I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to "socialism"? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say "well that wasn't true x". And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I'm a bit of a hypocrite here. I've been mostly telling people I'm a "social democrat" or that I support "capitalism with heavy regulations". But even those words can get picked apart and don't really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.
Gray
Honestly, I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to "socialism"? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say "well that wasn't true x". And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I'm a bit of a hypocrite here. I've been mostly telling people I'm a "social democrat" or that I support "capitalism with heavy regulations". But even those words can get picked apart and don't really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.
It's a mixed bag. Having moved to Canada, even modern constitutions can be a shitshow. For example, Canada's constitution allows premiers (the Canadian provincial version of state governors) to freeze certain rights from Canada's version of the Bill of Rights (the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) on a whim until the next election. Ontario's premier, Doug Ford, recently tried to use this technicality to freeze the right to protest to stop a school workers' strike.
The reason this ability exists is because when Canada first became an independent nation and created its constitution (in the 1980's), the provinces would only sign onto it if these kinds of exemptions to their Charter of Rights and Freedoms were included. Looking at it from that perspective, the strength of the Bill of Rights actually looks pretty impressive by comparison.
The other factor I think is worth considering is that when it comes to the legitimacy of constitutions and governments, time is everything. When you reach around the age of a century old, the mere fact that your country had made it that long with that constitution starts to lend legitimacy and stability to it. Which is to say that if we had a brand spanking new constitution, everybody would be questioning it. Worst case scenario you get civil wars. Slightly better, but still bad scenario is a lot of disillusioned people that refuse to abide by the new document. America's constitution is old enough that it gets a lot of respect from even the most fierce of rivals. That's pretty invaluable, especially in times of political turmoil.
I believe that Trump would have had an easier time trampling over a newer constitution, regardless of how well thought out the document was. Having a constitution steeped in a national mythology and at the center of so many norms and traditions protects us from even some of the worst stress tests. The greater challenge isn't a crazy stress test like Trump, but the gradual decay of those norms. Which is to say that I really believe our norms have been protecting us even still, after so many things have been thrown out the window lately. Creating a new baby constitution in the midst of this messy era of politics would be one of the worst moves we could make.
Worth mentioning that wealth and class are technically two different things that happen to usually coincide. In the US the connection is nearly 1:1, but in some places like the UK there is quite a history of high class people struggling with wealth and marrying wealthy people in order to combine their wealth/class. I mention this specifically because "caste" is really just another form of class. It's a form of class tied more to duty/work and less directly to wealth.
Growing up in Wisconsin, drunk driving was a serious issue. Especially on New Years and the Fourth of July. The joke was that every little town throughout Wisconsin always had a church and a bar. There were so many alcoholics that would spend every day at those bars. It's a tradition that probably goes back to the idea of public houses and having bars be a central location where your community gathers. Many people take the drinking part of that too far though and so the anti-drunk driving PSAs were necessary.
I know my brain is like at least 70% memes, but nooo, it's gotta be the horrors in sleep paralysis. Always gotta be the horrors with those damned things. How much funnier would it be to wake up to like a confused Travolta or a doge in your living room.
Aren't human brains fun? So kind of our brains to show us everything terrifying that it can cook up and place into our lived reality just to fuck with us.
I mean - boiling is boiling, right? Do you ever really need to measure whether your water is boiling in daily life? I would concede that it's useful to know more easily when water will freeze when it comes to the weather. It's really the higher end of the Celsius scale that I'm critical of. Fahrenheit could share Celsius's 0 and my criticism would be more toothless. Though Fahrenheit's logic around 0 is that anything below 0 weather-wise is exceedingly rare and momentous in northern climates. I think that makes sense as an argument. Negatives in Celsius are common (at least in North America), but a negative in Fahrenheit is mouth gaping dreadful levels of cold. That's at least as intuitive to me as having 0 be freezing. Since 0 implies the bottom of the temperature scale.
People round to the nearest degree in the US. But that's kind of my point. It's more awkward to throw in fractional temperatures and the fact that you do shows that Celsius isn't properly expanded enough. In Canada people in my anecdotal experience actually haven't been rounding to the nearest half degree, just the nearest degree thereby making the scale feel less granular.
Not to knock - everyone invariably likes what they're used to better. I usually get a lot of pushback from people for this opinion. But that's my point - I concede that even with my familiarity in miles and pounds that kilometres and kilograms are better systems of measurement. The wonder of the metric system is the simple ratios in multiples of 10. But temperature is a realm where that advantage doesn't exist. And on an objective level, I think Fahrenheit has a better argument for function.
Having lived in places that used both systems, I have to say - I'm objectively on board with distance and weights in metric, but I've been less on board with temperature. The Celcius scale is good for science, but less useful for human measurement than Fahrenheit is. Fahrenheit zooms in closer to the human experience of temperatures (around 0F/-17C to 100F/37C) and so allows for slightly more variation when describing temperature in sets of 10 (that range of 100 digits in Fahrenheit is only 54 digits in Celsius, so it makes Celsius feel roughly half as detailed when talking about it). Anything below 0 in Fahrenheit is unbelievably cold. Anything above 100 is unbelievably hot. Celcius centers on freezing/boiling, which I get, but that's not terribly useful for daily human purposes; namely weather. The temps from around 40 to 100 in Celsius aren't useful to humans. It's all just "really fucking hot". So I give a big thumbs up to everything metric except for Celcius.
Canada did a sudden change and adjusted pretty well. Moved here recently and they're pretty consistently metric, though I see some use of Fahrenheit every so often, though I think that's by virtue of being close to the US.
Yeah. Like saying you believe that companies beyond a certain size should be legally required to seek a vote from their employees before implementing certain types of changes is a real policy to argue about. Call it democratizing business or whatever you want. And then that's an actual concrete issue we can argue about. Or if you believe in the government buying out businesses beyond a certain size, that's a specific conversation we can have and we can discuss the hypothetical implementation of that. Call it business seizure or whatever. Just saying "I believe in socialism" doesn't dig enough into the details of how you perceive socialism or how you would implement it. And frankly, I think it hurts the socialists or communists or whoever is trying to persuade the current culture away from what we have more than anybody else. Ideas grow when you make real, concrete proposals. These exceedingly large scale labels usually end up killing a conversation rather than feeding it. Someone gets mad at a label and then everything shuts down on that sticking point.