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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   31067 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z

This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".

Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.

Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face.

Worse, "ghosting" has become ubiquitous in dating and employment, so doors aren't even being slammed. They just disappear without feedback.

Worse, they often don't even disappear. Sometimes that job keeps getting re-posted every week for another year.

You ring the doorbell and absolutely nothing happens. Nobody answers. The door just continues floating there.

The reason(s) for this is even worse.

If you can document that you posted a public job notice, you can demonstrate to the Feds that you are "equal opportunity" employer - even when you wanted the job to go to a specific friend-of-an-employee already. Seriously, this is how it works.

Part of it is also used by large public corporations to send noise to hedge funds. Hedge funds will scrape job postings as a rough proxy for expected hiring (and, therefore, demand) for certain companies. A bunch of ghost jobs can confuse the HF algorithm.

This isn't new.

Its a point I've made before.

Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.

Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.

And this means they're pretty much attuned to the Molochian incentives over their entire lives, and this thus sets their expectations for how the rest of their lives will turn out (spoiler: not great unless they get rich enough to just opt out of the race).

Yes, Algorithms have always been there, but now its more legible than ever. Or, ironically, less legible since most places keep their algos as black boxes. Its not like you can just ask "Why didn't you hire me?" "Oh, I don't like your tattoos/lack of experience/general attitude." Its always a nonspecific dismissal that even they can't explain.

So they're told to suck it up and try harder, keep going until they get a yes, etc. etc., but they're missing the 'feedback' part that might help them zero in on why they're failing and getting rejected. And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

One hopeful use case for AI if it does not end all our problems at once (we're all dead, or its utopia) is it should be extremely good at helping match people with positions that work best for them given their preferences and the other party's needs. An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which, AND given constructive feedback as to why certain applicants aren't suitable or what they can do to improve. Same for dating, in theory, although the thought of AI mediated dating/mating disgusts me on a visceral level. Hmm.

An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which,

Same for dating, in theory

The problem - a little more so in the case of dating, but not much - is that people/employers don't know what they want. Some might think they do, but they don't.

In the end, it's all vibes. "They know it then they see it", and they especially know what they don't want when they see it.

The AI won't help with that, at least not until it has a good training set of people who vibed in the past.

I suspect that training an AI that can do this is far simpler than you'd assume on the face of it.

And it doesn't have to be THAT good to beat the current system as described.

I'd be a tad more worried about how people might try to aggressively 'jailbreak' the thing to improve their chances.

My assumption is that an AI would be extremely good at this - if it had the training data. Far better than a person could be without meeting the candidate.

The problem is the training data. I haven't gone on nearly enough good and bad dates to show the AI what I like and what I don't like. So I can't let the AI choose my wife. Yet I knew I had found her when I first met her.

Given that a large percentage of relationships now occur in large part via text, ignoring privacy concerns it's easy to feed the texts I sent to my wife in the first six months of our relationship and then assign a value to our marriage, and so on across thousands of examples until they can look at your texts with your gf and determine if you should get married.

Interesting, that's not my experience at all! I've had good "text game" with many women who turned out to be bad dates, or who turned out to be good dates but absolutely not wife material.

In my experience, there's absolutely no way around meeting and talking/interacting if you want to know if you have potential. The AI would need to watch those meetings, and be trained on data like that.

I'm suggesting that the AI will likely pick up on patterns you and I don't, subtleties that predict relationship outcomes more reliably than the participants themselves.

The average single has zero training examples of what a text conversation looks like in a relationship that leads to marriage. At best, they may be able to conference with a few friends who may have experience of one text conversation they lead to marriage who may be willing to read a few messages and render an opinion. A hypothetical YentaGPT could trivially review months of messaging and compare it to thousands of examples of successful and unsuccessful relationships.

Just as a great baseball coach can judge a player from how they grip the bat, a great relationship coach could judge from a text conversation.

From your data set though the AI wouldn't be looking at how the player grips the bat, but how the player writes about gripping the bat, if he does at all, or how he texts about the game, etc. I believe @pbmonster 's point is that while "text game" may be one data point (and as far as it might get one in the proverbial door, an important one) but it doesn't read body language (gripping the bat), tone of voice, eye contact, scent, speed of talking, whether you shake your knee up and down, how she holds her hair over one shoulder, etc etc. To say nothing of moments when the two of you laugh at the same thing, or other, small but deep indicators that may not be very legible in text interactions.

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Don Draper: Arranged marriages, but arranged by a computer instead of parents who love you.

"Our Super Yenta, with a measured IQ of over 9000, has studied over 200,000 successful relationships and over 300,000 unsuccessful relationships, in order to determine what subtle factors in communication can indicate relationship compatibility. Super Yenta has no ulterior motives: she doesn't want to hook you up with her niece, she's a computer without feelings that rates relationships only on objective criteria discerned from training data."

Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.

Once again, I find myself quoting:

“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

And this:

And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

reminds me of the gritty cyberpunk dystopia Tyler Cowen forecasts our civilization becoming in Average is Over.

And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

I think @KulakRevolt had a good essay related to this. I can't find it right now, but he argued that in the past, most men were pretty happy to see increased military spending because it meant jobs. Relatively good jobs that an average man could get, no experience or credentials necessary. Nowadays we tend to think there's a tradeoff between "guns or butter" where increased military spending means less money available for all the nice stuff. But the more common pattern is the opposite- war opens up opportunities, while longtime peace creates a glut of men with no clear role in society. If some of them die in a war, that just creates even more demand for young men.

If some of them die in a war, that just creates even more demand for young men.

Kind of like the idea that the Black Plague was a good thing for the peasantry (that survived)?

Yeah. It's the same Malthusian logic- the population grows faster than the amount of available wealth. And even if the population is shrinking, the wealth is also getting concentrated into fewer and fewer hands unless the government steps in.

the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

It's a actually not that bad. I can't find the original article (which I read at least ten years ago), but it's easily shown that if every company hires the ""top 20%"" of their applicant pool then much more than the top 20% of the actual labor force in that sector is employed.

Of course, but it doesn't leave those getting rejected with much insight into what they could do better.

While true, I don't think there was ever a time when an employer would tell you how you could be a better candidate. If nothing else it's probably covered in spooky liabilities, at least if you are a lawyer.

You can't even ask, is the thing.

Because the people doing the hiring probably don't even know, or would rather not explain "the computer told us no."

I graduated with a Masters in 2020.

I’m now 41 and still work retail.

I have 22 years of retail management experience.

The amount of no’s I’ve received is in the thousands.

I don’t even believe entry level positions exist - I’ve never seen one. No idea why I got a Masters.

My idea was that ‘ hey my experience and this degree will mean I’ll be making 6 figures in a few years. LOL

Applying for jobs is bad, but not that bad. When I was applying for my first real jobs in 2017-2018, I had about a 10% conversion rate to first-round interviews. Even if you have 1/10th of the level I had, you should still get several interviews per thousand applications, and that's pretty conservative. If you're not even managing that, there's a good chance there's something fundamentally wrong with the way you apply.

There’s clearly something off about me that prohibits me from finding a new career in some way … and possibly with the way I apply of course.

I’m just at a loss and stuck in retail for now.

It’s not literal Hell - I can probably be a store manager if a Dillards in 5 years and that’s six figures … but I just feel the need for more.

I wouldn't blame you for wanting more, as I've never heard retail to be a particularly wonderful sector to work in. There's probably a lot of that vague existential dread that you're "missing out" in some way when you've worked a job you don't want to for decades.

I don't know what sector you're applying to, but I'd be open to further conversation if you want tips applying to places, or for a second person to look over the resume you're sending. For the record, I work tech in a smallish DC financial lobbying firm.

No pressure to take me up on it or anything.

Strange. Gen Z has grown up with historically low levels of unemployment, at least in America. Although I think that changed in the last two years, due to rising interest rates. Is this mass application thing due to people already at jobs trying to find better ones to switch to?

There's certainly been low unemployment for the most part, but that's not the issue (though it could exacerbate things if unemployment spiked). It's the fact that the internet has made applying for things (jobs, dating, schools) so much easier, which led to a proliferation of applications. But applications are mostly a zero-sum game, so employers, schools, etc. have responded by ratcheting up expectations.

This could theoretically be solved if the government cracked down on the most abusive practices (like ghosting after a formal job offer) and instituted a well-designed tax to counteract application spam, but that would probably be as unpopular as congestion pricing, so I doubt it would pass in our populist-addled age.

It's the fact that the internet has made applying for things (jobs, dating, schools) so much easier, which led to a proliferation of applications. But applications are mostly a zero-sum game, so employers, schools, etc. have responded by ratcheting up expectations.

Yes, fully agree. While macroeconomic and cultural changes leading to unemployment and underemployment are real, the big factor I see underlying this whole conversation is that online applications make it possible for 15,000 people to apply for a job, which was never possible before. You can't treat 15,000 people respectfully and humanely. And the surplus of choices creates a sense of decision paralysis, dulling any ability to reason through options while diluting any sense of personal responsibility. There's a reason making most decisions starts by creating a shortlist.

That's why online dating is collapsing, too: a surplus of options leads to a sense of paralysis and lack of moral responsibility. Where before someone would be restricted to the local fare, now someone can see everyone around, and reach out with almost no effort. And what is offered with no effort can be rejected with no effort.

As always, technology is introduced as a liberating option but quickly transmutates into a crushing obligation. The market will extract all value, and will trample over any barrier in order to obtain it.

You know, for all the many downsides to a career in medicine, I'm profoundly grateful that I haven't had to scrabble, beg and apply scattershot to job offers as if I was hunting a goose that laid golden eggs with a shotgun.

I'm probably just lucky. The job market for fresh grads, even those with an MBBS, is tight in both India and the UK. Arguably worse for the latter, due to both a massive increase in med school enrollment without a concomitant increase in higher training positions, as well as an influx of international doctors who find even the grim conditions there an upgrade. That same glut hasn't struck the higher levels of job roles, because it's far harder and more time consuming to manufacture a consultant or specialist.

In India, I think I was batting over 90% acceptance rates for all the jobs I applied for. The one place that didn't take me reached out a few months later asking if I was still looking (I wasn't). Maybe it was a CV that had proper grammar and the perfect degree of self-aggrandizement to inflate limited (at the time) work experience. Maybe it was the fact that I come across as friendly, earnest and even painfully polite and respectful. It might just have been dumb luck.

In the UK, I took one glance at the ballache that was applying to jobs when all you've got on your CV was a pass on the PLABs and a GMC number, and opted to not really bother. This was made far easier by the fact that psych training only considered scores in competitive exams, instead of (((holistic factors))).

Come to think of it, even applying for med school in India never required you to scrape and beg. You sat the exam, and you either beat out the millions of hopeful aspirants, or you tightened your belt and hoped for better luck next year.

That's what matters, IMO. If you have a robust grading system that winnows the chaff straight from the get go, employers can be far more complacent about the quality of potential employees. It all boils down to supply and demand. If there's an oversupply of candidates, or even the impression of too much choice (to a first approximation, the number of single men equals that of single women), then you get the party with the power imbalance in their favor playing hard to get.

The only other plausible solution to this is some kind of costly signal, such as educational qualifications, or having a girlfriend (while seemingly perverse before you actually think about it, taken men elicit far more interest from the opposite sex).

Of course, the old saws like Leetcode are facing rapid annihilation from people using AI to jump hurdles for them. The only real solution, for SWEs, would be to look at real projects, or have in-person and monitored interviews.

Some mad black Deleuzianism, arriving from 1993:

With the emergence of a market-driven integrated technoscience of control and communications comes the diffusion of electronically synthesized reality interfaces across the entire efferant and afferant surface of the Body. Having libidinally saturated the actually-existing channels of consumption, capital is overflowing into cybersex — sex with/through computers - in its relentless passage to the traumatic disorganization of the biological order. Eros dissolves definitively into its function as a subprogram of runaway Thanatos at the point that it unreservedly invests technical interfacing with digitally synthesized excitations. The mask capital exhibited to seduce eros was a pretension to ultimately resolve matters in relation to stimulation or unpleasure, but this has now fallen away, since cybersexuated capital cynically displays its program to replicate a tradable modulation of unpleasure, and thus its unsurpassable addiction to traumatic excitation.

Technocapital colonizes every aspect of human life, deterritoralizing all that is holy.

