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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35328 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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That paper did not predict an outbreak in May. It is a wargame that seems to have chosen its start date arbitrarily, as is the norm for these sorts of things. And, note that under the scenario discussed, the initial outbreak is in June of 2022, not May. Note also that the monkeypox variant in the scenario is airborne, since the paper states that measures like social distancing and mask mandates were effective at reducing transmission.

Sharing power is what Trump offered. An American civic nationalism, an ethnogenesis, an ethnic fusion. Everybody gives up their other identities and becomes American and adopts American values. Everybody of every colour and creed becomes ethnically American, no hyphenation. This was rejected. Perhaps someone will be able to do it, but TPTB do not want this.

Oh? What are these "ethnic American values"? How much is everyone required to give up? It's hardly giving something up, after all, if what you call "ethic American values" just happen to be your own. You say no more hyphenation, I imagine the first to step in should be European-Americans.

Umm, recent racial tensions are mostly rising between whites and blacks, though, and blacks are both not increasing as a share of population and not exactly new(they’ve mostly been here longer than most white Americans). There’s also that African immigrants would probably mostly side with whites against African Americans.

A national divorce along racial lines is implausible- historically, the only things that have shut down state power have been either 1) inhospitable terrain plus small rewards or 2) another state.

I don’t see genocidal intentions from new Americans. Can you provide a source on this?

If you look at the marital choices of the most voricious woke POC female leaders like AOC, Jackson, Omar, etc they universally choose white husbands that they subsequently breed with. Doesn’t seem like a great strategy if their intentions are to kill off their own progeny

Are the enough PMC black husbands to go around?

Any view if Omar's prior husband was her brother?

I don’t see genocidal intentions from new Americans. Can you provide a source on this?

Read the dude's user handle, and ask yourself "do I really expect this guy to respond in good faith?"

Given some of their other comments this is almost certainly a sock-puppet/troll account.

I don't think appealing to "ethnogenesis" is a steelman for not that many people (despite what certain users here want to believe). I also don't think its a steelman because those warm to the idea of a divorce (mostly Red Tribers) don't put forward this same argument.

Here's my attempt at what I think is a superior steelman.

Think of a literal marital divorce.

Oftentimes a couple divorces not because either side is bad or in the morally wrong. But because they can't tolerate each other.

It's often easier to just let each person go their own way than having to force a person to either become a completely different person or deal with someone they can't tolerate. Forcing someone to do this would be a form of psychological torture depending on how much they differ.

Much in the same way. Two groups of people within a country might be find each other intolerable. This doesn't mean either of them are wrong or bad, their values and lifestyles are incompatible.

Forcing one group to be ruled by the other, follow their values, be told what to do, is all the equivalent of psychological torture.

If their differences are vast enough there is no peaceful solution but separation, that preserves at least one of the groups identity. The alternatives are non peaceful solutions or one group assimilating into the other.

So if we aim to preserve both groups identities, and maintain peace, a divorce is the only card at hand. Because making them tolerate each other is torture.

Whoops totally missed that. Will repost as comment there

largest breach in American-German trust since the NSA spying debacle last decade

I would feel fairly comfortable in saying that it would be larger than that. Spying won't win you friends, but it's been a tacit axiom of geopolitics since the founding of Jericho that everyone spies on everyone. Damaging critical (not to mention obscenely expensive) national infrastructure, however? Wars have started over much less.

If this is Biden's doing I commend him for his pluck. I have my problems with NATO, but Ostpolitik really should've died with the USSR. There is nothing redeeming about Putin's Russia.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tno6nPT66RM

Have we talked about Georgia Meloni’s powerful speech? A few days ago half my twitter feed was talking about.

I believe she is fundamentally correct that we have robbed society of their identity and tried to replace it with whatever pronouns are.

The consumer stuff gets a little silly but whatever it sounds good. Need to have an enemy your fighting against.

My pro nouns are

Man, American, Catholic, Son.

I think makes a strong implication that gender identity and whole pronoun thing is for those without roots. Empty people.

Sorry you’re getting downvoted. There’s nothing wrong per se with what you said; you just need to stretch it out over five paragraphs in order to be in compliance with the etiquette of this forum.

  • -15

That's not accurate and you know it.

Don't be obnoxious.

I can't seem to report comments at the moment, but you can put in more effort than importing Twitter takes.

I think it's, frankly, kind of dumb. There are plenty of trans people whom I know of who have families (in the sense of a spouse, children, and relatives). The idea that trans people, or people who support trans rights, are opposed to the idea of "family" seems straightforwardly false. Indeed, a large concern among trans people (I'm given to believe) is how their family will react to their coming out. Not quite the concerns of someone opposed to the idea of a family! Similarly I know of plenty of trans people who conceive themselves as "woman" or "man", as "husband" or "wife" and have no issue with cis people identifying similarly.

On the religious front, there are christian denominations that are welcoming to trans people. Almost certainly there are trans people who identify as much with "Christian" or "Catholic" as you would. I'm confident this holds for national identity as well, though I don't have citations to hand.

I think it's a pretty standard speech blaming minorities in a society for its perceived decay regardless of the actual facts.

Did you listen to the speech? I don't see any blaming of minorities. The transgender culture and movement is toxic to families and there is limited data on the long term prognosis for children raised by transgender parents which I'm sure will be censored if anyone at all is studying the topic, which I imagine is impossible in academia now. Transgender people are mentally ill, unfit for raising children, and absolutely disgust me and I'm tired of pretending they don't.

Transgender people are mentally ill, unfit for raising children, and absolutely disgust me and I'm tired of pretending they don't.

Well, you don't have to pretend you aren't disgusted by them.

You do, however, have to follow the rules of discourse which still apply in our new space. Trans people are welcome to post here, there probably are a few around, and blankly asserting that they are all mentally ill, unfit for raising children, and disgusting, isn't acceptable. Just like you can talk about HBD, crime rates, your pet theories about the Holocaust, redpill philosophy, etc., but you cannot just say "black people/Jews/women suck." Even if that is what you believe.

You are right I will take heed

While I agree with the rest I find this curious:

blankly asserting that they are all mentally ill

But aren't they sufferers of Body Dysmorphia which was (is?) a mental illness? or why would they want to change their body if it wasn't a mental illness? Are you asserting that being trans is normal?

This has come up before, and it really depends on the tone in which you are making the statement. It's one thing to say that you do not believe that anyone has a "gendered brain" or is "born in the wrong body," and that trans people who genuinely feel these things are suffering from body dysmorphia, i.e., a literal mental illness. That allows room for reasonable discussions that don't just express contempt, like, "Okay, so how should we treat these people? Do we allow them to identify as the gender they think they are, or do we argue that therapy would be more useful?" While a lot of trans people would still object to those discussions (which is ironically a major part of the reason why we are here and no longer on reddit, sigh), reasonable people can treat these as legitimate arguments that can be made in good faith. As opposed to just saying "Trans people are crazy and disgusting."

The thing is, though... If you look at all of the monikers she mentioned, each of them forms a group that is a lucrative target for vast amounts of consumerism. There's certainly a lot of nation-related consumerist goods; I'd imagine that during the World Cup, and at other times too, you are going to make a buck selling various fan gear in Italian flag colors, just as during the last IIHF world cup (ie. hockey) in my hometown every second person on the street seemed to be wearing a hockey shirt in Finnish flag colors. Secularized as the society is, there's still a plenty of Christianity-themed consumer goods going around - even in largely post-Christian Finland, cross necklaces aren't uncommon. Women, of course, are a huge consumer segment, and even a male parent can't help but encounter an imposing amount of maternity consumerism of various sorts.

You can say the same about virtually any identity you can imagine though. Any identifiable group of people can be marketed to. Does that mean it’s conceptually impossible to have an identity outside of consumerism? It seems like that argument proves too much.

That’s because she doesn’t view those things in terms of consumerist angles. Christianity is god, church, morals, faith, etc. It’s not wearing a trinket. Same thing with your nation. It’s where your ancestors grew up. It’s your national history’s. It’s shared memory. For many it’s shared values (once upon a time the US Constitution was considered special by the left and right and a moral document on how people will live together as much as a rule of law).

For family it’s things like Christmas. But not the presents under the tree. It’s spending time with loved ones over Holidays.

You almost make her point for her. These are things of identity. It’s not about wearing your nations flag for the World Cup and getting drunk at the pub while posting Instagram stories.

we have robbed society of their identity and tried to replace it with whatever pronouns are.

I'm not a fan of trans ideology or wokism in general but you need to do better than "wE lIvE iN a SociEty" level takes.

Wokism as an ideology and wokism and its symbols being a standin for a tribal identity is not some novel analysis.

Wokism as an ideology and wokism and its symbols being a standin for a tribal identity is not some novel analysis.

It's hard to find truly novel analysis about anything. People devote their their lives to doing just that-- authors, professors, etc.- Finding novel insights is very hard; hard enough that every year some important people convene in Stockholm to award people who have done just that a million dollars. A famous intellectual with a decades-long career may only have a handful of actual original insights (Dawkins and selfish gene, for example). Also, there is so much content being produced that the odds are close to 100% that it's already been done.

She quoted Chesterton. My jaw dropped, what do I have to do to get a politician in my neck of the woods to do that?

I think the anglosphere right have been burned too much by talking the talk but not walking the walk for anyone to get excited about more words, however passionate and pleasing they may sound.

When she takes some decisive actions, maybe then she'll become a champion. Not before.

What evidence is there that financial speculators are the right people to blame for what she is complaining about?

It depends what is meant by financial speculators. There were a number of Jews on Twitter that seemed to think she was talking about them.

My take was corporations with access to capital markets that use cheap debt to 'disrupt' existing commerce chasing growth while searching for a path to profitability. The marketing and PR for these companies is typically on-board with the current thing.

I see them as both the corporations and their financiers.

'Financial speculator' is a good intuitive descriptor for the more abstract 'commodifier'. The essence of neoliberal capitalism is that it turns every human attribute into a form of capital and every cultural artifact into a commodity. Everywhere it seeks to produce systems of winners and losers, and it desires that everything be packaged up and sold. Are 'financial speculators' in the narrow sense responsible for all this? Not wholly, no, but they serve as a useful synecdoche. The mindset of the forex trader or the rolex flipper is very much the sentient manifestation of neoliberal ideology, just as the mindset of the brutal cop is a sort of sentient fascism.

Financial speculator' is a good intuitive descriptor for the more abstract 'commodifier'. The essence of neoliberal capitalism is that it turns every human attribute into a form of capital and every cultural artifact into a commodity.

I think this view is flawed. neoliberal capitalism doesn't do that, it recognizes that this already happens naturally as we better understand the world around us. At every level of business if communication is possible there are immense benefits to scale and specialization. This goes all the way up the chain and naturally has all these effects you dislike. This is not some memetic belief system infecting the people that we can wipe and then return to our idyllic past. This is a force of nature that can only be combatted by forcing isolation from the nation outward and within the polity itself if too large. And even that would fail to outside interference with competition. This is Moloch. One does not slay Moloch so easily for he is deep in our nature.

Tariffs and regulation are probably sufficient.

I don't think so unless you're ready for the quality of life to drastically reduce and to become a global backwater entirely dependent on allies. You'd need to totally isolate your markets or your internal market simply can't compete and will collapse immediately.

Not true. Even if we assume that neoliberal capitalism is unassailably efficient, the inefficiencies induced by a socialist system would in many cases not be very great and could be protected with relatively modest tarriffs. And of course for many (perhaps most) industries, a regulated market is the best solution, as well evidenced by the real world.

