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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   33031 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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No Culture War articles today? Have we achieved Culture Peace?? No one wants this!

Quality over quantity.

I held off on making a post because I assumed it would get buried under a flurry of tariff discussion. Although it looks like that hasn’t materialized yet.

On the tariff front, I'm still waiting to see if the market fall off is a tantrum or a real turn.

I think that tariffs on China are enough to cause a real turn. Add everything else to mix...

The S&P 500 is now up on the day.

I wonder if the drop was retail traders scared by the news into a sell off and the recovery institutions eating their lunch.

AFAICT there have been no noises made that the tariffs won’t actually be put into effect. Just lots of concessions being offered by other countries.

As of right now (2025-04-07T18:15:00Z), we're up 0.2% for the day, down 8% for the week, and also down about 8% since Trump took office.

I don't think a <1% recovery is the recovery institutions "eating the lunch" of retail traders.

it's see-sawing. I added to the dip. I think it's an overreaction. It's one of those things where it's not suddenly going to get better as both sides have massive egos invested, but IMHO it's not as bad as the headlines and market reaction would imply.

The opposite, it was institutional investors selling and retail investors trying to "buy the dip". To a record degree during the first big selloff on Thursday.

Individual investors made a record $4.7 billion in stock purchases Thursday as new tariffs pummeled markets

Individuals made $4.7 billion worth of net equity purchases on April 3, meaning value of shares they bought outpaced the amount they sold by $4.7 billion. This is the highest daily inflow over the past decade, according to data from J.P. Morgan.

Which makes sense. For one because retail investors have more of a gambling mentality where they aren't obligated to avoid risk and can bet that Trump will back down or get overridden by Congress. For another they aren't necessarily knowledgeable about markets or economics, when 50% of the population voted for Trump I'm sure there's plenty of people who default to partisanship and assume he knows what he's doing. And even in left-wing communities a surprisingly common line I saw was that "Trump is deliberately crashing the market so that billionaires can buy it up cheap", people tend to assume that it must be to someone's benefit.

Stocks have exhibited a long-term tendency to rise, so buying dips has generally been shown to be prudent. Institutions have to meet other criteria, like defined risk tolerance. You don't have to be that knowledgeable to observe this trend, and even the experts who are assumed to be knowledgeable have been shown to be no better than a coin toss e. g. "J. P. Morgan sees 40-60% chance of recession in 2 years" This is what passes for 'expert analysis'.

The record for stocks outside of US is less promising, it took Japan almost 30 years to reach the stock market level seen in late 80s.

The US stock market has not just boomed because US is somehow an exceptional economy, it has also boomed because of its role in the global economic order as the global financial hub. This is precisely what Trump is attempting to dismantle.

similar to Covid, the market is pricing in the non-zero possibility of something really bad happening. like a bad recession or hyperinflation. Like Covid, history has generally shown such moves to be an overreaction.

What is there to say? Trumpism is being exposed. Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed. Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.

Trumpism has been exposed.

Give it some time, the jury's still out...

democracy itself has been exposed

This one is true.

The sentiment I'm seeing from both leftists and "centrists" is "surely this won't be allowed to go on, the business class will step in and save us, the 'powers that be' don't like losing money"... if these "powers that be" do indeed have that much political power (because you presumably don't mean Congress), then aren't you admitting that we already don't live in a democracy? If you want the democratically elected president to be overruled by unelected elite interests, then aren't you admitting that you don't think democracy is actually a good thing? Sure, maybe ~30k swing voters in Pennsylvania actually shouldn't have the power to unilaterally dismantle the world economy. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold. But don't keep calling it democracy.

Combined with the actions taken against Le Pen and Georgescu, we can conclude that there are actually very few principled supporters of democracy, but plenty of people who are willing to use the rhetoric of "democracy" as long as their side is winning.

If you want the democratically elected president to be overruled by unelected elite interests, then aren't you admitting that you don't think democracy is actually a good thing?

I guess if 'democracy = one elected man can do anything he likes', then no, very few people believe in democracy, and rightly so. Democracy requires the all branches of government, media, public discourse and checks and balances to be operating as a healthy whole. Or at least a lot better than they are now. Hoping that unelected elites will intervene is just knowing that democracy is no longer working properly and, given that, it's all that might save us.

No, "democracy" is the idea that power vests in the expressed will the people, and frankly the only politics that most people know anything about is presidential politics. With apologies to Madison, the house is not the body closest to the needs and desires of the people, because most people can't name their representative and few people vote in those elections when there isn't a presidential race to goose interest and drag lower offices along on its coattails.

The Demos, whether for cultural, material, techological, or irrational reasons has decided to place its trust in an elected hetmanate occupying the office of the President, imbuing the occupant with totemistic responsibility for just about everything, regardless of his formal ability to cause or prevent the events in question. This has been done with the connivance and acquiescence of the legislative branches, who voluntarily have surrendered most of their actual power to the executive, and have contented themselves with insider trading and playing wannabe-cable-news pundit on CSPAN.

I have this idea I call 'Mistake Theory' which posits that the only official acts that benefit the public are mistakes. US Politics exist solely as a way to screw the ninety-percenters and the POTUS is the perpetual enemy of the people. So a wildly chaotic moron is better than an effective genius because there's the teensy-tiniest chance something good might happen.

As far as I'm concerned, the collapse is well underway. The only thing Trump did was rip down the curtain. The 'national nightmare of prosperity' ended on 9-11-01 with every political and economic act afterward serving merely as a way of jamming the door open for looters. Better now than 5 years from now when we'd have even further to fall. Democracy has been nakedly exposed since...Obama? Bush v. Gore? earlier? The only question that remains in American politics is which flavor of authoritarianism is going to win--unless...someone makes a huge mistake!

America: I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave.

As far as I'm concerned, the collapse is well underway. The only thing Trump did was rip down the curtain.

the market was at close to record highs just 4 weeks ago, and the crash came right as Trump unveiled the tariffs. Your analysis seems to get the causality wrong.

peace

I would not call the state of the world today "peaceful".

prosperity

For whom? Real incomes have been down for a generation for the average American worker, pretty much every other challenge the working class faces is downstream of that. Also, if you are referring to the stock market a) it is not the economy, and b) as of this minute up on the day.

I like the new term "Panicans" which very succintly describes those for whom a bit of chaos and correction is a world changing event, and contrasts nicely with the Stoics, who just want to have a pint and wait for it to all blow over.

Real incomes have been down for a generation for the average American worker

Even if it is true, then USA is still hilariously prosperous, also for average American workers. It could be better, but denying prosperity is not honest

as of this minute up on the day.

and down 7% over last 5 days, 11% over last month, 13% over last year. If you take since Trump inauguration it gets worse.

People getting way poorer from stocks crashing than from tariffs, which aren't even going to be that bad in terms of projected increase in inflation (2-3% overall). Whole thing feels like a huge overreaction. Stock valuations are based on multiples, so a small loss of profits can mean a large decrease in share price.

I'm genuinely curious about a projected 2-3% inflation when imports are all increased in cost by >10%, and that includes a lot of input costs for domestic goods. It doesn't pass the sniff test. I'm open to being educated about it though.

Not all goods are imported, raw goods are only a fraction of the cost of a good. So it evens out to much less than 10%. A large percentage is advertising . For a $5 cup of coffee Starbucks, only a tiny percentage of the price is the raw goods.

it could be better

Yes and that is the point of this excercise. Making things better for the average American.

denying prosperity is not honest

I think the average American is being quite honest when they say rising costs for everything combined with stagnant wages does not leave them feeling very prosperous. This recent canard of insisting that the working class disbelieve their lying eyes and consider themselves lucky is very strange to me, especially since it usually comes from those who claim to be advocates for the everyman.

13% over last year.

And theres approximately 10,000% more media hysterics now than in say, 2022 when it was down roughly 20%. This is not whatsboutism, but rather praise for the recognition then that markets get overheated and correct, and number does not always go up. I remain unmoved, and will contiue to DCA as always.

Real incomes have been down for a generation for the average American worker

They're not.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

While I agree in that in general Americans are incredibly prosperous in absolute terms real median household income doesn't really paint the full picture here.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881900Q (real male earnings)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252882800Q (real female earnings)

The growth in real median household income is, to my understanding, driven by more women entering the full-time workforce and the growth of highly-paid white collar service work (which the median woman is more suited to and which AI has a good chance to cannibalize soon) which doesn't benefit you one bit if you're a working class male who can't attract a white-collar partner.

Really, "prosperity" to most people means access to zero-sum things such as land in desirable areas, social status and the labor of other people. Access to those things has absolutely gone down for the median American worker in a world where wealth inequality keeps increasing and where other countries have become much wealthier relative to America, and where worst of all they keep getting blasted by social media about other people having it better than them 24/7.

Pretty much nobody cares that all but the very worst off Americans can afford a flat-screen tv, the total digital sum of human knowledge online and much more food than they could ever stomach even if that would have been unimaginable a few generations ago, all of that is just eaten up by the hedonic treadmill and they're still miserable because they're at the bottom of the totem pole and see no way up.

The growth in real median household income is, to my understanding, driven by more women entering the full-time workforce and the growth of highly-paid white collar service work (which the median woman is more suited to and which AI has a good chance to cannibalize soon)

Maybe you could tell this story before the pandemic, but the pandemic and the aftermath have boosted male median wages too.

which doesn't benefit you one bit if you're a working class male who can't attract a white-collar partner.

It clearly benefits the median American household, so either the median American household has a white collar woman or it's not just white collar woman whose wages are going up.

Really, "prosperity" to most people means access to zero-sum things such as land in desirable areas, social status and the labor of other people. Access to those things has absolutely gone down for the median American worker in a world where wealth inequality keeps increasing and where other countries have become much wealthier relative to America, and where worst of all they keep getting blasted by social media about other people having it better than them 24/7.

This is just by definition wrong to some extent, right? To the extent that status is determined by wealth, it isn't affected by wealth inequality. Elon is wealthier/higher status than me and would be if he was worth merely a hundred million rather than a hundred billion. The top 1% are going to buy the 1% most desirable real estate and the median American by definition cannot. Etc.

What has changed here with respect to real estate is that the number of 1%ers has increased in pace with the population. There's 50% more people in the country than there were in 1980 and the California coastline hasn't grown a bit. That means that the median American is living in a less desirable, in absolute terms, than the median American in 1980.

As far as buying others' labor, consumer goods have never been cheaper. Automation has made big strides and there's still countries with much lower wages than the US. Where this has become a problem is with domestic service industries like education, medicine, the trades, etc. but this may be partially an unavoidable effect of the productivity growth that drove down prices in other sectors.

all of that is just eaten up by the hedonic treadmill and they're still miserable because they're at the bottom of the totem pole and see no way up.

The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways, the things that people think were so great about the imagined past were not considered so great by those living in the actual past. Being at the bottom of the totem pole sucks no matter what year it is.

It clearly benefits the median American household, so either the median American household has a white collar woman or it's not just white collar woman whose wages are going up.

I'd be interested to see demographics of new households adjusted for population growth. Just anecdotally and based off urban demographics, younger men are more likely to stay at home (especially if lower-earning or unpartnered) whereas the median woman is more likely to have moved out to an urban metro and gotten some sort of decently paying white-collar job.

Hence household income went up but there's still plenty of disaffected men who can't / won't make it in the white-collar world and see their real wages and status falling like a rock. I do agree that it's more accurate to say "real incomes have been down for a generation for many American workers" because if you had white-collar exposure you likely did very well in absolute terms over the last generation.

The issue is that even if they're much better off absolutely and can afford a huge amount of food, technology and clothing most of the things people care about when feeling rich are relative and simply can't be accessible to everyone.

That means that the median American is living in a less desirable, in absolute terms, than the median American in 1980

Where this has become a problem is with domestic service industries like education, medicine, the trades, etc. but this may be partially an unavoidable effect of the productivity growth that drove down prices in other sectors.

This nails it on the head imo. Even for the median household that has done well in absolute terms they likely live in a smaller or less desirable location compared to their parents and their real wages, while they have gone up, have likely gone up less relative to the cost of domestic services and hence they feel poor because they've gone down the totem pole.

The hedonic treadmill cuts both ways, the things that people think were so great about the imagined past were not considered so great by those living in the actual past. Being at the bottom of the totem pole sucks no matter what year it is.

This is very true though. The issue is that nobody thinks they'll be the poor peasant who struggles to feed themselves and they all think they'd be in a higher class where property and domestic service was much cheaper in relative terms.

What’s being exposed is our useless government. This may be worth it if it wakes up everyone to what their jobs are supposed to - I have my doubts.

Peace is still there … and unlike the other poster, I agree it’s been peaceful and prosperous for the western world and some adjacencies.

Like all good things, hubris was too high and it’s time to correct course - which this isn’t, nor will we do it after it’s over. Wow will continue.

Trump made tariffs a cornerstone of his campaign, and he's acting on that, so there is nothing to expose. But some ppl got more than they bargained for. voter regret. ppl did not expect such bad tariffs, China to retaliate, or the reaction by stocks to be so negative. I think it's a way overreaction.

Trump made tariffs a cornerstone of his campaign, and he's acting on that, so there is nothing to expose.

It's exposed Trump apologists. After years of his defenders insisting we should take him seriously but not literally, it turns out he's a malicious idiot and we should have taken him literally.

Beyond that, democracy itself is being exposed.

Another way of saying this is that it's reverting to the historical mean in terms of sophistication and rhetoric.

In 2025, peace broke out.

It always takes a few hours for the thread to be populated with topics ,and then the discussions build from there

;-) Figured I start things out with a little levity.

Because both of the sides of the culture war wants to destroy the system and the system is being destroyed?

I would like for the system not to be destroyed, given that I have to live in it, and destroying something doesn't automatically make a better alternative pop out of nothing.

Also I'm not too keen on it being destroyed. But it is not in the cards that we are able to stop it, just accept that it is happening and trying to get the best outcome of what is to come.

John Psmith reviewed "Believe, by Ross Douthat"

Imagine a prophet who tells you he has a special understanding of the universe and can predict a far-future eschatological event with certainty. This might be one of the many apocalyptic preachers of a conventionally religious sort, or it could be a different sort of prophecy like the believer in scientific Marxism who has deduced the laws of history, or the charismatic business leader explaining to investors why he will inevitably conquer the world of B2B SaaS.

...

I am speaking, of course, of the wrongest and worst prophets who ever lived: the last few centuries of atheists.

People really don’t like it when you point this out, but past generations of atheists made specific and detailed predictions about what would happen as religion loosened its grip on the mind, or what science would reveal about the nature of the universe. Those predictions have been uniformly awful. For example: Enlightenment-era skeptics acknowledged that there were a vast number of purported miracles, apparitions, and self-reported mystical experiences. They conjectured, reasonably enough, that some of the supposed miracles were “pious frauds,” and the rest were delusions brought on by religious superstition. They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population).

...

The fact that the atheists centuries ago were wrong about…approximately everything doesn’t actually have much bearing on whether God exists. Atheism has adapted. Today, instead of telling you that reports of miracles will inevitably decline, they will tell you (with equal confidence) that they will continue at the same rate forever because of…something to do with fMRI machines.2 And the eternal and unchanging universe is back, baby: it’s just the multiverse cosmology of eternal inflation now (which even takes care of the fine-tuning problem).3 There are about as many ways to be an atheist as there are to be religious, so why should we care that one particular set of guys from the 17th through early 20th centuries got repeatedly owned by events? It didn’t happen, but they deserve credit for making a specific prediction.

Ross Douthat cares, because he thinks that much of the intellectual and cultural power of modern secularism comes from a widespread but undeserved sense that the God-deniers have been proven right about stuff. Another way of putting it is that the default position for the intellectually serious has shifted from belief to unbelief. Among the educated class, at least, it used to be only the brave weirdos who were atheists, and now it’s only the brave weirdos who aren’t. Douthat quotes a Tom Stoppard play where a philosopher muses: “It is a tide which has turned only once in human history… there is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it.” And Douthat thinks that this shift of the default, this sense that maybe at one point in the past it was reasonable to believe, but that today it is not, is completely 100% made up and unearned, founded on a self-congratulatory retconning of history.

The middle section has examples of atheist scholars being wrong... but are examples of atheists scholars being wrong evidence against atheism? We know they were wrong, because atheistic scholarship has deeply-flawed-but-integral self-correction mechanisms. What self-correction have religions done, in the last 100 years? Or is this an isolated demand for rigor, because the pro-belief case is simply that some religion is inerrant, even if we don't know which (if any!) presently-practiced religion is inerrant, therefore, no religion needs to self-correct?

There's also a section on miricles, which includes:

In the Middle Ages, many miracles had the official sanction of the state, the universities, and all the other epistemic organs of society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many miracles were recorded. And as I said at the start of this review, secularists like David Hume assumed that as soon as the miraculous lost official sanction and encouragement, the flood of stories would dry up as people stopped claiming or pretending to experience them. But what actually happened was that disenchantment didn’t really happen on the ground. People still report miraculous healings, experiences of contact with a sublime Other, mystical visions, even really crazy stuff like levitation or bilocation. In this respect our society is a bit like a communist one, where the entire ruling class adheres strictly to a certain dogma and everybody else quietly pretends to believe it while actually disbelieving it, because it clashes profoundly with their direct experience of the world. Disenchantment is official but virtual. The official encouragement and recognition of miracles stopped, but the miracles kept pouring in. Douthat discusses many of them, some quite hard to dismiss as an individual’s hallucination or forgery because they were seen by many witnesses, others reported by committed materialists who recount them the way a religious believer might shamefully discuss almost losing their faith. Or as Chesterton once put it:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them… it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

But isn’t the very torrent of miracles itself a problem for believers? After all, one of the most noteworthy things about wondrous or uncanny or miraculous events is that they seem to happen worldwide, to people of every imaginable creed or culture, at roughly the same rate. Shouldn’t this count as evidence against most religions, which claim that their own doctrine is true and all others are false?9 Curiously enough, no. If you actually go and look at how even the most jealous and narrowminded faiths in history interpreted the miracles reported by heathens, you find that basically none of them deny their reality. Frequently they will interpret the miracles bestowed upon followers of rival religions as acts of diabolical rather than divine power, but only very rarely do you see them claiming that they are fake. Chesterton again:

No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.

Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine? And why deny another religion's morals, if you don't deny its signs and wonders of other religions? And doesn't this "prove too much," inasmuch as it's also true of conspiracy theories, cryptids (fun fact: Scotland's national animal isn't the unicorn, because someone thought it'd be funny - the Scots genuinely believed unicorns existed, at the time they chose it), and UFO sightings?

The review ends by making a strange argument promoting Christianity:

All of this sound and fury and debate over who wrote the story has a way of distracting us from the story itself, and I’d like to end this review by encouraging you to read it even if you don’t believe it. The narrative of the Gospel has been the single biggest influence on the millennia-old civilization that you (probably) are a child of. But it isn’t just the story of that civilization, because it’s also somehow had an electrifying effect on just about every other culture that’s ever come into contact with it. Forget all your beliefs or disbeliefs or presuppositions, doesn’t that sound interesting? Isn’t that the sort of thing that an educated person in the year 2025 should have direct experience with?

So pick a Gospel, any Gospel (yes, they have some important disagreements on the details,12 but the overall story is the same), and try just reading it through from start to finish. Maybe next week would be an auspicious time. And as you read, try to forget all the associations you have with Christianity, positive or negative, and read the words. If you want, you can imagine yourself in the cultural frame of the first people to encounter the story, and who were much more shocked by it than you will be. But even you, who have spent your whole life subtly marinating in the moral and cultural world that this story built, will be a little bit shocked if you read the words. Because just taken at face value, it’s a really weird story.

It begins, like countless Indo-European myths, with the miraculous birth of a great hero, and a succession of dangers that befall him in childhood. This is classic perennialist stuff, maybe the biggest cliché ever, repeated in myths and legends all over the world. Maybe that should bother Christians, because it means our story is one myth among many others. Or maybe it shouldn’t, because if our story is true, then it is in a sense the story, and we should expect to find echoes of it in all times and places, like refractions in a funhouse mirror. The one thing that’s already strange about this story, though, is how insistent it is on its own specific historicity. All the other myths and legends of demigods and heroes tend to begin with something like: “long ago when the earth was young,” or “once upon in a strange and faraway land.” But this one has dates, and at the time it was written those dates were recent! It cites names of witnesses, and mentions specific people and places. That doesn’t make it true, of course, maybe they all made it up in a conspiracy of lies, but it does make it different from most legends of a great hero sent by the gods.

Anyway, the hero is born, survives his childhood trials, is officially recognized and charged with a mission by the gods, and then begins roaming the countryside: recruiting a fellowship, righting wrongs, and lifting up the sorrowful. Once again, we’re solidly in monomyth territory, this is the plot of like every adventure story ever. But wait a minute…look more closely and the details are all subtly wrong. Like, the “meeting the mentor” stage of the hero’s journey isn’t supposed to have the mentor immediately proclaiming the young hero as Lord. And then there’s the wandering part — most of it just seems to involve upsetting or confusing people. Zero monsters are slain. Zero Roman legionnaires are ambushed or waylaid by this supposed revolutionary folk hero. His only really heroic acts are miracles of healing, but whoever heard of a legend of a Great Physician? And the people who get the healings tend to be ones who, in the view of this society, don’t deserve it — heretics, prostitutes, lepers, the possessed — all of them “unclean.” Some of the healings even deliberately violate the law. Is he the first ever anarchist, come to overthrow not only the Roman occupation but also the rules of the Jewish religion? Is he a prophet of just using common sense and being nice to each other?

