TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.

In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.

There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.

Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, Scientific^TM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.

Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.

I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.

Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:

In my review I said that ESP only occurs, according to the anecdotal evidence, when a person is experiencing intense stress and strong emotions. Under the conditions of a controlled scientific experiment, intense stress and strong emotions are excluded; the person experiences intense boredom rather than excitement, so the evidence for ESP disappears...The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.

This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.

There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:

Dressed in his famous white “dontcaredam suit” Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he related the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were lying in port in St. Louis, the writer had a most remarkable dream:

In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.

Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream. Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him a huge overdose of opium for the pain. Normally, the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised sixty dollars to put Henry in a special metal one. Twain explained what happened next:

When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.

Now who of us would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it all as a series of coincidences? Twain certainly could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”

Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.

However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.

If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.

Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:

In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.

We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.

Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4

This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.

It's worth considering, at the very least.

Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:

As Aldous Huxley pointed our long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences, we have no reason to think from our ordinary experience that water is composed of two gases fused together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by “traumatizing” it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with advanced technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands.

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to exquisite technologies, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not “material” at all. But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars, necessitated the participation of tens of thousands of professional physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, and required decades of preparation to inflict it and then analyze its results. Hence the recent discovery of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson at CERN.

We invested our energies, time, and money there, and so we are finding out all sorts of astonishing things about the world in which we live and of which we are intimate expressions. But we will not invest them here, in the everyday astonishing experiences of human beings around the world, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones—that is, models that assume that “mind equals brain” and the psyche works like, or is, a computer. What is going on here? Why are we so intent on ignoring precisely those bodies of evidence that suggest that, yes, of course, mind is correlated with brain, but it is not the same thing. Why are we so afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world; that we possess fantastic capacities that we have so far only allowed ourselves to imagine in science fiction and fantasy literature? (The Flip, pg. 38)

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

Why not just get vaccinated? I also thought it was kind if bullshit but did it to avoid running my social life.

Are you concerned about health risks or is it a principle?

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

When we consider the lie that America is a nation of immigrants

Starting with this assumption, you really need to prove it. I find it hard to read the rest when you start with such an incorrect premise. Especially when you say things like:

To begin with, it’s important to note that immigrants have never been the dominant force in American society.

If you read your American history, you should know that all of the white folks here in the U.S. were immigrants. Immigrants were absolutely the dominant force in American society during the most pivotal period - when American society was actually being built. That's what people mean when they say we are a 'nation of immigrants.' On top of that, we have have multiple waves of immigration Throughout our history, in the early 19th century and around the turn of the 20th.

When you say immigrants do you really mean 'non-whites' or 'non-British?' If so you should just come out and say that, it would make much more sense based on the argument you seem to be making. The premises you are taking to start this argument right now makes me not very interested in reading past the first bit.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 9mo ago

There's been a ton of bashing of immigrants and the idea of assimilation here recently. Lots of doom, not a lot of hope or true attempts at understanding. I'd like to briefly outline a positive case for immigration and assimilation, looking at three major groups throughout history.

First we have Rome. Famously Rome is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, empires an lights of civilization in the Western world. In many ways the Pax Romana and the heights the Romans achieved paved the way for the modern Western order. The United States' governmental system is in large part explicitly modeled on the Roman system.. How did Rome achieve so much success? Many scholars believe it was their ability to assimilate new peoples into their culture, and make them productive members of society. There's even a word for it: Romanization. (Or if you prefer, the less politically correct 'civilizing of barbarians.')

Going from their example, we have the many great and powerful Islamic empires. Now before everyone spouts off about how intolerent Muslims are, I agree. For many historic reasons Islamic states nowadays are the opposite of an immigrant loving place that's open to assimilation. Ironically, some scholars claim that:

How can the current state of political violence in Muslim countries be reconciled with the often-invoked tolerance of the past multicultural and multireligious Muslim Empires? One way to address this conundrum is to distinguish between toleration and tolerance. The former refers to the modern institutionalised protection of religious, ethnic, and gender differences through the rule of law, while the latter implies organic mechanisms specific to communities to accommodate differences.

From this perspective, Muslim Empires were tolerant, while modern-day Muslim states lack toleration. The past tolerance expressed itself in the regulation of the local religious diversity under the purview of the Islamic judges (qadis).

