<story><title>A Soviet Prisoner&apos;s View on What&apos;s Important</title><url>https://butwhatfor.substack.com/p/speech-at-the-stadium</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>I was sadly amused when Obama decided to get involved in gender and bathrooms.&lt;p&gt;Shouldn&amp;#x27;t the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.?&lt;p&gt;But such involvement from the top in minor issues is characteristic when the top accretes too much power. Everyone lower just delegates it upwards because nobody wants to take responsibility.&lt;p&gt;Back in the 70s when the dorm at Caltech I attended went coed, the bathrooms weren&amp;#x27;t set up for that. So the students solved the problem themselves. A sign was made with a circle divided into 4 quadrants and a rotating pointer in the center. The quadrants were labeled:&lt;p&gt;1. men&lt;p&gt;2. women&lt;p&gt;3. don&amp;#x27;t know&lt;p&gt;4. don&amp;#x27;t care&lt;p&gt;which seemed to satisfy everyone.</text></item><item><author>brundolf</author><text>&amp;quot;Try not to set too much store by politicians. Not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement…&lt;p&gt;No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Society doesn&amp;#x27;t get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives (and heaven forbid it to be an integral part of our identities). Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count. And the tragedy is that even as we&amp;#x27;ve put more and more stock in the former, we&amp;#x27;ve been actively sabotaging the latter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>azemetre</author><text>I think you are gravely misremembering why the DOJ took a stance, North Carolina declared it illegal for transgendered people to use the bathroom that best represents their identity.&lt;p&gt;The backlash was immense with many companies and the NBA pulling support out of North Carolina. They &amp;quot;lost over $400 million in investments and jobs.&amp;quot; [1]&lt;p&gt;As a result the governor that advocated this bill lost his election that year.&lt;p&gt;But no, Obama didn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;just decided&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;stick his nose&amp;quot; in the bathroom debates. The Republicans decided to take up a new culture war because attacking gay people after they were allowed to marry was no longer socially acceptable. The President responded because it was a stupid law put forth to attack vulnerable people.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Public_Facilities_Privacy_%26_Security_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Public_Facilities_Privacy_%26_...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>A Soviet Prisoner&apos;s View on What&apos;s Important</title><url>https://butwhatfor.substack.com/p/speech-at-the-stadium</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>I was sadly amused when Obama decided to get involved in gender and bathrooms.&lt;p&gt;Shouldn&amp;#x27;t the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.?&lt;p&gt;But such involvement from the top in minor issues is characteristic when the top accretes too much power. Everyone lower just delegates it upwards because nobody wants to take responsibility.&lt;p&gt;Back in the 70s when the dorm at Caltech I attended went coed, the bathrooms weren&amp;#x27;t set up for that. So the students solved the problem themselves. A sign was made with a circle divided into 4 quadrants and a rotating pointer in the center. The quadrants were labeled:&lt;p&gt;1. men&lt;p&gt;2. women&lt;p&gt;3. don&amp;#x27;t know&lt;p&gt;4. don&amp;#x27;t care&lt;p&gt;which seemed to satisfy everyone.</text></item><item><author>brundolf</author><text>&amp;quot;Try not to set too much store by politicians. Not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement…&lt;p&gt;No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Society doesn&amp;#x27;t get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives (and heaven forbid it to be an integral part of our identities). Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count. And the tragedy is that even as we&amp;#x27;ve put more and more stock in the former, we&amp;#x27;ve been actively sabotaging the latter.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BoxOfRain</author><text>&amp;gt;Shouldn&amp;#x27;t the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, be instead concerned with issues like, say, nuclear destruction, defense of the realm, the economy, etc.?&lt;p&gt;I think prioritisation is half the problem in politics, everyone thinks that &lt;i&gt;their&lt;/i&gt; issues ought to be a priority and it&amp;#x27;s very hard to have a centralised authority wade in and decide that for people without looking at best out of touch and at worst actively malicious. It&amp;#x27;s a big reason I&amp;#x27;m a fan of liberalism (in the British rather than American sense) and subsidiarity, central planning in my opinion usually leads to poorer results because the people on the ground in a given situation tend to make better and more informed decisions than someone sitting at a desk in London with many degrees of seperation from the situation at hand. The solution I think is to make government as local as possible so that different places can have different priorities without breaking things for other people.&lt;p&gt;I believe that politics ought to be as decentralised as practically possible and political abstractions are employed only when absolutely necessary (ie it&amp;#x27;d be a bit silly to ask Ceredigion County Council to run its own nuclear energy programme). Not only does this reduce tensions between ideologically diverse areas, it also frees up what remains of the central government&amp;#x27;s power to focus on long-term globally important issues rather than flitting about with the issues of the day. We need to dispense with this &amp;quot;winner takes all&amp;quot; approach to politics where the most powerful ideological minority can lord it over everyone else for five years at a time and instead adopt a much more &amp;quot;each to their own&amp;quot; approach in my opinion.&lt;p&gt;The two big barriers to this approach are a) politicians that currently rule the roost of a highly centralised system would be loathe to give up their power - it&amp;#x27;s very rare that powerful people have the moral fibre to selflessly abandon power and influence for the greater good of humanity and b) current local government infrastructure is pretty atrocious, it&amp;#x27;s often made up of ridiculous retirees with nothing better to do than exercise their instincts for petty tyranny.</text></comment>