Gen Z enters a world where their humanity has been abstracted and previous social bonds and customs have been relentlessly mined for capital. The job market (like dating apps) operates within a libidinal economy: it is driven by desire, competition, and consumption of possibility. Just as cybersex is a market-saturated extreme of libidinal capitalism, the contemporary job hunt is saturated by hypercompetitive dynamics and the promise of a better two-sided match. Capital and desire become identified: the ideal job or partner is constantly promised but never realized, which makes the Molochian altar ever more appealing.

Strange. A few hours ago I was checking this thread in the phone and I swear there was a short and witty response wondering just how unique the historic experience of Gen Z is. By now it disappeared.

If it was mine, I deleted it because on second read I didn't feel like it added a whole lot to the conversation and was essentially navel-gazing. Here it was, just in case:

Need a quick vibe check on this. I don't know if I was reverse Born in Le Wrong Generation, but I feel like the world has always been like this. Or, rather, this is the only world I have ever known. But I'm saying this as someone who came of age in the late 2000s, and am what would be probably considered an oldhead by most youth.

Was I ahead of the awfulness curve? Or does intergenerational understanding really take decades to percolate upward?

It's funny, as I make this post I got an e-mail response from a job application telling me in automated corpospeak that, yes, my resume is being reviewed by an AI bot and yes, I will be ghosted if she doesn't like it.

I applied to this job not because I really need it, but because I am essentially a perfect fit that checks 14/15 boxes on their Preferred Qualifications wish list. Funny to think their unicorn candidate might not even get a screening call because they are too lazy to review resumes.

Or maybe it isn't that. Maybe they won't reach me because they are flooded with resumes that look just like mine, not because there are so many people like me out there, but because so many are using their own AI bot to generate the perfect resume for every job in a 100 mile radius and aren't particularly concerned if they're full of lies.

What a horrifying tragedy of the commons. While it's always been horrible, I'll agree that things have clearly gotten worse. Somethings gotta give. Regulation, or something. In the meantime, maybe this is a good indicator that it's time to abandon any remaining vestige of K-selected application strategy, no matter how promising the outlook.

But I'm saying this as someone who came of age in the late 2000s, and am what would be probably considered an oldhead by most youth.

I'd say the situation has essentially been like this since 2008, yes. Maybe the period between 2015-2019 was slightly better.

My memory of this is that the general feeling was that, yeah, things are really bad right now because of the financial crisis, but things will recover and go back to normal. Then they never did.

Somethings gotta give. Regulation, or something.

Why do you say this? I mean, I wish it would, but why do you think someone is coming to save us?

I suppose that things could get worse than I could (or would want to) imagine before they get better, but at some point things get so pathological that they outright stop working. There are a lot of very powerful parties that have a strong interest in things actually working (both employers and employees alike) and I don't see a whole lot of strong beneficiaries of dysfunction that could resist such motion. It's just that the two major parties who have an interest in the system working well have a typically adversarial relationship, and the problem hasn't yet gotten big enough for them to set aside their differences.

But eventually it will.

It's really only dysfunctional for employees, who have to spend the effort applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs filled with broken interfaces and astrology quizzes. For employers everything's working fairly well, or at least it's not materially worse than it's ever been. It costs next to nothing for them to filter out more candidates, especially if the process is partially automated.

No, it's broken from both sides. Employees are presented with job listings that are mostly junk, either pure junk (no real job behind them) or inappropriate jobs without enough information to determine that. Employers get resumes which are crap or pure lies. Both sides employ filters, but the amount of junk is so high, the amount of information easily available so low, and the filter-makers so incompetent that the filters have low selectivity and sensitivity.

The basic problem is just that the market is too big.

I really don't see why employers would see that as a big problem. Filtering out junk is not expensive or hard. ATS exists, and this is one of the tasks HR uses to justify its existence. Big companies like being able to grab talent from all over the world.

Filtering out junk is not expensive or hard.

Of course it is.

ATS exists, and this is one of the tasks HR uses to justify its existence.

Yes, but it doesn't work very well. You've got a job. You post it somewhere. You get 10,000 applicants. 10 of them are good, the rest are bad. You need to cut that somehow using very cheap filters. Say you get your cheap filters to cut you to 100 applicants... but unfortunately while they've filtered out over 98% of the junk, they've also filtered out all the good applicants.

Big companies like being able to grab talent from all over the world.

Grabbing talent from all over the world exposes them to junk from all over the world.

As someone who has gotten a first-hand glimpse into certain hiring pipelines, I'm not at all convinced this is the case. Resume stuffing and spamming seems to be a serious issue, one that has even managed to waste some of my non-HR time, and while I didn't get to see what it was like before, it's difficult to imagine that GPT et al hasn't made it worse. I think hiring agents are turning to AI bots for a reason.

I can buy that things have gotten worse faster for job seekers, but I think that ultimately only delays the inevitable. Like any market, while the buyer and seller have a large adversarial component to their relationship, it's ultimate a cooperative exercise because they both want the deal to close. If one party is so disadvantaged that they begin to drop out, both parties lose.

But sure, that doesn't mean that whatever new equilibrium asserts itself has to be a good one. Perhaps the endgame really is AI agents screeching at each other, producing a barely functional market with a large, profiteering new middle man. Maybe that reality is already here, and I'm an old man who needs to get with the times.

I've considered feeding Claude an omnibus resume with all reasonably delineated units of experience on it, and asking to to pare that down for individual listings. But I'm honestly afraid that might be too honest for today's meta, and I'm nowhere near desperate enough for new employment for change that radical.

Look, commenting about jobs- I freely acknowledge that tech jobs might just be uniquely ridiculous. But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired. The zoomers seem to have forgotten that second step. As with most things, they should listen to their elders born before jet fuel melted steel beams and they’d do fine.

But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired.

I’m not sure what type of jobs you’re referring to here, but I can confidently say that this is not how the hiring process works at all at my job, which is an extremely standard-issue white-collar/pink-collar corporate call center position. We have a whole HR/recruiting edifice to receive, sort, and filter out applications, and our company also does background checks. If an applicant called our HR department to “check in” at any point during this process, it would not make any difference in expediting any stage of the process. If the applicant got any response at all from our recruiting team, it would almost certainly be a generic “your application is still under review, please wait to hear back from our team with an update” email. Maybe you and I have very different ideas about what constitutes a “normal job”.

I was about to say. While I'd love for what he's saying to be true, this has not been my experience for over a good decade - both in the realm of job searching as well as helping my boss sift through resumes and interview applicants.

Even a decade ago, job search was a depressing affair of constant spamming of resumes and applications to employment agencies that always acted as a third party for the actual company trying to fill the position.

Yeah, I work at a generic-ish large-ish company, and there is literally zero way - including being an internal applicant and stopping by the hiring manager's desk! - to get your resume moved in front of them quicker or to jump the line.

This is true, but it’s also true that calling your recruiters to check up on status often does make a difference, and usually expedites the entire process. As anyone who has ever worked in any large company, pinging people regularly to update their status and nudge them towards doing or accelerating the work they owe you, is in fact a significant part of your work, and does make a difference. Recruiters/HR is no different, and pushing them does work.

Education is more like this than not -- I've gotten about a third of the jobs that I've applied for. They do make people enter all their credentials into an online application with no chance to autofill, and ask for written letters of recommendation, often from one's current principal, before even scheduling interviews, though. It's also accepted to substitute teach in a school district someone wants to work in until they offer a permanent job.

It doesn't help to call and "check up," though. I suspect it might annoy the people involved, and make them less likely to hire, actually.

Well yeah, big institutions(like what teachers generally work for) do not have a way to get your resume directly in front of a hiring manager. But I’ve gotten trade jobs for billion dollar companies by calling to check up and holding through boss’s secretaries to get a ‘oh, we’re looking for someone who knows x, y, z, since you already know x and y come in for an interview and we’ll discuss training you for z- I’ll talk to hr about fishing your resume out of the bottom of the pile’.

Education loves its bureaucracy so I’m not surprised there’s no way to short circuit. My friends that work as CPA’s and lawyers know this trick, though.

From what I've seen, "normal" jobs like big-company retail are even worse. They take thousands of candidates for tens of jobs, make them take various personality tests intended to tell if you have the proper attitude (the typical format has various questions where you answer from Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree... and the correct answer is ALWAYS Strongly Agree or Strongly Disagree), then ghost all the losers.

I applied to one recently that had a long list of adjectives, like basically any adjective you could use to describe a person. There were hundreds, maybe a thousand, and you had to mark all the ones that describe you. From "industrious" and "punctual" to "gregarious" and "sanguine", it was ridiculous.

I'd be curious about the job. It almost functions as a test of some combination of IQ plus perseverance: if you mark all the good words, you get maximum points. You can do this faster if you're smarter, but can make up for it with enough perseverance. Not altogether unlike work itself.

Though, if I really wanted the job and had this as a step, I'd probably just write a script for it.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting too, I wavered on what they might be looking for. I thought maybe marking all the positive words would be a strike against me, so I only picked like a five or six kinda similar ones, like "industrious" and stuff. I didn't get the job, but I don't know why or what would have been better.

Going by the people I've known who want to work retail between getting a college degree and a serious job, Starbucks and Trader Joes are both fine with the trade off of higher turn over, but smarter, more interesting employees, and will give an immediate interview. Other companies don't necessarily respond at all. I suppose these are simply different business strategies?

Experienced Tech Bro checking in.

Leet code grinding and blind resume application have been losing propositions for years. This isn't new info. The career / job strategy median is:

  • Recruit hard out of undergrad. The good news is you're cheap and a degree from a "good" program will probably get you an offer. Your whole job is to learn how XYZ corp does their development / product roadmapping etc.
  • 2 - 4 years in, you lateral. You DO NOT do this with blind resume flinging. You use your network of friends (you've been making those, haven't you) to figure out who is hiring and which one of your friends has the relative clout to get your resume in front of a decision maker.
  • (Option B after undergrad) Do the startup thing. Whole other world, but it's an option, at least.
  • (Option C) Pivot to a tech adjacent role; solutions architect, tech sales / sales engineering, technical PM. The good news here is that networking is built into your job. If you're good at your job, you're good at networking and the inertia supports itself for a while. This isn't a guarantee to wealth, but you'll never be jobless.
  • If you want to stay hard on the engineering track, you job hop as much as you want to build a big salary / options. Really, however, you need to start creating some sort of public portfolio. This used to mean just having a good GitHub profiler with some pet projects. No longer. You need to be involved in some sort of ongoing and pretty large scale open source project etc. The idea is that you're creating true "subject matter expertise" in some niche.
  • Now you're getting headhunted for that expertise. Well funded startups, big time roles at FFANGs etc.

The keen eyed among you will detect something here; a tech career is now much like any other professional career; you have to network and you have to develop some sort of specific edge, usually born of genuine interest and passion in a niche area. The era of "Yes, I can sling code pretty good" is over. That was 2005 - 2015, give or take a two years in either direction.

I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story. I can remember when I was in High School and everyone wanted a job at the local hardware store because it paid really well and wasn't that difficult if you had some level of real interest in, well, hardware stores. This being commonly known, kids from all over the county would stop by to drop off their resumes everyday. How many do you think were called back and interviewed?

Luckily for me, the owner's son happened to be in my grade and we were in the same Geometry class.

I had a really good summer working at the hardware store.

I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story. I can remember when I was in High School and everyone wanted a job at the local hardware store because it paid really well and wasn't that difficult if you had some level of real interest in, well, hardware stores

And now there are no kids working at the local hardware store, because the local hardware store ran out of business and got outcompeted by a big box that employs illegal immigrants for below-minimum wage. If you don't think the current generation has it worse I simply do not believe you have an accurate understanding of the world as it currently exists. I'm not Gen Z and while I could tell that I had fewer opportunities and conditions were worse compared to my parents, the employment market they're graduating into is fucking dire. Every single public-facing job I interact with that was previously done by a highschool kid is now done by an Indian adult.

I'd expect big box stores to be much less likely to employ illegal immigrants. Home Depot has an HR department and a legal department. Bob's Hardware has neither.

I see plenty of zoomers working cash registers in my area. Fully one third of people in my county are Asian or Indian.

I'd expect big box stores to be much less likely to employ illegal immigrants.

I freely admit to ignorance on this front - I'd heard multiple stories about the employment of illegal immigrants by larger companies, especially in hardware and convenience stores. I was under the impression that a HR department would actively encourage the employment of illegals given the policies of the Biden/Obama/Bush regimes, but if I'm wrong I'll accept that.

I see plenty of zoomers working cash registers in my area.