...

The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.

Has anyone read this book? If so, does this review do a bad job relaying the book's thesis? Am I wrong to think that the thesis, as presented in the review, is unpersuasive? If I am wrong, how am I wrong?

I haven't read the book (though you've piqued my interest) but I have this to add: in my time as a missionary in the Czech Republic (one of the most atheistic countries on earth) I'd estimate that a majority of the atheists I met there still believed in all sorts of new age mysticism and general woo.

Czech Republic (one of the most atheistic countries on earth)

Here come bad news for both atheistic and religious talking points. Czechia (together with former East Germany) is indeed one of world's most atheistic countries.

Atheists would predict it would be earthly paradise of science, logic and reason, theists would predict it would be hell of earth, charnel house of ceaseless rape and murder.

In reality, it is ordinary small European country, not much different from neigboring heavily religious Poland. Maybe the real black pill is that religion (or lack of it) is really not much important.

Or, maybe, the other similar experiences that those two countries have gone through over the last hundred years, plus the common christian heritage for roughly a millennium before that, outweigh the last generation or two's habits when it comes to organized religion.

Large effects deserve large treatments. I'm not sure that the way most modern religions are actually practiced would cause significant impacts on people's lives.

Islam being an exception, but probably not as big as some people think.

A median Christian believer is attending church a few times a year and has mostly segregated that set of beliefs from everything else they do.

A median Muslim in the US is going through the motions of praying a few times a day, and going to a mosque pretty often. But probably not making a pilgrimage to mecca, probably cheating during Ramadan, definitely not wanting anything to do with the extremist parts of their religion, and occasionally having alcohol.

Poland actually had weekly mass attendance at a majority level less than ten years ago.

I'm not sure that the way most modern religions are actually practiced would cause significant impacts on people's lives.

Well, what Douthat means by "everyone shall be religious"? "Everyone should be regularly weekly attending church/synagogue/mosque", or "Everyone should follow the holy book of his faith to the letter"

But in other countries most of these people would be ‘not very religious’(a sign of crossing the road to avoid black cats) and not atheist.

I'd estimate that a majority of the atheists I met there still believed in all sorts of new age mysticism and general woo.

This may be openness-to-experience bias in the sample of people who are likely to interact with a missionary.

They predicted that as the proportion of religious people waned, both sources of miracles would dry up. Naturally, nothing of the sort has happened (even when normalizing to total population)

True if big, but is it big? I am really interested to see comprehensible statistics of miracles per capita.

The historian Dr. Keener researched how common miracle claims are both currently and throughout history and published his results in two big ol' books. Unfortunately I don't own those two tomes so I don't have the hard data to throw at you, but based on reviews and interviews it seems that Keener has collected data on millions of miracle claims all over the world and finds that such claims are still pretty common.

For some statistics, according to Pew Research 29% of Americans claim that they had an experience of being in touch with the dead, 18% claim to have seen a ghost. In a more global study they found that among Christians (sadly they didn't study everyone, but given that 1/3rd of people are Christians it still covers a lot of ground) in the U.S. 29% claim to have witnessed divine healings, 39% say so in Brazil, 26% in Chile, 56% in Guatemala, 71% in Kenya, 62% in Nigeria, 38% in South Africa, 44% in India, 38% in the Philippines, and 10% in South Korea. That's a lot of miracle claims! It's certainly not uncommon.

EDIT: Also don't forget that the 2020 SSC Survey asked people if they ever had a spiritual experience or a religious experience. 21.6% said they had a spiritual experience, with 18.7% saying they might have had one, and 8.2% said they had a religious experience with 8.9% saying they might have. And this was a survey in which over 60% of the respondents were atheists, a very different sample from the general public (which, in the US, is about 4% atheist).

What self-correction have religions done, in the last 100 years?

Religion is hardly a static target here, nor is it a unified concept like "science" (although maybe science is more fragmented than advertised: ask some physicists if they "trust the science" in a random economics or psychology paper). There are huge religious changes in the last century, often to the point of causing minor schisms or schism-like breaks. Vatican II, a whole bunch of discourse on the role of the church around moral issues from WWII to Vietnam, rules on who can be church leadership (women, gays), and so forth. And some have disagreed with these changes being "self-corrections".

Or is this an isolated demand for rigor, because the pro-belief case is simply that some religion is inerrant, even if we don't know which (if any!) presently-practiced religion is inerrant, therefore, no religion needs to self-correct?

Somewhat uncharitably, I'd ask the physicists how they feel about the replication crisis, and then use that questionable inerrancy to decide that the entire edifice of science should be thrown out with the bathwater. Analogously, I think religion can bring decent value to how humans behave and interact that isn't dependent on its absolute inerrancy.

Somewhat uncharitably, I'd ask the physicists how they feel about the replication crisis, and then use that questionable inerrancy to decide that the entire edifice of science should be thrown out with the bathwater. Analogously, I think religion can bring decent value to how humans behave and interact that isn't dependent on its absolute inerrancy.

Are there spiritual or philosophical domains for which Religion A's clerics say "That's not my area of expertise - go ask Religion B's clerics?"

What does "religion can bring decent value to how humans behave and interact" have to do with belief?

I'd ask the physicists how they feel about the replication crisis

Ask them how they feel about "dark matter"

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them… it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.

No. This implies that everyone has evidence for miracles, and only by faith can they be denied. This is just plain false. Likewise, many who believe in miracles have only books to go on. This feels like a slightly less awful version of the "how can you not believe, when God is clearly pumping divine sensation into your system?" argument.

No. This implies that everyone has evidence for miracles, and only by faith can they be denied. This is just plain false. Likewise, many who believe in miracles have only books to go on.

Chesterton argues (quite rightly) that everyone does have evidence for miracles: the evidence of testimony. People have been writing about miracles and testifying to having witnessed miracles since as far back in history as we have records for. People report the supernatural and miraculous all the time. Chesterton's point is that theists can take each miracle claim and accept it based on the evidence: is this person a reliable reporter, how likely are there to be natural explanations, how probable is it that it was a trick, etc. But the atheist must begin by dismissing the possibility that the miracle could have happened at all, because the atheist is committed to the "doctrine" that miracles do not happen. Even if the evidence was very strong that a miracle occurred, the atheist would alternative explanations to be more probable from the get go, since he "knows" that miracles do not happen.

Here's the full quote, which captures the nuances a bit better:

Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious"; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland. It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.

the atheist would alternative explanations to be more probable from the get go I would argue that most rational theists act and believe this way too. Don't most religious believe that true miracles, ones that clearly defy natural laws and are direct intervention by some higher power, are rare?

Sure the atheist is more sure that miracles don't exist, but that's kind of the definition of an atheist. They've seen less evidence that miracles are true, and no direct evidence, only testimony. And testimony is weak evidence, especially for questions core to people's identity and upbringing, where even if the person can be trusted, there's also clearly incentive avoid skepticism.

That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy

Democracy is a system of government, not a scientific method.

In the book the quote is from (Orthodoxy) Chesterton uses the word "democracy" to generally mean the liberal idea that ordinary people should have a vote, as opposed to aristocracy where only the elite have a say in things (which was a live issue at the time in Britain). Here's where he defines his use of the term:

I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions....This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves—the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

Evidence and proof are different things. The Eucharistic miracles, the healings given by the saints, the holy tilma, etc- these are individually weak arguments for the truth of the Catholic faith(and even non-Catholic Christians retreat to the evidence for the Catholic faith to try to prove the Christian religion in general). But when you combine them they become a pattern.

The 'it's just witnesses' argument is also spurious because this is how we know about every other historical event. Some of them had too many witnesses, some of them skeptical, to just be made up. And no, people in 1917 couldn't have faked the miracle of the sun. Nor could Joseph of Cupertino have caused himself to levitate using stage magic. Padre Pio couldn't have caused a woman's eyes to regrow. Legions of incorrupt saints come before modern embalming techniques.

This does not mean, of course, that every purported miracle is miraculous- the Roman Catholic Church itself regularly dismisses them as fake.

Uh huh, now step aside, every other religion in the world is in line behind you waiting to give the same speech.

The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.

C. S. Lewis laid out the central "similarity to monomyth argument" in more detail in his essay "Religion Without Dogmas" He's a key quote:

"If you start from a naturalistic philosophy, then something like the view of Euhemerus or the view of Frazer is likely to result. But I am not a naturalist. I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief."

In his autobiography he discussed the "difference from monomyth" argument:

"I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not “a religion”, nor “a philosophy”. It is the summing up and actuality of them all."

I fail to understand why the similarity of the gospels to myth, whether for, or against, or both(?) has relevance to whether or not god exists.

Like "humans tend to tell similar sorts of stories, with some differences" is a perfectly reasonable rebuttal to these kinds of arguments.

You are right to feel underwhelmed, because Lewis wasn't so much putting forward an argument in favor of Christianity there but responding to one of the current significant arguments against Christianity of his day: that because Christianity is similar to other myths, it must not be true. As Lewis wrote,

If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief. But if the truth or falsehood of Christianity is the very question you are discussing, then the argument from anthropology is surely a petitio*

In other words, yes, "people tend to tell the same kind of stories" is a perfectly reasonable explanation of the phenomenon. But its not a good positive argument against Christianity being true, which is what atheists were claiming at the time.

*Meaning, begging the question.

Hm, thanks for that explanation, I see what he's going for and why he'd make both kinds of arguments. Kind of agree with him that similarity to other religions is not really the best angle to go for if you're trying to refute Christianity. (I guess I think there's a bit of an angle here -> it's weak evidence that Christianity is the result of the same process that makes humans tell pagan myths, but not really enough on it's own)

it's weak evidence that Christianity is the result of the same process that makes humans tell pagan myths

Lewis would agree, but would say that the process that makes humans tell pagan myths could be the fact that there is a God, so it's not good evidence either way.

You're thinking of God's existence as an empirical question whereas Lewis is not thinking about it in those terms and considers it a spiritual question, wherein truth takes a more directional form as the nature of things is considered ineffable.

Humans tell similar stories because those stories are true. And they tend to be true insofar as they are similar.

You can't refute the virtue of heroism, that's a category error. There's no evidence that's going to come in and convince the nature of the human experience of the universe to be different from what it is fundamentally.

"God exists" really means "the universe has intentional meaning". Is it more right (in a axiological sense) to believe in this proposition or not? That's essentially what religion is about. Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven.

You can arrive at some rationalistic explanation for this through some evolutionary model and arrive at some model of values that way, but it's eventually going to become homomorphic to religion and natural law insofar as one is willing to have the humility to provide for being inside what's being modeled.

You're thinking of God's existence as an empirical question whereas Lewis is not thinking about it in those terms and considers it a spiritual question, I mean you've got me there. I think it's clearly an empirical question, especially when talking about the Christian god.

Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven. Christianity tends to make a lot of physical claim - most Christians seem to believe miracles are possible, or that god can answer prayers.

I'm always frustrated when these topics come up because people with totally different vocabularies of the same words just talk past each other because the cogs don't roll the same way.

What's a miracle to you?

If your mother falls deathly ill of an incurable illness, you piously pray every day while doing everything in your power to sate her and she makes an unexpected recovery, did a miracle occur?

Did the laws of physics get suspended to make this happen or is your mother just so extremely lucky? Is there a functional difference between these two statements?

One of the main innovations of Abrahamism is the metaphysical claim that fortune or fate isn't separate from the intentional will behind the existence of the universe. This is usually called Providence.

Insofar as miracles make sense as a concept within this framework, one has to distinguish between the general form that upholds the natural order and the special form where God (the breath behind the universe) intervenes more directly in the lives of people.

Positions on this latter category vary of course. But it doesn't seem to me that this general metaphysical principle is a testable claim.

wherein truth takes a more directional form

The existence of God is one of the least “directional” questions we can consider.

What people want from God is immortality. They want a guarantee that biological death is not the end. My immortal soul will either ascend to paradise upon my death (or I will experience bodily resurrection at some point in the future etc, whatever your preferred theology is), or it won’t. That makes a big difference in terms of what I can expect to directly experience in the future. Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

The retreat from viewing eternal life and eternal damnation as very concrete, tangible, and urgent matters is yet another symptom of religion continuing to cede ground to materialism and atheism.

The existence of God is one of the least “directional” questions we can consider.

I don't think so. Orthodox Christian theology indicates that God does not exist in any sense that we could comprehend as existence. To say that God exists would be considered inaccurate, as the notion of 'existence' we're (capable of) using does not apply here. But it would also be wrong to say that God does not exist, as our idea of that is wrong too. God is beyond existence and nonexistence.

What people want from God is immortality. They want a guarantee that biological death is not the end. My immortal soul will either ascend to paradise upon my death (or I will experience bodily resurrection at some point in the future etc, whatever your preferred theology is), or it won’t. That makes a big difference in terms of what I can expect to directly experience in the future. Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

How do you explain pre-Christian Judaism, in which major schools of thought denied an afterlife and most of the major ones said 'idk' at best? Personally, while I like my (wrong) notions of what eternal existence will be, I'm much more concerned about what we might call ultimate consequence. Meaning, if you will. I don't need personal eternal existence to live a meaningful life.

Or, you know, any pagan religion which doesn't posit an afterlife, or indicates that the afterlife is fairly uniformly terrible.

Being “directionally correct” is cold comfort if you don’t get the actual immortality along with it.

I'd take being sure of that in a heartbeat.

The retreat from viewing eternal life and eternal damnation as very concrete, tangible, and urgent matters is yet another symptom of religion continuing to cede ground to materialism and atheism.

This narrative just doesn't ring true to me at all, not least for the reasons above.

To this comment I'll append some words by Fr. Thomas Hopko of blessed memory.

…In the Latin, Aristotelian line, God was being, but not becoming; God was unchanging but not changing; God was simple and not multiple; God was static and not moving, not dynamic, and so on. Whereas the Bible, or how the Eastern Fathers, like Gregory and Basil and the other Gregory and Maximos and Simian and others said — especially Dionysius — they said, ‘No; God is completely different! God’s not like anything that exists. God is beyond being. He’s beyond becoming, beyond un-being. That in God, the one and the many — God isn’t one as opposed to many; God is beyond one and many. But He reveals Himself to us as being itself, as goodness itself, love itself, truth itself… but He also reveals Himself in a multiplicity, countless number of the divine actions and energies because He is the living God, and these operations or actions or energies of God, His speaking, His acting, His being angry, His revealing Himself, His hiding Himself — these are all real. God is a living God. He’s beyond anything in the created order. We can’t simply identify Him with ‘being’. In fact, Gregory of Palamas will say, ‘If God is being, I am not. If I am being, God is not. If God is, I am not. If I am, God is not.’ What he meant by that is, you can’t use the term ‘being’ for God and for creation in the same way.

Now if you say that ‘God is’, then you have to qualify that God is beyond anything. For example, if a Christian was, let’s say, walking down the street, and wearing a cross, and some person came up to him and said ‘Hey, are you a Christian, you’re a believer, you have that cross on?’ Say ‘Yeah’. And then if the person said, ‘Do you believe God exists?’ And of course the first Christian answer would be ‘Yes, of course. We believe God exists.’ But if we were really doing our duty, according to the Bible and according to the Holy Fathers — certainly according to St. Gregory of Palamas — we would say to that person, ‘You have a minute? Let’s chat.’ And then we’d say to that person, ‘You know, I just said to you “God exists.” And by that I mean, yes, there is God. Yes. It is not true that there is no God. There is God. But, if you think that God exists like I exist, or you exist, or that building or that tree exists, or even like the planet Earth exists, or like the hundred billion galaxies with the hundred billion stars in the expanding universe exist, then we would have to say God does not exist. God brings into existence creatures who can say that they exist. But God is beyond existence. He’s even beyond non-existence.’

In his summary of the patristic writings that he wrote in the Ninth Century, St. John of Damascus said, ‘God is not only beyond being, He’s beyond non-being.’ That we have to negate even the negations that we make about God. Because if we say that God does not exist like the creation exists, that concept would even be somehow contingent upon an idea of creation. But God, as Prophet Isaiah said [a] long time before Jesus, ‘God doesn’t have any comparisons.’ There’s nothing in Heaven and on Earth to compare with Him. As it was already revealed to the men and women of the old covenant, God is holy. Kadosha, holy. And ‘holy’ means not like anything else. It means completely different; completely other. Like there’s nothing you can say about God but just to contemplate His activities in silence. St. Gregory of Nyssa says, quoting Psalm 116, ‘If we dare to speak about God, then every man is a liar.’ ‘Cause whatever we say, we have to correct somehow. Even the great Englishman and great theological writer, John Henry Newman, who was a Church of England person who became a Roman Catholic, mainly because of the Church Fathers, he said that theology for a Christian is ‘saying and unsaying to a positive effect’. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware quoted that once. I loved it. He says that that’s the same thing that the Eastern Church Fathers say. Theology is saying and unsaying for a positive effect. For a good reason. Because you affirm something — in technical language, that’s called cataphatic — and then you negate it. That’s called apophatic. And so when you say anything about what God is or what God is like, you can say it! You can say ‘God exists, God is good, God is love’, but immediately you have to correct it and say, ‘not like being and not like goodness and not like love that we can capture with our mind. God is way beyond that.’

Nevertheless, He acts. He speaks. He shows Himself. As Gregory of Nyssa said way back in the Fourth Century, ‘His actions and operations,’ he said, ‘they descend even unto us.’

This reads like modern neogender theory.

Yeschad.jpg

Liberalism is rebellion incarnate, and rebellion incarnate works only by self-deification. Neogender theory is describing the self as God.

Did not expect to see a reference to Fr. Thomas Hopko here… he baptized me as an infant.

I find the concern with one's corporeal life instead of the symbolic meaning thereof to be the cthonic position here actually.

Souls aren't material objects.

"God exists" really means "the universe has intentional meaning". Is it more right (in a axiological sense) to believe in this proposition or not? That's essentially what religion is about. Not whether some specific physical claim can be proven.

I think this take would have been considered blasphemous in most religious societies.

Religions have both exoteric and esoteric meaning, and it is usually forbidden to mix them in public, that is correct.

I don't recommend evaluating the content of a philosophy by what random people off the street tolerate.

I haven't read the book, but read the review. I definitely find it unpersuasive, focusing on miracles and cosmology feels like a bad approach if you're trying to convince atheists.

Like yes, atheists in the past (and present!) have made incorrect predictions about how people would behave without religious guidance. That's more a failure of their understanding of people, not of the core question of god's existence. And anyways, the modern world's technology, which works perfectly well when designed and operated by atheists and the religious alike, has produced common, everyday wonders that in previous eras been absolutely godlike.

Likewise trying to argue that religious views offer better views of cosmology, or that QM is weird in a way that can be described as "metaphysical"? Like sure, some scientists have found QM weird, or had preconceived notions of what the nature of the universe is. But I'd argue they've gotten a lot closer than religious though ever has.

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them

No, they don't.

If there was even one example of an honest-to-god miracle for which uncontrovertable evidence existed, that alone would be sufficient to prove God (or, at least, the supernatural). Of course, such evidence does not exist.

uncontrovertable evidence

There's the rub, right? Miracles tend to be one-off historical events, not laws of nature you can subject to experiment, so you end up having to rely on witnesses. And witnesses are easily dismissed as liars or suffering from delusions.

Though even the kinds of miracles that can be literally put under a microscope seem not uncontrovertable. Take Eucharistic miracles for which there are consistent findings that the material being examined is human heart tissue, that had been subjected to great stress, was very recently alive, of blood type AB, and with DNA that can't be sequenced. Some of the folks that investigate these even contracted with secular labs to do sample processing to avoid the appearance of bias.

so you end up having to rely on witnesses.

But never video footage.

Eucharistic miracles for which there are consistent findings that the material being examined is human heart tissue

You're talking about literal transubstantiation? hang on, how do they know it's human heart tissue if they can't sequence the DNA? what does it even mean to not be able to sequence the DNA? Like, the machine broke?

Hoaxes are a known source of Christian relics. Apparently there are over 30 holy nails in various european curches and cathederals today! there were probably enough holy nails and pieces of the true cross floating around 15th century europe to fill a warehouse.

But never video footage.

In my humble opinion, video footage alone is actually not super good evidence. If it was, you (and everyone else) would believe in Bigfoot and UFOs, which you can see by the dozens on YouTube.

Of course. If Bigfoot and UFOs were both real and capturable on camera, I'd hear about it from CNN and the like, not no-name Youtube channels.

This still leaves the "it's faked from one level above them" out, as you've noted.

No offense, but I'm not sure you would, since UFOs have been captured on camera (military targeting systems no less!) and it's been covered many many times in outlets like the New York Times and, yes, CNN.