There's a lot of definitional games here, but Muslim empires were certainly notable for assimilated other 'People of the Book', i.e. Christians and Jews, which even their contemporary Christian states thought was insane. Many Muslim empires were much stronger than European nations at times, especially during the so-called Dark Ages.

Finally, we have America. I won't rehash this too much, as I think it's practically inarguable that America is a nation founded on the principle of immigration, religious freedom, and has levered it's ability to assimilate masses of immigrants to become the greatest nation in the history of the world.

The point of all these examples is to say that yes, immigration is difficult. And yes, modern Western nations may not be in a perfect spot to assimilate immigrants, there are many flaws with social programs and how immigration works currently. I'll concede all those points.

However, I think the reason immigration and assimilation is so attractive to so many intellectuals lies in the potential! If your culture can figure out a way to bridge gaps between different cultures, ethnicities, and groups, if you can truly make disparate peoples unite under one flag, one cause, one set of ideals, you can rule the world. The tail benefits of successful immigration policies are massive.

It's a major mistake to sneer at modern issues with immigration and say it's a doomed project when so much of our culture exists because of cultural plurality.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

Come on man, @ymeskhout is routinely one of the highest quality and most evidence based posters here. Plus he’s got great legal knowledge.

We’re lucky to have him, especially if we actually care about not becoming a far right echo chamber.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

Just like how euthanasia is only ever used for 95 year-olds with terminal brain cancer and Alzheimer’s, right?

The snark combined with the strong claim without a source makes me dubious you're actually trying to 'argue to understand.' At least mention what you're referencing with the 300 bonus points metric?

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 9mo ago

You may have a point for France, but for America at least this is hilariously backward. It denies the whole founding purpose of the USA.

May I remind you:

Give me your tired, your poor

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Nations can be built and can thrive based on more than just ethnicity or “family” as you call it. It’s been done before, to more success than anything else in the history of the world, and we can do it again.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

For the folks here who talk heatedly about trans issues - I want to pose a thought experiment. Let's say it's the year 2300, and people can quickly, cheaply and painlessly switch their sex from male to female, and vice versa. There are no long term side effects, and it's as simple as going to buy a pill from the corner store.

On top of that, fertility issues have been handled, babies are grown/raised by artificial wombs and many different types of family structures are available with parents being able to choose what works best for their preference. Gender and sex can play a role if needed, but only for those who wish to have traditional families. It is not socially stigmatized to raise a family with two women, or two men, etc.

If this all were the case, would you have issues with people transitioning genders/sex still? If not, at what point along the line do you think it becomes okay to freely switch?

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

/r/neoliberal vampires

If I have to become a neoliberal in order to become a vampire, I may accept.

In all seriousness, yes losing your home to developers sounds terrible but it does promote valuable use of land. At the end of the day it depends on how you fundamentally view land and how it should be used.

From my point of view, having land simply reward whoever squatted there first with no view to their effort on the land is both unfair and a huge waste of potential value. If anything I would say the landowners who get a massive benefit from simply being lucky enough to live in a desirable area are the vampires, as they are sucking away monetary value from the surrounding area by doing essentially nothing.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 2mo ago

Is this sarcastic? Do you genuinely not understand that many people live lives of despair and feel they have no hope of things ever getting better?

Most people don't want to OD from drugs or commit suicide. They do because their lives are purposeless, hopeless, and devoid of meaning.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 3mo ago

No need to beat yourself up so much. It’s perfectly legitimate to believe the Eucharist to be Christ’s literal blood and body. Many modern ‘rational materialists’ believe things just as ridiculous on their face, like the Big Bang or the origins of life.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 9mo ago

VisionOS and the Future of Input

Ever since the computer first arrived, keyboard and mouse has been the standard. You have a flat surface with raised little squares that you smack with your fingers. You have another little rounded shape with a flat bottom you move around, and click with.

This awkward, clunky interface has significant culture war elements, in that an entire class of powerful people arose - specifically people who didn't have traditional status markers like height, strength, or indomitable physical presence. Instead these 'nerds' or 'geeks' or whatever you want to call them specialized themselves in the digital realm. Now, the Zuckerburgs and Musks of the prior generation rule the world. Or if they don't, they soon will.

These outdated interfaces seem perfectly normal to everyone who has only used them. Sure many people have used a controller for video games, and may think that controllers are superior for some cases, but not others. Keyboard and mouse is the only way to operate when it comes to a computer, most people surely imagine.