Khmer Rouge and Ancapistan are two ends of a very long spectrum.

Very little of that spectrum is devoid of molochian tendencies though. Moloch is able to instantiate itself within even moderately small economies. especially if exposed to a global information source. Maybe my critique is better express in more concrete terms. If you can only really know 300 people, and I'm being generous here, and you want to know the people responsible for your various staples and customs then you're going to quickly run out of your 300 person budget. How many of those people are doing your sewer work, without economies of scale how many of them are cobbling your shoes and keeping your clothing patched up? Producing your food? Nearly zero of them are producing entertainment for you. Modern day man's consumption is the center of a web of many millions, isolating your economy isn't just a matter of cutting off some dubious Disney channels, it's paying a lot more for everything, including essentials and many going without for that fact. Those people are going to see what your vision costs them in very real and personal terms. If you can sell them on the vision you still need to deal with the fact that a collection of strong independant local communities are reliant on the kindness of other geopolitical actors to prevent their pillaging on a global stage. How do you produce cars if companies can't be allowed to grow so large that they commoditize the workers? let alone warships.

Limited. The corps do push wokeism (not speculators it’s the PMC; most speculators lean right). I think they push it because of anti-discrimination laws in the US which means they can’t say anything back about the ideas pushed by wokes or they could open themselves up to a lawsuit. So in that sense she correct that trans ideology has capture Disney etc.

Financial speculators are a much more specific group than corporations. Also, this is Italy, not the US. Do they have a similar phenomenon of companies going woke to avoid discrimination lawsuits?

American media and tech dominate the globe.

I think she’s using financial speculators as a fill in for corps. The culture wars aren’t about some autistic SBF type sitting in a basement running algos. But American corporates do dominate. And that ties into consumption a lot better.

I believe she is fundamentally correct that we have robbed society of their identity and tried to replace it with whatever pronouns are.

Pronouns are words that serve as stand-ins within a sentence for nouns, including the names of people and things.

You should be more precise here. Have we robbed the individual members of society of their individual identities? Have we robbed the individual members of society of some shared collective identity? Or have we robbed society, considered as a gestalt, of its identity, separate from the identities of its members?

The consumer stuff gets a little silly but whatever it sounds good. Need to have an enemy your fighting against.

I'm surprised that you consider modern society to be rootless but don't see this as downstream of consumerist ideology. This is something that is widely agreed upon in anti-neoliberal circles on both the left and the right. I think that you've actually misunderstood Meloni's argument - you think she positions herself as opposed to the nebulous enemy 'pronouns', as you yourself have. In fact, she positions herself as opposed to the globalising and commodifying trends in modern capitalism and views pronouns as being simply detritus strewn in the wake of these forces. Her vision is of a reactionary and illiberal opposition to neoliberalism; I would favour a more socialist and egalitarian approach - but in any case, we would find common ground in the idea that global capitalism makes homogenised consumers of us all. You say it yourself - empty people. Consider that this may be a direct consequence of the consumption patterns that we are subjected to.

Would this, in your opinion, mainstream the Third Position on the right? I see many (most?) American right wingers still arguing that socialism has infiltrated their institutions to birth much of the social ideologies that dominate the western zeitgeist today. Maybe Europe will take the "red pill" sooner?

I'm not totally sure what you mean by the 'red pill' in this context but I will try and answer. I do not see orthodox 'Third Positionism' coming back into vogue: besides the stain of historical association, it is anachronistic - politics from an age when modernity was symbolised by screaming-fast newspaper presses and the broadcast tower at Alexandra Palace.

American right wingers don't even know what socialism is for the most part so it's barely worth listening to their opinions. However it is true that far-right parties have always been, let's say, undogmatic about economics. They just don't find it interesting. They care only about power: power over people, power over institutions.

Yeah, by "red pill" I meant if the European right will become less committed to upholding capitalism. I agree with your 2nd paragraph too, I once spoke to a paleocon from Minnesota years ago and he'd propounded the view that the alt right movement is largely Jacobin in its visioned role of the state. Which may be true, but yes, they probably don't care what political or economic system they need to employ in shaping their socio-cultural agenda. I just don't know what kind of comeback the right would do in the US, nearly all big businesses generate a lot of social capital by espousing liberal values which show no sign of going out of fashion anytime soon. Perhaps they'll just wait until the free markets "correct themselves"?

I think the ‘plan’ is to punish businesses for being woke and hope they respond rationally to incentives. Of course the right doesn’t really have the personnel to do this consistently, but you know. Baby steps.

Point of order, the "third position" is not "neo-fascist" it's old fashioned, original flavor, Benito, Franco, and Failed Austrian Painter fascist. and if it does take root I'll wager that it takes root amongst those that it took root among historically, that is black-pilled leftists.

I was thinking about her speech on my way into work today, and I realized that invalidating my identities is indeed the current work of the successor ideology. I am not allowed to be Normal, Patriotic American, Not Racist, or A Good Christian anymore, the four identities I most value.

Taking away the ability to identify as they choose is the oppression the purity spiral progressives fought against, but once they won, they kept going.

Sure you are.

I rate as 2-3 of those 4, and I'd proudly announce such to anyone I work with or know by name. It might not even get a weird look. Ads for political candidates and for trucks proudly trumpet one or another of those categories.

Yeah, you could probably draw down some ire for stating such on the wrong parts of Twitter. But in the real world? In your job and neighborhood? We can still live those values.

At my workplace two days ago, I walked in on a conversation about fast food, and one of my co-workers actually said this: “I won’t eat at Chick-fil-A because they sponsor charities that commit genocide against LGBT people in third world countries.” I looked around incredulously, but the other two people in the room just nodded sagely.

Now, this goes beyond mere bigotry. They were claiming that every meal bought at a Christian restaurant chain includes some money going to killing people for being gay. That’s a blood libel, and in that moment, I realized some people who call fundamentalist Christianity “American Taliban” or “Y’all Quaeda” are no longer joking.

I wrote a more thorough commentary on that conversation, which is depressing to hear, as a top-level.

I want to defend the broader stance and say that a fossil criticism of one organization is not the same as a blanket condemnation of Christians. Ultimately, though, I would agree with you that being anti-Christian is more acceptable than any of the other categories. Regardless of the historical justifications (which mostly cash out as "it's still punching up, right??"), this sort of conversation is depressingly plausible.

But you aren’t allowed to be those things in your public persona anymore. You can’t be a son. You can’t be a Christian. They are literally trying to repress these things at elite institutions https://www.foxnews.com/politics/air-force-academy-diversity-training-tells-cadets-to-use-words-that-include-all-genders-drop-mom-and-dad

A diversity PowerPoint says that cadets shouldn’t assume parental gender. Corporate PR in the armed forces, sure. How the hell is that exclusive of “being” a son?

“Refrain from saying things like mom or dad”

You can secretly be a son you just can’t openly be a son.

Oh, we’re interpreting this different ways. I figured it was if you don’t know—like if asking “where are your parents?”

If it is actually telling cadets not to gender their own, known parental units, then whoever wrote the guidelines is a moron. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, but I’ll grant that.

It doesn’t sound like it means if you asks someone “use neutral terms” but if you talk about yourself you shouldn’t say your a father or a son etc. Which robs people if their identity as a father or a son.

At a technical level I'd be more offended that the Academy which now produces both Airmen and Guardians recommends using "Guardians" in favor of "Mom and Dad."

Had started writing a commentary on Meloni’s speech myself but as this thread is here I'm just going to piggy back off of it.

Long story short I think that you and pretty much everyone amongst the dissident-left are alt-right are getting the causality backwards by accepting the default progressive framing of identity as correct. It's this framing that Meloni is explicitly rejecting. It's not that gender identity (along with the rest of the progressive stack) are for "empty people". It's that empty people latch on to those things as an identity because they don't have a strong identity of their own. An individual with a strong sense of self does not require affirmation of their identity from others, an individual with a strong sense of community doesn't care what his neighbors look like or how much the make so long as they are good neighbors. Preoccupation with gender identity, race, class, etc... are down stream of the social atomization. As you yourself note: @Stefferi's critique of Meloni's position could almost be read as making her point for her.

Meanwhile @DuplexFields talks about progressives fighting against the purity spiral, but was that really ever they case? Some of the oldest critiques against the entire post-modern and progressive movements come from Christian Apologists of the late 19th and early 20th century like Kipling, Lewis, and Chesterton. The characterization of progressivism by it's critics was that they were never interested in fighting oppression so much as weakening the structures that stood as bulwarks against it. They dismissing binary views of black and white, good and evil, truth and untruth as "simplistic", only to replace them with an even simpler view, a unitary view where there is only grey, and do as "do you will". Or as a more recent critic put it "when everyone is 'Super', no one is"

I think that Meloni's choice of closing quote makes this interpretation makes this interpretation explicit so here it is in it's proper context...

It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought “dogmatic,” for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought “dogmatic” to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic. Or, again, we see nothing “dogmatic” in the inspiring, but certainly most startling, theory of physical science, that we should collect facts for the sake of facts, even though they seem as useless as sticks and straws. This is a great and suggestive idea, and its utility may, if you will, be proving itself, but its utility is, in the abstract, quite as disputable as the utility of that calling on oracles or consulting shrines which is also said to prove itself. Thus, because we are not in a civilization which believes strongly in oracles or sacred places, we see the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ. But being in a civilization which does believe in this dogma of fact for facts’ sake, we do not see the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole. I am not speaking of a tenable ultimate utility which is true both of the Crusades and the polar explorations. I mean merely that we do see the superficial and aesthetic singularity, the startling quality, about the idea of men crossing a continent with armies to conquer the place where a man died. But we do not see the aesthetic singularity and startling quality of men dying in agonies to find a place where no man can live– a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.

Let us, then, go upon a long journey and enter on a dreadful search. Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think. In the course of these essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense. Being full of that kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book, I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage.

  • G.K. Chesterton, Heretics 1905

...and before anyone tries to paint this as an uncharitable weakman I must ask "what is a woman?".

Clarification: I use “purity spiral progressives” instead of “woke” both for clarity and politeness. The purity spiral I see these progressives fighting for is the discarding of previous progressive darlings such as JK Rowling for not fully embracing all the fourth wave “feminism” of transwomen, for example.

...and before anyone tries to paint this as an uncharitable weakman I must ask "what is a woman?".

No need to reach so far, we in fact literally had disputes on whether 2+2 = 4.

Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Repugnant Conclusion - https://youtube.com/watch?v=PCnkJ1y9kys

Russ Roberts talks with Erik Hoel. They both think overall that effective altruism does good, but they think it, and strong/exclusive forms of act utilitarianism have some strong problems. Most of what they mention will not be new to many people here, they talk about the repugnant conclusion, and the difficulty of predicting results, and comparing the utility of different outcomes. They mention Yudkowsky discussion of a huge number of trivial harms being compared to one severe harm (specifically a googleplex people getting hiccups compared to one person being torn apart and killed by a shark). Despite the fact that most of it wasn't new to me I still found it to be an interesting discussion.

I think I agree with them on what I called strong/exclusive act utilitarianism (they didn't use that term they just called it utilitarianism). What I mean by strong/exclusive is that you don't consider other moral principles, and that you give an extremely heavy weight to utilitarian calculations. OTOH I don't think totally ignoring consequences, or even specifically utility is a good idea either. I think your actions should aim for outcomes with higher utility. I have a mixed moral view both deontological and consequential. Sometimes the two conflict. When that happens I don't have some well developed overarching theory to choose between them its more of an intuitive thing. If an act I consider to be immoral on deontological grounds is necessary to prevent some horrible catastrophe, I'd probably say it still is immoral but you should do it anyway.