Here's a video of the then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe (merely on Fox News, but still) pointedly telling the audience that US spy satellites and other sensors catch UFOs from time to time. (And although I don't think this made the news, here's relevant documents from the NRO about a possible UAP image capture and discussion of a "UAP model" as part of their SENTIENT AI image intelligence program.)

Yes, there's been definition fuzziness/creep between "a UFO is, literally, a Flying Thing we, the general public, are Not Sure What It Is" and "a UFO is an alien encounter".

Sure. I am not convinced they are aliens (but the cutting-edge UFO Believers/Enthusiasts/Fanatics often don't think this either). But (imho) that doesn't make them mundane and certainly not a good example of something that's obviously not real.

They are a pretty good example of something "science" has a hard time dealing with since you can't snap your fingers and reproduce them in a test tube. In that sense at least they are miraculous.

video footage alone is actually not super good evidence.

Well, yes, it often isn't super good evidence. They are few in number and invariably low quality. This is strange; as the number of cameras on the planet increased exponentially, you would expect the number of video captures of any given real phenomenon to increase exponentially, and statistically you would expect some of those captures to be high quality, but this does not happen. The fact that this does not happen is strong evidence against such phenomenon being real. Bigfoot is an excellent example of this.

On the subject of UFOs, both here and in your other comments you are fudging definitions pretty hard in order to conflate unlike things.

UFOs - meaning flying objects that are unidentified - certainly exist.

UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and appear to perform incredible maneuvers - plausibly exist.

UFOs - meaning specifically tic-tac shaped objects which hang out in the middle of nowhere and actually do perform incredible maneuvers - probably do not exist, but I would place low probability on some weak versions of this being true. The fact that these tic-tacs apparently like to hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets provides a convenient out to the 'why so little footage from 2010 onward?' question.

Flying Saucers - meaning alien spaceships that abduct folk from Arkansas and anally probe them and/or take them on whistle stop tours of the solar system - certainly do not exist, for the same reason that Bigfoot does not exist. The XKCD comic uses the term 'Flying Saucer' not 'UFO'. I expect this is deliberate.

Finally, neither Bigfoot nor UFOs nor Flying Saucers are 'miraculous' things in the sense that the OP used the term - meaning divine or diabolical phenomenon.

Bigfoot is an excellent example of this.

There are some pretty decent videos of Bigfoot, but I have no strong opinion on their veracity. I think it would be fairly easy to fake something like that. Which goes to my point: video evidence by itself is not great evidence.

They are few in number and invariably low quality. This is strange; as the number of cameras on the planet increased exponentially, you would expect the number of video captures of any given real phenomenon to increase exponentially

First off, I think we should all just acknowledge that cell phone cameras are not good at taking nighttime photographs at any real distance. I don't own the latest and greatest, so maybe they stole a march on me. But if hypothetically I had an encounter with a real Bigfoot (or an ape or, heck, a deer) at night and took a photo of it I would expect it would look low quality.

But secondly, by this argument, there are no weird (but perfectly mundane) things flying out of Dreamland, but there are. They just don't want to be seen, so they hang out in the middle of nowhere where the only thing likely to stumble across them are fighter jets. In fact, to use just one recent example, the US constructed and flew multiple prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet for years, yet to my knowledge not a single photograph of them went public. (There are always one or two photos of "weird stuff in the sky" that circulate, so maybe one of them was a NGAD demonstrator).

If the position of XKCD is that an intelligence [including potentially our own] that can engineer a craft superior in performance (as reported by US defense officials) to conventional aircraft cannot keep a low profile in a way similar to that of our own bloated inefficient corrupt government bureaucracy can then, well, that position is very silly! Particularly when you realize that there are a couple of ways, such as lens detection or emissions detection, that would allow you to steer clear of would-be photographers, so if the 2024 iPhone - which is not an ideal platform for aviation photography - is really the threat vector you want to defend against you probably have options there, especially if you have advanced technology at your fingertips.

And indeed it turns out that if you read the actual US government reports on UFOs you'll note the term "signature management" is used. In fact one might certainly wonder why hypothetical UFOnauts would get caught on camera (or radar) at all, and if UFOs were real and preferred not to get caught on camera, one might expect that high-powered military sensors would be disproportionately likely to capture compelling evidence. And interestingly from what I recall the F/A-18s started picking up UAP on their radar regularly after receiving an upgraded AESA, which could be indica of a mundane sensor issue but also could be a sign that that a hypothetical UFO designer's signature management model was not up to the task of deceiving latest-gen hardware.

Finally, neither Bigfoot nor UFOs nor Flying Saucers are 'miraculous' things in the sense that the OP used the term - meaning divine or diabolical phenomenon.

That's certainly begging the question.

In fact, to use just one recent example, the US constructed and flew multiple prototypes of the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet for years, yet to my knowledge not a single photograph of them went public.

The US didn't want its test flights to be seen by the public, and so tried to conceal them. Religious believers don't claim that God is deliberately concealing miracles from scientists.

I actually suspect there's a diversity of thought on this among religious believers.

But again, my understanding is that Catholics do apply something like the scientific method to miracles, so they would probably say that you are correct, and that scientists can in fact find evidence of them.

There are human specific proteins that can be identified independent of DNA sequencing.

Grok suggests that it’s likely a failure to replicate the DNA via PCR that is at fault, with the report on the Buenos Aires miracle citing this explicitly, with other reports being more vague about failures to sequence.

My conversation with Grok also reminded me that the Eucharistic miracle blood type of AB is also the same observed in the Shroud of Turin.

Realized I didn’t address your first question: video does exist, but suffers the same problem that it can be dismissed out of hand as a hoax.

Here’s video of a spontaneously bleeding and pulsing host contained in a monstrance: https://aleteia.org/2019/06/17/this-eucharistic-host-was-filmed-bleeding-and-pulsating-like-a-heart-on-fire

And video of an apparently beating host: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251891/a-new-eucharistic-miracle-in-mexico

There's the rub, right? Miracles tend to be one-off historical events, not laws of nature you can subject to experiment, so you end up having to rely on witnesses. And witnesses are easily dismissed as liars or suffering from delusions

What about all those sites, like the grave of Padre Pio where pilgrims regularly report miraculous cures? Or the spring waters at Lourdes? The latter has 70 recognized miracles by the Catholic church, with OOMs more claimed over 150 years. I'm pretty sure if that if it kept up the pace, we could dispense with hospitals for all expenses paid tours.

Sadly, lying and delusions are the only sensible responses when it comes to such poorly documented incidents which conveniently avoid cameras and MRIs. Funny how that works, and even funnier that people take them seriously despite this.

It's a funny deity that throws fire and brimstone about in front of crowds of hundreds or thousands, yet shies away from electronic media or even film.

Though even the kinds of miracles that can be literally put under a microscope seem not uncontrovertable. Take Eucharistic miracles for which there are consistent findings that the material being examined is human heart tissue, that had been subjected to great stress, was very recently alive, of blood type AB, and with DNA that can't be sequenced. Some of the folks that investigate these even contracted with secular labs to do sample processing to avoid the appearance of bias.

My textbooks must have skipped over findings of such magnitude. I'd love to see evidence for these claims. It would have to be a great deal of evidence to overcome the inherent tallness of the tale.

I hate to respond with “read this sizable book” but I am curious how a skeptical medical doctor like yourself would respond to it.

I was intrigued by these miracles and so read A Cardiologist Examines Jesus by Dr. Franco Serafini. I came away with the impression that this would be too hard a hoax to coordinate and the odds of congruence are between miracles are very small, and so there’s very likely something to them.

He comes to the subject with a faithful but also rigorous attitude and dismisses at least one of the miracles he investigates.

It’s a fairly easy read, matter of fact and right to the point.

After reading it I searched for refutations and found nothing convincing. These are extraordinary claims, but it seems they don’t get serious consideration on account of that alone, not on the details being incorrect.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DebateACatholic/comments/1gjnkac/concerns_regarding_the_historicity_and_the/

This has a substantial rebuttal. The core claims are hilariously overblown for anyone with even a passing familiarity with medicine or lab work.

Hahahaha was this written in 2013, a mere two years before the first story came out about the UFO that caught on FLIR and radar, which was then recycled into the New York Times, pretty much forcing an avalanche of "okay so UFOs are real" confessions from .gov types? Impeccable timing.

Most of my (Christian) circles have been tepid on "Believe," largely because making a general argument for believing something isn't very strong without making an argument for a specific happening. It's not clear that there is a category that can be called "Religion and Spirituality" which can be generalized, that includes various world cultural practices, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc. Arguing for Athiesm vs Religion in the general doesn't work out super well.

I'm inclined to agree here - Psmith goes off more in his own direction, but I think Douthat's work is somewhat problematic from the perspective of Christianity itself, and I would presume from the perspective of most great 'religions'.

Probably the most valuable advice Douthat gives is that interested, open-minded seekers ought to genuinely consider the great world religions and immerse themselves in those traditions - the centuries or millennia of practice and meditation and speculation that they hold are not to be dismissed.

Arguing from miracles is just... painfully bad. If you have strong evidence that could be tested and perhaps replicated of supernatural phenomena occurring on Earth, that would be one thing. But this is like debating Trumpian 2020 election skeptics, where they're full of reasons to sneer and hate their outgroup, but if you ask them to make a positive case for their own arguments, they wither and try to deflect. The best evidence I can think of to dismiss these people as a group is the fact they've failed to find a single good example to rally around (be it an example of election fraud that was widespread enough to make a difference, or a miracle that genuinely occurred). They all have their own little gish gallop of bad reasons that primarily rely on the audience not being familiar with the arguments, because any evenhanded analysis would show their points are bunk.

I don't think our philosophy of science has a good way to handle non-repeatable results. If you look at something like the Oh-My-God particle detected exactly once in 1991, I'm not sure how I'd distinguish from a miracle. Sure, a scientific instrument saw it, but those aren't immune to weird things, like the faster-than-light observed neutrinos a decade ago. As a one-off observation, it's a bit more believable than, say, a coherent message, but if we instead observed the alien equivalent of the Arecibo message (sent exactly once in 1974), we'd be talking about something that would look, to me at least, rather miraculous.

I sort of agree with this at a broad level, but people claim miracles are happening quite frequently, so you'd expect at least one case to have evidence that's genuinely decent instead of just testimony.

I think most of the miracles that people claim are happening quite frequently are things like:

  • Inexplicable healing
  • People understanding things in a foreign language
  • Ghosts
  • Unusual or prophetic dreams

I'm not really sure how to get proof that any of these things occur - most of them happen or may only happen inside the mind of the experiencer.

I could be wrong but my guess is that inexplicable healing (which would be the one pretty trivially verifiable thing, one would think) is not even particularly uncommon and that you don't hear about it because, well, does someone inexplicably healing strike you as slam-dunk proof of a miracle?

Apparently people inexplicably recovering from conditions such as dementia shortly before death is so common as to have its own name ("terminal lucidity") so it seems to me trivially easy to prove the "inexplicable healing" is real, but proving that the inexplicable healing involved supernatural powers is pretty hard and I'm not really sure how one would go about doing this.

I do think there have been experiments to see if people who were prayed over recovered at better rates than people who did not, and my recollection is that there did not seem to be a statistically significant difference. But it's been years since I read about that and I don't know any of the internals of the study, so I have no real informed opinion of its validity. At any rate, though, even an airtight study of that nature would not be able to prove that miracles were not real.

I do think there have been experiments to see if people who were prayed over recovered at better rates than people who did not, and my recollection is that there did not seem to be a statistically significant difference. But it's been years since I read about that and I don't know any of the internals of the study, so I have no real informed opinion of its validity.

Here's a quick look at the methodology of several studies. One of the largest studies, which famously reported a negative result, included people from many religions but barely any Protestant Christians.

Thanks, interesting!

From a Bayesian perspective, I'd say that the claim that "miracles happen, but only in ways that are conveniently impossibly difficult to scientifically corroborate" is pretty good evidence that we should discount them unless we really do get some solid proof. This is especially true given humans have a known habit of attributing unexplainable phenomena on the supernatural, but which have later been conclusively proven to have mundane origins (e.g. primitive humans thinking thunder and lightning were gods fighting each other).

Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.

The claim is quite specifically that Bayesianism is incapable of handling certain truths. It is entirely possible for something to be absolutely true and immensely unlikely.

From a Bayesian perspective, I'd say that the claim that "miracles happen, but only in ways that are conveniently impossibly difficult to scientifically corroborate" is pretty good evidence that we should discount them unless we really do get some solid proof.

Well, firstly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And as discussed, the evidence is (and your priors should be) that inexplicable things do happen, sometimes with enough frequency to be given a name. Which leads to goalpost shifting, because in the mind of many people, giving something a name explains it! But that's actually not so.

But secondly, that's very specifically not my claim. I am sure if we bothered to go around and look either of us could find instances of scientifically corroborated miracles, in the sense that

  1. a miracle was claimed (e.g. miraculous healing), and
  2. the miracle did occur (e.g. here's a CAT scan showing the person was healed)

My question is – how does the CAT scan showing the person was healed prove that it was miraculous?

Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.

This all reminds me of the fact that scientists refused to accept the existence of meteorites for a very long period of time because they were one-off events.

But anyway, the claim here being made (by Voxel) is that miracles (or supernatural or if you prefer inexplicable events) aren't very uncommon or, shall you say, extraordinary.

My question is – how does the CAT scan showing the person was healed prove that it was miraculous?

I'm not sure what you're asking. We know that some things just don't happen. If someone regrows a limb after prayer, and there hasn't been some massive discovery about biology, then that's a miracle.

If you are asking "couldn't they have healed normally?" that's TA's point: "miracles" happen in ways that are hard to scientifically corroborate. It's always healing something that naturally heals in 10% of patients or otherwise could happen, not regrowing a limb. Then yes, the CAT scan doesn't prove it's miraculous, but that's not because it never could for any miracle, that's because the miracles are conveniently hard to corroborate.

If you are asking "how does that 100% absolutely prove a miracle, the answer is that pretty much everything science "proves" is just shown to be very very likely, and the miracle can meet that standard, even if it can't meet a standard of absolute 100% proof.

If you mean "how do we tell between a miracle and aliens shooting their heal ray at us, or some other explanation that's weird but doesn't involve God", the answer is that saying "it's either a miracle or aliens" is a really good start and drastically increases the credibility of religion, even if aliens can't be ruled out yet. Once that happens, we can proceed from there.

Except of course, it doesn't happen.

I'm not sure what you're asking. We know that some things just don't happen. If someone regrows a limb after prayer, and there hasn't been some massive discovery about biology, then that's a miracle.

See, this is a catch-22. If things "don't just happen" then we know they aren't real. If things that shouldn't happen happen (such as dementia patients recovering their cognizance) than it's just a random mystery of the universe, but not a miracle. If someone regrew a limb after prayer, which a minute of Googling shows has in fact allegedly happened! people would be like "wow, there must be a good scientific explanation for this!" or "oh, clearly an elaborate fraud!"

Which I don't even think is necessarily a bad attitude - in my opinion there needs to be a nonzero amount of healthy skepticism in the world. I can think of plausible materialistic mechanisms for terminal lucidity. I'm sure with ten minutes of research I could do the same for the regrowth of limbs. Shoot, I can also think of plausible scientific mechanisms for pretty much any miracle you can think of, including regrown limbs, if you posit Sufficiently Advanced Science (which was Clark points out is indistinguishable from magic). If you posit a world where entities indistinguishable from angels were scientifically verified to exist, a nonzero number of people would just be like "woah its The Entities up to their advanced science again" instead of becoming religious converts (and in fact this describes a lot of the UFO community, particularly the more "out there" parts).

I'm sorry, I guess I am rambling. My point is that I don't think there's a single standard from skeptics at large here, as a general rule, just some very mobile goalposts. If you disagree, and want to post the specific evidence you'd need to believe in something miraculous, as well as what you would define "miraculous" as, maybe we could investigate whether your criteria have been fulfilled.

If you are asking "how does that 100% absolutely prove a miracle, the answer is that pretty much everything science "proves" is just shown to be very very likely, and the miracle can meet that standard, even if it can't meet a standard of absolute 100% proof.

One obvious problem is that scientists (and doctors) are so incompetent that any attempt to prove a miracle medically or scientifically can easily be dismissed as incompetence or fraud. And in fact this is what happens, there are plenty of allegedly scientific attempts to probe paranormal topics and the accusation hurled at the experimenters is always that they are frauds or that their study designs suck. Which is probably true! Probably most study designs suck! So any time you bring up a study or a "medically verified miracle" it is very easy to dismiss it on the basis of "fraudulence and/or incompetence."

I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a good perspective on their methodology (and miracles are not really my jam anyway, so I don't good sources or really strong opinions on the famously reported ones) but my understanding is that the Catholic church actually does scientifically investigate miracles as part of their canonization process. Maybe some other Mottizens can point out some specific compelling cases. But I doubt anyone who is not already sympathetic will find them persuasive since "well they are motivated to find miracles," which again goes to a catch-22, since few people who are not so motivated bother to go looking for them.

The long and short of it is, though, as I understand it, is that there have been scientific investigations of miracles, they do convince some people, and other people remain unconvinced.

Except of course, it doesn't happen.

Well, actually, things impossible according to the known laws of physics do happen. And when they are proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, scientists literally invent magic an invisible practically unfalsifiable mystery substance to explain them. But I don't particularly think this increases the credibility of religion, it just decreases the credibility of scientists. Which is much the same reaction skeptics of "woo" have when research that seems to validate "woo" comes out.

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Well, firstly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

It's not conclusive evidence but it should certainly raise our suspicious given that 1) humans frequently and erroneously attribute mundane phenomena to the supernatural (it's an extremely common human logical fault), 2) with so many claims, you'd assume at least a few would have clear evidence of occurring and not having ready explanations. It's similar to UFO sightings, which were quite common a few decades ago. If they were real, the proliferation of smartphones with cameras should have led to a surge in evidence of their existence. Instead, the lack of such evidence is a good indication that it was bunk all along. That's not to say we should be completely closeminded on the issue if evidence does arise, but we should wait for that compelling evidence first.

Minor or even moderate healing is a bad metric since the human body is extremely complicated, so mundane phenomena could easily be confused for the supernatural. Moreover, health is something people are very emotional about, so they pray about it frequently. But if people were e.g. regularly doing crazy things like being able to walk on water or (as Jiro mentioned) regrowing lost limbs, then that would be a better starting point.

This all reminds me of the fact that scientists refused to accept the existence of meteorites for a very long period of time because they were one-off events.

This story should raise your opinion of science, not lower it. Rocks falling from the sky would seem like superstitions in the early enlightenment, but Jean-Baptiste Biot collected evidence it actually occurred and science was persuaded relatively quickly. Miracles should be held to the same standard.

But anyway, the claim here being made (by Voxel) is that miracles (or supernatural or if you prefer inexplicable events) aren't very uncommon or, shall you say, extraordinary.

Claims of miracles aren't uncommon, I'm sure. But that just proves that humans are fallible fools in their explanations.

It's not conclusive evidence but it should certainly raise our suspicious given that 1) humans frequently and erroneously attribute mundane phenomena to the supernatural (it's an extremely common human logical fault), 2) with so many claims, you'd assume at least a few would have clear evidence of occurring and not having ready explanations.

I mean, my superficial understanding is that there are supposedly such instances (for instance my understanding is that the Catholic church investigates claims of miraculous healing fairly regularly, and I think that they use e.g. relevant medical professionals to investigate these claims as part of the canonization process).

Were you familiar with this? Sadly I know little about the topic specifically, so I feel under-equipped to make very specific arguments based on specific cases. If you are familiar with it, I would be very interested in your analysis. If you aren't, then perhaps we're being a bit presumptive to assume there aren't at least a few with clear evidence of occurring and no handy ready explanations?

It's similar to UFO sightings, which were quite common a few decades ago. If they were real, the proliferation of smartphones with cameras should have led to a surge in evidence of their existence.

I know more about this topic. I find that particular XKCD to be extremely facile (have you tried using a cell phone for aviation photography?), but I suppose it serves a socially useful purpose inasmuch as it prevents people from actually doing any research into the topic, which periodically ruins people's lives. I will just link to my earlier analysis of this position.

Minor or even moderate healing is a bad metric since the human body is extremely complicated, so mundane phenomena could easily be confused for the supernatural.

Yes, and I think healing is one of the easiest to use a scientific test on. (I think the bar the Catholic church uses for canonization is supposed to be higher for this reason).

But if people were e.g. regularly doing crazy things like being able to walk on water or (as Jiro mentioned) regrowing lost limbs, then that would be a better starting point.

Well, and this is part of my point, if people regularly regrew lost limbs (as they might with future technology) then it would not be considered miraculous, would it? I doubt you consider terminal lucidity miraculous, even though there apparently is clear evidence of it occurring and relatively scant evidence of good explanations. (I could be wrong about this, though, it's not my area of expertise).

Claims of miracles aren't uncommon, I'm sure. But that just proves that humans are fallible fools in their explanations.

