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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I posted this on a progressive Christian subreddit yesterday, only to have it removed a few hours later. Frankly, I don't know what I expected to gain from speaking my mind there, because aside from a few people who asked genuine questions, everyone else was annoyed. Probably should have just posted it here.

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Title: Emotionally drained by politics

For some context, I consider myself to hold left-leaning Christian and political viewpoints. I have gone through a journey of faith that has led me to re-evaluate conservative teachings and doctrine, which I no longer support or believe in. One of the most important values for me is mutual respect. I react negatively towards people who don't actively listen and hear out people who's values and beliefs are different than theirs. To be clear, active listening isn't tantamount to listening to agree, but rather listening to understand. It appears to me that this kind of listening is severely lacking not only in Christian circles, but in much of society today. I also hold above all other Scripture, the Great Commandment, and believe with my whole heart that loving your neighbor as yourself means loving every neighbor.

It of course bothers me greatly when I see Donald Trump calling Kamala Harris "mentally unwell since birth" or Donald Trump and JD Vance proclaim as fact that Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH, are eating dogs. But it also bothers me when I see pro-Palestinian activists circulating posters depicting a university president with devil horns and missiles (https://www.courant.com/2024/09/19/uconn-leaders-refuse-to-meet-with-pro-palestinian-protest-group-following-grotesque-antisemetic-imagery-depicting-university-president/), or those times when both Marjorie Taylor Green and Jasmine Crockett go back and forth taking personal jabs at each other, or even something like Tim Walz telling JD Vance to "get off the couch" and debate him. From my lived experience, acting in the manner that some of our politicians do is not fruitful and is not loving.

I recognize that the policies of the GOP are dangerous to minority groups in this country. I recognize that a Donald Trump presidency would threaten American democracy. But at the same time, I cannot help but feel like politics as a whole has become more about being right instead of making our country better. And part of making it better, I feel, is listening to not only people who hold the same values and beliefs, but also to people who don't. It appears to me that politicians are very quick to assume that all people who support the opposing party live in a vacuum, so they don't bother to hear them out. I have not seen a single Democrat or Republican candidate try to build bridges across the aisle in an effort to win over their vote. It seems like they're all cooped up in their respective echo chambers, only really caring about what it takes to get elected and nothing more.

I've actually decided not to vote at all this election. Respectfully, I am not looking to have my mind changed on this, as I've already heard and considered most of the usual arguments for why I should ("it's your civic duty" "Trump will win if you don't", "Vote the issues, not the person", etc). I live in a solidly blue state in New England. My congressperson has been in office for the past 15 years and has always won by a wide margin. Sure, there are my state and local offices, but I'm not convinced that anyone who's running would actually listen to the ideas that I have to make out state better. I think they're too busy catering to the interests of the party and wealthy donors.

I don't know, maybe what I'm seeking with this post is more understanding about my frustration than actual guidance. It's very hard for me to want to be invested in politics when it seems like all everyone wants to do is yell and scream at each other.

TL:DR This election season, due to all the personal attacks and inflammatory rhetoric and lack of mutual respect, has left me very politically disillusioned to the point where I don't want to vote anymore. Any understand or gentle guidance is appreciated.

I don't know, maybe what I'm seeking with this post is more understanding about my frustration than actual guidance. It's very hard for me to want to be invested in politics when it seems like all everyone wants to do is yell and scream at each other.

I know you didn't ask for guidance but how you're feeling is clearly a function of how plugged in you are. Do you use social media? Watch news daily? How much and for how long? I ask because...

it seems like all everyone wants to do is yell and scream at each other

all the personal attacks and inflammatory rhetoric and lack of mutual respect

...this is not unprecedented in American politics. The best (and frankly the funniest) examples are Jefferson v. Adams (1800) and Jackson vs. Adams (1828). That's not to say I condone it, but rather that it's not unique to this election, or even to American politics and history. For all our technological and scientific progress we're still human.

I know you didn't ask for guidance but how you're feeling is clearly a function of how plugged in you are. Do you use social media? Watch news daily? How much and for how long? I ask because...

I've been cutting back significantly since the start of the year. I've dwindled down posting on Reddit to about once a month. I have a site blocker on all my devices that blocks it. When I do override it, it's so I can view non-politcial content, and even then its only for 30 minutes at a time. I'm not on any other social media service, either. No Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, you name it. I do watch a lot of YouTube, but like how I handle Reddit now, its mostly for non-political content. I don't watch the news, and I don't even have linear TV. Until recently, I would make the rounds on more neutral news sites, like the AP, Reuters, and NPR, but now I've just paired it down to a local news site that picks up national and international stories from the AP/Reuters wires. I'm trying to fight our society's incessant need to have the most late-breaking news at our fingertips.

I think politics is exhausting. And I’ve said before, if the systems were working as designed working fairly well, I really think most people would be really tuned out most of the time. It’s just that I believe that we’re in the late Empire period of the Anglican-American Empire (which I content started with the sinking of the Spanish Armada) so none of our systems actually work properly. We’ve become a decadent society and our state’s competence and capacity have shrunk enough that you are stuck trying to wrestle a system you into something like competence just to get the basic things done. And I don’t think it will get better quickly because most of our systems (including BTW the institutional church) are weakened and often barely functional.

I sympathize with you quite a lot, I am non-US resident and I observe very similar pattern. However a lot of it I think is in the end are very fake controversies. Watching the media it seems that every single week there is a new crisis or a new controversy which will affect the future of the whole nation. People get riled up and lose themself in it.

I recently read a decent book called A Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. His outlook is to just accept that you already lost the culture war and just focus on what you can affect: build a community, be active in your local environment and live your values in your daily life - basically build something like Benedictine monastery in your environment. It can be definitely more useful compared to raging on Twitter over climate change or dog-eating Haitians or any other number of controversies you cannot move in any direction anyway.

The story was cats.

It's a matter of taboo. If it's normal in Haiti to eat cats or dogs, I would expect a non-filtered-for-assimilativeness population of Haitians in the United States to have members who catch and eat cats or dogs, just as I would expect them to catch geese, which they have done. Also deer, which I only speculate about, but we wouldn't find it expressly unusual for a foreigner living in the US to hunt and eat deer, and this returns to the point above. If it's normal for them to do it there, then given 20,000 normal Haitians moved to the US, the probabilistic assumption is they have done it here.

I also hold above all other Scripture, the Great Commandment, and believe with my whole heart that loving your neighbor as yourself means loving every neighbor.

What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself?

hasn't Trump built a bridge across the aisle. he is campaigning with Tulsi Gabbard and RFK. similarly, the Democrats have support from anti-Trump Republicans.

Is it bridge-building, or is it simply ongoing realignment?

Well then don’t vote if you don’t want to? A group of strangers on the internet, almost none of whom agree with you, is not a support group for not doing something.

did you watch the VP debate? I thought it was relatively calm and respectful, at least as far as anything in American presidential politics can be respectful these days. It's probably the sort of thing you're looking for, or at least a step in that direction. of course there was still a lot of "your running mate is hitler!!!!" but they were at least able to discuss the issues a bit and find some common ground.

No, I'm honestly just emotionally over it all.

No, I'm honestly just emotionally over it all.

This is OK. Just stop paying attention to politics. It will make little difference to your life beyond the improvement of shaking off the stress.

Almost any claim that X disaster will happen if you don't vote for Y is garbage. Most people just keep working, living, loving and tune out politics.

The VP debate looked like two reasonable people trying to discuss what’s best for the country.

I didn't watch it because I generally assumed that neither candidate would have been civil and that both are so deeply partisan that there wouldn't be anything to glean from it.

I think if you watched it you would be very pleasantly surprised. I was.

I'm happy to report that in this case, at least, your assumption was at least partially incorrect. I can't speak to whether you would glean anything from the debate, as I don't know how much you know about either campaign's issue positions. However, it was the furthest thing from bullying both Vance and Walz were very civil throughout, and the debate was far more policy-heavy than the Presidential overcard a few weeks ago. Though they disagreed a lot, they did so politely, and also were ready to acknowledge areas of commonality. Both men saw an approximately 20 point increase in their favorability ratings post-debate, according to a CNN poll.

Are you looking for non-progressive opinions? If so I will share my thoughts.

believe with my whole heart that loving your neighbor as yourself means loving every neighbor

Loving your neighbor means loving other Christians, and specifically precludes false Christians. ReligionForBreakfast explains this well in his recent “the most misunderstood parable of Jesus” analysis video. The historical evidence is overwhelming that Samaritans were considered co-religionists, and the textual evidence points to Samaritans being the “far case” of neighbor status. The Parable of the Samaritan defines who is a neighbor, and the further case of neighbor is a righteous co-religionist who isn’t totally aligned with your practices. God calls you to love your fellow Christians as yourself; and He calls you to love your brothers the most (those in your church, denomination, friends). While Christ does say to “love your enemies”, the Sermon on the Mount involves exaggeration to shock us into dispositional perfection: we do not actually cut off our hands when our hand leads to sin, or pluck out our eye when our eye leads to sin, and so the commands cannot be taken as literal practical rules.

It’s crucially important that we understand who are neighbors are. If you extend who you consider to be your neighbor beyond what God has established, you aren’t being “more good”, you are being bad. You are committing the worst sin, which is failing to love God with your mind and failing to obey his commandments. If you fail to obey Christ’s commandments then, according to John, you never knew him.

I'm not necessarily looking for guidance from a progressive perspective, nor was I really looking for a conversation about what "loving your neighbor" means. I'm quite convicted in my position on the latter and not really interested in having my mind changed on that.

Okay, but it seems integral to your progressive philosophy. You might feel better considering that Christ does not want you to love random strangers or, in this case, Haitians who practice voodoo.

Yes, it is, and respectfully, I'm not looking to have my mind changed on it.

Are there some relevant things you are willing to have your mind changed on? The whole point of being here is discussion. Not making write-only posts.

Yes, I would like to be challenged on the notion that all politicians have become completely self-serving and/or only serve the wealthy and elite and are incapable of nuanced thinking.

But you’re correct now and would be incorrect to change your viewpoint.

So the thing you want challenged shouldn’t be.

You should challenge the idea that Trump is an existential threat to anything or that living through Christ makes you live your best life … or some such.

Yes, I would like to be challenged on the notion that all politicians have become completely self-serving and/or only serve the wealthy and elite and are incapable of nuanced thinking.

Maybe instead re-evaluate the position politicians play in your worldview? One of the reasons I lean libertarian is my understanding that people's well-meaning motives and actions are easily corruptible and so the best we can do is limit the power given to anyone person. IMO, the root of your angst is that you want a single person moral enough to exercise a level of power no single person is moral enough exercise. The solution is not to create a false specter of a more-perfect human, but to reduce the power of the federal government.

As I was just explaining yesterday, almost no one ever changes their mind on anything, so making everyone sign a pledge before the discussion starts attesting to a non-trivial probability of mind-changing is an unreasonable standard to hold people to. You should go into every discussion assuming that no one will actually change their minds.

Christian agape for a Haitian voodoo neighbor would involve getting them to stop practicing voodoo and turn to Christ.

Christian agape applies to Christians, the in-group. Christians have an obligation to lead strangers to Christ, but the emphasis of love in the gospel is decidedly not on strangers. In Christianity, the voodoo practitioner is not your neighbor even if he literally lives next door to you.

Among other things, this interpretation doesn’t really jibe with the Great Commission.

The Great Commission does not say to make disciples out of neighborly love, or any love for that matter. It says to make disciples. Upon becoming Christian they become neighbors, brothers, etc. The theology of this can be explored through other passages: “many are called but few are chosen”; “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world”; “he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons”; “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him”; “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you”. It’s not simply that you create disciples through your own efforts and they become Christians from a blank slate because they have persuaded — there’s an element of Christ having already chosen those who would hear his message. There are logic and moral arguments against this which are known among atheists but that is, of course, outside the premises of the religion. Romans 9 takes this idea to an extreme level, calling those who can’t hear Christ “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, molded by God to show his wrath”. Not very neighborly to non-Christians, right? Barely humanizing. Another interesting tidbit is that the original Eucharist was called the Agape Feast, the same word used for love. Outsiders were completely excluded from participation in the central love ritual of the religion, and not just outsiders but students who were yet confirmed members. Those who participated but in Judas-esque fashion were also utterly dehumanized in the epistle of Jude, labeled “reefs at your love feast for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever”. Lastly, I would ask you whether Christ can love someone he never knew? Christ, plainly, never knew those who do not follow him, and at his return he tells them to go away. (Matthew 7:23).

The argument in that video falls apart when he assumes the man who is beaten is an Israelite. Jesus never states this, he is just identified as a man (ανθρωπος) who is stripped of his clothes and knocked unconscious, being rendered effectively unidentifiable. The Samaritan would have been a far case neighbor to the listeners of Jesus' parable, but to the man in the story, it is deliberately ambiguous. If Jesus wanted this to be about Jewish relations, he would have identified the man as a Jew.

He also tries to gloss over all of pre-reformation interpretation as allegorical and while there is a ton of allegory in those early writings, No less than St. Jerome (347-420) in his Homily on Psalm 14 lays out a pretty bog standard reading that is scarcely different than you'd hear at Sunday School class: 'Some think that their neighbor is their brother, family, relative or their kinsman. Our Lord teaches who our neighbor is in the Gospel parable of a certain man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho…. Everyone is our neighbor, and we should not harm anyone. If, on the contrary, we understand our fellow human beings to be only our brother and relatives, is it then permissible to do evil to strangers? God forbid such a belief! We are neighbors, all people to all people, for we have one Father.'

He is identified as an Israelite with “from Jerusalem to Jericho”. Jerusalem did not have a large foreign population. Jericho was a major trading hub used by Jews. While Jerome’s interpretation is his interpretation, it’s neither the oldest nor the most traditional. The oldest and most common interpretation in the early church is the see Christ as the Samaritan. Just per wiki,

”This allegorical reading was taught not only by ancient followers of Jesus, but it was virtually universal throughout early Christianity, being advocated by Irenaeus, Clement, and Origen, and in the fourth and fifth centuries by Chrysostom in Constantinople, Ambrose in Milan, and Augustine in North Africa. This interpretation is found most completely in two other medieval stained-glass windows, in the French cathedrals at Bourges and Sens."

It’s better to reason about what the parable means. If the purpose is to abrogate the command to love neighbors and replace it with everyone, then that would be specified. If everyone is to be our neighbor, then that would also be specified. If the Samaritan is in the story only as a moral exemplar, then there would be no reason to specify his identity, and indeed most parables do not specify identities. The Samaritan is the third identity introduced of three, and all three are “Israelite”, and so if the purpose is to tell us identities don’t mean anything, then the identity of Pagan or Canaanite would be introduced. But God is God, and every word has meaning. “Jerusalem to Jericho” is homeland; Samaritan is the furthest edge case of religious brother. Remember, the answer put to test Jesus was “who is my neighbor”. While I suppose you could argue something like “my neighbor is the one who behaves like the Samaritan to me”, I think it’s more reasonable to assume that the identifiers specifically placed in the parable are there for a reason.

