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« My shit smells better than yours.

Noooooo, take that back my shit smells good, your shit smells awful. »

This is what I hear when I see people debating politicians/political parties.

That’s not politics, not to me. That’s popularity contest fueled by emotions.

Debating policies… that’s politics in my book.
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Loki 2y ago

Politics and policy are indeed connected, as is the word police. C is often Ts in many european languages.

It's really a form of protocol engineering, the social order protocol, you might call it.

How do you find a way, with the lowest cost, and the least disruption, to eliminate criminal behaviour - that is, activity that can only be stopped if the motivations for it are eliminated.

Politicians usually opt for "moderate" compromises that in a game theory analysis would be the opposite of the best move. The Cobra Effect is an example of one of the most famous examples of imposing order creating more chaos than the problem itself.

Policies should be a matter of engineering, and then you could call it political engineering. People even mistake the statutes of governments for being the correct way to uphold the informal (but to average joe) contract that the law should have a specified effect, and there is rarely any deep discussion about amending the rule by simplifying it, always to add more and more and more exceptions until it takes an army of lawyers to map out the loopholes.

That's why the number of laws that everyone must agree on should only be tiny. Ten was a good number. Any other decree should be ruled invalid if it substantially contradicts the base rules.

Engineering.

There is no place for rhetoric in engineering, nor for ranking intent above results.

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Loki 2y ago

And note that such a legal system existed in Jericho for nearly 9000 years, and part of that story is recorded in books of the Old Testament, most especially Samuel and Judges.

Samuel 8, specifically, warns against substituting the Law of God with the Will of the Monarch, and how it leads to corruption and enslavement.

For a few hundred years the Icelanders also had a system like this where if you were unhappy with your local chief you could pay your dues to another chiefe from elsewhere to be your advocate, and the result was that bad chiefs went broke and good chiefs got rich and there was relative peace from centuries of blood feuds until the catholics came in to fill the role of organised crime cartel.