I feel like utilitarianism - perhaps most any moral system - is at its best when it's serving to restrain some other moral system from going off the rails, and at its worst where it would go off the rails itself.

Utilitarianism is at its best when it's reining in the likes of "if it saves even one life, it's worth any cost!" through saying "whoa, there: that's crazy, and here's why."

Utilitarianism is at its worst when it's proposing "so here's why we need to tile the entire universe with-" and needing something else to rein it in in turn.

It would be nice if I had some clear, consistent standard to say what "sane" was, but I don't, and I fear there's some impossibility theorem lurking in these parts. I hope not, though.

I think you need to clarify your question. You begin by asking what "ought" to be subject to democratic control, but then re Islam you seem to be talking instead about what is capable of being subject to democratic control. Those are different questions.

By what you just said, Islam is also a democratically decided issue- and the demos inclination is that it's uninterested to having a debate on changing its current status.

'Issue is democratically decided' =/= 'Democratic electorate is interested in changing issue' or 'Issue is currently in contention.'

I've gone back and forth trying to figure out how to form a coherent answer to this question, and I've decided it's ill-posed. Democracy is a pragmatic solution that makes it easier for people to live together. Any question about what "ought" to be subject to democratic control is moot; things are subject to democratic control because people agreed they would be, not because of any philosophical reasoning.

If I could snap my fingers and put any policy I wanted beyond the reach of voters, I'd select the a set of policies that get as close to the best outcomes (as I define them) without pushing people to the point of revolution. This is not a very interesting position though, and you'll probably find most people use the same kind of reasoning for what they think should be subject to democratic control. It's outcomes first, then principles are back-calculated.

things are subject to democratic control because people agreed they would be, not because of any philosophical reasoning.

This is not accurate. Things are subject to democratic control because people with philosophical reasonings used violence to make sure their views of what should be so are uncontested and succeeded.

The idea that the current regime is some natural compromise without ideological content is as vacuous for democracy as it was for monarchy. This is literally divine right.

And in practice, republics aren't appointed by God, or other fictional beings such as "the people" but quite evidently force of arms.

I'm libertarian and generally think most things should not be subject to democratic control.

I think there is a philosophical and somewhat legitimate case to be made that common goods, and public goods should be subject to democratic control. I think in practice this still kind of fails, but its at least gestures at a philosophically sound argument.

I have objections to democratic control, but they fall into philosophical categories more than policy categories.

Objection #1: Individual Sovereignty

The idea that there should be democratic control over individual decisions seems self-contradictory to me. A democracy is supposed to invest political power in the individual. To then turn that power towards restricting the individual seems odd to me. As if a monarchy spent all its time just writing laws about what the monarch is allowed to do ... laws that could easily be overridden by their predecessor. It seems to undermine the whole thesis of democracy. If an individual is smart enough and sovereign enough to make decisions about their government, why would they also not be smart enough to make decisions about their personal consumption and interactions? I feel like anyone subject to nanny-state like protections should also be stripped of their voting power in a democracy.

Objection #2: Defining the Polity

There is an issue with how government is run that different functions of government make sense to be run at different levels. A national defense strategy makes sense to run at a national level. A fire department makes sense to run at a local level. Who gets to vote on these things? A national level of democratic control over a national defense makes sense, but national level of control over all locally run fire departments? Its not as clear to me that this makes sense.

But even supposedly straightforward votes like national defense can become confusing. Someone in Nebraska might not care at all about how well the coast of Hawaii is defended. Someone in Hawaii might reasonably ask "why does some yokel in Nebraska get to determine how much money we spend on our coastal defense?"

There aren't logical or philosophically correct ways to determine who gets to vote on what. Its all a matter of practical and political maneuvering. And just because a system manages to screw over everyone equally doesn't mean it has made the correct allocation of governing power.

Objection #3: Voting sucks

Until we all get hooked up into a giant AI that determine what everyone wants and how to get it ... we will never get democratic control. Instead we just get voting. Which is a rough and terrible approximation of democratic control. There is an old saying: "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner". The majority of voters joining together to screw over a minority of voters is a winning strategy. When these minorities try and pool their resources together to fend off the predations of the majority we have a dirty word for it: lobbying.

Much of the western world seems to be under some strange impression that the solution to the problem of voting is to add more voting. Vote for representatives who then vote for things. It changes little, especially when you make those representatives barred from accepting bribes from minority groups.

The "one person one vote" rule squashes all strengths of preference into a single level of difference, so many supposed "subversions" of democracy are really just attempts to correct this fundamental problem of voting.

Whats the alternative and better way to get democratic control? I don't know, and it probably doesn't exist.

A democracy is supposed to invest political power in the individual.

No, the individual focus comes from classic liberalism, not democratic theory. Democracy vests sovereignty in the people, collectively, and starts from the premise that you have a society to begin with. It is a conflict-resolution device for making collective decisions. Every individual person has some sort of view of the world he'd like to live in; democracy is one method of transmuting those individual views into a larger system.

"the people" aren't an entity you can actually consult. The practical implementation of democracy still requires you to go around and ask all of the individuals that compose "the people" what they want. Any government that claims to represent "the people" without actually consulting them might as well be ruling by divine right for the religion of democracy.

"the people" aren't an entity you can actually consult.

Yes, it is, and that's in fact the whole point.

The practical implementation of democracy still requires you to go around and ask all of the individuals that compose "the people" what they want.

This is not "the practical implementation of democracy," it is democracy itself.

Any government that claims to represent "the people" without actually consulting them might as well be ruling by divine right for the religion of democracy.

Pure democracy has no government layer; it's decision-making by a committee-of-the-whole, so to speak. Past a certain size, this is impractical, therefore governments exist to solve the scaling and coordination issues. They necessarily do so imperfectly, though some instantiations are better than others, in terms of their fidelity to the expressed collective will of the demos.

I feel like this is just rephrasing what I said, and that none of it changes my original objection.

Governing other people is harder than governing yourself. So to say that a person is incapable of governing themself but capable of governing others is a bit insane. Which is exactly the conceit of a nanny state in a democracy.

I think what has actually happened is that some people have recognized that some other people are sometimes incapable of governing themselves. They have stripped the incapable of the responsibility to governing themselves, but left them with the responsibility to govern others. We are left with children and the criminally insane to rule over us.

Governing other people is harder than governing yourself.

Eh, I think this depends on cases enough that neither this statement nor the reverse is usefully true. It is true that very few people are fit to rule others unchecked, without becoming corrupted by having more power than is wise.

Fundamentally, what a government--any government--is, is a methodology for figuring out what rules will be enforced within a society. Absent a completely anarchic state of nature--which can exist, briefly--there will be rules that are enforced. Democracy is that class of methodologies where that authority is spread most broadly, unlike, say, monarchy, where the authority is very concentrated.

In a democracy, you get to determine the rules that your neighbor must live by. But the same applies in reverse, and hashing out what that means in practice is part of democratic negotiation such that the demos arrives at a conclusion. Can you set some questions aside, such that each follows his own path? Yes! And you really really should do that in a number of cases, history is quite clear! But the agreement to set questions aside, and not make an enforced rule, is itself a rule that may be revisited.

There are a number of ways to decorate decisions-not-to-decide, and paint "we really mean it!" on them. "This is locked behind a supermajority requirement" or "this concept is culturally set aside as special." Even then, those protections may erode, and what was once settled becomes unsettled again.

I think all of them should be subject to democratic control.

The three most controversial would be Property Rights, Religious Practice and Monetary Policy.

Property Rights are thoroughly undermined by taxation. What good is having 'property rights' if you're forced to give some fraction of your property to the state? You can't have a state without taxation.

Religious practice being beyond democratic control sounds good in theory but in practice it's thoroughly undermined. Polygamy is illegal in most places, as is female genital mutilation and a host of other religious practices. I'd argue that sharia law is a religious practice. There is no clear divide between religious practice and law.

There's an argument for the technocratic control of monetary policy on the basis that some pain is necessary for long-term gain, if politicians run wild they'll print too much money bribing voters. This is a legitimate argument. But technocratic control of monetary policy is just as easily undermined by lobbying and manipulation of banking and bailouts by elites. Monetary policy effectively means giving money to banks or manipulating their ability to generate money. Obviously bankers have a vested interest in this - and guess who runs central banks?

The alternative to democratic control is control by elite policymakers. These more knowledgeable actors also have their own special interests, which may diverge significantly from the rest of the country. They are often in a position to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of their decisions. They ought to be held more accountable. George W. Bush was formally responsible for starting an idiotic war on false pretences that squandered trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives and caused serious harm to US interests. And yet neither he nor Rumsfeld or anyone else was punished for this! If this was ancient Athens, he'd have been ostracised or worse. Woe to the generals who lose their wars. Even though Bush somehow managed to win the 2004 election, he wouldn't have been permanently safe. Why were so few of the Wall Street crooks who caused the GFC punished? Even if the public was prone to being deceived by the media, their anger could actually be vented on a target (including those who decieved them) after they realized what happened.

Lack of control breeds learned helplessness and indifference. Citizens should have much more power, voting via a cryptographically secured phone-app on all major issues. They decide what is a major issue by securing a certain number of votes for their suggestion. Direct digital democracy rather than leaving issues to bureaucrats.

Obviously bankers have a vested interest in this - and guess who runs central banks?

I just randomly checked half of the FOMC committee members' Wikipedia articles. None ever mentions them working at a bank besides the Federal Reserve Bank.

Am I missing something here?

While a cool idea, direct democracy via app would present an incredibly juicy target for cyber threats. I don't believe such a thing could be secured.

Well you'd need to bring in experts to design it from the bottom up. Not the sort of people who design government websites, people who know what they're doing.

If I can do banking from my phone, why can't I vote from my phone? Or desktop PC for that matter? In principle, I can pay my taxes from my phone and that is a much more important function for governance than voting.

If I can do banking from my phone, why can't I vote from my phone?

Because the secret ballot makes the latter much much harder to audit. If malware does a MITM attack on your banking app you'll eventually notice the bad transactions and malware guy will get hunted down like a dog. If you're able to review voting transactions after-the-fact, though, then your boss or husband or union leader or whoever can pressure you can review them with you, to make sure you voted the "right" way. So we strive to prevent that ... but in doing so we badly undercut our ability to detect all sorts of attacks.

IIRC there are ways around this with crypto systems that let you "verify" a vote for anyone but only you know which is the true verification, but then human error becomes a factor if you want to know whether an attack really occurred.

Is does not matter how secure your system is if people can vote from their app at home, because you just send your hired thugs to go door-to-door to "remind" people about the vote and "let us take a look at your phone to make sure you understand what you are doing."

Banking is trackable by design and very easy to reverse.

A simple answer to that would be to add a feature where if you put in a certain code on login, you could make it appear from your end that you'd voted differently on certain questions. One username, two or more passwords. You'd have a preset for thugs coming in and saying 'This is MAGA country' and holding you at gunpoint until you revealed whether you voted for a border wall, not that this is a terribly likely scenario IMO.

Why don't you have a problem with the existing system? You could just get lots of mail-in ballots, fill them out yourself, allege that they're from legitimate voters and deliver them. There are many more ways of defrauding the paper system. Voter suppression, everything that each side complains about.

Why don't you have a problem with the existing system

The fact that I am criticizing your amazing new dreamed-up-in-5-minutes system does not mean that I have no problems with the current system.

fill them out yourself, allege that they're from legitimate voters and deliver them

There are lots of issues with mail-in ballots, and I have discussed them at length in other places. But this attack is impractical in nearly every location. I cannot say definitely that it never works anywhere, but if you have a particular place where you think it works, let me know so we can discuss that specifically.