Allegorical interpretation was never done in a vacuum, it was something that existed alongside other methods of interpretation, traditionally one of four meanings acknowledged by early Christians. If are going to respond to the author of the Vulgate with 'That's just like your opinion man' I'm not sure you are taking this seriously. The reasoning about what this parable means has been done for millennia and caring for strangers is an interpretation by no means a recent innovation. When your non-progressive take involves reversing 2000 years of Christian teaching and practice I shudder to think of what you consider progressive.

It is a story about who reads the law better, and I agree with you and the video that all three should be regarded as law followers. The love God, love your neighbor formulation as a summary of the Law was not a new innovation, it was a oft repeated gloss of Leviticus 19:18 and Deut 6:5. The issue then and now is that our glosses become our totalities. Our law expert has given the pithy Sunday School answer that everyone knows. What our Lawyer doesn't want to acknowledge that the discourse he pulls his answer from also contains "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." (Lev 19:33-34). This is why the identity of the victim is obscured in the parable. Jesus isn't teaching anything new here, he is calling out the failure of the Jews to live up to their own Law, using the example of a law follower furthest from the centers of power. There is nothing to abrogate because the command is already there, Jesus is just mindful of the jots and tittles others forget.

Now, to be fair, in modern times the parable it's self has been pulled from its context to support things that would be unimaginable, especially in regards to the behavior of the guests. Loyalty and honoring the host on the part of the stranger are a given. Betraying one who has shown you hospitality was the gravest of sins, What Jesus accuses Judas of in John 13:18. Dante rightly places them in the deepest pits of hell.

The parables specifically are interpreted allegorically by every early theologian. Jesus effectively demands an allegorical interpretation in Matthew 13. Also, the anagogical and moral analyses are usually intwined with allegory.

If are going to respond to the author of the Vulgate with 'That's just like your opinion”

Again, the dominant reading of the parable was not that everyone counts as your neighbor. That is a minority viewpoint. Do you believe that every opinion of Jerome is correct? For instance, in his homily 35 on psalm 108, do you agree that every Jew is accursed because they bear collective blood guilt for killing Jesus? I’m excited for you reply — you give him full authority on being the author of the Vulgate, and you’re all about taking him seriously. (Feel free to copy my reply of “Jerome’s interpretation is Jerome’s interpretation”. I won’t judge you. But you can’t say he is wrong — after all, you note he wrote the Vulgate).

The reasoning about what this parable means has been done for millennia

Most of the early conclusions are not that everyone is your neighbor. Even more importantly, the conclusion doesn’t make sense upon careful inspection of the parable.

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong

In Leviticus the strangers are supposed to be circumcised and follow every single law of an Israelite. “But you shall keep my statutes and my rules and do none of these abominations, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you”.

Note that Jerome's conclusion to his statement about Jews bearing the collective guilt for Christ's death is that Christians must abhor violence and pray for the salvation and forgiveness of all Jews: "That is the Lord's weapon; that is our weapon, too, prayer. If ever anyone should persecute us and hate us, let us say likewise: In return for my love, they gave me calumny. But I, what did I do? I prayed. In order to get the better of them? God forbid; does the Lord pray for one in order to vanquish him? Why did He say: 'but I prayed'? What was His prayer? 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing's"

But really, Jerome's correctness is entirely besides the point. The point is that he was prominent, and bringing up another opinion that he held a prominent position on only reinforces my point. Its not that any church father was right about everything, its that the idea that loving your neighbor involved anyone you encounter was framiliar, not foreign to early Christians, and its in no way refuted by allegorical interpretations existing alongside it either. Rather as you rightly say, it was intertwined with the allegory. For example, in Homiles on The Gospel of Luke 34.2 Origen tells us that:

"He [the Lord] teaches that the man going down was the neighbor of no one except of him who wanted to keep the commandments and prepare himself to be a neighbor to every one that needs help. This is what is found after the end of the parable, “Which of these three does it seem to you is the neighbor of the man who fell among robbers?” Neither the priest nor the Levite was his neighbor, but—as the teacher of the law himself answered—“he who showed pity” was his neighbor. The Savior says, “Go, and do likewise."

Right after this he launches into allegorical interpretation, which also has a universal bent:

"The man who was going down is Adam. Jerusalem is paradise, and Jericho is the world. The robbers are hostile powers. The priest is the law, the Levite is the prophets, and the Samaritan is Christ. The wounds are disobedience. The beast is the Lord’s body. The pandochium (that is, the stable), which accepts all who wish to enter, is the church. The two denarii mean the Father and the Son. The manager of the stable is the head of the church, to whom its care has been entrusted." (34.3)

All this talk about a dominate reading is backwards projection of modernist legal theory onto people who just didn't frame the Bible using those concepts. The assumption that their use of allegory means that they rejected other interpretations just doesn't hold when you actually read what they wrote.

Yes, strangers needed to be circumcised to celebrate passover and circumcision for Christian converts was a topic of hot debate when Paul was writing. Note that he dropped that requirement. Hospitality was never supposed to be limitless. Guests had to follow the laws of the land, and give honor to their hosts. Liberationist readings of the parable fail because they ignore any expectation that would be placed on guests.

But this universal welcome and hospitality is a well established part of the faith, starting from Exodus and going through the church fathers. The fact that this reading of the parable doesn't make sense to you but did to the overwhelming tide of Christianity might give one pause. You say that Jesus demands an allegorical interpretation of his parables, but point to a novel historical critical youtube take as the only evidence of your position. If you want it both ways, that's fine. You can even have new revelation if you want. Maybe Moroni has issued you some new tablets for your new pro-social religion. You can do it, but what you have is another progressive religion, something you've invented to get what you want. Which is a strange place to end up with what was supposed to be a non-progressive take

Christian perfection is praying for enemies, yes. There’s nothing novel about that. But enemies are still enemies. And enemies are not strangers, and strangers aren’t neighbors, and neighbors aren’t brothers. Jerome telling us to pray for enemies is irrelevant to the questions at hand. The reason I bring up Jerome’s view on Jews is because obviously you don’t share that view. No one shares that view today. So your criticism that I had the audacity to disagree with Jerome is instantly rendered void and actually pretty humorous. You also disagree with Jerome. You disagree with multiple pages he wrote about Jews being cursed with bloodguilt, and I disagree with a few sentences in which he declares that the whole world is his neighbor. So let’s move past ol’ J-Dawg and focus on other evidence?

the idea that loving your neighbor involved anyone you encounter was familiar to the early church

As evidence for this you quote Jerome again. As an example, Origen does not conclude from the parable that everyone is now your neighbor.

But this universal welcome and hospitality is a well established part of the faith

The early church had a welfare system reserved for themselves. If they were not Christian, they were not welcome at the Eucharist (originally: “love feast”). If they sinned without repentance, Christians were commanded never to eat with them. If a widow wanted the financial charity of the church, they had to prove good Christian behavior to earn it. And in the Epistles, we have maybe eight passages commanding Christians to love brothers-in-faith, and little about neighbors. This is remarkable: if the apostles believed that they should love everyone as themselves, why do we only see an emphasis on brotherly love? Brothers would be but a part in the love for neighbor. The logical argument is that the neighborhood has become the Christian Brotherhood, just as Israel has become Christendom.

Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannota love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. [this is remarkable. Christ said our commandment was to love our neighbor just as we love God! But John has turned this to brother?]

Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another

Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor. [to everyone: honor. To brothers: love]

Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares [this is telling: do one thing for brothers; do another for strangers]

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself [this whole chapter is about brothers. Note that in speaking to brothers about brothers, he ties this into neighbor]

The idea that Christians should love strangers as themselves is the Achilles heel of Christianity. It has caused irreparable harm to Christianity worldwide and ushered in a world of absurd progressive theology and ultimately harm. It naturally leads to absence of brotherly love, because there can be no exceptional love for brothers if you are obliged to love strangers as yourself. The heart of Christianity is brotherly love. God Himself, as a Man, gave special love to his friends and made them brothers. He did not give special love to strangers, though he healed them upon request and when passing through. He stopped what he was doing to raise up Lazarus because he loved Lazarus particularly. And see here —

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you

You completely missed the point. You are arguing ought, but you are ignoring what is. You have to contend with the evidence, but you just laugh and say 'I disagree'. I don't care that you disagree with the history of Christianity, I care they you think you can rewrite it. Universal care for the stranger has been part of the faith since the Torah, continues through the church fathers, was never rejected or repudiated in the pre-modern era, it recognized reasonable boundaries, had the goal of making the stranger a brother, and was in fact a hallmark of the faith.

Origen says one must "prepare himself to be a neighbor to every one that needs help". If that isn't a conclusion that says help everyone that needs help I'm not sure what you are reading. We can't get anywhere if you keep ignoring the evidence.

Christianity would have gotten no where without the care for the poor and outcast, they fed and clothed them before they became Christians. This is the historical record. the disconnect isn't in the welcome, its that lack of formation in modern times that has become a problem, coupled with the embrace of secular materialism. You love the stranger by making them like yourself. If they reject that, you send them on their way, if they abuse or exploit your generosity, they sin like Judas and we pray that they can find forgiveness in this life. But that doesn't mean you don't help them from get go. You absolutely need to make sure your welfare system is secure against abuse, that's in the Bible too, but that doesn't abrogate Leviticus. But tossing out the scripture and abandoning the historical practice of the church because you disagree with it just makes you a different kind of progressive theologian.

More comments

Loving your neighbor means loving other Christians, and specifically precludes false Christians. ReligionForBreakfast explains this well in his recent “the most misunderstood parable of Jesus” analysis video.

That video mentions Jews and even antisemitic tropes several times. It does not say that loving your neighbor means loving other Christians; Jews are not Christians.

In ReligionForBreakfast 17:20, the conclusion is that “the parable is about insiders and how things should work for insiders”. 17:28, “the Samaritan is being used as a limit concept”. In 17:42, that the Samaritan is the edge case to specify the broader concept of the people of Israel.

To understand how this applies to Christians requires Christian assumptions. These are difficult to succinctly explain to non-Christians but widely agreed upon in mainstream Christian traditions. The stories in the Gospel are for the edification of Christians, not Jews; the elements of the story involving temples and scribes and Pharisees are not stuck in the first century, but apply universally; Christians are the Chosen People, with those who do not accept Christ being cast aside. When Christ offers a teaching to his community it is accepted that this teaching is for his proclaimed community of followers, with the lessons applying today. In other words, the gospel lesson mentioning Samaritans apply to what the Samaritan represents for Christians today, and interpreting otherwise would be a serious misinterpretation (“beware of the teachings of the Pharisees”).

Okay, so you're telling me that a parable that is about Jews, mentions Jews, and whose analysis says that Christians have misinterpreted it because of antisemitism, is trying to say that Jews do not count as your neighbors for the purpose of loving your neighbor? I'm not even asking you about Samaritans or Pharisees.

(And even if that's what you think it means, that's not what the video you linked thinks it means.)

You’re not making the compelling critique that you think you are making. There are things you have to know first before you can understand the parable. (“This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: ‘You will indeed hear but never understand’”).

  • A major plot of the New Testament is that the disbelieving Jews are severed from God and the gentiles are grafted in. But that takes place at the end, and this parable takes place earlier. So how do we understand it?

  • We can’t understand it as applying to modern Jews, because that is the religion of the Pharisees centered on the Talmud which denies Christ. The New Israel for Christians is about Christ. Indeed, no theologian has ever interpreted it as actually involving present-day Jews and Samaritans. Maybe some silly ones today, but no Church Father.

  • Christians read the parables as applying universally, involving moral lessons and symbols. Disagreeing with this fine if you don’t consider yourself Christian, but nonsensical if you’re trying to understand the readings under Christian assumptions (the purpose of the original OP). This is shown in Matthew 13.

  • We are left with a parable which applies today in form and symbol, but using context from the first century (before the Atonement and before Christ becomes the full-fledged mediator between God and Man). So who are today’s “Samaritans” which act righteously? Christ somehow answers the question “who is my neighbor” here, and we have to understand it as applying today. There must be a neighbor category; who fits the category?

If Jesus didn’t intend to have a message to Jews why did he say in Matthew 15: 24 “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”?

I disagree. It's quite obvious that Christ viewed himself as the Messiah of the Jewish people and the Samaritans were the outgroup for his Jewish followers. He explicitly compares the Jewish PMCs with the Samaritan and shows that actions are more important than earned or inherent prestige.

Imagine Mirza Ghulam Ahmad telling Muslims that a mufti and a sayyid didn't help a man, but a Christian did. Other Muslims don't consider Ahmadiyya Muslims and maybe the religions will diverge, but Mirza Ghulam Ahmad considered himself one.

The historical evidence goes against the notion that Samaritans were the “out group”. The most consistent enemy of the ancient Jews were the Canaanites and the contemporaneous enemy was the idol-worshipping Pagan nation. The Samaritans were as close you could get to Jewish without being fully Jewish. The Mishna mentions that they could celebrate liturgically together. In speaking to the Pharisees (a sect), Christ has a number criticisms and calls them devil-worshippers. In speaking to the Samaritans, there is no criticism of their theology and just a mild “salvation has come from the Jews”. The idea that the Samaritans were hated and despised by ancient Jews isn’t really evidenced. And God, being God, wouldn’t say something and mean something else. If he wanted to use a despised group, he would do so in the clearest way, and if he wanted to use a neighboring group, he would do so in the clearest way. If the very notion of a neighbor was to be abolished, which is what the outgroup theory implies, he would treat it the way he abolished divorce (“you have heard it said… but truly: …”; or “because of the hardness of your hearts…”). Instead, Christ himself says that we must love our neighbor, and the usage of “neighbor” must mean something, otherwise he would say “everyone”.

You're confusing the enemy with the outgroup. I was using Scott's definition of "proximity plus small differences". Just enough differences to not count as "one of us".

Instead, Christ himself says that we must love our neighbor, and the usage of “neighbor” must mean something, otherwise he would say “everyone”.

Why can't it mean to literally love your neighbor? I've seen enough arguments here that one should care about one's physical neighbors before the fargroup. You're not God, you can't meaningfully love everyone, so love your neighbor.

In a word: globalism. “Love your neighbor” was a prescription written ~400BC to an audience whose physical neighbors were co-congregants and cousins in a mostly pastoral lifestyle. The prescription becomes less reasonable in cosmopolitan or exiled contexts. Loving your neighbor is a rule with utility when you’re on the same page with values, authorities, honors and punishments. But what if your neighbor is some random guy? I think if we consider love in its actual biological function — the syncing together of identity and cares between two creatures, the allocation of cognitive and emotional resources to ensure the other’s good, having its origin in filial and procreative and beneficiary roles — we see that love is precious and holy and shouldn’t be metaphorically thrown to swine. Many men and women have been irrevocably hurt by loving the wrong person or thing.

It appears that you are just using Jesus's words as a jumping off point for a claim you want to make rather than seriously engaging with what He meant. He tells the parable in response to a troublemaker asking for a rigorous definition of whom he needs to love as his neighbor, and after telling the story he asks "which of these was a neighbor to him?" - in other words, trying to limit to whom the commandment applied and to whom it didn't was the wrong spirit in which to approach it.

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I just love that style of self flagellation before getting to the point. What is the point of repeating the laundry list of Trump, GOP etc complains as a preface?

I like to think that someone might understand how I'm feeling and give genuine, constructive responses. And if you read through what I wrote, I address my issues that I have with folks on the left, too.

