Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Vol]

I hope there are at least a few Churches that are not ran by corrupt assholes and that would not go bankrupt if suddenly they had to pay taxes.

I don't think it's that costly to run a cult when you're not in it to scam the believers. You need a building, and you need several employees, but I seem to remember something something christians aren't supposed to look for personal wealth. Which means actual priests would probably be fine with modest donations from the believers - the way most cults do in the world - while con artists would have to either steal a ton of money, or find another way to satisfy their greed.

If it is a way to root out the scams, it might not be a bad thing in the end. As for Mega churches...isn't Utah a state already, or am I mistaken?

To go back in time, if there was no fully centralized education system, and you were simply a well-read Parisian man teaching in a rustic village, I would expect the people there to provide you with a house, or build one. Food. Paper and ink, candles, firewood. Goods and services, and maybe even some coin, in exchange for teaching adults at night how to read and write. Your presence is desired, and your service earns your living.

If King Louis' men should descend, and demand you pay property tax and whatever other applicable taxes there are, that seems purely destructive to me. Your job was to provide education, and in turn the people gave you what you needed. Why should government take something from that symbiotic relationship? Much less if the tax is so high you would have to become "profitable," or leave? As far as I know (in America), churches run off donations, meaning, the local congregation freely gives to sustain the presence, and in turn, the church should do charity with what's left after upkeep. Interfering in that relationship for a petty amount of tax revenue, and prop up the loathsome real estate speculation market, seems perverse.

I don't actually know what Mormon temples are like in Utah. "Weird," probably. But mega churches are more a "blandly Protestant" thing. Get a bunch of businesses in one giant building, and then vague services on thinking positive, or something.

[Ragabul]

I will once again plug the book Bad Religion by Ross Douthat which answers that question. I have only read about half of it as I usually keep a nonfiction book I pick at gradually while reading long fiction that allows me to scratch the nonfiction itch I get all the time just enough to keep focusing on the fiction.

The basic premise of the book is that the main reason for the dominance of weirdness in modern American religion is because the mainline denominations collapsed. As I said in the book thread, parts of the USA actually had established churches up until about the 1830s. This was legal because the original Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government and not to state and local governments. These established churches fell away naturally long before the 14th amendment but if they hadn't, they would have been outlawed at that time because the 14th amendment explicitly extended the Bill of Rights to constrain state and local governments as well. The fact that the the 1st amendment says that the government will not establish religion both means no official state church but also that the courts nope right on out of doctrinal disputes.

An example of this is something like religious exemptions to various things, say, conscientious objection in war. Most Christian denominations are not pacifistic. So somebody who is a Baptist or a Catholic or a Methodist and wants to claim conscientious objector status has 0 grounds to stand on from a doctrinal point of view. But the court will not try to decide the issue of whether or not such and such a belief is actually doctrinal within that denomination. Instead, they will try to determine if the individual belief is sincerely held or not independent of whatever a given church says about it. A "church of one," the utter antithesis of organized religion, is endorsed as just as legitimate as organized religion in this way.

This legal endorsement of religious idiosyncrasy has meant that mainline religions in the USA have always had to compete with weird experimental sects to a degree that was not the case in Europe (until much more recently at which point Europe was already pretty secular). The USA also has no strong cultural tradition of a particular church like most European countries do (Catholicism in France, Anglicanism in Britain, Presbyterianism in Scotland, etc) but merely in generalized Protestantism. And even that started watering way down given massive levels of Catholic migrants starting in the mid 19th century.

The staid, chill mainline denominations like Lutherans and Methodists did a remarkable job of holding their own given there was 0 overall cultural or legal nudge keeping a given person at a given church. Irreligion (and Catholicism for a while) was frowned on but there was basically 0 reason you couldn't church shop among Protestant denominations. This all reached its zenith with the Neo-orthodoxy movement in which boring mainline churches saw remarkable popularity and growth following the World Wars up until about the 1960s. The reason for this resurgence is unclear but one theory is that people were so shaken by the wars that they rejected some of the more secular, modernizing philosophies that had been on the rise before and between the wars as being responsible for causing them.

Whatever the case, the trend ended in about the 1960s and boring mainline denominations went into an aggressive spiral of collapse that has never abated. There's lots of theories for why this happened too, but the pertinent fact is that it did in fact happen. This left all the weird "church of whatever I say church is" stuff with no counterbalance so people naturally gravitated towards churches that just tell them what they want to hear be it "God will make you rich" or "God chose the USA" or whatever. So to some degree I would actually say you are seeing what disorganized "make your own" religion looks like. Church like everything else has been swallowed up by expressive individualism and consumerism.

The USA is naturally more religious than most of Europe for particular cultural reasons such as never having religion stomped out by a communist regime or not having a long, sordid history of abuses by established churches that sour people on it or never having religious wars. Going back to Albion's Seed, it's also no small point that 2 of the 4 original founding English cultures were explicitly religious in nature and trying to create religious utopias. It is secularizing but at a much slower rate and I hazard it will probably be more religious through all of our lifetimes at least. That religious impulse is going to find expression somewhere. It can't be stomped out. At best in can be channeled in more or less healthy directions.

*Edit*

This is the Story of How Lincoln Broke the U.S. Constitution

Another argument that the USA has two different constitutions in practice. This one saying that the second was really the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that originated in various unilateral decisions made by Abe Lincoln.

I don't really buy this one as much. To me these amendments don't overturn or invalidate the original. Rather they resolve contradictions in it and explicitly extend its scope to the states. They don't just make something up out of nothing like various Supreme Court cases have done.

[Ragabul]

Why is France so Afraid of God?

Provocative headline I obviously didn't choose and I'm not endorsing anything in particular in the article. Just ironic I keep seeing a bunch of articles on religion in the public square and/or non-profit tax abuse in the last few days.

That is the key hang-up though in American style separation of church and state versus French style. In the USA, there is no right to freedom from exposure or display of religion (or irreligion) in the public square. The government cannot favor one religion over another or prevent people from exercising it. That is all.

[TTTX]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc8FcQZUlnk&ab

well at least both sides of the political spectrum are dumb as fuck.

[Ragabul]

Yeah, book banning or burning is pretty beyond the pale. Worse than even shouting down speakers.

Though I also have to admit from having been a librarian that there are ways to be provocative and not provocative with books that you need to take into account.

Like, yeah, I kinda get why parents don't want this:





handed to their kid by the fifth grade librarian with 0 input from parents whatever.

Just because you have The God Delusion available for checkout in West Podunk public library in Alabama doesn't mean it's a good idea to make a prominent book display advertising it there.

Your job as librarian is make the library a place that is useful and has content for everybody. And that means books on intelligent design and books on queer theory and Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto and all of that will be on your shelves. Libraries really should be free speech absolutism land. But when you shout from the rooftops advertising or pushing only one type of political content, you are tacitly telling someone else "this place is not for you." This doesn't mean never push people towards political content ever but you really need to be aware of who your community is. Drag Queen Story Hour might work in Berkeley. If you are insisting on doing it in Waco, Texas, you are really more interested in making a political statement than you are in being a good library.

School libraries are a little different as they have an overtly age geared pedagogical purpose. It would in fact be bizarre to insist on needing a copy of 50 Shades of Gray for an elementary school library.

Even in public libraries, the presence of kids make things a little different. If a kid is given a library card by their parent, it lets them check out whatever they want so it's really up to the parent to screen what they are getting. Even so, should I as librarian refuse to tell parents their 12 year old is checking out erotica or steer them towards reading How to Be An Antiracist? If the parent was progressive and I was pawning the childrens books written by Bill O'Reilly on their kid would the parent be particularly happy about it? There's a lot of nuance here. The idea that I get to fill a kid's head with whatever I want and keep it secret from a parent is going to create a push back. People have the right to read what they want which is why books should not be banned, but parents also have rights. It's a tricky thing to balance.

[Vol]

Yeah, book banning or burning is pretty beyond the pale. Worse than even shouting down speakers.

Though I also have to admit from having been a librarian that there are ways to be provocative and not provocative with books that you need to take into account.

What has helped me rationalize these sort of things is to accept the idea that the people affecting all these rapid cultural changes are, in lieu of any certainty that demons actually exist in a metaphysical sense, are as definitionally demonic as people can be. They hate anything good or noble, virtuous and self-sacrificing, and have only the most base, crude impulses, with twisted emotional rhetoric, shrouded in academic bullshit, to justify their actions. Everything you would believe is evil and perverse would be a checklist of goals. Then enough of the actual human population go with it, lacking any reason not to. These people that make porn for kids to promote whatever gets them wet is only the obvious consequence. I would expect nothing less, and only that it will become mandatory at some point.

Obviously, their works should not be destroyed, but kept properly segregated from any literature that contains any meaning that can't be summarized by "I am unable control my libido and I want kids to know this." You know, somewhere in the back, behind a beaded curtain, with poor lighting so this kind of retardation doesn't stain the eyes of decent folk.

(If this doesn't make sense, the devil in the gin made me do it)

[Sinekein]

If King Louis' men should descend, and demand you pay property tax and whatever other applicable taxes there are, that seems purely destructive to me. Your job was to provide education, and in turn the people gave you what you needed. Why should government take something from that symbiotic relationship?

Because France is a centralized country and it's the government that allows those local educators to get paid in the first place.

Also France is a secular country that did a great job of severing religious influence from political decision-making more than a century ago (1905), which means that it tightly monitors cults as a whole, and intervenes when needed.

One of the issues we have with Islam is actually that the State never really bothered with checking which imams worked where, which allowed a ton of foreign influence to sneak in (because believers got their money from somewhere), leading to some nutjobs getting and spreading some vile ideas to the public, and it is really hard to cut those tumors now.

That is the key hang-up though in American style separation of church and state versus French style. In the USA, there is no right to freedom from exposure or display of religion (or irreligion) in the public square. The government cannot favor one religion over another or prevent people from exercising it. That is all.

It's quite simple really in that it means that the laws of the State must always come first. You have every right to exercise any religion as long as its beliefs agree with the laws of the State. Religion is never above the law. And I don't see anything problematic in that. There are many countries in the world where religion and religious organizations are above the law - if you think that your religious ideals are the most important, you should move to one of those countries, I'm sure they will welcome another zealot with open arms.

Yeah, book banning or burning is pretty beyond the pale. Worse than even shouting down speakers.

Though I also have to admit from having been a librarian that there are ways to be provocative and not provocative with books that you need to take into account.

Like, yeah, I kinda get why parents don't want this:

In the library I was going to when I was a teenager, I remember that one day, in the comic section (in which I spent most of my time) I happened upon this book by Georges Wolinski - one of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo killins.

It's...it's porn, I don't know how to tell it differently. Porn with a plot, but porn notwithstanding. There were several Milo Manara comics too. It was in the adult section, granted, but "adult" includes, well, all books for adults. Some of them were very violent, like Olivier Ledroit's comics. And some were neither sexual nor violent, but were just made for adult readers. Watchmen would have been in that section.

And honestly? That was before internet was a thing. Nowadays any kid with an internet connection can easily get access to 100x more hardcore stuff than a relatively realistic drawing of a blowjob - featuring two characters with human proportions, I might add - or depictions of onanism.

The US should really rethink the way it gives access to sexual content to young viewers. Even law-abiding male French teenagers who never click "I am an adult" have been exposed to boobs already in their life, because you see naked people in movies, or series, or comics. Not all the time, but on a sufficiently regular basis that it's not seen as some kind of ultimate taboo whose mere presence means that it has to be adult content.

In 1998, one of the most popular movies in theaters was Gérard Pirès' Taxi, which absolutely was for all publics, and in which you had several shots of a naked (and then relatively unknown) Marion Cotillard.

It's quite well summed up in this Last Week Tonight segment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyn6YwxFhWU

[Vol]

Because France is a centralized country and it's the government that allows those local educators to get paid in the first place.

Also France is a secular country that did a great job of severing religious influence from political decision-making more than a century ago (1905), which means that it tightly monitors cults as a whole, and intervenes when needed.

One of the issues we have with Islam is actually that the State never really bothered with checking which imams worked where, which allowed a ton of foreign influence to sneak in (because believers got their money from somewhere), leading to some nutjobs getting and spreading some vile ideas to the public, and it is really hard to cut those tumors now.

That's my point, the education system became centralized, but nobody wants your churches to be. If the local community can sustain them with freely given donations, then why should the government have any hand in that? This idea that every bit of land and organization has to be focused on economic growth and sustaining itself over all other considerations, enforced by the power of government, seems absolutely miserable.

Though I've read you guys are having a dozen or so mosques built for every church torn down, and that sounds like foreign money will keep those mosques going regardless of donations, so that's going to be fun for France. Christianity does not make for a good system of government, though it can inspire a great one, but Islam is outright a theocracy builder, that we all hope secularizes in the west, despite the massive immigration.

The US should really rethink the way it gives access to sexual content to young viewers. Even law-abiding male French teenagers who never click "I am an adult" have been exposed to boobs already in their life, because you see naked people in movies, or series, or comics. Not all the time, but on a sufficiently regular basis that it's not seen as some kind of ultimate taboo whose mere presence means that it has to be adult content.

I remember being about 8 years old, looking through my mother's art book on Michelangelo, and immediately grasping the difference between his work and the porn I'd see on the Playboy Channel (we had a black box then). Obviously, I couldn't articulate it, but always had that belief since, that there's a big difference between the beauty of the human form, positive depictions of the body and sexuality, and the "bad" side.

Like everything in life, perfectly discrete categories aren't possible, but I'd like to think we can all intuitively understand the difference. A movie scene where a woman welcomes her husband home, they kiss, she slips off her sundress, and they leave for the bedroom, that's beautiful, positive human behavior. Tweens getting on smartphones and immediately seeing the depths of perversion and physically unsafe kink has no positives whatsoever. And it bothers me we've jumped from the old puritans to new ones, with largely the same content restrictions, except these puritans nudge you towards internet porn with a wink.

[Sinekein]

That's my point, the education system became centralized, but nobody wants your churches to be. If the local community can sustain them with freely given donations, then why should the government have any hand in that? This idea that every bit of land and organization has to be focused on economic growth and sustaining itself over all other considerations, enforced by the power of government, seems absolutely miserable.

Though I've read you guys are having a dozen or so mosques built for every church torn down, and that sounds like foreign money will keep those mosques going regardless of donations, so that's going to be fun for France. Christianity does not make for a good system of government, though it can inspire a great one, but Islam is outright a theocracy builder, that we all hope secularizes in the west, despite the massive immigration.