A simple answer to that would be to add a feature where if you put in a certain code on login, you could make it appear from your end that you'd voted differently on certain questions.

What if the thugs don't tell you which side they're thugging for until after you enter your code?

Can't you tell who they're thugging for based on dress or logical assumption?

Under our system, can't the thugs just go to the polls and look through what everyone voted for? They can't because hopefully police will stop them. The same applies to you in my system. Call the police. Or draw a gun and tell these strangers to get off your property! That's another answer.

I don't see how my proposal is qualitatively inferior to the existing system.

Under our system, can't the thugs just go to the polls and look through what everyone voted for?

No.

You could solve the above problems. Just let people vote multiple times, only counting their latest vote.

These theoretical thugs make sure I vote for Alice. They leave. I vote for Bob. They come back - there's no trace of my previous Bob vote. I guess they could make me vote for Alice again, but, once they leave, I can again vote for Bob.

People are really pessimistic about the possibility of this because we generally suck at security, but on paper it's doable. The math primitives required exist and are routinely used for cryptocurrency stuff.

Hell arguably it's already deployed for DAOs and actual decisions that affect non trivial sums have been made from completely online and anonymous votes. It just hasn't risen to the level of politics yet.

It's not the math I doubt, just the ability of professional developers to outsmart professional threat actors. The balance is very much on the offensive side right now, especially for people with state level resources. Imagine if North Korea or China's hackers could change US policy directly.

I am quite skeptical of crypto-voting systems for many reasons (particularly user education), but high-quality first-world security researchers will voluntarily throw massive amounts of resources for free at various implementations.

We can also come up with various attack scenarios and decide which ones to particularly defend against. There are lots of systems to choose from. Each individual implementation can be reviewed, tried in small mayoral elections first, and reviewed again.

If we had to do an E2E system for some reason, we could do it.

I understand the issue, but then this is an issue with democracy in general. What if China could do that by bribing representatives (as they do) or financing propaganda (as they do)? And possibly an issue with any system of governance.

I'm quite familiar with how rickety infosec is in particular but I feel like when this is discussed people assume that the existing institutions are much more trustworthy than they assume in literally any other context.

The relative effort required is vastly different. Right now you need to compromise thousands of systems and individuals, in the app democracy scenario a single zero day could deliver you any policy you choose and nobody would be the wiser.

a single zero day

This is not how crypto-voting systems work.

You get the series of numbers from the voting system and can run them in your own computer, or even by hand with pencil and paper, and verify that your vote was counted.

The entire point of crypto verification is that you are not relying on someone else's computer. The threat model is the other person actively trying to screw you over, so "someone loaded a zero-day onto the voting equipment" is not even relevant.

I don't quite understand your reasoning here. What quality of crypto voting secures it? It's still software running on a client or server, yeah?

More comments

The problem with infosec in the context of voting etc. is that it's much easier to interfere without getting caught (and from a continent away) and the magnitude of possible interference is much greater. Bribing senators scales linearly or exponentially in difficulty with each additional senator, changing one vote is as easy as changing 100,000 with electronic voting.

I think that most people are only in favor of democratizing things like weed as an instrument of legalizing it, because people are in favor of individual liberty as it's easy to empathize with the idea of someone else wanting to do a thing and not wanting to be told not to do that thing.

The sticky bit comes in with externalities and I think that's where the real debate lies. The nuclear waste dump next to a preschool law affects not only the landowner but it also protects the kids. Private nuclear weapon ownership is probably a bad idea, but private warplane ownership might be fine. Finding that line is what policy is all about.

So why make some lines uncrossable? Well, I think that having religious freedom enshrined helps to guide the rest of your thinking. Someone's internal beliefs are by definition side effect free (you can control behavior but not mental state) and making that the uncrossable legal like hopefully guides people to drawing lines in the right place.

What is your philosophy of which issues ought be subject to democratic control, and which ought not?

Honestly, the bare minimum needed to maintain the pretense of popular will. Ideally, issues that don't really matter too much on the macro scale like abortion, weed and American Idol are things fine to delegate to the people. Democracy is a technology for facilitating the peaceful transition of power, not a mechanism for good decision making or leadership.

The fundamental assertion of democratic theory is that sovereignty lies with the people, which is to say, the right to determine the rules of society that will be enforced by law and government. If "the people" make a decision, it stands, unless and until the people decide differently.

The purest of pure democracy has many practical problems, though, including the most damning--failure to scale. So democratic philosophers have added layers of tradeoffs, leading to representative democracy (the people have agents! ...see principal/agent dilemmas, but still an improvement), constitutional structures (checks and balances, supermajority requirements), topics that are Off The Table For Discussion (Bill of Rights, human rights guarantees more generally), etc.

But if you go back to the fundamental assertion, all of the tradeoff layers can never be permanently emplaced--the people may always decide differently. The superstructure is based on belief, legitimacy, and credibility, which work very well until they don't. One of the quickest paths to erosion is when The Structure In Theory and The Structure In Practice diverge and are not reconciled, either by amending theory to meet practice, or directing practice back to theory.

What can be voted on is fair game to fight over. You shouldn't allow votes you aren't willing to lose.

Putting some issues beyond the reach of ordinary democratic politics is an attempt to limit the scope and scale of political conflict, hence keeping such conflicts survivable. People are more willing to accept losses in limited conflicts; an awareness of even the potential for unlimited conflict drastically accelerates political polarization, as losses can snowball and the potential downside is effectively unbounded.

Of course, cordoning off such issues as "rights" requires consensus on which issues deserve this status. That consensus requires a fair degree of homogenous values. When the consensus breaks down, it doesn't matter how you set the system up, because no system created by humans can constrain human will.

(Crosspost from CredibleDefense)

Absent a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and assuming Putin or his appointed successor remain in power in Russia in the medium-long term, it seems unlikely that sanctions on Russia will be lifted any time soon, not least because Europe's transition to LNG over piped gas will be well underway by then and economic pressure for a relations-reset will be relatively muted. Under this "North Korea" scenario, Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially, in the domains such as nuclear sabre-rattling, cyberwarfare, political influence, funding of terrorism, and so on.

What should the West's response be to this new threat on its doorstep? One obvious possibility would be to accelerate and strengthen the NATO missile defense program. While the kinetics of a 99%+ intercept rate remain extremely challenging, a limited missile defense shield capable of reliably intercepting a small number of targets is vastly more technologically viable now than in Reagan's era. Indeed, the fundamentals of such capabilities are arguably already in place, with Aegis Ashore batteries in Romania and Poland (soon to become operational), THAAD batteries are active in Turkey, and Patriot systems in Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. While there has been persistent concern among NATO powers that a missile defense system would risk antagonising Russia, the changing geopolitical environment means that many European governments may be politically and financially willing to commit to accelerating the shield.

What of developments in hypersonics and decoy tech? While these do pose challenges, in the case of Russia at least, the Ukraine war suggests that many of their vaunted capabilities may be mere vaporware, or at least perform well below claimed performance measures. Moreover, other technological developments in fields like AI have the potential to make reliable interception more feasible.

What would the point of all this be? In addition to providing NATO with a better way to prevent nuclear bullying by Russia of its neighbours, and to defend against rogue international actors, we might reasonably hope to present Russia with a painful dilemma much like that faced by the Soviet Union in the light of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: either commit to an arms race that it can ill afford, or risk its nuclear capabilities being de-fanged by a more technologically-advanced West. If anything, Russia's current position is worse than that of the Soviet Union in this regard, given its relatively weaker scientific and industrial base and etiolated conventional forces. And whereas Reagan's SDI was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking in the 1980s, contemporary missile defense boasts impressive and growing capabilities.

Of course, absent any miracle breakthroughs, it remains unlikely that any missile defense shield in the near- or medium-term would be able to withstand a massed nuclear strike involving hundreds or even thousands of warheads. However, the old principles of mutually assured destruction mean that this is not the most pressing nuclear threat that is faced by the West today. Instead, we face the risk of an increasingly isolated, weakened, and aggressive Russia using nuclear weapons in a more restricted capacity to gain battlefield advantages or to coerce its neighbours. Even a limited shield would be useful in combating these threats, and may help contribute in the longer-term to the downfall of Russia's current regime.

If you're a fan of unstable nuclear equilibria and mass nuclear proliferation, maybe. Personally I'm not a fan of 'wars of territorial conquests will be accepted if you have nukes' as a basis of international norms, as it seems slightly possible that it skews incentives of everyone on any side of a nuclear conflict to race for nukes.

Now, if your proposal is that someone in the world is supposed to pre-emptively invade, occupy, and dismember any government that tries to start a covert nuclear program, by golly this is an interesting proposal but I'm curious as to who is supposed to doing this and why the international community shouldn't simply accept their conquests to also be annexations based on tail risk theory.

If you’re a fan of unstable nuclear equilibria and mass nuclear proliferation, maybe.

Non-proliferation isn’t a stable equilibrium, sorry.

Personally I’m not a fan of ‘wars of territorial conquest will be accepted if you have nukes’ as a basis of international norms

The time to stop that from becoming the basis of international norms was before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That ship has sailed.

The rest of your post seems like word salad.

Non-proliferation isn’t a stable equilibrium, sorry.

If that's the stance you wish to make, sure, but that rather undermines the basis of concession on the grounds of tail-end nuclear risk. Accelerating nuclear proliferation is itself a source of tail-end risk. If tail-end nuclear risk is unavoidable, tail-end nuclear risk ceases to be a meaningful objection to resistance to a nuclear power.

But I was referring to nash equilibrium between two nuclear powers as the stability, not proliferation solely. Hence the 'and' as an additional category. Stable nash equilibrium, just bilaterally, requires assumptions of rational actors that recognizing that 'I have nukes, no take backs' won't actually be supported by nuclear deterrence models.

If you don't believe in the value of nash equilibrium models, sure, but then tail-end risk stops being a meaningful consideration either, since risk management decision making requires consistency to avoid being just a fallacious example of bias justification.

The time to stop that from becoming the basis of international norms was before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That ship has sailed.

Territorial wars of conquest being acknowledged on the basis of nukes sailed before nukes were introduced to the world? Neat.

The rest of your post seems like word salad.

It was making light of the implicit localization of risk to solely the Ukraine conflict by using non-standard vernacular pulled from theories of statecraft that aren't localized to Ukraine by application of second and third order effects opposed to the premise that localized risk outweighs global considerations that...

...I was making fun of their argument for trying to use technical-sounding language to bolster their position without considering the same theories that actually employ such language have implications far beyond Ukraine that counter the premise of the argument.

What is unsound about, “I have nukes, no take-backs” as a deterrence strategy?

And I’m not sure how you managed to so badly misconstrue such an obvious point: The US used nukes against Japan to secure their conquest of the country, thereby establishing the precedent of conquest via nuclear arms. The norm is already there, hence it wouldn’t be a new innovation on the part of the Russians. Of course the time to prevent a norm of nuclear weapons being used to conquer others is before they’re used to conquer others, that’s literally tautological.

What is unsound about, “I have nukes, no take-backs” as a deterrence strategy?

Because it's not a credible claim in practice or theory, and a claim that lacks credibility is not an effective deterrence strategy.

On precedent alone, it fails because Russia already has demonstrated that attacks on claimed russian territory are not nuclear retaliation criteria, in this very conflict. There have already been attacks on Crimea (legally claimed as core territory) and in pre-2014 internationally-recognized territory.