To me it always sounds like trying to bargain with a bully. It is not going to work. Especially on reddit. And being apostate has always been worse than being infidel from the point of the inquisition. Just by starting talking you are burning a bridge. The least you can do it is to do it in style and to grill some hamburgers on the fire.

Well, that's what politics in 2024 feels like to me -- arguing with a bully.

He originally posted it on reddit, it's to reassure others that he's part if the ingroup. Though it never works, of course.

A true member of the in-group would know to read the room.

I don't know what I'm a member of anymore, but I will grant you that I didn't read the room and probably should have just posted it here.

I recognize that the policies of the GOP are dangerous to minority groups in this country.

How?

It of course bothers me greatly when I see Donald Trump calling Kamala Harris "mentally unwell since birth" or Donald Trump and JD Vance proclaim as fact that Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH, are eating dogs.

Just to be clear: are you also bothered by all the Trump supporters and wrongthinkers who have had their friendships, familial ties, and careers ruined? Are you bothered by what happened to a figure like, say, James Damore? Or does your sympathy run out when dealing with people who have "objectively" dangerous ideas?

I recognize that a Donald Trump presidency would threaten American democracy.

Why? He was already president for four years. Nothing happened to American democracy. It's doing just fine. What will make the next four years so much more dangerous than the previous four years?

It's very hard for me to want to be invested in politics when it seems like all everyone wants to do is yell and scream at each other.

The basic point you need to understand is that people argue and fight for reasons. It's not just random, and it's not just because people are stupid. You can't just have someone come along and say "have you all just tried respecting each other instead?" and then everyone claps and goes "ah, how could we have been so blind, if only we had just tried respecting each other instead then we could have avoided all this mess".

People fight because they have mutually incompatible views about how society should be structured, and it's impossible for everyone's preferences to be implemented simultaneously. Not everyone can get what they want; someone has to lose out. And no one is happy with losing out. There's nothing unique about our current situation compared to any other historical era. Open the history book to any random page and you'll find conflict.

The basic point you need to understand is that people argue and fight for reasons. It's not just random, and it's not just because people are stupid. You can't just have someone come along and say "have you all just tried respecting each other instead?" and then everyone claps and goes "ah, how could we have been so blind, if only we had just tried respecting each other instead then we could have avoided all this mess".

It's not arguments in general that I take issue with, its how those arguments are conveyed. I think that you can argue while being respectful, but it seems like politicians have moved away from that.

Maybe I'm just projecting my own desire for people to be civilized when addressing conflict. When people start escalating their arguments into ad homs and inflammatory rhetoric, I disengage, I distance myself from them, or just stop talking to them all together.

Oh, lay off him. He explicitly asked for "gentle guidance", and other than that not being it, I don't know what you're trying to accomplish by jumping on someone who's going through burnout.

I'll be as gentle as the decorum rules require. If the mods think that my post violated the decorum rules then they're free to let me know. I don't think it did though.

If we took every request to be "gentle" seriously, then people could just preface every post with "please be gentle" and then soapbox about whatever they wanted to with the expectation that they would receive no pushback, which is obviously not desirable. This is a space for having your ideas challenged, so if you post here, you should expect to have your ideas challenged. I raised the points that I thought were a) salient for understanding the foundations of OP's worldview and b) possibly fruitful for a broader discussion.

It's not about rules and mods, it's about picking fights when there's no reason to. But he said he doesn't mind your response, so I'll bow out.

I don't perceive him as not being gentle. I have no issue with his his comment. And yes, a lot of what I'm feeling is burnout.

Well, I'll leave you two to it, then.

I reacted the way I did because I sympathize a lot with the way you're feeling, but I come from the other side politically, and thought his type of response is not a particularly productive way to engage with what you're expressing.

I have to give you points for sheer balls making this post. I'm still not sure if it's genuine or intended as Motte-bait. Lines like the below are almost tropes of exactly what not to say on the Motte:

"I recognize that the policies of the GOP are dangerous to minority groups in this country. I recognize that a Donald Trump presidency would threaten American democracy."

But, again, I have to commend your ... bravery?

I don't know, maybe what I'm seeking with this post is more understanding about my frustration than actual guidance.

Politics isn't a good line of work. There are two primary categories of politicians in my view; 1) True believers who actually hold a sense of duty and want to work for their constituents and ideals. In one sense, these can be the more dangerous group because they might actually hold crazy ideas as God's Own Truth. In another sense, what you see is what you get. 2) Grifters and "Company Men" who love getting in the political mud and doing dirty work. A lot of these folks, frankly, failed at other careers in life but come with enough moral flexibility that they'll happily do whatever they need to to keep striving up that ladder. My favorite example here is Terry McAuliffe. Read his bio. This man was destined to be a douchebag.

With that heady mix, you're never going to have "discourse" you like. The task becomes trying to move your level of analysis to a different level in order to better understand the mud-slinging nonsense happening. The main thread here is "The Culture War." This is important. The de facto stance of the Motte is that understanding larger culture movements, norms, changes etc. is far more informative than focusing on the yelling matches happening in Congress and elsewhere. To your point about "frustration", culture warring (done well, as it is here) is often far less frustrating than pure politics argumentation.

Here's a question that can maybe be of help; if you believe that you are not alone in your frustration (which is true), and that a whole lot of people feel similar, then why do so many more people continue to engage in political firefights? Are they simply demented non-humans? Or they radical zealots? Or are they mostly normal people?

I have to give you points for sheer balls making this post. I'm still not sure if it's genuine or intended as Motte-bait. Lines like the below are almost tropes of exactly what not to say on the Motte:

I can assure you, I'm not trying to bait anyone. I'm fully aware statements like that aren't well received here, but I came to to The Motte because folks here are genuinely insightful and responsive to what I have to say. I came here to escape Reddit, essentially. I was tired of the echo-chambers. Sometimes out of shear desperation to be heard, I post over there thinking someone would understand where I'm coming from, but it never seems to be fruitful. At least here, people are thoughtful and respectful, even if we disagree. I don't have much to lose, at this point.

Here's a question that can maybe be of help; if you believe that you are not alone in your frustration (which is true), and that a whole lot of people feel similar, then why do so many more people continue to engage in political firefights? Are they simply demented non-humans? Or they radical zealots? Or are they mostly normal people?

I think that the people you see out there engaged in political firefights represent a small fraction of political viewpoints. The loudest people in the room are the ones waging the culture war. I think that most people are more concerned about getting up, going to work, putting food on their/their family's table, their finances and their social life than they are with waging the culture war. The people out there making the most noise, I believe, are drowning out the voices of those who would take a more gentle and pragmatic approach to politics. You should know that I'm an introvert. I tend to keep my thoughts to myself and only speak when I feel confident I can put together a cohesive statement of opinion. I also tend to regress if a conversation gets too heated. So, my personal biases are definitely influencing how I feel about this.

The loudest people in the room are the ones waging the culture war. I think that most people are more concerned about getting up, going to work, putting food on their/their family's table, their finances and their social life than they are with waging the culture war. The people out there making the most noise, I believe, are drowning out the voices of those who would take a more gentle and pragmatic approach to politics.

These sort of "the majority are reasonable" arguments understandably pop up quite often, and I have many problems with them, but here I'll just say this portrayal is far too flattering of them. The majority won't even stay friends with someone who the loudest have called out as a wrongthinker, and that's a necessary condition for any kind of gentle approach to politics.

The majority won't seven stay friends with someone who the loudest have called out as a wrongthinker, and that's a necessary condition for any kind of gentle approach to politics.

And that's the key aspect that I feel needs to change. I think the more we shut people out who are "wrongthinkers", the more we group each other into group-think silos, the less compromise and progress we make as a society.

1 - Double check your formatting. You accidentally looped your response to a quote into the quote itself.

The people out there making the most noise, I believe, are drowning out the voices of those who would take a more gentle and pragmatic approach to politics.

This is fair and probably correct. It raises the question, however, about what "pragmatic" means. I fear that a lot of "pragmatic" politics involves people coming together to workout their policy issues and compromising for a balance approach to ... doing something.

As a constitutional conservative, the number one thing I don't want the Government to do is anything. Sure sure, normal caveats like providing for Defense and common infrastructure goods. But the point remains, a lot of the culture war has to do with the fact that people feel out of control of their own lives because of a slow, Long March of the institutions dating back to about the Great Depression with antecedents going as far back as the Civil War.

"Pragmatic Politics" sounds really intuitive and good, but it assumes that political activity (really, State activity) is something that should, ought to, and will happen at scale. I'd contend that everyone in one issue or another is against this. Some people don't want the Gov't to interfere with the internet, for others its food and diet, guns, abortion etc. So you can see how, all of a sudden, "pragmatic politics" slams into closely held discrete-issue beliefs. Then, nothing gets done because you're trying to hold a meeting in the middle of a minefield.

Well, see, there's something we can find agreement on. I would prefer a more limited government as well, maybe not as far as suggesting we abolish the FDA for example, but I would definitely agree with you that State and federal governments have become too big, especially as it pertains to interstate commerce. I would love to see Wickford v. Filburn get overturned. I tend to be pro-2A as well, with caveats for universal background checks, training, and safe storage. I'm happy that both Harris and Walz openly talk about how their firearms owners.

I see what you're saying about "pragmatic politics". Like, it could easily go down the slippery slope of "my issue is the only one that matters" and then nothing gets done. I agree with the notion that politics should involve compromise. But if no one is willing to compromise, what then? And that's where I'm getting hung up. In everything that I've learned in life, you don't get your needs met or your voice heard by throwing out snarky one-liners or calling someone Hitler or labeling a university president as the Devil or what have you. It just doesn't make sense to me.

But if no one is willing to compromise, what then?

What then? Status quo.

And this was exactly, precisely, and explicitly what the founders intended. Government is incredibly powerful. It's like a mountain. If a mountain shifts in massive ways haphazardly, we call it an earthquake and it's bad. We want the mountain to mostly do nothing unless everyone super-duper agrees on it. Gridlock is the de-facto state of The State.

The problem arises when the State is involved in everything and, therefore, gridlock spreads to everything. This is the housing crisis, this is lack of energy independence, this is the wild "need" for college degrees for jobs that don't need them, this is "certifications" for hairdressers in some states.

Compromise is elusive because built into it is a positive sum assumption. In reality, a lot of political contentious are pretty much zero sum. Taxes are higher or lower. Economists can quibble about which taxes are "good" in the grander scheme of things but, in the immediate, somebody somewhere is paying more than they were before. They have less money with which they can decide to do things.

Again, "pragmatic politics" falls apart because it implies that the State should be doing things and that, if the state cannot do things, that is in and of itself a bad outcome (hence your rejoinder "But if not is willing to compromise, what then?"). To put a fine point on it: I don't want to need the State to function in order to live my life. Your assumption has built into it that we, as a society, absolutely need a well functioning State in order to live our lives. That's paternalism at best and authoritarianism at worst.

Have you considered the possibility that you are wrong about your perceptions of various politicians or political philosophies?

The feeling your feeling is exhaustion from trying to hold some incompatible ideas in your head.

Maybe Trump is not a threat to democracy, maybe conservatives aren’t being mean to people violating our federal border laws, maybe Trumps policies are absolutely in no way a threat to minority groups.

I think there is a mental tax to hearing these sorts of engineered slogans all the time, trying to internalize them as if they were true, and not being able to create a coherent understanding of the world which allows them to be.

I think that’s the burnout you’re feeling. You’re being completely bombarded by increasingly impossible to square lies, and keeping track is tiring you out. I could see this being especially tiring if you live in a place where accidentally saying the sky is blue will get you in trouble socially.

Have you considered the possibility that you are wrong about your perceptions of various politicians or political philosophies? Yes. It's hard to get an accurate perception of them when all you see of them is what is depicted in traditional media and social media. I'd like to see more of the personal side of politicians so I can understand them better.

Maybe Trump is not a threat to democracy, maybe conservatives aren’t being mean to people violating our federal border laws, maybe Trumps policies are absolutely in no way a threat to minority groups.

Maybe so, deep down, but when I see how incoherent he is at public speaking, or read the names he calls his adversaries, or spreading rumors about Haitians in Springfield, OH, eating dogs, I can't help but feel like he shouldn't be anywhere near the White House.

I think there is a mental tax to hearing these sorts of engineered slogans all the time, trying to internalize them as if they were true, and not being able to create a coherent understanding of the world which allows them to be.

I think that’s the burnout you’re feeling. You’re being completely bombarded by increasingly impossible to square lies, and keeping track is tiring you out. I could see this being especially tiring if you live in a place where accidentally saying the sky is blue will get you in trouble socially.

This an accurate summary, thank you.

You seem particularly upset by the Haitians in Springfield eating pets story. We're you also upset by the Russian collusion, or pee dossier stories?

I think there were a couple elements to the Hatian story that gave it the legs it had. There was a woman arrested while apparently eating a cat, though in Canton not Springfield and she isn't Hatian. There was a 911 call reporting 4 Hatians stealing geese from a park. There was a viral Facebook post purporting to describe 3rd or 4th hand about a lost cat found field dressed hanging from a tree. The memes of Trump saving kittens and ducks were sharable because cats and the internet.

It seems to me that this is one of those misinformation stories that's only horrible when it's my evil out-group doing it. When it's the righteous and good in group repeating Russian collusion, pee dossier or Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation, disinformation it's OK.

Upset isn't quite the word I would use to describe how I feel about it. Its more like... dumbfounded, that they would make such an incredulous claim. It doesn't surprise me that Trump would (allegedly) collude with members of the Russian government, because he strikes me as a person who would do whatever it takes to win. I don't think Trump can stand losing because he views losing as total defeat.

Though, at this point, what the hell do I know?

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Trump would (allegedly) collude

Do you believe this claim? I believe we've high quality evidence that this was manufactured at the behest of those working if not on behalf of the Clinton campaign, working independently while also working for the Clinton campaign.

This still sounds like boo-outgroup. That dastardly Trump is the sort to collude with Russia to win.

Poor Hatians would never eat a cat.

At best I'm reasonably confident a Hatian in Springfield, OH hasn't eaten a cat it the trailing 6 months. I would be less confident that no Hatian has never eaten a cat anywhere.

I'm also less confident that no European-American has never eaten a cat anywhere, but that's no reason to say "they're eating the cats" about that group.

If the claim were Europeans are using cat pelts as a traditional remedy for arthritis?

Surely we'd be able to point a finger at at least one smoking gun case if the traditional remedy claim was relevant?

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Neither ‘recent immigrants misunderstand cultural norms enough to eat pets’ nor ‘a presidential candidate colluded with an enemy nation to increase his chances of winning’ are Bigfoot-is-the-babydaddy level implausible. Trump repeated claims from a local and democrats repeated claims from elsewhere. Both of these claims are probably false, but there’s not one that’s clearly much worse than the other.

Incredulous? Have you been to Haiti?

My favorite response to this on Twitter;

“In 2023 there was footage of Haitians eating people, and the thought that they might eat cats is too offensive to consider?”

Bush meat is a real thing. Recent immigrants from countries that eat bush meat doing what they did in their home countries before they are acculturated to their new environment is not even remotely shocking to consider. I’d be more amazed if it didn't happen.

Just to steel man the eating pets story:

These are people who are desperately poor, who come from a place which is one of the poorest in the entire world. It doesn’t seem out of the question that they would need to be told not to eat local dogs, cats, ducks, and geese.