Churches can be centralized - that's the case of the Catholic one, since it's been there for more than a millenia. AFAIK it is mostly the case with Jews in France too.

The problem with Islam is that it was built from the bottom up by people of very different faiths - Shia, Sunni, etc - and for the longest time they were left on their own, and they kinda followed the US model of "my church my rules".

Now, regarding the Mosques being built, it's mostly an issue of the Catholic faith dwindling in numbers, while muslims are growing and, more importantly, are finally getting access to Mosques. Which is good, as it is much easier to monitor a Mosque, than it is to monitor an underground prayer room no one but the believers know exists.

Eventually, it will reach a balance, although considering the quality of the buildings, I expect to see more Mosques being brought down and rebuilt in the future than Churches. The latter tend to be sturdier in design - and most Mosques are relatively discreet because a large majority of muslims don't want minarets in a country they know is not historically muslim.

[Ragabul]

This is kind of one of those arguments that borders on aesthetics, made especially apparent by how we are mostly all defending the efficacy of the system we grew up with and are used to. Doesn't speak much to the actual objectivity of the debate. Suffice to say I am hesitant to couple state power with aesthetic tastes for these reasons. In as much as the USA mostly refrains from that (in theory) I think such is appropriate for a country as diverse as this one. If there must be diversity, let it be real diversity and not cosmetic "I season my food with slightly different spices" diversity.

I'm the sort of person who thinks the world described in John Lenon's Imagine sounds like a horrible monochrome dystopia devoid of all the things that make human society interesting and worthwhile.

[Vol]

Charity, for me, is as simple as "if your means has made you affluent then you share that extra material, funding, assistance. Not for supposed promises of a good afterlife that has no proof to exist, or the threat of a bad one if you do not, but simply because you are a person and you'd hate to be in the position they are in so you help them out of it, or help them so they are able to be standing on their own.

Those are motivators to perform charity, yes. I'm always hesitant to link moral actions with economic investment though.

I haven't read the story of Job yet, but I as understand the premise, it's about doing the right thing, in good and bad times, and not expecting to get anything for it. Thus praising God even while he allows Satan to torment Job to absolute ruin, there is no divine vending machine or investment portfolio where X good deeds gets you Y material returns. Terrible things happen to seemingly good people, and that story is one way to try and rationalize it, regardless of physical or metaphysical truths.

You give a jacket to a hobo because he's cold and needs a jacket, not because you ever expect anyone would ever do the same for you, or you'd get a tax write-off, or because the hobo might rent a flat and pay taxes one day, or a priest tells you that's 10 steps towards Heaven, or even to tell anyone about for social status. Solely because you can help, and even take his suffering on yourself in a small way. Anything to lessen that selflessness takes away from the goodness. That's how I see it anyway.

The main problem is the current system of how things are run in the USA means it hates a socialist view of "everyone chips in, anyone takes out".
Charities provide shelter, counselling, food, clothing, healthcare and even funding if and when they can.
Social housing and affordable housing for all, plus housing for the homeless provides the shelter.
Universal Healthcare provides the healthcare and social workers under the Universal healthcare would provide the counselling.
Food banks provide assistance to food.

Americans have had a high-trust, wealthy nation turned into a low-trust international ATM/dumping ground in living memory, you'll have to forgive us for being wary of the people who embezzle 99 cents on every dollar having more power than any monarch. To paraphrase the blue collar workers I meet all the time, "I chip in, hundreds of politicians, state contractors, investors, managers, paper-pushers, and other assorted grifters take out, but maybe someone in need gets to live better than I do."

If we could be guaranteed the money was spent wisely and efficiently, and we certainly have conjured enough of it lately, you'd see very little complaining, except for those who want more of it.

The only things charities would need to take care of would be those that slip through the cracks, clothing and additional funding. Not seeing a need to be religious to fil that need.

Rules are made to address problems. There would be no need to invent rules of charity if there wasn't an existing problem that needed addressing. If common empathy was enough, no crazy people would need to invent stories about immaterial beings to dupe dummies into giving their excess resources to those who don't have enough. So we can excise the mumbo-jumbo, but then we're left with the problem we had to start.

But your perspective is logical. An all-powerful government has the means to provide for everyone, though the will to do so is a perpetually open question.

Edit: And thinking about it for a second, consider the consequence. Is it desirable to offload a sense of duty to your fellow man to the abstraction of "the government"?

[Ragabul]

Pre-agriculture gender relations seem bad

Not horribly surprising but there are circles where some sort of wonderful egalitarian Eden-like state gets floated as the historic norm and this supposedly all went to shit with either 1) agriculture or 2) the emergence of "capitalism" circa 1600.

More likely there was, is, and will be a variety of different styles of societal organization that people engage in with varying degrees of shiftiness on different metrics.

Edit:

Also been listening to this podcast called Advisory Opinions which is two center right lawyers going over various legal cases of note twice a week and explaining the history of relevant case law, profiles of various justices and how that might change outcomes, predictions on how cases will get decided and speculation on what it will mean if they get decided in certain ways. It's actually very informative, not particularly partisan though obviously not a good listen if you think Federalist Society member=fascist (or that Joe Biden stole the election), and the two hosts have an enjoyable, dorky, Dad joke kind of rapport that works. It's pretty much the only podcast I've been listening to every episode of lately. Most others I pay any attention to I will skip many episodes that don't look interesting.

[Vol]

Pre-agriculture gender relations seem bad

Achkshually, there's no multiple third party independently verified peer reviewed published secular non-biased expert studies who assert that egalitarianism is an objective good to judge primordial man by, now let me tell you about the Selfish Gene.

Not horribly surprising but there are circles where some sort of wonderful egalitarian Eden-like state gets floated as the historic norm and this supposedly all went to shit with either 1) agriculture or 2) the emergence of "capitalism" circa 1600.

More likely there was, is, and will be a variety of different styles of societal organization that people engage in with varying degrees of shiftiness on different metrics.

Of the people I'm aware of who do espouse some sort of ancient lifestyle, it does skew far more towards pastoralism than hunter-gatherer (I can't actually think of anyone who espouses that). To make sweeping assumptions of a very tiny number of people, the women seem to like "cottage aesthetics," and the men "dairy + meat + chariots." The underlying idea being that we've lost something vital and good in the transition to bugmen. Though that article is fascinating, if for no other reason than to see how ideological blindness results in more grotesque contortions than Cirque du Soleil.

[Ragabul]

egalitarianism

Well, egalitarianism is an intrinsically inane goal but obviously you can't prove that with some scientific process. The way I usually phrase the better goal is with the unwieldy phrase "the lowest common denominator of acceptability." Every society has a certain pool of resources, time, expertise, and cultural capacity it can devote towards uplifting members of that society. This varies by time and place and is constrained by many different factors.

The way I usually illustrate the point is with what you might call the starving children rule. In the United States, the richest society in the history of the world, it would be completely inane to have children starving in the streets. We can obviously afford to prevent starvation in children in this country with 0 real opportunity cost or noteworthy constraints. Starving children is uncontroversially below the lowest common denominator of acceptability and we should absolutely use public resources to raise any such children up to the lowest common denominator of "not starving."

Having a similar standard in, say, Ukraine during the Holodomor would be pointless moral theatre. Obviously Ukraine would vastly prefer that there are no starving children in Ukraine but the constraints put in place by the Soviets make it completely impossible for them to address the problem. Likewise, it would be a pointless standard in some ancient kingdom undergoing ecological collapse because of a volcanic eruption.

On a higher rung, "girls not being about to read" is clearly below the lowest common denominator of acceptability in most advanced countries. Telling some poor African country this is pointless if they don't have the infrastructural means to do anything about it. That African country is probably better off focusing on something they can control to some degree such as say trying to treat everybody for intestinal parasites.

I understand foreign aid is a thing and this complicates things. I'm just using these for illustrative purposes to make the point clear.

We can argue strenuously about what the exact level of the lowest common denominator of acceptability is in a society as affluent and with as much technology as ours. Here it's obviously going to be considerably higher than Honduras or Haiti. But we are never going to attain actual egalitarianism. Such has never and will never exist on the face of the Earth.

And I would say the standard of "uplift who you can" *is* an intrinsically good goal for thoroughly non-scientific common sense reasons. There is a reason it's one of the underlying rules in pretty much every world religion or moral system.

I am using this standard to mostly apply to material conditions. I guess I'm unconvinced you can engineer state solutions to existential or spiritual problems that don't have their underlying root in material conditions or where those problems are largely a product of prosperity itself. Make everybody materially worse off to make them perhaps spiritually better off is not a goal I'm ready to endorse. At a bare minimum, I doubt it's even possible because people will fight anybody trying to do it tooth and nail. Make them materially worse off now to avoid even worse material loss later is a different thing altogether but also no easier to execute.

And I would also say the left is just as guilty as the right of mixing up material conditions with (for lack of a better summarizing word) "woo woo" things. Take the consistent, stubborn persistence of behavior in men and women at the aggregate level. No matter what is attempted, girls keep stubbornly deciding to be nurses at higher rates than boys and boys keep stubbornly deciding to be engineers at higher rates than girls. We are more and more and more controlling for material things that might influence this outcome and it still keeps happening. At a point, the sensible thing to do is to accept the disparity is happening for reasons you don't understand and move on to disparities that actually matter and that aren't mysterious, controversial, or intractable (again starving children).

This is sort of the underlying idea behind the Effective Altruism movement which I mostly support. In as much as charity is going to be a state function, this is the standard that should be used for determining what to do. The main area I diverge from this is on their standards of impartiality. Humans are not capable of being impartial and I would even go so far as to say that our lack of impartiality is a good thing. Thus why this stuff needs to be qualified with healthy nationalism or some other type of locally based communitarianism. This doesn't mean never helping people outside your tribe, but it does mean explaining things in such a way that people can see why helping the people outside the tribe will also help people inside the tribe.

*Edit*

To bring this back to the point of judging pre-modern societies, I would say the metric of "compare civilizational quality based on what percentage of its total population it has managed to uplift out of material misery" is a perfectly good standard to use for judging civilizational quality on the material plane at least. Other things obviously matter (like happiness, sustainability, artistry/innovation, etc). And since no post of mine is complete without picking on socialism this is another fundamental flaw in the socialist argument. It is an explicitly materialist ideology and on the materialist level, there is straightforwardly no system that's ever existed that has delivered more material prosperity for more people than 20th century capitalism, which is to say free markets qualified by some level of social safety net. This is obviously just as much of a rebuke to pure 19th century laissez-faire capitalists.

[Ragabul]

On the origins of the demographic transition: rethinking the European marriage pattern

Ta da! Everyone is wrong in ways that get on everybody's nerves and violate everybody's pet assertions of "the way things are." These are my favorite types of conclusions.

The literature on gender equality commonly argues that girls’ age at marriage is a good measure of the subordination of women in a society. The classic argument is that the increase in human capital delays marriage and gives greater autonomy to girls/women.Footnote23 Our analysis shows that this is indeed the case in traditional societies (where religious belief and pressure are strong). In such conditions, greater gender equality occurs in parallel to low nuptiality, late marriage, and a high proportion of individuals remaining single. Yet what our analysis reveals is that in a progressive society (where the pressure of traditions is low), greater gender equality is practiced in environments characterized by active nuptiality, early marriage, and low celibacy.

[Vol]

Well, egalitarianism is an intrinsically inane goal but obviously you can't prove that with some scientific process. The way I usually phrase the better goal is with the unwieldy phrase "the lowest common denominator of acceptability." Every society has a certain pool of resources, time, expertise, and cultural capacity it can devote towards uplifting members of that society. This varies by time and place and is constrained by many different factors.

I was being extremely sarcastic, I find the idea that only ideas that have been "academically examined" have value is as retarded as an actual retard playing with firecrackers, but that might not have carried into the text. While I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 earlier, I was listening to Matt Dillahunty debate Jay Dyer. They left me with "Every goal ever is inane," or, "every goal is progress towards or away from theosis." Which is remarkably unhelpful when reading articles in today's paper about how white people need to (metaphorically, then later literally) cut their throats for the sake of the ur-good. It seemed too obvious, growing up, that egalitarianism, promoted but never enforced, was obviously the best way of doing things. The reality of suicidal cults and bigots has done a number on that idealism.

The way I usually illustrate the point is with what you might call the starving children rule. In the United States, the richest society in the history of the world, it would be completely inane to have children starving in the streets. We can obviously afford to prevent starvation in children in this country with 0 real opportunity cost or noteworthy constraints. Starving children is uncontroversially below the lowest common denominator of acceptability and we should absolutely use public resources to raise any such children up to the lowest common denominator of "not starving."

We have a schizophrenic view on the sanctity of human life. But "our" children, the worry is more obesity, diabetes, and medical mutilation than anything else. For all the vaunted "socialization" schools are supposed to bring, my paternal grandma has fared far better than any of my peers despite dropping out of school young to help her mother at home. Solving childhood starvation is a good goal, and one we should think of like polio, something archaic and eradicated. But certain elements have sensed that void in innocent suffering and filled it themselves. Karma, in a perverse way.

To bring this back to the point of judging pre-modern societies, I would say the metric of "compare civilizational quality based on what percentage of its total population it has managed to uplift out of material misery" is a perfectly good standard to use for judging civilizational quality on the material plane at least. Other things obviously matter (like happiness, sustainability, artistry/innovation, etc). And since no post of mine is complete without picking on socialism this is another fundamental flaw in the socialist argument. It is an explicitly materialist ideology and on the materialist level, there is straightforwardly no system that's ever existed that has delivered more material prosperity for more people than 20th century capitalism, which is to say free markets qualified by some level of social safety net. This is obviously just as much of a rebuke to pure 19th century laissez-faire capitalists.

Materialist or materialist?

If any standard we generally agree on is a good standard, then sure, we've achieved a resounding success for the history books. It might not outlive us, but a new highwater mark for the future humans to aim for is still something. Whereas, if there are any more important principles than basic survival and small pleasures, we've gone so horribly wrong it should be criminal to record the American golden age.

I don't have much of an opinion on it, beyond a vague sense that a sufficiently wealthy country aught provide for the common welfare, and that the people in charge of those programs, or advocate for them, must always be treated with complete hostility. But I genuinely believe, at least at this iteration of my life, that most of us would thrive best in a semi-rural environment, with access to antibiotics and a 5th grade education.

Who could ever have expected that the greatest amount of average resource wealth would turn us into deranged weirdos?

[Ragabul]

I was being extremely sarcastic

Yes, I know, and I was being extremely pedantic. You should never pass up an opportunity to be an insufferable pedant.

