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See, people seem to read that into any ambiguity I leave in my writings.
But that's quite far from what I'd actually want or even suggest for society. I do not, in fact, think that we need to make blacks into second-class citizens, or strip voting rights from women, or created mandates for childbirths.
I'm mostly in favor of radical individualism, I may be the most nonracist person on this entire board, insofar as I consciously, deliberately choose to judge every single person I meet on their own merits, by their own behavior, and accept their words as truthful in good faith until proven otherwise.
But that runs smack into the reality that a lot of people are not well-suited to run their own lives and this is very detectable in the larger aggregate outcomes.
So when I look at broader statistics, I feel very comfortable discussing them as concrete facts about the world, and proposing the hopefully least intrusive intervention that might improve on the current equilibrium.
Western women are getting less content with life.
Young western men are getting lonely, discouraged, and angry.
A LOT of immigrants in the U.S. are a net economic drain.
Boomers are clinging to wealth and power well into old age, to the detriment of later generations.
Religious groups have higher TFR.
Non-White groups tend to vote for Democrats, Whites are the biggest racial bloc for the GOP.
Ashkenazi Jews have a significantly higher average IQ than the global average. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
Kenyans are better at long-distance running than virtually any other group. All signs point to this being very genetic, partially cultural.
I find none of this distressing to discuss, there are many ways to divide up society to try and model the effects of various policies.
I literally just want to have a social order that grants people maximum autonomy, but also a culture that provides basic life scripts that young people can follow to produce generally good outcomes in their life if they're not particularly intelligent and agentic. Complete High School, Get Married, have kids is a pretty decent one.
And, OF COURSE, I want elites/politicians to have skin in the game.
The one thing that genuinely peeves me off is when I see people in positions of power/authority making absolutely DUNDERHEADED policy decisions, causing untold amounts of suffering or economic loss, and then skating off unscathed because they had no direct stake in the outcome/were poised to benefit either way.
So as you can imagine, I maintain an ongoing level of simmering disdain for a lot of our current political class.
Yep. There's an element of faith required, and that seems to be in shorter supply. People don't know what to believe in, what purpose to work towards, or what the 'point' of it all is.
If a king genuinely believed in an all-powerful creator who could and would punish them eternally after death, that would indeed incentivize 'better' behavior during their life.
That's all, just pointing out how the removal of a deity (and the threat of hell/promised reward of heaven) leaves us with very few tools for guiding human behavior.
Unless you're arguing that there is a hard limit on how long humans can live, ingrained at a biological level, I don't see this as discouraging.
Not just your writings. Thing is, the people who want the RETVRN generally have an entire detailed vision of what the society is supposed to look like at the endpoint (even if they arrived to the vision entirely by calculating exactly what will trigger the libs the hardest). While the people who see the problems with the status quo but are closer to
than Handmaid's Tale, and I'm including myself into that group... generally don't. So speaking loudly about problems with the status quo in a certain perspective becomes a heuristic for certain assumptions.
It also doesn't help when you write things like "I THINK WE'RE ABOUT TO SEE [what happens when too many young men are hopeless and angry]" in all caps. It reads like you're rooting for the civil war.
Indeed.
Indeed. And I'm specifying that in this case it's specifically faith that not only things are going to be bad, and not only that they can be made better, but that the windows for going to be bad and able to be made better intersect just right.
In that case it does not look like elites were ever selected for their genuine belief. Genuine belief appears to be the kind of thing that was mostly for the downtrodden classes and the kind of clergy that was secluded in monasteries and not making too much political noise.
I'm not well-versed enough in biology to confidently state a number, no. But from what I know, organs tend to wear out and fail, the very structure of bones tends to become brittle, telomeres in your DNA shorten with time and gradually stop protecting you from runaway cancers, and brains degrade to senility. To my knowledge we have not yet found ways to reliably halt even one of those processes. I said 120 years because this is the current world record for where the combination of genetics + personal decisionmaking + medicine can get you. So when the first human lives to 150, I expect it to be because of massive breakthroughs in medicine.
And I won't even deny that those are valid heuristics.
But its so often used as a means of just writing off the whole discussion.
"Only a Fascist would notice this facet of the world and dare to comment on it."
Okay fine, call me that if you want, but we either discuss it or I suspect certain bad things are going to happen. (note, I'm not accusing you of accusing me of being fascist)
By making it so only the icky right wingers can talk about an issue, a REAL issue, guess whose proposed solutions will end up gaining the most traction?
Anyhow, if anyone is curious as to my preferred solutions or the shape of society I prefer, I can happily explain all that. I don't hide the ball, and I'll bite virtually any bullet when it comes to defending my stance.
Even then, they had to keep up some level of appearances for greater societal buy-in. This is after all why Henry VIII had to go to such massive lengths to divorce his wife, since he had to at least pretend that God's rules were binding him.
I mean honestly, I suspect that's why religiosity is so aggressively waning. The elites/upper classes have abandoned its constraints, and nothing obviously bad is happening to them, so the classes that take their cues from those with higher status are simply learning by example.
Sure hit me
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