There are plenty of Americans who poach deer or raccoons or squirrels or whatever else they can find who are also desperately poor and live in rural parts of Montana.

There were local reports that this was happening. It doesn’t seem like a big stretch that it would be, the locals were saying it was, and Trump repeated their reports.

If we are both sides-ing this: it is heinous the types of lies that Democrats are telling people about maternal healthcare. Their intentional ambiguity about abortion or what it means is leading to doctors not knowing what they’re allowed to do, and leading to mothers who think that they are going to be denied healthcare while they’re having a miscarriage.

This is leading to women engaging in extremely dangerous behavior, which the Democrats then use as fodder for their power games. If they would simply stop lying about the state of maternal healthcare, and stop lying about what their desires WRT abortion, they would have a net positive effect on the healthcare of women. But instead they are willing to let women put themselves in danger at sort of unwilling martyrs. It’s disgusting.

Poaching deer sure. Squirrel and racoon may not even be poaching. Some states have no limits on varmit animals though you'd need permission from the landowner on private property.

It doesn’t seem like a big stretch that it would be, the locals were saying it was, and Trump repeated their reports.

This seems the most likely to me. Combined with the Canton women who ate the cat.

About a month age I made the argument that essentially, future historians will draw parallels between Gorbachev and the Kamala Harris presidency, which at this point seems to be rather likely to come around next year. I can understand why it was downvoted because I made it deliberately vague, thinking that spelling my assumption all out in detail would narrow the discussion down too much and derail it at the start. Anyway, I recently read the New York Magazine article titled The Joyous Plot to elect Kamala Harris... by Rebecca Traister, and while I wouldn't say that it strengthens my argument to the full, it certainly doesn't include anything that would contradict it, I think. She's being lauded as a champion of both Democrat party leaders and grassroots organizers (mainly of female ones, that is), ushering in a new era of hope and political change after long and disheartening years dominated by old farts in leadership positions.

X

Like sure, Gorbachev was young, and relatively unknown(key word relatively), but that’s where the similarities end.

For my part, I expect the crisis she précipitâtes to be more like the crisis of the third century- driven by deteriorating relations between different parts of the state apparatus and currency mismanagement, and taking place in an era of massive cultural change.

précipitâtes

Hey, we’re talking about New York magazine here. Get back over to the New Yorker with your weird orthography

Is 8 years (two presidential terms) really so long? Bush was 54 when he was elected in 2000. Obama was 47 in 2008. Harris will be 60. She's younger than Trump (70) and Biden (78) were when they were elected, but is solidly middle of the pack among presidents since 2000.

In historical terms, it isn't long. But in terms of the cultural war and social change, definitely a lot has changed between 2016-2024, even more so between 2012-2024. So the social context is different.

future historians will draw parallels between Gorbachev and the Kamala Harris presidency

This is just goofy. First off there's only like a 50-50 shot she'll win the election.

Next, the implicit argument of your claim is that Harris will lead to the political collapse of the USA, a doomer take that the far right has correctly predicted 4929 of the last 0 times it's happened. This is another motte post claiming something bombastic with little evidence. Another broken clock.

First off there's only like a 50-50 shot she'll win the election.

What's "just goofy" here is the idea that Trump has even the slightest chance of winning, let alone 50%. I think Curtis Yarvin, in this interview with "Jolly Heretic" Ed Dutton, makes the case as to why Harris's victory is foregone conclusion: "Trump will LOSE."

This interview is silly. Yarvin claims without evidence that Democrats know how to steal all the elections without leaving any evidence. When asked how Trump won 2016, he handwaves it away by claiming they "didn't have the technology back then".

This is just pre-cope for if they lose. If they win, they can claim "we won despite all the Dem fraud, we must have actually won by 40 points!"

Maybe there's actual evidence somewhere but I stopped watching after a few minutes.

Again, as I said to the other guy, if you're so sure the election is a foregone conclusion, put your money where your mouth is.

put your money where your mouth is.

What money? My new landlords just raised my rent. I'm basically broke.

I think I have at least a vague idea of what the usual so-called “far right” accusations were against Biden, Obama or Clinton and I’m rather certain they never included that “he’ll accelerate the decline of the US empire and cause political instability/collapse due to failed reform attempts”. I can think of a dozen other accusations regarding abortion, gun laws, overreach of federal power, BLM etc. but not this one.

Also, I think the notion that Trump has a 50% chance of winning the upcoming election is, in light of what happened the last time he tried, is rather far-fetched.

“he’ll accelerate the decline of the US empire and cause political instability/collapse due to failed reform attempts”

If you haven't heard this from the right, you haven't been paying attention. Stuff like "Obama is ruining the country" was common back in 2009-2017, especially in regards to stuff like TARP and Obamacare. Lots of breathless exclamations that a Kenyan was turning us into a Communist nation, with a leader who was definitely going to pursue a third (and fourth, fifth, etc.) term subverting the constitution.

think the notion that Trump has a 50% chance of winning the upcoming election is, in light of what happened the last time he tried, is rather far-fetched.

Put your money where your mouth is then.

The resolution source for this market is the Associated Press, Fox News, and NBC. This market will resolve once all three sources call the race for the same candidate. If all three sources haven’t called the race for the same candidate by the inauguration date (January 20, 2025) this market will resolve based on who is inaugurated.

No, thanks.

I don't get it. If you think Trump has lower chances of winning because of fraud, bet against him?

I don't want to bet on what three news organizations decide.

Do you expect them to announce Trump, but make a switcheroo for Kamala at a later date?

I expect them to do the same thing as last time, jump the gun to declare first, then follow whoever went first out of pressure.

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I'm not anything resembling an expert on late-soviet history, but I do remember being impressed by Zubok's Collapse which argued that Gorbachev failed primarily because (1) he was really unlucky, (2) he didn't build himself a personal constituency within the state, (3) he was a true believer who underestimated the degree of cynicism and suppressed opposition present in the soviet body politic, and (4) lacked the economic chops to understand the uniquely-complex soviet economy, which was full of odd kludges, hacks, and workarounds accumulated over the years to square necessary interface with the rest of the world with Marxian ideological dogma, and so blundered into speeding up the implosion of the system in the guise of reform.

I can kinda pattern match Kamala to some of these, but I gotta be honest, the comparison isn't exactly leaping off the page...

True, it doesn't exactly do so. But I remember the days when, after years of culture-warring, Great Awokening, militant leftist SJW rhetoric, all the talk about dismantling the vestiges of structural racism, BLM riots etc, American society got to a point in 2020 when there were three rather old cishet White men remaining in the competition for the position of presidential nominee. I just found it rather ironic, and I saw a bunch of people online drawing parallels with the late-stage Soviet gerontocracy, which, considering the ongoing socio-economic crises (the opioid epidemic, rising rates of alcoholism - especially among single women - and prescription pill abuse, rising levels of violent crime and mental illness, the obesity epidemic etc.), appeared to be definitely warranted. I think it's just logical to extend this parallel when a relatively much younger candidate emerges, poised to win the election and portraying herself as the anointed one who will finally shake things up.

I do consider Harris and the people surrounding her incompetent but I see certain important differences.

Harris wants to double down on the elements of the regime and push things in a more totalitarian direction.

Gorbachev wanted to strongly reform aspects of it although he didn't want the USSR to fall.

Also Gorbachev was more in control, until he wasn't, while Kamala is less independent.

In my opinion people like Harris and the general elites of this type, represent more the leaders of USSR prior to Gorbachev. Incompetent, but authoritarian. Unlike them they are willing to double down in authoritarianism, and are more radical so maybe she has both parallels with earlier Communists and those of the time of stagnation. Although, the system is more oligarchical and the central figure is less important.

Someone who isn't out to be a revolutionary but sincerely wants to positively reform the regime and not in a 50 Stalin anti-dissident direction, without desiring to dismantle it, but in a manner that will cause its end, will fit more to the Gorbachev role.

Edit: Although doubling down in the areas Harris wants to double down, could lead eventually to a collapse. Or it could lead to a 1990s and after South Africa situation of the same and similar but more radical types in charge, of an increasingly failing society. This counts as a collapse in important ways even though similar type of elites are in charge but admittedly South African elites exercise less control over some parts of the country.

Kamala isn't a reform candidate at all. And she isn't young at 59. Vance is the true harbinger of reform in this election. Trump is at least partially anti-establishment. Kamala is the candidate of the politburo if ever there was one.

She's relatively young. Gorbachev was also 54 when he assumed power, and was the protege of the former head of the KGB, and voted into power by the Politburo.

Again, please write something that strengthens this parallel other than that she is relatively young compared to other politicians. What issues can be her Perestroika, her Glasnost, her liquor ban?

It's not merely that she's relatively young, it's that she's much younger than the two presidents who'll have preceded her.

What issues can be her Perestroika, her Glasnost, her liquor ban?

You can also name about a dozen potential issues, can't you? The college debt bubble, the NIMBY vs. YIMBY struggle, the opioid crisis, economic stagnation, the housing bubble, Medicare, women's rights etc.

We can all name issues present in society, but is Kamala Harris going to solve any of them? Is she even going to try?

She strikes me as a political opportunist who wants to be President just so she can be President. Does she even have any policy proposals? You would think that, if she did, she would be putting them into action right now as the de-facto leader of the Democratic party.

I think she’ll have every conceivable incentive to try. She’ll be pimped by the MSM and the Dem establishment as the first woman of color to become President, and they’ll push the narrative that she’s set to leave a great legacy and accomplish great things for a society still tainted by the vestiges of structural racism etc. Also, the polycrisis (I wasn’t even aware that such an expression exists!) will probably continue and worsen, so the overlapping negative socio-economic tendencies will reach a point of escalation sometimes between 2025-28 where Kamala’s supporters will compel her to act – if she doesn’t initiate reforms herself first, that is. Also, she derives whatever level of political legitimacy she has from not being an old white fart who failed to cure the nation’s ills i.e. Biden and Trump. She’ll have to continue to demonstrate that she’s different from both of them.

Who cares? John Q. Adams was younger than every previous President. Then Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, Pierce…I’m too lazy to count up the “two old, one young” pattern, but it’s so specific. Congrats to Joe Biden for breaking the website curse!

Also, all of Gorbachev’s predecessors died in office. I hope to God that doesn’t apply here.

As for issues—I can think of plenty. They’re just not particularly textbook-worthy. We’re taught about perestroika because it represented the decline of Cold War ideology. Glasnost for similar reasons. It has to be a pivot of the political landscape, and nothing Harris has said fits the bill. She’s stumping for the same old Democrat stance on all of your example issues.

I do not see concrete proposals from Harris that realistically will be enacted for any of these issues you mention except for abortion access (same for the other candidate). I think you might be buying what the candidate is selling a little too much. If she solves all these issues, then great (except abortion access I differ from her viewpoints on that) but don't tout her as a greater reformer rather than standard democratic candidate 2.0 especially before she's done anything of substance. Its possible I just don't have the information, can you elaborate on Harris solutions for college debt, housing, the opiod crisis or fixing Medicare? Economic stagnation has J. Powell on the job. To me it sounds like every Presidential state of the union type of address where grand vague future plans are proclaimed, but the issues linger year after year.

See my reply to Sunshine.

Gorbachev wasn't that much younger. Andropov was 1914, Gorba 1931, barely 17 years difference. Why fixate on Gorba? There have been younger presidents since forever. TR had 15 years on his predecessor, JFK 27 years, both promised plenty of new policies. (Kennedy was born during WW1 while Eisenhower and Truman fought in it).

The Soviet gerontocracy problem was not simply about age of the general secretary. The problem that in 1980s, the politbyro had been staffed by generation of Brezhnev, implementing Brezhnev policies since Brezhnev. Then Gorba decided to try to implement large-scale changes to the Soviet state that weakened the authority of the dictatorship.

Gorbachev wasn't that much younger. Andropov was 1914, Gorba 1931, barely 17 years difference.

True, but Kamala isn't that young either, in fact she's 5 years older now than Gorbachev was in 1985.

TR had 15 years on his predecessor, JFK 27 years, both promised plenty of new policies.

Again, true, but the political environment was rather different from the current one in both cases, wasn't it? There was no sense of vibecession/stagnation, disillusionment in the party leadership, general anomie etc.

The problem that in 1980s, the politbyro had been staffed by generation of Brezhnev, implementing Brezhnev policies since Brezhnev.

I suppose one can make a similar point about the Dem party leadership?

the political environment was rather different from the current one in both cases, wasn't it? There was no sense of vibecession/stagnation, disillusionment in the party leadership, general anomie etc.

This is very wrong; both presidents were elected as countermeasures to perceived (and actual) vibecessions.

Especially in Kennedy's case, his cult of youth and personal example were so powerful precisely because they provided an outlet for this broad but unfocused and aimless search for an alternative to what was thought to be a depersonalized, cog-in-a-machine, stagnant society. The late 50's had spawned an intense critique of percieved conformism and rigidity in culture and economy. "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit" came out in 1956, the same year Mills published "The Power Elite" and Whyte (who had coined the term "groupthink" in 1952) published "The Organization Man." The Beatniks reached their apex in the 50's, and were clearly reacting to a vibecession avant la lettre: "much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program ... It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind." Ginsburg's "Howl" (most famous in this community as the inspiration for the True Caliph's "Meditations on Moloch") was written in 1954-5 and published in 1956 (what was in the water that year?!?).

I don't have my sources at hand to fully dive into the eighteen nineties at the moment, but the fin-de-siecle decades were also stuffy and conformist, which spurred cultural backlash. TR's progressives were just as much a reaction against corruption in government and established political machines as TR himself was an icon in the cultural charge against perceived Victorian over-domesticity...not for nothing were TR's progressives smeared as "goo-goos" (short for "good government").

I didn't know that goo-goos was that old. I thought it was from the 1990s.

which spurred cultural backlash

Note also that the 1910s and 1920s were perhaps an even more woke time than the 2010s and 2020s; Prohibition and sufferage being the most famous wins for that faction, but Charismatic Christianity has its roots in that time as well. Indeed, the opinion of women was indeed taken so seriously in the WW1 years that they could get men to kill themselves [by signing up for some stupid European war] simply by performing certain gestures, which is not yet a power woke women enjoy quite so directly today.

what was in the water that year?!?

If I had to guess, it was probably radioactive.

I can confirm that Roosevelt’s Progressives were relatively extreme reformers. We take most of that era’s changes for granted, but people were understandably upset about Gilded Age excesses. Externalities, as it were.

I would have guessed LSD, personally.

No they won't. Choose the decline of different empire. You may be right that Kamala Harris presidency may be the beginning of the end of US, but it is not because she was chosen as a nominee by the democratic politburo.

I don't think that you fundamentally understand the challenges in front of the Eastern bloc and USSR. If the Soviet Union had figured out how to make a washing machine, color tv and a car as cheap, affordable and abundant as the west, we would have been communist. (But we did make damn fine hand mixer - nothing the world has ever produced can compare to the RG28 - this thing is immortal and the best piece of consumer good in its class ever created). Because that was people wanted - the standard of living the western Germans had - nothing more nothing less. Because communist didn't allow failure of state enterprise there was no feedback to push them to be better. And because all enterprise were state there was no innovation at all. So the soviet union fell behind technologically (not scientifically, we just couldn't convert science into consumer technology). And with this technology fail came diplomatic isolation.