More elaboration on your actual points tomorrow.

*Edit*

One little update now though. I finally got around to reading that transcript of the conversation between the two orthodox priests and that is super interesting stuff! I'm less interested in the big sweeping sociological transition to disenchantment or whatever I thought they were mostly talking about (which is why I didn't immediately jump on it) but super interested in them going over in detail all this stuff about various spiritual entities. That's great. I'll probably just straight up start following this podcast.

[Vol]

Yes, I know, and I was being extremely pedantic. You should never pass up an opportunity to be an insufferable pedant.

One little update now though. I finally got around to reading that transcript of the conversation between the two orthodox priests and that is super interesting stuff! I'm less interested in the big sweeping sociological transition to disenchantment or whatever I thought they were mostly talking about (which is why I didn't immediately jump on it) but super interested in them going over in detail all this stuff about various spiritual entities. That's great. I'll probably just straight up start following this podcast.

My big take away from the sociological stuff is to start seeing the pattern of "lower to higher order" everywhere, and how it used to be entirely reversed. Perhaps obvious, but it drives home how disconnected we are with the thinking of people before Darwinism became orthodoxy.

Was that the Nephilim one? Can't remember the specifics of that transcript, but the concept of neighboring pagans "taking on the aspect" of their gods for fertility rituals, which when fruitful produced these tyrannical, powerful sons, is a fascinating concept. That becomes an extremely plausible story, based on biology and Bronze Age culture alone. We've always had weird sex cult rituals, and I'm 100% sure our elites still do. Whether or not supernatural entities reward this behavior, that's a question if we're putting together a puzzle or frosting a cake.

[Ragabul]

It seemed too obvious, growing up, that egalitarianism, promoted but never enforced, was obviously the best way of doing things. The reality of suicidal cults and bigots has done a number on that idealism.

"Egalitarianism" meaning "equality before the law" and "each human having equal moral worth which entitles to them to X things by benefit of being human" are perfectly fine goals. But you can have those and the default will still be the presence of massive unpalatable disparities. There is no total equality in this sense. Most moderns agree that every human deserves X things by virtue of being humans. What's up for debate is what precisely X things should be. I'm saying that having your goalpost as total equality is inane.

Solving childhood starvation is a good goal, and one we should think of like polio, something archaic and eradicated. But certain elements have sensed that void in innocent suffering and filled it themselves. Karma, in a perverse way.

Sure. I wasn't using it because it's an actual problem here. It was a hypothetical chosen because I think 99.99999999% of people would agree with it as a goal and could thus focus on the point I was trying to make instead of whether that's a good goal or not.

Materialist or materialist?

Kinda both, but more in the sense of "having your material needs met."

Socialism (or at least Marxism) does actually care about woo woo stuff that they just don't consider to be woo woo stuff. Namely Marxism is deeply concerned about alienation which is a quasi-spiritual malaise men get because they are reduced to wage slaves and separated from all the things that make them authentically human. So this kinda isn't materialist because it's talking about some weird species-essence thing that's based on nothing scientific in particular, but a Marxist would argue it has its roots in material conditions and thus really is materialistic.

But even this expanded definition of materialism doesn't really prevent 20th century capitalistic prosperity from undermining their core arguments. The vast bulk of people in the west are no longer wage slaves. They have shorter working hours, considerably more disposable income for recreation and worthwhile pursuits, much better workplace safety, social safety nets, and universal enfranchisement so they can wield political power. And yet alienation persists and if anything seems to be growing, increasingly decoupled from underlying material conditions. Maybe there is some abstruse Marxist tome somewhere that addresses this. I've never wanted to get that much in the weeds but it's certainly not something your average DSA rando is addressing.

But I genuinely believe, at least at this iteration of my life, that most of us would thrive best in a semi-rural environment, with access to antibiotics and a 5th grade education.

I don't really disagree with this. I just see no path there that isn't so authoritarian it doesn't end up crushing most of the things it's trying to preserve.

Who could ever have expected that the greatest amount of average resource wealth would turn us into deranged weirdos?

Decadence tends to do that and we are really decadent. We are the societal equivalent of a middle-aged filthy rich, bored, fat man who can spend any amount of money he wants trying to not be bored.

[Ragabul]

Was that the Nephilim one? Can't remember the specifics of that transcript, but the concept of neighboring pagans "taking on the aspect" of their gods for fertility rituals, which when fruitful produced these tyrannical, powerful sons, is a fascinating concept. That becomes an extremely plausible story, based on biology and Bronze Age culture alone. We've always had weird sex cult rituals, and I'm 100% sure our elites still do. Whether or not supernatural entities reward this behavior, that's a question if we're putting together a puzzle or frosting a cake.

It was the introductory episode to the series where they were explaining various weird passages in the Bible as teasers to demonstrate what they wanted to do with the pod.

My starved Protestant, "the Pope is the Whore of Babylon" half is all about learning the weird metaphysics of demonology and angelology and saints and whatnot.

One immediate bombshell right off the bat. There's an actual ancient established tradition and theology around guardian angels. My exposure to this stuff has been 100% bastardized old lady Hallmark channel movie level stuff which I obviously dismissed out of hand by age 8 or so. My instinctive reaction to belief in guardian angels is 100% synonymous with my reaction to belief in Sasquatch. Precisely because the popular image of guardian angels is about as compelling as "Buddy Jesus."

[Vol]

Wow. From listening to the recording of the SCOTUS hearing on abortions today, mood seems to be that the 15 week ban might be upheld, which would rapidly invite an erosion of Roe v Wade. Full overturning seems much less likely, though possible, and it'd promptly go to the states anyway. Didn't expect the SCOTUS to actually consider this though, instead of finding any technicality to punt.

One immediate bombshell right off the bat. There's an actual ancient established tradition and theology around guardian angels. My exposure to this stuff has been 100% bastardized old lady Hallmark channel movie level stuff which I obviously dismissed out of hand by age 8 or so. My instinctive reaction to belief in guardian angels is 100% synonymous with my reaction to belief in Sasquatch. Precisely because the popular image of guardian angels is about as compelling as "Buddy Jesus."

My mother was really big on them too. She was raised Catholic, rebelled to some formless Unitarianism, but really liked the idea of guardian angels. To my young mind, with the extent of her explanation being "they watch over you and guide you on the right path," and noticing no effect or guidance in what happened to me or what I did, it fell at the wayside.

So what does the properly ancient, long thought out theology say?

But even this expanded definition of materialism doesn't really prevent 20th century capitalistic prosperity from undermining their core arguments. The vast bulk of people in the west are no longer wage slaves. They have shorter working hours, considerably more disposable income for recreation and worthwhile pursuits, much better workplace safety, social safety nets, and universal enfranchisement so they can wield political power. And yet alienation persists and if anything seems to be growing, increasingly decoupled from underlying material conditions. Maybe there is some abstruse Marxist tome somewhere that addresses this. I've never wanted to get that much in the weeds but it's certainly not something your average DSA rando is addressing.

I'm of two minds on this. Either, humans require some degree of constant material suffering to flourish, and sating those needs in perpetuity, lacking the ability of the nobility to contextualize comfort, means that we more easily turn into miserable bugmen. That seems like a suitably cruel trick of nature. Or, the world wars have been so incredibly traumatic that we're still in the civilization-level equivalent of crying in the shower while shallowly cutting our wrists. Probably both, a big ole' economic paradigm shift without a clutch.

I don't really disagree with this. I just see no path there that isn't so authoritarian it doesn't end up crushing most of the things it's trying to preserve.

Lopping off the arms of government programs and subsidies would cause immediate chaos, mostly bad, but I can't believe we wouldn't settle into a very familiar equilibrium in the end. Though in this case, America's best shot is probably to split up on ideological lines, and letting the chips fall where they may, because we're getting jackbooted thugs regardless, but some might let us have cozy hamlets.

Eventually, it will reach a balance, although considering the quality of the buildings, I expect to see more Mosques being brought down and rebuilt in the future than Churches. The latter tend to be sturdier in design - and most Mosques are relatively discreet because a large majority of muslims don't want minarets in a country they know is not historically muslim.

Out of curiosity, how fast (generations) is the Muslim diaspora over there regressing to the mean birth rate of the natives?

[Ragabul]

I'm of two minds on this. Either, humans require some degree of constant material suffering to flourish, and sating those needs in perpetuity, lacking the ability of the nobility to contextualize comfort, means that we more easily turn into miserable bugmen. That seems like a suitably cruel trick of nature.

Suffering, yes, but I don't think it has to be material suffering. It's just that if you have affluence and your suffering isn't material, you can more easily use material things to try to distract yourself from mental, social, or spiritual suffering which allows you to avoid steps that would actually let you face them. Social media produces another level of hell because much as you can try to buy fulfillment you can also now try to *perform* fulfillment to the masses and thus make it come true by play acting. So in 1970 you had money for booze and whores. Now you have money for booze and whores and a free bullhorn.

Or, the world wars have been so incredibly traumatic that we're still in the civilization-level equivalent of crying in the shower while shallowly cutting our wrists.

I've actually thought something like this before. Specifically the Holocaust. On some level it seems like *everything* is really about how closer or farther we think we might at any given moment to that happening again. It's like all of Western civilization has Godwin's Lawed itself for the last 75 years.

So what does the properly ancient, long thought out theology say?

It was just a tease in the first episode but they promise to go into detail later. Roughly, the huge host of spirits that run the bureaucracy of heaven are appointed to different roles. So there is literally an angel in charge of natural elements like the moon, angels assigned to particular cities or nations or places, and angels assigned to individuals. Roughly, they are there to provide protection from demonic forces, to carry prayer to God, and to lend strength. They don't miraculously save you from getting run over by a bus and such. They will definitely keep incubuses/succubuses away in your sleep though.

[Ragabul]

Speaking of Muslim diaspora in France, this lecture by Zenmour is something that passed over a blog I read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=220&v=R5pozMZdTdo&feature=emb_logo

And the main thing that consistently strikes me with populist right wingers in Europe is how different they are from American ones in two consistent ways. They are way, way, way more egg-headed and way more into overt ethnonationalism. (If a mainline American right winger openly described the country as "white race, Anglo-Saxon culture, and Protestant religion" he'd get run out of town on a rail. The most they can consistently get away with is saying we are a "Western, Christian" country). I don't know enough about this dude or European politics to write WoTs about this speech. It was mostly this flavor difference I found interesting. I'd like to steal the eggheadedness but they can mostly keep the overt ethnonationalism stuff. I think this is explains like 80% of right wing American intellectuals infatuation with Viktor Orban. He doesn't sound like a stupid man like most of the current guys on offer here.

[Vol]

Suffering, yes, but I don't think it has to be material suffering. It's just that if you have affluence and your suffering isn't material, you can more easily use material things to try to distract yourself from mental, social, or spiritual suffering which allows you to avoid steps that would actually let you face them.

I more meant that the born affluent never experience the qualia of material suffering, they're effectively inured. We're not. Without the pressure to always strive for those basic material needs (a good thing), we're left in an awkward position. We don't have that "noble qualia," the ability be defined by social/spiritual suffering, but we do have enough for the numbing pleasures. Hence why college is such a ripe time for radicalization.

Tldr; Monkey brain not know how deal with always have banana but not have many, many banana, go bananas in process.

Social media produces another level of hell because much as you can try to buy fulfillment you can also now try to *perform* fulfillment to the masses and thus make it come true by play acting. So in 1970 you had money for booze and whores. Now you have money for booze and whores and a free bullhorn.

Case in point. Performative hedonism is meant for the rich who shirk their duty, it sits ill on us, because we cannot sustain it or rationalize it as "deserved."

I've actually thought something like this before. Specifically the Holocaust. On some level it seems like *everything* is really about how closer or farther we think we might at any given moment to that happening again. It's like all of Western civilization has Godwin's Lawed itself for the last 75 years.

The weirdest part is that it seems like the trauma is even stronger than when it was fresh. I've mentioned it before, how Nazis and Hitler have become even more emotional, mystical evils than even my grandma, still haunted by their occupation of her hometown, would describe them as. Though as the last of her generation dies off, maybe that'll swiftly change. I can't imagine the kids coming up now are learning much about WW2 and industrial genocide in a meaningful way.

It was just a tease in the first episode but they promise to go into detail later. Roughly, the huge host of spirits that run the bureaucracy of heaven are appointed to different roles. So there is literally an angel in charge of natural elements like the moon, angels assigned to particular cities or nations or places, and angels assigned to individuals. Roughly, they are there to provide protection from demonic forces, to carry prayer to God, and to lend strength. They don't miraculously save you from getting run over by a bus and such. They will definitely keep incubuses/succubuses away in your sleep though.

Interesting. So in a functional sense, instead of relying on brute facts to explain the regularity of nature, it would be a celestial bureaucracy, and their protection/loss thereof, acts on humanity in the larger "narrative"?

[Ragabul]

I more meant that the born affluent never experience the qualia of material suffering, they're effectively inured. We're not. Without the pressure to always strive for those basic material needs (a good thing), we're left in an awkward position. We don't have that "noble qualia," the ability be defined by social/spiritual suffering, but we do have enough for the numbing pleasures. Hence why college is such a ripe time for radicalization.

I meant affluent relative to historical norms. 90%+ of people in the west are inured from meaningful material suffering. They have food. They have housing. They are physically safe. They can procure treatments for or prevent most non-age related severe illness. There hasn't been a giant war in 75 years. Yes, we have to work to procure these things but it's not existential and you can achieve this bare minimum standard with zombie levels of effort. There is certainly *some* material suffering for the really poor like having to work into old age despite weakness and fatigue or not having AC/heating and obviously the homeless exist. But most moderns live in Eden compared to even year 1900. Most of our suffering is not material. It's mental and social but because we have money we can distract ourselves from it with palliative care.

The weirdest part is that it seems like the trauma is even stronger than when it was fresh. I've mentioned it before, how Nazis and Hitler have become even more emotional, mystical evils than even my grandma, still haunted by their occupation of her hometown, would describe them as. Though as the last of her generation dies off, maybe that'll swiftly change. I can't imagine the kids coming up now are learning much about WW2 and industrial genocide in a meaningful way.

Took an art history class in college on depictions of the Holocaust in art and this was totally a thing. There was roughly 20 or 30 years of near total silence on the topic and then it's actually the children of survivors who mostly started probing about it. The graphic novel Maus is a kind of case in point. The survivor father is telling his story but only because his son is interviewing him and putting it in a graphic novel.

