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Democracy vs fascism is the discussion I hope you can win on merits. In fact I wouldn't mind honest debates on this topic at schools: it can serve to vaccinate

• jakelazaroff 6y ago
  Let’s actually switch examples to the Civil Rights Movement. That shows up on the curriculum in kindergarten. Would you have five year olds debating the merits of segregation? Consider that people were having debates about whether things like democracy and slavery and caste systems were good for centuries before people got on board. And plenty of people still aren’t! What should the teacher do if the kids on Debate Team Jim Crow actually win the debate? Step in and say “actually, equality is better, let me show you why”? Or do we now have a bunch of kids who go through life thinking that we actually should make Black people drinking from different water fountains? I also suspect that plenty of teachers themselves are not quite as bought in on racial equality as we’d hope. Because problem is that segregation, fascism, etc aren’t “bad” per se. We don’t reject them because there’s some inherent logical fallacy — we do it because they’re morally wrong. It took us hundreds of years to get here, and if we’re going to get further it will be because we drew a line in the sand and said “hey, treating people in this particular way is just better than doing it this other way”.
  • ptero 6y ago
    I did not follow your reasoning about 5 years old debating the merits of segregation, can you elaborate? Many topics are introduced at young age, and can take many years until they become a part of the person's worldview that they person can meaningfully defend. But it better reach that state for key topics before the person is out of school. > segregation, fascism, etc aren’t “bad” per se. We don’t reject them because there’s some inherent logical fallacy — we do it because they’re morally wrong. Ouch! Fascism and segregation are morally wrong, but just as important they produce systems and societies that exhibit horrible features and, time and again, crumble and fail. Morality is pliable -- many things considered good two generations ago can now seen as morally wrong and vice versa. When your grandkids ask "grandpa, why did you break/prohibit/deplatform/cancel X?" you may want something better to stand on than "because we had that power and we could". Because that is how your argument reads to me.
    • jakelazaroff 6y ago
      > I did not follow your reasoning about 5 years old debating the merits of segregation, can you elaborate? Sure. We teach five year olds about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement because it’s an important part of our history. Children are going to have questions about why things happened, and what the “right” side of it was. What are we going to tell them? At that age, they’ll basically believe whatever we say. So we have to either decide that segregation will be the “fringe” view, or that kids will grow up thinking that it’s acceptable. > Fascism and segregation are morally wrong, but just as important they produce systems and societies that exhibit horrible features and, time and again, crumble and fail. Who’s to say what features in a system are horrible? If we’re truly neutral here, should we not implement those features too so as not to ostracize people who think they’re good? :) My point is that for literally every “horrible” feature, there are people who want it in earnest — and they often want it because it benefits them, not because they haven’t been won over by the merits of the alternative. Like, how are you gonna convince the dude wearing the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt? It’s not like he’s never been exposed to the argument that genocide is wrong. At some point we just have to draw the line and say “this is bad” rather than wringing our hands about how we can really decide not to listen to people advocating segregation or fascism or genocide or whatever.
      • ptero 6y ago
        > We teach five year olds about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement because it’s an important part of our history. Children are going to have questions about why things happened, and what the “right” side of it was. What are we going to tell them? I hope you have a good answer. And if they question it, because it is natural for kids to question the world around them, you have a great chance to explain and reinforce that message with arguments. But if instead we shut down the questioner that chance will be lost, and they will likely revisit it later as they grow up, not inclined to take your priors anymore. And yes, a few will always stay unconvinced. That is the price of freedom. But the country where the majority holds their opinions because they were allowed to think them through, consider alternatives and were not demonized for disagreement is much more resistant to sellers of next Auschwitz than the country where the majority parrots what a talking head on TV/Twitter/Facebook tells them. > Like, how are you gonna convince the dude wearing the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt? A dude or a gal wearing the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt is, as I said, the price you pay for freedom. In a society where the majority would like to live, the predominant reaction on the street would be "Yuck". In a society that is told what is right it is much easier for the ruling party to bring the next extermination camp to a site next to you.
• salawat 6y ago
  A democracy can be even more fanatically authoritarian than a fascist state assuming a relatively benevolent leadership for the fascist state, and a ramrod militaristic and homogenized culture amongst the population of the democracy. That is one of the absolutely insane things I just cannot wrap my mind around with people these days. No form of government is inherently "Good" or "bereft of evil". Saying as much is like saying a token ring network is inferior to a mesh network when the use case of said token ring network may not have anything to gain from the properties of a mesh network between all the nodes. It all depends on the people involved. Governments are much like computing systems in that Garbage In, Garbage Out applies. A constitutional republic was deemed at the time of the founding to strike the best balance of all systems of governance at the time. That's it. It scaled, it resisted demagoguery, and most importantly, it virtually guaranteed that the pace of legislation and change was slow at the time. No man can do much damage in 4 years. Fast forward to now, and you have D.C. pulling strings and reacting on weekly timescales. The status quo can change on the timescale of hours, not even days. Issues increasingly get pushed to be resolved at the National level instead of being delegated up only to the locality or States effected, which contributes to increased inter-state animosity. The key optimization that the Founders were going for is something that let everywhere "do as thou wilt" with a mechanism for collective action organized from the bottom up. It was certainly not the intent to drive the entire country at once from the top-down except in regards to matters of National Defence and International Diplomacy, and resolution of interstate matters. The role of the Federal Government has greatly expanded over the years, now including land management/conservation, operating regulatory edifi, law enforcement, etc... The Founders understood a government was only as inherently good as the people running it, and admitted from the start it would only be fit for a nation of well-educated citizens with a vested interest in maintaining their own liberties. No formal guarantee was given that somehow the system would work sevoid of everyone putting their best foot forward, which in part means not getting what you want all the time, and actually accepting that just because you could do something, it doesn't mean it should be done forever, or even permanantly.