This is the thing, though, is that the "humans are fallible fools" position extends to scientists and doctors. Which means that it provides a very convenient "out" for disbelieving in anything, no matter how reasonable belief in that thing is. There's no inherent limit on how many times you could say "humans are fallible fools" - if I were to bring you a hundred cases where doctors attested to a miracle, it would remain just as true the first time as the last.

And I don't even fully disagree! Humans are fallible fools! But ultimately I think that a lot of people, if they were being honest, they would refuse to believe in miracles unless they saw them personally, or, if they were particularly hardcore, even if they experienced them personally (this is the case with Michael Shermer, as I recall). The problem, though, is that if held in isolation it essentially lets people comfortably avoid updating their priors and lets them drift along with what is socially acceptable to believe instead of what is true. Anything upsetting can be dismissed as people being stupid.

Look, I apologize if I am coming across as a little testy. My very first comment on here was in response to someone saying "well if other countries had UFO programs, I would take them seriously." I provided some of the specific evidence he was ostensibly interested in, but my perception, based on his response, was that he was more interested in shifting the goalposts so that he didn't have to take UFOs seriously. (No offense to said user, and I hope I am wrong!)

Now, what I mind isn't people who are skeptical of miracles, or UFOs. I think measured skepticism is good and necessary. But I want some sort of framework to that skepticism, not merely a blank check to dismiss anything that is slightly out of step with the dogma of the day. Things that, in limited doses, might be true and helpful - things like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" or "humans are gullible fools" still have a tremendous potential to become thought-terminating cliches.

absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Yes, it is.

"P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)P(¬E)" is a tautology, true for for any valid probabilities and conditional probabilities P with events E and M. Likewise for the identity "P(¬E)=1-P(E)". Combining the two gives

P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))

To say that "E is evidence for M" is to assert "P(M|E) > P(M)", and if we use that (along with "P(E)>0") we can derive the inequality

P(M) > P(M)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))

Subtract "P(M)P(E)" from both sides, then divide by 1-P(E) (using "P(E)<1"), and we get

P(M) > P(M|¬E)

which is to say that "absence of E is evidence against M".

The magnitude of the evidence depends greatly on the specifics, and can be negligible, but it's never zero.

Perhaps it is more accurate to my position to say that absence of admitted evidence is not evidence of absence. Because there's "evidence" for practically every insane position in the world. This leads people to want to exclude evidence on the basis of it not being high-quality enough. Now, a certain amount of this is admirable and good, because it keeps you sane!

But some people, even subconsciously, use this to simply exclude all the evidence they like, and then having excluded all the evidence they dislike, declare there to be no evidence to the contrary position.

There’s not a shortage of miracles with better than witness evidence though- the tilma of Juan Diego and the various Eucharistic miracles, for example.

I don't know about the tilma of Juan Diego, but I've looked into Eucharistic miracles a long time ago. All claims of such miracles are either 1) fringe enough that nobody cares, 2) unfalsifiable in that there's no evidence to check against, or 3) rely on witnesses.

Yes, the review is not very rigorous. I became annoyed at the glaring rhetorical sleight-of-hand where a claim how some atheists were wrong about some things become "atheists centuries ago were wrong about…approximately everything" in the next sentence.

Taking as broad strokes as possible, I think the reality would be better described by delineating different domains of predictions. Many atheists were wrong in their sociological and psychological theories and predictions. Darwin remains ... approximately correct about biology. (Impressively correct, given nobody had a good idea how DNA works until a century later.)

Likewise, finding room for god in cosmology and physical constants is very much quite distant from the pre-Enlightenment Christianity, verily the OG goalpost shift. Many religious authorities and theologians have also been wrong about history and physics (ETA: inclding history and veracity of the scripture they supposedly knew). If you take religious philosopher who was successful with philosophical ideas --- my favorite is Francis Bacon, one of the kickstarters of Western scientific project --- it is difficult to argue that his contributions are intellectual victories of Christianity because they (his religious beliefs) are also easily attributable to widespread religious background baseline. He is rarely read as religious authority today.

The middle section has examples of atheist scholars being wrong... but are examples of atheists scholars being wrong evidence against atheism?

I think the sociological angle specifically (where the New Atheist types said that declining religion would make the world a better place and well that is not what happened) revealed that their religious opponents (who were often chided for the idea that "morality comes from religion") actually had a stronger grasp on reality than the New Atheist types did. In my opinion it does not slam-dunk prove anything about God one way or the other by itself.

But if two groups of people make predictions and one of them is better at the predictions, your priors should be that they understand reality better. I don't know that "religious people" are perfect scorers but against the New Atheists on the general question of whether (our) society would flourish without God...I think they've generally won.

Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine?

Well yes, that's what Chesterton is suggesting, isn't it? That you sort out the diabolical from the divine?

And doesn't this "prove too much," inasmuch as it's also true of conspiracy theories, cryptids (fun fact: Scotland's national animal isn't the unicorn, because someone thought it'd be funny - the Scots genuinely believed unicorns existed, at the time they chose it), and UFO sightings?

This is another pet peeve of mine, but UFOs (much like, topically, the historicity of Christ) is another one of those "midwit meme" moments where both people who have studied the topic and people who just absorb what's on Ancient Aliens both take UFOs much more seriously than people who take the superficially informed view that there's nothing there.

The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.

I think it's incorrect to view this as trivially wrong. Imagine instead this was a purely scientific argument about a specific aspect of reality instead of a broader argument about the true nature of reality. Any would-be successor theory must explain why it is similar to and yet superior to alternative competing theories. Typically adherents of competing theories agree on the vast majority of the underlying facts, and so all theories will actually be quite similar, but the adherents of all of these theories must explain the distinctions in their theory from other theories, to show how it is the best theory.

If we threw out scientific theories on the basis that they were similar to (and therefore derivative of and thus incorrect) another similar theory we rejected, we would not be in a great place. Ultimately religion, too, is trying to explain reality as we know it, although on different terms.

And the reality is that materialism is unsatisfying, that people do have religious experiences and that those experiences sometimes conflict with each other.

Has anyone read this book?

I haven't, but noting the interest here in case I do.

I think the sociological angle specifically (where the New Atheist types said that declining religion would make the world a better place and well that is not what happened) revealed that their religious opponents (who were often chided for the idea that "morality comes from religion") actually had a stronger grasp on reality than the New Atheist types did.

Do atheists commit crime or otherwise contribute to social dysfunction at a greater rate than theists? Who gets credit, if the "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" leads to the moderately religious population falling below the critical mass necessary to socially constrain religious zealots?

Shouldn't we question which miracles are "diabolical" and which are "divine?

Well yes, that's what Chesterton is suggesting, isn't it? That you sort out the diabolical from the divine?

Where does Chesterton suggest that we consider the possibility other religions are correct?

This is another pet peeve of mine, but UFOs (much like, topically, the historicity of Christ) is another one of those "midwit meme" moments where both people who have studied the topic and people who just absorb what's on Ancient Aliens both take UFOs much more seriously than people who take the superficially informed view that there's nothing there.

Yeah, I was hesitant to include UFOs, because the "U" tautologically includes real phenomena, but I couldn't think of a better "you know what I mean" example, off the top of my head. Perhaps "extra-terrestrials" would have been better.

The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.

I think it's incorrect to view this as trivially wrong. Imagine instead this was a purely scientific argument about a specific aspect of reality instead of a broader argument about the true nature of reality. Any would-be successor theory must explain why it is similar to and yet superior to alternative competing theories. Typically adherents of competing theories agree on the vast majority of the underlying facts, and so all theories will actually be quite similar, but the adherents of all of these theories must explain the distinctions in their theory from other theories, to show how it is the best theory.

If we threw out scientific theories on the basis that they were similar to (and therefore derivative of and thus incorrect) another similar theory we rejected, we would not be in a great place. Ultimately religion, too, is trying to explain reality as we know it, although on different terms.

If Jesus was unique, why would his story have any connection to the monomyth? And if his story is true, why would stories from unaffected cultures resemble his story?

the moderately religious population falling below the critical mass necessary to socially constrain religious zealots?

Western countries, including those in which the moderately religious population is boiled off more-or-less completely, do not seem to have problems with religious zealots. How much terrorism do the Dutch Calvinists or Laestadians do? Next to no one else goes to church in those countries.

Do atheists commit crime or otherwise contribute to social dysfunction at a greater rate than theists?

Yes, at least in certain key aspects. Atheists are less likely to give to charity, for instance (I think that's the latest science), less likely to marry, and less likely to have children, all of which ultimately make society a less functional place.

Where does Chesterton suggest that we consider the possibility other religions are correct?

Well, I dunno about that phrasing, I have not read Chesterton. But here's the quote:

No religion that thinks itself true bothers about the miracles of another religion. It denies the doctrines of the religion; it denies its morals; but it never thinks it worth while to deny its signs and wonders.

In denying the doctrine of a religion you are (correctly or incorrectly) thereby sorting the diabolical from the divine, aren't you?

If Jesus was unique, why would his story have any connection to the monomyth? And if his story is true, why would stories from unaffected cultures resemble his story?

Well, first off, why (in your theory) do cultures unaffected by Christianity have stories resembling Christ!? Genuinely interested in your answer here!

From the Christian perspective, it's very clear that God, as revealed through Scripture, loves tropes (or memes) and Scripture plays with them repeatedly. It does not seem remotely odd from that perspective that similar ideas and tropes, echoing from the dawn of time and the Author of Man, would manifest in many separate cultures.

However if I put my Cranky Literalist hat on: I am actually very suspicious of the idea of the monomyth. I do think there are a number of tropes that are fairly common, perhaps to all mankind, possibly due to oral tradition but possibly also just due to human nature. (A separate POP SCIENCE tangent, but I am told there is evidence that oral traditions can persist up to 10,000 years, which is also, I am told, within "striking range" of humanity's most recent common ancestor, so presumably it's not crazy for cultures to share a monomyth by virtue of a common oral tradition). But from what I understand of the "monomyth" specifically, it derives from Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which, admittedly, I have not read. (One of my friends did read it, and gave me a very negative review, so perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced.) But I strongly suspect Campbell (who was influenced by Jung) constructed a Procrustean bed that anyone so inclined can torture nearly any notable person into a "monomyth."

Wikipedia quotes Campbell's formula as follows:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

You could apply this to a historical figures like Julius Caesar pretty easily, it proves nothing about their historicity. (If I was a professional apologist I would have a better example, my understanding is that there are some really fun ones out there.) In fact from what I understand many primitive cultures have initiation ceremonies into adulthood which means that you could apply the monomyth neatly to...practically everyone!

Now, I should note that comparative mythology is outside of my area of expertise. But I suspect that people whose expertise it is tend to overfit it. I'm particularly more than a little suspicious of Campbell (and people like Lewis and Tolkien) because I don't trust them to do the work to show that the "monomyth" is actually the same worldwide instead of just, basically, Western.

In short, my suspicion is that while there will be parallels between Christ and various other (mythical and real) people, suggesting that the Christ story is part of a monomyth (when done by friend or foe) is more a literary exercise than anything, and that while the idea of a "monomyth" is interesting taking it literally and seriously is a mistake (not just theologically, but as a matter of history and literature.)

I'm open to contrary takes on this, though!

In denying the doctrine of a religion you are (correctly or incorrectly) thereby sorting the diabolical from the divine, aren't you?

Then by what definition of "diabolical" are other religions' miracles diabolical and how do we know they're diabolical? The review is very unclear about this.

Well, first off, why (in your theory) do cultures unaffected by Christianity have stories resembling Christ!? Genuinely interested in your answer here!

In the case of prior myths and legends, I'd guess that the similarities are from blending common mythic elements with facts about the historical figure.

Then by what definition of "diabolical" are other religions' miracles diabolical and how do we know they're diabolical? The review is very unclear about this.

Sure, I agree the review is unclear about it, as it is a bit of a tangent. As I laid out in my longer comment, every hypothesis has to explain why it is different from every other hypothesis. In some cases this requires accepting opposed supernatural forces (actually in most cases, I think most, perhaps all, religious traditions teach that not all supernatural forces are aligned).

In the case of prior myths and legends, I'd guess that the similarities are from blending common mythic elements with facts about the historical figure.

Yeah I mean, why are their common mythic elements? From what I understand Campbell was influenced by Jung, who had the psychological/mystical idea about some sort of collective unconscious (my apologies if I am butchering Jung, I have not read his work). But if you don't believe in the collective unconscious you have to do harder lifting.

From what I understand what e.g. Lewis does is says "isn't it odd that all stories have a Christ-figure-legend but none of the figures had historical backing until Christ shows up? That's very classic divine foreshadowing" which is an interesting take, but, well, I am not sure I buy the idea of a monomyth, at least in a very "tight" or specific sense.

However if I put my Cranky Literalist hat on: I am actually very suspicious of the idea of the monomyth. I do think there are a number of tropes that are fairly common, perhaps to all mankind, possibly due to oral tradition but possibly also just due to human nature. (A separate POP SCIENCE tangent, but I am told there is evidence that oral traditions can persist up to 10,000 years, which is also, I am told, within "striking range" of humanity's most recent common ancestor, so presumably it's not crazy for cultures to share a monomyth by virtue of a common oral tradition). But from what I understand of the "monomyth" specifically, it derives from Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which, admittedly, I have not read. (One of my friends did read it, and gave me a very negative review, so perhaps I am unfairly prejudiced.) But I strongly suspect Campbell (who was influenced by Jung) constructed a Procrustean bed that anyone so inclined can torture nearly any notable person into a "monomyth."

If I put my literary crank hat on, I am fucking sick of the monomyth. Yet another example of a measure becoming a target. Can I ask if you recall where you heard of an oral tradition lasting 10k years? That seems implausible and like it could only be supported by a society that treats oral traditions as evidence, aka a silly one.

My understanding is that indigenous Australians are speculated to have extremely long oral traditions because some of them seem to line up with astronomic/geological phenomena. Example press release with overview, linking to the actual research (which I have not read): https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2023/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives-in-the-world

ETA: also, thanks for connecting "the measure becoming the target" to the monomyth.

I don't think this does a great job of relaying Douthat's thesis specifically, but I will say that it was delightful to read the second half, where he gives a fresh glance at the gospels.

One of the first pieces of advice I give to anybody interested in Christianity is to sit down and read a gospel, in one sitting. If possible, find a printing of the gospel without section headings or verse numbers, because those just confuse and aren't authentic to the original text anyway. Then read it. Hold all your questions until the end - jot them down if you like, but keep reading. Get through the whole thing in one sitting. And then see how it affects you.

Unfortunately even for churchgoers, one of the most frequent ways to experience the Bible is to hear it chopped up into tiny morsels, and then for each morsel to be surrounded by so much sugar and honey, in the forms of prayers and sermons and hymns, as to make them palatable. But how much scripture can you really get that way? Put all the extras aside, and have a full course meal of nothing but scripture.

Often, I find, when people do this they are shocked by what they find. Perhaps the story is much more dramatic than they thought, or it's much more bizarre and incomprehensible, or they find themselves drawn to or repulsed by characters they never thought about before, or they just realise that the puzzle pieces fit together in a way that they had never registered. But it usually does something, and that something, whatever it is, is worth exploring.

I'm more likely to read a Gospel, now, than I was prior to reading the review.

@gemmaem has a less self-satisfied review up, Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe

Douthat wants to go beyond the fine tuning argument, however, arguing not just that there is a God, but that humans are special to God in a way that is not shared by anything else that we are aware of. Consciousness is special, he argues, because the “Copenhagen Theory [sic]” of quantum mechanics is “scientific evidence that mind somehow precedes matter.” Regrettably, Douthat’s argument here is based not on the work of any physicist, but rather on an essay in the Claremont Review of Books by Spencer Klavan, who holds a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Yale.

Approvingly quoted by Douthat, Klavan goes so far as to claim that photons, atoms and the like “cannot exist unseen,” and hence that all of our scientific theories about things that happened before humanity are “about how things would have behaved if there was someone there to watch them.” This is then used to set up an argument for God: “The most fearsome heresy of all … is that indeed there was someone there.”

Let’s think this through. If we suppose that observation by a conscious mind is enough by itself to collapse a quantum wavefunction from probability into actuality, and if God is essentially a conscious Mind, like our minds except perfect and all-knowing and much more powerful, then every wave function must already be collapsed, since God sees all. Yet we know from physical experiments that this is not the case, because this would make the entire field of quantum mechanics unnecessary! The postulates of Klavan, which Douthat encourages us to accept, thus bring us to a startling conclusion. We would appear to have scientific proof that God cannot possibly exist.

Debate about religion is welcomed at any time, especially at time when the world looks it is going to catch fire.

It usually consist on debating three propositions.

1/ Factual claims of [religion] are true. Not "symbolically, mythically and lobsterifically true", but true as "this really happened".

2/ Belief in factual claims of [religion] is good for you personally.

3/ Widespread belief in factual claims of [religion] is good for "the society".

The problem is that these three propositions are unconnected to each other, and, unless we disentangle them at the beginning, fruitful discussion is unlikely to happen.

Is the "symbolically true" position (lobsterifically or otherwise) a separate thing from these or is it vacuous and not worth categorizing?

The idea that religion metaphors contain deep truth that cann't be said straightforwardly for whatever reason. Rhymes with that the purpose of fiction to tell deeper truths than reality. Something zen idk.

Peterson himself seems closer to a 3, when he's talking about "marxist assault on traditional modes of being"

In the spirit of 'what American culture war development aren't we talking about because of the Trump tariffs,' might I offer...

Trump Goes After the (Largely Democratic) Federal Government Labor Unions

On 27 March, Trump signed an executive order titled the "EXCLUSIONS FROM FEDERAL LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS PROGRAMS." That is pretty vague, and I wouldn't blame anyone who doesn't recognize what it says inside either.

The (very) short version is that this executive order formally determines various executive agencies "to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work." This is the criteria that allows an exception to normal public sector union formation rights and so on. (You don't want the military or CIA to form a union in case it decides to strike, after all.) That might make sense in principle. What may raise eyebrows are some of the additions.

Newly added agencies determined to have a 'primary function' as national security work or otherwise, include-

  • 1-401. The Department of State.
  • 1-403. The Department of the Treasury, except the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
  • 1-405. The Department of Justice.
  • 1-412. The Environmental Protection Agency.
  • 1-415. The National Science Foundation. *etc.

...and you hopefully get the gist. A number of not-usually-considered-national-security departments and agencies have gotten determined to be so. Which, by the law as written, the President can do. Which means also that the public union rules and rights don't apply.

Who does this matter?

Well, for one, public sector unions political action committees (PACs) donate overwhelmingly to the democratic party. $12.5 million vs. $1.6 million in 2023-2024. That's small in absolute political money terms, but shows a significant difference in union institutional support.

But more importantly, about half of all union members in the United States are public sector union members. That's about 7 million public sector members versus 14.3 million total. Further, the ratio of unionization is completely lopsided. Only about 5% (1-in-20) of the public sector employees in the US are unionized. About 33% (1-in-3) of public sector employees are unionized. That's all public-sector unions, mind you, not just the federal government. There are only about 1 million federal public union employees, so 1-in7 of the public sector employees. That's about 14% of public sector employees, or 7% of total union employees. And not all of those will be caught in this recategorization.

Still- last week Trump put in motion a wrecking ball that seems primed to take a major chunk out of what was once a foundational pillar of the of the post-New Deal Democratic party alliance. It seems also likely to defang / weaken some potential internal resistance organizers within the Federal government, which I suspect was the more immediate motive as Trump attempts to shrink the federal work force. But as far as far as the union implications...

Well, not everyone likes public sector unions. Arch-MAGA personality Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned against public sector unions, on grounds that the government couldn't negotiate with itself. The case against public sector unions has been made for many decade. I'll let people read those takes and have their own opinions. What's more important is that these arguments are not new, but have never made significant traction... until last week.

Reactions have broadly been overwhelmed by the media coverage of last week's tariffs and other Trumpian news cycles. The right-leaning City Journal lauds the effort thought it conceeds some of the classifications are a stretch.. The left-leaning Jacobin calls on unions to make a "militant" response. Somehow, I don't think that will exactly dissuade trump, but we will see.

Will this go to court? Already has. Are plaintiff unions liable to find sympathetic judges in the DC district court, where 11 of the 15 district judges were appointed by Obama or Biden? Probably.

Will they win? I don't know.

But I think this does add another bit of evidence that Trump's chaos has some deliberate intent that often gets lost in the media chaos that follows him.

This is the death blow to the Democratic party nomenklatura: if it goes through then it will be Trump's Great Purge, utterly destroying the federal government as an institution for generations. Even if Vance loses in 2028 there will be nothing left to rebuild. No one will make a career that can be destroyed on a whim every four years. We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.

We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters

Hey, just like the late Roman Republic!

Trump came too early in the decline of the USA's one. He would have made a decent Nero or Caligula.

Would Nero or Caligula have had the full support of the Evangelical community, tho?

No but on the other hand they would have gotten on a lot better with the Europeans

We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.

Every regulation has a corpse behind it. In the case of the Pendleton Act granting civil service protection, the corpse is a Republican President. You do not want to go back to a spoils system.

Every regulation has a corpse behind it.