Interesting. So in a functional sense, instead of relying on brute facts to explain the regularity of nature, it would be a celestial bureaucracy, and their protection/loss thereof, acts on humanity in the larger "narrative"?

Seems so. As I say, it was only a tease.

[Vol]

I meant affluent relative to historical norms. 90%+ of people in the west are inured from meaningful material suffering. They have food. They have housing. They are physically safe. They can procure treatments for or prevent most non-age related severe illness. There hasn't been a giant war in 75 years.

It's physically true we're in a relative paradise of plenty, but we're not able to internalize that sense of perpetual assurance. "We," broadly speaking of sentient adults, are very aware we might one day discover our own nudity and be cast out of Eden. Food, security, and medicine operate on exceptionally abstract, fragile systems, and for nearly all of us, participation is mandatory until death, and while we fairly assume there's enough hidden machinery to ensure they'll be there tomorrow, the certainty that the "harvest" will come in, the "lords" will protect you, is not present. By design, even, such that our ramshackle oligarchy is sinking into the soft mud.

So that qualia of material suffering doesn't manifest as "I literally have nothing to eat," but as, "I have to skip meals until payday," or "I need to spend an hour clipping coupons to afford meat." In absolute terms, exceptionally less suffering than any people have ever had, still some, but not enough to temper a character either. Hence: bananas.

Took an art history class in college on depictions of the Holocaust in art and this was totally a thing. There was roughly 20 or 30 years of near total silence on the topic and then it's actually the children of survivors who mostly started probing about it. The graphic novel Maus is a kind of case in point. The survivor father is telling his story but only because his son is interviewing him and putting it in a graphic novel.

I don't think Europeans suddenly decided they liked the Jews (we ignored the other groups in yearly Holocaust lessons) because the grim details of industrial genocide were laid bared. That was what we were taught, that the awareness of how terrible the Holocaust was flipped a metaphorical switch of empathy and social revolution specifically for the sake of those groups, then the ones we'd oppressed. Though it surely was a big part of it.

Maybe it was the shock of the utter failure of the "peak" of human achievement. Industry, social Darwinism, used for something as basic and cruel as any mindless savage could think of. Starve and torture your enemies, steal their wealth, then murder them? That was the peak of western philosophy, of nationalism, of science and martial strength, a plan as evil and petty as a tribe of cavemen could think up. The scale was new, but the larger the scales, the less people can personalize the event. And I can't imagine we were all that naïve and innocent, with the living memories of past wars, that people would do that to innocents.

So it makes sense to me, thinking about this for the first time, that it might've been realizing sacred "progress" wasn't quite real as we'd thought. Then the future generations take an incomplete message and go on to lay the framework for the same fucking mistakes, as if those kinds of thoughts and people were part of a mist-shrouded past, and not the "real" present. Which feeds on itself, making that past even more mystical and emotional. So while, yes, there's obviously a politicization angle to consider with the events that came after WW2, if we focus solely on the Holocaust's cultural power, we've so badly ignored the lesson on how and why it happened that we're stuck in a loop of holding onto the roots of that intellectual era, but not facing the cumulative consequence. We all know it's bad to round up people for extermination, in any society worth living in, but don't appreciate how we got that point without realizing it. That's my rambling idea anyway, if that's coherent.

[Ragabul]

I believe the documentary Shoah specifically was a massive flood tide event for discussion/focus on the Holocaust if I remember right. There was a gradually increasing trickle since the 1960s and then a massive floodgate of stuff after Shoah. Schindler's List was an exponential spread event as well.

And, yes, I think that analysis is spot on pretty much. With the addition that there is a contradictory approach taken to Hitler & Nazis which is 1) to turn them into demonic expressions of evil thus removing them from mundane humanity and pretending nothing about them has something to do with innate human nature and 2) simultaneously mostly blaming their actions on various cultural processes. This allows people to ignore scary innate flaws and limitations in humans while keeping the idea that if only we perform the *right* cultural processes we would not produce men such as Hitler and that humans are more of less infinitely improvable.

[Vol]

And, yes, I think that analysis is spot on pretty much. With the addition that there is a contradictory approach taken to Hitler & Nazis which is 1) to turn them into demonic expressions of evil thus removing them from mundane humanity and pretending nothing about them has something to do with innate human nature and 2) simultaneously mostly blaming their actions on various cultural processes. This allows people to ignore scary innate flaws and limitations in humans while keeping the idea that if only we perform the *right* cultural processes we would not produce men such as Hitler and that humans are more of less infinitely improvable.

"Mao" by Jung Chang & Jon Halliday has a moment that's stuck with me in particular. Young Mao, the son of wealthy peasants, who detested hard labor, was working at a book store. He was taking bribe money from Communists to also hand out their literature, which he was too lazy to do. Then when it came time to pick sides, he did a very simple analysis of which side would likely benefit him more, and decided the Communists would have more opportunity for personal advancement than the Kuomintang. And it wasn't that, much like Hitler being denied admission to an art school, it was "the" pivotal moment that all of history hinged on, but that a lazy bookseller contained within him all the capacity for everything Mao ended up doing.

Then much later on, the man groomed to be his successor, who made a spectacle of ritualistic loyalty, saying all the right things, always having the Little Red Book, being the most perfect sycophant possible, was found to be preparing a coup, and when he tried to escape to Russia, his "plane crashed." I might be mixing up multiple men, but the point is that even with total adherence to cultural processes, doing the little dances, saying the prayers, his future assured, he was still treated with suspicion (for being "too" loyal), and found to be a traitor.

[Ragabul]

I should read more about China as I said awhile back. There are too many books for a human lifetime to be fair. The universe owes us at bare minimum the lifetime of a hobbit and really I'd say one of elves.

I actually am reading a transcript of the Supreme Court case on abortion that had oral arguments the other day. The solicitor general of Mississippi is saying he wants the viability standard thrown out and instead to use *just* the undue burden standard, which strikes me as a bizarre position to take for someone wanting fewer abortions. Something like a *shifting* viability standard seems like what you want because obviously viability is going to get pushed earlier and earlier into pregnancy with improvements in medical tech.

I guess his theory is that if you ban all abortions before some crazy early point, say, 1 month or something, but then have 0 abortion regulation before that point so that you can get one in any way whatever in any place whatever, you can reasonably claim there is no undue burden to obtaining an abortion during the legally allotted time.

*Edit* Also just an odd thought that we have these massive existential battles in the courts that we only have because of the quirk of happening to be placental mammals. Makes me wonder what sort of bizarre ethical issues grounded in alien biology some hypothetical alien civilization is locked in constant cultural turmoil over. I've only read one sci-fi book ever that really addressed something like this. It's an interesting premise to start on.

[Vol]

I should read more about China as I said awhile back. There are too many books for a human lifetime to be fair. The universe owes us at bare minimum the lifetime of a hobbit and really I'd say one of elves.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

I'm partial to Tom Bombadil, but he makes for poor quotes.

I actually am reading a transcript of the Supreme Court case on abortion that had oral arguments the other day. The solicitor general of Mississippi is saying he wants the viability standard thrown out and instead to use *just* the undue burden standard, which strikes me as a bizarre position to take for someone wanting fewer abortions. Something like a *shifting* viability standard seems like what you want because obviously viability is going to get pushed earlier and earlier into pregnancy with improvements in medical tech.

I guess his theory is that if you ban all abortions before some crazy early point, say, 1 month or something, but then have 0 abortion regulation before that point so that you can get one in any way whatever in any place whatever, you can reasonably claim there is no undue burden to obtaining an abortion during the legally allotted time.

My understanding is that the legal reasoning for Roe v Wade is a specific interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Not a philosophical argument about when personhood is conferred on a fetus. By secular philosophy, either the moment the gametes form a zygote, that's a living human, or, it's a completely arbitrary standard we make up. So the viability standard, formerly a trimester standard, has nothing to do with the reasoning for legal abortions, it's assuaging conscience. Tech could push it back, or loss of tech might push it forward, and the court defining personhood on what machines a neonatal unit has is ridiculous. The legal definition of a person is a matter for lawmakers, not judges.

So if I'm grasping the SG's tactic correctly, he's trying to force the justices to consider that the legal basis for Roe should extend to third trimester abortions, like that psycho in VA supported. A full term pregnancy is the largest burden after all. The State in turn should have tried to zero in on that, because that's the only mollifying factor for pro-choice people, "they're not people yet." Instead the State's lawyer went in on the undue burden angle, which plays into the SG's hands.

TLDR: The SG wants the SCOTUS to think of fully developed babies being murdered, by tossing out the viability standard as not the court's role and arbitrary, to hack at the legal root of the Roe tree.

*Edit* Also just an odd thought that we have these massive existential battles in the courts that we only have because of the quirk of happening to be placental mammals. Makes me wonder what sort of bizarre ethical issues grounded in alien biology some hypothetical alien civilization is locked in constant cultural turmoil over. I've only read one sci-fi book ever that really addressed something like this. It's an interesting premise to start on.

As I'm playing Cyberpunk right now, I can think of the horrifying ways corporations and rudderless, half-bionic people might take it!

[Ragabul]

My understanding is that the legal reasoning for Roe v Wade is a specific interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

From reading the transcript, it's the supposed meaning of the word liberty in the 14th amendment which has been interpreted to mean fundamental individual right to make decisions regarding marriage and childbearing among other things.

So if I'm grasping the SG's tactic correctly, he's trying to force the justices to consider that the legal basis for Roe should extend to third trimester abortions, like that psycho in VA supported. A full term pregnancy is the largest burden after all. The State in turn should have tried to zero in on that, because that's the only mollifying factor for pro-choice people, "they're not people yet." Instead the State's lawyer went in on the undue burden angle, which plays into the SG's hands.

This completely leaves out the question of bodily autonomy for both the woman and the fetus. The viability qualification and the undue burden qualification were both established to try to balance the right of the mother to bodily autonomy against the state interest in maintaining fetal life *without* rendering an answer to the philosophical question of when personhood begins. And the SG is not saying he is trying to get the court to render an answer on this question either. In fact his argument hinges on the supposition that the court *cannot* answer this question and thus it must be answered by the people via their representatives in legislatures.

But again, for a person wanting fewer or less grisly abortions, it's a weird position to take because if viability gets destroyed *without* personhood getting defined, there is 0 stopping New York or Virginia from saying you may kill a 8 months, 30 days fetus by partially expelling it from the mother's body and smashing its head with a hammer. The undue burden standard would do nothing to stop this because it doesn't target egregiously permissive abortion standards, only prohibitive ones.

If you have *my* standard which is more or less "let the states do whatever they want" this is a perfectly good strategy I guess, but not so much if your standard is "abortions are evil and we want to get on a path of making them extinct."

Meanwhile, keeping the viability standard because it balances bodily autonomy of the mother with state interest in fetal life puts the pro-choice sides under more and more and more scrutiny as medical science advances. After all, if we could remove a fetus from a woman's body at 8 weeks and keep it alive with technology, what is the remaining argument for killing it? If you still demand its death at that point, you are not actually arguing for a woman's right to bodily autonomy but to a woman's right to kill children she finds inconvenient. What's the difference in a 8 week old being keep alive by expensive machines and a severely disabled 2 year old being keep alive by expensive machines?

[Vol]

The reaction of conservatives, moderate to far right, to the Patriot Front march (ethno-nationalists, non-violent as of yet) is fascinating. So terrified of federal agents, of looking scary and serious by association, they fall over themselves to claim they would never and surely no one else would either. While the right in general isn't ethno-nationalist (impossible to tell anyway), there's this abuse victim like aversion to anything even tangentially related to organization and presence in any movement within a stone's toss of the Overton window. It'd be like if Martin Luther King had spent more effort on denouncing Malcolm X than giving speeches. Maybe the mental image of fat Boomers carrying fancy rifles, milling around like it's the 1970s, as lawmakers completely ignore them and pass the laws they want is what "sic semper tyrannis" really means in their heads.

"Sirs and madams, you might take my guns, send my job oversea, raise my taxes, flood my country with immigrants, spend our dwindling wealth overseas, make my son a eunuch, turn my daughter into a whore, and let our cities burn, but I will peaceably assemble and disperse before our permit expires, and vote in the next election!"

Meanwhile, "Oh, yeah, this is a reckoning about racial injustice, the people are upset, there's no such thing as Antifa or communists, things can be replaced, only counterrevolutionaries got hurt, so we better do what the people want. *wink wink*"

In fact his argument hinges on the supposition that the court *cannot* answer this question and thus it must be answered by the people via their representatives in legislatures.

Right, that's exactly the point. Roe is an interpretation of law, and a poor one, because the real issue is getting legislatures to define personhood, not the court's ad hoc "we must have a line somewhere." So the ruling on Roe is based on the 14th and bodily autonomy, but there's a massive moral issue that has to be addressed.

But again, for a person wanting fewer or less grisly abortions, it's a weird position to take because if viability gets destroyed *without* personhood getting defined, there is 0 stopping New York or Virginia from saying you may kill a 8 months, 30 days fetus by partially expelling it from the mother's body and smashing its head with a hammer. The undue burden standard would do nothing to stop this because it doesn't target egregiously permissive abortion standards, only prohibitive ones.

The SG isn't arguing for that specific outcome, it's a rhetorical tool to get the Mississippi law upheld, because one arbitrary line is as good as any other, and ideally to get Roe v Wade overturned, because the manner in which the court ruled abortion into "law" should legally and logically extend to 9 month abortions. That's the point, as far as I can tell. Because the viability line is solely for the moral acknowledgment that fetuses become babies (biologically) and killing babies for the mother's economic benefit is too evil to possibly be the intent of the 14th, thus striking the viability, leaving us with only the ruling on the 14th, becomes unpalatable and leads to an overturn.

I mean, hypothetically, if the court just struck down the viability addendum, and NY passed "total abortions" in response, I would earnestly hope so few people would ever possibly seek them, and so few doctors would ever perform them, that it would be a problem a few motivated individuals could solve fairly easily. But it's not what the lawyer is actually seeking, he's using the logic of the ruling to kill it. Which then the center and south of the country would quickly pass total (except life of mother) restrictions, and the coasts would pass something probably very similar to what we have now. It would be politically untenable (if not physically dangerous) to advocate for a nearly full grown baby to be dismembered in the womb so Charlii can work more.

What's the difference in a 8 week old being keep alive by expensive machines and a severely disabled 2 year old being keep alive by expensive machines?

I largely agree, if this challenge should fail, technology "should" help reduce the rates regardless. But in practice it's less ideal, because it lets giant corporations effectively decide when personhood exist. Plus the perverse perspective it casts on women. In the utilitarian sense of reducing murder, yeah, it's far better than some alternatives.