The US have strong economy and it's biggest potential problem - the debt is not really a problem. They can just refuse to pay. Here is prediction what will happen - one party will cut SS, medicaid and medicare, the other will come to power from the backlash and fiddle their thumbs to do nothing because the math will still not work. Or they may start putting printed money into the programs and cause inflation that will dwindle the external debt away. In 10 years people will grudgingly accept it.

The other problem is that if Xi doesn't wreck china's economy (on the fence, but probably will, he has some soviet vibes) he offers a very alluring model for the authoritarians - democracy is optional as long as you make sure that people can buy a car, washing machine and color tv. And top it with AI powered surveillance state. A carrot and stick - forever. I think that O'Brien would find it amusing how this strain of Angsoc works. Which will lead to waning US influence - or turn US towards authoritarianism - it is not as if the culture war has not eroded people's beliefs in the democratic system. Everyone wants to be on top and impose their values on the others right now.

I don't think that you fundamentally understand the challenges in front of the Eastern bloc and USSR. If the Soviet Union had figured out how to make a washing machine, color tv and a car as cheap, affordable and abundant as the west, we would have been communist.

This. The Soviet Union fell because the Brezhnev generation of CPSU leadership (Andropov and Chernenko were not significantly younger than Brezhnev) was not able to recruit and develop a next generation of leaders who believed in the system to the extent that they were willing to fight to maintain it. (I don't know how long Gorbachev could have stayed in power if he was willing to be as brutal as Brezhnev, but ultimately the reason why the Soviet Union fell was that he didn't try, and Yeltsin, who was the other pre-eminent CPSU leader of his generation, actively sabotaged it when someone else did (in the 1991 coup).

And the secret weapon, the mind control ray that turned Yeltsin into the double agent who would end the Cold War with a crushing NATO victory, was a supermarket.

I’m not sure that non-western authoritarian societies need quite western tier standards of living- China isn’t as prosperous as South Korea, but it’s still much more prosperous than China was, and most of the low hanging fruit is there. People care a lot more about the difference between the third world and the second than between the second and first, and even less about the difference between upper first world places like the US and lower tier ones like southern Europe. Washing machines, climate control, and meat every day count for more than tv sizes due to diminishing returns.

This assumes that authoritarian societies will be able to match open societies in harnessing new technologies and making them available to the public

Until there are no open societies, at which point it doesn't matter, and was 1984's premise.

Xi's reluctance to facilitate greater consumer spending on goods like healthcare in China is not a good sign for China in this regard

Healthcare is unsolved problem in all of the world right now. I don't think that there exist a system in the world that is affordable, immune to brain drain, sustainable and high quality. So there doesn't seem to be obviously wrong policies there. His management of real estate and banking sector is probably more worrying.

The problem with the United States is that it’s very interested in imposing all of the shitty and mean parts of authoritarianism without the parts that make the trains run on time.

I just can’t believe she’s the focus on a movement. Trump definitely is, as he represents something different from the status quo. In pretty much every way imaginable, Trump is just built different from other political leaders. He isn’t lawyered in his speech, mincing words and using “technically the truth” statements to lie. He’s loud, proud and brash. He’s not an institutionalist. He does things and if the state apparatus doesn’t like it, so much the worse for the deep state. That in a nutshell is why Trump ever got so big — he’s not like anyone else in the political class, he doesn’t act, think or speak like they do. He’s his own thing.

Kamala is the status quo. The biggest difference for her is her race/class and her age. If she were a white male democrat, nobody would be excited for her. She’s not special, she talks and acts like anyone else in the field. Her positions are the same as Biden’s, except girlboss.

Future history will consider this the age of Trump, because like him or not, he’s the zeitgeist of our era. He’s the one calling the shots whether by advocating things or by causing extreme reactions in his opponents.

You're right. Maybe it's all just gaslighting, astroturfing etc. But I'm sure she has more political influence behind her than Trump.

I mean thinking about how we define political eras, it’s almost always the political forces that are making changes or doing big things that get the notice of historians. Lincoln is important because he ultimately freed the slaves and saved the union. Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts. FDR did the New Deal. Even in the revolutionary era, the ones that got eras named after them were the ones making things happen.

Trump is somewhere between Napoleon and Teddy Roosevelt. He believes in things he wants to do, he wrestles with the institutions of American government to get things done. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks about his ideas. That’s the kind of thing that gets your name on an era of American politics. Doing things that leave a mark on society.

Kamala has some hype. But if you look at her, she doesn’t have any influence, no big signature ideas, no changes to the direction of the country, nothing really to set her own mark on the institution. She’s just a run of the mill democrat.

So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.

But I don't think the math works out? Anyone want to check this?

~2.7 mil made legal from 1986 law seems to be the common estimate. Here claims 1.6 million applied in California. This report says that 90% were approved. But critically, just because you're made legal doesn't mean you can vote! The same report said that as of 2001, only a third had naturalized. Generally speaking, only half of immigrants ever fully naturalize. That means in the 15 years after the amnesty, only in the ballpark of 500-700k voters were likely added to California rolls. Here we can see that Latinos in general do skew Democratic, but the gap varies by year, anywhere from an 9 to 52% gap. Is that enough to make a difference? In 1996, with that biggest gap, that would be 250k-350k (very ballpark) swing votes, but the margin of victory was at the lowest around 350k in 1988 (about 250k at most according to the gap that year, but I think this was far too soon for the naturalization numbers to swell even that large, since the process takes a few years even for legal residents). Every other election had a gap of well over a million votes! So if you go on and match up the years and the Hispanic vote gap, the effect is even less, often dramatically less: 2004 we see 9% or about 60 thousand votes of delta, versus a margin of victory of around 1.25 million votes, so a very small fraction.

So even the poster child of amnesty doesn't seem to fit with the narrative. Okay, sure, fine, when you drill down to more local elections, not just presidential ones, it can make a difference. But overall, California's blue-ness seems to only be very slightly due to the amnesty bill. If I were a fact-checker, I think I'd say "mostly false" -- the math VERY plainly does NOT work, and doesn't fit with history, but there might be some nugget of plausibility buried. I think you can still, despite these clear factual falsehoods, in good faith make an argument that granting citizenship is a bald-faced political power grab, but I think there are other, stronger explanations. In this sense, the general ideas behind "great replacement theory" might hold some water on the cultural side, but in terms of the actual mechanisms of governance, consider me quite underwhelmed.

Note that the same could not be said for DC statehood -- that's something that in my opinion couldn't possibly be less nakedly partisan and also wildly unconstitutional. I bring it up here as a sort of rough proxy or prior for the general claim about power grabs being real/something to be worried about. When it came up in 2021, 37 senators co-sponsored the legislation. Allowing for some good faith there too (no taxation without representation?), I'd say you can conclude that maybe half of all politicians are willing to make such a power grab? But there's a reason 37 senators is not enough to pass a bill. Once you reach the neighborhood of 45, the difficulty goes up exponentially, so beware accidentally "intuitively" weighting support by the simple number of cosponsors. So again, this seems to suggest that there's a lot more going on than vote-buying.

So the whole idea is far from wild fancy, but the way it's being made, and the framing seems plain partisan warfare. And remember, demographics is NOT destiny! Hispanic voters aren't even necessarily permanent, locked-in Democratic voters, only a few tweaks to the Republican party (which almost happened in 2004ish) would make the platform appeal to plenty of them. For all the noise about how you can "buy votes" via specific, targeted policies, I don't see much anecdotal evidence of that being the case. For example, would-be student loan aid recipients I know don't seem to weight it all that heavily in their decision of who and how to vote -- other things overshadow it by a lot. Polling data suggests the same is broadly true of Hispanics, even if they were to receive generous amnesty. See for example one reason why no one talks about Puerto Rico being admitted as a state: besides the fact that Puerto Ricans somewhat don't want it, neither big party is actually convinced they would in fact be the ones to get the votes. It's a wild-card they don't want to deal with.

I'm always amused by this argument because my parents, who became legal via the 1986 amnesty, have voted red down the line in every election

my father still insists Nixon was the best president in history

it's true there were more people in the US fleeing communism during that time, so they would be more inclined to vote Republican

what about today? Venezuelan immigrants are in the news, guessing the ones who ever feel inclined to vote won't be so impressed by the way Democrats sound

Aren't Venezuelans a fairly D constituency? Republicans are gaining among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and ahead among Cubans but I thought Venezuelans were still fairly strong Democrats?

I supposed it'd only make sense--Democrats love to advertise themselves as the party that will protect democracy, that's probably all you need to win over a constituency that was effectively prevented from using democracy to remove the tyrant of the country they fled.

While you might think that today's illegal immigrants are the reliable Republican voters of the future, this is a vanishingly rare viewpoint.

Most Republicans and Democrats view immigrants as a solid blue voting block. The stats seem to bear this out.

wouldn't surprise me, just sharing my personal anecdote

Is this one of those things where the statistic is wrong as bait to get people complaining about real numbers? Cause I do not want to go through that again. Goalpost movement is not admirable.

Anyway. I generally agree that no single policy works as a vote purchase. That includes helicopter money. People don’t generally want a handout; they want a system which subsidizes whatever they were already doing, but makes it socially acceptable. Unfortunately, everything that resembles such a system is laundered through the lawmaking process and then tossed in the tumble dryer that is our economy. If the cycle lines up and we get a Good Economy, the program was a success and will never be removed. If it runs into a Bad Economy, it was obviously the only cause; anyone involved ought to be run out of town on a rail.

On the other hand, there are lots of ways to buy your opponent votes. Class warfare. Scandals and/or witch hunts. Doing anything that can be remotely tied to a Bad Economy.

These are powerful incentives for incrementalism. Any bold plan is a point of failure. I suspect this is why none of the Presidential candidates since Obama have pitched a signature policy. The closest we got was Trump’s wall, which appears to have been overcome by events. As with the ACA, the popular underlying concept has given way to a series of last-minute compromises tolerated by both parties.

When minorities vote Democrat at rates of 60% (Hispanic and Asian) or 90+% (black), you don't need to buy anything, you just need to have them there, and registered. They will take care of the rest with or without your handouts.

Why do you think this is the case, then?

Probably because those minorities and foreigners are exhibiting the failure mode of all democracies, especially when they are multi-racial. They know voting is a racial head-count, and if they want to be counted, they need to vote D.

The Democrats are the party of minorities and foreigners. They've chosen to be so rather than moderate their policies to appeal to the native American population. This is a reversion to form, as Democrats have been shot through with international communists and Soviet sympathizers since FDR was first elected.

This is why you see internal migration going from blue states to red states. Democrats have shit policies which drive people out. This should cause Democrats to slowly lose relevance, or force them to pivot to more reasonable policies. Instead, they import foreigners, make them citizens, and rely on those votes (and the census representation that goes with the warm bodies) to maintain relevance.

The problem with this is that it means Democrats are trying to replace their opponents, breed them out, and kill them through neglect and indifference, in order to turn the country into a one-party government. When California becomes a one-party state, people leave for Texas and Idaho. When all of the US becomes Soviet, there's nowhere left to move.

I'm interested in "failure mode of all democracies" -- do you really think this, and what evidence are you using? Because sure, I can think of a fair few countries where democracy went poorly, but I'm not sure I'd jump to "democracy always fails in this manner" or similar argument "all democratic failures happen in this manner" or even "all countries that get too multiethnic and are democracies fail this way" and the similar prediction that "all democracies are doomed to eventual failure". Not quite sure which angle exactly you're describing.

If anything, I think that the two-party system, for all its incredible and well-documented failings, actually serves as a pretty good insulation from what I think you're talking about. Since both parties have an incentive to change their policies (often incrementally, but the base pressures are there) in order to win, or regain an edge, this means that a multi-ethnic state cannot rely on simple alliances between ethnic groups, but must in some sense compete for them, and trade groups once in a while too. Don't think we'd get very far broaching replacement theory per se in this context, but more wondering about the proposed mechanism and evidence side of things. Even assuming deliberate importation of votes is happening and intentional (which I obviously above dispute), for the sake of argument here, you can't do so indefinitely. I just don't think it usually makes sense numerically, without being washed out by backlash. For example, we can plainly see that even Kamala has had to harden her border policies. That's in direct response to discontent. Might she be lying? Sure. But the discontent is real and might even cost her an election, which I count as evidence for my above contention.

I'm interested in "failure mode of all democracies" -- do you really think this, and what evidence are you using?

Greece and Rome, mostly, as well as the American Founders reflecting on Greece and Rome. This is ancient, and has been known for millennia. This is nothing new, and it is nothing I came up with on my own.

Read Aristotle and Socrates and Plato. Read Thucydides. Read history.

If you're looking for a peer-reviewed study in Nature or Science, you've come to the wrong place.

Even assuming deliberate importation of votes is happening and intentional (which I obviously above dispute)

You are incorrect, it's obviously happening, and it's happening at an unprecedented pace during this administration.

Another, longer article arguing the same.

Even in a high-immigration scenario, US population will peak around 2080 and red tribe white TFR is the highest stable one. Just make it that far and the country gets reconquêred.

Here is the Cato institute proofing with many studies that Hispanics turned to the Dems because the local GOP was more and more anti-immigration. That pushed minorities away:

https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned-california-blue

Hispanic voters were alienated from the GOP and welcomed by the Democratic Party during the fights over Proposition 187, Wilson’s reelection, and during a series of other propositions proposed in the mid-1990s. One way this shift occurred was by galvanizing Hispanic naturalization in response to the perceived GOP threat.

Here is Mother Jones saying that demography is destiny and the whites deserved it:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/11/it-was-redistricting-not-prop-187-that-turned-california-blue/

It’s that simple. Prop 187 probably cemented Hispanic support for Democrats, but that was about it. It was demographics and redistricting that really made the difference.

If you believe in the demographic theory of presidential elections, the same thing will happen nationally when the non-white vote reaches about 50 percent. Unfortunately, that’s still a decade or two away.

I suspect the demographics are destiny strategy is going to backfire anyway. Immigrants will initially vote for whichever party is promising not to deport their extended family, but once they are all citizens that leverage goes away. Once their physical safety from deportation is secured, those voters actually start wanting things. Things that the Democratic Party seems unable or unwilling to provide. Just look at how the party seems to be simultaneously hemorrhaging both Jewish and Muslim voters. Or the increasing tension between African Americans and newly arrived immigrant groups. Or the way that the LGBTQ bloc conflicts with the social opinions of most of the newly arriving ethnicities. The Democrats have taken on too many different identity groups and the contradictions are starting to burst them asunder.

Don't know why the downvotes, we've seen this quite a lot. People are people at the end of the day. The wants and needs are usually pretty similar. And vote-buying in a macro sense is only mildly effective, to the extent that in many cases (not all but many) it doesn't even make sense for the ruling politician or party to pursue it. Plus, in my opinion many ethnic voting blocks are fundamentally temporary, not structural. Okay, fine, sure, worldview does play a part in politics, even a major one. But like, if we're talking about Mexican-Americans for example, there's no actual fundamental reason they'd be Democratic voters instead of Republican ones. And at risk of being over-broad, polling data seems to support my view.