This is a fully general argument against repealing any regulation. The idea that we need a fourth unaccountable branch of the Federal Government to prevent assassinations by jilted wannabee civil servants is ludicrous.

One obtains a stronger rebuttal by pointing to the dynamics.

Stage one: Politicians seek out and appoint competent administrators to civil service jobs

This isn't formalized and the incentives for politicians are to game the system, leading to stage two

Stage two: A spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.

The disadvantages of this become increasingly apparent, creating pressure for reform and eventually the Pendleton Act

Stage three: A permanent civil service. This provides a reservoir of experience, damping down swings of the political pendulum. But it is also a source of inertia (perhaps I mean viscosity?) which leads to stagnation. Which tendency will grow with time, leading to the downfall of the Pendleton Act?

Neither. Ambitious men are always seeking power. Traditionally by standing for election. If they win, they have limited time to do something before standing for election again. Ugh! Perhaps there is more power to be had as a member of the permanent bureaucracy. Ambitious men game the new system created by the Pendleton Act.

Stage four: The civil service the fourth branch of the Federal Government, and answers to on-one.

A new President is elected to change the course of the nation, away from the iceberg, towards the rocks :-) But he finds that the fourth branch insists on steering towards the iceberg, and the Pendleton Act gives them real power.

Stage five: err, I don't know

The point is that we should expect bad reforms to fail because they are bad. And we should expect good reforms to fail because of the passage of time. Good reforms work well, curing the problems caused by people gaming the old system; that is what we mean by a good reform. But a good reform changes the system. It may take a generation before people work out how to game the new system, but game it they will. We should expect that no reforms withstand erosion by human cunning.

The current system very nearly offered up the corpse of a Republican President not a year ago. The spoils system was very corrupt, and produced many results that were undesirable, but we cannot be locked to the whims of civil servants forever. And if we're going to be, let's stop calling it democracy and design our autocracy properly.

Luévano v. Campbell turned civil service appointments into a racial spoils system in 1981. America has already gone back to a spoils system.

It does unfortunately seem as if one of the themes of this Presidency will be 'making all the mistakes which the nation learnt to avoid by lessons of experience it has since forgotten'. Given the company he keeps perhaps he'll start asking for a return to the gold standard next.

What may raise eyebrows are some of the additions.

Wait, the War Department Department of Defense isn't usually considered a national security department? If that isn't, one wonders what is.

This isn't raising eyebrows to me because a lot of this stuff seems trivially correct.

  • Obviously, agencies with the power to ban all development of certain resources critical to national security qualify
  • Obviously, agencies that are in charge of keeping the electricity and natural gas working qualify
  • Obviously, agencies with the opportunity to destroy the economy over something stupid, like the uncommon cold, qualify
  • Obviously, agencies with the authority to arbitrarily declare food-producing practices as unsafe qualify

Stuff that has more gradual bad outcomes, like the Department of Education (not listed in this order), would be more of a stretch simply because their negligence degrades the country over long periods of time, not potentially overnight.

But I think this does add another bit of evidence that Trump's chaos has some deliberate intent that often gets lost in the media chaos that follows him.

The ultimate problem with Trump II is that he's a reformer in a country that has hit the Snooze button on reform since late 2001 for some or other distraction- blowing up 10-dollar camels with 2 million dollar missiles, causing 30% inflation because some people couldn't be bothered to wear masks, whatever the fuck Trump I was, and Yes We Can discover that black Presidents are just as useless as white Presidents.

I have to admit that I'm a little jealous, since European countries are actively cracking down on reform parties and jailing their members for something everyone does (they're far more progressive-traditionalist than the liberal Americans), the UK public actively prefers Two-Tier state policy, and the Canadians are too busy bitching about checks notes being offered a vote on policies that affect them to bother with reform (which would make it more likely they survive as a whole country).

he's a reformer

Really? Arguably one of the defining aspects of 'reform' in the traditional sense is it's opposition to special and entrenched interests, and a believe in a Chadwickian scientific governance. Free trade is in many ways the paradigmatic reform cause, as it stands against the special protection of a subset of society (manufacturers) in favour of the entire nation of consumers - most of the great reformers were free traders.

By contrast the whole ethic of Trump II seems to be that some of the nation deserves special status and protection (literally), and some of it (the public and service sectors) deserves punishment.

Really? Arguably one of the defining aspects of 'reform' in the traditional sense is it's opposition to special and entrenched interests...

Yes. Really.

Who are "the Swamp" if not "entrenched interests"? Much of complaints about Trump being erratic and not listening to the experts reads to me as "special and entrenched interests" frustrated by Trump's refusal to "stay bought".

Still- last week Trump put in motion a wrecking ball that seems primed to take a major chunk out of what was once a foundational pillar of the of the post-New Deal Democratic party alliance. It seems also likely to defang / weaken some potential internal resistance organizers within the Federal government, which I suspect was the more immediate motive as Trump attempts to shrink the federal work force. But as far as far as the union implications...

It seems worth noting that private sector unions are also decreasingly onboard with the DNC.

$12M vs 1M — besides being lopsided, that’s just peanuts. It’s all barely a rounding error.

I've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.

What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.

There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.

Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!

The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?

So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?

Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.

This is something I have been thinking about recently too and made an account just to respond to this. It's like the modern Western leftist memeplex is one of the worst things you could want if you were trying to create an ideology that would lead to the success and health of a nation. Although I have to admit that MAGA is just as bad in many ways, so the main alternative we have isn't any better (which itself is even more concerning because wokeness may actually be preferable to its alternative).

If you were trying to create an ideology for success, it would value strength, honor, intellectual curiosity, optimism for the future, pride in your country and people, and most importantly, not venerate weakness. This is of course the complete opposite of what modern day wokeness is, so it's not really a surprise that people are demoralized and depressed.

I also don't know how to fix this, and it feels like we are destined to just decline and everything will become worse for the foreseeable future. It's very depressing and I try not to think about it. I just try to have positive values for myself and those around me, and maybe that small amount can spread. But I've been pretty depressed myself the last week from these tariffs and market volatility. It makes it seem pointless to even try when even your safe investments absolutely tank and you see the money you were trying to put towards a house absolutely tank.

I think the “rot” goes back much farther than people think. The biggest difference between modern society and much more ancient ones is that we have lost the idea of purpose, or to be more precise a purpose other than selfish hedonism. Why are we here, and what is our society actually supposed to accomplish and how every person fits into that great plan for society. Most traditional societies have that, usually connected to religion. You fit into the world created by God or the gods to do something either great or small to bring about whatever the will of the universe. Sometimes it’s secular, bringing about freedom for everyone, civilizing a frontier, colonizing a place (even mars). But it’s something all of society is striving for. We have “money and bitches” more or less. That’s the grand narrative— you exist as an atomized human in a society and your job is to get what you can for yourself and to have fun in any way you choose. Anyone getting in the way of your hedonistic desires or your wealth is bad.

This is no way to build anything. A society of atomized humans is not a society, just like a herd of cats — it’s not a cohesive unit coordinating to do things, it’s a bunch of cats who happen to be in the same place at the same time. And they cannot possibly trust any other cat to not steal their Fancy Feast, or not scratch them, or to let them use the scratching post. A herd of atomized humans is the same. You don’t form a community, you just exist around each other. And as such you don’t expect that anyone will not try to take advantage of you, or let you have things you need, or just simply leave you alone if need be.

That is not how traditional societies by and large saw the world. People in traditional societies did not see themselves as individuals with a purpose, they saw themselves as members of a community- kind of the way we see ants or bees- and that community had obligations to God or the gods. An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.

An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.

This is simply incorrect, individuals routinely made offerings to gods, both minor and major, to try and influence events in their life. IE, a Roman sailor might give an offering to Neptune to protect him on his next voyage, or a soldier might do the same to Mars to protect him before a battle. Also you don't seem to grasp the primarily transactional nature of a lot of (most? all??) polytheistic ancient religions, you offer things to the gods because you want them to intercede on your behalf, in the same way that you might try to bribe a judge or a prominent politician. You worship and flatter the gods because they are powerful and can do things for you, not because they are paragons of morality.

I would also add that trying to reduce the worldviews of all the members of "traditional societies" into less than a paragraph is nonsensical, there were major differences in worldview between a Roman alive during the reign of Augustus and a Roman that was alive during the reign of Diocletian, let alone between an Assyrian labourer and a Gothic chieftain. The omnipresent threat of bandits and pirates puts paid to the idea that ancient societies were a monolith, before we even talk about the various historical\mythical figures who were very much just in it for themselves (Odysseus being a personal favourite of mine).

I think this has become a growing pet peeve of mine, listening to people try and make political points by referring to a funhouse mirror version of history that they have in their heads. It happens right across the political spectrum and I understand that by the nature of things no one will ever have a truly accurate understanding of the way things were (in fact I think nobody will ever truly have an accurate understanding of the way things are at any point in time), but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.

but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.

Worth remembering that some or all of those kinds of posters are secretly women (allegedly).

I thought they were Indian engagement farms?

An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.

This doesn't even pass the smell test, because why then did it quickly become notable - and criminal - that Christians wouldn't sacrifice?

And yes, I'm sure the Senate liked to believe that they managed the relationship between Gods and the people. And, because of the slack in the polytheist system, they eventually could slide Emperors in there (and those sorts of proclamations are obviously more likely to reach us compared to a random freedman's sacrifices). But people probably still worshiped their tribal gods. In fact, when Constantine finally got tolerance for the Christians it was justified on the grounds of good politics: each group would cause its patron deity to be favorable to the Empire. That seems like the opposite relationship.

You can't look at the trouble a far more concerned Christian clergy had with enforcing uniform doctrine on the laity and imagine that the Senate alone managed religion

I think that Elon gives an idea for a shared vision - to colonize the galaxy. And I don't know why so few people are actually interested of moving beyond Earth.

The people who get invested into moving beyond Earth seem to generally not be the kind of people who trust Elon to do anything about that. Anymore, at least.

Because a) Elon and b) the vast majority of people do not know how to contribute or cannot. It'd be different if you could jump on a colony ship but what is the average person to do here?

This is the problem with many legitimately impressive secular achievements: lots of people have nothing to offer or nothing to gain. We don't want to be building pyramids and we can't all be at Los Alamos.

Absent a purpose, at least the existence of the "other" can substitute for it. But these days, with globalism, mass media erasing cultural distinctions and the internet carving communities crossing national lines as if they were nothing, we are denied a clear "other". If there is no "them", then "us" is meaningless. This is how the last vestiges of unity and brotherhood in humanity are being wiped out. Blaming nationalism for the evils of the previous centuries, Western intelligentia cheered globalism on, thinking it would unite all of humanity, but a united humanity is impossible without something to contrast it against, and without the large entities we used to unite as, humans just fall back into basic individualism.

As @MaiqTheTrue says, the rot goes back much longer and, I would add, across many different domains.

This is at the root of anti-enlightenment / anti-modernist thinking (a position I seemingly become more comfortable with daily). Humans used to have a much more humble and limited opinion of their ability to understand the complexity of the universe and capital-T "Truth." Much of that was left to religion, theology, or, sometimes, applied ethics and morality. In fact, even the best thinkers of the enlightenment period had a totally different conception of religion and faith in terms of epistemic systems.

Whereas today, in purely rational terms, it is fashionable to draw a box around theology and religion as a kind of esoteric study of the human spirit or heart, classically, religion and theology was seen as a bedrock component of any knowledge system in much the same way we might think of arithmetic, basic grammar, or ... geography? (you take your pick).

And I think it's taken 300 or so years for the compounding effects of that loss to be felt. Your post highlights demoralization as a key issue. Many other places I've seen the term "crisis of meaning" thrown around. The figures for male suicides, drug overdose, and chornic alcoholism are often lumped together as "deaths of despair." The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal. That is, information processors. But that alone does not make life livable, nor does it do anything to orient us towards useful application of information processing. One thing I know for sure about Scott from SSC - he is a world class thinker. Another thing I know for sure - sometimes he chooses the goofiest things to think about.

The various more developed religions do a lot to remedy this. The more purely "spiritual" ones (Buddhism etc.) I think aren't as great because they fail in engaging with the world in the opposite direction of rationalism. Instead of overthinking, they actively cultivate a profound detachment from things that may subjectively feel serene and peacful but is just a different method of undermining prosocial activities. If people find themselves adverse to organized religion, I see the most effective systems being some of the classic virtue ethics regimes -- stoicism etc.

There's going to (always) be a temptation to secularize the religious in order to try to split the baby and get the maximum amount of "meaning" without all of that pesky sin-and-metaphysics. This is the primary critique of Kant's categorical imperative. And I think it's a valid critique - secularizing something that is inherently not isn't possible and you're more likely engaging in some elaborate self-deception. Play the tape forward and you end up with wokeism - which has all of the anthropological trappings of a religious belief system yet is rife with internal contradictions and has zero rigorous epistemic construction.

In a nutshell, people need to cultivate a sense of faith - deeply held belief something transcendent and beyond themselves that they can orient a life towards. And there needs to be an accompanying practice of it. Just like physical fitness or general mental acuity, if you aren't doing "it" everyday, you're getting worse at it.

That’s absurd. Believing in something really hard doesn’t make it true, nor does it make it good. You’re opening the door to a lot more than the classic deontologies. New Age woo, personality cults, ultranationalism—they’re a lot harder to discount once you throw out rationality.

I think it’s also ridiculous to accuse the Buddhists of being “less developed” than, presumably, Christians. Doubly so if you’re considering the initial Protestants, the Second Great Awakening sects, any of the charismatic branches. Criticizing the parent church for being too materialist was like half their reason for splitting.

Oh, and of course you trot out the old punching bag. I don’t exactly disagree that “wokeism” is missing key traits of a religion, so I have to ask: do you think it would work any better as a movement if it abandoned all pretense of materialism? Would the practitioners be happier, would they resolve their internal contradictions?

Because it sounds like a lot of double standards. They should stop overthinking, but also be logically consistent. Oh, and they can’t underthink, either, or they’ll undermine their prosocial activities. Those get measured in material terms, so that subjective serenity must be worthless. Also, material terms don’t matter, and the real failing is allowing a “crisis of meaning.” Everyone should develop their own faith, except where it contradicts with your values, in which case they can get bent.

I don’t think your position is consistent.

But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Great! You start. What do you like about America as it now exists?

There's something a little funny about this depressing rant about how negatively-biased navel-gazing intellectuals have demoralized America with their depressing rants. "The Root Cause of all the bad things happening is our demoralization, and the Root Cause of our demoralization is everyone going around pointing out the Root Causes of how bad things are!"

The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible.

To this list I would add earlier examples: the War on Drugs. They won, and there was never any serious chance of any other outcome. No serious effort was ever made to achieve victory, or even to define victory in a way that was achievable. Enforcement was always somewhere between haphazard and hopelessly arbitrary. At no point, even at the height of mass incarceration, did upper class degenerates succeed in giving everyone the impression that they didn't want or couldn't get drugs. Spreading Democracy, I grew up with it understood that this was part of America's mission in the world, then at some point we just kind of gave up on it. Iraq was part of the problem, but worse than that was coming to accept China's totalitarianism wasn't going anywhere. We just kinda gave up on these goals, like the War on Poverty, the effort to spread capitalist prosperity, environmentalism, space exploration. They seemed to just fizzle out.

As for solutions? I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job:

At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

Americans need a hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being brings comfort to all. Who you want to put at the top, and who at the bottom, is less important than that everyone needs to feel that their status can be raised above someone else's through their efforts. In my mind, the problem of so many NEETs is that when hitting on a girl, one is almost better off being unemployed and a charming slacker or daring criminal, than saying one works an entry level job at Amazon or McDonald's or wheeling dirt around a construction site. Work doesn't seem like it will significantly increase one's status. This is why things like exercise are such red-pilling experiences for so many men: they combine natural and inevitable hierarchy (someone is faster than you and someone is slower), and change in that status from one's own efforts (you move up or down in the hierarchy). We have to eliminate the sense of learned helplessness.

I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job

Totally unrelated, but it is always great to find a fellow Christopher Moore fan. He is probably the best comedic author after Pratchett and is criminally underappreciated.

No kidding! I LOVED him as a teenager, I actually drove to a college in New Jersey with my mother when Fool came out to watch him stage a live reading with the college Shakespeare company, they'd do scenes from Fool juxtaposed with King Lear. I keep meaning to do reread Lamb to do a write up here.

Lamb is his masterpiece. To make a die hard atheist like me to think "This is the jesus I would like to know better" is quite an achievement.

I see these rants about instituting a muscular system of top-down control over the american economy and culture and think--

Have you considered communism?

No, seriously. What you are proposing is just globohomo minus the globo and the homo. And I don't mean that as a joke-- you are speaking to the exact same complaints that motivate the world's marxists and socialists. In particular, I could imagine the words "incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated," being a pointed critique of capitalists out of another person's mouth.

I don't say this as a rebuttal of your comment, exactly-- because there isn't much to rebut. Your line-level proposals are mostly things I like, and I firmly believe that the vast majority of all humans would prefer for things to get better rather than worse. But in response to proposals about how we should all push toward a particular unifying cultural norm, I'm always thinking... well, why doesn't the speaker just capitulate first? And the answer is always that their individual ideological quibbles really are more important to them (and everyone else) than linking arms with their ideological opponents.

How about some more immigration news? Just today the Supreme Court of the United States issued a per curiam opinion in Trump v. J. G. G., et al. This is the case about the two planes of individuals deported under the Alien Enemies Act. The ruling is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the court rules that the Plaintiffs can't sue under the Administrative Procedure Act and instead must file habeas petitions to get relief. On the other hand the court also rules that determinations of whether the AEA applies to an individual are subject to judicial review and individuals have to be given an opportunity to seek that review:

More specifically, in this context, AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.

The decision is technically 5-4 because Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson, and Barrett would have left the TRO in place and allowed Plaintiffs to proceed under the APA rather than requiring habeas. All 9 agree that judicial review is available and that prospective deportees under the AEA must have the opportunity to seek it, the disagreement is about how. Whether detainees will be able to practically use that opportunity remains to be seen. Steve Vladeck, as always, has a good write up.

On thing missing in the court's ruling, though, is any mention of the ~270 individuals already deported under the act. Certainly without the kind of review the court orders today. The courts decision implies this was a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights but does not actually say anything directly about them. Can they file habeas petitions in the United States to be returned? If the government can get you out of the country is that it? There is some precedent (arising from the Guantanamo Bay detainees) that people held in a foreign country on behalf of the United States can still pursue relief in US courts. Maybe that will end up being the remedy.

We can also return to Abrego Garcia v. Noem. I made a post about it last week and quite a lot has happened since then, including today. Last Friday the judge in that case ordered:

1. Plaintiff's Motion (ECF No. 6), construed as one for preliminary injunctive relief, is GRANTED;

2. Defendants are hereby ORDERED to facilitate and effectuate the return of Plaintiff Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7, 2025;

The judge issued her opinion supporting the order on Sunday. The government appealed and a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government's request for a stay. The circuit court's opinion pretty directly raises some of the concerns I mentioned in my post:

More importantly, the Government cannot be permitted to ignore the Fifth Amendment, deny due process of law, and remove anyone it wants, simply because it claims the victims of its lawlessness are members of a gang. Nor can the Government be permitted to disclaim any ability to return those it has wrongfully removed by citing their physical presence in a foreign jurisdiction. This is a slippery -- and dangerous -- constitutional slope. If due process is of no moment, what is stopping the Government from removing and refusing to return a lawful permanent resident or even a natural born citizen?

The government then appealed to the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roberts granted an administrative stay.

The cases are not exactly the same. The Venezuelans in the J.G.G. case were at least arguably deported pursuant to a lawful authority. Even the government concedes Abrego Garcia's deportation was entirely unlawful. Still, it would be a surprise for there to be relief for the Venezuelan's deported (arguably) in violation of their Fifth Amendment rights but not for Abrego Garcia who certainly was.

These proceedings do little to assuage my concerns with the system. If you are a US citizen and get kidnapped to a prison in El Salvador and the remedy is "hire a US lawyer to file a habeas petition for you" that seems not great! Pretty bad!

If the US government actually abides by SCOTUS' order that means mass deportation via the AEA is likely dead. You're talking about individual cases in front of an Article 3 judge with all the appeals that entails for every individual you want to deport.

There is some precedent (arising from the Guantanamo Bay detainees) that people held in a foreign country on behalf of the United States can still pursue relief in US courts.

Wasn't the key fact in those cases the fact that the United States had physical command and control over the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center? It doesn't seem immediately applicable to the Salvadorian prison situation. Is there any precedent for the United States sending prisoners to foreign countries? That seems like the more interesting novelty to me.

Bukele has said that the US is paying El Salvador to hold the prisoners on an ongoing basis. If he is telling the truth, this looks awfully like "the seller would make minor changes on normal commercial terms if the buyer asked them to." In reality, it may also be "the seller can tell if the actual buyer (i.e. Trump, not America) actually wants the thing, and a request that is obviously made under coercion will be ignored"

There is a common asset protection strategy of putting your wealth in the name of a trust lawyer in an offshore jurisdiction. The legal arrangement is that the lawyer has broad discretion to manage your wealth in the interests of a long list of extended family members. The practical arrangement is that the lawyer will manage your wealth to your instructions unless you are acting under a court order in favour of your business creditors, your ex-wife, the parents of the kid you ran over while drunk, the IRS etc. The US courts typical response is to throw the clown in jail for contempt and tell the trust lawyer that his client would very much prefer not to be in jail, so send money now. Unfortunately the US courts can't jail the President for contempt.