In practice, the failure of nuclear deterrence to prevent counter-attack or refusal to abide by demands is more generalizable. We call it the nuclear taboo, but it remains a true fact that the Soviets did not nuke Afghan rebels, or their non-nuclear middle eastern enablers, or the Warsaw Pact uprisings, or the Warsaw Pact dissolution. These weren't because Russia lacked the ability, or their foes had nuclear deterrence, but because in practice nuclear usage has very real costs- diplomatic, and subsequently economic and political- that can easily outweigh the gains. Functionally, the only costs that justify the risks are regime survival... but regime survival isn't at stake with the 'no take-backs' clause. Nuclear states can lose their empires and still survive. Russia's own existence in it's post 1990-borders demonstrates this.

For the practical threat of Russian nuclear retaliation to conventional defeat over non-existential territory to hold any credibility, there needs to be reason to believe that regime survival is at stake if the Ukrainian conquests are reversed. But this is not at all aparrent, for Putin or the oligarchy. For Putin, personally, losing claimed Ukrainian territory is very bad, but not existential- if the territory itself were existentially required, he wouldn't have existed without it. Instead, for Putin the risk is domestic politics... but here Putin's survival isn't based on territory, but the control of the security state aparatus, which he maintains control of. Putin continue to regularly remove, rotate, and demonstrate effective control of his internal state security aparatus. The Army may have been destroyed by the war, but the internal security serves have not, and the Russian exodus and crackdown on anti-war protestors and high-ranking officials falling out of windows are demonstrations of a lack of credible opposition force.

'I must be granted [concession] or I face a coup if I don't use nukes' is not a credible deterrence strategy. If Putin's hold on power is so tenuous, he faces risk of a coup no matter what, and permitting an annexation encourages him to take further actions to solidify his station with the same threat. If Putin's hold on power is stable enough, there is no actual existential risk he needs a concession to ward against, and thus no reason to give a concession.

This is the drawback of effective state security regimes. Having dedicated significant blood, treasure, and cracked skulls to dismantling any credible domestic opposition, they have no credible opposition to claim need to placate. Putin can always just crush more Russian protests...

...if there were any of scale to note, instead of his dissidents fleeing the nation and making his risk of a popular uprising (or popular champion) less, rather than greater.

On the game theory side, strategic deterence model- which will generally turn to Nash equilibrium paradigms explicitly or implicitly- it fails the very basic premise of acknowledging that current events are repeat games, and you do not get to arbitrarily separate action-reaction-reaction to action-reaction in order to avoid another party's reaction to your initial action. Deterrence models work on the construction of action-reaction in multi-phase considerations, not in pure isolation.

The basic premise of nuclear deterrence is 'if you nuke me, I nuke you back.' This is an isolated instance whether no other context is really needed. However, nuclear weapons also work as a substitute to conventional deterrence capability for allowing 'if you invade me and beat me on the field of battle, I nuke you back.' These two premise are not separatable, because they represent the same core premise- nuclear deterrence is deterrent to the other party posing existential threat, whether it's nuclear or conventional.

The issue here is that while nuclear weapons provide the deterrence for existential threats- that the enemy will not provide an existential threat to you- the difference in gradiants and nuclear worst-case outcomes does produce a stepped effect. Before you resort to nuclear defense, you resort to conventional defense. If you can win conventionally, you demonstrate you neither need the nukes to win... and that you are cognizant of the costs involved in nuclear use, not just of nuclear retaliation but other costs as well. These might be justified in case of existential threat, but that doesn't apply here for the reasons of both precedent and practical.

What this means is that the theoretical construct of annexing the territories is not 'if you attack my territory [pose an existential threat of invasion], then I nuke you.' It is 'if I attack you [conventionally], but am unable to gain my goals [conventionally], then I nuke you.' Action (invasion) - reaction (conventional defeat and loss of occupied territories) - reaction (nuking), not action (attack on occupied territories) - reaction (nuking).

The issue at this point isn't the practical irrelevance of demanding annexation via WMDs. There's an entire cold war of how, and why, things didn't work like that in practice. No, the theoretical credibility problem is that smuggling the action-reaction shift is hiding the fact that you were already trying to avoid nuclear weapons out of consideration of the nuclear costs by committing to conventional force in the first place.

These other costs still exist, and they are higher in the action-reaction-reaction model than an isolated action-reaction model. If you were already considering the cost too high before, they are higher now.

If Russia's position was that the territory was so existential that nuclear use was warranted, the time for nuclear use in the service of conquest was not even months ago, but years or even decades ago. Russia choosing to meander through decades of political influence loss, years of proxy warfare, and months of stalemate at massive cost to not pay the expected costs of nuclear weapon use.

On a model level, this remains true. Russia is in a worse position to use nuclear weapons now than it was a month ago, because there is the context and intermediary stages of the nuclear decision model that brought to this point. Annexing territory doesn't reset the clock and wipe away the prior decision games that were non-nuclear every previous month.

On a model level, Russian nuclear threats aren't credible. Credibility would have to come from the practical level, based on precedent (not used) or existential threat (not credible, as Putin is firmly in power).

Now, you COULD argue that both the theoretical and practical reasons that Putin wouldn't should be thrown out, that This Time is Different and Putin should be considered as an irrational actor because something changed in the last month or so...

...but if you're treating Putin as an irrational actor in nuclear deterrence theory contexts, that throws away most of your reasons NOT to press harder. Madmen are not placated by rational concessions- if they could be placated by rationality, they wouldn't be madmen.

The basic premise of dealing with mad things that pose danger is to reduce their capacity to cause harm as able, whenever able, as aggressively as possible. As irrational actors do not react rationally to reasonable threshold criteria, and they are irrational anyway, their stated views become irrelevant to consideration. What matters is the views of the critical enabling actors beneath them, and their own rationality/irrationality tradeoffs.

Now, that is the sort of thing that might cause a rational actor to believe their means of existential-threat deterrence is under attack. But, notably, Russia's nuclear deterrence is NOT under attack. Nor does losing the annexed territories endanger it.

And I’m not sure how you managed to so badly misconstrue such an obvious point: The US used nukes against Japan to secure their conquest of the country, thereby establishing the precedent of conquest via nuclear arms.

The US did not conquer Japan and annex its territory, which is the rather obvious construction of conquest in the context of 2rafa's 'keep some of his gains' and the resulting reply. Nor did the US secure it's nukes to secure its 'conquest' against a counter-invasion/liberation/defense, because there was no such attempt: the Japanese did not launch an insurgency, let alone a counter-occupation force.

And that's if you accept the framing of Japan's defeat in WW2 as a 'conquest' in the first place, which is just a tad of a reach.

Meanwhile, within a decade of WW2's resolution, the US very nearly lost the Korean War, and accepted a stalemate after (technically two) reversals that lost the war again and certainly lost huge amounts of 'conquered' territory, rather than use nuclear weapons.

This is, in fact, the origin of the nuclear taboo, and the US went on to lose several more conflicts- including Vietnam, Afghanistan, and arguably Iraq- rather than use nuclear weapons to defend it's conquests.

The norm is already there, hence it wouldn’t be a new innovation on the part of the Russians. Of course the time to prevent a norm of nuclear weapons being used to conquer others is before they’re used to conquer others, that’s literally tautological.

I will submit the norm is there, and you are playing rather weak semantics to walk back an embarassing and obvious misread and overreach.

The message that I get out of this Gish-gallop is essentially, “Russia hasn’t used tactical nukes yet, therefore they won’t ever use tactical nukes.” The idea that the costs of using tactical nukes once Russia is getting badly beaten conventionally is somehow higher than any plausible benefits is completely incredible. Putin doesn’t have to be a madman, he just has to decide that his conventional forces are sufficiently exhausted to render it impractical to defend his territories by non-nuclear means, and that doing so is a matter of survival.

And of course regime survival is at stake in this war. Or are you now going to tell me that Putin and his friends will be just fine after the war ends if the ultimate result is a humiliating and final Russian defeat by Ukraine? By contrast, the Afghan war was not existential, and the collapse of the USSR was down to internal factors, not military ones. Soviet conventional forces would have more than sufficed to retain the Warsaw Pact if they really wanted. But the hardliners lost the political dispute with Gorbachev.

Instead you’ve set up a “heads-I-win, tails-you-lose” scenario. If Putin doesn’t nuke, it’s proof that the West should push even harder, because if he was going to then he would have by now. If Putin does nuke, then the West should also push even harder, because it’s proof that he’s gone insane. The possibility that Putin just has widely disparate priors from Western armchair generals, but acts rationally given those priors, simply does not arise. How convenient!

That the US has not yet used nukes again post-Japan does nothing to reverse the precedent that was set by their actions in that regard. Not to mention that tactical nuclear strikes were not infrequently contemplated during the Korean and Vietnam wars - that they didn’t eventuate is a matter of luck, not taboo. And tactical nuclear strikes along the Fula Gap to overcome the Soviet conventional advantage in a Western European conflict were a commonplace of NATO war planning, at least up through the 60s. The US even set up nuclear mines in Western Europe during that period. As for Iraq and Afghanistan, nukes don’t work against insurgents, obviously. I’m not the one reaching here.

and in pre-2014 internationally-recognized territory.

which ones?

For Putin, personally, losing claimed Ukrainian territory is very bad, but not existential- if the territory itself were existentially required, he wouldn't have existed without it. Instead, for Putin the risk is domestic politics... but here Putin's survival isn't based on territory, but the control of the security state aparatus, which he maintains control of.

I broadly agree with your other points, but I think the above is debatable. First, the existential link seems like it could ebb and flow over time, especially if it's tied to domestic politics--"strong horse" confidence, where supporters like expansion, tolerate stasis, but reject contraction. Especially after formally annexing several parts of Ukraine, losing those chunks isn't a case of renegotiated battle lines that are expected to be in some level of flux, but actual political losses of claimed-core territory, so they might be existential today when they weren't a month ago. Second, this ties into the security state, which I agree Putin has control of now, but would lose if there's a cascading failure of confidence within its ranks. I'm not claiming that will happen tomorrow, or anytime soon, necessarily. But Putin's iron control of his security state is the sort of thing that's true until it isn't, and preference cascades are remarkably abrupt when they occur.

In the hypothetical where Putin loses control of the security state, and with it, Russia, I can't say which of the following is more likely ("Putin's poor decisions have led to disaster!" is a given)--"Putin's rampant militarism has caused great harm to Mother Russia!" or "Putin's half-hearted efforts have failed to achieve our mission!"

I'm not a Ukrainian so I don't really have attachments to Crimea or Eastern Ukraine, so I'm perfectly fine to let Putin keep Crimea and 2014-era Donbas for the war to end, but it's not a realistic compromise for any of the parties here.

Putin just annexed Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in addition to Donbas, so to Russia, they are officially Russian territory. The annexation of non-separatist oblasts is the Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment for Putin. He's staking the Russian future and legitimacy on this, and there's no going back.

Same thing for the Ukrainians. Before the annexation of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, maybe Ukraine can still believe Russian war aims were limited, and that they were only interested in securing the separatists regions, but no longer. It's very clear to the Ukrainians that Russia is going for the shameless land grab, and there's no stopping Russia from annexing Odessa, Kharkiv or Dnipropetrovsk next. If they settle for a ceasefire now, there's always the looming future invasion, suppressing any foreign reconstruction investments. After all, why help Ukraine rebuild when it can all be torn down in the next Russian invasion? Therefore, if Ukraine settles for a ceasefire now, its long term prospects are bleak and they'll only be inviting Russia to take another bite out of their territory later. So, the Ukrainians must get a decisive result for their national sovereignty and their future. Either they win, or they die as a nation.