I don't - but this is just an anecdote, and I don't think this sort of thing would be evenly distributed. There's a decent chance that my area is just low in children and high in Indians, but I just can't accept that the vast increase in the number of Indians working low-paid jobs hasn't had an impact on the hiring market for the young people who used to work those positions.

I haven't heard about any overabundance of Indian illegal immigrants-- I'd wager they're legal (at least, relatively speaking) working on student visas or brought over as dependents/relatives of indians that went from h1bs to green cards.

Big businesses pay for illegal immigrants, but my understanding is that it's indirect-- they'll hire a contractor that uses illegal labor rather than hiring them directly.

I think the problem is just elite (or aspirant-upper-middle-class) overproduction. Gen Z'ers could actually have a material life better than their past equivalents by working a menial or unskilled job, the problem is that such a high proportion of the youth would find that insultingly low-status. That's not to assign blame, the decline of towns and cultural messaging has produced this state of affairs, but it's also worth noting that the internet makes discontent more visible and self-sustaining.

Don't have much commentary on the rest of the bullets at the moment, but I'd like to reemphasize the first bullet point for any young person, whether out of undergrad, masters, MBA, or PhD, and regardless of industry beyond tech.

There's a zero'th bullet point, potentially negative n'th bullet point. If you're an undergrad, you already should be grinding for (summer) internships. Within tech or tech-adjacent, this could mean leetcode-maxing.

All the better if you can secure an internship between your junior and senior year, or sophomore and junior year, at a prestigious firm. Jobs are like women: It's much easier to get another one when you already have, or demonstratively have had, an attractive one or more.

  • a tech career is now much like any other professional career; you have to network and you have to develop some sort of specific edge, usually born of genuine interest and passion in a niche area. The era of "Yes, I can sling code pretty good" is over. That was 2005 - 2015, give or take a two years in either direction.

  • I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story

I'd say there's a contradiction here.

Yes, that's the tech BRO track. If you're in tech and not a bro, you won't be pivoting to a tech-adjacent role, you won't be schmoozing with people to get a job, and it will be VERY unlikely to do the startup thing because you probably won't know the right people (some do, by accident). But it's always been easy for the bro types.

Me: "Here's my experience in the field"

You: "I'm not you, so this doesn't help me"

.... I don't know what I can do for you? I'm trying to relate my experience and perspective. I'm not trying to craft a career strategy for randos on the internet.

I've got plenty of experience in the field. Advice like yours is evergreen. It's not wrong. But it only works for a certain type of person (who are somewhat rare among tech people, though less so than they used to be). Consider it the other way -- if the best way to get ahead as a sales bro involved writing code, and most sales bros couldn't write a line of code to save their life, would advice to follow that best way be useful, in general?

I'm asking because I'd love to be in an industry that's more normal than tech: what are normal jobs that have that hiring routine, in your experience? Are we talking like working in a construction site, being a teacher, being a librarian, working as an accountant, all of the above?

  • CPA, Lawyer, etc for a medium sized firm rather than a big one

  • Outside sales of any description

  • Blue collar work that isn’t for a giant institution

  • Functionally all trades jobs

  • IT for small to medium sized non-tech companies

  • Secretarial or other pink collar work for non-giant companies

Being a teacher, librarian, nurse etc would probably be an exception(because government/giant institution). Finance and tech definitely are(because high compensation and hiring cycles that don’t correspond to the needs of the business).

Most law firms hire in the way hydroacetylene describes.

Yeah there are a bunch of jobs where hiring works the "normal" way. I work at an IP litigation firm. If someone emails me their resume I look at it to see if they meet the qualifications we're looking for. If they do I circulate it to the other partners and recommend an interview. Then we have an interview and if we like the person we hire them.

n=1 Within the last 5 years my wife walked into a firm that she thought looked interesting, no "We're hiring" sign, zero experience in the industry, just with a portfolio showing she was artistic, and got a job.

Do We Live In the Dankest Timeline?

Or

Is the United States Going to (Re)Join the British Commonwealth?

(Probably not, but this is funny.)

Earlier this month, @hydroacetylene gave a flattering compliment about how if he ever lucked into power, he'd consider me for an advisor. However, I deferred at the time and now must formally defer in favor of another Motte poster, who has a geopolitical creativity I would never have thought of despite dropping their hints in ways that only most perfidious minds of Albion could make appear unserious at the time.

Specifically-

If I had a nickel for every time someone had proposed expanding the British Commonwealth as a way to address a geopolitical question...

@FiveHourMarathon, care to explain how you convinced King Charles that all he had to do was just ask Trump to join the British Commonwealth?

Because according to Trump... Sounds Good!

More seriously(?), emerging reporting of the hour(s) is that Trump has pre-empted (via his Truth Social, no less) a planned-but-not-yet-extended invitation by the British government to bring the US into a voluntary association agreement with the Commonwealth of Nations, aka the British Commonwealth, aka the post-British empire talking club.

As a geopolitical unit, the British Commonwealth... isn't? The wiki page summarizes obligations as-

Member states have no legal obligations to one another, though some have institutional links to other Commonwealth nations. Commonwealth citizenship affords benefits in some member countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, and Commonwealth countries are represented to one another by high commissions rather than embassies. The Commonwealth Charter defines their shared values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law,[12] as promoted by the quadrennial Commonwealth Games.

A no-obligation talking club isn't the worst thing in international politics. It offers a channel to communicate, nice summit opportunities, and engagement opportunities. Not much, but not nothing either.

So... why now?

The Independent speculates-

Having America joining the Commonwealth, even as an associate member, could be a way for Charles to smooth over tensions between Washington, London and Ottawa that have erupted over Trump’s frequently-stated desire to make Canada — a Commonwealth founding member and one of the 15 nations that still counts the King as head of state — the 51st American state rather than the fully independent nation it has been since the 1982 Canadian constitution removed the country’s vestigial legal dependence on the British parliament.

Would Commonwealth-association defuse the trade war? Probably not.

But it will be a heck of a funny if the British government tries to run with this opportunity(?) of a generation.

It will also be funny to watch how European (social) media covers this story, if it goes anywhere. A significant policy effort by the Europeans of late has been to try and get the current Labour government more and more involved with EU projects vis-a-vis US engagements. This is... not necessarily a reversal, but at the same time anything that lets the UK play the US of the EU (or vice versa) complicates efforts at reversing British disentanglement from the EU that followed Brexit.

Plus, the memes will be funny.

I imagine some British foreign policy experts (cough @FiveHourMarathon cough) have an interesting weekend ahead of them from this Trump tweet-leak.

I still have no idea why any Republican would want to make Canada the 51st state and thus add tens of millions of people who tend to lean significantly further left than the GOP to the US electorate.

Being term-limited and on his last term, Trump is unmoved by the electoral concerns of other, future Republicans. What he cares about at this point is legacy, and integrating the second largest country on earth, becoming the largest country on earth in the process, is pretty legacy-setting.

I'm not fully convinced, but that's an interesting theory. Trump does seem to really love size, he constantly uses the word "big" and he likes big buildings and so on. Although to be fair, who doesn't? A USA that includes Canada and Greenland would look gigantic on the map, and Trump would then be sure to have gone down as one of the most significant US Presidents of all time. Even more than he already is, I mean. From a purely aesthetic point of view, the map would look even better if the US also expanded all the way down to the Panama Canal. There would be something aesthetically satisfying about one country's color painted over the entirety of North America. But then, if the US absorbs not only Canada, but also Mexico and Central America, well US politics would become completely unrecognizable.

Not if they were merely territories with no voting power

Heh.

In GURPS Cyberworld, published in 1993, following a pandemic in 1997 the US is ruled by a dictator, who rules through executive orders, under a Provisional Government established in 2024 (there are still elections but it's a "managed democracy"), and has incorporated Mexico as six new states, with the lower-class Mexicans not free to travel to the old US.

And there are VR Cyberdecks (of course) but Steve Jackson Games failed to foresee social media.

If we look at Shadowrun another cyberpunk game from 1989, they do have the United Canadian and American States or UCAS which is basically the North Eastern part of America and Canada merged together. It has Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan as states.

Then the Confederation of American States in the South and a bunch of Native American nations in between after the resurgence of magic and several pandemics and volcanos erupting.

Mexico has been taken over by a conglomerate which is both simultaneously Aztecs gone back to sacrificing people on pyramids and a merging of the drug cartels.

Tir Tairngire, the Elf Supremacist dictatorship, is my personal favorite Shadowrun nation.

(I don't actually game, I just like to read the sourcebooks for the world-building.)

The Tirs (Tairngire and na Nog) are fun! I ran a game where my players woke up with their menories wiped and had to piece together they had completed a run for the Elves in Tairngire which went down a storm.

Shadowrun is one of my all time top RPGs and settings.

He's already said Canada would be the 51st state. I agree true empire would be the best if the US could administer it, but sadly, I think we can't.

So like 95% of Canada by land mass is already, then. Nothing would change for most of the country if this occurred.

About (aboot?) 40%, but what's half an order of magnitude between friends.

The 40% of Canada that doesn't live in Toronto has virtually no political power, and this has been true for the past 150 years.

The controlling empire being American rather than [Upper] Canadian would change relatively little.

Besides being a big move of the goalposts, you seem to have some weird-ass misconceptions about both Canadian demographics and Canadian politics. Toronto is about 17% of the population, not anywhere near 60%. That's not quite as weird as thinking the Territories are 95% of the land mass, but it still seems to be massively skewing your perspective. Things are certainly weighted heavily toward the East but it's nowhere close to all-powerful.

More comments

I'm far from convinced he seriously thinks of doing it, but I don't think changes in the electorate have anything to do with it; he's not going to be judged by an election anymore, but by the history books.

First, Canadian politics aren't American politics. Lots of people support the status quo no matter what the status quo actually is. Supporting Canadian single-payer healthcare doesn't mean they'd want single-payer across all 51 states.

Second, Trump hardly has any love for the GOP anyway. The Grand Old Party (especially as represented by the last pre-Trump candidate, Romney) was the old elite, the ones who talked about things like family values, the moral majority and the dignity of the presidency. Trump himself is the new elite, and now a lot of Trump's administration are disaffected former Democrats. Low income/low education voters were reliably Democrats for decades, and now every election they swing more for Trump. He doesn't care about classic Republican values, so why would he care if Canadians don't either?

Third, union would be by far the most significant political event in either country in generations. Consider how for awhile everyone in the UK was identified as Leave or Remain. A hundred times more than that, union between the US and Canada would itself redefine political identity in both countries.

But even if it doesn't and it's just a clean mapping, I think it's at least as likely for the Bernie Left to join the NDP as it is for the NDP, Liberals and Democrats to all sing kumbaya and join together. (Decent chance Quebec bails completely, so we don't have to worry about the Bloc.) That could mean Republicans/Conservatives get an advantage for awhile, but a lot depends on the exact electoral structure of the new country. Just given physical size it seems likely for each province to be a separate state, but then whither Canadian identity? Does Canada maintain a Scotland-esque autonomous regional government?

but then whither Canadian identity?

What Canadian identity? This is a post-national country.

Yeah, more like “wither Canadian identity”, am I right?

This is a post-national country.

Same can be said about the US.

British Empire in a funny hat? Never seen 'em.

The key would be to "eat" Canada bit by bit, taking over its most right-wing parts, accelerating the collapse of the rest of it and its associated right-wing turn, rinse-wash-repeat until you've gotten the whole thing.

Because Trump said it.

They would have to end democracy to achieve the conquest (just imagine the protests...), and therefore the opinion of canadians would not matter at all

The most significant thing that would change is that the ~200,000 Americans in the UK could vote in UK elections.

Fascinating! Do you know if they skew left or right?

I’m guessing in the American sense they’d be Dems but some might be attracted to Tory since that is more posh

Expats are usually high income, so they'd probably skew Tory for tax cuts.

The only American expat in the UK I know is my cousin, who married an English woman and moved to England. He’s a very standard-issue #Resist liberal stoner, as is his wife, although they clearly make good money, given the area in England where they were able to buy a home.

"Make America Great Britain Again"

I'm pretty sure I've seen that on a meme (complete with the not-yet-deceased queen) back in 2016. Life imitates art.

There were "make Hong Kong Great Britain Again" signs during the Hong Kong protests.

So we have oceania almost ready. Waiting for Eurasia now.

Some renewed life has also been breathed into the idea of a CANZUK confederation.

The leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, has publicly endorsed CANZUK in a recent newspaper column.

