrelevant. Attitudes to arms-length public bodies are not in fact parasitic on attitudes to the royal family.
On this logic, HM Treasury would be regarded as infallible. It isn’t. Britain has fiscal debates like everywhere else.
I do not think that pointing out the limited applicability of your point is remotely disingenuous. There is no guarantee that arguments you would give about other fields of philosophy would be convincing. That is not due to undesirable nitpicking but a general feature of argument.
I fail to see why asking for evidence is the same as denial that there is any.
> while emoting obfuscating and cobbling the terms of "moderator", "editor", "contributor" together and confuse the input mechanism of Wikipedianship even further
I’m not sure how I ‘emot[ed]’ anything. There are no Wikipedia ‘moderators’, and I, in good faith, considered the two plausible candidate meanings. I do not see how else one is meant to respond to claims about strictly inextant groups. You yourself now refer to admins, which were one possible group I specified. It is more obfuscatory to use an ambiguous and strictly non-referring term than to specify plausible reinterpretations (admins, editors). It is exceedingly odd to accuse someone who points out a distinction of ‘cobbling[sic]’ what is so distinguished together.
> against editors
This is very confusing. You began by complaining that admins are ‘the worst’. Now you are complaining about editors. Is your complaint that admins unfairly decided on consensus following discussion by editors? If so, it seems that the admins are at fault there.
I’ve lost arguments on Wiki before, and I think the people who disagreed were silly. But that doesn’t indicate much about editors in general, or indeed Wiki procedures. What would be generally damning is if the cases you have in mind were to show that the admins are systematically and unfairly predisposed one way or another.
2. Why would unfairness on one specific political topic impugn the judgement of Wikipedia editors generally?
3. Who are these ‘moderators’? Do you mean editors or admins? If you mean the former, any general judgement is pretty hard to justify; if you mean the latter, admins don’t intervene often enough for their misjudgements to cause a problem for the whole website. I’ve substantially edited at least a dozen relatively important articles (which is not that much by Wikipedia standards admittedly) and have never had to interact with an admin on matters of content.
Beliefs of course vary in the level of justification (a) that can be supplied (b) that actually is present.
There is a very substantial literature in philosophy of mind on consciousness, and many within the field are up to date on modern cogsci and psychology. Indeed, cogsci and philosophy quite fruitfully interact—as far as I can tell, with similar closeness to that of semantic theorists in linguistics and in philosophy. There are also philosophers of physics who are perfectly up to date with modern physics and quantum theory. I have not met any philosophers who were clearly up to date both with physics and psychology to the same level, but I expect some philosophers of physics have gone into philosophy of mind. Considerations at the level of your comment therefore point to taking philosophical work on consciousness seriously, which is not to say that the plurality view, so far as there is one, is correct.
The IEP’s entry on metaphilosophy does not explicitly compare or contrast analytic and continental philosophy, but is a start: https://iep.utm.edu/con-meta/.
> where exactly logical positivism fits into that
Logical positivism is fairly straightforwardly in the analytic tradition.
> accessible to the lay person
Williamson’s more technical work (e.g., /Vagueness/) is not terribly accessible, but this book review is fairly accessible, in the same way as, e.g., a moderately well-read philosopher can read lengthy book reviews in history journals.