domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14hr ago
Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.
They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.
I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.
I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."
The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
So everyone is "wholly justified" in destroying everyone else? That is a bit of a nihilistic conception of justice, there.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.
As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes.
Counterpoint: the two main participants in the Cold War, the US and the USSR, were both very active in fighting proxy wars with the other. Supporting Hamas against Israel is not that different from supporting Bin Laden against the USSR, for example. Both sides tried very hard to avoid situations where US soldiers would have a shootout with USSR soldiers, because both sides were very aware of the danger of escalation.
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well. Sure, the other side would support the opponents with weapons, and they might send the odd liaison or special op soldier, but these would generally not participate in the killing of US/USSR soldiers and if they were killed, their side would not sweep that under the rug.
So if Iran was a nuclear power, as far as the cold war etiquette between the US and Iran was concerned,
- the US supplying chemical weapons to Saddam would be within the norms, because the US are not the ones using them
- Iran supporting Hamas against Israel would be within norms -- a classic proxy war
- the US assassinating IRGC general Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020 would be against the norms -- like if Brezhnev had used a Soviet missile to kill Kissinger while he was in France
- Israel dropping US-manufactured bombs on Iran would be within the norms
- Trump bombing the Iranian nuclear sites would be against the norms
Another point of etiquette is that you do not try to critically destabilize a nuclear power, even through indirect actions. While their soldiers are out bringing freedom and democracy or the glory of communism to some backwater, they are fair game for your proxies, but you want your proxies to stick to their local theater, not engage in intercontinental terrorism. For example, you would not back 9/11, or arm Ukraine to the point where they might force a regime change in Moscow. (As far as cold war etiquette between a hypothetical nuclear Iran and Israel are concerned, the Oct-7 attacks would be debatable. Attacking civilians -- especially in the deliberate manner displayed by Hamas -- of a nuclear power is going to piss off that power, and you generally don't want to be anywhere nearby in the causal chain of events.)
Tail risks are an important consideration for military interventions. If you are pushing around a conventional enemy on another continent, the question to "what is the worst that could realistically happen due to bombing them?" is likely stuff on the level of "they miraculously manage to sink an aircraft carrier" or "the sponsor a terrorist group which manages to kill a few thousand citizens". If you try to push around a nuclear enemy, then even for NK the answer is a lot bleaker -- they might not be able to nuke you on another continent, but they will certainly be able to drop a nuke or two on your regional allies.
There is also a case to be made that the knowledge that your side has nuclear weapons will make you more careful when engaging other nuclear powers. At the moment, Iran can lob rockets towards Israel whenever they feel like it -- the tail risks are sharply limited -- Israel is not going to nuke Tehran over a few dozen citizens killed, at the most they will kill a few hundred Iranians in return. By contrast, if you are an actor who has some but not absolute control over a nuclear armed side, perhaps a general or military advisor, you want to be careful to avoid a spiral of escalation where your side might be the first to use nukes and gets destroyed in retaliation. Say nuclear Iran launches a few missiles, Israel responds in kind, and as usual their missiles are much more effective than the ones fired by Iran. Suddenly there is some possibility that someone will nuke Tel Aviv, and Israel will nuke Tehran in response.
In conclusion, no, a nuke does not make you completely untouchable, but it very much protects you from direct confrontations with other nuclear powers both by limiting their and your own conduct. I can totally see why the ayatollah regime wants nukes.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
14hr ago
Nobody in power seems to want to acknowledge what these men actually want out of society and, by contrast, what they're actually getting.
They will, but only long enough to say that it's disgusting or that them not getting it is entirely their own fault. The latter might be reasonable if it were actually true.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
14hr ago
Im starting to wonder if "Fortifying the election" might ultimately go down in history as the choice that brought down the DNC as a viable national party. All it seems to have accomplished is undermine thier own credibility while giving Trump four years to build a viable post-Trump MAGA coalition. Vance is the obvious hier apperant, but Rubio, Hegseth, and DeSantis are all under 55 and well positioned to be candidates in 2032 and 2036.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
14hr ago
They still have abortion, which they want to ban at the federal level.
kky
14hr ago
and by nature people love rightful royal power.