With these two factors combined, I don't see an end to the war any time soon without some miracle, and it's very depressing.

Either they win, or they die as a nation.

Nitpick: many nations existed w/o a state (and we don't know Putin's goals) for century or two and didn't go extinct.

If there was a world where letting Putin keep Crimea etc. would solve the problem, it could be something to discuss. But we're not living in such a world, and we know it for the fact since February 24, because Putin de-facto had all that already. Ukraine had neither capability nor will to retake any of the territories occupied by Russia in 2014, the West was not inclined to support it with anything substantially more than "blankets and helmets", and sanctions on Russia were feeble and inconsequential. Biden himself supported opening North Stream 2, for one!

To seriously consider that if we roll back to pre-Feb 24, and pretend nothing ever happened, that will be a stable situation acceptable to any side and a long term solution - it's just impossible for anybody seriously thinking about the situation.

because Putin de-facto had all that already

Not quite. Also, the Dniepr-Crimea water canal was closed by Ukraine.

These are trifles. He didn't start the war to open the canal.

To what end? Putin is not going to abandon his strategy of rebuilding Russian Empire, and he is considering the West as the antagonist which they need to fight. Throwing him a bone won't change it - he'd not suddenly feel warm and accepting towards Western values or concerns, or abandon his plans of territorial expansion. What he'd learn from it, is that the price for the bone is X soldiers dead and Y money spent. As long as he finds this price acceptable - and no amount of soldiers dead has ever been unacceptable in Russia, and due to green policies hydrocarbon prices will likely remain high for a while, giving him enough money - he will continue to reach for the bones. As long as the West guarantees there will be always "saving face" at the end, it's all worth it for him. There's no incentive to not do it again, and again, and again, and again.

As I've remarked before, the whole idea of just letting Putin annex bits and pieces of neighboring countries to allow for "saving face" just hits different when you live in a country neighboring Russia yourself.

Even if you don't, a cursory knowledge of 20th century history should tell one that it's not how you deal with a nascent Fascist state declaring it's going to restore it's rightful place in the world by taking whatever territory it likes to, and nobody should dare to contradict them because they are The Greatest Nation. Feeding them little pieces of neighboring countries is not a recipe for peace in our time.

How much nuclear firepower can Russia even bring to bear nowadays? What delivery vehicles for which kinds of bombs do they posses in what numbers and in what a state of readiness? I still keep hearing people talk about nuclear war as if the Russian arsenal were still what the soviet one was forty years ago, but I have a hard time imagining that it is.

Keep in mind that nuclear firepower is likely Russia's second most destructive class of weapons, behind biologicals.

Russia has more nukes than the USA does, but what the maintenance on their missiles looks like I don’t think anyone can tell you.

They're probably maintained better than 6 months ago, but nuclear weapons are still highly intricate tools with mechanisms that need to work perfectly for the intended effect to happen.

There is absolutely no way that they don’t work. All of the super powers invest in stock pile stewardship which is easier than you would think since The comprehensive test ban treaty only prohibits devices which achieves criticality, meaning that you can even test the devices with subcritical amounts of materials. If your interested you can read about the us efforts here https://www.llnl.gov/news/subcritical-experiment-captures-scientific-measurements-advance-stockpile-safety

There is no way that Russia, China Israel Pakistan etc don’t do the same

A lot of them probably don't work, because what's invested on paper and what actually exists are a very different things in Russia. But it doesn't matter - they're not going to try to win a war here. They just need to make one successful strike anywhere to cause humongous losses to all Western economic system. And both sides know it.

But it doesn't matter - they're not going to try to win a war here. They just need to make one successful strike anywhere to cause humongous losses to all Western economic system.

This sounds suspiciously like "Of course they aren't going to invade" circa January 2022.

I don't think even in the most feverish dreams Putin does imagine himself the Emperor of Earth, having won the planetary war and conquered all countries. That's too much even for him. And sure, I realize "some people also did some predictions and those came out wrong" is the ultimate answer to every prediction, but I'm still pretty confident in this one. The plan here is not to conquer the West, at least not for now - the plan is to scare away the West and let Putin continue building his Empire - at least until he feels ready to take on the West directly, which is not yet.

least until he feels ready to take on the West directly, which is not yet.

Could this ever happen in Putin's lifetime? Even considering how long Putin's parents lived long, still looks unreal.

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Yeah, I've been thinking and reading about nuclear war in recent days (unsurprisingly), and it soon become obvious people's idea of a nuclear war continues to be based on the Cold War era, chiefly 80s (when the nuclear stockpiles were highest). For instance, I did know that the total combined number of nukes is considerably smaller than in those days, but I was genuinely surprised that they are also smaller than in those days; when people talk about nuclear capabilities, they often discuss it in megatons, but even the largest Russian nukes these days are smaller than 1 Mt, and certainly not the capacity of Tsar Bomba, which was one-time demonstration that was never supposed to be anything else than essentially a proof of concept.

There's a listing of Russian nuclear warheads here.

On a related note, you can go to Nukemap.org to simulate what effects (apart from fallout and economic devastation, etc.) a nuke would have on you. Find the nearest military base and/or major city center and simulate away. Fortunately for my family it looks like we'd likely be completely safe from any (direct) effects from a nuclear attack, since the military base likely to be the closest target is over 30 miles away.

They started trending smaller as soon as ICBM delivery became practical. Prior to this they where designed to be large enough so that thermal pulses from the devices could simply ignite enormous firestorms at great distance, facilitating their delivery. I think it would still be a grave mistake to ignore the dangers of a smaller device and believe that even a 20 or 30 kiloton device delivered near or in a city will be the worst thing that has ever happened.

Yeah, it's easy to forget the only bombs dropped in action were, what, 10-20 kilotons? The destructiveness of bigger bombs doesn't scale linearly with yield (at least against civilian targets rather than mountain bunkers and missile silos) so number of warheads accurately delivered is going to be the best measure of damage potential.

How would China behave in this scenario? I can't imagine them sitting still and letting the US-led block alone transcend the constraints of MAD, but at the same time it doesn't seem to me like their R&D capabilities are quite on the level to keep up and join the newly forming circle of "have nukes, but can't be nuked" powers. Perhaps the right play for a US that has decided that the destruction of Russia is an overwhelming priority would then be to offer China unlimited participation in any interception technology it develops and deploys in return for its acquiescence, but I don't know if there is political appetite for such a bold trade.

On that matter, we really shouldn't forget that game theory demands precommitting to nuke your opponent before he makes himself unnukable. I'm increasingly finding myself wishing that we could just get one nuke each on DC and Moscow followed by a miraculous detente, to skim off some of the hubristic cream on top and make people on both sides realise how much they have postured themselves into feeling compelled to wager for skubUkraine.

Not sure where I read it, probably Scholar's Stage blog, but it's assumed any nuclear war between US and Russia or China would also involve the allied nation.

On that matter, we really shouldn't forget that game theory demands precommitting to nuke your opponent before he makes himself unnukable.

I am (not seriously) wondering if we're going to find out that what's been presented to the world as "Starlink" is actually Brilliant Pebbles.

One of the things I've thought about is that Russia and US would probably refrain from launching all their nuclear missiles at each other precisely for the reason that this would then leave China as the dominant power of the planet, essentially able to assert its wishes at will. (Assuming that this doesn't lead to nuclear winter or other complete global apocalypse, of course, but my understanding is that even a full-scale nuclear match would not do this, considering that the most sensible target for nukes would be just lobbing a lot of them at the other country's nuclear stockpiles so as to maximize the chances you'll succeed in destroying them, and the rest would be spent on other strategic military locations.)

I don't know if Russia would be that concerned about China in a context where it would consider a full-blown nuclear exchange with the US; opinions to the contrary to me generally seem to be based on a wrong model of Russia and/or China (which lead to inferences like "China wants to dominate/conquer Taiwan, which is clearly not of China, so it will want to dominate/conquer other things which are not of China" or "Russia is a right-wing fascist country, therefore they would resent being pushed around by Asians"). My read of Russian attitudes is that they would in reality far prefer a Chinese-dominated unipolar world, with all that entails, to the current one, both because they find smug Anglo overlords more loathsome than smug Beijing ones (perhaps in part because of the greater cultural distance of the latter: legible smugness is more obnoxious) and because the Chinese would actually meddle less.

I think China not meddling (except for all the times it does) is a pragmatic thing, and that the policy would change if circumstances changed enough.

Be is at may, I would still guess that Russians would prefer a situation where they have at least some nuclear weapons and so does China to a situation where they have no nukes and China does.

I didn't take "launch all nukes" as meaning that literally every single nuke is launched (and therefore Russia becomes powerless vis-a-vis China because no nukes left), but just enough for extensive devastation resulting in Russia (and the US) being conventionally incapable to resist China in any way (because not enough people and military production).

I don't know if Russia would be that concerned about China in a context where it would consider a full-blown nuclear exchange with the US

Is there a scenario in which a Russian-U.S. nuclear war is not essentially suicide for whichever country starts it, if not both? Unless it were somehow possible to completely avoid same-scale retaliation, it seems like "What will China do?" would be the least of their immediate and even medium-long-term problems. Large-scale nuclear war, as I think of it, is essentially, a murder-suicide in which any notion of "next" is not part of the game plan.

China is one of only two countries (the other being India) that have formally committed to a no-first-use policy. They also have enough ICBMs that they wouldn't need to worry about a missile defence system depriving them of their nuclear deterrent: even if it boasted high intercept rates, any near-term system would be unable to reliably intercept hundreds of simultaneous launches.

Also China would first blast fragmentation bombs in satellite orbit to disable/destroy 90% of all satellites before firing their nuclear salvo.

Are you sure this would be true if missile defence technology advances to a degree capable of drastically muting the Russian nuclear arsenal? How could a system which couldn't deal with the hundreds of Chinese missiles be of any use against Russia's thousands? Surely the premise of this line of argument is a credible defence against Russia's arsenal - which dwarfs China's.

Doesn't Russia still have many more nuclear warheads + ICBMs than China, so a system that could negate the Russian nuclear deterrent would necessarily either automatically or in a matter of a few months of logisticking also negate the Chinese one?

I'm not sure that "formal commitments" of this type are worth anything in the context of planet-spanning life-or-death conflicts, and either way I'm not sure if this is relevant: the subtree of the game we're looking at would involve China doing something to assert its interests in its near abroad, followed by a conventional US intervention against it which fails to be decisive, followed by US threats or usage of nukes (just as the US used nukes when it didn't want to pay the price for conventionally deciding the Pacific Theatre of WWII). It matters all the way up the tree whether China then can successfully threaten or enact nuclear retaliation or not.

Absolutely - the deterrent effect of a missile shield isn't to protect against a general nuclear war in which Russia, China, or the US decides to hit the big red button. Given the constraints of MAD, I'd like to think that no state would rationally launch a first strike at scale. The point of the shield is to prevent countries engaging in low-level nuclear bullying, or attempts to use nuclear weapons to gain a limited battlefield advantage. Existing MAD doctrine doesn't really cover these kinds of contingency: the US isn't going to nuke Moscow just because Russia uses a battlefield nuke against a Ukrainian airbase.

It's assumed by paranoid, untrustworthy people the missile shield is first intended to be just against 'North Korea' but after getting something working it's going to be scaled up to enable strategy where a first strike kills most of enemy weapons and then to withstand the limited retaliation.