This applies to the Venezuelan prisoners. Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen and is being imprisoned indefinitely in El Salvador without a trial on the word of one US confidential informant (who may or may not exist) that he's in MS-13.

Hmm, then I'll amend what I wrote above about redressability. If the US is paying to house this particular guy, then it is likely a remedy to order the US to stop paying.

Even the government concedes Abrego Garcia's deportation was entirely unlawful.

Do they? AIUI, there was a hold on deporting him to El Salvador specifically, and for specific reasons, and that the law granting that authority had a clause allowing it to be waived for a significant change in circumstances. And his specific pitch was "You can't send me back there because this specific gang will torture me to apply pressure to my mother's business", and his mother no longer owns the business and Bukele deleted the gang.

It seemed more like "There was a paperwork mixup, but we can justify it if we have to".

At minimum, the previous order was not dissolved. It's fine to say that the facts underlying it had changed significantly and it could have been relitigated, but it clearly wasn't. The Court has reiterated rather often that those orders remains in effect until removed, regardless of changes in the underlying merits.

You're talking about individual cases in front of an Article 3 judge with all the appeals that entails for every individual you want to deport.

I don't think this is necessarily so. The opinion reinforces that "the detainees are entitled to notice and opportunity to be heard "appropriate to the nature of the case." Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 U. S. 306, 313 (1950)." -- which means that the Court is not addressing what process is due here.

The Court goes on to say "The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs" -- which I read to mean that the government can provide notice of intent to remove and it is on deportee to then seek relief. That's just about maximally stacking the procedural burden in favor of the government.

On thing missing in the court's ruling, though, is any mention of the ~270 individuals already deported under the act. Certainly without the kind of review the court orders today. The courts decision implies this was a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights but does not actually say anything directly about them. Can they file habeas petitions in the United States to be returned? If the government can get you out of the country is that it?

Redressability is a key part of standing. It's not just out of the country like in GITMO -- those were still individuals detained by agents of the US government to whom a remedy would apply.

The most a court could order here is that CBP would be required to admit them if they presented themselves at a border crossing. They can't order a foreign government to release or transport them. Even that, I'm not sure would be considered a remedy that would redress the harm, given that it's so speculative. EDIT: It was suggested below that the US might be paying for the continued detention abroad, in which case it is possible to order the US official that is doing so to stop. I'm not quite up to my standing doctrine on whether this now counts as a remedy.

The Court goes on to say "The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs" -- which I read to mean that the government can provide notice of intent to remove and it is on deportee to then seek relief. That's just about maximally stacking the procedural burden in favor of the government.

I agree the court was disturbingly vague. How long in advance must a prospective deportee be notified so they can "actually seek habeas relief?" A day? An hour? A minute? What about people already detained? I guess in that paragraph I was mostly thinking of people who do manage to file habeas petitions.

The most a court could order here is that CBP would be required to admit them if they presented themselves at a border crossing. They can't order a foreign government to release or transport them. Even that, I'm not sure would be considered a remedy that would redress the harm, given that it's so speculative. EDIT: It was suggested below that the US might be paying for the continued detention abroad, in which case it is possible to order the US official that is doing so to stop. I'm not quite up to my standing doctrine on whether this now counts as a remedy.

Vladeck has an article (of course) that talks about this in some detail. The short version is there is precedent for the US government working with foreign nations to return individuals who have been unlawfully removed. Both US citizens and not. He also cites a case about a US citizen who was detained by the government of Saudi Arabia, while in Saudi Arabia, at the behest of the behest of the US government. In that case the court found that if the detention was on behalf of the US then the court would have jurisdiction to order his return since the US had "constructive" custody of him.

I agree it's vague, but it is as deferential to the government while still maintaining that deportees get some due process in the form of judicial review. I really can't imagine any other result that's this favorable to the administration.

In that case the court found that if the detention was on behalf of the US then the court would have jurisdiction to order his return since the US had "constructive" custody of him.

We shall see.

Vladeck has an article (of course) that talks about this in some detail.

I greatly respect Vladeck, but I have serious issues with his analysis. My two major complaints is that he cites concerns that are, frankly, not proper or justiciable.

Trading APA review for habeas, even if the remedies were otherwise commensurate, is trading the ideologically diverse (and national security-experienced) D.C. federal courts for the most right-leaning federal courts in the country. And the justices know that, too.

I mean, we all know that. It's a fact. But the best application of APA vs Habeas here does not depend at all upon this fact, and Vladeck knows or ought to know it. It also wouldn't matter if the DC Circuit was full of Trump appointees and the 5th full of Biden ones.

This isn’t any old case; it’s the case in which the government has come the closest to outright defiance of a court order (something Chief Judge Boasberg is still in the middle of adjudicating). [...] Not two weeks later, here’s Roberts providing the decisive vote to hold that, in fact, the case shouldn’t have been before that judge (or that court) in the first place

Again, whether or not this belongs in the DCC or the 5th is completely independent of whether the government ordered a court order. That fact cannot enter into a jurisdictional question -- and it's just beneath him to suggest that it's relevant.

The remedy for contempt cannot possibly be "we rewrite or reframe jurisdictional law to punish the contemptuous litigant".

https://x.com/TrumpDailyPosts/status/1909263788295041257

Yesterday, China issued Retaliatory Tariffs of 34%, on top of their already record setting Tariffs, Non-Monetary Tariffs, Illegal Subsidization of companies, and massive long term Currency Manipulation, despite my warning that any country that Retaliates against the U.S. by issuing additional Tariffs, above and beyond their already existing long term Tariff abuse of our Nation, will be immediately met with new and substantially higher Tariffs, over and above those initially set. Therefore, if China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th. Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated! Negotiations with other countries, which have also requested meetings, will begin taking place immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1909411006423392583

China Ministry of Commerce has just said: "Will fight until the end if US Insists on new tariffs"

China urges dialogue with US, strongly opposes 50% additional tariffs

So the two biggest economies are now locked in a full-scale trade war... I suspect this will be more severe than previous skirmishing. In the past China imposed restrictions on imports of Australian wine, lobster and coal due to us calling for an inquiry into COVID. The Australian government basically ignored this without retaliating and eventually (with a change of govt over here to the less anti-Chinese Labour party) the restrictions were dropped. And they didn't touch iron ore, our biggest and most important export.

But nobody really cares about Australia, there's no loss of face in restoring trade relations like there would be with being seen to submit to Trump. You can show magnanimity to a weaker country but you probably can't show weakness to a peer power. Plus the US-China tariffs seem to be much more comprehensive, there's no shielded goods listed. I highly doubt that Xi will back down here like Trump seems to be asking. Giving a one day ultimatum is quite rude.

It seems that Trump's strategy is to shake down the US's weaker trading partners (the 'other countries which have requested meetings') and try to smash the stronger powers like China and possibly the EU. The EU might even fall into the 'weaker' category if Trump can link security to the trade relationship, Vance and co wanted to send Europe the bill for bombing Yemen since it was mostly European trade flowing through the Red Sea. The US has opportunities for leverage in terms of energy flows now that Russia is persona non grata and with defence via NATO. On the other hand, the EU is run by Trump-haters and they're hardened experts in economically wrecking their own countries, so they may show some backbone.

Anyway, who has more leverage between the US and China?

China's exports to the US ($500 billion) are mostly manufactured goods, electronics and machinery. These are ironically the things you'd need to industrialize the US, though a lot is also consumer goods. China dominates certain industries like port equipment as seen here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/11jsyyf/well_thats_unfortunate/

https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports/united-states

The US's exports to China ($144 billion) are a mix of agriculture/energy and electronics (semiconductors are included in this category), aircraft, machinery.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports/china

Personally I favour a supply-focused view of trade conflicts. If you're losing out on $500 billion worth of goods due to high tariffs (an additional 50% on top of the 34% and the previous tariffs really add up!) then that's worse than 34% or 84% if Xi matches on a mere $144 billion. Many of those goods will be prerequisites for US production. A much smaller proportion of Chinese imports will be prerequisites and soybeans/gas can be bought from elsewhere. Plus the Chinese approach to industrial policy seems much more sophisticated, they target key sectors to build up economies of scale. They foster development in high-tech industries with huge state backing. They do plenty on the supply side, tariffs only affect prices and demand. I think China is not too concerned about losing US imports, they want to replace them with indigenous suppliers on the high-end anyway and have been working hard to do this for years and years, that's Made in China 2025. There is no equivalent comprehensive program to reshore production in the US.

And if China loses some of their exports, at least they retain production capacity. Those mobile phones and plastic toys could go to Chinese kids instead.

I've seen others online favouring a demand-focused view, so there is room for difference on this (elasticity matters a lot).

I think China will come out ahead here unless Trump manages some crazy 4D chess bullying other nations into tariffing China too. China is the central hub of the world economy in terms of trade flows, their economy is larger in real terms and their political system seems to be more stable, less erratic.

Edit: https://x.com/typesfast/status/1909362292367802840

On April 17th the U.S. Trade Representative's office is expected to impose fees of up to $1.5M per port call for ships made in China and for $500k to $1M if the ocean carrier owns a single ship made in China

This seems even crazier if true, it's like Trump is deliberately trying to crash the US economy with these hasty, no-warning orders and fines. See the thread for details. This is how you don't do industrial policy.

RIP republicans in 2026. Trump truly doesn’t care how far prices rise for basically everything. But if there’s one thing voters don’t forgive, it’s fucking up the economy.

I wonder if this is what it will take for the China bubble to finally burst? They’re so insanely drowning in debt and their economy seems to be extremely shaky in its fundamentals. Yet there’s a bad record on people saying “China is DOOMED” so I hesitate to say this will be the nail in the coffin

What do you mean by shaky in fundamentals?

They have a huge amount of industry and infrastructure that pumps out much of the world's goods. Putting finance to one side, isn't that a sound basis for an economy?

China has high corporate debt, that much is known. But debt is just paper. As long as enterprises are productive and efficient, debt doesn't matter. Regardless of what happens in the realm of paper the real productive wealth remains. All those phones, cars, ships will still be produced in increasingly automated factories. All that housing stock is still there. I remember hearing so much about Evergrande collapsing but there don't seem to be many material consequences from that. On the flipside, a home ownership rate of 96% is pretty good in my view, something is going very right there.

And they have plenty of human capital, the cohorts that will be relevant for the next 20 years have already been born, shrinking birthrates will take decades to really cause any major effect.

I think our media has emphasized China's flaws (debt, pollution, totalitarian political system) excessively and refused to cover their successes (logistics, cost-efficient industrial output, innovation) and so people fall into a state of confusion when Deepseek or Tiktok come out, when BYD starts outhustling Tesla or when the Chinese flew their next-gen fighter IRL, as opposed to in CGI like NGAD.

How about looming population collapse?

Looming? What do you mean concretely?

There's reportedly been 9.5 million babies born in China last year. Something like 3.6 million in the US; of those, 1.8 million white babies. Accordingly, in 18 years there will be 5 times as many Chinese 18 year olds as there will be their White American counterparts. Yes, they have lower TFR, but at current trends they'll have a vastly larger workforce for many decades.

Yeah I guess if you don’t count a little thing called “immigration” (leaving aside those birth numbers out of China are likely cooked)

It seems you've collected every possible cope and trope, congrats.

“immigration”

Yes, Venezuelans will surely bail you out in the arms race with China, if you don't deport them to El Salvadoran prisons first.

Nah. Immigration is 20th century solution.

21st century solution is annexation. First Greenland, then Canada, then Mexico, then all the way from North to South Pole.

What did you think MAGA meant? vibes? papers? essays?

Sure, it’s only Venezuelans migrating. Except all the best and brightest that America brain drains from every other country. Where did Xis daughter go to school again?

Meanwhile, all of chinas rich flee to America, displaying their utmost confidence in how China is going to lose and lose hard in the near future.

Except all the best and brightest that America brain drains from every other country. Where did Xis daughter go to school again?

I have nothing against Xi's daughter but I don't think she's very smart. Neither is Xi, for that matter. Rich and powerful Chinese sending their kids to the US is a common pattern when they are incapable of scoring enough on Gaokao to get into a serious Chinese school like Tsinghua.

Brain drain is drastically slowing down. I see accomplished Chinese American scientists actually returning home. The US isn't that attractive any more, and it doesn't want to be attractive. Nature is healing.

More comments

The question is about what the workforce will be doing.

An inverted population pyramid is the grand strategic equivalent of "shooting to wound" to incapacitate three hostiles instead of one.

I don't have very strong opinions as to what will happen In Real Life but historically from what I understand civilizations that lost their TFR edge crumbled regardless of their total population numbers.

There's reportedly been 9.5 million babies born in China last year.

How many of those were ethnic minorities in places like Tibet that will be passively or even actively hostile to the Chinese project? It looks like the regions with the five regions with the highest per capita childbirths were:

  • Tibet (problematic minority)
  • Guizhou (notable minority population)
  • Ningxia (majority Han, but a minority autonomous region for the Islamic Hui people)
  • Qinghai (about 50% recognized ethnic minority groups)
  • Hainan (majority Han, although there is a noticeable minority of the native islanders)

Google's AI suggests that around 800,000 of those births in China were minority due to relatively straightforward calculus of "national birthrate x 9% of the Chinese population that is minority.) But my priors are that minority groups in China (particularly the Tibetans and Islamic people groups) are going to have disproportionately higher birth rates (Tibet's birth rate appears to be twice the national average!)

Now, if you actually go and look at China's population pyramid, I think it's fairly clear the demographics for them are more of a long-term issue than anything, in the short term they can plausibly kick the can down the road and hope AI or robots or something will save them. It's very unlikely that demographics alone will e.g. decide Taiwan's fate.

Tibet is extremely sparsely populated, so their birth rates are irrelevant. There's like 3.4 million ethnic Tibetans, they can have 5x Han TFR and that won't matter.

All of this is just more cope. I think that for a few decades, there was a foreboding feeling in the west that eventually China will become the dominant superpower, and accordingly much mental energy was dedicated to crafting memes that dispel this impression. Like the idea that ethnic minorities in China will help in breaking it apart (this won't work any better than in Russia), or that low TFR or One-child-policy or pollution or real estate market collapse or COVID lockdowns or the crack in the Three Gorges Dam or the debt or x y z will signify the end of the Mandate of Heaven, or… I hope that soon people will realize how pathetic all this cope is. China is not a paper tiger, it's not all fake and propaganda, in fact they barely care what you think about them, it's a well-organized state, their bureaucrats are smarter than yours, they have repeatedly shown more capacity to remove threats to national stability than you have, and they are systematically patching all remaining vulnerabilities. In a sense, you project your own state's inability to manage itself onto China to see how it might conveniently take itself out of the picture.

Now, if you actually go and look at China's population pyramid, I think it's fairly clear the demographics for them are more of a long-term issue than anything, in the short term they can plausibly kick the can down the road and hope AI or robots or something will save them.

This is exactly what they are doing now, but that's also what the US is purporting to do. The problem is that they're very dynamic, in all possible way, and they'll clearly be able to produce millions of robots. Hell, even their Android ROM companies become behemoths that ship high-end race cars and develop humanoid robots (at market cap $127B). Apple (cap $2.6T) has given up on a car after a decade or so of work and is barely able to maintain its phone software. This isn't how things should look when you have a strong position and they're on the verge of collapsing.

(this won't work any better than in Russia)

Didn't Russia fight a violent internal war against minority separatist groups? I seem to recall that happening.

Broadly I think you are attributing a lot of views to me without any evidence that I hold them. Which is fine, I guess. I think that probably the truth on China is between "OMNICOMPETENT HYPERSTATE OF THE FUTURE" and "weak, lame, dying, about to crack."

This isn't how things should look when you have a strong position and they're on the verge of collapsing.

As I said, I don't think China is "on the verge" of collapsing over any sort of near-term timescale.

Didn't Russia fight a violent internal war against minority separatist groups? I seem to recall that happening.

Yes, we won. I refer to the “decolonizing” partition plans during this war, like this one. In reality, the colonized Buryats and all others eagerly enlist and fight in Ukraine (and get killed disproportionately). My point is that even a moderately effective state can easily suppress ethnic minority separatism within its borders, so hoping that China will somehow collapse due to ethnic tensions is not serious.

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Most of the non-white babies born in America are hispanic, who make good citizens as a rule- hard workers, their talented tenth can easily keep up with the whites, can learn the million and one practical skills you need to run an industrial society.

China has high corporate debt

It’s not just that. The evergrande crisis is a good example that their real estate companies are essentially a Ponzi scheme, did you know that in China,

  • most people buy a home before it’s ever built

  • And that everyone tries to buy brand new homes because it’s “bad luck” to buy previously owned homes

  • And that the concrete used in many of these homes is made from. Beach sand (ie it won’t last more than a handful of years) due to cost cutting corrupt practices

  • that the real estate companies rely on debt to build and if they aren’t made whole by gov (because consumers often refuse to or cannot pay) they will collapse

  • the above is made worse because housing prices are starting to collapse due to a bunch of factors, so people are paying for mortgages for houses that they cannot sell and get their money back, there’s no appreciation so people are just refusing to buy now

  • huge numbers of houses sit empty (ghost cities are a massive problem). These buildings decay and are essentially a total loss.

But besides all that, there’s also the problem of municipal debt. You see, in China municipal governments make all of their money through taxing developers. But if the developers stop building (see points above) then the cities cannot pay for their budgets anymore. We are already seeing budgetary crises across many Chinese cities. The CCP will have to bail these cities out as well. But with what money?

All of these crises are made worse by the fact that unemployment is a giant problem. The gov stopped collecting stats on this because it was so bad but about 1/3 of young Chinese are unemployed, and this number will soar due to tariffs

I remember hearing so much about Evergrande collapsing but there don't seem to be many material consequences from that. On the flipside, a home ownership rate of 96% is pretty good in my view, something is going very right there.

You don’t want to own a Chinese built flat. See above points. It’s quite often tofu dreg, or built in the middle of nowhere

You also have to remember China is an incredibly censorious state. It’s a black box, you will never hear about its problems generally. The CCP insisted they had like, 7 deaths from COVID during the entirety of the pandemic. When we can accurately guess there has been millions of deaths. But if YOU didn’t hear about it? Must be an amazing system!

And they have plenty of human capital

Hard to say. Most of the births are now in the countryside to poor peasant farmers. Hardly “elite human capital”

If the apartments fall apart, then they can simply move into the ghost cities - problem solves itself.

Seriously, these things may be true to a certain extent but real estate is not the defining feature of the economy. Production is the defining feature of the economy, production of goods. All else rests on top of production. There are no services without goods, even prostitutes need condoms and lingerie...

China is good at cost-efficient production, therefore it follows that their economy is strong regardless of the situation in real estate or whatever else. If the Soviet Union was the biggest producer of manufactured goods on the planet, bigger than the next 10 combined, then it would still be here today. Soviet production was weak, nobody ever cared to tariff Soviet exports because nobody in their right mind wanted to buy a Soviet car, television or anything but oil and minerals.

But if YOU didn’t hear about it? Must be an amazing system!

This is the reverse of the truth. We in the West hear nothing but bad news about China. We hear about protests in Hong Kong, genocide of the uyghurs, trouble with the Dalai Lama, pollution, liveleak industrial accidents, people getting locked in their homes for COVID, people getting their organs stolen, suppression of Christianity, Social Credit (which is blown out of proportion), repression of the LGBT, backdoors in Tiktok and all other Chinese products... and this shadow banking crisis that has been about to destroy the Chinese economy for the last 10, 15, 20 years. I was taught about it in school.

There are positives as well as negatives, the media is only interested in fostering hatred and contempt, preparing people psychologically for war with China. It's just like the 'Iran is 6 months, 3 weeks, 5 milliseconds away from getting the Bomb!' narrative, fearmongering and warmongering. They want us to hate China and also think they'll be easy to defeat, to manufacture consent for war. But in reality China is a very strong country and we need to be more realistic. War may be inevitable but we shouldn't go in half-cocked, assuming our enemies are made of tofu.

If the apartments fall apart, then they can simply move into the ghost cities - problem solves itself.

The ghost cities are often comprised of the same materials…

Seriously, these things may be true to a certain extent but real estate is not the defining feature of the economy

Housing is close to one third of china’s GDP. So, sure it’s not the only feature but it’s a huge, gigantic feature of the Chinese economy

Yes they do have a great, huge manufacturing sector. They are still fairly a poor country on a per capita basis, which means threats to their economy loom larger for the average citizen. The Chinese only tolerate their overlords because they are slowly getting richer, but that is precisely when the risk of revolution is greatest is when the citizenry gets a taste of freedom. I think if their economy suddenly stopped growing and stagnated it would be quite devastating for them, far more than for America

As for news, I think we get fairly large amount of positive visions of China all the time online thanks in large part to a combination of wumaos and anti American feelings among internet extremists, who love to throw up glittery pictures of neon Chinese cities at night. -And - Wow look at their rail network! And their drone swarm shows, and drone delivery!