I’m not so certain that the founders of this country would agree. Quite honestly this kind of attitude feels unAmerican. How did we get here?
He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor.
Obsequious, disgusting behavior. What happened to manly dignity and self-reliance? Isn’t America supposed to rise above feudal Europe?
kky
14hr ago
I think we are going through a Whig collapse, if much slower and less of a split. The party is sloughing off working-class voters and refocusing on the educated elite. The “small fractures” in the remaining party mean little; the core agrees on everything but whose ass should fill which seat. The real fracture is between center and periphery, and in the years to come I would predict an increasing muscular fringe of swing-vote Democrats whose real selling point to voters is that they do not fall in line in front of Trump or Vance or whoever, nor the Democratic apparatchiks. There will eventually be a showdown of sorts between that fringe and the party center, and the result will either be a takeover of the party itself or the founding of a new party. Either way, the principles of that group will steal voters back from the Republicans and re-establish the unstable equilibrium of two-party democracy.
That’s my prediction, anyway, or possibly my hope. I’m real damn sick of the current political divide.
faceh
14hr ago
Plus, they got their destruction of Roe v. Wade.
What large issue do they have to animate them to action and grant them leverage over the national GOP, after that?
hydroacetylene
14hr ago
Thank you for writing this up with more comprehension and detail than I could have done. I’ve had roughly the same impression- Trump has people to put democrats in jail this time, the party is increasingly in disarray, 2026 is going to be a disaster for the DNC in the senate for structural reasons, etc.
But Trump has also gotten good at performing the part of a strong rightful king, and by nature people love rightful royal power. He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor. Obviously, writing this way to Trump is a great way to get what you want(or at least make it more likely), but it also sets a precedent that this is how the president, leader of the free world, POTUS, is to be addressed, and that in turn makes it more normal, which in turn raises the impression that president Trump has the Mandate of Heaven. People understand that on a primitive clan based society level.
I wrote earlier about how Trump was campaigning not as a better leader, but as the rightful leader. Democrats don’t have any counter to that. That’s why Trump’s popularity keeps rising.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
14hr ago
Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.
Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens.
They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14hr ago
It seems to me that you have failed to understand the current state of discourse in Conservative Christian circles, and have instead proceeded with basing your reasoning off cached data from a quarter-century ago.
The fundamental difference that you appear to have missed is that Christians lost these arguments decisively around the turn of the century, and their opponents got their way. As a result, Conservative Christians no longer need to argue what might happen if the other side gets their way, but rather what has happened, and what results the other side is accountable for. Christians can now operate as a genuine counter-culture, offering a cogent critique of the conditions we are all living in every minute of every day. We can offer meaningful answers to the myriad discontents created by our present society, and through those answers coordinate the systematic withdrawal from and dismantling of that society. The powers of compulsion no longer rest within our hands, and so we can focus on persuasion instead. And the worse Progressivism makes things, the more persuasive our arguments get.
But by all means, if you believe Conservative Christianity is going to enshrine the rule of boomer-brained gen-x-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies, say so, and show some examples of how this happens. Meanwhile, I'm watching Atheist stalwarts openly reject liberalism and its works.
faceh
15hr ago
There's an inherent problem with the political landscape right now continually asking sacrifices of young men but being very short on the rewards that are promised to them.
Nobody in power seems to want to acknowledge what these men actually want out of society and, by contrast, what they're actually getting.
I think this problem is going to become unavoidably salient as the Boomers die off and a lot of guys enter their 30's unmarried and with few prospects on starting a family.
The side that at least wants the men to stop watching porn and to start a family might come around to realize that this requires addressing those men's concerns and shifting cultural incentives.
The Dems are intrinsically unable to address mens' concerns.
So yeah, maybe they walk away from the Boomer evangelical coalition, but they ain't walking into the arms of the lefties.
Hadad
15hr ago
Much of the Republican coalition would also like to put the average young male voter through a struggle session for such crimes as watching pornography, playing video games, engaging in "devil worshipping" activities like D&D, and not being married.