I'm having trouble imagining a missile shield that would work against tactical nukes but not substantially reduce the effectivity of a launch-all volley. If your nukes are counted in the thousands, having to launch 10 instead of 1 against a battlefield target seems to be merely a cost issue if you know you need to saturate the defenses. Also, the metropole may be much easier to defend than any contested frontline (because of longer warning times, better supply lines and better radar coverage), so a system which intercepts 90% of incomings on the front might well intercept 99% near the capital, thus being a real threat to "full-volley" MAD too.

the US isn't going to nuke Moscow just because Russia uses a battlefield nuke against a Ukrainian airbase.

I would hope, but who knows. Maybe they would be tempted to at least nuke a Russian airbase, and then who knows where it goes from there. I really hope that the people who are calling the shots on our side are not themselves falling to the sentiments that they are tactically whipping up in the general population.

Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially

I have observed an interesting parallel here recently between comments about how the left and right view "violence as a spectrum" versus "violence as a switch": American foreign policy definitely tends toward the latter, while Putin seems to have been fairly successful over the last few decades with escalationism convincing the US to back down, winning various regional battles of conflicting interests (Syria, Georgia, Crimea).

The difference here is that previous successes playing in moral gray areas -- neither Assad nor ISIS are paragons of virtue, and previous annexations were not met with sufficient local will to fight back -- are going to turn out very differently once it's clear that violence is inescapable. Most previous quagmires (Vietnam, Afghanistan) have originated not because American forces couldn't win on the battlefield, but because the local authorities we were supporting lacked a sufficient popular sovereignty mandate. Kabul didn't fall to the Taliban for lack of arms, but we think Kyiv -- and maybe even all of Ukraine -- won't fall to the Kremlin for that reason with sufficient support either.

Strategically, escalationism works against violence-as-a-binary right up to the point that it doesn't and the gloves come off. And in this case Uncle Sam is still just brandishing in the hope of avoiding direct conflict.

What’s the point of growth? I’m asking about economies, companies, social security, and all types of organizations. And should GDP growth stop at some point, what are the unintended consequences if such a thing happened?

Malthusian thinking was wrong but it was sound science for the data he had. There’s probably a max carrying capacity for the Earth, unless we find incredible inventions. Another invention like the Haber process just seems unlikely. To me that looks like a future where most countries around the world will stabilize into an economy that treads water without growing nor contracting.

I’ve always heard from big wigs that you either grow or die? But if our future looks more like the countries with low fertility, then at the end of it doesn’t it mean that our our economy needs a new way of functioning.

Well everyone hears stories about Musk or Gates or Bezos or Lebron or Jordan or Kershaw, making astronomical figures. To most Americans that type of inequality is okay because the economy is growing like an amoeba trying things out, that sometimes get unicorn status. Now, if in the future that economic pie becomes nearly constrained, the only level of power left is the communists/technocrats that will divvy up the economic pie.

Income equality is no big deal as long as there’s a rising tide with opportunities for your own lottery ticket.

Too big to fail has morphed to become one of the worst ideas this century. Doesn’t mean they should do nothing, they should’ve kept the system afloat while reforming the system and exposes/charging all the financial decisions those big banks did. Instead we are again stuck in the same system trying to put bandaids on their recklessness.

Remember the movie The Big Short explaining CDOs? Reuters in 2019:

Synthetic CDOs once symbolised the kind of financial wizardry that led to the financial crisis of 2008. A decade on, banks are again staffing up desks to trade these complex products on the back of growing demand from yield-hungry investors.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL5N22B5Q2

Why can’t we make the finance industry basic again? Without all the never ending novel financial instrument inventions—There’s almost zero productive reason that brilliant quants are needed in vast numbers on Wall Street. Unless of course you just want to make as much money as possible.

——————————

I’m sorry for how all over the place this was. I was up all night reading and had a bunch of disparate thoughts that felt quasi-connected. In the morning I’ll clean it up.

What’s the point of growth? I’m asking about economies, companies, social security, and all types of organizations.

This is a basic question. Most people, most economists, etc promote growth because they consider growth to be - improvements in technology, standards of living, growing the power of individuals and nations (although most people won't say that nowadays, they'll just say "making everyone happier and better off").

Growth is how we measure incomes collectively increasing. So all growth means people in your nation getting richer.

The big impact if it stops is highly leveraged (lots of debt) lose everything. Which is probably their just reward, but when debtors fail it can have pretty severe effects on people who were prudent.

Does GDP get adjusted for inflation?

Yes, but then it's called "Real GDP".

Real GDP does Nominal GDP doesn't, normally real GDP is the important, widely cited figure.

There is no 'point' to growth, *growth is an inevitable consequence of human psychology and social dynamics *.

Social status and acceptance among peers and romantic interests is an innate human desire (and indeed among just about every species which exhibits social behaviour). Status is often afforded to those with a lot of wealth (to the point the term socio-economic status usually means just, well, economic status), wealth is a great facilitator of all sorts of things and lifestyles, which makes it attractive. However a quirk of human psychology is that we assign status in a local, relative way. The private envies the sergeant, not the general. This has implications for what any given individual considers wealthy and worth assigning status to.

We accumulate possessions over the course of our lives and when we die we bequeath our possessions to the next generation. The amount of wealth in the world increases constantly. However status is in limited supply, always. Even though I have a level of material wealth that vastly surpasses my grandparents, my wealth is only average for my time and place and so I am afforded no more status than they were because of it.

What I'm trying to convey is that there is no fixed level of wealth that is considered to be 'enough', nor will there ever be. If there was we would surely have passed it by now. People's wants and desires are limitless. As long as one person can get an edge in their choice of friends and partners and lifestyles by having more to offer than the next man then he will seek out a way to increase his rate of resource acquisition at a rate faster than those around him, i.e growth. The picture you paint of the wider economy is simply the manifestation of this dynamic.

Growth doesn't just mean producing things at an ever faster rate either. Improvements in efficiency and the reduction of waste are also forms of economic growth. Switching from fossil fuels to green energy is economic growth, faster internet speeds are economic growth, new medical breakthroughs are economic growth.

Consider for a moment what it would mean if there was no growth. There would be no innovation and no improvement in our day-to-day lives, you could not reasonably hope for a better standard of living for your children. You would live stuck in the same era of technology in perpetuity. Would you prefer that economic growth had stopped in 2000? 1500? 1000 BC? 1 million BC? Do you not think tomorrow will be brighter than today?

I think people who advocate 'degrowth' are rallying against mindless consumerism (honestly from those I've talked to, who are uniformly upper-middle class, this seems to derive from a sense of moral superiority to those who don't share their beliefs, in their eyes consumerism is a kind of lower-class vulgarity) and have a concern that unrestricted growth threatens the Earth in an irresponsible pollution-of-the-commons way, which is a valid concern. But I fear they are deeply misguided in their assessment of the situation and push for policies that are not compatible with human psychology on a fundamental level. Our only hope is that responsible stewardship from our governments (lol) can curb the worst excesses of humanity's insatiable desire for status before it poses an extensional threat.

I've heard a few people suggest that perhaps if we were to adopt a kind of ascetic lifestyle we could circumvent issues surrounding growth. I think this is a trap though. Part of what makes an ascetic lifestyle tolerable is that, ironically, it affords its practitioners a degree of status. The problem is that once everyone is an ascetic hermit its no longer impressive, status is relative remember, and we circle back around again to where we were.

I kind of went on a bit of a ramble with this post but I hope I got myself across, even if I didn't connect specifically with everything you described about too-big-to-fail and CDO's and so forth. Ultimately it is status, the whole way down.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of growth:

  1. Extensive growth is where you increase outputs by increasing inputs.

  2. Intensive growth is where you increase outputs through process improvements that allow you to produce more or higher-quality outputs with the same inputs.

In recent decades, economic growth in wealthy countries has been heavily skewed towards intensive growth. For example, carbon emissions per capita peaked in the 70s in the US, and total emissions peaked just before the GFC. Growth is coming mainly from producing better stuff, not from producing more stuff. Computing technology is the ultimate example of this: Computers are orders of magnitude more powerful than they were in the 80s, but use the same materials in the same quantities, more or less.

The socialist claim that capitalism requires infinite growth (it doesn't, although increases in per-capita GDP are certainly desirable) and therefore requires infinite growth in resource consumption is simply false. We have had quite a lot of intensive growth, and can continue to do so indefinitely. In theory, there may be some optimal state of the economy beyond which no improvements are possible, but that's so far removed from the status quo that it's a purely theoretical concern.

The point of growth is that it increases material standards of living. That aside, there's a cognitive bias where people perceive slow growth as regression. This is how you get people like Bernie Sanders and his followers on Reddit insisting that real incomes have collapsed when all the evidence says otherwise. Living in a high-growth economy just feels better than living in a low-growth economy.

Because being able to collectively grease every palm in society with rising wages and living standards is the easiest way to buy a lack of major unrest or civil conflict.

Without growth, there is a fixed pie. Anyone else's gain is your loss. It becomes extremely important that you protect what you got, because once someone else has it, they are going to fight like a cornered rat to keep it.

A society without growth might be possible, in the sense that it would not violate the law of gravity. But anyone who thinks they can pull it off and be in charge is already too dumb to actually achieve it, and they will start destroying people about 5 minutes in.

People gambling money on various esoteric financial instruments do not contribute to growth.

Good thing that’s a separate argument no one is here discussing

Capitol allocation is important to growth, and all investment activity, even derivatives, are capital allocation.

Yes, but adding extra several layers of gambling doesn't help and destabilises everything. Did we learn nothing from the financial crisis ?

Did the elaborate financial products whose risks were not properly understood help in any way, or were they merely helping to set up the system for a failure ?

Investments involve risk, and the point of derivatives is to allocate that risk to the investors most willing and able to accept that risk. They exist for the same reason insurance exists.

If the instruments that are supposed to help allocate risk instead create extra risk because they're employed in an irresponsible way, what then ?

"Extra layers of gambling" seems rather arbitrary. Are calls and puts extra included in this? They're contracts that grant the right to sell or buy securities at a certain price. They also help to check prices that are either too high or too low. If there's a buying or selling panic you can contradict the crowd, help to nudge the price, and make money if you turn out to be right.

A credit default swap is just insurance.

The financial instrument is easy to point to and say "it's too complicated," but no one is forced to trade any particular instrument. The people that traded them almost certainly understood what they were, they just had little incentive to care about the risk they were exposing their institutions to.

The people that traded them almost certainly understood what they were

They didn't. Nobody understood the risks of the pooled mortgages failing.

Or rather the relevant credit rating agencies lied / didn't care, the banks who were making them didn't want to and the customers were too stupid.

They convinced themselves that the odds of a large package of mortgages failing were minimal because not enough of them could go into nonpayment at once, so even a financial instrument made out of a lot of dogshit mortgages was actually not risky because odds of mortgages failing were independent, or some BS like that.

You guys don't remember any of this ?

A credit default swap is just insurance.

Yeah, sure. But if you're buying insurance on stuff you don't own, in a completely disproportionate amount, because you see the CDS's as being just free money, and then it blows up, you could argue that it was just stupid gambling.

Are calls and puts extra included in this?

Nothing wrong with that. But why is the derivatives market apparently something like an order of magnitude bigger than planetary GDP ?

But doesn't that happen in cycles? The national economy starts to grow, then it revs up and year upon year everyone is getting richer, and it looks like the good times will never stop.