[Ragabul]

The other kink in this is that if other states keep really permissive standards there is nothing stopping people in no abortion states from just traveling there. And the logical thing for pro-abortion people in such states to do is to double down on creating extremely permissive access to abortion pills that can be anonymously mailed (including to states that ban it). The US mail cannot dig through stuff at leisure and would have no specific reason to do so at the behest of states anyway, and I really don't see national shipping companies eager to get on board with policing packages for abortion pills either. Which again from my perspective is actually a good thing because it defangs the most visible, visceral aspects of all this and would make fighting it a first cousin to trying to stop people from smoking marijuana which seems like it would pretty impotent and unpopular. But it seems bad from the "end abortions" point of view. At the very least, it seems like this would become a new focal point in fighting.

@ ethnonationalism and/or militias

I tend to be anti mob in general. The track record of mobs for doing anything worthwhile except to give some angry people catharsis for a while is not very good. Sometimes mob action shakes out in the long run but it's usually because some elites of some kind take back over that happen to be aligned with the mob. Or sometimes elites get scared enough to incorporate just enough changes that it placates the mob. Usually the mob mumbles around impotently, murders/destroys a bunch of things that have nothing to do with their main issue, is violently suppressed by authorities, or succeeds in tearing everything down but whatever gets built to replace it is just as bad or worse.

Mob coupled with other strategies can potentially be a useful tool and not everybody that organizes while looking scary is actually a mob. I admit to not being horrified by the mere existence of the far right. They annoy me because of their consistent strategic uselessness or outright harmfulness other than as a very occasional idea factory and even that only when the ideas get sanitized and stripped of 80% of their far right content. Actual fascists in particular are nothing but a lead weight. Old fart militias that are more like radical libertarians are less of a problem but still not great. If I have to deal with a far-right element, this is the most palatable. My dad drifts in this direction at times though he is more like one of those prepper type guys. More interested in building bunkers and surviving the end times than bringing them on. Physical troll armies (Boogaloo types) seem mostly useless but online troll armies do seem occasionally strategically useful. They also cause tremendous amounts of backlash from media companies so this is extremely checkered at best.

But overall, I think 99% of this is firmly in "useless" category and over half is in "actually shooting self in foot" category. And while I do not think *any* of these people actually poses any real threat in terms of taking over, obviously the fact that any number of them would then start lining people up against walls to shoot if they did manage it is hardly a thing to just look over.

So, no, I'm not going to waste much time trying to convince anyone I'm not these people. Anybody that thinks that would be pretty much impossible to dissuade anyway. But I admit my overall opinion of them is rather like that old lefty cartoon where there are 10000 people protesting by marching and 1 guy smashing a car window and all the cameras are on him and ignoring the 100000. The excuse that the media will portray anything right of center as Nazis is a really stupid reason to go "oh well, I guess we should just actually be Nazis then." Complaints of this in another form amount to "the news isn't faaaiiiiirrrrrr!" No shit, it's not fair. Which means you need a strategy for how to deal with it and "let's just do everything they accuse us of in the open" is not a strategy.

The pill both the far-right and far-left need to swallow is that you cannot do anything without boring moderates. Boring moderates do not like angry mobs, property damage, mean sarcastic slogans, guys wandering around neighborhoods carrying guns wearing masks, or people yelling/threatening hapless grunt level bureaucrats.

My stance on ethnonationalism is completely informed by being American. I probably would be an ethnonationalist at least to some degree if I was European. The USA is nobody's ethnic homeland other than American Indians and a few other mostly inconsequential groups (Amish, Cajuns, Gullah, etc). I am a *nationalist* and the USA is not an ethnostate. It's never been an ethnostate. From earliest days there were huge numbers of Dutch, Germans, and others (even if you unwisely ignore Indians and black people who were also always here). Our national myth has always been ethnically agnostic. It was not racially agnostic, but this has been a source of division and not strength. There was never a point in our history when there were not huge numbers of non-white people here. We just like to pretend there has been. I am a proponent of racially and ethnically agnostic nationalism. Most countries on Earth cannot do this because they are ethnostates. We potentially can.

[Vol]

But it seems bad from the "end abortions" point of view. At the very least, it seems like this would become a new focal point in fighting.

I mean, to be blunt, sending it to the states, and having some women order pills/cross state lines to kill their babies, is about the best outcome our system can give us for minimal abortions. Ending the practice would involve a many trails, and a lot of death, and a heavy authoritarian hand in the medical system. If it was an option, I would listen, but it's not American. So having states snipe at each other about their policies is, at least, how the union should function.

Or sometimes elites get scared enough to incorporate just enough changes that it placates the mob.

The transition from Occupy Wall Street to "JP Morgan says trans rights!" and "I want whatever Pfizer sells," has been eye-opening.

I admit to not being horrified by the mere existence of the far right. They annoy me because of their consistent strategic uselessness or outright harmfulness other than as a very occasional idea factory and even that only when the ideas get sanitized and stripped of 80% of their far right content. Actual fascists in particular are nothing but a lead weight. Old fart militias that are more like radical libertarians are less of a problem but still not great.

The uselessness is the failure of the sane part of the right to grasp how tenuous their continued existence is. The left has a perfect tactical symbiosis. Deny their extremists exist, treat the idea of organized anarcho-communists like silly-nonsense. Give no ground, deny blatant evidence, smug mockery at all times, and reward the loyal troops quietly. A black supremacist terrorist attack has been made a non-story, that it how effectively they utilize their extremists. Whereas, Emmett Till is still a legendary stain on America. That is not a reason to radicalize per se, but at a point, there are hard questions to be asked. Don't have to play in the rancid mud, but you might wish someone would on your behalf.

Or more simply, if we see fascists safely huddled under the left wing, we'd better hope militant moderates exist.

And while I do not think *any* of these people actually poses any real threat in terms of taking over, obviously the fact that any number of them would then start lining people up against walls to shoot if they did manage it is hardly a thing to just look over.

"Decorated Austrian WW1 veteran and aspiring artist to go into politics."

I think if we really dug into our fellow citizens, we'd find a lot more people willing to line up their enemies against a wall than we'd care to admit. To be very honest, I cannot say I wouldn't, not until I was standing there, though my "enemies" are thankfully an extremely small, specific group. I'd have to pray on it, and hope for an answer, I suppose.

Which means you need a strategy for how to deal with it and "let's just do everything they accuse us of in the open" is not a strategy.

Building a parallel society is about the least potentially violent strategy I've seen. Hampered by banks/payment processors/carriers/registrars having "chosen sides," to a degree. But it's something.

The pill both the far-right and far-left need to swallow is that you cannot do anything without boring moderates. Boring moderates do not like angry mobs, property damage, mean sarcastic slogans, guys wandering around neighborhoods carrying guns wearing masks, or people yelling/threatening hapless grunt level bureaucrats.

This is true, however, boring moderates also definitionally are not passionately rooted. Whoever is more aggressive will steer the ship, and the boring moderate will go along with it. With Trump, the boring housewives went blue. With the excesses of the left, the boring 20-30 somethings inched red. But those are the rocking of the waves, while the ship is tilted 135 degrees.

I am a proponent of racially and ethnically agnostic nationalism. Most countries on Earth cannot do this because they are ethnostates. We potentially can.

There's a case to be that made that "people who look like me" and "people who think like me" and "people I want to live around" is going to overlap heavily for nearly everyone in every group, with one notable exception (huwhite liberals), and those seeking wealth, so the consequence of enforcing that kind of agnostic policy is going to mirror the tension and violence we see right now.

So, sure, while the country was de facto, but not de jure, huwhite, what do you do from there to achieve that goal but not turn into the mess we are?

[Ragabul]

I mean, to be blunt, sending it to the states, and having some women order pills/cross state lines to kill their babies, is about the best outcome our system can give us for minimal abortions.

Sure, which is more or less why it's what I've been wanting.

That is not a reason to radicalize per se, but at a point, there are hard questions to be asked. Don't have to play in the rancid mud, but you might wish someone would on your behalf.

What point? Having to go to obnoxious DEI training at work? Slums that were already extremely violent becoming ludicrously violent? No more white Disney princesses or non-woke books winning Hugo awards? Getting rid of college entrance exams so the upper middles class get even more bonus points for lacrosse in "holistic" admissions? The US standard of living declining from really high to only high? Drag queen story hour?

I don't disagree with this really in theory but all of this stuff is slowly boiling frog with decadence stuff and not really "give me liberty or give me death" stuff And it's all very well to yell "I won't be boiled anymore!" but since the boiling isn't a result of some kind of small, identifiable cabal that can be rooted out, none of the yellers I see seem to have any actual idea what to do about it.

If decadent decline is a foregone conclusion, why isn't managed decline an option? Not every once powerful thing collapsed in a bloody heap. Some just faded into obscurity.

I think if we really dug into our fellow citizens, we'd find a lot more people willing to line up their enemies against a wall than we'd care to admit.

True enough, because most people are conformist and not particularly brave. This strikes me as even more reason not to listen to people who are already claiming they will do such things before there is any social pressure exerted on them. The historical track record of the "masses" resisting violent regimes once they are in power is not good so why go there voluntarily?

Building a parallel society is about the least potentially violent strategy I've seen. Hampered by banks/payment processors/carriers/registrars having "chosen sides," to a degree. But it's something.

This while fighting a rearguard actions with the courts. You want some somewhat protected space for weird dissenters to be weird dissenters, the courts are the only plausible "official" channel at the moment, which also requires boring moderates and the center-right.

Whoever is more aggressive will steer the ship, and the boring moderate will go along with it.

Only if they win and they only win by getting enough moderates on their side. Either way, wear your radicalism on your sleeve and you won't get in and the case of whatever you might do once in power remains theoretical.

So, sure, while the country was de facto, but not de jure, huwhite, what do you do from there to achieve that goal but not turn into the mess we are?

Miscegenation for one. The right hates this but it's part of the answer. It's already happening. Who knows if it happens fast enough to take the edge off in a timely enough manner or not.

[Ragabul]

Related to above but I swear I don't fish for this stuff. It's like some benevolent minor God of pretentious articles sends me links to on-point things I was just talking about:

What Happened to American Conservatism?

Obsolete or not, this style (classic Burkean) is what pulled me to the right and it's decidedly different form many aspects of Trumpism.

Related but older:

The Problem of the New Right

The fundamental disconnect between the current right-wing intelligentsia and the base is that Trumpists are at heart uber libertarians and hyper individualists. There is no channeling them in a non "Don't Tread on Me" direction.

*Edit*

Kinda funny. I spend my time here being a proponent of "David Frenchism" or whatever standard vanilla center-right stuff only to immediately turn around and have to try to convince my uber-left sister that woke elites are *actually* a thing worth worrying about and not just a Tucker Carlson conspiracy.

[Vol]

Sure, which is more or less why it's what I've been wanting.

Speak of the Devil, but the paper just had an article about California wanting to become an abortion sanctuary state, with paid vacations for poor women who can't afford to travel. "Have a free uterus scrape, then Disneyland for a great escape!"

If decadent decline is a foregone conclusion, why isn't managed decline an option? Not every once powerful thing collapsed in a bloody heap. Some just faded into obscurity.

That's the conundrum, because being utterly petty worked beautifully. No fight was too small, no event too clear cut, to not become a freak-out that demanded systemic change. It was constant, hysterical aggression that won (culturally). In the last 30 years, do you recall any "battle" too small or irrelevant to be a hill to die on for progressives? Slave/master hard drive designations, rope loops in garages, green cartoon frogs, the "okay" sign, anything Christian, social clubs, hiking, the existence of breasts, words that kind of sound like naughty words. Showing maturity and "letting it go" has been the exclusive duty of reactionaries.

I completely understand the impulse to be a dignified boiled frog. It's a lot more pleasant than facing the fringes, when we can instead denounce with pride, then submit to whatever new ritual humiliation the left is rolling out. That feels better, there's predictable order there.

(The Lee statue that was taken down during the riots, the state refused to sell it off for $100k to art groups or collectors, they're donating it to some black group to melt down into a symbolic trophy.)

The managed decline is inevitable, regardless. More a question of who gets to partition the wealth/rights as it happens.

The historical track record of the "masses" resisting violent regimes once they are in power is not good so why go there voluntarily?

From a utilitarian perspective, because you can influence the lunatics before they get the power, e.g., reeducation of glasses-wearers instead of mass graves, deportation of diaspora instead of genocide. It doesn't seem apparent to me that this brief, relatively moderate, peaceful, plentiful time is going to be eternal and unchanging.

Only if they win and they only win by getting enough moderates on their side. Either way, wear your radicalism on your sleeve and you won't get in and the case of whatever you might do once in power remains theoretical.

In terms of power and policy, who is winning right now?

Miscegenation for one. The right hates this but it's part of the answer. It's already happening. Who knows if it happens fast enough to take the edge off in a timely enough manner or not.

It's going to become a moral duty, and it will not be humanizing.

The fundamental disconnect between the current right-wing intelligentsia and the base is that Trumpists are at heart uber libertarians and hyper individualists. There is no channeling them in a non "Don't Tread on Me" direction.

There is a dissonance, when very intelligent, respectable men assure dummies like me that everything is working out great according to their well-reasoned, academic logic. Then comes Trump, loud and simple, brash and unapologetic, and while those sort do their best to stymy him, he at least creates the perception he's fighting, changing things "back," regardless of actual effect. So I think the uber libertarians, while never going to be suit-wearing dignitaries, would absolutely line up behind a principled, moderate position, if it could offer anything resembling victory. Because they did with Trump.

One of those writers is calling the 1960's-2012 a golden age of conservatism. I don't know what to do with someone who believes that. The first article is bizarre that way, I agree with almost everything he says, except his conclusions. He frames these trends and events as if the intellectual right is Maximus at the end of Gladiator, hanging on just long enough to fulfill his mission.

Kinda funny. I spend my time here being a proponent of "David Frenchism" or whatever standard vanilla center-right stuff only to immediately turn around and have to try to convince my uber-left sister that woke elites are *actually* a thing worth worrying about and not just a Tucker Carlson conspiracy.

And I play the moderate with some of my friends/family, so it's grounding if nothing else.

[Ragabul]

I completely understand the impulse to be a dignified boiled frog. It's a lot more pleasant than facing the fringes, when we can instead denounce with pride, then submit to whatever new ritual humiliation the left is rolling out. That feels better, there's predictable order there.