I mean it depends on the propaganda. If they can continue to paint the GOP as Nazi authoritarians who hate minorities and women, I think you could keep most immigrants on the D side. Most are coming from regimes that are authoritarian in some form or another and aren’t keen to have that happen here.

There's at least some loose relationship between voting patterns and the truth, though. The GOP is only able to be painted as Nazi authoritarians because some actual authoritarians do hang out with them, just like the Dems are only able to be painted as out-of-touch, gender-obsessed ideological warriors because they exist and Dems also commonly hang out with them.

Most of the Hispanics I've talked to however tend to be disillusioned with communism and general leftism and actually like the GOP rhetoric (this was Miami though, the Southwestern trends I'm a little less familiar with) and the financial policies too (lots of Trump fans for economy alone I've seen). GOP sticking points tend to be other issues. Like someone brought up Prop 187, which was raising specters of racial profiling and practical, daily QoL hits on actual Hispanic citizens. That, arguably, wasn't really propaganda. And of course Hispanics in general are much more traditional-family focused and religious, both traditional GOP wheelhouses.

Hispanics are already moving towards Trump.

Just look at how the party seems to be simultaneously hemorrhaging both Jewish and Muslim voters.

Is it? Or is it just losing turnout support

Most critiques about the Cato study is that it is intentionally ignorant about different groups of hispanics. There was a group of, essentially, founding Californians (same with Texas and most border states) that are legitimately what you would call 'hispanic whites' that were culturally indistinguishable from an Okie or 49er that came from Iowa or Nebraska in the 1850s. They were then "supplemented" with non natives from, primarily, Mexico who were completely different and leaned heavily Democrat. Because they were poor and unassimilated.

Prop 187 passed, and should have been law.

The fact that it was overturned and within one generation California was no longer majority white should tell you all you need to know about Democracy. Apparently you can't just vote on things you want done, and when you do, you deserve to be wiped out.

The math is much more generous for swing states. A few ten thousand votes in the right swing states and you have a new electoral coalition. The Biden administration is bringing in millions.

Are you conflating encounters and admissions?

Regardless, I don’t think the average illegal alien is voting. They don’t appear to have done so in the last election, at least.

I don't have data on the "average illegal alien," but it does seem like some will make the attempt.

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1839371055728918923

All those anchor babies grow up with citizenship. Give it time

Unless you have some wildly compelling evidence otherwise, most of what I've seen indicates that those born in the US, raised in the US, even to immigrant parents tend to vote at least in broad strokes similar to their peers, and don't follow their parent's preferences to any abnormal degree. Certainly it's hard to imagine an 18-year-old voting Democrat for the sole reason they are eternally and perpetually grateful for their parents being allowed into the country by Democrats 18+ years earlier... that's just not how people vote.

Who are their peers?

Biden-Harris TPS program is flying migrants directly into small communities with government subsidies. They released a special app for immigrants to apply to while waiting in other countries. Pew estimates just under a million immigrants:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/29/how-temporary-protected-status-has-expanded-under-the-biden-administration/

(The figure cited shows a few countries with TPS approval older than the current administration, subtract those for an estimate. Notably Trump rescinded TPS for a few countries during his administration and it was treated as a big deal.)

Hundreds of thousands of illegals are coming in across the border. Here's a pew post about how Biden stopped Title 42 expulsions, leading to Title 8 Apprehensions (they get a court date and then leave lmao):

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/migrant-encounters-at-the-us-mexico-border-hit-a-record-high-at-the-end-of-2023/

This article tries to put a positive spin on it by claiming Republicans are overestimating. The result is, still, alas, of course, millions of illegals coming in through the border:

https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigration-figures/

Of those 6.5 million encounters by CBP, 2.5 million people have been released into the U.S. with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.

Here's another great AP fact check which concludes that Biden and Harris aren't flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country, because they're actually just flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country on purpose:

Trump said during his speech, “Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown - migrants were flown in airplane, not going through borders ... It was unbelievable. I said that must be a mistake. They flew 325,000 migrants. Flew them in over the borders and into our country.”

But migrants are not being flown into the U.S. randomly. Under a Biden policy in effect since January 2023, up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can enter the country monthly if they apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at a specified airport, paying their own way.

[...]

Biden has exercised parole authority far more than any of his predecessors, which Trump calls “an outrageous abuse” that he will end if returned to the White House. Biden has granted entry — by land or air — to at least 1 million people using parole, not just the 327,000 who flew from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua or Venezuela though December.

The article then alleges that paroled immigrants can't become citizens, but that's not really true: eventually they simple stop being paroled immigrants because their status increases to some other status. There are law firms scattered all over the country dedicated to figuring out how to give legal citizenship to these kinds of immigrants. The government pays them!

I don’t think the average illegal alien is voting.

They acquire citizenship and then overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. Which is Musk's claim: if Harris wins election, these immigrants will stay in the US and form a voting block that will vote Democrat in 2028, by which time there will be even more and more immigrants on the path to citizenship.

Anyone who is going to be voting in 2028 already has a green card, unless they are married to a US Citizen (meaning a 3-year rather than a 5-year qualifying period) and their naturalisation happens unusually quickly.

Again, the process to actually obtain votes is

  1. apply to be made legal (X million)

  2. be made legal (1986: 90% accepted)

  3. apply for and be given citizenship (1986 cohort: about a third by 15 years, up to half over lifetime, probably much less immediately)

  4. register to vote

  5. actually vote (I think I misplaced this in my original, oops, this is combined with 4; overall turnout for eligible adults is 66% but some sources say naturalized citizens might vote more, others claim less. Might have to dig up where I got that original source.)

  6. have more of the new voters vote D than R (if so, how much?) (OP laid out how many, but last major election it was +33% D)

  7. was the net gain, if present, larger than the margin of victory?

You only actually get an effect when you reach the last step. You're acting like you can just skip from 1 to 7 and poof, permanent Democratic hegemony! Some of those steps take years, and many math-wise aren't nearly as strong as you might imply. Going backwards, to assemble, say, 20,000 votes, enough to swing a very close swing state, you'd need (20,000) / (33% current Hispanic net +D margin) / (66% of citizens who vote) / (33% who became an actual citizen) / (90% who applied for legal status) = about 310,000 applicants needed. Of course IRL this would lag as the naturalization process usually takes a bit.

So sure, overall plausible in a swing state. Georgia apparently has about 340,000 per that source, so right there on the line, though 2020 was a real squeaker and not that common. Most swing states don't have millions of immigrants, either, and there are plenty of non-swing states too to talk about. That's important when talking about Senate control -- remember, a permanent Democratic electoral stranglehold like Elon posted about would require at least a 2/3rds margin in the Senate, in all practical likelihood. And again, you need the Senate in the first place to even pass legislation giving this pathway to citizenship.

Even in the unlikely event that Democrats took control of the Senate (quite unlikely this cycle, Montana is toast) and House and Presidency and actually pass a bill to do a change like this...

Senate appointments rotate on a staggered basis only a third at a time rotating two years apart, so at least one cycle if not many more would take place before these new voters even showed up! Boy were the Founders smart. That's long enough for public opinion, if merited, to swing against Democrats for making an allegedly naked partisan power grab, more than offsetting any gained votes, it seems to me in that scenario. And even if you pass all those gauntlets, I'd pose the final question: didn't the process work anyways? As a country we're allowed to set our laws including citizenship, though of course the history of what that means and naturalization in general is actually a matter of some great debate, I will grant you.

The grandchildren of the people given amnesty are already out there voting.

The majority of children and 100% of the grandchildren were always going to be citizens.

Why? We could end birth right citizenship. It’s a very strange and weird policy when you zoom out and look at most countries

No we can't, it's in the constitution.

Depends. Birthright citizenship is not as straightforward as it appears.

That is why they are part of anyone intelligent's conversation about letting in the first gen.

So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.

This is not the main thrust of your post but I've been on Twitter myself a bit lately and Elon Musk really is not a high quality poster. Charitably I think he just doesn't really spend that much time on high quality political discussions and his political diet seems to be heavily weighted by low effort right wing shitposters. The guy is running several very large companies, I'm not knocking his intelligence or whatever, but his posting is very low quality. I wouldn't take anything he says that seriously. I don't think I've ever seen a political take by him that even reaches the median post, not even top level post, of this forum. I really would quite like to like musk, he's culturally on my side by being someone who builds impressive things, but he's definitely not pumping out impressive political takes.

The guy is running several very large companies

No, he isn't.

He's put some world class people in charge of his various companies to run them. Elon Musk is maybe the single best identifier and motivator of talent the world has ever seen. He's done some majorly impressive things across very different industries.

And he really wants to be seen as an genius engineer. Which is super sad to me. Dude is a world class talent picker and he has a reality distortion field that turns well adjusted smart people into cult members in their obedience.

But check out his Twitter avatar. Dude's self-conception is already out of this world.

Yes and no. I didn’t read the Musk biography by Isaacson, but I read last weekend the new book “Reentry” by Eric Berger about SpaceX from 2010 - 2022. There is also a prequel “Liftoff” about SpaceX early times. I can both recommend glowingly. He truly did build SpaceX from the ground up. He did know nothing about rockets so he learned everything he could and even Russian rocketry manuals! Since Twitter he became more absent though (which Berger counts as a big negative), first because he focuses so much on the business of the new company but also because he is addicted to tweets.

Anyway this is of lesser importance. Aquota point was that garbage in produces garbage out, and I think Musk is victim to that on X. Snarky soundbite discussions (or mastodon or thread) are rotting the brain of everyone not counterbalancing it with more deeper longform material.

I don’t know him, maybe I am unfair to him and he does have deep discussions with very important people in the Bay Area we could never even dream about reaching. He could just phone Nobel prize tier economists to invite them to dinner! Hire policy experts. Or ask any Senator about their opinions. But instead he shitposts when he is bored.

He's most often scanning the headline, trusting the shitposters, and then hitting repost. I did follow him at some point, but you can tell that he's starting to panic and resorting to just filling up feeds with a repost of Wow and This is insane instead of adding even a lukewarm take or analysis to anything.

As you said, he's busy. I sometimes have to just punch out a link to a thoughtful article to my reports at work instead of warming it up for them in the microwave with some Thought Leadership. But yeah, he's not a high quality source of information.

Probably true. He's out there retweeting quite a lot of partisan stuff. Maybe he was pent-up from being (for Elon) relatively circumspect for a few years before? Surprised me still though, because the tweet wasn't just off the cuff in the sense that it's seven (twitter-sized) paragraphs long (!!)

Speaking of vice presidents and feeling like politicians aren't interested in building bridges across the aisle anymore, does anyone have any thoughts on repealing the Twelfth? For some reason, ever since I heard about that amendment, I fell in love with the original procedure of "VP goes to the runner-up". There's the obvious counter-argument that you wouldn't be able to get anything done, which was the actual rationale for the amendment in the first place, as far as I can tell from the Wiki. On the other hand the obvious counter-argument to that, is that the two top candidates being forced to 'tard-wrangle each other for the next four years lowers the stakes of either one losing or winning, and might be just what a divided and polarized nation needs. Maybe despite everything I've seen throughout my life I'm still naive, but I imagine if something is truly urgent, the President and VP would be able to come to talk it out - in any case that should be easier than getting the majority of Congress to agree on something, and some critical decisions are deliberately and explicitly left in their jurisdiction.

Hopefully this won't be too short for a top level comment, but I only have a superficial understanding of the American system and it's history, so it's hard for me to judge it's pros and cons. What do you guys think?

Hard no.

  1. It would create much more incentive to assassinate a president since it would result in a complete switch in control of government.
  2. It would make the president a lot less likely to step aside if health or other reasons made it so he really should not continue as president (of course, presidents have not been good in the past at stepping aside, even when they really should and have someone of the same party in succession).
  3. The VP would be completely frozen out, putting him in a poor position to take the reins if something happened to the president. There would be no 'tard-wrangling' with each other, the VP would be entirely ignored and left doing absolutely nothing except collecting a pay check.

I would actually go the other way -- allow the President to fire the VP and replace him with any Senate-confirmed cabinet member, and take the Speaker of the House out of the line of succession. The problem with the VP now is that it is supposedly an apprenticeship for the president, but because the President cannot fire the VP the President is very wary of giving the VP any real responsibility. And if the Speaker of the House is in the line of succession, the President would never want to fire a VP because then the line of succession could be going to the other party.

I am not sure it would change much. According to the original language in the Constitution Electoral College members vote for two Persons, which I imagine have to be different people. Presumably each states' electors would vote for the President/VP that won their state same as the current procedure. This means the same President and VP probably win. Although this means the President and VP would always have the same number of EC votes so every election would go to the House. You could end up in a situation where the same two people are President and VP but which one is which is decided by state delegations in the House. Or maybe some coordination mechanism evolves for sufficient electors to vote for neither candidate such that the same President and VP win but with the President having, like, one more EC vote.

Presumably each states' electors would vote for the President/VP that won their state same as the current procedure.

I think in a winner-takes-all state that would mean the current P/VP, in states where it's proportional, it would be split. I think that would still work out to the competing candidate being most likely to have the second-highest amount of votes.

I think this misunderstands how states that allocate EC votes proportionally work. They are not allocated proportionally according to the popular vote of the state. Rather, the states allocate one vote for the overall state winner and then one vote for the winner of each Congressional district. A description here. So the vote-getting is still winner-take-all at the level the voting is occurring at. Presumably whoever won NE-2 would get both votes, same as ME-2.

Huh... why do they explicitly mention "president and vice-president who were political opponents, constantly acting at cross-purposes" in the wiki, then?

The Results section of the 1796 election article has some details. The short version is that parties failed to unite around VP candidates. If Pinckney had won every VP vote for the Federalist party he would have beaten Jefferson easily. Part of it seems to be they tried what I mentioned in my last sentence, coordinating so that the President ended up with fewer ECs than the VP, but too many people voted for other candidates. Note that the 1800 election didn't have this problem, and by 1804 we had the 12th amendment.

Important to note that, then as now, electors formally cast their ballots at their respective state capitals. Without mass communication there was no reliable way to coordinate. If all federalists defect and vote for Jefferson and Burr, the tie gets broken in the House, where the Federalists could swing the election to Burr. If some Democrats honestly defect so Jefferson is ahead of Burr, there's the risk that poor coordination puts Adams ahead of Burr. And who's to say that, right now, there aren't Federalists defecting to Burr so he's ahead of Jefferson?

The College was so chaotic that it could have very quickly ended the Republic.

They won’t act at cross purposes because the Vice president doesn’t have much formal power.

The main problem I see with that is that the VP doesn't really have any formal power except breaking ties in the Senate. If a hypothetical President Harris chooses to just ignore Vice President Trump, there's nothing the he can really do except run his mouth, which he would have done regardless.

Then it sounds like it's at least no worse then the current system, even in the worst case scenario?

Also, having a Runner-Of-The-Mouth-In-Chief sounds pretty fun.

Well, the VP is the President of the Senate. That role is not defined by the Constitution, and right now has been pretty much eclipsed by permanent Presidents Pro Tempore elected from within the Senate itself. However, it could theoretically be made much more powerful if the Senate's rules provided for such.

As far as cutesy proposals to fix partisan electoral procedure, I think the arguments for repealing the 17th are a bit more compelling.

Oh yeah, I heard about that one too, though that feels a bit more esoteric.