Until they do, and you are plunged into a recession. The Great Depression was like that, and so was Celtic Tiger Ireland where we were being assured that this time for sure, we had broken the old cycles, and Ireland was now going to be modern and self-sufficient and not at the mercy of outside forces anymore, and it would never stop. Then 2008 happened, and the housing bubble burst (exploded, more like) and suddenly people were taking the emigration boat and planes once more as the national economy stagnated.

plunged into a recession

The recession does not undo all the growth since the last recession. Even the Great Depression, the very rough picture was that each year of it wiped out 1 year of normal growth.

No, but recessions knock out "our economy is going to grow forever and ever and never again will there be a crash".

There is always a crash. There is always a boom.

I am not sure who in this conversation said "there will never be a down year" but anyone who said that was wrong.

A society without growth might be possible

Just want to throw out that this is effectively what existed for almost all of human history. Otherwise, I agree with your comment.

Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency. Hearing people strawman capitalism as "it requires infinite growth", then equating it to a cancer cell, is one of those braindead arguments on par with "if you don't like gun control, why don't you just move to Somalia???"

Why can’t we make the finance industry basic again?

Some financial innovations have been good like ETFs, while others have been bad. Careful regulation is better than becoming a Luddite and trying to stop all financial advancements entirely.

Canada's financial regulation seems to be "see what America does and wait a few years to see if it is fucking stupid. If not, allow it." It is pretty good but I do not see how America can find someone bigger to watch.

I understand natural growth like your population is increasing (be it by new births or immigration) so spending is going up as more people buy more things, there are more workers, there are new products and new businesses, they create new markets and expand into existing ones, and so on.

But there does seem to be an expectation for perpetual growth that seems difficult to reconcile with reality. Company F reported gains in this quarter, but they weren't as much as last quarter and not as much as the market expected, so company F's shares reduce in price even though they still made a profit and are not in danger of going bust. Is it reasonable to expect company F to grow 2% this quarter, 3% next quarter, 4% the quarter after that and so on to infinity? What happens when company F drives all its competitors out of business and is the only remaining business with 100% of the market? And after it expands globally to take over 100% of the entire market for left-handed grape peelers in every nation of the earth, what then? How can it continue to grow?

Why should investment be directed towards businesses that don't grow? What would be the point in investing money into a business that isn't going to use that money to hire more staff, buy more equipment, open new locations etc.?

Company F reported gains in this quarter, but they weren't as much as last quarter and not as much as the market expected, so company F's shares reduce in price even though they still made a profit and are not in danger of going bust.

Why invest in them when you could invest in a company that is growing and improving?

What would be the point in investing money into a business that isn't going to use that money to hire more staff, buy more equipment, open new locations etc.?

But do they? Are the FAANG companies opening new locations? They may hire on new staff, but that seems to be running to stand still.

A fresh new company that has nothing to do but grow and improve and expand, I can understand investing in that. But Jones Bones is well-established, makes a tidy profit each year, has generally had good growth, and because this quarter they 'only' grew by 2.6% instead of 3.2%, you decide to pull out your money and invest in banana trees for dog kennels (that's a growth opportunity right there!)

Is it reasonable to expect company F to grow 2% this quarter, 3% next quarter, 4% the quarter after that and so on to infinity?

No, but literally no one expects that of any company. If you want illumination, not straw manning the beliefs you have trouble understanding is a good place to start.

And after it expands globally to take over 100% of the entire market for left-handed grape peelers in every nation of the earth, what then? How can it continue to grow?

As GP said:

Economic growth just means "continuous improvement". Sometimes that's by making the pie bigger, other times it's from increasing efficiency.

Company F figures out how to manufacture left-handed grape peelers more cheaply, or makes them last longer, or makes them work better, or invents a machine that peels grapes that both left- and right-handed people can use. Or someone else invents a better grape, so the value of grape peelers to people goes up, and more people buy them on the margin. Markets aren't static.

Markets aren't static.

No, I understand that, but neither are they infinite. You can only sell 100% of grape peelers, even if you develop AI that builds robots so you fire all your human staff and your factories run on a cost of fresh air churning out the world's cheapest and most technologically advanced grape peelers. You can't grow from 100% to 110% next year. Well, ignoring that if the global population was 9 billion this year and will be 12 billion next year so you sell 3 billion more grape peelers, but suppose we are all now uploaded into cyberspace and no more new babies are going to be born ever again. You are selling all the grape peelers you can possibly sell, there is no market to sell more. Every single entity on planet Earth has a drawer full of your grape peelers.

I do see that there is room for company F to improve its market share while there is competition from companies G, H, I and J in the cut-throat world of grape peelers, but there surely can't be infinite room for growth forever?

I do see that there is room for company F to improve its market share while there is competition from companies G, H, I and J in the cut-throat world of grape peelers, but there surely can't be infinite room for growth forever?

Growth isn't gross production for a reason.

If the market can't support companies F, G, H, I, and J all in the cut-throat world of grape peelers, but only four of them, then company F might expand the market by executing the sub-market of grape-peeler production, and support it's growth instead via the grape-peeler advertisement market to increase the market efficiency of one of the remainers, or the grape-peeler delivery market to expand the size of the consumer market who can be sold to, or offer grape-peeler-throat-cutting-protection services to protect corporate secrets (and throats) against cut-throat competition.

In many cases, growth isn't about gross production increasing at all, but efficiency increasing or upkeep reduction. Say you do have a maximally-saturated equilibrium where everyone who could possibly want a grape peeler has one, and no more should be made. At this point, market growth can come from cutting costs- whether the application of a material science for cheaper handles, or international trade deal market access for cheaper peeling-blades, or removing the now-excess grape-peeler production-expansion parts of your business, so that the freed up capital can go into the next great thing, pear-peelers.

At which point, the market continues to grow again, as having maximized profit in the current equilibrium in one area, capital can be invested to grow in another. But as we do that, things may (will) change in the old equilibrium. Maybe the market capacity for grape peelers grows again, because we uplifted our fellow primates and now monkeys are consumers. Maybe the market capacity shrunk more, and now we need to dismantle existing market infrastructure to re-allocate capital.

Well, that deconstruction is going to require capital, which markets will compete over to offer, and re-allocate the dismantled capital, which market actors will seek to repurpose, and that will feed other markets and submarkets as the entire ecosystem of managing this transition supports expertise and industrial specialists who can do the task more efficiently than the competition, who will be consuming tools and systems developed for that purpose, which-

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Like /u/FarNearEverywhere says, the expectation of Wall Street is that growth is perpetual, outside of actual innovations that genuinely increase productivity — like a better kind of grape, or a better machine to process them.

And why shouldn't it be? Investors are the ultimate reality-based community, and economies have in reality grown basically forever. Where and in what form this growth happens changes, though. It can change a lot, which is why companies that fail to grow get capital removed and companies that do grow get capital applied.

This is not a moral judgment, though. Investors are not morally shunning companies that fail to grow. It's just that by all appearances, those resources would be more useful elsewhere. It's like selling a guitar you rarely play any more to finance a bicycle that you would ride often. This is not a judgment on the quality of the guitar, or its inherent moral worth, or driven by an unreasonable expectation that the guitar be more useful to you. It's purely an optimization.

The stock market prices in expectations, so if a company misses its earnings prediction then its price declines relative to the profitability that market participants presumed the company had. It doesn't crash to zero. A stock price that declines for a week is not a death sentence. Furthermore, blue chip stocks (the ones that have grown very large and bought out many competitors) are not expected to grow exponentially ad infinitum; people buy blue chip stocks for steady rates of return, typically either from dividends or stock buybacks. So no, this "companies expect infinite growth in a non-infinite universe" argument really doesn't hold up.

That said, there are arguments to be made that many companies have time-horizons that are too short. Everybody wants to get rich quick, which has led to stuff like companies underfunding R&D budgets and taking on massive amounts of debt in order to finance stock buybacks.

I've been seeing the claim "capitalism requires perpetual growth" online, particularly over the past year or so, and in contexts such that I can't help but take that to imply "so the [latest] reason for overthrowing capitalism is to stop that rapacious all-consuming monster."

Which in turn seems like sour grapes to me, or a grudge in search of a grievance, because I recall that when it seemed credible that the U.S.S.R. could (always thirty years in the future) economically overtake America, there wasn't really any question about economic growth being good. It seems like a thought process going "communism is better than capitalism, therefore communism must economically outperform capitalism - but if capitalism economically outperforms communism, then, from the starting premise, greater economic performance must be bad."

This won’t be a long post but maybe it will be an area for people to post other political ads.

Here in S Florida I just saw an ad for a Latino State Senator who started the ad saying freedom 3 times. She then accused her opponent of being a socialists……drumroll…..socialists Maga Republican who will launch a dictatorship taking a womens right to choose.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Dem accuse GOP of being socialists (though politically there’s some support for that in maga today - Meloni supports a lot of family funding ).

In the past we’ve had Dixie Democrats. Now extinct. And Bill Clinton was forced to adopt Reagan’s Neoliberalism which is now considered a leftist politicial philosophy.

Now S Florida is a different place. I’m curious are there any other American political subcultures where they adopt the other teams language? I’m fairly certain no one will contest that it’s the right who accuses the left of socialism.

And Bill Clinton was forced to adopt Reagan’s Neoliberalism which is now considered a leftist politicial philosophy.

The fact that it is the predominant economic paradigm in America, with the consequence that it has many adherents within the Democratic party, does not make trickle-down neoliberalism a 'leftist political philosophy'. You would be laughed out of every economics faculty in existence if you claimed such a thing.

Sementics. Go to the neoliberal sub on Reddit it’s a Democrat establishment sub. I meant in the current American politics. The terms been co-opted by establishment Dems.

Go to the neoliberal sub on Reddit and they'll tell you themselves that they're 'economically centre-right'.

As a mod there -- some would? I think most would reject the dichotomy. Being against a corporate tax and for a land tax or carbon dividend, against most land use regulation, for some form of distribution and universal healthcare, against student loan forgiveness -- you'd lose a bit too much information to sum it up that pithily.

(referring here to the ideological core of the sub, i.e. the flaired DT regs -- the drift-in commenters commenting on random posts are obviously more diverse)

Pinochet support was a bannable offense on day 3 of the sub going live, if I recall correctly. To the extent the subreddit polarised against republicans since 2016 (which is true, and justifiable), that particular stance fell outside the sub's overton window from the start.

Hahaha. They ban anyone whose a Republican there. That’s not “economically right”

I agree the term neoliberal has been butchered. And the people now call themselves neoliberal are more like ordoliberal or neo-neoliberal.

But the people who use the neoliberal label today are in the American context center-left.

They are right of tankies.

I doubt they ban Republicans for being too much in favour of economic liberalisation.

They had a purge about 18 months ago. Banned anyone who gave away any signifier of not Biden voter.

It’s not like this hasn’t happened before. I consider myself a liberal but in the American context I’m not. Because in popular usage the term changed.

Huh. That probably says more about Reddit mods than it does about neoliberalism to be fair, though.

Think the popular definition of it has changed even outside Reddit. Now it just means establishment Dem who supports every spending bill out of the left.

Don’t get me wrong I’m old school Pinochet loving neoliberal.

More comments

Isn't southern Florida the place all the Cubans are at? Those people hate socialism more than the average American will, and it seems like enough of an outlier that I'd be careful not to assume nation-level trends.

I’m not extrapolating. And she was very Cuban or other South American running against the same.

The best other example would be in Chicago my alderman (Brendan Reilly) was a Democrat who on his Twitter bio lists himself as 26 year recovering GOP - clean and moderate.

But my point was are there any other interesting examples of local politicians using code words usually associated with the other side (socialism definitely counts, freedom is to a lesser extent coded red).


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