Comment by talkingtab

These are real problems. But they are also loaded questions, if someone asked me these at a party I would view them as looking for confirmation, and not seeking truth. There's nothing wrong with that, but the author's goal is curiosity and truth seeking, and I'm skeptical that most of these questions align with that goal.

Those are good questions for sure and could lead to some interesting discussions, but (and maybe my generally left-leaning bias is showing by saying this) they're questions that are in many ways self-evident. For example, it's hard to argue that health care should only be affordable for the rich and that everyone else should just die in the streets.

There's other issues that are much less clear and, in my experience, more likely to shift from discussions and debates into strife and arguments:

- Should private citizens be allowed to own firearms? Should they be allowed to carry them on the streets?

- What do we do about meth and opiates on our streets? What do we do about the associated property and violent interpersonal crime?

- Should we start building more nuclear power plants to cut down on our greenhouse gas emissions?

And locally:

- The city is expanding to the west. What should this neighbourhood look like?

These, I believe, are squarely in the realm of "politics" and unless you're having the discussion in an ideological bubble are likely to be much hotter-button issues.

> Are common American citizens able to afford and obtain reasonable health care?

"Should common American citizens" ... is a question.

This already implies a country's citizens having access to health care without financial barriers is a good idea already :)

[Note that I'm in the EU, I have access to affordable health care by default and I like it that way. But I don't think everyone in the US thinks like that. Or even understands what it means.]

> The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

I don't personally agree with how quick you are able to write those things off as not being political. Would you mind providing a bit more explanation of how you are able to arrive at such confident No's?

Perhaps you consider political to be an intrinsic quality of a thing rather than a descriptor of how a thing is used/intended? I fall into the latter camp, and thus am very open to consider almost anything and everything political. Much like art.

> The crucial question is what is "politics"? Are personalities politics? No. Are parties? No. Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

What an easy answer when you not part of the disadvantaged demographic. Some problems apply almost exclusively to a single demographic. Not asking the cultural questions is like thinking that segregation was perfectly okay because everyone had access to everything you'd need. Just not in the small space.

Urban problems are not rural problems even when they look like the same problem. Why there is a food desert in Nowhere, SomeState is not going to be anything like the reason there is a good desert in Urbanville, Somestate. So while everyone definitely deserves the ability to acquire food pretending that subgroups don't exist means you can't actually solve their struggle. If you apply a blanket solution it doesn't help everyone.

It is beyond disingenuous to pretend that different kinds of people don't feel the impact of culture and regulation differently and in ways they either can't themselves or can't at all change. To take that stance, shows that one is on the default demographic that is always considered before anyone else.

Literally none of this is politics, its governance. Politics is the human word for the chimplike "who gets to be the boss" games we play. No matter how well your society is running there will always be politics, put 20 people on a tropical island with no problems and 4 weeks later half of em will want to kill the other half - thats politics

Politics is decision making in groups.

Every group of people is a political unit and anything that affects decision making is political. Your office is a political unit, your family is a political unit, etc.

So if a racial issue is affecting the decisions we make then yes it’s political.

> The crucial question is what is "politics"? … Are inflammatory issues about race, sex or gender or political correctness or immigration? No!

When people talk about privilege, this is it - being able to dictate which issues are ‘politics,’ and being able to dismiss my rights as ‘not politics.’

Do I have a right to work? To live? To own property? To marry the one I love? To have sex with the people I’m attracted to? To raise a child with my partner? To choose my own identity and to live my own life?

A white cishet man takes all those rights for granted - why shouldn’t I? Why should my struggle to obtain those same rights be dismissed as ‘inflammatory issues about sex or gender or political correctness’ and therefore ‘not politics?’

Are you married? Would you like to be? Do you ever worry about how you’ll be treated when you go to work, or make a purchase at the store? What’s it like to go grocery shopping, or car shopping, or touring places to live? What’s it like apply to and interview for jobs? Does you boss look like you? How do your parents feel about you? How do your neighbors greet you when they see you? What’s your relationship like with your landlord?

You’re really telling me that none of that is worth ‘politicking’ over?

that attitude is exactly why things are not going well right now - because we are pretending that of we look away, equality and justice will take care of itself.