Why would handing Senators back to state legislators, which are often more partisan than their constituencies, help?

Because the ways in which they would be partisan, and their institutional incentives, would be different. Additionally, it is unclear the degree to which the incumbent effect would effect appointments from small legislative bodies, particularly the seventeen states whose legislatures turn over frequently due to term limit restrictions.

I share your concerns about the caliber of political leadership we have in state legislatures, but I think the exposure to and reliance on special interest lobbying groups mandated by public campaigning is uniquely bad. You would hope that it would be similar to the federal versus state judiciary, where federal judges are generally lower variance (at least in my view) even though direct selection by the sitting President is hardly unpartisan. And then at a bit more of a stretch, parties might be more willing to replace the gerontocracy without the safe bet that voters will rubber stamp re-election of the familiar name.

I would think the major argument against this would be that it massively increases the incentives for a deranged partisan to try and elevate their guy to the presidency through assassination. As such, I don't think repealing the 12th would be a good idea at all.

Repealing the 12th would do little more than act as a massive incentive for an assassin's bullet. The VP has basically no defacto power, but that could change if #1 isn't around any more.

...

I think you're onto something personally. I also have a slight lean toward esotericism, not a very hot take incoming but I feel we are missing much regarding consciousness and the capabilities of the mind. Perhaps that even relates to your discussion of UFOs as well.

I used to be very materialist, but I'm a lot more open-minded now because I think there's freedom of choice at the most fundamental level when we are building our models, and there's nothing wrong with constructing a theory of reality that allows for immaterial phenomenon. I don't believe we should shove so much stuff under the Occam's Razor rug. We don't have to choose some subjective "simplest" explanation, we can choose whatever explanation and mental model/theory that happens to be useful at the time, and experiment with and construct different models, we can be creative with our mental models of reality just because we can. And also, because we might just live in a crazy/esotericist world where being willing to change your model of reality is what allows you to maintain maximum utility across different times and circumstances. I don't know if I explained that well, maybe it sounds like crazy rambling.

Anyway, I agree it seems like we're heading for some kind of event horizon. One point I'd disagree with is birth rate collapse being "spooky": it seems to be more first-world countries experiencing this, with cultural causes that have been discussed on this site a decent amount, no? Although to your point, I suppose it is unusual how successful the spread of those behavioral shifts that decrease birth rate was.

As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast.

So glad to see that there's a fellow traveler here on TheMotte! Lots to look forward to in the next few months - hearings coming up in both the House and the Senate, and it appears that the UAPDA provision of the NDAA isn't completely dead yet.

Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism?

I wouldn't say that it feels "esoteric" to me, no. But I do think it's wild that the universe allows this to happen, at such a cheap cost and so soon after the invention of electronic computing in general, in much the same way that it's wild to me that the universe allows heavy metal tubes to fly through the air.

...

I wonder, with some affection, how The New Atlantis is doing. They seem to have revamped the website and have articles more suited to internet virality - I remember them as a slightly stuffy, but high-quality resource, essentially the place to find conservative American academics writing on philosophy of technology.

Very interesting framing! The question that most strongly appears to me, though, is this one:

With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?

This sounds to me like positing a kind of agency or purpose to history - a sense that it's almost like there's a design, or something that's meant to happen now.

That sense would imply some kind of agent to have that purpose, a designer or meaner who lies behind this. To UFO cultists (pardon the pejorative language), that agent might be some enlightened alien race, or spiritual being or group thereof that are only observed through these esoteric occurrences. Someone more focused on AI might posit some way that a future agent can reach back in time to influence its own creation (perhaps something like Dan Simmons' Ultimate Intelligence?), or to create the condition of its own possibility. Or adherents of traditional religions might easily slot their own divinities in there.

Do you have any sense of such a purpose, or implied agency?

In reading your post and contemplating it, I realized that a very likely response that humans would have to a significantly super-humanly intelligent AI is to worship it as a god. I suppose this is old hat. There must be hundreds of old sci-fi stories with this premise. But I used to find this premise hokey, whereas now it actually seems pretty plausible. And it is especially plausible if the AI is super-humanly charming as well as being super-humanly intelligent in a scientific way. And why wouldn't it be super-humanly charming? This AI would combine in one being an intelligence that is beyond any of humanity's geniuses and the charisma of a pop megacelebrity like Elvis or Michael Jackson, or a politician like Hitler, but on steroids. The likely human reaction to such a being is not just fawning support, such as Obama gets from Democrats or Trump from Republicans, it would probably be something more like religious awe.

Some might object that humans would not feel such an awe because they would be aware that the machine intelligence was a human creation. But I am not convinced by that. Humans are capable of worshipping Jesus even though Jesus was born from a human woman. It would be easy for future humans to imagine that the super-humanly intelligent AI was actually some sort of being from beyond the metal, some kind of essence that the universe suddenly decided to activate in that metal like Jesus becoming incarnate in a human body.

Granted, the AI wouldn't have a human body, unlike say Michael Jackson, who could get worshipped as a demi-god off the power of his accomplishments and raw charisma by standing still and turning his head occasionally, and who still has the largest online defense force of any modern celebrity, one that includes thousands of people who worship him and constantly argue online against the idea that he was a pedophile. But it would have so many other advantages that I'm not sure the lack of a human body would matter. For all I know, it might even help. Humans have never yet in their history, unless you credit stories about gods or aliens, been exposed to an intelligence that is genuinely significantly super-human.

As long as I'm talking about Michael Jackson, I might as well mention that he was so beloved and worshiped that he could release a music video that is basically fascist propaganda and get away with it. Check it out, the HIStory Teaser is both hilarious and epic. Even if it was meant to be satirical, it is still probably the best fascist music video that has been made in the West since Leni Riefenstahl, or maybe parts of the Pink Floyd The Wall movie.

I’d argue that on a low level we’ve been worshiping AI and before that computers. The number of times I’ve seen someone ask AI a question and just assume AI is correct is pretty darn high. They’ll ask ChatGPT a question and post the answer as though this is all that’s needed to know the answer. That’s pretty close to divination— ask a question, get an answer from the gods and then just go with it. And before that, you could find the same thing with making computer models or researching on the internet. You’d get an answer from a computer analysis and never ask what assumptions are in the model, it was done on a computer after all. With punch cards and everything. It has to be right. Or once we had internet, any information found by Google search would be assumed correct. It’s just built in, I think, that if you think the box in front of you is intelligent, you assume it’s right and simply accept that what it says is true.

This makes the word "worshipping" meaningless.

So, my church doesn't have an official position on this, but the unofficial one I've seen in a lot of places is that if 'true' GAI happens it'll be used as a puppet by demons.

This makes sense on a secular level if we translate demons to something like Scott's take on Moloch. Naturally-emergent suboptimal (or downright deleterious) local minima / pernicious local attractors in the possibility space of ways-of-being, of niches.

But I don't see why it needs to be either/or.

...

I am not a member of any organized religion, but I think that your post nails something very important.

And is pragmatic intelligence really anything other than an ability to objectively survey the field, especially when that means being able to see past the local maximum to a higher one?

But though I agree with you at least in that there is a similarity between the religious notion of a demon and the possible darkness of AI, I am not convinced that the argument makes sense unless I accept your metaphysical perspectives. From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?

I suppose the non-secular, more optimistic argument would hold that humans have some kind of extra sauce, something that naturally makes them less demonic, maybe more altruistic, than an AI following pure gradient descent on matrix math would have. But what is the evidence that this is true?

And I say this as someone who thinks that consciousness might be beyond the ability of humans to ever understand. But when it comes to ordered/demonic, I'm not sure why the AI would tend to be more demonic, unless I buy into some kind of metaphysics that I see no reason to buy into so far at least.

From a secular perspective, why would AI be more drawn to chaos than humans are?

Darwin. The human brain, and its various chordate forerunners, is the product of hundreds of millions of years of ruthless selection forces; who knows how many vulnerabilities and failure modes both gross and subtle have been winnowed out over the aeons?

As many people have noted, the decline of religion in mainstream society has left a lot of people with a yearning for something like religion. Some people channel that into politics, some into sports, and some into esoteric new-age beliefs like the idea that UFOs are faeries. Or, sure, maybe the relics of some ancient civilization that developed AI and then went extinct, leaving their robot-ufos to forever roam the Earth without a purpose.

I'm not a believer but I'm open-minded. I've never been fully convinced by any of the arguments against UFOs-as-aliens. I certainly don't buy the idea that the government has some sort of decades-long project that makes super-advanced aircraft which seem to defy physics, and has also kept it hidden all these years. They're just not that competent. We know about all their high-tech research projects, because those projects involve a huge amount of money and people working on them.

One theory I do like is that it's the opposite- it's a conspiracy by the air force to cover up their own lack of knowledge. They see all these bizarre events, they've tried to research it, and just never come to a satisfying conclusion. It looks really bad for the air force to admit "weird shit is happening in our skies, and we have no idea what it is or how to stop it." Of course the "weird shit" might just be odd aerial phenomenon like ball lightning. Or it might not be. it could also be that all the pilots are just going crazy from too much time staring at clouds, and starting to hallucinate things that aren't there, but that looks even worse for the air force to admit.

Anyway, it's clear that a large number of people really want to believe in aliens, thanks to science fiction and a lack of religious meaning in their life. But there's also a large number that really want to not believe, because it makes them feel comfortable and secure in their worldview of scientific certainty. It's hard to find people that can actually investigate this in a rigorous, open-minded yet skeptical way.

Anyway, it's clear that a large number of people really want to believe in aliens, thanks to science fiction and a lack of religious meaning in their life.

I want to believe in aliens because an intelligent non-human civilization would be a treasure trove of philosophical data. What are they like? Is their conscious experience anything like ours (vision, touch, taste, etc), or is it totally different? Do they have art? Do they have a concept of good and evil? Do they have math? Is it isomorphic to our math, or is it built from different concepts? Are they a collective hivemind, do they have a concept of individual rights? Do they have conflict, do they have war? Do they care to ask any of these questions about us, or are they not interested?

I don't need any more meaning. My life is more meaningful than I know what to do with already, if anything I suffer from too much meaning. I just think aliens would be cool, is all.

So, do you believe in them? or, to put it another way, what would you guess is the probability that aliens exist? Bearing in mind your bias that you want them to exist.

In terms of intelligent aliens who have actually visited this planet (as opposed to say, alien bacteria existing literally anywhere else in the universe)? It's not that likely. But unlike the staunch skeptics, I don't think the probability is 0 either. The US government has acted quite shady about the whole thing over the decades, and congressmen have claimed to have seen enough shocking things in classified briefings that I think it's worthwhile to dig deeper and get more of this classified information (and we know for a fact that this information exists, even if we don't know its actual contents) out to the public.

The US government acts shady about lots of things. If looking into something would expose classified projects that have nothing to do with space aliens, their reaction is going to look an awful lot like someone acting shady about space aliens.

An extremely funny but prosaic explanation for a lot of this stuff is that the government just keeps lying about aliens to conceal their totally mundane projects and occasionally people within the government get fooled and the story gets out of hand and it's embarrassing to admit how much you lied/got fooled, so...

An even funnier and scarier version of this is that this and the "aliens are real and can hurt you" theories are true and the people who know about the aliens actually prefer alien stories to circulate anyway since it's helpful for people to peel back the layer and find that the "real" story is that the aliens are just a cover for the next stealth bomber or whatever.

We know about all their high-tech research projects

Well...yes, but I feel compelled to point out that, because of this, we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics (and perhaps more relevantly to a lot of UFO sightings, to make it seem like there are objects, including possibly physics-defying ones, where none exist – that's electromagnetic warfare for ya!)

we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics

Like what? Making an aircraft (briefly) hover in mid-air doesn't defy physics, it's just really difficult and expensive. Same with electromagnetic warfare. Defying physics would be something like instantaneous acceleration or faster-than-light travel.

Well, I guess in theory, if you have a sufficiently broad understanding of physics, nothing can violate physics.

But yeah the government has conducted various covert research endeavors on things in the ballpark of what you mention. The Navy got a patent that included gravity manipulation technology in 2018 and the US military/defense industrial complex has been researching "antigravity" for decades.

Edit-to-add: as an aside, it's interesting to ask if the fact that the government has put effort into tilting at these particular windmills indicates a belief inside certain corners of the US military-industrial complex that these things are possible, perhaps itself due to observing UFOs/UAPs. Food for conspiratorial thought for the so inclined!

I think it mostly just shows that they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes. It doesn't sound like they put a lot of effort into it, just gave a bit of money to one crackpot to work on "antigravity" for a while. Similarly there was the time they did some research on psychics and remote viewing which... didn't work out.

Anyway, notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light. They're not good at keeping secrets!

they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes.

Yep, I 100% agree with this, and am glad someone is doing so.

didn't work out.

Well, admittedly there's some contention on this point.

notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light.

I...am very skeptical of this logic. Imagine if you were the director of the CIA and someone told you you didn't need to worry about Russian spies because all of them that you were aware of had been uncovered eventually!

But anyway, to my point: the government's definitely done far-out research like this. I broadly agree there's not solid evidence they've hit any real "physics-defying" breakthroughs, just that they've looked for them. (However if they found them, I'd obviously expect them to lock it down very tightly.)

Similarly there was the time they did some research on psychics and remote viewing which... didn't work out

Well, that implies that the purpose of those programs was definitively looking for psychics rather than simply just trying to either psyop certain individuals into believing in psychics, or stigmatizing the field even further. Hal Puthoff (one of the leaders of the CIA-contracted Stanford study of ESP) most probably conspired with Uri Geller to deceive Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell to raise thousands of dollars for further research through making him think that Geller could spontaneously teleport lost keepsakes. The main weirdness comes in the personal anecdotes of outside-party observers whose soundness of mind would otherwise be assumed in good faith. Jacques Vallee, for example, wrote down in his private diary an example of Geller receiving hidden information psychically after Vallee sent other information the last second. Vallee otherwise notes (in the same diary) LLNL engineers allegedly measuring Geller's telekinetic abilities and receiving interference patterns on photographic machinery only possible through an external source of light that was otherwise absent, which lines up with other weird stories like Jack Sarfatti (PhD physicist, personal hippy friend of Lenny Susskind) talking to LLNL physicists throughout this fiasco and bringing up to them the fact that if Geller was actually psychic to the extent they were claiming, he would have no issue in activating or neutralizing nuclear weaponry remotely, to the group's horror. The resulting conclusion would be that either the entire program was able to convince highly-technical observers individually and in groups upon personal contact that ESP was real when it actually wasn't (up to and including the President, as Jimmy Carter stated that remote viewing found a downed aircraft when prosaic means couldn't) for some unknown ulterior purpose, or that this entire operation of conmanship was operating on some foundation of otherwise hidden knowledge of ESP or crashed spacecraft or whatever. Vallee personally came to the second conclusion, thinking that Geller was a genuine psychic who also engaged in widespread fraud for whatever reason. It should also be noted that Geller was discovered and brought to America in the first place by a MKUltra doctor who also brought psychedelic mushrooms to America, whose sessions of hypnotism made Geller think that he was empowered by an artificially superintelligent computer onboard an alien spacecraft from the future, but that's neither here or there.