This just isn't true nowadays, I don't think. The religious right has never been weaker or had less cultural sway. The Republican coalition nowadays isn't a bunch of disaffected people united by Mother Church's guiding hand -- the religious ones are just a small part of that coalition themselves, and need make concessions to other people, not vice versa.
thejdizzler
15hr ago
I wonder if we'll get a democratic collapse along the lines of the 1850s Whig party. I don't see any particularly salient issue that could divide the party like that. Instead, it seems like lots of really small fractures, which paradoxically keeps the party together. Which is unfortunate, because we need a collapse like that of the Whig party: the Democrats don't stand for basically anything other than grifting anymore.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
15hr ago
On top of that, I don't see any possible way the Dems can attract young male voters back. They've gone way too far out on the "men are inherently evil" limb. Can't reel that back in without pissing off the unmarried white female demographic that is their backbone. But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session, like with Harry Sisson, will balk at anything they say. There's NOTHING to offer them.
I could imagine it. Much of the Republican coalition would also like to put the average young male voter through a struggle session for such crimes as watching pornography, playing video games, engaging in "devil worshipping" activities like D&D, and not being married. Trump won because he wasn't identified with that faction of the party. If the 2028 candidate decides to wrap themselves in conservative Christianity, those young men could decide to take a hike. Remember, it won't be BASED Christianity developed by and for young men, it will be the Christianity of boomer-brained Gen-X-er preachers and middle-aged church ladies.
ControlsFreak
15hr ago
I mean, if we had a clean EPC opinion, you might have a case. (Of course, Skrmetti is already casting doubt on whether there's support to push the (often claimed dubious) Bostock reasoning in Title VII into EPC.) But we didn't get that opinion. We got the cluster that is Obergefell. It should be pretty high on the list of people who are pro-SSM-from-a-policy-perspective for "opinions where I agree with the outcome, but disagree with the reasoning".
ControlsFreak
15hr ago
1855? 1850? 1845? ... 1776, when the Constitutional compromises were made? This seems like a silly exercise with only faux numerical justification.
sohois
15hr ago
I didn't claim that China lacked historical sites, rather that the cities themselves were somewhat lacking. The issue is that all the sites are dispersed throughout a continent-sized nation, making it very difficult to plan a trip - as you've discovered. Personally Suzhou, Luoyang, and Chengdu did not stand out as markedly different from the tier 1 cities in being composed of vast sprawls of communist blocks and a small handful of proper history. At least everyone likes Xi'an, but that seems to be the exception to the rule.
I lived in Harbin for a short period, so it's more that I passed through while the ice festival happened than I visited. Certainly it's very unique, and Harbin isn't a bad city as some of the Russian influences have still remained. But I recommended it more because much of China is quite grim to visit in December, particularly further south: I moved from Harbin to Shanghai in January, and found it worse in the 0-5C of Shanghai to the -20C of Harbin just because so many places lacked proper heating.
faceh
15hr ago
While I think there are real concerns about what happens to the GOP Post-Trump, yeah, the Dem's issues are structural and the alliances they've forged by being maximally divisive on sex, on race, on religion, on class, and on age too, I guess, mean there's no way to please each of these disparate groups.
In fact, the post-Trump era might be harder on the Dems because opposition to Trump was like the one thing that united them!
Dems can't run another stodgy White Guy for President. I mean, they can, Biden proved that the party can get everyone in line and on task if needed, but it is impossible to imagine the guy who has the political juice to win the primaries at this point.
Likewise, Dem leadership is ossified and they've hamstrung any new blood from acquiring much power. AOC is popular but she's also been ground down by the party machine. Pelosi et al. will grip the reins of power right up until their dying breath. Trump, by elevating Vance, is giving the 'new Generation' a generous toehold on power which they can use to climb up.
David Hogg was stupid about it, but he had the right idea that there needs to be enough of a shakeup that young upstarts can compete for influence in the party and identify talented candidates. Kinda how Obama got into power (which, ironically, was probably what prompted the party to lock down that issue so Hillary could win next time).