That being said, it's actually quite easy to dip your toes into alternate input methods. Talon is a system that utilizes voice to let you do practically anything on a computer. You can move the mouse, click on any object on your screen, dictate, edit text, and you can even code quite well. Talon's system even supports mapping operations, sometimes very complex ones, to custom noises you record on your own.

On top of that you can integrate eye tracking, using a relatively inexpensive device. If you've ever used voice control combined with eye tracking, you can operate around as fast as someone who is decent at using a keyboard and mouse.

If you have ever used these systems, you probably know that because most digital setups are built for keyboard and mouse, it's not necessarily perfect. Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.

But. There is a certain magic to controlling a computer through your voice, or your eyes. It begins to open your mind to new possibilities, the idea that there are better, faster, easier, more natural ways of interfacing with a computer than the defaults we have been stuck with.

Enter Apple's VisionOS.

If you haven't seen the recent demo of Apple's new VisionOS they're breaking brand new ground. The entire OS is built around looking at things, and making minute hand motions to control the icons you're looking at. There are no controllers, no physical interfaces whatsoever besides your eyes and your hands. It's breathtaking to watch.

In a review from John Gruber, a well respected old head in the VR space and a creator of markdown, the possibilities behind this new technology are apparent. Gruber describes how

First: the overall technology is extraordinary, and far better than I expected. And like my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, my expectations were high. Apple exceeded them. Vision Pro and VisionOS feel like they’ve been pulled forward in time from the future. I haven’t had that feeling about a new product since the original iPhone in 2007. There are several aspects of the experience that felt impossible.

Now Apple does tend to get a ton of hype, but this reaction of being amazed by the experience is surprisingly common among earlier reviewers:

Similarly, Apple’s ability to do mixed reality is seriously impressive. At one point in a full VR Avatar demo I raised my hands to gesture at something, and the headset automatically detected my hands and overlaid them on the screen, then noticed I was talking to someone and had them appear as well. Reader, I gasped.

The implications of this 'spatial operating system' are varied and multitudinous, of course. There will be all sorts of productivity gains, and new ways of interacting with the digital world, and fun new apps. However I'm most interested in how this innovation could shift the balance of power back to the strong and physically capable, away from the nerds.

No longer will clunky interfaces make sense - instead computers will be optimized around healthy, fully functional humans. Ideally the most intuitive and common control schemes will reward physical fitness and coordination. Traits which nerds lack in droves.

Will we see a reversal of the popularity that being a nerd or geek has gained in the past few decades? Only time will tell.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

If I had to steel man the idea of making all villains white, it would go something like this:

Before the vast majority of Western history, minorities, especially blacks Hispanics and to some degree Asians have been caricatured. When mass media first came about this was accelerated to an unprecedented degree.

After decades and decades of this harmful depiction, negative stereotypes have been baked in. In order to reverse the already baked in trends, we will need at least a few decades of vilifying white people. Then maybe we could have equal representation and declare that the war against whites is over.

To be clear I don’t exactly advocate for this position, but I do think it has a sort of insidious logic around balancing the scales so to speak. And I would agree that minorities still deal with more racism than white people when it comes to day to day interactions, in America. Institutional bias is a different animal, and conflating the two muddies the water in my opinion.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 2mo ago

Thanks for the quality response here. I also think the effects of stress are dramatically underrated by modern medical science. Overall we have to understand that our understanding of population level genetics and statistics are extremely poor and misleading. We need far more epistemic humility than we have, especially for a claim as strong as HBD.

Unfortunately, it's easy to believe things that confirm your priors.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 7mo ago · Edited 7mo ago

In terms of Gender War, it's hard to predict. The Progressive zeitgeist seems to be losing a bit of steam, but it has seemed like that before and it always plows forward relentlessly.

Frankly without a major disruption to the global tech economy, a major war or political backlash or something, I see us sliding pretty directly into Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism. Technology will get more and more apt at changing our bodies until we can change sex at will. No idea how we will handle families and reproduction, we may just make humans immortal and have reproduction be something we do for fun, or as we need to handle population levels.

The tension is caused due to the historical juggernaut of European Christianity discovering the unjust cries of the victim, and over the millenia slowly trying more and more to prevent harm and abuse in any and all ways. This historically unfolding process has been going on for far longer than most here think.