As you can tell, all these very people involved in the ESP research fiasco for the government are also the very people involved in the modern UFO "cover-up" scene. Hal Puthoff himself was good friends with a Lockheed Martin Vice President (James T. Ryder) who was also a Luciferian theosophist, and people around Puthoff (including the people who work for him) all claim that this Vice President literally handed over a flying saucer that Puthoff's team broke into and looked inside. This is the event that David Grusch talks about when it comes to the 'crash-retrieval program'. The purely fascinating aspect of this is that either there actually exists some sort of supernatural thing everyone is acting totally fucked-up around, or we have hugely powerful and influential people in our governmental black programs roleplaying about parapsychological things for no apparent reason other than to psyop their own black-world colleagues. It makes absolutely no sense.

For what it's worth, I appreciate the long effort post response and all the links. Though I do feel a bit um.. Gish-galloped/Eulered. I don't really know what to say in response to all this. I feel like I would have to do a very long deep dive into 1970s psi research to really respond properly, and I'm not prepared to do all that right now. But still, thanks.

The purely fascinating aspect of this is that either there actually exists some sort of supernatural thing everyone is acting totally fucked-up around, or we have hugely powerful and influential people in our governmental black programs roleplaying about parapsychological things for no apparent reason other than to psyop their own black-world colleagues. It makes absolutely no sense.

It makes perfect sense. Even the most intelligent powerful people get swept up in religious cults and movements. Some might have schizophrenia-esque disorders, or even low key schizophrenia. Others might just be the kind of people easily swept up in this kind of thing. Some of it is fraud and some of it is true belief.

There isn't anything that needs explaining about people getting swept up in religious cults. We have countless examples throughout history that haunt the world to this day. Just accept that the supernatural isn't real and that people are in general prone to schizo-reasoning. From Siberian shamans, to West African witch-doctors, to psychics in 20th century America.

I did not mean that the dichotomy did not make sense, just that the reasons behind both hypotheticals would not make sense to me even if they were true. The government is not acting the way I would expect it to if the supernatural existed, and even then, they are acting in a way that I would not expect them to even if I thought they were trying to make the supernatural seem to exist even when it didn’t. My hypothesis space for what the ‘UFO psyop’ is is completely barren, especially when you look deeper into UFO lore.

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Critical thinking is completely uncorrelated to intelligence

The above does not seem to me to be mere ‘uncritical thinking’, but some sort of memetic disease or contacted mental illness. It’s one thing to imagine that there may be UFO programs because of uncritical thinking, it’s another thing to probably earnestly believe that a Lockheed Martin VP handed over a flying spacecraft which you broke into and looked inside. The thing that ‘did not make sense’ that I referred to earlier is that either there is something there, or there is a mass-psyop going on similar to what happened to Paul Bennewitz, just on a higher scale, whose motivation I cannot make out whatsoever. That opaqueness is the main thing that is confusing me, as otherwise I am willing to believe that there might be a ‘UFO phenomenon’ simply due to the fact of my own theory of mind and the fact that people I trust have seen unexplainable things.

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I have only a passing interest in aliens/UFOs, but the one book I read on the topic really piqued my interest. It's called The Uninvited by Nick Pope, who by his own account was tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the UK Ministry of Defense, began the role as a sceptic, but came away from it convinced that there really was something going on.

Per your dichotomy, the book starts off by the Explorer end of the spectrum and becomes increasingly Esoteric as it goes along. The opening chapters describe some of the canonical alien abduction stories which are very much in the Explorer camp (a man meets a spaceman who claims to be from Venus and who explicitly urges him to promote nuclear disarmament; a couple on a long cross-country drive experience several hours of "missing time": regression hypnosis reveals that they were plucked out of their car into a spaceship and surgically experimented upon by "Grey" aliens), followed by chapters in which Pope recounts anonymised interviews he's conducted with members of the British public, whose own accounts are far more bizarre and harder to square with a simple extraterrestrial explanation. Throughout the book, Pope emphasises that accounts of interactions with intelligent, non-human entities (from Biblically accurate angels to leprechauns and djinn) are as old as the human species, and gave me my first exposure to the Bayesian concept of priors shaping experience: if you wake up in the night and see a pale, short, oddly-proportioned figure at the end of your bed, you might think it's an alien, but a religious person might think it's an angel, while a believer in the afterlife might think it's a ghost.

At the end of the book, there are two chapters in which Pope offers a range of hypotheses for what's going on. The first is Explorer: assuming these experiences are the result of aliens visiting us from elsewhere in our own universe, what are their motivations? The second chapter is a collection of hypotheses which don't take aliens as their starting point, ranging from mundane (hallucinations, mass hysteria) to mundane-but-conspiratorial (government-induced mass hypnosis) to Esoteric (the "aliens" are visiting us from another dimension; the aliens are our genetic descendants visiting us from the future). It's cracking stuff.

Interesting, thanks for the recommendation! My first exposure to the Esoteric case for UFOs/UAPs was reading The Mothman Prophecies for the first time but I've never shaken it since. The publicly released videos from the Navy have seemed more Esoteric than Explorer to me as well, though to be fair that might well be because my bias had already been established at that point.

Oh I'd be curious to read that book. I have something of an obsession with the 2002 film of the same name starring Richard Gere. My understanding is that it has very little in common with the source material, but it's incredibly eerie and unnerving all the same.

Given that you're already curious, I'd definitely recommend it. The movie is what got me to read the book as well, and while I'd agree that the source material differs substantially from the movie, one of the things that I was able to better appreciate after reading the book is how well the movie does at both creating the strange atmosphere and conveying how deeply the MC (Keel) falls down the rabbit hole. I'm not a UFO/UAP buff or anything like that but my dad was so I'm familiar enough with the basics, but that book was my first exposure to the Esoteric explanation and I found it to be every bit as unnerving as the movie!

Actually as a sociological phenomenon, I find UFOs rather fascinating. More properly, I find the changes in the descriptions and speculations about UFOs and their missions to dovetail pretty clearly with our understanding of physics and our desire for contact with the spirit world once we ditched traditional religions. When we were deep in the Cold War, these things were very physical phenomena with scientific and very real things like computers and engines and were made of materials at least something like what was used in planes. They wanted to prevent nuclear war. Once the Cold War was over, they took on a much more of a spiritual mission, to enlighten humans for the shift in consciousness. They stopped being so physical and mechanical and started to resemble angels or spirits or pagan gods. I suspect a widespread understanding of the speed limit of the universe and how long a light speed trip from across the galaxy would actually take as well as the failure of SETI to find any signals fueled the change as well. Them being actual spacemen no longer fits what we know of the universe. Them being inter dimensional spirit beings does.

While I don't think you're wrong wrong about this, at least not in terms of popular perception, the shift of UFOs from the tangible to the esoteric began during the Cold War. The Raelians were founded in the 70s (and apparently the first "UFO religion" in the 1950s.) I think the dynamic you're describing is more that it took a few decades for pop culture to catch up to the "cutting edge" of "UFO research" (however you want to define it.)

From what I can tell, it's extremely common for people who start out on the tangible nuts-and-bolts angle to go very quickly down the esoteric pipeline (see Vallee and even Hynek!) But as Spielberg explained to Vallee while making Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's harder to explain to an audience. (Of course then he caved in the fourth Indiana Jones movie.)

Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards

It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.

It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:

I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.

Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI

Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!

This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation!

That is not what is at stake in contemporary debates about physicalism.

And I don't think it is, but I don't think that's what OP was talking about. "scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the ... simulationism ... out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing ... "

Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!

You don't think deliberate efforts to reduce the population entered into it?

No, because those deliberate efforts are aimed at the third world. Only a handful of political radicals- disproportionately the kind of environmentalists that don’t get invited to cool parties- want to reduce middle class first world birthrates.

No, because those deliberate efforts are aimed at the third world. Only a handful of political radicals- disproportionately the kind of environmentalists that don’t get invited to cool parties- want to reduce middle class first world birthrates.

Well, isn't that because the efforts to crash non-third-world fertility rates have already been successful?

Well, kind of. East Asia really did see fertility control programs that are probably part of the story for the regions anomalously low fertility.

In white countries, economic factors and Vatican II(seriously, the delta between Catholic and nonCatholic TFR in the fifties was wild in a lot of these places) were the main reasons and nobody really pushed population control except accidentally(the idea behind teen pregnancy prevention programs was that these girls would have kids in their twenties instead). India and Africa saw the brunt of deliberate- and often coercive- population control programs outside of the one child policy(which, again, was a pretty big deal).

...

Would you classify "deliberate efforts to promote values that compete with populationmaxxing" as "deliberate efforts to reduce the population"?

Only when people with these values have a history of advocating for eugenics and population control, never really repudiated those views, and see concern over fertility as some sort of Nazi dog whistle.

Are you talking about specific people who have advocated for all that in their lifetime, or about "those people" as a set that spans 100+ years of discourse? In my observation it's gonna be hard to find someone who both hates Nazis and approves eugenics nowadays.

As for Nazi dog whistles, when it appears that the ones most vocally concerned about fertility also have some kind of white ethnonationalist views (when people are concerned about black/black-adjacent fertility it seems to be more along the lines of "they're more fertile than us"), what is one supposed to believe?

Are you talking about specific people who have advocated for all that in their lifetime, or about "those people" as a set that spans 100+ years of discourse?

Yeah I am talking about specific people, all the way from Malthus to Ehrlich, and many, many, people in-between.

In my observation it's gonna be hard to find someone who both hates Nazis and approves eugenics nowadays.

As for Nazi dog whistles, when it appears that the ones most vocally concerned about fertility also have some kind of white ethnonationalist views, what is one supposed to believe?

By the same logic, I will answer your question: when it appears that the ones most vocally concerned about "women's liberation" are implementing policies that increase the fertility of the most rich, and drop that of others, what is one supposed to believe?

(when people are concerned about black/black-adjacent fertility it seems to be more along the lines of "they're more fertile than us")

Interesting crowd you're hanging out with. What I'm hearing is more to the tune of "abortion is literal black genocide". Would you be ok if I called your support for abortion a Nazi dog whistle?

(when people are concerned about black/black-adjacent fertility it seems to be more along the lines of "they're more fertile than us")

As I've pointed out many times- attempts to reduce African fertility, and third world fertility more generally- is very establishment-linked progressive NGO coded. Bill Gates has been notable for his efforts in such matters.

Governments that have put a lot of effort into trying to increase the population, such as modern Russia's government, have not seen much success, so I doubt that the low modern fertility rates have much to do with governments trying to lower fertility rates. I think that fertility rates are just something that governments, even relatively authoritarian governments, do not have much control over. For a government to significantly influence fertility rates it would have to either make sweeping economic and cultural changes somehow, and/or go totalitarian beyond the degree to which even the current Chinese government is totalitarian.

Governments that have put a lot of effort into trying to increase the population, such as modern Russia's government, have not seen much success, so I doubt that the low modern fertility rates have much to do with governments trying to lower fertility rates.

I don't see how it follows from there, that the resulting reduction in population growth was not deliberate.

I think that fertility rates are just something that governments, even relatively authoritarian governments,

True, it isn't just a matter of government policy, but that doesn't mean the reduction in fertility wasn't premeditated, and implemented from the top.

Governments that have put a lot of effort into trying to increase the population, such as modern Russia's government, have not seen much success

A lot of effort by Russia's government: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xlf2G0O_VY0&t=87

Their latest idea was: Russians don't have enough space to raise kids. Not very original thought, but okay.

  • Russians don't buy enough houses because we only allow mortgages for apartments. Let's allow mortgages for houses.
  • Russians still don't buy enough houses because the interest rates are too high. Let's subsidize their mortgages for new houses so their interest rate is below the key rate.
  • Russians can't buy houses because there aren't enough SFH developers. Let's wait for the invisible hand to solve this.
  • Russians started buying houses, but the prices have tripled because there still aren't enough SFH developers and not enough construction materials. Let's wait for the invisible hand to solve this some more.
  • Russians stopped buying houses with cash because at these prices only subsidized mortgages make sense. Let's wait for the invisible hand to solve this again
  • Oops, we've run out of cash to subsidize new mortgages. Let's stop handing out new subsidized mortgages.
  • Oops, Russians stopped buying new houses altogether because they won't pay 3x the price and 20% interest.
  • Oops, the real estate development market has crashed.
  • Oops, the wave of bankruptcies means that fewer new houses are being built than when we started.
  • Oops, some Russians are stuck paying mortgages for unfinished houses while their existing property is the collateral. Good luck solving that problem in court.

How about a new idea? Let's introduce escrow accounts so that real estate developers can't run away with all your money! Oh, wait, someone has snuck in a clause that this applies only to prefabs, so 95% of the market is not covered.

I don't think that's a huge component, no. Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing, and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians). What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?

Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing

How does one measure's failure disprove the other measure's success? Especially since the measure that worked is still in effect, and is still being promoted - it's not like "countries" have total control over what's going on inside them, and are free from outside (and inside) influences.

and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians).

Same question, as above.

What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?

Getting women to join the workforce, attempting to close the wage gap when they have (even though it primarily comes from men picking more lucrative careers and devoting themselves to work relatively more), and the denigration of motherhood in mass media, and all status-granting institutions.

Ok I think that was a combination of changes brought on directly by technology (women always did a large amount of critical labor within the household, farming or making clothes or similar, cleaning, physically maintaining the household, and as technology automated that having them work made sense) and changes brought on for direct political, eg progressive, reasons which in turn was enabled by technology. I believe little of that had the explicit aim of lowering the birth rate. There was, of course, the overpopulation panic, but I think the impact of that was very small compared to the global trend of progressivism and technology!

There was, of course, the overpopulation panic, but I think the impact of that was very small compared to the global trend of progressivism and technology!

I don't get it. That is my entire argument - this is exactly how the measures to reduce the population are being implemented to begin with! "Progressivism" is being introduced through deliberate centralized efforts, and "overpopulation panic" has been it's feature for over a hundred years. Why are we assuming that this is just some magical "global trend" appearing out of nowhere, rather than it being an expression of these deliberate efforts?

Why are we assuming that this is just some magical "global trend" appearing out of nowhere

Because it isn't a 'magic global trend that appeared out of nowhere', it's a central political/moral/philosophical development of modern history, something that basically all politicians, intellectuals, philosophers have been debating for the past few hundred years? You can read historical progressives and talk to existing progressives, and they're much more concerned about stuff like freeing women from domination than they are overpopulation.

it's a central political/moral/philosophical development of modern history

And where do central developments of modern history come from, are they by any chance deliberately implemented?

and they're much more concerned about stuff like freeing women from domination than they are overpopulation.

I mean, it's only so long you can twirl mustaches and laughing like a me monocled villain, without people noticing. Also the reaction to fertility concern belies them supposedly not caring about it.

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My understanding of physicalism is that its main point is very much not that intelligence can come from mechanical causation - I think that most modern self-identified non-physicalists would agree that intelligence can come from mechanical causation. Physicalism claims that consciousness comes from mechanical causation, which is a claim that is orthogonal to the claim that intelligence can come from mechanical causation.

I wasn't trying to use a specific meaning of 'physicalism', just a general sense that 'physics is all there is', but

In philosophy, physicalism is the view that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical,[1] or that everything supervenes on the physical.[2] It is opposed to idealism, according to which the world arises from mind. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality, unlike "two-substance" (mind–body dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) views. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.

this also works


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