You'll have a hard time convincing me economic development is an inherent good. Right now we live in an age where economic development has driven overconsumption and self destructive climate change. This is why degrowth is a philosophy that exists. Economic development being an inherent good is not an opinion that is actually universally agreed upon and there's some very good arguments as to why it needs to slow or even reverse.

I'd strongly recommend the YouTube channel Our Changing Climate for more information about the links between economic growth and climate change and why infinite growth is a suicide charge.

I started Spanish at 29, was conversationally fluent within two years. As an adult it comes down to desire and usefulness of a language to really learn it.

I actually think power distribution and enshrining national values are the best arguments for democracy and I’ll be discussing them in a future posts. Yet these are only good to the extent they lead to good decisions.

If power distribution instead lead to factionalism rent seeking, or poor policymaking overall, and if a better method of policymaking was available, then we’d be better off with that other method instead.

For instance, international data shows that a more independent central bank leads to lower inflation. If we cared about lower inflation, we should give more discretion to a central bank rather than elected politicians in creating monetary policy.

>People don't realize that despite being fluent, they still have huge gaping holes in their knowledge of "their own" language.

Yeah, my native language is English, but I've used Spanish extensively for my work in a technical field for 20+ years and I know all kinds of technical words and concepts in Spanish that the average native Spanish speaker doesn't know.

Nope, pass.

This article is just another case of liberalism (see the emphasis on "natural rights") want to reduce democracy to be nothing more than popularity contests of candidates in an election + reducing themselves to technocracy.

It seems like those who says "When conservatives can't win in a democracy they will abandon democracy" are the ones who should look at themselves in the mirror.

Good pick up and I should clarify. The argument I make in my substack argues that political authority requires moral authority.

Basically it’s: reason>moral principles of social contract> constitution> formal legal rules.

If you have any questions regarding this argument, I’d be happy to address them here and in future posts.

Analogy and onomatopoiea are nonsense?

I don't see why reason can't be a part of Democracy. I know the article does not explicitly state this, but it reads like the goal is to replace democracy with reason instead of arranging them better.

But might have also been that English is not my native tongue.

Right. Democracy isn't a solution for how to get a moral society, it's a solution for how to have a functional society at all when the people in it disagree on morality.

Aren't you conflating moral authority and political authority?

How does this apply to government actions which are not passing laws? Like regulations on planning permissions, budget for construction of infrastructure, support for industries like agriculture (ensuring farmers receive enough revenue so that farming always continues), and import and export tariffs and subsidies. It seems that this rather Libertarian view of law and ethics either sees all these activities as unjustly arbitrary or binding on freedom, or simply doesn't have anything to say on whether they should or shouldn't be implement and how.

There's quite a few problems with that: "Perfection" and "imperfection" are two sides of the same myth. Also (just for context) I am a 42 year old virgin with no interest in bloodline or raising a family of my own, in other words your clear attraction to it is not universal. And (this is just technical nitpicking) you forgot to add that I'm a woman or there'd be no woman carrying my third child or that I had not "put some swimmers on ice" in one way or other in order for your "ending your bloodline forever" to be true.

But to answer you: Yes, if that were the case that would be how this universe plays out, just like how every horrible detail of WWI and WWII played out. In short, this is the universe that begin with a particular Big Bang (or however it all began) and everything leading up to the drunk teen swerving and everything after it are the consequences. My life and your life (however they will play out) are not random, the future is the future of that Big Bang. We cannot know the future (kind of like Romeo and Juliet cannot rewrite the pages in order to know in the first act that they die in the third act) but nothing in the future is random just like nothing in the past is. There's no Choose-Your-Adventure to Romeo and Juliet.

Humans yeah?

Tell me you speak no other language without telling me you speak no other language.

I don’t know, there must be a link between hormone and biological needs. Hunger is triggered by a hormone is it not? I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss it as an unintended side effect of hormones.

You're missing the inherent virtue of democracy: it provides the maximum dispersion of power throughout a population, which matters because in a free society everyone should have an equal voice, virtually by definition.

Your alternative is to say good decisions are better than popular decisions. Unfortunately you cite only hypotheticals of perfect AI and "impartial" courts to provide this.

How could we decide which cabal of intellectuals is granted tyranny over us? Right and wrong are quite orthogonal to politics unless you spell out your meta ethics first. I.e. there are rational defences of both left and right policies. The differences are in our values.

So, policy guided by reason doesn't tell us anything about how to organise ourselves.

Depends on your definition of fluent. My mother tongue, Indonesian, is not spoken fluently by most Indonesians because most would rather speak in their own regional dialect e.g Javanese Sundanese etc. and pepper their speech with it. Sure most people understand it but few can write or speak it at a grammatically accurate level, even fewer at an academic level

Yes but don’t people often disagree on what is a just law and what isn’t? So at that point you have to figure out whose opinion to go by. And going by the one with the most support seems like the most “just” way of choosing. Even if I’m in the minority and believe that a law is unjust, I’ll still believe that the process through which it was chosen was just. And crucially, democracy contains an internal mechanism for those who want to change unjust laws (convince enough people of my position).

Definitely agree with your opinion. Sartre never denounced the genocidal campaign perpetrated by Stalin during his reign. Legions of Sartre supporters chose to remain silent on the latter's stance toward the Stalinist epoch of terror. Camus on the other hand spoke the hard truths of the times.

Could you say then that the brain dead corpse has no capacity of consciousness therefore shouldn't be valued. However the fetus does have a capacity for consciousness therefore should be valued?

But not for first language acquisition. This has been shown in studies of children who experienced extreme neglect. Perhaps the original commenter was mixing up information they've heard and applied it to learning additional languages. I agree this thread has been painful to read because nearly everyone is making the incorrect assumption that first language acquisition = learning a second, foreign language.

It is dishonest to claim that Nietzsche did not formulate coherent arguments.

Not sure why you are singling out English speakers when every monolingual would be "guilty" of this. Your comment just comes off as an attempt at using language to get some unnecessary slight at specifically English speakers

If most people aren't meeting the criteria for "fluency" under the definition you have given to it, what use is that terminology? Surely it would be more logical to adjust your criteria for "fluency" than to have it be a mostly useless term.

That's why in sociolinguisutics fluency has much more to do with whether or not all of your needs are able to be met and accomplished with the linguistic repertoire you possess. It actually is able to function as a useful term through that lens.

You've hit the nail on the head here. This is more or less the exact criteria and understanding we have of "fluency" in sociolinguistics and it is disappointing that so many others in this thread are trying so hard to come up with some neat little box they can package "language" and "fluency" together in. It reeks of 60's understandings of language and psychology (thanks Chomsky).

I'm especially happy that you brought up the idea that even native speakers are still growing in their own language. People don't realize that despite being fluent, they still have huge gaping holes in their knowledge of "their own" language. Show any common person a "lawyer-ese" document and their eyes will glaze over.