[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by nik-

No, but it starts with some plants here and there.

The government of the US can't even stop buying tanks they don't need because of a few thousand jobs that are affected. What do you think happens when it comes to a few mines and a few coal fired plants?

This is the reality, nothing is going to get done unless those people are accounted for. Their government is practically a holy war as it is, imagine adding this?

Well, you get what you vote for I guess.

We can agree the system is undemocratic, but if you check out some of the political threads on here, you'll find that in the end that might not mean much anyway.

People that vote for a candidate will often parrot what the candidate says even if they disagreed with it prior to voting. You have to support your guy. That's how the relevant political spectrum changes over a given generation. The electorate parrots the political direction and not the other way around. It's like a kind of aristocracy.

Edit #2:

The tendency of people to favor a group that includes them, at the expense of outsiders and even at the expense of their own self-interest, has been called parochialism (Schwartz-Shea & Simmons, 1991). We may think of parochialism as an expression of both altruistic and moralistic goals. It is altruistic toward co-members. It may be moralistic in its effects on outsiders. The outsiders are being asked to help achieve the goals of insiders, in effect, whether this is consistent with their own goals or not. (What is not clear whether they are being asked to do this voluntarily, or whether coerced behavior would suffice, in which case the values are not truly moralistic.) More likely, though, parochialism is moralistic in its application to insiders, who are expected to be loyal to the group.

A prime example is nationalism, a value that goes almost unquestioned in many circles, just as racism and sexism went unquestioned in the past. Nationalists are concerned with their fellow citizens, regardless of the effect on outsiders. Nationalists are willing to harm outsiders, e.g., in war, for the benefit of co-nationals. This sort of nationalism is moralistic to the extent to which nationalists want outsiders to behave willingly in ways that benefit their co-nationals, e.g., cede territory, stop trying to immigrate, allow investment, etc. Nationalists typically want others in the group to be nationalist as well. The idea that one should vote for the good of humanity as a whole, regardless of the effect on one's own nation, would make total sense to a utilitarian (and it would require little self-sacrifice because voting has such a tiny effect on self-interest). But it is considered immoral by the nationalist.

An experiment by Bornstein and Ben-Yossef (1994) illustrates the parochialism effect. Subjects came in groups of 6 and were assigned at random to a red group and a green group, with 3 in each group. Each subject started with 5 Israeli Shekels (IS; about $2). If the subject contributed this endowment, each member of the subject's group would get 3 IS (including the subject). This amounts to a net loss of 2 for the subject but a total gain of 4 for the group. However, the contribution would also cause each member of the other group to lose 3 IS. Thus, taking both groups into account, the gains for one group matched the losses to the other, except that the contributor lost the 5 IS. The effect of this 5 IS loss was simply to move goods from the other group to the subject's group. Still the average rate of contribution was 55%, and this was substantially higher than the rate of contribution in control conditions in which the contribution did not affect the other group (27%). Of course, the control condition was a real social dilemma in which the net benefit of the contribution was truly positive.

Similar results have been found by others (Schwartz-Shea and Simmons, 1990, 1991). Notice that the parochialism effect is found despite the fact that an overall analysis of costs and benefits would point strongly toward the opposite result. Specifically, cooperation is truly beneficial, overall, in the one-group condition, and truly harmful in the two-group condition, because the contribution is lost and there is no net gain for others.

This kind of experiment might be a model for cases of real-world conflict, in which people sacrifice their own self-interest to help their group at the expense of some other group. We see this in strikes, and in international, ethnic, and religious conflict, when people even put their lives on the line for the sake of their group, and at the expense of another group. We also see it in attempts to influence government policy in favor of one's own group at the expense of other groups, through voting and contributions of time and money. We can look at such behavior from three points of view: the individual, the group, and everyone (the world). Political action in favor of one's group is beneficial for the group but (in these cases) costly to both the individual and the world.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/pap...m/ratsymp.html