Following the resignation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, four candidates have emerged to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, with two of the candidates [Carney and Baylis] resoundingly endorsing CANZUK during a televised leadership debate.

Ed Davey is famous for doing or saying anything to get on camera. The Lib Dens are currently irrelevant so any publicity is good publicity.

Do we get to play in the commonwealth games?

Only if you adopt cricket.

There are a surprising number of cricket fields in the couple American metro areas I frequent. Not a ton, but people are clearly investing in them. I suspect a good chunk of the players are South Asians on H1B visas or their relations, but I don't see a problem with trying to evangelize a sport.

There's a cricket field(and professional team) in Grand Prairie, in the metroplex I live in. It's pretty near the notoriously Indian neighborhoods(but much cheaper) and promotional materials for it I've seen are full of Indians.

I would guess upwards of 95% of people who play cricket in America on a regular or semi-regular basis are of South Asian descent. In very big cities there will be a few expats from the UK / Australia / NZ / South Africa, and maybe some expats and immigrants from the former colonies in the Caribbean, but that’s it.

I worked parks once upon a time. We had plenty of basketball courts and baseball and soccer fields, along with picnic shelters, but we also had a single cricket oval at one of the bigger parks. Since I was clearing trash cans on the weekends, I saw who was using it, and it was always all Indians.

My large corporate employer has as cricket interest group who get together to play at a local field. There are two English players, one from Granada, and the rest are entirely Indian.

A few big Indian tech tycoons / execs are trying to promote cricket in the US.

We're working on this!

(and this baseball fan finds T-20 cricket immense fun)

Sure, if you like losing to us.

I am generally supportive of peaceful, voluntary political union, and have occasionally mused on the topic myself. I could see some trouble selling Americans on it with an actual monarch as it's head, though.

I did think it was interesting when The Queen died that everyone so quickly agreed that Charles would head the Commonwealth (apparently agreed upon in advance by the heads of state), since the position is officially non-hereditary.

My main problem with joining the commonwealth isn't that we'd have to accept a monarch, it's that we'd have to accept the wrong monarch. There are NAPOLEONS on US soil! And they've already served our country with distinction. Why should we settle for the inferior house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha ?

(apparently agreed upon in advance by the heads of state)

Isn't the british monarch the head of state of like 90% of the commonwealth?

The Commonwealth includes India and Pakistan, so no. The British monarch is head of state of approximately 150 million of the 2.4 billion citizens of the commonwealth.

It's a commonwealth of nations (that's its name...) not a commonwealth of individuals

Wait, that was real? Learn something new every day.

@FiveHourMarathon, care to explain how you convinced King Charles that all he had to do was just ask Trump to join the British Commonwealth?

我们有办法

This reminds me more of a PJ O'Rourke column from the early 1980s where he proposed that Reagan was a bad president, but would make a great King.

It's interesting to consider a Commonwealth that includes the USA, because the USA would naturally begin to dominate it. From the Commonwealth Games to economic deals, the club goes from being primarily "Former British Possessions" to primarily "America and Friends." This could be the Atlanticist vision of Brexit. Or it might be scuttled by Trump's mercurial nature.

A brief primer on the forthcoming Canadian federal election

I say brief in an attempt by myself to keep this short. The newly sworn-in Mark Carney has asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and call an election for April 28. This was as an anticipated reaction to the recent swings in polling so it's not exactly a surprise, but it's still short notice and parties are rushing to fill out their candidates and get their campaign in action.

The big story in all of this is the massive collapse in Conservative polling support, which is what prompted the election call as the Liberals hope to capitalize. The Liberals have been in power for ten years now, and were up until Justin Trudeau's resignation in December seemingly cooked. The Conservatives were on the verge of outright majority support in the polls, Liberal support was in the high teens, almost every ironclad safe Liberal seat was up for grabs, and it seemed possible - if not necessarily probable - that the Liberals might be reduced to a mere handful of seats nationwide. Now, as the election kicks off, polls suggest something between a comfortable Liberal minority to a majority government. What happened?

For general context: Canada has four major political parties, three national (progressive NDP, centrist Liberals, centre-right Conservatives) and one regional (Bloc Québecois). There are also two minor parties, the environmental Greens and libertarian/populist People's Party. Canadians are in general not partisan: it's very natural for support to shift between parties, and your average Canadian will have voted for 3 different federal parties by the time they hit middle age. What's unprecedented is the degree of the swing in support towards the Liberals, not that it never happens; in 2015 Justin Trudeau entered the 5 week election campaign thoroughly in third place but ended up winning a majority.

I think there's three major factors, and they are all individuals rather than larger undercurrents. The first is obviously Donald Trump. Never has one man done more for Canadian pride and unity. Canada of course is heavily intertwined economically and culturally with the United States, and the actions of the Man Down South has put everything in a bit of a frenzy. For once we are actually seeing meaningful progress towards dismantling inter-Canadian trade barriers, to building new nationwide infrastructure, and indulging in a bit of national pride which has been treated as rather disdainful the past decade. It also goes without saying that Trump's antics are repulsive to most Canadians, and you could not do worse as an advertisement for conservatism to Canadians. It does not help that there's a very fringe and annoying portion of MAGA Canadians, or that the federal Conservatives have done an agonizingly slow job of voicing meaningful denunciations to Trump's tariffs and annexation threats. (By comparison: Doug Ford whipped about quick and used the bully pulpit very effectively, and won his Progressive Conservatives another majority in Ontario).

Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, is the second factor. To put it simply: he is not an inspiring candidate to most Canadians. He has spent the past two decades in Parliament (he has never worked outside of politics; he became an MP more or less immediately after graduating university) as the attack dog, and he has kept up that spirit as party leader. He has incessantly and somewhat annoyingly been fixated on Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax for the past few years, ever eager to get in a dig. The problem: Justin Trudeau is gone, and so is the consumer carbon tax (Carney axed it on his first day as PM). Poilievre was never a popular individual, but up against an even less popular leader in Trudeau and his generally maleffective ministry Canadians would have grumblingly voted for him. Now suddenly he is very much the dog who caught the car. The things he has been harping about for years are gone, and he has not shifted his message an iota since the start of Trump's upheavals. The old tricks are simply not working anymore. I think if the previous Conservative leader Erin O'Toole were still leading things they would still have a comfortable lead. He was much more palatable to the average Canadian and far less vulnerable to the changing of the winds. Poilievre's combative nature has put them in a real bind because even if they win the most seats it's hard to imagine them forming government: the things I hear from insiders suggest people just hate working with him, and he's done his best to piss off all the other parties.

And that is particularly damaging because of the third factor, Mark Carney. He might be the most qualified individual to have ever become Canadian Prime Minister; he was appointed to lead the Bank of Canada during the Great Recession under the previous Conservative government, and was subsequently the first non-Briton to head the Bank of England. In a time where there are suddenly great questions about the economic future of the country, he is exactly the type of person voters look to. (Whether he will lead the country effectively remains to be seen.) I've often said that in times of turmoil even the most dysfunctional of democracies will pick boring bankers as leaders, but I was imagining this to be the case in 2029: I really did not see this polling turnaround coming. I think everyone misjudged Trump's capacity for havoc. Poilievre's partisan nature and lack of experience are very stark in comparison to Carney who at least so far is setting a more centrist sort of tone in his messaging and is soliciting notable from both the Conservatives and NDP to run for the Liberals in this election.

The only other thing to add is the real loser in all this might be the NDP. They had helped prop up the Liberals for the past few years and for the last two were generally polling ahead of them. But now the tent is collapsing and all their support is shifting to the Liberals instead. I very much dislike their leader Jagmeet Singh and will not be sad to see him go, but it looks likely that the NDP will lose official party status. It's a long long fall from where they were ten years ago, when they entered the 2015 campaign looking likely to form their first government.

My personal opinions are as follows: part of me wants to see the Liberals win a majority because it would be very funny, and I quite strongly dislike Poilievre and would find it simply embarrassing if a man like that were the leader of my country. We've been through ten years of Trudeau making a mockery of us and do not need any more nonsense. The other half of me finds it a bit galling that the Liberals might escape ten years of misrule and divisive politics without punishment. They are for better or for worse the natural ruling party of Canada (and the one I am most closely aligned with, ideologically) and that means they are the experts at shifting with the public, but it means they also can get arrogant and complacent and that begets all kinds of nonsense and corruption. So I guess I'm hoping for a small Liberal minority that chides the Liberals and forces them to do a better job.

One thing that annoys me a lot is that I don’t even think Poilievre was slow to denounce the tariffs or other Trump policies (I recall seeing articles about him denouncing them the day they were announced) - I feel like the internet (generously aided by what was probably an advertising blitz for Carney) decided to ignore it.

One thing that happens in Canadian politics is that as a conservative, you do not have any of the leeway granted to a LPC or NDP candidate. Most donations to the LPC are close to the donation limit, and they facilitate the largest transfer of wealth out of the middle class? Well obviously the CPC is the party of neo-feudalism and big business. LPC candidate literally raised from birth to be prime minister with a multi-million trust fund while the CPC candidate was adopted and raised by a middle class family? Clearly the CPC candidate is the elitist.

It’s really frustrating how little people seem to react to the facts on their own. Someone who votes for Carney because he doesn’t care for Poilievre is infinitely more palatable to me than someone who votes for Carney because Poilievre is secretly in the pocket of big business.

One thing that happens in Canadian politics is that as a Reformer, you do not have any of the leeway granted to a Big City Interest candidate

Don't think I have to say anything more than that, really. There are no checks and balances to prevent them from screwing up the rest of the country like there are in the US, which is why this divide is permanent in a way it really isn't there. It's the same problem all one-party states suffer from.

It’s really frustrating how little people seem to react to the facts on their own.

At this point I don't think there's any compromise.

Canada is hardly a one-party state. Sure, the Liberals have been in charge for almost ten years, but before that the Conservatives were similarly in charge for almost ten years.

But I agree that Canada just doesn't have the same checks and balances as the US, either for offices or for individuals. The only thing keeping a PM from being in office for life is that eventually something bad will happen that they'll have to take the blame for. I do wonder how much that's uniquely Canadian vs just being a feature of parliamentary systems.

I do wonder how much that's uniquely Canadian vs just being a feature of parliamentary systems.

Uniquely Canadian is an oxymoron. Also, this is a design feature of Parliamentary systems.

Canada is hardly a one-party state.

Canada in 2006 was not as harshly divided urban/rural as it is now. The ultimate problem is that one specific hyper-urbanized area is able to dominate Canadian politics to the detriment of everyone else, so if it votes as a bloc (and it does far more often than not) for any variety of reasons there aren't any moderating factors (no law, no bill of rights[1], no separation of powers) to slow them down.

Actually, that's another design feature of Parliamentary systems, since the entire reason that system exists is to let London do exactly that to the rest of England. You don't vote for an MP and who they are is irrelevant (again by design- wouldn't want individual members being accountable to the public or anything); you vote for a party and that's it.

[1] Before you say "but the Charter", I will remind you of Section 1, which exists to nullify the entire thing and make it more of a polite suggestion than anything that can be used to defend oneself against government overreach.

Could you elaborate on this ? Do you mean the GTA ?

25% of Canada's population lives inside of Greater Toronto and Greater Montreal. Ofc they get to decide regional and national outcomes.

  • Greater Toronto controls Ontario.
  • Greater Montreal controls Quebec
  • BC / Vancouver are wild cards
  • Greater Montreal + Greater Toronto control national politics because they have more people than all the remaining provinces combined (Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland)

For all intents and purposes, the nation of Canada is one consequential urban corridor containing 50% of its population (Quebec City -> Toronto). The remaining Russia sized mass doesn't get a say, because it is the minority. That is how it should be. For comparison, the Boston - NYC - Philly - Baltimore - DC corridor only contains 14% of Americans.

the nation of Canada is one consequential urban corridor containing 50% of its population (Quebec City -> Toronto)

Which is why it should be its own country. They have very little in common with those outside there and everything they do is destructive to those outside of it.

That is how it should be.

I think you nailed the tale of three personalities on this change in the winds in Canada. The intra-west vibe shift toward the right has clearly happened in Canada, perhaps more than other places, but it is being parsed through our electoral system with unusual results. The Liberal Party is a non-ideological chimera which is optimized fully for power. This is why, for example, they have the slack to enable constant corruption. Trudeau capitalized on a woke vibe shift back in 2015 and lurched the party to the left and now its lurching back to the right. Canada's other parties are ideological and this puts them at a huge relative disadvantage. The NDP are controlled by unions and woke college students and so can't pivot from leftism in any way. The Conservatives contain multitudes but their leadership keeps them solidly center-right out of fear of the electorate. This gives the Liberals room to maneuver and their natural governing status allows them to attract high-quality candidates who just want competently run centrist globalism. Add their extremely efficient distribution of voters and constant pandering to Quebec and you have a recipe for success.