>A functioning democracy requires that the common people are able to use the law and courts to right wrongs. Are the common people able to use/afford access to the courts when wrongs are committed.

Having recently been completely railroaded and betrayed by the court system I can tell you. No. I literally had all my evidence thrown out with no explanation from the Judge other than "I don't think this is relevant" in regards to several different topics that I had made an organized report on. Meanwhile the corporate defense provided unorganized meaningless piles of documentation that would takes months to go over and it was left as "evidence" I do mean meaningless, several hundred pages were literally blank white pages submitted as evidence. I guess the crappy software they use to do discovery generated lots of white space in between snippits of info.

The court had decided before the trial that by default a person is wrong and a corporation is right.

“What is politics” is entirely contextual.

I start talking about my wife’s work. That’s just personal family stuff, right? Not if there’s someone there who’s a hardcore women-should-stay-home sort.

Or maybe everyone is ok with women having jobs, but my wife’s work has been substantially impacted by the recent DOGE nonsense. Something as simple as “she has to go to the office on Monday” becomes political if there’s a Trump supporter present.

Let’s just talk shit about our cars. Oops, what brand of car you own is now political.

“My parents are going to come visit” sorry, turns out that the ability of foreigners to enter the country without fear of being detained for weeks for no good reason is political.

The problem is the property political class, which includes both parties a-la Gore Vidal, seeks to dismiss, gaslight, and distract from these problems and instead make them pseudo-wedge issues or political footballs. One side is stuck on remaking reality as a shared, fantastical mirage, and the other complains about the delusion with stern words but agrees to it anyhow. Neither is concerned with addressing the core problem: big money buying all 3 branches of govt, and John McCain found that out the hard way that ethics don't win votes because enough Americans' manufactured consent to condone lawlessness, authoritarianism, radical deregulation, and privatization.

Either a Constitutional Convention 2.0 needs to happen to undo the damage like the repeal of the Tillman Act and the disastrous Citizens' United, or Americans needs to voluntarily do away with popularity contests by instead picking public administrators with limited power by sortition from amongst professional societies for a limited term of say 4 years once.

Great post, I agree with all your points regarding what is politics except that a functioning democracy should rely on common people, I think it should rely on the valuable people.

Common man democracy just lowers the decision making process to majority of idiots of the country that are easily manipulated. Worse yet, in its current form, it essentially causes the flip flopping mess because of the lack of long term vision and focus, something the common man doesn't want to deal with.

One man one vote in general makes no sense either. Why should a homeless or fresh immigrant's vote have the same impact as someone that has lived and paid taxes in a country for decades? How about...you get a vote weight equal to the amount of investment/taxes you have made in that country over the course of your life. Provide more for the community, have more to lose, get more say on policy.

Give incentive to the society value providers to remain and society detractors to leave.

Add to this that the current Democracy system is fundamentally flawed, most of those systems are exploitable anyway, it makes zero sense to change things up when a great leader is doing well. Having an arbitrary rule that they must step down because they can only serve for x time makes no sense. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Same goes the other way, where bad leaders can remain in power using war mechanisms.

The core problems today with society is not the left right or whatever, it's that people are lazy, selfish, manipulative, different, it's hard to find a system that works that can make everyone happy.

Are you willing to risk personal death or decrease your value for the greater good of the nation as a leader or citizen? That's the standard that all citizens and especially politicians should be held to. There are examples of this in the past, usually when a revolution happens. One might say it's happening in the US right now.

For certain one solution would be to remove people as much as possible from the equation, remove all incentive to abuse the system. The dictatorship and laws of a country should provide negative motivation for someone to cheat and should reward people providing value to society.

It's not easy, no matter how well a system is designed, people will find a way to cheat it, Bitcoin is a great example of this, not accounting for the banking industry buying the ecosystem and shitcoins diluting the entire system.

AI is not there yet, I don't think it ever could be, it's been trained on existing flawed ideas which have been further gimped in the interest of 'security'. It has no original thought, can't even draw a full glass of wine.

