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Notes -
Trump shot during rally.
The biggest news. The biggest! It literally just happened. I don't know what to say. Commentary beggars one's belief. I apologize for the brevity of this post, but the implications of it are mind-boggling. Political violence has escalated (perhaps, degenerated) into new levels of unforeseen disaster. What do you Americans think?
There was a poster here who promoted the scenario of Trump being the target of an assassination attempt and was widely criticized by many here. Have any of the people who done that willing to say mea culpa and accept that they were wrong?
There is a connection between the rhetoric promoted by various figures and media towards Trump, and it being more likely to lead to unhinged people to consider assassinating him. And also a connection between taking that threat seriously and try to suppress people and media of such rhetoric and condemn this, with acknowledging the problem and the risks it represents.
Taking seriously the genuine problem of anti right wing and anti trump extremism, it something that should have happened previously. But it becomes obvious now that there needs to be stronger condemnation and a serious desire and attempt to suppress this extremism.
I don't think acceptance of being wrong on any particular subject matters. Centrist philosophy dictates that nothing ever happens. Be that the invasion of Ukraine or assassination attempts on world leaders. If anything does happen it's a 'Black Swan' event that no one could have predicted. Then it moves into the past and we chalk it up to things that happened in the past but could never happen now because reasons.
A more cynical reactionary philosophy would say: Things like this have been happening and will continue to happen as things move away from the abnormal spikes of human flourishing that European people afforded themselves, that centrists have grown up with, and towards a more balanced representation of humanity. Which happens to be ill equipped to deal with scarcity and large populations of terminal 'have nots'. Something that Europeans, through millennia of suffering, managed to break away from for a few short decades.
There's no individual instance of 'aha' that can change a centrist mind. They can always cope back to the vestiges of their top 5% lives. Maintain that the world is propelled forwards by the actions of normal, rational and well meaning people and that because of that no forecast of doom can ever be accurate.
To that extent there's no counter argument. It's long been a meme that a frog in a pot won't jump out if you bring it to a boil slowly. It's just really annoying to sit in the water listening to your fellow frog talk about how the water isn't that hot yet.
I think I could be roughly described as a centrist, but I don't think I'd ever characterize my view as "nothing ever happens". I'm a Taiwan war doomer, after all (in that I think that a war with China over Taiwan is at least fairly likely in the next ~8 years, as well thinking as if we fight one, we will more likely than not lose the war). I do think history is a great guide, but it's always at least a little tricky to identify macro/largescale trends in real time, rather than with hindsight. However with a US-focused lens, I view the system as robust and generally speaking having handled things like mass immigration just fine historically. And even civil war, and world war, and crazy economic depression. So yeah, of course I set the threshold for "doom" pretty high, and think I have good reason for doing so.
Like, I thought and honestly still think that assassinations of presidents are not very likely and not worth worrying about at least in a general political sense. Most of the danger of extremist political positions comes from when they interfere with regular governance, a la Freedom Caucus or The Squad (though how extremist you think those are is I guess debatable... maybe MTG/Pressley? Or maybe we open it beyond Congress?) I also tend to view virtually all major political movements as rooted in some sort of general but legitimate grievance, even if I think that the logic leading to their actions is, well, illogical. In much the same was as I view pop music as inherently "good" in a kind of revealed-preference kind of way, perhaps.
With that said, I will still say that I'm a little bit of a leaner on the "great man" school of history. I have a friend who is on the extreme "larger forces" side of things, who talks about stuff like how Steve Jobs didn't do much for Apple and Elon Musk didn't do much for any of his companies, it was all the workers/company/larger forces and I think that's total crap. I do think that individual, idiosyncratic decisions as well as individual politicians do in fact influence history to a good degree. That's just a fact, but it's harder to predict, so I usually decline to do so where possible and instead acknowledge that there's always going to be some sort of error bar from that. In other words, "psychohistory" a la Foundation series in bunk.
Maybe a better question is this: What do you consider "doom"? Of course you can deliberately define a paradigm where there's no falsifiability, but that doesn't mean that it exists.
I consider doom to be anything that causes a reproductive collapse or any sort of negative large scale genetic bottleneck.
On that front your comment illustrates very well why I have a big problem with centrism and centrists. You trace back the steps of modern human history, drawing confidence from that which has brought us to a point of a self induced dysgenic bottleneck.
I can't look at modern Western societies and think: This has gone great! In fact, considering the technological advancements that have been made, I have a hard time imagining things going worse short of a more immediate mass extinction event like a nuclear war or pandemic. The amount of desperately needed first world genetic material that will be lost every single day in the coming decades will never be replaced. All in the service of an ontology built up as reasonable and moderate by its adherents.
To make a long story short: if the path you took led you to doom, it doesn't matter how scenic it was, it was the wrong path.
Why is that genetic material so desperately needed? Just because first world populations shrink doesn’t mean there’s not going to be plenty of first worlders still.
The obvious need is for the advancement and maintenance of first world societies. You need first world people to stave of stagnation, deterioration and corruption.
On a social level the proportions that make up a population are very important if you care about first world living standards. This is why populations like Iceland can create a better living environment than populations in various eastern European countries despite the total number of high trust, high IQ people being higher in eastern Europe.
It has to pay off to be high trust. Otherwise the people predisposed to trusting will learn to do the opposite. This creates a drastic division within a society where people, most often the smartest who are very capable of forming collectives of trust, close themselves off from wider society because engaging with it fairly is not worth it since it has too many trust breakers.
This effectively makes nepotism and corruption a winning move, which is obviously awful for anyone who idealizes any modern conception of a first world society.
Interesting. Are there documented examples of this happening in real life?
Also, why is high IQ and not, say, high pro-social values so important for establishing trust?
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