And kudos to Mark Carney who saw all of this months ago. Everyone thought whoever took over for the Liberals was just taking Trudeau's bullet for him, but Carney saw that the hatred for Trudeau masked ambivalence about Poilievre. And now we're probably headed for a Liberal majority.

The specifics of my view of all of this is similar to yours, except I'm a conservative so it blackpills me (even more) about the country. My top issues are immigration, DEI, crime, and housing prices and the Liberal failure on those files is so complete that a rational people would electorally annihilate whosoever did it to them forever. Carney's ideas on these files are either non-existent or the same the previous government. As ever in Canada, the boomer cohorts will sail merrily on with a little anti-Americanism and economic and social mediocrity until the end of time.

The one bit of solace I take from this is the Liberals have moved sharply right virtually ensuring a more conservative country going forward. The NDP have been obliterated and I think its an open question whether the party continues to live on. What I'm really opening for is that we may get an Overton expansion to the right, a CPC re-absorption of the PPC, and open calls for very low levels of immigration and the end of DEI/affirmative action. Anything that puts those ideas into the mainstream is a win.

In terms of first-world government competence (from a right-wing perspective), I rate Trudeau's Liberals as delivering 3/10. Nothing cataclysmic happened but on virtually every file things got worse, often much worse. I am confident that Carney's Liberals will be more like 6/10. They'll steer the ship capably toward a destination that is okay, not great. I am already lamenting that we wont get a confident and high-agency conservative government with a large majority to reverse the damage liberalism has wrought.

My top issues are immigration, DEI, crime, and housing prices and the Liberal failure on those files is so complete that a rational people would electorally annihilate whosoever did it to them forever. Carney's ideas on these files are either non-existent or the same the previous government.

My top issues are basically identical to yours, but wouldn't it be fair to levy this criticism at Poilievre as well? From what I can tell, Poilievre is as wishy washy as Carney. Really, only Bernier is serious about tackling immigration, although I wonder if people can pressure Carney to get tough on immigration.

A close reading of statements and actions tells me that Carney is much more bullish on immigration than Poilievre. Carney appointed the founder of the century initiative as an advisor and is inheriting much of the same team as his predecessor. The current immigration targets which Carney has said nothing about are 395,000 falling to 365,000 per year.

Poilievre has been cagey but clearly wants numbers down. He has said good things about Harper’s system which was 200,000-250,000 per year and he has also said the number of immigrants will not be greater than the number of housing completions the year before. We are on track for housing completions to fall well below 200,000 in the next few years.

So there is daylight there, but I agree the Overton window has not moved sufficiently far towards the correct number which is less than 100,000 indefinitely.

How will this likely play with the western Canada/rest of the country tensions?

Danielle Smith, premier of Alberta, had a meeting with Carney last week that went terribly and ended with her issuing a number of demands which certainly wont be met by Ottawa. I'm not sure my mental model of Alberta - Ottawa relations. Carney will almost certainly represent a lowering of the heat relative to Trudeau, but Albertans were about to confidently have their champion and that is now ripped away from them. When a people who see themselves as victims have their hopes dashed is when they are most dangerous (see Blacks after Civil Rights).

and ended with her issuing a number of demands which certainly wont be met by Ottawa

It wouldn't have mattered what she said

Carney will almost certainly represent a lowering of the heat relative to Trudeau

lol, no

but Albertans were about to confidently have their champion and that is now ripped away from them. When a people who see themselves as victims have their hopes dashed is when they are most dangerous

One can only hope.

The NDP have been obliterated and I think its an open question whether the party continues to live on.

The NDP has lost official party status before and been just fine. Hell, there was even talk that the Liberals were close to collapse after coming in 3rd to the NDP in 2011, only for the Liberals to take everything in 2015. Singh is done, but then again, it's 36 days until the election, and 36 days ago everyone was sure the Conservatives would have the next government.

What I'm really opening for is that we may get an Overton expansion to the right, a CPC re-absorption of the PPC, and open calls for very low levels of immigration and the end of DEI/affirmative action. Anything that puts those ideas into the mainstream is a win.

If there's anything that's going to happen in that regard, it's going to be provincially.

I am already lamenting that we wont get a confident and high-agency Western government with a large majority to reverse the damage Big City Easternism has wrought.

What distinguishes Big City Easternism from standard progressivism in your view?

All of the nastiness of American progressivism, none of the checks and balances that keep it mostly talk.

I guess you could add regional looting which is enabled by our system and which the U.S. doesn't have.

The US doesn't maintain a public list of have and have-not states, but I'd venture that most members of Congress see it as their sacred duty to get as much money as possible redirected from the rest of the country to their state, and preferably to their district. The US is just better at hiding the fact that the regional looting has any costs to anyone.

The Conservatives were on the verge of outright majority support in the polls, Liberal support was in the high teens, almost every ironclad safe Liberal seat was up for grabs, and it seemed possible - if not necessarily probable - that the Liberals might be reduced to a mere handful of seats nationwide

There was a period of time where the polling was showing that the Bloc Quebecois was going to be the second-largest party and therefore the Opposition, which would have been even funnier than this Liberal comeback.

They have been official opposition before, after their first election in the 90s, which is kinda crazy to think about. As much as Republicans and Democrats accuse the other of destroying democracy/America, neither actually has the literal stated objective of leaving the country.

New thing that might possibly hurt the conservatives even more is the recent Breitbart interview by Danielle Smith (premier of Alberta).

In it she says

So I would hope that we could put things on pause is what I’ve told administration officials. Let’s just put things on pause so we can get through an election,”

Notice that it's "on pause" for why people are pointing this out as a failure and

but I would say, on balance, the perspective that Pierre would bring would be very much in sync with, I think…the new direction in America,”

So at a time when Trump is upsetting Canadians so much that it's pushing for a resurgence in support for the liberals, the CPC's public strategy seems to be digging the grave even deeper. Meanwhile the liberal party has done a fantastic taking the sails out of Pierre's campaign by replacing Trudeau and cutting the carbon tax.

There's a very high chance that the conservatives have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here and it's almost entirely thanks to Donald Trump and his aggressive rhetoric and trade wars on Canada, and a strong showing by the Liberals to capitalize on this effectively.

Meanwhile the liberal party has done a fantastic taking the sails out of Pierre's campaign by replacing Trudeau and cutting the carbon tax.

They have not cut the carbon tax when producing goods, only when consuming them. So the price of gas will drop a bit (and as the US shows, this is important enough for them to draw down their strategic reserves for) but that's about it.

All the Liberal party has to do for Easterners is be "their guy" (and being a fresh face doesn't hurt) if they perceive they're under some kind of threat. Only if they're not will they consider voting for what is, from the Eastern perspective, a foreigner.

Also,

the CPC's public strategy

Danielle Smith is not CPC nor federal, nor is her provincial party named the same way. Canadian politics work a little differently.

Danielle Smith is not CPC nor federal, nor is her provincial party named the same way. Canadian politics work a little differently.

I mean, if you're concerned with Canadian unity, it's arguably more alarming that the premier of Alberta is doing this.

PP will understandably be tossed out if he should lose this election and the CPC will likely overcorrect. Any tensions with Smith or the (continued) perception of diverging interests between Alberta and other provinces can't be erased or fixed so easily.

Yeah you're right she's UCP, but they're working in tangent with the CPC. After all her whole interview was about supporting Pierre.

After all her whole interview was about supporting Pierre.

It would be easier for AB to get policy goals accomplished were its people represented in the Federal government, something they haven't been for a long, long time now. Liberals don't listen to anyone outside of Toronto, and it shows.

But I don't think there's a future for Reform parties in this country and yet another CPC loss/Eastern aggression + economic cataclysm might start convincing people of that.

Eastern aggression What do you mean by that?

I think they're referring to the general disdain at the root of Liberal decisions. I can't point to any explicitly discriminatory laws, but the differences in impact are pretty clear.

  • COVID vaccines were distributed to the provinces proportional to (total) population. The Federal government is responsible for providing healthcare to Treaty Indians, while Provincial governments are responsible for providing healthcare to the rest of their residents. The feds assigned a larger-than-proportional number of the doses to go to them (which is probably appropriate given the risk factors) from their province's stock, and as a result non-Native Manitobans got worse access than non-Native Ontarians due to that province's larger Native population.
  • They wanted to increase affordability, so they cut the carbon tax for some home heating. Specifically, for home heating oil which is (almost) exclusively used in the East, while the West uses natural gas. When asked about it, a Liberal MP said that Westerners should elect more Liberals if they want to benefit from the government. This is the clearest example IMO. (Saskatchewan decided that it wanted that tax exemption too, so it stopped collecting/paying the carbon tax on all home heating. I just checked and haven't seen any news about it since then, so it sounds like it worked.)
  • Equalization payments are above 100% of "equal" because the Liberals maintained a Harper-era law that reduced equalization amounts (at the time. Then circumstances changed and the formula gives a different result). Instead of the "have" provinces mostly in the West bringing the "have-not" provinces up to their own level of economic prosperity and services, they're forced to push them above their own levels by a few billion dollars.

[O'Toole] was much more palatable to the average Canadian and far less vulnerable to the changing of the winds.

Lol, lmao even. That flip-flopping is part of what cost them the election in '21- on the right flank, it's worth noting.

So I guess I'm hoping for a small Liberal minority that chides the Liberals and forces them to do a better job.

The last 6 years suggests this will not happen.

The only other thing to add is the real loser in all this might be the NDP.

Yeah, polarization (an American cultural import) means the Western Socialists are no longer viable. The Bloc is the same way when the people of Quebec get scared the rest of the country's going to take away their toys, which is why the Liberals are doing that well in the polls in the first place.

The other half of me finds it a bit galling that the Liberals might escape ten years of misrule and divisive politics without punishment. They are for better or for worse the natural ruling party of Canada

Upper Canada, its interest party, and those who voted it in have done nothing but destroy the future of this country and its culture without consequence, and I hope the trade war they (and it is exclusively they) are insisting we wage destroys it forever. Fortunately, the manner in which they will wage it has a higher likelihood of doing that.

How much of it is due to conservatives/trump vs just dumpstering trudeau working very well?

Coming on the heels of the Biden-Harris switch, I really didn't expect a Trudeau-Carney switch to do much better (and the election hasn't happened yet so I guess I shouldn't speak too soon). Basically nobody knew who Carney was before he ran. He did really well in his election but partly because no other candidate was really given the time of day. Whether it was the media or the party, he was essentially chosen before the voting.

But Canadian politics is not American politics, and here we are. For all that Trump seems to dislike Poilievre, a lot of Canadians see Poilievre as Trump-lite, so the more Trump acts out against Canada, the worse the Conservatives are going to do.

Harris was a weak candidate, though, between being Californian and her race/sex being the things that got her the candidacy.

She was, which was made worse by the way they switched. But she had name recognition and more of a political record than Carney does.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but Liberal+BQ is the most probably governing coalition, and liberals might win an outright majority?

No, Liberals + BQ would actually be a huge sea change in Canadian politics. The Bloc Québécois are effectively in a cordon sanitaire. The national parties are not supposed to vote with them, and any legislation which could only pass through their support is withdrawn instead.

I would actually expect a joint caretaker-ish Liberal-Conservative government over cooperation with the Bloc.

Though if the Liberals are that close to a majority, the NDP support is probably enough to form a government.

No? The Bloc has voted with and propped up minority governments before many many times. The PPC is being kept out.

I don't think they have. At least, they never voted for legislation where their votes were the difference between success and failure. Possibly they've not voted for a non-confidence in a minority government, which I suppose counts. But the governing parties don't cut deals to ensure their vote in such situations, the way they do with other parties.

They came close in 2008-2009, potentially Lib-NDP-Bloc. But that government never actually formed, the Conservatives stayed as minority government.

If you have an example, I'd be happy to see it.

A Liberal + BQ government is not meaningfully distinguishable from a Liberal majority.

The big potential difference is on immigration. The Bloc (besides the PPC) is the only federal party that is immigration-skeptic.