On top of that, I don't see any possible way the Dems can attract young male voters back. They've gone way too far out on the "men are inherently evil" limb. Can't reel that back in without pissing off the unmarried white female demographic that is their backbone. But any guy who looks and sees how they force any popular young Democrat male through a struggle session, like with Harry Sisson, will balk at anything they say. There's NOTHING to offer them.
Whomever they nominate, it'll either annoy their base, or it'll alienate the median voter.
And all this is before we talk about how the extreme progressive wings are demanding concessions constantly.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
15hr ago
This is why David Hogg was called a jackass for trying to primary fellow democrats as DNC chair. It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere. The value of a reputation of neutrality is that people don’t expect neutral actors to be that sort of backstabber, and they don't make plans to backstab the neutral actors either. It reduces internal coalition tensions.
Of course, if you thought the DNC was neutral before Hogg you were mistaken. They have learned since Clinton made a joint funding agreement with the DNC that effectively gave her control of the party for her run against Sanders in 2016, leading to the wikileaks emails that showed key DNC officials suggesting strategies for the Clinton campaign to use against Sanders and Donna Brazile feeding Clinton debate questions. Primarily they learned not to use email to discuss that sort of thing. That's how you maintain neutrality!
What always struck me as weird though, was that people act like the DCCC are somehow separate from the DNC, despite both being commanded by the party leadership. So when the DCCC blacklisted vendors from supplying Justice Democrat candidates like AOC on behalf of the incumbents, that's somehow different from if the DNC had done it. It's a real "Clark Kent wears glasses. Superman doesn't wear glasses. How are you confusing these guys?" vibe.
Wohlfe
16hr ago
I would just recommend you take your time travelling on highway 101, it's such a beautiful piece of the country. If you can swing it, I'd recommend not cutting through Portland and going the long way down 101 before heading east through Salem. Tillamook is a nice little afternoon getaway if you're big fans of dairy products, Astoria is a cute cozy little city, and the area around Tillamook Bay is wonderful (if a little touristy).
Tree
16hr ago
A handful (effectively: 1-2 that are very close to each other) of ideologies dominating the mass-media ecosystem seems to fit right into my model, and "dissidents" buying a SocMed is far from a contradiction.
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Imaginary bailey of 100% strong mind control : everything is controlled by one ideology, no dissenting centers of power. People have no independent minds, they just receive the transmissions the elites send, when they deem something not worth censoring.
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Imaginary bailey of 0% mind control: people vote and buy only in accordance with their intimate conviction, deep desire, and pure, untainted knowledge. you cannot buy any influence at all. censorship never works. The centers of power perfectly represent the ideological population distribution.
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The mottes, our true positions: golden middle of enlightened centrism, haggling on 20-80% mind control. Land of on the one hand, on the other hand.
This conversation is each of us arguing against a bailey the other doesn't actually wish to defend.
For example, it would be silly to try to represent the population's beliefs 1-to-1 (using a stringent form of ideological AA) in, say, hollywood, or newspapers. Is this not obvious? It's one thing to occasionally force a woman or a conservative in to make sure there's a little bit of everything, and prove they are not excluded, it's another to force equal representation. AA devolves into completely unmeritocratic fixed roles for everyone, without regard for ability or interest: the 8th employee must be a 30 yo black creationist, 9th a 50 yo redhead anti-vax woman, etc.
I don't think I heard anyone tell me they want to reward the company for a particularly well-made ad
If you see attractive people on a boat drinking Trademark, or a 4x4 Trademark driving though the wilderness on TV, it can move you, and if so, it does add to your enjoyment of the product later. Thank you michael jordan for making me feel like michael jordan when I put on these michael jordan shoes.
It can also inform you of a sale or a new product that alone can meet your peculiar needs, but that's standard ad apologism.
The deeper question is whether the ad can just totally subvert your 'true wishes', or if it is limited in its effects, can even in some cases bring you something positive, or reveal your true wishes. The same goes for political influence: I don't think you can convince people of anything, censor anything, buy any idiot the presidency. There are limits to what this mind control/nudging can achieve.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
16hr ago
It missed its chance to be the one and only 10th Amendment precedent.
The Republicans will not ban abortion at the federal level. Neither will they commit significant political value to attempting such a ban.
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