All the advances of the industrial revolution, a direct outcome of advances in philosophy, have meant that there are now a lot more people on Earth. Population grows exponentially. And that appears to mean that exponentially more people will suffer.

I'd go into this at more length, by it's almost my time for the drive through window at McDonald's, and I need to order the Unibomber manifesto in hardcopy because my Kindle hurts my eyes and I've ground too much Cheeto dust into the screen.

That's interesting. I've had a similar experience vis-a-vis Gnosticism. Not that there isn't a focus on practical experience in churches I've attended, they certainly advocate Bible reading and prayer, but it's also bracketed by the doctrines of "saved by faith alone" and "original sin" pretty heavily.

I suppose there is a kind of presupposition that, no matter how much you learn in internal inquiry, the foundation and lens through which to sift all those experiences should always be those two doctrines.

I didn't grow up going to church so I have an outsiders view. My wife won't notice it, but the repetition of the two core doctrines, with a health dose of barbs against Catholic and Orthodox theology, has filled a line at least once every 10 minutes of sermon across a dozen plus churches on hundreds of days in my experience. You can be ignorant of theological history, but it will still surround you I guess.

I believe you chronology is a bit off. Kabbalah was developed centuries after the Gnostics were genocided by their coreligionists out of existence. Schloem has connected Kabbalah to Gnostic mysticism and Hermeticism, but it came after the heyday of the Gnostics.

Gnosticism was of course influenced by Platonism. The two have a connection there. Platonism itself had influences from older Greek traditions, as well as ones from the east and Egypt. We don't know where the idea of the transmigration of souls filtered into Greece, but it seems it could have come from India. We now know that Plato's Theory of Forms pre-dates him by generations in Memphite Theology, and the four elements, as well as the semiology of opposites also seem to come from Egypt. The Orphic Cult might have been a vehicle for eastern mysticism into the Greek world.

In any case, I don't think you're entirely correct about these being somehow more elitist traditions. The Cathars were beggars and rejected material wealth. The Gnostics as well forsake material possessions and preached amongst the poor. Indeed, it was their rejection of temporal power that paved the way for their massacre by the forces of orthodoxy.

Bit of a caveat, Thomas was discovered in it entirety in 1945 but scholars knew about it long before. Thomas likely predates a the later synoptic gospels, Mark and Luke, while likely being put down after Mark. It is almost certainly older than John.

Luke and Mathew quote Thomas as length, or at least quote the same source. Scholars hypothesize a Q document that served as a repository of Christ's words, that was later added to narratives from people who knew his life's story.

Anyhow, I think the biggest misnomer with Thomas is that it is a Gnostic gospel. John has far more explicit Gnostic themes. From God as Word, (a decidedly Platonist theme), to the elevation of the spiritual above the material. Paul's letters also have more Gnostic themes. You can see how the idea.of hylics, psychics, and pneumatics could be drawn from Paul's discourse on those born of spirit in I Corinthians. He also personifies wisdom (Sophia), which became a Gnostic trope (Wisdom is even more fully personified in Proverbs).

The best way to think of the Gnostics is as a wide range of Jewish and Christian sects with overlapping beliefs. You can define Gnostic as a belief in a Demiurge, a flawed or evil creator of the material world who is below the true God of ideas and forms, or more broadly as early Christians who saw salvation as a form of holy enlightened, rather than atonement. The themes reappear later, with the Albegensians and Cathars.

I think people get led off track with the very strange cosmology of the Apocryphon of John and the Hypostasis of the Archons, which posit Yahweh as a demonic force called Yaldaboath or Secclus, who gang rapes Eve with his Archons and tries to blind humanity. Christ's main appearance is to bring the Fruit of Knowledge to Adam and Eve in the Garden. Jewish Gnostics further focused on Seth, Eve's third son, as the lineage of enlightenment.

But this is hardly a universal cosmology. That is what makes them so fascinating. The modern American Protestant churches I've been too seem to fetishize the early church a bit. I always take this in stride remembering that the early church had no bible for Sola Scriptura, indeed the New Testament quotes Enoch, and also had an active melange of Gnostic beliefs. A Gnostic was almost Pope. Orthodoxy had to be enforced after the fact, with the sword.

I'll get back to you later, but in terms of your second question, I found the this course to be a really great primer on the "hard problem of conciousness."

You can get it for free using an Audible trial. Just cancel after you download.




https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Body-Philosophy-audiobook/dp/B01N0RBT5H

Yes, it's hard to be a strict positivist once you look deeper. Plato is probably the place to start on contrary opinions.

A good story. Although, you also have to see the ironic humor in how faith often works instead in this one:



Switch a few words and it's the Thirty Years War.