We don't really do the Euro-style coalition thing. A minority government has to scare up enough votes from the other parties to pass any given piece of legislation (or any non-confidence motion that the other parties might be able to force). But it isn't as formal, and in practical terms, it isn't necessarily the same party all the time. In this case, for a long time Singh and the NDP could mostly be counted on to support the Trudeau Liberals and several of the thousand cuts they died of took the form of Singh withdrawing that support.

Matthew Schmitz, of conservative Catholic magazine First Things, criticises Elon Musk and the American right over family values

Specifically, he points to a clash between what he regards as an older or more traditional set of family values on the right, heavily influenced by religious conservatism, which emphasises stable marriages and households, care for children and spouses, parents' obligations towards their children and children's duties towards their parents, and so on; and a newer set, which regards parental behaviour as largely unimportant, and instead prioritises genetic predisposition.

He takes Musk as a good test case. Seen from the former perspective, Musk is a despicable father - he has flitted between women and been irresponsible and uninvolved with the raising of his children. Seen from the latter perspective, Musk has perhaps been quite a good father - he has fathered many children while going to deliberate effort to maximise their genetic potential. Should Musk be admired or condemned?

Schmitz is, of course, on the traditionalist side, and he tries to draw a link between Musk's behaviour a kind of libertarian-transhumanist worldview which, he argues, also implicitly endorses positions that Musk repudiates, such as transgenderism, or which the right-wing has traditionally opposed, such as abortion. Naturally he wants a reassertion of the traditional worldview.

Apart from Schmitz's entirely predictable conclusion, though, I think he's correct to identify a tension here. It's no surprise that people like Richard Hanania (who has often protested that he doesn't like conservatives) are in the genetics-first camp, and it's more interesting to note even more 'mainstream' Republicans, like Matt Gaetz, turning towards the genetics-first position. Is there a transformation going on in the right? Are new divides forming around family policy and technology? Or is there some way to square the circle?

Since we just talked about Musk the other day, and since I know the Motte has a large share of what I would consider libertarian(ish) genetics-first or heredity-first posters, it'd be interesting to hear some comments!

I couldn’t disagree with the author’s framing more. That said, I am not a First Things subscriber, and my take necessarily ends where the archived article does.

The author frames this as a faction on the right discovering human genetics and deciding to jettison family values as a consequence; he emphasizes this with the label “genetic determinist.” This is backward. These are people who already occupied the secular center left to center right and weren’t adherents of family values in the first place. They were already okay with premarital sex (and occasionally adultery); they were already okay with divorce; they were already pro-choice, or at least not so pro-life as to have reservations about IVF. They are part of a right-wing coalition, and they have common cause with social conservatives, but no one was under the illusion that they were social conservatives.

I hold (loosely) that nature and nurture both matter and that the nature-nurture ratio is different in different areas of life. But I am not a consequentialist: if I thought that all life outcomes were 95% genetic, I wouldn’t cease to be a social conservative. It’s good to do the right thing because it is the right thing; positive consequences are frosting on the cake. (Even if you are a consequentialist, you should consider the implications for childhood happiness as well as adult outcomes.)

Looking up the author, Schmitz believes that social conservatives should make common cause with social democrats, not with libertarians or the pro-business right. If he has laid this out clearly and dealt with the difficulties in that position, I’d be interested to read it. In America most social democrats are also social progressives, and they have a history of leveraging the welfare state to promote social progressivism and oppose social conservatism. The current political alignment follows in part from that.

As it is, the piece comes off as a disingenuous attempt to find a label for right-wing social liberals that won’t also stick to left-wing social liberals. I expected better from First Things.

And you’ve underlined the reason that the religious right will remain the religious right- when push comes to shove, you get the little sisters of the poor situation going on.

MAGA are bad Christians, but progressives are anti-Christian. MAGA are ostensinsibly Christian, or at least like Christians and will generally let them be, but progressives hate Christianity and will continue attacking it at every opportunity, or at least just stand by and watch while it is destroyed by their extremists. It's not a difficult choice, though Schmidtz seems to have misunderstood the situation.

Even granting the framing that progressives are anti-Christian and MAGA are bad Christians, I'm not sure where that implies that Christians shouldn't challenge MAGA bad Christianity, attempt to drag it towards better Christianity, or even simply warn Christians against imitating MAGA? Christians can be in a tactical alliance with MAGA while also needing to maintain a sense of why MAGA is bad and they must not become MAGA.

Arguably under those circumstances, it's more important for Christians to clearly articulate criticisms of MAGA. Progressivism is obviously an enemy and there is no temptation to imitate it. But Christians might be tempted to imitate MAGA. So that path must be guarded more fiercely.

Even granting the framing that progressives are anti-Christian and MAGA are bad Christians, I'm not sure where that implies that Christians shouldn't challenge MAGA bad Christianity, attempt to drag it towards better Christianity, or even simply warn Christians against imitating MAGA?

What's your evidence that they aren't doing any or all of these three things?

Christians can be in a tactical alliance with MAGA while also needing to maintain a sense of why MAGA is bad and they must not become MAGA.

The chain of inference here seems quite long. Is Musk MAGA? When he claimed that massive "skilled" immigration was a good thing and got immediately hammered by the grassroots, were the people hammering him rejecting MAGA? Is MAGA bad, and if so, why?

From the inside, the proper way for Christianity to interact with politics is a very interesting question. Let's presume that "MAGA" stands for right-wing politics not explicitly guided by Christian principles; that seems to be your general intent here, though if you'd disagree I invite you to offer a more fitting definition.

Christianity tried right-wing politics explicitly guided by Christian principles during the Bush administration, and it seems to me the result was disaster, even from a Christian perspective. The reasons for this disaster seem pretty straightforward to me: first-order Christian ends can't really be secured by Government power, second-order Christian ends mostly can't be secured without social consensus, and the Christians (along with everyone else, for the most part) were sufficiently blind to the realities of their situation that prudence in the exercise of power never materialized, and their political capital was entirely wasted.

As I see it, Christianity's interaction with MAGA has abandoned pursuit of first- and second-order Christian ends through the exercise of Government power, and are aiming exclusively for prudent exercise of power. That is, Christians are spending their political capital in an attempt to prevent rule by people who hate them, to secure some modicum of political and social stability, and to attempt to preserve and maintain peace and plenty. The hope is that if prudent exercise of power can be obtained, first- and second-order Christian ends can be pursued outside the arena of political power, as individuals and as churches.

Let's leave aside MAGA for the moment. What does "Challenge Bad Christianity" look like? To me, it seems like this involves preventing people from pushing non-Christian values and positions while claiming the mantle of "Christianity". An obvious example would be Pope Francis's various shenanigans. But neither Musk nor Trump are making any credible claim to be Christian, nor indeed any claim to speak for Christians. Both are very clearly pagans, and never made any notable attempt to claim otherwise. And indeed, this is how most Pro-Trump Christian discourse has gone: Trump is compared to Nebuchadnezzar, say, a pagan monarch with no claim to righteousness who can nonetheless serve as God's instrument. There hasn't been nearly as much discourse on Musk, but I'd expect it to evolve in a similar fashion.

I see no evidence that Christians have endorsed the paganism of either Musk or Trump. What I see is Christians accepting the evident reality: we no longer have the power to impose our values through law, even were it desirable to do so, and we no longer have the consensus necessary to impose our values on society, even were it desirable to do so. We cannot compel, but can only attempt to persuade, and those unwilling to be persuaded will do what seems right in their own eyes. Our fight now is centered on what Christianity actually is within itself, not on how best to impose Christian values and rules on the pagans without. It seems to me that people arguing for a Christian broadside against Musk's or Trump's paganism come mainly in one of two varieties: Christians who haven't grasped the scale of the change in our society and of Christianity's position in it, and non-Christians who for reasons of mental habit or momentary expedience prefer the Christianity of the past to the Christianity of the present. Neither, it seems to me, really has a coherent argument here.

If people actually want Christians to start policing non-Christians again, they should present a general case for when and why this is desirable, and also for why the desirability of such policing was not evident in the past. Absent such a case, it is difficult to take their arguments seriously. "Family Values" as a going concern died with the introduction of ubiquitous internet porn; people appealing to it now as though it were a live political entity are either deeply confused or lying.

This is an excellent take. I have tried to explain these things to people I know, but not half as well. A couple of points, though:

Christianity tried right-wing politics explicitly guided by Christian principles during the Bush administration, and it seems to me the result was disaster, even from a Christian perspective.

I think that Bush sincerely wanted this to work, but his personnel decisions did not reflect that. He largely chose neocons associated with his father’s administration, and they didn’t care about this at all. He also didn’t account for resistance from the permanent bureaucracy that has become so conspicuous since. So I think that there are some approaches left untried here, even if Christians no longer have the political power to attempt them.

Both are very clearly pagans, and never made any notable attempt to claim otherwise.

Trump has occasionally expressed the fig-leaf level of Christian pretense expected of U.S. politicians, but this is even more transparent than it was with Obama. I do think that that, combined with outgroup homogeneity bias, has sincerely confused a few people on the left.

What I see is Christians accepting the evident reality: we no longer have the power to impose our values through law, even were it desirable to do so, and we no longer have the consensus necessary to impose our values on society, even were it desirable to do so.

This is the heart of the matter.

What's your evidence that they aren't doing any or all of these three things?

I think they are doing most of those things, and I commend them for it. My top-level post here was in fact about a conservative Christian attempting to both issue a call to reform and repentance to MAGA and warn Christians away from being influenced by MAGA.

Our fight now is centered on what Christianity actually is within itself, not on how best to impose Christian values and rules on the pagans without. It seems to me that people arguing for a Christian broadside against Musk's or Trump's paganism come mainly in one of two varieties: Christians who haven't grasped the scale of the change in our society and of Christianity's position in it, and non-Christians who for reasons of mental habit or momentary expedience prefer the Christianity of the past to the Christianity of the present. Neither, it seems to me, really has a coherent argument here.

I'm not sure I'm arguing for a broadside, or for any kind of concerted political campaign. I'd hold that Christians ought to, where possible, speak the truth and call people to better behaviour. That may take a different form when it is issued to other Christians as when it is issued to secular society (and Christians should of course try to improve secular society), but either way I don't see a valid argument for Christian quietism.

It is, incidentally, worth noting that Trump himself claims to be a Christian, and Elon Musk, though stopping short of saying he's a Christian himself, identifies as a 'cultural Christian' and says that he's 'actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity'. For Christians to issue a call for Trump and Musk to live out Christian values more fully is not actually a call to pagans in the first place. Trump claims to be inside the tent; Musk has at least one foot in. So Christians asking Trump or Musk to behave in more Christian ways is by no means "policing non-Christians".

Christians are used to being the junior partner in a coalition with the big bully that can protect us from scary progressives. We don’t like musk’s or Trump’s personal behavior but we shut our mouths because the alternative would be to have our institutions forced to support abortion and push retarded gender ideology.

It does not seem Christian, to me, to excuse or justify what is evil? What you've said reminds me of the "we need our own Putin" argument from conservative Christians circa 2016 (criticised here). The last I checked Christians were not supposed to act out of fear. When Musk or Trump behave badly, it seems entirely appropriate, to me, for Christians to say that behaviour is bad and to issue a call to repentance.

Christians are supposed to be signs of contradiction to the world. As that blogger says, "the idea that we should keep our mouths shut instead of "dividing"... is an insidious falsehood that is totally off the mark".

Progressives are anti-Christian? Every progressive I have met in my life has espoused the tenets of Christianity more than the sum total of Christians I have known in my life.

If anything from my experience, Christians hate Christianity. I can think in my 20+ years of living two Christians that met the minimum definition of a Christian, while I can think of plenty of atheist progressives who have gone beyond the minimum.

  • -21

Do any of these progressives believe in God or go to church?

Because I'd say that's the absolute bare minimum. Someone who doesn't believe in God isn't a Christian, and someone who doesn't go to church isn't a practicing Christian.

Christian isn't a synonym for 'virtuous' or 'progressive'. It's a religion.

No. Most I know were raised Christian, then left the faith.

Progressives loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind means exactly that. Loving God is not following Christian doctrine; notice how when asked what the minimum was Jesus did not say "believe in Jesus", otherwise all of the indigenous people of Mesoamerica were doomed because they missed the Jesus boat. Loving God is loving God; and what is God? Love. And what is love, according to the Bible? "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." Therefore, to love God is to love those things; kindness, patience, humbleness, honor, tranquility, etc. When love manifests, God manifests, and when that love is loved in return, God is loved as well.