Meanwhile military leaders are getting purged for filling missiles with water instead of fuel. It’s really hard to gauge how strong they are when they haven’t fought a war in four decades (and lost all the wars they did fight)

And they have plenty of human capital

Hard to say. Most of the births are now in the countryside to poor peasant farmers. Hardly “elite human capital”

One of Scott's book reviews had a neat thesis that homesteading peasants are the first step of the magic formula that produced the Asian tiger countries.

But even beyond this, Studwell talks up the almost spiritual benefits of land reform. In a typical land reform measure, an equal amount of land gets allotted to every peasant family. This is about as close as anything ever comes to the completely fair starting position that eg John Locke liked to fantasize about. Everyone gets to work for themselves in their own little small business, reaping the consequences of their own decisions. The generation who grow up immediately after a land reform tend to be thrifty, hard-working, honest, and civic-minded. They go on to found all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development.

Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.

Tried very cursorily to search if the Chinese peasants are the homesteading sort and got as first hit a local paper which sounds like yes, and they now want to run down the homestead system. Maybe that's how they finally fall flat.

Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.

Sure. Except the Chinese already have their own version of this. Many Chinese kids are basically checked out of society . “lying flat” is the name of the current youth movement in China, and it’s pretty self explanatory

when the Chinese flew their next-gen fighter IRL, as opposed to in CGI like NGAD.

NGAD prototypes flew years before China's next-gen fighter broke cover. IIRC the US had one flying in 2020. We just didn't advertise.

These prototypes look nothing like the 3D models you have now, however.

I have never seen pictures of those prototypes, not have I seen any 3D models of NGAD.

I've seen promotional or imaginary images, none of which, except probably the two 2D teaser posters that came out after Boeing was announced as the NGAD winner, did not necessarily (to my knowledge) had any visual similarity with "real" aircraft. I still don't think we know much about how NGAD will look.

If you have images of the prototypes or 3D models of NGAD I would be extremely interested to see them, provided I can do so without violating US espionage laws ;)

Do you imply that F-47 is not “NGAD”? The one from 2020 presumably was like that Boeing art.

Do you imply that F-47 is not “NGAD”?

No. Where's the 3D model?

This art from Boeing shows one concept for the Air Force’s future fighter, known as Next Generation Air Dominance

I don't think literal concept art like this should be taken to necessarily mean anything. (At least three NGAD prototypes flew, so maybe it was real, or maybe it was just something an artist thought would look cool in a press release.)

No. Where's the 3D model?

Do you mean that this “artist's rendering” of F-47 is 2D? Well, I admit this possibility didn't occur to me, but now that I look closer…

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If the jet can't even be shown to the public then it must be in a fairly early stage of development. Only a few months ago it looked like the whole project was going to be cancelled or turned into a family of systems. These air-superiority fighters can't be kept hidden forever, people have to be trained about them, they'll need to be fielded to airbases...

Furthermore, the Chinese could've and surely were secretly flying their next-gen jets before revealing them.

Public reveals should have more weight than allegations of secret techniques. It shows that a design has been largely worked out and that it's closer to deployment.

I half agree with you.

The thing is that countries will debut aircraft and not procure them. For instance the J-35 debuted in 2012. To the best of my knowledge, the Chinese military has not procured them. Russian examples are the Su-47 and (so far) Su-75. The F-20 is a good American example. The Chinese have debuted two prototypes; they might procure neither or both and they could have been at any stage of development. It is also of course possible that countries would reveal or conceal their aircraft for foreign or domestic political/psyop reasons. In the case of the recent Chinese stealth fighters, they debuted on Mao's birthday, so the data might have been chosen more for its symbolic purpose and less for relevance to their maturity.

If the jet can't even be shown to the public then it must be in a fairly early stage of development. [...] Public reveals should have more weight than allegations of secret techniques. It shows that a design has been largely worked out and that it's closer to deployment.

The United States has a long history of IOCing and even operationally using aircraft before they are public.

US economy isn’t that trade dependent and the US trades a lot more with Canada, Mexico, and EU compared to China. If Trump can get the EU to reduce trade barriers along with countries like Japan etc. the economy will be fine.

I’m not an economist so I guess we will see! My understanding is America is primarily a services based economy meaning they have to import almost anything manufactured, so your goods are going to explode in price

The market went up after this announcement IIRC. 50% on top of the already existing and already announced tariffs is almost too absurd to take seriously, bayesian evidence that Trump is bluffing.

Alternatively, both you and the market are still in the denial/bargaining stage.

My impression after obsessively monitoring this situation for days (of course) is that neither side will fold, tariffs are here to stay, and everyone will be poor and mad for it. China of course won't fold, the idea that they're at risk is preposterous, they can well weather complete cessation of export to the US.

Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability. I believe that Trump, Navarro and the rest of that gang are as misinformed as the average MAGA guy on Twitter, given how they speak and that amusing formula. Americans still think that their great consumption is the linchpin of Chinese economy, 10-30% of their GDP (it's more like 3%); that the Chinese produce apparel, “trinkets” and low-quality materials (they also produce things that Americans plausibly cannot start producing at the same quality in years); that American IP is vital for their industry (they're making their own software, OSes, CPUs…) and so on. The idea that American de-industrialization is a product of betrayal by Wall Street Elites who offshored jobs to China also feeds into the delusional notion of possible parity – but the truth is that there has never been a point in history where American industry had scale or diversity comparable to what's going on in China now. The issue with their bad financials is also overblown; as for losing markets, they have the capital at hand for consumption stimulus. This guy from Beijing writes:

China’s PPP GDP is only 25% larger than that of the US? Come on people… who are we kidding? Last year, China generated twice as much electricity as the US, produced 12.6 times as much steel and 22 times as much cement. China’s shipyards accounted for over 50% of the world’s output while US production was negligible. In 2023, China produced 30.2 million vehicles, almost three times more than the 10.6 million made in the US.

On the demand side, 26 million vehicles were sold in China last year, 68% more than the 15.5 million sold in the US. Chinese consumers bought 434 million smartphones, three times the 144 million sold in the US. As a country, China consumes twice as much meat and eight times as much seafood as the US. Chinese shoppers spent twice as much on luxury goods as American shoppers.

…It is prima facie ridiculous that China’s production and consumption, at multiples of US levels, can be realistically discounted for lower quality/features to arrive at a mere 125% of US PPP GDP. … Similarly, analysts who lament that China accounts for 30% of the world’s manufacturing output but only 13% of household consumption are far off the mark. China accounts for 20-40% of global demand for just about every consumer product but much of the services it consumes have been left out of national accounts.

Accordingly, with a higher real GDP, their effective debt to GDP ratio may be as low as 150%, not 200-300%. They have US assets to sell too.

So China can trivially absorb half of the overcapacity freed by reduced trade with the US, and might find buyers for the rest.

My thesis is that in picking this fight, Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, their delusions are globally shared and become reality in their own right. But perhaps not enough to offset the gross physical one.

The actual dangerous thing for China here is that Trump seems determined to immiserate the whole planet, completely irrespective of any geopolitical rivalry, because he's an illiterate anarcho-primitivist and thinks that all trade is theft unless it's barter, basically. America vs. The World, especially with a chain reaction of tariffs on Chinese (and likely also Vietnamese etc…) capacity spillover, results in massive reduction of productivity for everyone. For now, nations like Vietnam are unilaterally dropping tariffs on American crap, but that can't be a big effect because their tariffs were low to begin with, and Americans just don't and cannot produce enough at price points that people of those nations can afford. (We may see IMF loans for 3rd world countries importing overpriced American beef or Teslas or whatever to placate Don, but I doubt it'll be sustainable). I suppose in the long run the idea is that Optimus bots will be churning out products with superhuman efficiency, at least Lutnick argues as much. But that's still years away. Perhaps this extortion of zero balance trade (so in effect, the demand that trading partners buy non-competitive American products) is meant to finance the transition to posthuman automated economy. Bold strategy.

I am of course very amused and curious to see how it'll go. Will Fortress America intimidate the rest of us into submission, likely forever? Or will it be so stubborn, brutal and ham-fisted that humanity will finally rebel and ostracize the rogue state, letting it broil in its own supremacist fantasies? Can Bessent et al. turn 1D “trade le bad” checkers of the King of Understanding Things (懂王) into 4D chess? We shall see.

Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability.

I might have missed an update, but have you changed your mind on this recently? A boiled-downed version of your opinion on the topic, that seems to be stored in my memory, is something to the effect of: China is doomed to be at the mercy of hypercompetent Anglo boomers who will rule the Earth for the foreseeable future. Or am I misremembering something?

No, you're correct. In fact, had the US continued the course it had just half a year ago, I'd still be largely holding this opinion. But the election of an illiterate boomer strongman does change matters. Xi also has managed to not do anything too self-defeating long enough. I admit I was wrong: the US does not have a functional elite to make appropriate use of its genuine (if transient) political, economic and technological advantages and keep the Chinaman down.

ASI may restore my faith in the previous model, but this is looking like a remote possibility.

China’s PPP GDP is only 25% larger than that of the US? Come on people… who are we kidding?

Its not hard to pick out a few industries youre strong in. The only number there thats worth taking seriously for macro measures is electricity. And that still seems consistent with the 25% number - manufacturing generally needs more electricity than services, e.g. Icelands GDP is not actually underestimated. Theres an argument that services are BS and therefore Chinas economy really is better - but at that point, youre far enough from conventional economics that GDP is a questionable measure anyway.

But he actually argues that the Chinese services sector size is underestimated, by Chinese accounting mainly.

We believe China’s GDP and PPP GDP are lowballed by an incomplete transition from the Material Product System (MPS) of national accounts, which excludes services by design. The World Bank is likely dutifully doing its sums with goods consumption in China multiples of the US but measuring services consumption as a fraction of the US.

The United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) provides voluntary guidelines and specifically states that nations should base their national accounts on local conditions. What that has meant in the West is to adopt all UNSNA “innovations” introduced over the years.

Items like imputed rent, legal fees and R&D are now all included in GDP. The UK went hog wild with both illegal drugs and prostitution as now part of their GDP because… hey, why not? UNSNA’s 2008 guidelines explicitly recommend that illegal market activity should be included in GDP.

China’s NBS stood its ground on a conceptual level. Rightly or wrongly, the Leninist MPS considers services necessary costs of material production rather than real value creation. In China’s first attempt at converting MPS to SNA in 1985, it tacked on a ludicrously low 13% to the MPS number and called it China’s services GDP.

Over the years, the World Bank has twisted the arm of the NBS for modest increases to China’s services GDP – with limited success.

The affordability crisis in Western economies, the US in particular, is largely driven by inflation of necessary services – rent, healthcare, education and childcare – not by manufactured goods. While these costs have also gone up in China, they have increased less and much are left out of GDP anyway.

Also not captured by the ICP survey conducted in 2021 are the price and service wars that have broken out across industries and products – a bane on businesses but a boon for consumers.

This is most visible in China’s car market with OEMs either cutting prices to the bone (Hyundai Sonatas down to $17,000 from $42,000) or offering cutting-edge technology for peanuts (a 2,000-kilometer range BYD Q plug-in hybrid electric vehicle for $14,000). The price of solar panels fell 50% in 2023 and continues to trend down in 2024. CATL has announced plans to cut lithium-ion battery prices in half by the end of 2024.

Restaurants are offering white glove perks like hot towels, lotion by the sink and snazzy remodeled decors. Hairdressers hand out bottled water and fruit plates. Tech companies have slashed large language model (LLM) prices to basically free. Service quality in China, impossible to quantify, is now head and shoulders above the West and probably even Japan.

Adherence to UNSNA has caused a breakdown in the meaning of GDP. As necessary services become an ever larger share of Western economies, their growth does not appear to result in discernable improvements in living standards.

It's not a workshop country. The thesis isn't that they have a strong industry - everyone knows that.

If Chinas service economy is actually triple of what those numbers say, it gets you from 125% of US to ~155% - not a significant change to debt/GDP.

The affordability crisis in Western economies, the US in particular, is largely driven by inflation of necessary services – rent, healthcare, education and childcare – not by manufactured goods.

This is still propably a problem with the concept rather than the measurement - depending on how exactly PPP is defined, but just a few things being weirdly expensive it would likely miss. With housing especially, if you consider the value of location at all, its hard to see how international "quality" comparisons could be made.

Also not captured by the ICP survey conducted in 2021 are the price and service wars that have broken out across industries and products

Why are they not captured?

it gets you from 125% of US to ~155% - not a significant change to debt/GDP.

Fair. This author thinks that the real scale is Chinese economy is 2x of the US or more, all things considered.

With housing especially, if you consider the value of location at all, its hard to see how international "quality" comparisons could be made.

I think American housing value is inflated by the peculiar, unique necessity of getting away from Undesirable People while still being in the vicinity of jobs, schools and other desirable factors.

Why are they not captured?

For example, how do you compare the utility of a high-status American SUV and a noname Chinese SUV with some crazy AI-driven suspension or drone launch pad, especially if they do not meaningfully coexist on either market?

I think American housing value...

And how do you expect this fact to make its way into PPP determinations? I mean even aside the overton considerations, is there any way to say how much of US housing prices are due to this, beyond "I reckon"? At risk of meme-ing, if I said that living in a free and democratic country is valuable to consumers and this is reflected in the prices of the naturally limited houses-near-XYZ in such countries, how do we know youre right and Im wrong? Indicator measures arent useful if measuring them is epistemology-complete, which is why PPP is almost certainly defined in a way that cant detect these things.

especially if they do not meaningfully coexist on either market

Im sure this is true in some cases, but I dont think its true "across industries". And with services it seems like the default case - e.g. the "style of waiting" in everyday-grade european restaurants propably isnt offered in the US - so they propably have some strategy to capture it anyway

I think that if we are trying to genuinely compare apples to apples, PPP is inadequate between significantly different developed systems and we may indeed have to fall back to Marxism-Leninism and factors of production. In the end, what is being discussed is whether China will be able to finance their debt, and any analysis must have to backchain to the possibility to say anything about that.

Yes I agree, much of US GDP is nonsense, it's like an inverted pyramid with the manufacturing base too small and services too large. There are of course real services like R&D but there are also more or less fake services, HR training sessions and legal compliance, managing tax... There's real education and fake education, those schools in America where nobody can perform to grade level, useless or negative-value degrees...

Just because money is changing hands, it doesn't follow that it's a good thing. Fentanyl raises the GDP after all. Metrics of production should be prioritized over financial flows.

Just because money is changing hands, it doesn't follow that it's a good thing. Fentanyl raises the GDP after all. Metrics of production should be prioritized over financial flows.

I don't know if I'll be able to find it, but I saw a clip of an interview (edit: or speech I guess) with Bukele, where he recounts how the world's (or El Salvador's) top economists' told him "nooo! you can't just arrest all the gangs, that will tank the GDP!".

EDIT: Found it

I don't think it's really possible for this to be true on a grand scale. After all, if the American GDP is in some way fake how come the median American can buy so much Chinese production with his or her dollars? The ratio of durable goods consumption to GDP in the US is not vastly lower than it was in the 60s, and that small decrease we would expect given that the average person obviously has many more 'consumer' services to spend his money on these days in a way that is obviously real consumption than he did in the 60s.

After all, if the American GDP is in some way fake how come the median American can buy so much Chinese production with his or her dollars?

Largely because China (like everyone else) is buying your assets and the USD is the global reserve currency.

Trump is doing what he can to fix this pathological situation, by being laser focused on goods.

Consumption is indeed high but production is too low. That's my point. It's an unstable position to be in. There are lots of people in the US who are very wealthy and prosperous but shouldn't be.

production is too low

Physical production? I don't see why this is a problem if service production rises to compensate (except for e.g. national security reasons which has nothing to do with whether some service jobs are 'fake' or not). Yes the US runs a BoT deficit but the durables deficit is like an order of magnitude bigger than the overall deficit - that is to say service exports wouldn't have to rise that much to eliminate the deficit, which would certainly be easier than trying only to boost physical goods exports in which the US obviously has far less comparative advantage, especially in mass production.

There are lots of people in the US who are very wealthy and prosperous but shouldn't be

How could this even be true in an inter-country sense? If production is too low, what sustains consumption? Foreign investments in American instruments? But surely these prove that investors are satisfied in the likelihood that future American production, on which they are trading, will be able to make good their investment? Service exports would be the other candidate, but then these, if they are competitive on the open world market, clearly 'deserve' their price.

I don't really understand tbh, and I don't mean that in a rhetorical sense. How do you perceive the supposed 'instability' of the US position unravelling?

A lot of Americans have completely made-up jobs, working in DEI or consulting or HR, compliance (with bizarre laws), educating people with ridiculous nonsense... it's not productive activity. Some of those jobs are useful but much are not.

They're basically sucking wealth away from productive enterprises since they consume wealth but do not produce wealth. The US runs huge trade deficits to support a high level of prosperity, relying on the social construct of 'the US is the greatest country in the world, with the strongest military and the safest currency' so that people maintain confidence in the US dollar.

They're basically sucking wealth away from productive enterprises since they consume wealth but do not produce wealth.

See this doesn't necessarily any problem with trade as such, as this is an internal dynamic - if regulation produces non-productive workers who piggyback off productive workers in 'real' sectors, it's just shuffling around the fruits of production among Americans.

The US runs huge trade deficits to support a high level of prosperity, relying on the social construct of 'the US is the greatest country in the world, with the strongest military and the safest currency' so that people maintain confidence in the US dollar.

If this is the explanation for how the US sustains non-productive work, how come other Western economies have observed a similar turn toward services?

See this doesn't necessarily any problem with trade as such, as this is an internal dynamic

I meant to say sucking wealth away from productive enterprises around the world. Suppose Zhang in Chongqing makes an iphone that goes to a product manager who doesn't do any useful work, just sits around in meetings all day. This is an unstable dynamic in my book. It would be unstable even within a country if you have a class of elites who laze around all day and a class of workers who make goods for them. When Onlyfans whores delight in their paid-off houses it incites a lot of resentment amongst people with shit jobs. Elites are supposed to lead wisely, that's why they're supposed to get goods from the workers.

Other Western countries are poorer than the US. Not everyone is cut out for productive work, there are internal status games and politics... But the US is unusually rich and has a high trade deficit, the US is the biggest offender. The rest of the West (with some exceptions, though German industry seems to be declining fast) is relying on prestige, not production. Degree mill universities, immigration ponzi schemes, selling enterprises overseas. Selling assets to pay for consumption is bad, profits and capabilities head overseas.

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Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability.

My thesis is that in picking this fight, Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, their delusions are globally shared and become reality in their own right. But perhaps not enough to offset the gross physical one.

People do keep pointing out that Trump has had this fixation with tariffs and the US being screwed by the world for so long that Japan was his original target.

I have wondered if he simply slid China into that same niche and never updated anything else.

This whole thing is demented but if you imagine Trump is still in the 80s or 90s in his head fighting the trade war he never got to fight then, it makes a bit more sense.

This would actually make more sense yes. Allegedly, Trump’s Love for Tariffs Began in Japan’s ’80s Boom:

WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump lost an auction in 1988 for a 58-key piano used in the classic film “Casablanca” to a Japanese trading company representing a collector. While he brushed off being outbid, it was a firsthand reminder of Japan’s growing wealth, and the following year, Mr. Trump went on television to call for a 15 percent to 20 percent tax on imports from Japan.

“I believe very strongly in tariffs,” Mr. Trump, at the time a Manhattan real estate developer with fledgling political instincts, told the journalist Diane Sawyer, before criticizing Japan, West Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Korea for their trade practices. “America is being ripped off,” he said. “We’re a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country.”

Thirty years later, few issues have defined Mr. Trump’s presidency more than his love for tariffs — and on few issues has he been more unswerving. Allies and historians say that love is rooted in Mr. Trump’s experience as a businessman in the 1980s with the people and money of Japan, then perceived as a mortal threat to America’s economic pre-eminence.

That's from 2019. If China is just a stand-in for Japan (which he also tariffed anyway), it is no wonder that he acts so brazenly. You can bully Japan with no repercussions. He can finally get back at them for that piano humiliation.

If china was just producing plastic junk it wouldn't be an issue. BYD can produce cars at a similar quality as American companies while using their enormous home market, their mineral and processing capacity and the fact that Chinese engineers cost 20% of what American engineers cost. Far more Chinese people in the 100-120 IQ range go into trades while the west unfortunately dumps low Iq people into these jobs while pushing the slightly above average into meaningless office jobs.

Free trade was great in 1950 when the US bought bananas and sold cars. It isn't great when almost everything can be produced in China, India, Poland or Vietnam. China can even compete with AI models and satellite systems. The US can't compete without tariffs. The US risks becoming a real estate bubble using debt to buy goods from Asia.

Free trade was based on American supremacy, the rise of tariffs is the US becoming one country among many. The US isn't a global empire any more, they are a sphere of influence and need to be self sufficient.