Ultimately we're going to have to learn to have a stable society without oppressing people, either that or have a nuclear war that sends us back to pre-Christianity, and hope that people don't come up with a similar philosophy. Personally I'd vastly prefer the former option, but sadly it seems many here see the way women act nowadays and just want to burn it all to the ground. I'm sure there are other options, but the binary is clear to me.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 7mo ago

Good! If people are intimidated then it filters for people who are serious and willing to grow in their opinions, take criticism, and continue posting. Those are the type of people we want.

If you are so emotionally fragile and/or lazy you can stomach writing a few paragraphs of your thoughts about a link, maybe you aren't the right person to make a top level post.

I don't mean to be a jerk here, but years ago I felt the same way before I started posting my writing online. I ended up just doing it, and realized that my fear was pointless and holding me back. Since then I've been in a much better place mentally, and I think many others would benefit from facing their fears and doing the same.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

These claims are hyperbolic, do you really think people will outright ban cars? The goal is to make public transit reasonable or possible for people to use, not destroy all the roads and cars people have.

This type of disingenuous argument about older folks is why I get so frustrated about density conversations.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

But I have to live in the world that I live in - a highly-complex, highly-diverse urban society that demands stratification and the ability to reason probabilistically about people based on group generalizations, since I have no possible way to get to know each person I meet as an individual. I need to be able to draw reliable probabilistic assumptions about people in order to impose some measure of legibility onto an environment which by its very nature defies that legibility.

This is the key and I strongly agree with it. Especially for folks like myself in sales, you have to be able to understand and thrive within many different types of communities and social settings.

It may not be ideal, but it's the world we've built. Blame Capitalism, blame science, blame Christianity, blame whatever you want, but we are in a fully global world. Our societies are so intertwined we would likely collapse if we were fully cut off (as we got a peek of during the Covid supply chain crisis.)

The biggest tell for me that these sorts of posters wouldn't be able to survive in a different world comes from Resident Contrarion's post on what it's like to be a Christian. He flat out states that the center of the Christian worldview is that anyone who is not Christian, who doesn't hold the faith, is morally wrong and will go to hell. He tries to equivocate by saying he doesn't really think they're bad people necessarily, but it's clearly hogwash.

You can't operate in a global society if you go around thinking that everyone who doesn't share the specific interpretation of your religion is immoral, a view @TheBookOfAllan very clearly lays out downthread. The cognitive dissonance will either drive you insane, or you will become a cold emotionless shell who can't connect with the vast majority of people. Maybe some trad folks are okay with that tradeoff, personally I find it repugnant and against the very point of society.

The stable equilibrium you believe you’re endeavoring to protect has already been destroyed some time ago in the environment wherein most of us have to make our way in the world. And unless we all go back to living in the Shire, that equilibrium won’t be coming back, because it is inherently at odds with the necessities created by complex and diverse modernity.

I get the sense they realize this, and want to persuade/manipulate/force everyone to go back to that time. Unfortunately the Djinn is out of the bottle, and I find it ludicrous people seriously think we can return to that sort of traditional world.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

I would say that Jews do have a hugely disproportionate amount of power in society, but they are also generally higher IQ and higher achieving than pretty much any other group so I guess I’m OK with it. I mean hell the whole reason America and the West won World War II is because the Jews came over and built super weapons for us.

Speaking as someone who is not Jewish.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1mo ago

How far am I supposed to bend over backwards extending charity to all the sorcery that turned out to not actually work? Magical beliefs have been with us since we climbed down from the trees, and after thousands of years we have what? What have you brought us?

All of civilization and the foundation that allowed science to be developed and flourish, perhaps?

Yes materialist science is powerful. It's also flawed, and from my perspective has essentially been burning down our cultural myths and the built up social capital of millenia in order to fuel it's relentless search for reductionist physical truths. That store of fuel is almost gone, and if we don't realize and pay attention to the societal structures which undergird science, it won't matter how much scientific knowledge or power we've accrued. We'll kill ourselves anyway.

To be honest, I'm not sure what non-materialists even want from us materialists. They aren't bringing any experimental insights, they aren't bringing any testable theories, and they don't have any magic that works. Do they just want to get snorted at less when they relate their ESP anecdotes at a party or on an internet forum? I don't know what they expect me to do with what they've given me other than shrug.

Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 7mo ago

FWIW, I agree with you. @Sloot's intense and sometimes deranged takes on the Gender War get very tiresome for me as well. He does toe the line between "offensive, annoying but directionally correct" and "crazy hates-all-women redpiller" quite well though.