I'm sympathetic to your point here, and certainly deeds tell more than words, cf. Matthew 7:21-23. However, I would be concerned that defining Christianity exclusively in terms of love is too broad. The category 'Christians' doesn't just mean everybody who loves, or everybody who loves the concept of love. That's a criterion that would capture many atheists, as well as practitioners of any number of non-Christian religions. I (though a Christian myself), find, for instance, Santideva to be one of the most eloquent religious exponents of unconditional love, and I would never call Santideva a Christian.

I suppose I think I would define Christianity in the broad, or visible, sense in terms of both doctrine and behaviour. A Christian is one who believes certain propositions (we can roughly summarise those with the Apostles' Creed, I suppose; you might reasonably object to me that the Creed doesn't mention any ethics, but I'd hold that taking the Creed seriously implies some downstream ethical commitments), and then behaves as if those propositions are true. It is necessary to be a Christian to believe that Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God died for the sins of the world and was raised to fullness of life, but to properly or fully be a Christian, that belief must shape and condition your behaviour. And that is what leads the Christian to do things like listen to what Jesus taught and attempt to behave accordingly (cf. John 14:15), or attempt to follow his example (cf. Philippians 2:5), and so on.

So while I certainly agree that patient, radical, self-sacrificing love is something that Christians are called to, I wouldn't say that it suffices as a definition of Christianity.

For what it's worth, on my understanding there are true Christians who are dyed-in-the-wool progressives and who are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. I think that much more important than whether a Christian is progressive/conservative is how that Christian goes about being progressive/conservative. But I tend to think that most prudential political judgements properly belong to the conscience of the individual Christian, though, as with all things in life, they ought to be informed and nourished by a properly Christian moral formation. That is much harder than it sounds, but all of us are fallible works in progress, and I suppose there's no Christian alive who can be confident that their politics perfectly match those of the Kingdom.

That's a criterion that would capture many atheists, as well as practitioners of any number of non-Christian religions.

I think C. S. Lewis had something to say on that....

[The Lion] bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. [I] said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.

--The Last Battle

Certainly that represents my hopes.

Every progressive I have met in my life has espoused the tenets of Christianity more than the sum total of Christians I have known in my life.

What are the tenets of Christianity, as you understand them?

I can think in my 20+ years of living two Christians that met the minimum definition of a Christian, while I can think of plenty of atheist progressives who have gone beyond the minimum.

What is the "minimum definition of Christianity", in your view?

The tenets of Christianity include the Ten Commandments and the principles of tranquility, forgiveness, humbleness and charity.

The minimum definition of Christianity, as stated by Christ when asked, is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” and ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

"tranquility, forgiveness, humbleness and charity"

I'm on board with the accusation that many Christians are only nominally so. But it is absolutely laughable that you think Progs have exemplified these values to any significant degree given the last 10-15 years, if not more. I've seen almost none of these things from the Left as of late. Nor do I recall them exemplifying these values any more than the average person on the street from my teen years to early adulthood - a time when the idea of ever voting Republican for any reason was unthinkable to me.

Well, I dunno what to tell you other than that’s not my experience. Progressives I’ve known have demonstrated those things; conservatives I’ve known are so entrenched in their mommy and daddy issues the concepts are hard to reach. Tranquility? More like constantly stressed. Forgiveness? More like gossiping for lack of conversation topics. Humbleness? More like cowardice. And charity? More like “I got mine”.

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Awesome. I guess our 'lived experiences' cancel each other out, then? As in, it should have been predictable that unverifiable statements like 'Progs I know are more Christian than actual Christians' was going to be an unproductive dead-end in this discussion, and why did you even bother with it?

Maybe your friends are totally angels. It's rather weightless compared to your vanguards that freak the fuck out when they see a crucifix in a public building, or give themselves the sweats over Pete Hegseth's tattoos. For extra fun, go look up who Bernie Sanders invited to sing at his recent rally. Meanwhile, the Left (coded non-religious) reports more mental health issues and their compassion dries up the moment 'refugees' get bussed to their towns.

Who are my vanguards who are freaking out at crucifixes and tattoos? Last I checked, being discriminatory towards religion wasn't in the progressive handbook.

Bernie Sanders invited a singer who had vulgar lyrics is...what, exactly?

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These seem like reasonable definitions.

I know neither the Christians you've met in your life, nor the Progressives. Maybe the Christians were really awful, and the Progressives really saintly. I am curious as to how you see the Progressives "loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind"; what does that mean to a non-Christian observing non-Christians? Likewise "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

My suspicion, perhaps unfounded, is that you are rounding these principles to "is a progressive". Perhaps I'm wrong, and there's more to it.

Do you believe your experience generalizes? Moving beyond Christians and Progressives you've personally met, I presume you'd agree that we can observe Christians and Progressives in society generally, and identify notable examples. When drawing from a reference class that broad, we ought to see extremes both ways. I can certainly find cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Progressives are acting in a significantly more Christian fashion than the Christians. Would you agree that there are identifiable, individual cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Christians do in fact seem more Christian than the Progressives?

Take the cake shop guy versus the trans activist; does it seem to you that Phillips was acting in a more Christian fashion, or Scardina?

I could see arguments either way, but I lean pretty hard toward "no".

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Progressives loving the Lord their God with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their mind means exactly that. Loving God is not following Christian doctrine; notice how when asked what the minimum was Jesus did not say "believe in Jesus", otherwise all of the indigenous people of Mesoamerica were doomed because they missed the Jesus boat. Loving God is loving God; and what is God? Love. And what is love, according to the Bible? "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." Therefore, to love God is to love those things; kindness, patience, humbleness, honor, tranquility, etc. When love manifests, God manifests, and when that love is loved in return, God is loved as well. Progressives loving their neighbors as yourself is also...just that.

I do believe my experiences generalize. My anecdotal evidence is just that; anecdotal. On its own it's not good evidence, which is why that isn't my only evidence. Observing Christians and progressives in society in general, it is obvious to me that progressivism is more aligned with the principles I described above; Christians, in general society, promote social conservatism, and God - who is love - is not compatible with social conservatism. I would agree that there are identifiable, individual cases of Christians interacting with Progressives where the Christians do in fact seem more Christian than the Progressives, but seeing as how Christians are famously homophobic and transphobic and progressives are not, I imagine those cases are rare.

Obviously Scardina; unless Phillips also refused to bake a cake for alcoholics, murderers, adulators, liars, thieves, and all of the other sins, which are seen as equally bad as homosexuality, then he is judging and condemning based on his own preferences and not because of his religion, which is un-Christian. Scardina called on Phillips to be truthful when he said he would serve LGBT customers, and Phillip was caught in his lie, which is also un-Christian.

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Obviously Scardina

Being a troll (and using Satanist imagery as part of trolling) does not seem particularly compatible with

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

I've met a lot of Christians that fail to live up to those things! Myself included, for all have sinned and fall short. But by goodness I find it a tough pill to swallow that you've met so many progressives who aren't impatient, hateful, envious, boastful, prideful, self-seeking, angered at the slightest whim of disagreement, who don't seek to get people fired and depersoned for decades-old offenses, and who don't treat the truth as little more than a tool to be disposed of when it's not in their favor.

Scardina called on Phillips to be truthful when he said he would serve LGBT customers, and Phillip was caught in his lie, which is also un-Christian.

Should artists be required to paint anything that someone asks in commission?

Christians, in general society, promote social conservatism, and God - who is love - is not compatible with social conservatism.

I can readily agree that under a definition of "Christian" that considers social conservatism disqualifying, most Christians are not actually Christian. Likewise, under the definition of Christianity employed by the Westborough Baptist Church, only themselves and those who agree with them are the true followers of Christ. This is an obvious feature of arbitrary, bespoke definitions, which is why most people who wish to communicate clearly try to avoid them.

I do wonder, though: have you ever interacted with a serious addict? Suppose a meth junkie asks you for help securing more meth so that they can get very high. Under your definition of Christianity, what is the properly Christian response? What is the proper Christian response to a heroin addict asking to use your bathroom to shoot up?

Obviously Scardina; unless Phillips also refused to bake a cake for alcoholics, murderers, adulators, liars, thieves, and all of the other sins, which are seen as equally bad as homosexuality, then he is judging and condemning based on his own preferences and not because of his religion, which is un-Christian.

Suppose, hypothetically, that Phillips had not refused to sell a cake to a trans person, but rather had refused to customize a cake to celebrate transition itself, in the same way that he would refuse to customize a cake themed to celebrate acts of alcoholism, murder, adultery, deceit, theft, or any other sin. Suppose designing artwork whose message was celebration of sinful behavior in general was what he was objecting to, and that Scardina's request was not to buy a cake generally, but to commission exactly this sort of sin-celebratory confectionary. In this hypothetical scenario, would your assessment of either Phillips' or Scardina's actions change?

The Christian theological virtues are faith, hope, and love. The cardinal virtues are temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice. I see ‘charity’ which is a synonym for love in your list. I don’t see anything, uh, supernatural.

I'm confused what you're trying to say.

I find it oddly bizarre that you've been down voted here for answering a question sincerely, without rancor.

I, sadly, don't.

A bump of that sweet, smoking gun, as you write in your bio. I sense you're here not exactly as a troll, but that you don't particularly feel you're among like minds.

It's sarcasm. Dry as dust sarcasm. I'd put an /s, but that's not my style of humor. I had a hunch when I made the step from lurker to poster that no matter what I said, and I mean what, I'd be downvoted and called a troll or a man; hence my username. My hunch was proven correct. There is a small fraction of users on here who genuinely want to debate, and the great majority else want to boo outgroup.

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”you should let in more refugees because Jesus said to be compassionate in the Bible somewhere. No I’m not a Christian and I have nothing but contempt for your backward religious beliefs. So yeah, this argument wouldn’t work on me, but maybe if I use it on you, you’ll do what I want.”

This is an unflattering paraphrase of what the author purports to be a progressive position. It is not a good example of progressive attitudes toward Christians, because it was not written by a progressive. I find it a useful text to encapsulate what I perceive to be a common attitude among Progressives, but if you want to assert that this attitude really is widespread among progressives, you need to provide actual examples of the behavior, not the mocking paraphrase.

The family values voters were mostly Silent Generation and are mostly dead.

Musk is a Trump ally. But I think everyone on the right is aware that he only got there because the more authoritarian elements in the Democratic Party felt he wasn't toeing the line and decided to go after him.

But I do think there is less of a split than you think. The traditionalist right has always been pretty accepting of wealthy men being bad parents so long as their children were all well provided for. Musk is more shameless and extreme than is typical, but it's really less offensive to conservative sensibilities than a DINK couple.

The family values voters are still there. There’s a steady upper-teens-lower-20’s percent of the American population which are consistent social conservatives and the decline in Christianity has mostly halted.

That being said, this is not a big enough group to win a democratic election on its own.

What Musk is doing is actually quite "traditional". Historically, powerful men didn't invest much time in raising their children, particularly young ones.

Yes, I think you can plausibly argue that wealthy and powerful men fathering many children on a range of mistresses, and then minimally investing in them while also planning to select the most (genetically?) capable of them to pass the family name on to has been common throughout history.

The traditional/conservative/Catholic/Christian line that I imagine First Things would take would be that they are quite aware that their position has not been the norm, because virtue is hard and requires discipline and effort to achieve. The idea would be that traditionalism is a set of norms intended to tame barbarism, as it were, and that what we now see from the right, especially the tech right, is a moral backsliding. They're barbarians; they are the resurgence of a wretched old thing, rather than bold innovators, as they would presumably prefer to see themselves.

The goal is to raise the next generation of adults. Ideally, so that they are happy, capable, virtuous and have the fundamentals for success in their lives. Typically the role of the father in all this is material support and some kind of practical and moral guidance. The traditional nuclear family works well in that regard for most normal men. That said, I don't see an issue with providing those things in another way if one has the resources to do so. Materially speaking, Musk's children are provided for. And he could easily hire highly moral, capable and intelligent people to give them personal guidance, or arrange for them to spend time with such people. That's also a "traditional" solution. I think with some care, he could easily give them a life at least 95% of Americans would envy. If he manages that, it would be hard to condemn him as irresponsible.

Fatherhood is not fungible.

Traditionally powerful men cared about the raising of their legitimate(which these are, because they’re acknowledged) sons even if they didn’t do it personally. Musk doesn’t seem to care much about eg the schools they go to.

What's the evidence for that?