What does submission even look like in this process? Is anything but overt winning right now submission? Like is there nothing but a hard winners/losers dichotomy with nothing between those poles? I don't feel like I've submitted to much of anything other than not wearing my politics on my sleeve in public, which I was never doing anyway.

The most successful cultural shift of the last 50 years has been the gay rights movement, specifically on the topic of gay marriage. They have so thoroughly convinced the public they are right that even the types of Republicans who yell about things like a "war on Christmas" waste 0 breath seriously trying to push back the change. This took 40 years of consistent, steady, non histrionic effort. This is also how the NAACP got Plessy V Ferguson overturned.

It's premature, but if Roe is overturned that will also represent the culmination of a 40ish year strategy by the most organized and consistent component of the right, the pro-life movement.

Concerted strategy is also how the Republican elite keep doing a one-over on the base on economic issues. They know tax cuts for rich people are *deeply* unpopular so they don't talk about them. Instead they talk about the things that fire up the base and as soon as they get in power immediately start working on tax cuts for rich people.

I'm not saying I have a neat and tidy 5 year plan or something. As a peon, most of my time and energy has been consumed in what *I* was personally going to do in all this. But at the macro level, over and over again, concerted strategy beats mindless flailing.

The underlying criticism of the center right is also 100% true of the far right. What is their actual strategy? How are they *actually* going to win? If they admit they cannot win in any remotely feasible way for years and years and years, what are they doing right now to get the most plausible component of what they want done? Because on top of being strategically ineffectual right now, far right stuff is also deeply unpopular. Center right at least has the leg up of being occasionally effective, having several actual popular things it can fight for, and plausible ways to phrase the things people are more skeptical about.

(The Lee statue that was taken down during the riots, the state refused to sell it off for $100k to art groups or collectors, they're donating it to some black group to melt down into a symbolic trophy.)

This is gross but it's also not the fate of all statues. In Houston, we had two which were removed. One (of an actual man) was sent to a historic battlefield site. The other represented no actual person but merely "The Spirit of the Confederacy" and was sent to some black cultural museum to be "interpreted in context." I was pretty pleased with this approach which generated 0 national headlines for being boring, normal, and reasonable. Obviously, these are not safe forever, but there is 0 that could make them or any statue of anything safe forever.

To bring this back around. How useful is this for people on the left from an actual "winning and keeping power" point of view? Has anybody won an election because they insist on saying "Latinx" and "pregnant people?" The number of people truly motivated by that are less than ten percent of the population.

We appear to be on the potential tip of a spear of a generalized working class revolt against it. We'll see where it goes. I've actually been tentatively rethinking some aspects of my fatalism in just the last few weeks because I had a kind of epiphany, partially based on my digging into popular vote margins for past presidents.

The New Left of the 60s and 70s(which was almost point for point the same, insane overwrought moral histrionics as woke stuff) faced such an outsize backlash in the 1980s that Reagan won 49 states. He did not win by hardcore right wing revocation of that stuff but by advertising himself as sane center-right and mostly concerned about the economy. This realignment was so thorough that the agenda of every president since has been set by it, even ones who ostensibly were post-Reagan. The Dems lost 3 elections in a row and only won again with Bill Clinton who would be considered center right in most of Europe. Obama's single greatest piece of legislation was explicitly designed to *not* be a public option and took most of its meat from a right wing plan to answer liberal demands for singlepayer. The #1 thing Trump "got done" was tax cuts. The progressives were beaten by their own base during the Democratic primaries twice in a row in 2016 and 2020 and Biden's attempt to tack leftward is already being punished by voters who care way more about the cost of gasoline than they do about rebuilding bridges (which itself was a compromise position and not a particularly progressive agenda item).

People can say "zombie Reaganism" all they want but the reality is that the American public is still *extremely* Reaganite. They are vague libertarians who mostly don't care what people do in their private lives but don't like moral busybodies and who do not want to pay high taxes to support a massive Euro style safety net but also aren't deeply interested in gutting existing entitlements. I thought we were solidly "post-Reagan" but I think the reality is that the elite wants to be post-Reagan and the loudest parts of each party's base wants to be post-Reagan on some key issues (immigration, climate change, trans stuff, etc.) The overwhelming bulk of the American public is still perfectly fine with slightly modified Reaganism.

Anybody willing to speak Reagan speak can use this strategically. And certainly the right is in a *much* better position to do it if they want than the left.

In terms of power and policy, who is winning right now?

Boring moderates. Trump is gone and replaced with the most boring moderate the Dems put up on offer to replace him. Joe Biden's big ambitious plan to try to placate the left wing of his party by shoveling money into transformative social projects got reduced to repairing bridges, rural broadband, and an anemic pre-K program that will run out of money in 3 years. People currently care more about the price of milk than the fact that Roe might get overturned.

There is a dissonance, when very intelligent, respectable men assure dummies like me that everything is working out great according to their well-reasoned, academic logic. Then comes Trump, loud and simple, brash and unapologetic, and while those sort do their best to stymy him, he at least creates the perception he's fighting, changing things "back," regardless of actual effect. So I think the uber libertarians, while never going to be suit-wearing dignitaries, would absolutely line up behind a principled, moderate position, if it could offer anything resembling victory. Because they did with Trump.

Maybe. The question is if said moderate could beat them in a primary at the moment. My point was not that they wouldn't vote for some Romney type dude (they obviously have in the past). My point was that they won't support the communitarian half of the social conservative agenda because doing so would mean limits on their individual rights and expression. Romney might can convince them of a child tax credit. There is 0 chance in hell he can make them stop getting divorces, stop looking at porn, have more kids, stop saying politically incorrect things, or give up guns.

One of those writers is calling the 1960's-2012 a golden age of conservatism. I don't know what to do with someone who believes that. The first article is bizarre that way, I agree with almost everything he says, except his conclusions. He frames these trends and events as if the intellectual right is Maximus at the end of Gladiator, hanging on just long enough to fulfill his mission.

He's saying that because of this:

"American conservatism descends from Burkean conservatism, but is hopped up on steroids and adrenaline. Three features set our conservatism apart from the British and continental kinds. First, the American Revolution. Because that war was fought partly on behalf of abstract liberal ideals and universal principles, the tradition that American conservatism seeks to preserve is liberal. Second, while Burkean conservatism puts a lot of emphasis on stable communities, America, as a nation of immigrants and pioneers, has always emphasized freedom, social mobility, the Horatio Alger myth—the idea that it is possible to transform your condition through hard work. Finally, American conservatives have been more unabashedly devoted to capitalism—and to entrepreneurialism and to business generally—than conservatives almost anywhere else. Perpetual dynamism and creative destruction are big parts of the American tradition that conservatism defends."

This is a challenge for anybody who is American claiming they want to preserve things and is why I'm not an ethnonationalist and also consistently defend liberal (the political system) foundations like freedom of speech. To want to preserve the USA (the actual thing I'm rooted in) is to be at least on some level capitalist, liberal, and individualist. You can be American and against these things and be on the right, sure, but it's not the Burkean right then. It's to be anti what America actually is and always has been (a hyper-individualist, capitalist, liberal republic) and to be instead a species of utopianist revolutionary who wants to completely replace this system with some imagined one. You can be a lot of things and be a Burkean but a revolutionary utopianist isn't one of them.

I don't want to fight for some utopia in some rando's head. I want to preserve the actual messy, contradictory, imperfect country and community I was born into.

*edit* typos

[Vol]

What does submission even look like in this process?

Refusing to suffer any significant discomfort for a principle. Acquiescing to ideas and systems we hold to be wrong for non-vital gain, beyond the reasonable standard required to live in a civilization. Being aware of the freaks in our school system, but not sacrificing dual-income to homeschool their children, or finding a co-op, or a private school. Whining about SJWs gross incompetence at creating art, then buying their products. Finding the corona vaccine measures to be authoritarian, then getting it anyway to keep a job. Investing in companies that hollows out the country, because it makes portfolio numbers go up. Endlessly talking about how degenerate and Pravda media is, but having a Netflix subscription and watching football. Decrying illegal immigrants and the cartel violence they bring, then buying drugs that fund them for the weekend.

It's not an all or nothing premise, we all submit in big and small ways because we're not hyper-individualist lunatics, but there's a tacit acceptance of making no sacrifice whatsoever for a principle, which works out perfectly for the aggressive idiots who affect changes they don't understand. We can all sit around and rationalize why we aught to submit to every new indignity, because there's always a good reason, and there's never a singular reason to become irrational. There doesn't exist a hard line where the music swells and the people shout from their windows, flood the streets, and the tyrants' guards throw away their arms and join us to restore peace and love. It's a steady process of personal compromise, always reasonable in the moment, always a good decision in hindsight.

That is the value of the petty fringe groups, they take every speck of dust on their cheek as a grave insult, and make a spectacle about it, while the adults can play off them to have a reasonable conversation. But there is no counterbalance on the right, only flare ups that are shamed into submission, the motte and bailey. We can denounce the unreasonable people on the right, but there is no courtesy of reciprocity, you're hobbled, because the integration of leftist extremism coached in moderate terms is all pervasive.

The most successful cultural shift of the last 50 years has been the gay rights movement, specifically on the topic of gay marriage.

That is not at all how I would frame that shift, given it took SCOTUS fiat in the end, and decades of propaganda, but I get what you're saying.

Concerted strategy is also how the Republican elite keep doing a one-over on the base on economic issues. They know tax cuts for rich people are *deeply* unpopular so they don't talk about them. Instead they talk about the things that fire up the base and as soon as they get in power immediately start working on tax cuts for rich people.

There's still this nostalgic memory of a local lord, a portly man in suspenders smoking a cigar who owns the factory/mine, and he does genuinely provide for his workers, and the associated economy. If he was taxed less by those pinkos in Washington, surely it would benefit the place his wealth is grown form. That doesn't exist, but it's a fond idea to rationalize with.

I'm not saying I have a neat and tidy 5 year plan or something. As a peon, most of my time and energy has been consumed in what *I* was personally going to do in all this. But at the macro level, over and over again, concerted strategy beats mindless flailing.

In the personal, practical sense, all I'm saying is that the right should play the motte & bailey game too.

Because on top of being strategically ineffectual right now, far right stuff is also deeply unpopular. Center right at least has the leg up of being occasionally effective, having several actual popular things it can fight for, and plausible ways to phrase the things people are more skeptical about.

I've always held that to be true, but lately I've wondered if it's not a matter of presentation of viable choice. Meaning, the center right is the most popular position solely because it can occasionally get things done. What is popular might be what seems possible. Trump's wall was completely possible, and so people took to it. If the next guy ran on "Right-wing death squads deport every illegal in the country," it'd have 1% support, everyone would shit on him. But if seemed like it was actually possible, it might be as popular as the border wall.

To bring this back around. How useful is this for people on the left from an actual "winning and keeping power" point of view? Has anybody won an election because they insist on saying "Latinx" and "pregnant people?" The number of people truly motivated by that are less than ten percent of the population.

I'm looking at power in the sense of "getting people to do what you want." Elections matter only so much, it's the broader trends behind them, the intermingling of institutions that don't change every couple years.

So nobody votes because "Latinx" and "autonomous fetal incubation then potential birthing persons" are coined, they might even vote against people who use them (according to a recent poll). But if your HR department makes it policy, you use those terms. You curtail your personal vocabulary, public and private, in case it gets back to your job. If all you see in media is "Latinx," and all you face for the traditional terms is neutrality, awkwardness, or punishment, that's all you end up using. You don't teach your kids "Hispanic and Latino for these situations, Latinx for school/work/professional environments." You use their nonsense word. You're not going to lose your job over what to call mestizos, or get booted off social media, or have your bank sever ties.

That's power, some retards in HR who believe Twitter posts, can force a deeply unpopular linguistic change because it's a pointless hill to die on. Case in point, I feel stupid for even thinking this hard about gender-neutral SJW words, but some people are taking it utterly seriously. They'll hound and whine for it, as if the most important thing ever, while we feel like idiots for engaging in petty semantics.

Anybody willing to speak Reagan speak can use this strategically. And certainly the right is in a *much* better position to do it if they want than the left.

That is a heartening opinion. My best friend broadly shares it. My hopeful future is of a relatively peaceful balkanization, though I'd prefer what you two envision. Mind you, the only swing voters in America are huwhite, 80% of the population in 1980, so banking on the Latinx vote embracing Reagan Thought at similar rates is vital, because they appear to be amiable to European traditions.

People currently care more about the price of milk than the fact that Roe might get overturned.

It does sometimes feel like we're collectively all waiting for a tyrant to appear, and make us an offer. Obviously, Trump was not a true demagogue, but it'd be interesting how a real one would fare. I used to picture Red Dawn sorts of fantasies, where we all unify against a common threat, to restore the republic and wave the flag and eat hot dogs under a non-homosexual rainbow, free and happy again. Now I think it'd be more a matter of if the State could figure out mercenary logistics.

I don't want to fight for some utopia in some rando's head. I want to preserve the actual messy, contradictory, imperfect country and community I was born into.

Martin Luther has deep fear over salvation->Scuffle with the Pope over indulgence bagman->95 Theses->Persecution->Reformation->...->A gay non-denominational pastor preaches Satan in the Garden was actually the good guy because he was expanding Adam's mind with the apple.

Fear of Hell->Embrace Satan

A silly example. I get what you're saying now though. We're clearly still in the shadow of the Founders & Burkean conservatism, thankfully. As much as subversives and poor stewards have corrupted that, it's still a country/belief worth defending. The glaring issue with the ethnonationalist perspective is that is assumes a biological correlation with our principled republic and genetics. Given how fragile and new republics are, that is not apparently true. However, of all people who could live and vote to sustain what America was "meant to be," it would be people common to the geographic region the Founders came from.

So it's an awkward situation where you don't need white people to preserve freedom of speech, gun rights, capitalism, individualism, whatever aspects of America matter, but you do because no other group seems to care in sufficient numbers. The aftermath of the Rittenhouse trial drove that home. I read numerous articles and opinion pieces every day, and they all made mention of a white defendant, white victims, white jury, white judge, as if there was an intrinsic difference in how white people see self-defense, gun rights, and justice, to everyone else. They left it unspoken if they meant biologically or culturally, but either are deeply disturbing to consider, being subtext in mainstream news. All these authors, in the most public forums possible, were implying the laws and minds of the white man were different, and in this case inferior, to what "justice" would have been. Yes, they're crazy bigots, but they're also tolerated and celebrated in the public discourse, and it's not apparent what the moral recourse is beyond taking it on the nose that my opinion, based in those liberal principles, is on the way out.