Or to sum up, this image contains the essential truths that Ibn Khaldun realized in his own era. The problem is that the people who use this imagery often think they are the "hard men," yet can't even run a mile.

We're really all bequeathing to our children a legacy of ashes. The far-right, ready to demolish the pillars of civil society to get their way, more than any other party.

Thankfully, America has birthright citizenship, so we haven't created a 30 million person underclass. That said, we have 10-15 million people who will head into retirement with no safety net. Given that American born Baby Boomers, who arguably had the greatest economic period in all of human history to accumulate savings, have less than $30k in liquid assets on average, I have to imagine this will end poorly and cause more instability.

This is, of course, another reason that migration is, as you say, a policy lapse. We need people paying in to the system, regardless of what comes next. Half the budget is wealth transfers to seniors, and it is growing exponentially. American provides UBI and universal healthcare, but only above a certain age. It doesn't tax enough to fund these, hence, after the Trump tax cuts, the US deficit trippled to over $1 trillion. About $0.25 of every $1.00 spent had to be borrowed. Debt is necissarily a wealth transfer from the current generation to the next. Services are rendered today, the bill is due in 10-30 years. Since the Baby Boomers reached majority in the 1980s, tax cut after tax cut has inflated the national debt during their prime earning years, to the tune of $27 trillion. This is a wealth transfer on top of the current transfer systems for older citizens.

"Canceling college debt would be the greatest wealth transfer in US history," is a ludicrous statement by Fox pundits. An amount greater than all mortgages combined has already been staked against the earnings of the next generation, let alone a measly $1 trillion in student debt.

It is of course an accident of history, and still quite relevant that the Baby Boomers who benefit from most of this transfer were born in an era when the nation was 90% white. History and demography won't leave policy alone. And so the transfer increasingly become from minorities to the old "majority," from young to old. As faith breaks down over future generations having it so good, so does good will.

Shifting expenditures to the next generation has a certain logic. Technology advances and wealth grow exponentially, not linearly. Or at least it did. A person born in 1950 had a much better life than one born in 1890, on average.

But now we must challenge that assumption. Life expectancy has been falling the last several years. The median wage peaked, in real terms, in 1979 and has stagnated since. For the poorer half, 160 million people, it is falling. 40 years is enough to call something a trend.

Yet, the generational gap appears to only be getting worse. Trump lost voters under 55 by 9 points in 2016 and voted in massive tax cuts focused on the rich (and consequently the old). He lost the young again by 11 points in 2020. Landslide margins.

Into the fray comes social conservatism. I consider myself a social conservative, but there is something rich about the older generation of today decrying the degeneracy and licentiousness of the young. Number of extra martial partners, drug use, violent crime? These are all plummetting, in the case of sex to a frankly disturbing degree. A full third of young men are now abstinent. We model Saudi Arabia more than we'd like to admit. All three peaked with the Baby Boomers, who now claim both half the nations tax revenue, and moral supremecy. To make it worse, age and race are now highly correlated in a dividing line.

I doubt the result will be pretty. I'd vote for a president who is honest and says benefits will be cut and taxes will be raised. Hell, start a draft for civil service projects, you could do worse than the WPA.

:eyeroll:

Yes, there are two sides. Defenders/survivors, and the Satanic forces of darkness. Only by a miracle can the hosts of the isms be defeated. Rest assured, when they are, things will be totally different.


At least until the next revolution does what they always do...





Of course defeating the Nazis was just. There are, or course, gradations in justice. I find it hard to see how the current circular firing squads of the America left advance justice. They instead appear to further the cause of reactionaries, more than anything else. You're more likely to tilt at a windmill than a Nazi.

I'm skeptical of such Manichean pronouncements entirely. On one side the great hosts of racism, sexism, and oppression gather. On the other, the forces of wisdom and freedom.

It isn't realistic.

How many disagreements have their been over simply the definition of "racism?"

"Black people cannot be racist. Racism, is not bigotry, but bigotry in addition to social privilege."

This definition causes near endless arguments across America. For many, racism is negative action against another for their race. For others, there is necissarily a component of large scale power imbalances.

Thus, I've heard it said, black people cannot be racist, even against other minorities, since they face the most oppression. This is true, given a definition of racist that looks through a wide lense of "privilege" and advantage at a national, or transnational level.

At the same time, I can see why this doesn't fit with personal experience. The word racist has connotations of a greater than average sin. To be racist, is to be sinful on a deep level.

For my own experience: I went to school in one of the poorest and most violent cities in the US. Hispanics were the largest demographic, followed by African Americans. Whites made up what I would guess was at least 15% of the population, although when I check now it's less than 10%, making the district's schools segregated by most datasets definitions. The city's demographics are not so segregated, but the median age of White and Hispanic populations differs by a full 23 years.