I guess the first thing I'd do is separate 'is' questions from 'ought' questions. 'is' questions may not be easily answerable but they are answerable as opposed to axiom conflicts. As a start:

'is':

  1. How much does parenting / genetics affect parameters that conservatives care about? Virtue, happiness, skill, self-discipline, love, etc.

'ought':

  1. How important, morally, is parenting to a life well lived, for the parent and the child? Is taking care of something, and/or receiving unconditional love, an important part of what it means to be human in a terminal values sense?

Your "ought" question is actually just a second "is" question

I thought someone might say that. I was trying to separate ‘is conventional parenting important to achieve desired outcome X’ and ‘is the experience of parenting in both sides in and of itself a terminal goal?’

Tried to edit for clarity.

Is there a transformation going on in the right?

Yes- the people who drove "the right" are being transformed into corpses daily at a rate far in excess of people converting to progressivism. If their subsociety's memes are going to be allowed to survive (because the progressives will stamp them out given the opportunity, and to a large degree already have), they would be wise to throw their support behind the people who are going to treat them as a relatively benign curiosity rather than an existential threat.

Naturally he wants a reassertion of the traditional worldview.

Yes, but the problem is that there's only room for one traditional-type worldview, and the one that now fills that niche is dead-set on the destruction of the traditionalist worldview. Narcissism of small differences, and all that.

So now his side's only hope are the liberals. Because while the liberals of old did contribute to the rise of progressivism (in the sense that liberal mockery weakened traditionalism- which is why religious countries have anti-blasphemy laws), they're also by definition more likely to tolerate/get along with/not try to actively destroy less-orthodox family configurations, of which traditionalism now finds itself.

and a newer set, which regards parental behaviour as largely unimportant, and instead prioritises genetic predisposition.

Yes, this has been a traditionalist/progressive vs. liberals tension for a long, long time. Traditionalists argue that good behavior and virtue (i.e. cultural aesthetics) are terminal values, liberals argue the only terminal value are results, and the world turns.

I don’t know that it’s a transformation of values. Political parties are alliances, and you are trying to take the government or some other institution by force, and you can’t do that without numbers. As such, you’ll take anyone you can get who will sign onto as many of your values as you can. At this juncture, the conservatives don’t control the means of cultural production (they have conservative media and explicitly Christian media, but this is fairly niche and doesn’t really set the cultural tone), don’t control any of education, nor do they control the deep state.

This is obviously a problem, and it’s going to take a pretty big alliance to move the needle here. Purity tests only make sense after the victory, not before. It’s actually the biggest tell that a group is a hegemon — it has the luxury of purging itself of those who do not agree with them. If you can maintain control without heresy, you’re in firm control of the cultural battlefield. Conservatives cannot make this mistake— if they start purging heresy before they get control over culture, education, and the government (and not just the elected government, the deep state is probably more important here) they’ll slide back into irrelevance and the left will go right back to preaching socialism and LGBT stuff and enforcing their agenda.

Yes, this has been a traditionalist/progressive vs. liberals tension for a long, long time. Traditionalists argue that good behavior and virtue (i.e. cultural aesthetics) are terminal values, liberals argue the only terminal value are results, and the world turns.

Interestingly, if you look at other domains, the sides reverse. Liberals/Progressives attack the Trump administration on the grounds that they are not displaying the proper "good behavior and virtue" (i.e. "subverting our democracy," "norms", "rule of law", etc.) where Trumpist-rightists are arguing that, e.g. in the recent immigration kerfuffles, "the only terminal value [is] results" such that any district court which purports to order Tren de Aragua gangmembers brought back into the country after their deportation flight had already left US airspace cannot be legitimate on a fundamental level.

Even on family-planning issues, there's a similar dynamic between a progressive left that views upholding an ideal of women's role in society as the primary goal (virtue primacy), whereas the natalist right points at crashing TFR and marriage rates (material primacy).

Additional evidence that the mainstream left increasingly takes over the role of the status-quo conservative; If you're in control of the arbiters of good behaviour and virtue, critiquing it in your enemies is essentially free. This has been a conservative strategy for basically as long as humanity exists. This is especially obvious here in germany, where the churches increasingly openly align with the left (the Katholikentag [catholic day] barely even bothers inviting CDU politicians anymore, and the catholics are the less progressive wing of german christianity).

For this reason, "traditional conservatives" like Schmitz are in reality impotent regressives, harkening back to an old order nobody really believes in anymore.

People like Musk make much more sense in this framework; Obviously a shitposting technofuturist who wants to smash the status-quo has absolutely nothing to do with conservatism. And on the other side, Biden; A senile old nominal leader who not only doesn't, but simply can't, change anything is the archetype of (dysfunctional) conservatism.

Yes, but the problem is that there's only room for one traditional-type worldview, and the one that now fills that niche is dead-set on the destruction of the traditionalist worldview. Narcissism of small differences, and all that.

I'm not quite following - is your suggestion that progressives are the new 'traditional-type worldview'?

Thus you would see traditional conservatives like Schmitz as a declining minority whose only hope of survival rests on finding an accord with other dominant factions, which at the moment include the progressives (who hate the traditionalists), the liberals (who are prepared to live and let live), and I suppose the new right? The libertarians, technologists, transhumanists, and utopians?

I think Schmitz would argue that the libertarian/technologist position is fundamentally unstable, and will collapse back into progressivism if it continues to follow its own (supposedly) nihilistic creed to its logical conclusion.

Yes, yes, and yes. Though I hesitate to call them "the new right" because they don't have anything to conserve yet, no entrenched interests to inflate; they're still on the upswing so that hasn't come out yet.

Traditional conservatives have a problem where 2000+ years of sociobiological truth was upended basically overnight 100 years ago- that men and women are a lot closer in socioeconomic standing than the Bible had anything to say about. So you have a pivot away from a civil religion that had no answer for that to one that could- and predictably, the one that won out almost immediately was "women good man bad".

Christianity has had no productive answer to that ever since. It's not something they're equipped to handle proceeding forward as they have been, and since these are traditionalists we're talking about they're going to be even slower on the uptake.

and will collapse back into progressivism

The liberal position is fundamentally unstable because the type of people it privileges cannot be entrenched in the same way a religious or identarian movement can. "Correct" is not an identity, though genetics have a non-trivial role to play in who is more often to be correct, and who is less- hence the movement's emphasis on making sure people who have genes that predict correctness are pushed so that they are correct more often and more productively.

And yes, this means that if there are differences here between subpopulations, they're going to get magnified. This will offend progressives, who are statistically more likely to be on the losing end of this (as part of why they're progressives). But if you can at least create and keep that cultural standard you'll at least be back at the point where you have enough seed corn that eating it becomes a possibility again.

Traditional conservatives have a problem where 2000+ years of sociobiological truth was upended basically overnight 100 years ago- that men and women are a lot closer in socioeconomic standing than the Bible had anything to say about. So you have a pivot away from a civil religion that had no answer for that to one that could- and predictably, the one that won out almost immediately was "women good man bad".

I like this framing. What do you think makes this predictable though?

Christianity has had no productive answer to that ever since. It's not something they're equipped to handle proceeding forward as they have been, and since these are traditionalists we're talking about they're going to be even slower on the uptake.

Yeah unfortunately I agree... Christianity is still working through the implications of birth control but I on the whole think it's good for the Christian worldview. There was definitely a problem with sexism towards women, something that Christ explicitly warned against.

What do you think makes this predictable though?

Honestly, maybe I'm reaching a bit outside of the standard reactionary "fuck you men, reeee" (though I definitely think this is a major part of it, and understandably so), since that's the only mechanism of action I can come up with.

There was definitely a problem with sexism towards women, something that Christ explicitly warned against.

The problem with sexism in the Church is that on plain reading the Bible outright justifies it. So, the wicked can point to any number of verses that says "women exist for the benefit of men"- like, say, Genesis 1- and have a solid argument that takes words words words to defeat. "Lean not on your own understanding" is fucking catnip to a traditionalist because it means you can do nothing and call it devotion (which the progressives have their own carbon copies of re: "alternate ways of knowing").

It's like the whole point is to grow together, where the interests of one converge into the interests of the other like some sort of... marriage or something. Not sure why the Church would know anything about that, though.

Nothing whatsoever in Genesis 1 says or even implies that women exist for the benefit of men.

I'd guess you're thinking of Genesis 2:20, and the idea of the woman as a 'helper' or 'support' for the man? I'd argue that it's quite a tendentious and implausible reading of that verse to simply interpret it as suggesting female inferiority or servitude, but at any rate, it is not in Genesis 1. Genesis 1 only mentions gender once, in 1:27 ("male and female he created them"), and that verse does not suggest any superiority or inferiority.

I'd guess you're thinking of Genesis 2:20, and the idea of the woman as a 'helper' or 'support' for the man?

This is still suggesting inferiority on plain reading. It doesn't have to be, of course... but then we read a little further and we see "your desire shall be for your husband, and he will rule over you". Sure, the context is describing a curse, but that doesn't make it any less pre-ordained to occur.

So this is a real viewpoint, it's backed up relatively well by the text (both testaments), and even Jesus himself backs it up (by the way he addresses the woman at the fountain). Which means that the wicked, and wicked men in particular, will latch onto it and abuse it even in societal conditions that don't obey that fundamental curse as strictly as they once did.

The Church has to find a way to deal with those wicked men in a way that won't drive off the wise or damage the life script for the simple (they're running closer to biology, and traditionalist ways are objectively best for those people). Their success is mixed.

You mean in John 4? I don't see where that passage implies female inferiority? He asks the woman for a drink of water, and the text immediately indicates that he's asking her because the (male) disciples have gone into town to buy food, so it seems like he's comfortable asking people of either sex for nourishment. The woman's response does not mention sex either - she's surprised because he's a Jew and she's a Samaritan. The operative categories are ethnoreligious, not sex.

There is a subsequent discussion of the woman's husband, but again I don't see anything that implies that he considers her the inferior of men?

If I were looking for a gotcha passage showing Jesus giving priority to men or being demeaning of women, I feel like I could do better.

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‘Still working through’ is mostly not true- the RCC has articulated its reasons for condemnation and other sects have made their peace with it.

I am not a Roman Catholic. The Church is broader than the Patriarchate of Rome.

What sect hasn’t figured out what their stance on birth control is? Most conservative Protestants make some well defined allowances, orthodoxy allows most contraception while pretending not to, and other groups generally allow any use of contraception. The church fathers are pretty clear that the answer to not wanting a baby is ‘don’t have sex’(and indeed condemn contraceptive methods by name), but the groups considering the church fathers binding have decided what to do about that.

The right that Schmitz critiques is right-wing in the sense that it tends to be hostile to various elements of social liberalism, e.g. feminism, anti-racism, or LGBT rights. But it is not especially socially conservative in the sense of favoring traditional social arrangements. Thus people like Musk or Trump, who pretty much categorically fail at the traditional role of Father and a more general reject traditional masculine duties in favor of what amounts to perpetual boyhood. Frat boy conservatism is nothing new, of course, but it was generally something one was expected to outgrow, not a dominant aspect.

Hereditarianism isn't a necessary element for this value set, but it helps in that it provides a general purpose rationale for writing off any duties one might have to others. Help the poor? No point, bad genes. Raise your kids? You already donated your genes, parenting doesn't matter that much and besides taking care of children is for women. But this is fundamentally an ablative belief - if it were incontrovertibly proven false, few of its adherents would change their behavior much (which is not to say they're insincere, just that the belief is non-essential).

Actual hard hereditarians are pretty scarce on the ground, if for no other reason than it's a sufficiently intellectualized position as to escape mass appeal. People like Hanania exist, but they are largely gadflies without much influence.

Another way of putting it would be that Schmitz and company care about what fatherhood does to the father, as well as to the children.

A Motte poster defended Musk to me on the basis of outcomes for the children - "the goal is to raise the next generation of adults", and insofar as Musk has provided them with sufficient material abundance and with sufficient mentoring, he has discharged his duty and everything is all right, from a traditional perspective.

My reply to this was snarky, but I think substantially correct. From the traditionalist perspective, you do not only take into account the results for the child (they will argue about the child's welfare, but as you say, that's at least partially ablative), but also the results for the father. Fatherhood is meant to be morally forming, even educative, for the father as well as the child. The discipline of raising a child well should make you into a better, wiser human being.

Your mention of "perpetual boyhood" is a good way of putting it. Musk is a failure of masculinity because he's avoiding growing up, becoming responsible, disciplining himself, and so on. He is failing to learn the proper lessons of fatherhood. No amount of material provision for children can compensate for that.


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