Do we give each other sidelong glances, nervously hoping Burkean conservatism via Reagan's rhetoric is so universally appealing that people whose only link to European tradition is being colonized will embrace it? Do we stare down the ethno-nationalists and tell them we disagree with their beliefs, won't support their cause, but they can sit in the corner, where the lightbulbs are out, and have some fruit punch too? All these floating trends came together after Bush to fuck up the delicate machinery of a boring republic.

[Ragabul]

That is the value of the petty fringe groups, they take every speck of dust on their cheek as a grave insult, and make a spectacle about it, while the adults can play off them to have a reasonable conversation. But there is no counterbalance on the right, only flare ups that are shamed into submission, the motte and bailey. We can denounce the unreasonable people on the right, but there is no courtesy of reciprocity, you're hobbled, because the integration of leftist extremism coached in moderate terms is all pervasive.

There is some dusting off of ideas that originate in the far right as I already mentioned. Certainly elements of "Great Replacement" have and do get used. Terminology also drifts upward. SJWs is one. This is not only inevitable but useful and one reason I mostly don't care about the pedigree of ideas on either the right or the left. The content of the idea is what matters. Not having this as a standard inevitably puts you into a position of hypocrisy. I promise you that some idea you are fond of is 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon away from an origin in Nazis, fundamentalist religion, militant communism, or the like.

And again on some level, this strikes me as a complaint about fairness. It is not fair that the cultural powers-that-be condemn right wing whackery with considerably more vehemence than they do left wing whackery. And yet, given that this is true, any strategy that consists of not much more than railing against it but doing nothing in particular to work around it or change it is going nowhere fast. One strategy is to de-emphasize your actual unpopular goals and pursue adjacent more popular goals that will move you in that direction. Another is sitting it out in the trenches even when that looks like hypocrisy. One instance of conservatives shooting themselves in the foot over and over is they voluntarily surrendered positions in academia, media, etc. because they were somewhat ideologically skewed and thus uncomfortable. They are now ludicrously skewed. The two groups of vaguely right wing whatnot that did *not* abandon the Ivory Tower (free market economists & the types of law people who are members of FedSoc) have been wildly successful compared to pretty much every other component of the right.

Voluntary withdrawal for purposes of building a replacement institution is one thing, but otherwise what does withdrawal get you other than a personal sense of moral purity? This is on some level the same dead end as many of the original critical race theory people entered. Most of them were deeply, deeply, deeply pessimistic about the possibility of ending racism against black people. They really, honestly did believe that American institutions were so corrupted by it that anything less than radical would never fix it and they did not believe radicalism was tenable. Thus, their continued fight was mostly about personal meaning and "harrassing white people" (actual quote from Derrick Bell). And yet, they didn't quit their jobs in compromised law schools to go join the Black Panthers or whatever. And lo and behold, their ideas are now experiencing a zenith of popularity (in a bastardized form they wouldn't be satisfied with admittedly).

Will some people that remain be corrupted by the polluted institutions they remain in? Sure, probably most will at that. But what good is voluntarily surrendering every position of actual power and not building something to replace it? 2 out of 10 not getting corrupted is still 2 on your side in there that wouldn't exist if all 10 left to maintain purity. 10 leaving to build something new is even better, but that's mostly not happening.

Mindlessly rationalizing why you should capitulate to each and every new thing on practical grounds is not what I'm advocating. But "ragequit" is not a workable strategy to every slight and whatever actual strategy of resistance you formulate will probably at some level look like capitulation to the types of people for whom the answer is always "ragequit." Taking your marbles and going home does not mean that people won't just keep playing marbles without you and telling you to make sure the door doesn't hit you on the way out.

That is not at all how I would frame that shift, given it took SCOTUS fiat in the end, and decades of propaganda, but I get what you're saying.

It was SCOTUS fiat but it's SCOTUS fiat once the popular question was pretty much settled. This is still not good from a strictly procedural point of view but it is the reason why this didn't create an immediate, massive backlash and Roe did.

In the personal, practical sense, all I'm saying is that the right should play the motte & bailey game too.

This is strategic and workable. It's also arguably what the Tucker Carlson type niche in the ecosystem is for. Part of what they do is dust off things with bad pedigrees into a form that is plausibly possible for elites to take up and also to translate egghead ideas into a more populist frame the masses will listen to. It's one reason I do not waste much if any time getting worked up about anything Tucker Carlson types say even though most of it makes me roll my eyes. I absolutely do think that center-righters attacking Tucker Carlson types are shooting themselves in the foot. It still doesn't mean giving anything much farther right than Carlson explicit legitimacy is a strategically (or morally) good idea.

I've always held that to be true, but lately I've wondered if it's not a matter of presentation of viable choice. Meaning, the center right is the most popular position solely because it can occasionally get things done. What is popular might be what seems possible. Trump's wall was completely possible, and so people took to it. If the next guy ran on "Right-wing death squads deport every illegal in the country," it'd have 1% support, everyone would shit on him. But if seemed like it was actually possible, it might be as popular as the border wall.

I think there is something to this. In more detail, the public does indeed seem to have "status-quo bias" which is to say that as much as they bitch and moan about how things are, they actually punish anybody who tries to change it. But once you do manage to overcome the punishment and the change becomes part of the status quo, they will defend whatever the new thing just as vehemently as they originally resisted it. This is pretty much what happened with Obamacare. It still doesn't mean running on the explicitly unpopular is a good idea. If you manage to win on this, yes, you will probably have more momentum, but it also radically increases the chances that you will lose outright. Winning on the popular and then pushing the window on the possible once in power seems like an idea with a much higher success rate if with lower payout. (Though if Bernie Sanders is anything to go by, losing but doing way better than expected is also a viable tool for pushing people on your own side at least in a direction you want).

I'm looking at power in the sense of "getting people to do what you want." Elections matter only so much, it's the broader trends behind them, the intermingling of institutions that don't change every couple years.

More reason people on the right should not abandon these en masse just because staying in them is compromising and uncomfortable.

Mind you, the only swing voters in America are huwhite, 80% of the population in 1980, so banking on the Latinx vote embracing Reagan Thought at similar rates is vital, because they appear to be amiable to European traditions.

Given the shifts in Latino votes in the last couple of elections, this does not appear to be the case. They are also consistently very amenable to the old school American principle of "people who work hard get ahead" and do not actually have a massive negative opinion of law and order. (Again according to recent polling anyway). One reason I've deeply, deeply chilled on Mexico specifically. You want some natural non-white allies? Immigrants from Mexico who have been here for decades and people from Asia that got in with some merit type visa are totally it. But it's going to require chilling on ethnonationalism and being pro meritocracy and free markets on some level.

It does sometimes feel like we're collectively all waiting for a tyrant to appear, and make us an offer. Obviously, Trump was not a true demagogue, but it'd be interesting how a real one would fare. I used to picture Red Dawn sorts of fantasies, where we all unify against a common threat, to restore the republic and wave the flag and eat hot dogs under a non-homosexual rainbow, free and happy again. Now I think it'd be more a matter of if the State could figure out mercenary logistics.

I don't think I'm confident enough to make any particular predictions regarding this other than "it will probably involve more paperwork and be more boring than you'd expect."

However, of all people who could live and vote to sustain what America was "meant to be," it would be people common to the geographic region the Founders came from.

If this is true, it means these ideas were doomed from the beginning because no group (of non isolated) people has managed to maintain cultural and ethnic purity for very long on historical scales. Even insular, exclusionist groups like Jews and Roma have only a few drops of Semitic or Indic blood swimming in a sea of generic European blood if you look at genetics. The male line of ancient Europeans appears to have been largely wiped out and replaced by lines originating in the steppe, and yet the descendants of these still mostly became sedentary farmers (albeit speaking tongues descended from the steppe). It comes down to the memes, not the genes. (Or at least not genes that do nothing but cause cosmetic differences. Genes that change behavior may matter).

But it also means that any idea prefaced on maintaining ethnic or racial purity forever will also fail.

So it's an awkward situation where you don't need white people to preserve freedom of speech, gun rights, capitalism, individualism, whatever aspects of America matter, but you do because no other group seems to care in sufficient numbers. The aftermath of the Rittenhouse trial drove that home. I read numerous articles and opinion pieces every day, and they all made mention of a white defendant, white victims, white jury, white judge, as if there was an intrinsic difference in how white people see self-defense, gun rights, and justice, to everyone else. They left it unspoken if they meant biologically or culturally, but either are deeply disturbing to consider, being subtext in mainstream news. All these authors, in the most public forums possible, were implying the laws and minds of the white man were different, and in this case inferior, to what "justice" would have been. Yes, they're crazy bigots, but they're also tolerated and celebrated in the public discourse, and it's not apparent what the moral recourse is beyond taking it on the nose that my opinion, based in those liberal principles, is on the way out.

And yet it's also white people that mostly drive the woke message. As I've said before, this is on some level a battle over what "white people" will mean in the future being fought between two factions of white people. And non-white people are probably the ones who get to tip the balance on the question. And "the USA is a white Anglo-Saxon country" does not seem to stand a chance in heck of convincing many of them.

Do we stare down the ethno-nationalists and tell them we disagree with their beliefs, won't support their cause, but they can sit in the corner, where the lightbulbs are out, and have some fruit punch too?

To be really blunt, yeah, pretty much. If they had some actual strategy on offer backed by numbers and institutions this might be different but they currently do not. I don't expect them to be happy or quiet about this which is one reason I don't waste much time condemning anemic right-wing rallies or whatever. But inasmuch as anybody wants to organize and channel all this in some direction, as things currently stand, it would have to be with the far right sitting on the back of the bus if on the bus at all.

All these floating trends came together after Bush to fuck up the delicate machinery of a boring republic.

I'm not sure what point you are making here. That boring middle-of-the-roadness did not stop all this? No, of course not, and it never has done forever. But again the track record of boring gradualism at solving problems is way better than radicalism. This doesn't mean gradualism always works or that radicalism never works. Identifying when radicalism is definitely better is probably something that requires a rare genius to do well. It's an interesting question and probably something I should read more about.

I would also hazard that precisely what kind of radicalism and who is in charge of the radicals matters a lot as well. On some level, the American Revolution was radical, but it was also led by a bunch of radical boring cautious moderates if such a thing is even possible. The rabble-rousers (Samuel Adams types) did not end up in charge of the process at all.

The Civil War on some levels could also be considered radical and yet, again, successful side led by the boring moderate who was Lincoln.

As I said earlier in the thread, the most successful type of radical thing off the top of my head appears to be terrorism trying to get an occupying power to give up and leave.

[Ragabul]

*Addendum* A summary in a sense is that what's needed is a Donald Trump like figure who will still throw rhetorical bombs but is capable of doing it strategically and not just at whatever happens to piss him off in a particular moment.

What the New Right Sees

Another accidentally timely article I found that I mostly agree with. He is not talking about the actual far right types who go to rallies. He is talking about Sohrab Ahmari "post-liberal" Viktor Orban admiring younger right-wing eggheads. I think this article is broadly correct. These people do have the most accurate, correct analysis of what's going on today. What he doesn't talk about in this article and what I think they lack is any particular actionable plan of what to do about it.

*Edit*

Also relevant:

Hispanic Voters Now Evenly Split Between Parties, WSJ Poll Finds

It's one poll so take with grain of salt, but it can be added to the growing pile of evidence from the last 5ish years that no really this is a thing.

[Vol]

The content of the idea is what matters. Not having this as a standard inevitably puts you into a position of hypocrisy. I promise you that some idea you are fond of is 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon away from an origin in Nazis, fundamentalist religion, militant communism, or the like.

Being able to get away with naked hypocrisy, however, while flirting with these topics, is the danger. If someone important can stand on a soapbox, extoll the moral and economic virtues of civil rights, then segue into why concentration camps are necessary for malcontents, and face no more pushback than whining that they're a hypocrite, they're carrying institutional and public acceptance.

Or more simply, if the contents of a popular belief is, hypocritically, X and ¬X, and X is the current standard, then ¬X will reasonably overtake it. Ideally, this happens only for irrelevant issues, they skirt by. Everyone can look to their extremists and put up toll booths at each step in that direction. We are in a situation where a lot of those toll booths have been paved over. It doesn't materially feel that way, we still live very comfortably and peacefully, but the inane discourse is the warning, along with disturbing recent events. The far-left:left, far-right:right, authoritarian:libertarian situation is rather like the Mexican border, the Korean border, and the strait of Taiwan, respectively.

And again on some level, this strikes me as a complaint about fairness. It is not fair that the cultural powers-that-be condemn right wing whackery with considerably more vehemence than they do left wing whackery. And yet, given that this is true, any strategy that consists of not much more than railing against it but doing nothing in particular to work around it or change it is going nowhere fast.

Sort of. There is no appeal to a higher authority than the barnacles that run our government, we appear to be left to figure these things out for ourselves, more a whimpering demand to respect the common culture and rules we once largely agreed to. I don't expect fairness or wisdom, because the ghouls that run us are not Solomon, but I expect a greater respect for American liberal principles than a toddler letting an ice cream cone melt in the sun because they thought not licking it would make it last longer. It is deeply frustrating, but not unexpected.

Voluntary withdrawal for purposes of building a replacement institution is one thing, but otherwise what does withdrawal get you other than a personal sense of moral purity? This is on some level the same dead end as many of the original critical race theory people entered. Most of them were deeply, deeply, deeply pessimistic about the possibility of ending racism against black people.

There's a key distinction here, and studies back this up. Conservatives tend to believe in liberal (philosophy) ideals. There's the inertia of tradition, and Chesterton's fence, but once you get over that, they let you play in the sandbox too. That is not reciprocal, moderate leftists are about the same as moderate rightists, but beyond that point, there is a gross intolerance for dissent. The hidebound white men accepted their ideological opponents, accepted them into schools, hired them, and let them have a fair shake. And now, as those people who had their dreams denied take up those posts, young white men are lying about their race to get into college. Companies and agencies are actively boxing out people on racial and ideological lines, so where do you look to for people to hold the line?

I agree, fighting (abstractly) to retain those institutions is the higher road, withdrawal is a last resort in lieu of violence. And that the time for this fight was 40-60 years ago. Calling for a Long March through the institutions was a very different prospect for civil rights activists, they were facing people who vehemently disagreed with them, but did not have the means or will to wipe them out. That's why the times it did happen, it became iconic. The idea that someone right now could become a hiring manager for any big company, implement a totally blind merit process, and survive the consequence of having mostly white, Jewish, and Asian people get hired, seems as quaint as Andy Griffith. What is the strategy to begin a push with? Assuming of the population of conservatives, there exists the talent and will to handle all these roles, and that a parallel society could be built, consolidation and hardening of hearts seems more reliable than feeding people into the ideological Somme.