“Hello friend, thanks so much for coming over. I just wanted to start by asking you what do you think are the preconditions for having a functioning democracy”

Politics is simply figuring out who’s on your team. It’s why our current billionaires are so big on immigration and divisive rhetoric. Small groups have used this tactic for thousands of years to rule over larger groups.

In a good society you would know and have a favorable view of our wealthiest (kings in all but name) people. They wouldn’t be afraid and hide their wealth (Bezos, musk, etc are not the top) because there wouldn’t be an immoral wealth gap.

There are a lot of questions that are upstream of yours. Or at least, that illustrate why your questions are aggressively framed in a specific ideological directions and it's possible to frame them in the other direction.

If common American citizens can't afford health care, do other American citizens have an obligation to provide it? There is a word for a system where people are obligated to provide their labor to others. Does that word apply to a system where everyone gets free healthcare?

Do common Americans provide enough value to earn the wages they make now, especially the ones making a legislatively mandated minimum wage? How many fewer can actually earn an arbitrary increased number? Do people deserve things they didn't earn? What's the non-mystical explanation for that, if so?

Why aren't we having children? They can't have a productive life without having a life.

Is the difference between earnings and expenditures growing larger because Americans are unwilling to pay one another? If we are, why is that? (Actually I'll cheat a little on this one and provide a correct answer: the entire increased gap here is explained by housing. So the questions becomes: why aren't Americans willing to let strangers live closer to them? Might there be some risk or self-interest there? Are people obligated to act against their interests? Why, how, and by whom are they obligated?)

Which is better, democracy or a stable and prosperous society? Might they be mutually exclusive? What's holy about the popular vote, especially for morons? Even if we keep democracy, does a functional democracy require some form of IQ tests as a condition of the franchise?

Is the purpose of courts to write wrongs or interpret the law? Does separation of powers require courts to refrain from writing wrongs if the legislature has passed laws that are wrong? If not, does the lack of separation of powers place any limit at all on the courts' ability to right wrongs? How about when the courts are controlled by people whose concept of wrong is different than yours? Doesn't a functioning democracy require the concept of right and wrong to be decided by what are literally called the political branches, the legislative and executive?

Are the news media obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? Are you then obligated to produce content in the interests of the people? What's the difference between you writing in a public forum and a journalist? If there is a difference, should you therefore not enjoy freedom of the press? What if you, say, advocate for the courts to ignore separation of powers to do what is right? What if we the people decide that is not in our interests? How will you be punished for this transgression?

In actuality, I would probably give the same answers to many of these questions that you would. But the point is that there is no "just asking questions, man". Questions have premises and assumptions. If you, like me, don't like the ones in this question set, don't assume people will be comfortable if you're just askin' yours. I wouldn't be. And if people are all comfortable with you just askin' yours, ask yourself whether you have friends or conformation bias with echo chamber.

On top of that if you strictly want avoid political topics, be aware that there are forces who profit from making topics "political" that probably shouldn't be.

So when someone else decides which topics are politicized and you want to avoid political discussions — congrats you just let others decide about which topics you are willing to discuss.

My opinion is that most topics have a political dimension anyways, also because most topics have a economic dimension. Or phrased differently: Everything is political.

When discussing politics with friends the "how" is probably much more important than the "if". Most people do not have a vetted political opinion, they just have a strong vibe that they can't really reason about. They aligned with some sources and read/watch news they like to hear and that forms their image of the world. They never really tried to form a logically coherent worldview that is backed by facts instead of pre-filtered annecdotes that may or may not have happened in that way.

With this as the starting point a healthy political discourse isn't possible. You can't argue against someones vibes.

But that doesn't mean good/interesting political discourse isn't possible. It just means that if someone lets the politicians turn them into a vibe-based party-before-issue follower that uncritically believes most of what politicians say, they can no longer think or discuss the topics that impact them with others on a reasonable level. And this is why topics get politicized in the first way.

And no-one is immune to this, especially not you guys over there with that two-party system. But we all need to remember that towing the line of a political party means they no longer represent us, but we represent them. Mental flexibility translates to voter agency and our democracies hinge on voters being well informed and not throwing their agency away.

TL;DR: Not discussing politics and blindly towing the party line is like throwing your own agency away.

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