I think Sloot represents the cleaned up, highly rationalized anti-women maximize your 'game' rhetoric that we saw get developed by people like Heartiste and Rollo Tomassi. Unfortunately this entire worldview towards dating and relationships grew up as essentially a counterpoint in a mimetic arms race as feminism grew into an ouroboros that began to eat it's own tail when it started trying to feminize men far too much during the early 2000s.

While some men, like myself, were lucky enough to stumble upon less blackpilled, non women-hating writers like Mark Manson and eventually and pull ourselves out of a toxic, anti-social and antagonistic mindset towards women, many other young men who grew up with the internet and /r/redpill telling them how to date instead of a well-adjusted father figure have continued to go down the dark left hand path. The prevalence of single mothers raising young boys can't be understated in terms of causing this phenomenon as well. I know we talk a lot about inceldom and the future of sex here, and unfortunately I think men like Sloot, who from a homo economicus standpoint do have a rational set of values and goals, are going to dramatically worsen the problem of sexual relationships as the gender war heats up.

At it's core the dating market is suffering from a sort of tragedy of the commons issue, or perhaps a prisoner's dilemma. The societally healthy, pro-social approach that Christianity and most religions have endorsed for essentially the last ~10,000 years give or take of marrying young, being loyal to your partner, reproducing and teaching your sons to do the same is at risk. More and more young men are deciding to defect from a combination of pure lust mixed with either anger at the world, rejection of God and/or other religions, rejection from women they can't emotionally process, or all three at the same time.

It doesn't spell a good future for either sex, as far as I can see. I hope that our modern rationalistic worldview can produce an answer as compelling as the old religious framework, or we're in some serious trouble.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 8mo ago

But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.

I mean, I strongly disagree. I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever, at least under your worldivew.

I'd like to see a humanity that moves forward and values things more than just base reproduction. I'd like to see us value knowledge, and understanding, and frankly love. Even if it contradicts some of the transhumanist futures some other users believe in.

Demographics are not destiny, and never have been. Memes are destiny, and you'd better start acting like that's the case, or you'll be outcompeted.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

What did liberalism promise that it hasn’t fulfilled though? You say people haven’t chilled out but then again we haven’t had a major war or civil unrest for decades.

Also we have done a decently good job of living together in a diverse society. It’s not perfect, but I doubt it ever was. Dissidents were just silenced in the past or didn’t make it into the history books. Now we’re letting that frustration out, which is on balance a good thing if we can figure out how to address it.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago

Pulling out of Afghanistan, BBB, student loan relief, CHIPS Act, etc. He's doing things, even if they aren't things you agree are problems.

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TheDag Per Aspera ad Astra 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

I made a top-level comment here a couple of weeks ago that tried to outline some of the major updates on the Georgism discussion in the ratsphere.

(Editing for less strawmanning.) I think that a lot of the problem is that Georgism strikes at the heart of fundamental value differences for folks. Many people seem to equate Georgism with Communism, or redistribution of wealth, which I don't find convincing.

For instance:

@bnfrmt:

LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale.

@Brannigan:

Georgism at heart is about identifying what is often the most precious possession a person can have, that most of the middle class has spent 30 years of their lives working to pay off, to render to their posterity, and stealing it from them despite the fact that they haven't really done anything wrong.

@laxam

"We know better than you how you should use your land", is roughly analogous to, "We know better than you what you should put in your body".

@Westerly

This strikes me as rationalists rationalizing their own class self-interest. The same way EA just so happens to only support democrat politicians, rationalism coincidentally just so happens to work out extremely well for the types of people that are rationalists. Easy to be YIMBY when you are 25 and living in a rented apartment in San Francisco.

@naraburns

My concern with LVT is that I regard most kinds of property tax (as well as income tax) as fundamentally immoral

@The_Nybbler

Still low-effort is "it's communism, but only with land". But given how bad communism has turned out, I think it's sufficient. The Georgist LVT is equivalent to the government owning all the land and leasing it out to the highest bidder.

@MeinNameistBernd

Frankly advocating "georgism" is the "break out the guillotines" limit for me, because the victims are my people and the preparators are /r/neoliberal vampires.

These are not cherry picked responses - all of these had at least 10 upvotes, and in many cases 25+.

Some of the responses were less charitable, which has led to me getting heated on this topic, such as people literally calling me a vampire (and getting 15+ upvotes) for arguing for a type of land reform.

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