Also with covid and Ukraine we should have learned that self sufficiency is paramount and that the US shouldn't be dependent on convoluted global supply chains. Having several supply chains in the world with local suppliers is a lot less fragile.

Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability.

I can of course only speak for myself, and not the Trump administration, or even the "MAGA movement" as a whole.

IR policy wonks would say that this suggestion is nonsense; that any conflict between the US and China is just the rational, mechanistic outcome of two world powers who are both vying to secure their own interests. But for my part I will acknowledge that, yes, there is a racial element to the designation of China in particular as a geopolitical adversary, as opposed to some other nation. Ceteris paribus, I would prefer for world power to remain concentrated in the hands of European and European-derived peoples, as opposed to non-European peoples. (This is largely already a doomed project due to the ongoing mestizofiction of America, but, you know, you can't win 'em all...) And I particularly don't want power to rest with the Chinese, who have produced a civilization that (in its current phase of historical development at any rate) I view as uniquely soulless and utilitarian. (I do not view all non-Europeans, or even all East Asians, as exactly equivalent in this regard; if Japan were in China's position instead, I would be welcoming them as liberators!)

The Chinese, too, have a sense of centrality and irreplaceability. They too believe that they have a world historical mission to be the center of world civilization. Very well then, we shall see who prevails.

But all this only goes so far as influencing the fundamental choice to take up the conflict in the first place; it has no bearing on the strategic considerations for how the conflict should actually be navigated. China is obviously very powerful and capable, and it would be the height of foolishness to underestimate them as a nation of "trinket producers".

Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal.

A change in American economic policy sent global markets into a tailspin, so objectively speaking, America is in fact a big deal.

I can only say that engaging with the Chinese, and with people like you, has gradually convinced me that White People (Hajnali European stock specifically) are basically jumped-up serfs, the confused lower caste of prawns from District 9, with little more to offer to the world sans stale kanging and hollow, corporate-coded pretense of “soul” that, if it ever existed, resided in your currently extinct owners. You don't even notice my point about simple economics and logistics, so lost you are in your racial superiority masturbation. But of course those issues are related.

if Japan were in China's position instead

But it isn't, and you are largely responsible for that, because your previous generation had the exact same attitude towards the Japanese. Deaths from overwork, rigid hierarchy, soulless collectivist automatons cheating and copying to flood the markets and dispossess our Christian Germanic workers – this can't be allowed, can it? Oh, what a pity that now that we know them better, Japan is a geriatric country of no ambition, that mainly produces anime to give you some respite from the toxic antihuman sludge of your own media. (Presumably this is the fault of Joos. Somehow for all your natural nobility of spirit you are not capable of resisting a tiny tribe of natural wordcels. At least the Chinese managed to overthrow the Manchu).

Regrettably, China is 10 times larger and the same tricks won't work.

A change in American economic policy sent global markets into a tailspin, so objectively speaking, America is in fact a big deal.

Yes, you can do a great deal of damage to humanity. This is akin to the bafflingly swinish line of argument that “China needs us more than we need them, because they need to sell their valuable manufactured goods to someone; our consumption is more valuable than production”. We shall see how well this philosophy works.

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You don't even notice my point about simple economics and logistics

No, I did notice your point about economics and logistics. But your point wasn't relevant. The likelihood of winning a conflict has little relevance to whether that conflict should be waged in the first place.

Ironically, and contrary to your accusation, it is the serf who acts in accordance with prudence and rationality. The serf is a serf precisely because he correctly calculates that servitude is what gives him the best odds of continued survival. The nobleman, in contrast, acts in accordance with virtue, even when the outcome is certain destruction.

A Nietzsche quote for every situation:

Noble and common. - For common natures all noble, magnanimous feelings appear to be inexpedient and therefore initially incredible: they give a wink when they hear of such things and seem to want to say, 'Surely there must be some advantage involved; one cannot see through every wall' - they are suspicious of the noble person, as if he were furtively seeking his advantage. If they become all too clearly convinced of the absence of selfish intentions and gains, they view the noble person as a kind of fool: they despise him in his pleasure and laugh at the sparkle in his eye. 'How could one enjoy being at a disadvantage? How could one want with open eyes to be disadvantaged? Some disease of reason must be linked to the noble affection' - thus they think and look disparagingly, the way they disparage the pleasure that a madman derives from his fixed idea. What distinguishes the common nature is that it unflinchingly keeps sight of its advantage, and that this thought of purpose and advantage is even stronger than its strongest drives; not to allow these drives to lead it astray to perform inexpeditious acts - that is its wisdom and self-esteem. In comparison, the higher nature is more unreasonable - for the noble, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing person does in fact succumb to his drives; and in his best moments, his reason pauses. An animal that protects its young at the risk of its own life or during the mating period follows the female unto death does not think of danger and death; its reason likewise pauses because the pleasure in its brood or in the female and the fear of being deprived of this pleasure dominate it totally; the animal becomes stupider than it usually is - just like the person who is noble and magnanimous. [...]

The likelihood of winning a conflict has little relevance to whether that conflict should be waged in the first place.

It actually has a lot of relevance. The real reason you act like it doesn't is that you do not seriously engage with the possibility of losing, and losing badly (losing what? To what degree? How many cards do you have left at the point of losing, and what terms can be negotiated?). People make unreasonable maximalist demands when they are assured of their invulnerability. You treat a great power conflict like another Middle Eastern adventure, “oh we found WMDs in this shithole, our Democracy will perish if we do not conquer it hue hue!”. It's an instinct that's hard to overcome after a century of uninterrupted wins and cost-free losses. The same Main Character Syndrome, coupled with low human capital in Trump team, explains decidedly suboptimal and cost-insensitive means that were chosen for prosecuting the conflict. Americans think they can afford anything, because that's recorded in their institutional DNA. But they have never fought a superior power, due to it never having existed prior to this day. So they have developed an auxiliary belief that the very fact of them antagonizing any power confirms it is inferior. It's hard to feel pity for such a narcissistic people.

it is the serf who acts in accordance with prudence and rationality. The serf is a serf precisely because he correctly calculates that servitude is what gives him the best odds of continued survival. The nobleman, in contrast, acts in accordance with virtue, even when the outcome is certain destruction.

In Imperial Russia, there was a trend when mujiks, LARPing as nobles, initiated duels over petty spats, murdering each other with axes; eventually the state had to put its boot down. Due to extremely low literacy rates they couldn't have plausibly cited Nietzsche when doing so, but I believe that they'd have appreciated your quote.

Self-serving, petulant, handwavy, shallowly aesthetic notions of virtue are cheap and easy to brandish in defense of one's animalistic impulses; any kind of impulsive retardation can be dressed up as a calling of aristocratic, virile masculine nature, there's a whole genre of extremely popular Western music about it, authored by the impromptu warrior aristocracy of the streets. Your own elite has been wiped out to such a degree that this whole discourse is vacuous, we can't consult with a living bearer of a tradition, only speculate. It is plausible that I am wrong and there's just never been any substance to the whole fraud.

It actually has a lot of relevance. The real reason you act like it doesn't is that you do not seriously engage with the possibility of losing, and losing badly (losing what? To what degree?

I am well aware that losing is a live possibility, and I know exactly what losing would look like. Losing means a Guangxi Massacre in every American town and city. Losing means obliteration; losing means being consigned to the graveyard of civilizations. Still we press on.

Given that your deepest yearning is for technology to liberate us from life as it has existed hitherto, it is unsurprising that you find these values to be unintelligible.

Losing means a Guangxi Massacre in every American town and city.

It's not clear what must happen for the world to end up like this, but America is a nation of dreamers; I suppose you can effect even this result if you keep pressing on. However, my optimistic theory of American loss is that due to constant bluffing and irresponsible policy epilepsy the USD loses its status as reserve currency, your fraudulent markets deflate, your internal racial contradictions bloom, and after a while you get a lot quieter and less obnoxious as your living standards crash down to roughly Polish level, which is actually very neat and, given your current course, more than you deserve. The traffic to your shores dies down, as mandated by the Great Leader Donald Ieyasu Trump; the rest of humanity, free of the loathsome star-spangled yoke, peacefully trades and gets richer, while you lick your wounded pride and dream of revenge.

A median scenario is that you simply accept the existence of a bigger guy on the block (bloodlessly, or after trying your luck one last time in the South China Sea) and retreat to your hemisphere, living much the same lives as today.

And I suspect that you know this. But it's too painful to imagine such a world, a boring high-probability world where the sky didn't fall, but you're no longer the uncontested Main Character Nation. Visions of massacres and genocides are anesthetic in comparison, they return you to the familiar domain of Marvel movies. Any Avengers-Level Threat, by laws of narrative, ultimately gets defeated, so there really aren't any stakes or hard decisions to make this way.

I would happily accept either of these worlds. Certainly they sound much better than where things seemed to be heading as of last year.

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Great Leader Donald Ieyasu Trump

That should be Iemitsu if you are looking for whoever enacted sakoku.

Self-serving, petulant, handwavy, shallowly aesthetic notions of virtue are cheap and easy to brandish in defense of one's animalistic impulses; any kind of impulsive retardation can be dressed up as a calling of aristocratic, virile masculine nature, there's a whole genre of extremely popular Western music about it, authored by the impromptu warrior aristocracy of the streets. Your own elite has been wiped out to such a degree that this whole discourse is vacuous, we can't consult with a living bearer of a tradition, only speculate. It is plausible that I am wrong and there's just never been any substance to the whole fraud.

Missed your writing. Glad you’ve rejoined us briefly in this transitional period while we no doubt wait for ASI to materialize and save/destroy us.

But they have never fought a superior power, due to it never having existed prior to this day.

America fought Britain twice and the Ottoman Empire once when they were far superior powers.

I know. This was a completely different America, it's like saying that Moscow was once conquered by Poles or something (Russians are very proud of that episode, thanks to propaganda in history lessons, but obviously there is no memory, institutional legacy or military tradition that survived) – a dim fact people learn in school. America that lives today was born in the Civil War and was fully formed in McKinley's era, probably. Since then, it was straight up dunking on weaker powers. With some tasteless underdog posturing from time to time, of course.

Russians are very proud of that episode

Really, very proud? Because, against all odds, it ended with Romanov dynasty rather than a Polish king, or did you mean to write 'Poles' there?

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At least the Chinese managed to overthrow the Manchu

An intellectual like yourself is no doubt familiar with the extensive Chinese online theories that they secretly control the CCP.

I do know this and I wonder how that coexists with the common East Asian respect for the Hebrews. Have they considered playing one great tribe against another? Or learning the Manchu ways to beat them at their own game, like Koreans try with Talmud? I should ask.

My own impression (and you are likely more familiar than I) is that most Chinese never think about the Jews, a smaller group of boomers and people interested in international politics are vaguely or in rare cases substantially philosemitic, and then young very right wing men online are antisemitic in a vintage /pol/ type way, hate Israel etc.

Some have crawled deeper into a similar rabbit hole and instead declare that China hasn't existed since the Song or the Ming.

To the user who reported this comment with:

can we not have wumaos invade this forum?

lol. Dase has been productively commenting since before you knew this forum existed.

That said, I’m going to remind him not to put words in other peoples’ mouths. Especially not with this level of sarcasm.

Speak for yourself, serf.

What I see is the inverse. The professional managerial class seems to have internalized this idea that intelligent reasonable moral people should not exercise agency.. That intelligent reasonable and moral person does not just do things, and if they do the inescapable conclusion is the individual in question is not reasonable, not intelligent, not moral, and possibly not even a person.

Ironically this valorization of non-agency and the demonizing of those like Elon Musk and Daniel Penney who break from this is itself the road to serfdom. The serf is a serf because he prefers the guarantees of servitude to the risks of being a free agent.

He's a spurned Russian nationalist who has run into the arms of the Chinese. A tragic outcome I don't wish of the Russians writ large. Being a serf isn't a problem so much as a traitor. Justifying that, welcoming the Chinese overlords, on the accusation of Europeans of being serfs is... interesting especially given this criticism is in context of the erratic behavior of high-agency people rocking the boat, like you said.

This is of course a projection of your own tribalism and your own deluded moral framework.

Your problem is that your only guiding light, the only salvation you see for your people, is Nazism, and Nazism is still quite degenerate and NGMI. I won't talk of its moral merits, it's just strategically bad because it's aestheticized desperation and refuge from hopelessness in animalistic impulses. A stronk chieftain (high agency!), will to power (rock the boat!), blood-based tribal identity, vibes over facts… in effect, reject modernity, retvrn by rolling back the evolutionary clock 9000 years, to where an average European was a fat bipolar slob with 65 IQ. Nazism was swiftly crushed by Capitalism and Communism. 80 years later, they remain the dominant forces on the planet and continue their dialectic and coevolution. You like to think that Judaism is still more important, the root of all evil. Well, it's underrated for obvious reasons, I'll give you that, but Earth is a big place, and your struggle with Joos is ultimately quite parochial.

I have observed many sincere Nazis over the years and most are suicidal. It doesn't have to be this way. Accept that the dream of Aryan greatness is dead, but you can live if you accept this world on its own terms, where your people have some advantages and disadvantages entirely irrespective of “jewish manipulation” or “suicidal empathy” or what have you, and need to manage them soberly. In particular this requires a good understanding of where you stand relative to that huge chunk of humanity in East Asia. One approach is to cope with 4chan gifs of tortured dogs and industrial accidents, or the book of Ralph Townsend. Another is to grow the fuck up.

And yet you run into the arms of National Socialism with Chinese Characteristics... No, Nazism is a dead political movement, not something to be treated as a cheap foreign import. I want to see something new, not trying to rehash a dead ideology, and certainly not turning traitor and running for the embrace of the Chinese who hold those same racial sensibilities you mock Europeans for, and which Europeans do not themselves actually hold.

You simultaneously mock Europeans for being "not capable of resisting a tiny tribe of natural wordcels" and for being parochial when they do voice resistance. You just hate Europeans, particularly the West Europeans, you see them as your enemy and you always have. It's unfortunate. Whatever you accuse me of, my hope for the future is fundamentally pro-European, I want the best for Europe and the United States and I do not want to see them under Chinese hegemony. That's not the future I wish for Russia either. You can mock the suicidal Nazis, I will mock the despondent Russian nationalists who have decided to become Chinese nationalists to have some sort of vent for their understandable but misguided hatred of Europe.

National Socialism with Chinese Characteristics...

It's a funny joke but really, they're not any more National Socialist than any normal European state was before WWII. They are quite different from historical Nazis. They have a representation for minorities (even repressed ones) and affirmative action, they have legalized gender transition, they employ open furries in the PLA (explicitly as fursuit engineers, to develop next generation combat armor). Their notions of “degeneracy” or “racial hygiene” would be quite alien to Germans. The basic level of care for the ethnic majority is just what a state is supposed to do. And Socialism – that they owe to being literally Marxists, with a big portrait of Marx in their main hall of power and stuff. They're far more Capitalist than the Third Reich was, too. Xi has restored the cult of personality, though. Seriously speaking, it's its own complex thing, and should be considered on its own merits in its own historical context, not as a copy or a pastiche of Western paradigms. When all is said and done they're just a modernized Chinese empire.

You simultaneously mock Europeans for being "not capable of resisting a tiny tribe of natural wordcels"

I apologize. My sarcasm there may have been too confusing. I don't think Jews are solely guilty for the quality of your media. Jews, from what I can tell, genuinely like their sermonizing slop, but so does the audience, and creators are increasingly Gentiles too. I think you just have ran out of gas. Particularly Americans. Your culture is vulgar and plain bad, and you should feel bad about it. Your mavericks are sleazy hustlers at best and psychopaths at worst, and you do not resist your worst impulses to bow before the undeserving strongman. You come up with zany and harmful ideas and then force them upon everybody else. Thus, you are what has to be resisted now, at least until you improve somehow.

You just hate Europeans, particularly the West Europeans, you see them as your enemy and you always have.

I don't hate Europeans. I am disappointed in you. In you collectively and in you, SecureSignals, personally. You are less than what I figured, you don't deliver on the crucial advertised open-mindedness and ability-to-change-opinions features, and you take pride in stuff that's completely meh or plainly disgusting. You're like some purebred dogs. Remarkable, peculiar, WEIRD phenotype, but no spark, or almost never. Disappointing.

and I do not want to see them under Chinese hegemony

And at the rate you're going, you may well see Chinese hegemony. It is indeed unfortunate because the Chinese themselves never had it in them to establish one, I don't think. Too insular, too mercantile, too autistically uncharismatic, and frankly not capable enough to dismantle natural affinities and alliances. They'd have secured their backyard and grew content to have limited trade with barbarians, and this was the scenario I still consider preferable. But a few more iterations of low-IQ, smug WINNING and ROCKING THE BOAT, and who knows, they may have to pick up the crown tossed their way.

And the ironic thing is that all this is because you'd have wanted your own hegemony, because for all the denialism – the dream, the hope of being Intrinsically Racially Superior, crushing lessers under the jackboot, still lives and yearns for confirmation. Alas.

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internalized this idea that intelligent reasonable moral people should not exercise agency

This is a better treatment: https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/315895?context=8#context

So how has this intelligent reasonable agency worked out for you? Not tired of winning yet?

It's actually been working out reasonably well. So no, I am not "tired of winning" yet.

Godspeed! More wins to come then.

This is largely already a doomed project due to the ongoing mestizofiction of America, but, you know, you can't win 'em all...

Latinos are reasonably western euro, certainly moreso than Slavs.

Suppose you wake up tomorrow morning, and find that, worse than Gregor Samsa, your consciousness has been transmigrated into the skull of The Donald. Further, the divine agency enacting this alteration has placed an aegis upon you, such that you cannot blow your brains out in horror; for your many sins, you have been given the penance of wielding great power to Make Things Better.

What do you do? What does "better" look like, and how do you steer things to get there? Assume that, like Trump, you are not particularly bound by norms or even your own prior positions, that you have a great deal of sway over ~50% of the American public, and that you have more-or-less full control of the dominant political party which currently has tenuous control over all three branches of Government. What would the plan be?

I don't want my country to rule China. I certainly don't want to be ruled by them, but I stubbornly believe it's possible to step back from what I perceive to be a long-metastasizing American global empire and to move toward a world where we get our own country working and simply leave other people alone. I'm open to the idea that Trump is a swinish idiot and I am as well, but what does actual wisdom look like? Was it a good idea to help build China into the unrivaled manufacturing and arguably economic colossus that it currently seems to be? I'm pretty sure it wasn't a good idea to try to invade and destroy multiple other countries in the name of "spreading democracy", but maybe you disagree? Was Biden on the right track? Obama? Bush? Or if the string of presidents preceding Trump were all cold, merciless imperial manipulators and Trump is a moronic rampaging swine, can it really be that both of these things are perfectly equally awful, or is one in some way preferable to the other?

There's a thing you wrote one time, about how your people and mine could never be friends, that our relationship would always be conducted across gunsights. Maybe so. But I, at least, have zero desire to actually start shooting, and I perceive the people on my side who want to start shooting, who believe the conflict to be innate and existential, as the enemy that is innate and existential to me. Maybe this is naive. Maybe the perspective I perceive from you is correct, that everything is doomed and the evil always win, and no matter how things change they always change for the worse.

A year ago, the narrative was that Trump could not win, and that if he did win nothing would actually change. Now the narrative is that he's changing everything for the worse. Maybe so! I'm waiting to see what the next updates say, though.

your people and my people could never be friends

What were “his people” and “your people”, in this context?

Russians and Anglos, IIRC. His framing, not mine, but the point seemed reasonable. Given our history, particularly post-USSR, I do not expect Russians to assume Anglos are pursuing cooperation with them in good faith.

There are so many things wrong with what Trump is doing that I find it silly to write a serious response. Literally an LLM would manage. For one thing, accept Von Der Leyen's offer of mutual tariff drop, that's enough of a “win” for your base and an actual economic boon! Apologize to Denmark and negotiate expanded military presence in Greenland under the existing framework. Offer China a mutual reduction in tariffs for sectors where you actually cannot back up your confidence. Tell Bukele to send back the wantonly arrested innocents for a fair trial. Stop gutting STEM research institutions. Crush or pay off the longshoremen, abolish Jones act. Buy a shitton of equipment for manufacturing drones. Put a few bombers on Guam instead of in Afghanistan, send a garrison onto Taiwan. It's not really complicated, he's done too many errors.

Was it a good idea to help build China into the unrivaled manufacturing and arguably economic colossus that it currently seems to be? I'm pretty sure it wasn't a good idea to try to invade and destroy multiple other countries in the name of "spreading democracy", but maybe you disagree? Was Biden on the right track?

Many questions. Was it a good idea to help build China? Probably not, but was it a bad idea to exploit their growth for salvaging your own one? I guess not again. Invasions? I think that was dumb. Biden? Yes, I think that Biden, or rather the system behind his limp body, was highly effective in reaching at least some subset of relevant goals of the Empire, it was going pretty smoothly. I am surprised to see them so thoroughly vanquished so fast.

How to deescalate? Oh, that's a big one. I think it's psychologically impossible, the US isn't willing to be #2, even if that carries none or minimal material demerits. Neither is Xi willing to give up on his system, or on Taiwan. History will decide.


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