Mindlessly rationalizing why you should capitulate to each and every new thing on practical grounds is not what I'm advocating. But "ragequit" is not a workable strategy to every slight and whatever actual strategy of resistance you formulate will probably at some level look like capitulation to the types of people for whom the answer is always "ragequit." Taking your marbles and going home does not mean that people won't just keep playing marbles without you and telling you to make sure the door doesn't hit you on the way out.

To keep the Chinese metaphor going, Ben Shapiro is Mao and Tim Pool is Zhang Guotao, and they're herding the moderate true believers to Shaanxi. And then Shapiro will murder Pool's followers to secure power, heh.

I think my difficulty is imagining what you're describing. The practical means of putting up a bulwark of traditional sanity via vocation. Ironically, as social Darwinism has come back into style, Darwinist principles also show the failure of those ideologies to propagate. There's a pressing need for the few productive demographics to supply children to sustain institutions, so homeschooling/homesteading is a beautifully effective idea to starve out the crazies. Until that becomes illegal. But if you're talking more broadly of the mood of the right, "all is lost, fend for yourself, and maybe an election win will fix everything," then yeah, that's not helpful. Presupposes there exists that potential for the liberal principles that invited their own downfall to be used to restore them, and that gets harder to think is true every year.

It's also arguably what the Tucker Carlson type niche in the ecosystem is for. Part of what they do is dust off things with bad pedigrees into a form that is plausibly possible for elites to take up and also to translate egghead ideas into a more populist frame the masses will listen to.

Pretty much. My only qualm with him, besides a couple neocon beliefs, is that he floats the ideas out there, puts them in vaguely acceptable terms, then stops short. Strategically, he's a steam release, Hannity is for the Boomers, and O'Reilly once was/still is.

But once you do manage to overcome the punishment and the change becomes part of the status quo, they will defend whatever the new thing just as vehemently as they originally resisted it. This is pretty much what happened with Obamacare.

And as mentioned, civil rights. We're semi-obligated to assume that what's popular has a good reason, hence why manufacturing consent is obscene.

(Though if Bernie Sanders is anything to go by, losing but doing way better than expected is also a viable tool for pushing people on your own side at least in a direction you want).

Sanders is an odd case, because his effect seems to have pushed the party more authoritarian than left, but emboldened the left to be brazen. At the same time, I think almost all of the right, except the Rand libertarians, are going to be on board with universal healthcare. Not on the principle of giving our government total power of life & death as a moral act, or that they'll not embezzle trillions into their cronies, but as a practical matter of grabbing a last shrimp cocktail from the buffet as the ship takes on water. So Sanders did a vital job of forcing that idea to a moderate position, or the moderate perception of power dynamics away from individual liberty.

Given the shifts in Latino votes in the last couple of elections, this does not appear to be the case. They are also consistently very amenable to the old school American principle of "people who work hard get ahead" and do not actually have a massive negative opinion of law and order. (Again according to recent polling anyway). One reason I've deeply, deeply chilled on Mexico specifically. You want some natural non-white allies? Immigrants from Mexico who have been here for decades and people from Asia that got in with some merit type visa are totally it. But it's going to require chilling on ethnonationalism and being pro meritocracy and free markets on some level.

https://sacredstructures.org/messages/w ... ary-fable/

It's an interesting case, as Europeans-descent is now below 50% of the youth. Mostly mestizo (I think), and living in a failed state bordering a sick one, there should be a lot of that overlap, to be "cousins." As I've said, even the open racists I know agree that immigrants that live like "Americans should" can be tolerated, though not (socially) forcibly mated to their kids or planted in their communities. My father loathes illegals as a group, but of the Hispanics he's personally worked with, nothing but praise. And the slow process of integration seemed to be working, until academics trained enough radicals to shit the bed.

It gets into a weird place that isn't exposed to the sunlight. I suppose if offered a choice between Orania, or an identical community but ethnically diverse, I'm picking Orania. But I'd rather have Jose and his devoutly Catholic family as a neighbor than a lily-white feminist activist. Loud, obnoxious rednecks or loud, obnoxious Orthodox Jews, coin flip. It's an intersection of expectations and harmony, and if I'm the dumbest, most evil person around, I'm living in a good place.

So if the rapidly growing Hispanic bloc does not end up splitting, with large amounts of swing votes, do you shift?

But it also means that any idea prefaced on maintaining ethnic or racial purity forever will also fail.

Yes, until we start living in space colonies anyway.

It's a paradox, where if the philosophical idea that ancestry is irrelevant is true, to live by that philosophy means to acquiesce to anyone else who does care about ancestry. We're not defending or preserving anything, therefore anyone who does, by default, overrides the apathy. So are we correct to treat the handful of genes that make us white as utterly valueless, and does that apply to every other ethnic group in existence? And if other groups (writ large) disagree, are they inherently more correct?

I have to think the reasonable path is somewhere between the poles of Nazi and nihilism.

That boring middle-of-the-roadness did not stop all this?

The boring system was working well enough, but was woefully unprepared for the shock of miseducated Millennials entering the workspace. Lots of people asleep at the helm, missing trends and warning signs, along with fantastical economic theory not working out.

Identifying when radicalism is definitely better is probably something that requires a rare genius to do well. It's an interesting question and probably something I should read more about.

Hypothetically, what possible situation would cause you to think a radical solution is best? I'm not quite there, but it's like a closing window kept open because my fingers are trapped, and half the country is hitting the frame with a mallet.

As I said earlier in the thread, the most successful type of radical thing off the top of my head appears to be terrorism trying to get an occupying power to give up and leave.

Wouldn't be too hard to make America too much of a pain in the ass to be worth governing. Cell towers, bridges, highways, power stations, it's all out in the open, lots of chokepoints, needs to always be running full tilt to maintain our immense quality of life. In theory anyway. But it reads better than random acts of violence.

[Ragabul]

Hypothetically, what possible situation would cause you to think a radical solution is best? I'm not quite there, but it's like a closing window kept open because my fingers are trapped, and half the country is hitting the frame with a mallet.

Hard to say until push comes to shove because I may actually be a coward when it counts for all I know. Until I'm actually there I don't really want to make lofty predictions about what I would do. That being said what I *hope* I would do:

Actual bans on guns and/or books would not necessarily radicalize me, but I would absolutely violate these laws. I would not turn in guns or banned books I own. I would not snitch on people I know who own guns or banned books. If I knew how to do it, I would absolutely try to traffic underground books or writings.

I would actively try to squirrel away wealth if there was some kind of racially mandated redistribution (not counting some kind of generalized taxation targeted for the benefit of all poor people that gets called "reparations" or taxes for *living* victims of housing discrimination, mass incarceration, or the like).

Actual "I'm willing to shoot people" level of radicalization would require something like suspension of elections, institutionalization of some kind of de jure racialized caste system, widespread suspension of core civil rights like assembly, freedom of conscience, and speech, or unchecked mob or state violence targeting me, my family, neighborhood, etc.

If this is just "what would it take for me to vote for specifically Trump?" I don't actually think there is much of anything that really would make me vote in any kind of convinced way. Not because of moral horror (though I have nontrivial amounts of that admittedly), but because I think the man is an arrogant idiot who only cares about himself. Would I vote for someone like Trump if some Stalin level thing was on offering from the other side? Yeah, probably. But I'd do it feeling like I was handing off the wheel of the ship to a blind, deaf man who happened to be the best choice because all the other options were blind, deaf, and also paralyzed from the neck down. I would do it because I can't pretend Stalin isn't Stalin, but also fully expecting the blind, deaf helmsman will run the ship into the rocks.

Beyond that, I'd probably go for vanilla right wing radicalization if two things were true. 1) The actual government began forming and enforcing policy on a Marxist/critical theory type axis that entailed forcible redistribution on essentialist lines or active repression of disfavored groups. 2) The standard liberal opposition is nonexistent or completely ineffectual.

*Edit*

Just occurred to me after I posted this but you asked when I thought a radical solution would be *best* and I more answered when *I* would personally radicalize.

As for when radicalization is *strategically* best overall, I can think of 3 instances off the top of my head based on nothing but me guessing.

1) When opposing factions are also radicalizing and actively planning plausible government takeover. Played right you can outmaneuver them or even throw them out once they've done a lot of the work for you. This is not far from what the Nazis and the Bolsheviks did.

2) When the existing government is extremely brittle and does a poor job extending its reach outside key enclaves. This can let you consolidate power in places they can't reach and created a parallel system that eventually overwhelms them.

3) When you are occupied by a technologically superior opponent.

Here I am assuming that you mean violent radicalization. All three of this presume some level of preexisting chaos or a weak central state.

When nonviolent radicalization is best, I'd have to think about some more. My hunch is that uncompromising position + willingness to play the long game (across multiple generations even) is the thing that works best to actually produce notable changes. Christians won. It took 6 centuries. Radical abolitionists won. It took 150 years.

[Vol]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDnkaAzi5gE

A fascinating bit of wartime propaganda. And intensely depressing, because the (propaganda) idealism could've been.

[Ragabul]

There was at least something more honest when propaganda was self-aware that it was propaganda. Propaganda never stopped but the whole idea of it has now become deeply suspect and unpalatable (again the "everything is about the Holocaust" thing; I assume it has something to do with horror at Goebbels). So now we're stuck with propaganda that people pretend isn't propaganda or honestly believe is just "the truth" which on some level is far worse. I think I pointed out once that on some level memes are literally just filling the official propaganda niche. Most even have the same format as a basic wartime propaganda poster. Big provocative image of some kind with giant font making some highly emotive on the nose point. This might be me over-reading things and that format is just innately appealing to people for whatever reason and this is just a basic principle of advertising or something. But it's a format that the "official" communications seems to have mostly abandoned in favor of subtle manipulation.

That being said I do recall seeing some *actual* propaganda from I want to say Radio Free Asia or some similar entity targeted at China and that stuff was shockingly old school (showing Xi as this Hitler type figure suppressing gay people and such) and I was quite surprised they actually did that. Apparently it does still exist in some corners.

*Edit* Admission I did not actually watch this. Also with family, but that also involves a lot of dealing with my dads *horrible* taste in movies (nonstop "cop on the edge" and C- monster flicks; and that's the compromise position as it would otherwise be on Fox news and OAN all day) so I might sit and watch it with headphones at some point.

[Vol]

There was at least something more honest when propaganda was self-aware that it was propaganda.

Because it was not intended to convince anyone or prove anything, it's a bold liar slapping his dick on the table, you accept it or you shut up and do nothing anyway. With modern propaganda, it's rats and slime, layers of fallacies and gaslighting. Our lie-detectors are picking up on it, but don't understand why.

So now we're stuck with propaganda that people pretend isn't propaganda or honestly believe is just "the truth" which on some level is far worse.

Because it means there's no understanding of the message the propaganda is espousing, only the surface command. A well-trained dog has no idea why I'm telling her to sit, shake, and roll over, but if she does, we're both content. Whereas if she did understand, and performed anyway, it's infinitely more meaningful. Hence why the video I posted was poignant and what I see now is infuriating.

This might be me over-reading things and that format is just innately appealing to people for whatever reason and this is just a basic principle of advertising or something. But it's a format that the "official" communications seems to have mostly abandoned in favor of subtle manipulation.

It's that, on both accounts. There's an old Bolshevik piece that's quite literally the soy-faced bourgeois shrieking impotently while a slab-jawed Chad prole grins at them.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

What pains me the most about the subtle propaganda is that there's no tail to grab, no obvious fallacy to refute, or simple lie to dismantle. It's like noodling and finding only snappers. You don't ever get the catfish, if you catch my drift.

That being said I do recall seeing some *actual* propaganda from I want to say Radio Free Asia or some similar entity targeted at China and that stuff was shockingly old school (showing Xi as this Hitler type figure suppressing gay people and such) and I was quite surprised they actually did that. Apparently it does still exist in some corners.

Americans are notoriously poor at understanding east Asian sensibilities, at least as far back as Sun Yat-sen, so I'm not surprised. I don't imagine they have quite the same perception of Hitler as countries with relatively large, extremely influential, Jewish diaspora have. Though it's something of a running joke that America exists to preach homosexuality in other counties right now, so maybe that's the point.

*Edit* Admission I did not actually watch this. Also with family, but that also involves a lot of dealing with my dads *horrible* taste in movies (nonstop "cop on the edge" and C- monster flicks; and that's the compromise position as it would otherwise be on Fox news and OAN all day) so I might sit and watch it with headphones at some point.

It was portraying black people as effectively dark-skinned WASPs who were always here too, fought for the country too, built it too, are Protestants too, and they're just as dignified as huwhites, and want to serve to stop the fuhrer's tyranny too, so give them a fair shake, Johnny Whitemen, because they're men just like you.

My condolences, but enjoy the family time!

[Vol]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/art ... 732562.php

An interesting little dust up. Two teachers were grooming students by monitoring their web use through some school snooping software. It's all technically legal, but obviously, parents are somewhat upset. But I got a laugh out of how the article focused in on the technically-legal "spying" as the reason people are so upset, and not the grooming part, before going into the editors apologetics for the teachers.

[Mazder]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Two-California-teachers-were-secretly-recorded-16732562.php

An interesting little dust up. Two teachers were grooming students by monitoring their web use through some school snooping software. It's all technically legal, but obviously, parents are somewhat upset. But I got a laugh out of how the article focused in on the technically-legal "spying" as the reason people are so upset, and not the grooming part, before going into the editors apologetics for the teachers.

I mean if Americans really wish to be against the whole grooming thing then they'll need to abolish the pledge of allegiance every day thing for a start, lol.

[Vol]

When I was younger, I was more hardline about the Pledge and the flag and other symbolic things. But at this point, it's so perfunctory, and meant for a different people in a different time, I agree.

[Mazder]

When I was younger, I was more hardline about the Pledge and the flag and other symbolic things. But at this point, it's so perfunctory, and meant for a different people in a different time, I agree.

Yeah, I mean, the whole point of instilling love for one's country just can't be done as an artificial construct like having to say the pledge. It's the same thing as if you force kids to pray. You're just going to teach them that they've just got to make a show of it, rather than actually believe the things you want them to believe, or hope they believe.

At the end of the day it has to be a choice and ultimately the best way to show true love for your country is being able to acknowledge when things are batshit fucking insane and fucked up and speak out against them, something your nation could use a hell of a lot more of right now.
Hell, mine could too, so it's not as if we're without fault.