The ethnic demographic subjected to the most ostentatious bullying were Asians. This included frequent racist mocking, up to serious random beatings that sent high schoolers to the hospital, and resulted.in permanent brain injury.

Later in life I've heard the theory that Asians can be racist to African Americans, but African Americans cannot be racist to Asians Americans. The differences in privilege make equal acts unequal.

Whatever merits this argument might have, I doubt it will do anything to stem communal violence. If anything, it seems designed to be a wedge to perpetuate it.

The same question comes up in the question of Zimbabwe. Is the communal violence there racist?

Making definitions of racism correspond to broad, changeable ethnic hierarchies world wide seems to me to make for more fights over definitions, and less dialogue.

At it's worst, you end up with extremely warped ideas of history where "White" rich males have dictated all things, from time immorial, and all other peoples lack agency.

Why did Mossadegh face a coup? Because a single white man with $50,000 cash and a phone line willed it. Why did Pinochet lead his coup? Because he was told he would not be punished by US State Department employees. This is incredibly reductive reasoning that remains popular and seems racist in its own way.

I think the positive feedback loop example also works for systemic racism. I've seen examples of how car insurance and credit scores are racist. Unable to use variables for race specifically, companies use spurious variables in their calculations as a proxy for race, which is what they really want to model.

Because certain groups are more likely to be unfairly treated in the justice system (e.g. "driving while black"), it means that individuals within those groups are going to be more likely to get tagged with variables that also correlate with risk (e.g. felony status).The US justice system is racist. Felony convictions correlate with credit worthiness because having a felony conviction makes it hard to get a job. These two factors working in confluence make some minority groups more likely to default on debt. Because the justice system is racist, all else equal, a truly color blind credit score system will be racist.

Who faces blame for a car accident depends on police reports many times. All else equal, because there is widespread racial bias, a minority driver is more likely to be blamed for an accident. This in turn makes it true that a minority driver is more costly to insure, and thus should be asked to pay more based on their risk profile (in pure, formulaic sense).

Regression analysis, by its nature, will turn into a feedback loop that perpetuates racism. Hypothetical magically non-racist AI cops would still arrest African Americans for smoking marijuana at a higher rate than European Americans, despite African Americans using the drug less, based on identical visual and olfactory sensors, because African Americans live in denser neighborhoods, which makes detecting marijuana smoke more likely.

This is essentially the same old structural racism argument that many have made better than I. I think the message also gets jumbled though. Structural racism would appear to have two components:

1. Ways systems are designed to carry out prejudice intentionally or based on subconscious bias;

2. Ways in which systems create almost mathematical feedback loops, where an oppressed group gets disadvantaged due to the system, and the measure of their disadvantage is a variable that feeds into further oppression.

A terrible example I know is that leaked Amazon documents show they seek to hit given levels of diversity because higher diversity actually makes union organizing less likely to occur or be successful. In turn, the poverty caused by machinations like these, make people more likely to hunker down into racist ideologies.

false positives are far less risky, and more readily correctable, than false negatives.

My intuition is that this truism, is part of the neurological behavior that makes racism so endemic and persistent. Racial biases act like positive feedback loops. A person has a bias against black people. They walk by a group of black youths. They tense up, their heart races. We're programmed to react to low frequency, high risk incidents. Particularly interpersonal conflict. We are, after all, a species the evolved under homicide rates that are far in excess of anything today. Measured homicide rates in modern hunter gatherer societies are higher than Europe if you use 1914-1918 as your measuring period. The fight or flight response is irrational, quite likely not based on any personal experience, but it's acute.

Nothing has to happen for the loop to be reinforced. The person feels stress due to bias, regardless of if the object of their fear has done anything to warrant it, and this feeds the loop. The same thing can play out in social situations.

Thankfully, modern interest in short term profits over all else has led to our water and food supply being so inundated with estrogenergic chemicals that sperm counts have already plunged by half. The question: will humans be able to reproduce naturally, might be a real one some day.

https://futurehuman.medium.com/humans-may-not-be-able-to-reproduce-naturally-much-longer-scientist-warns-bd3b9dbbf859

Ironic that in the US, where this problem is particularly pronounced, the right will rage against transgender individuals, but then support any companies right to dump sex hormone mimicking compounds into our water.

Reverse osmosis set ups help, I have one, but won't get everything.

Well maybe some people. My Holy Grail has Indiana Jones in it.

I'd add that the American left has also had a penchant for ridiculous conspiracy theories as well. They've largely been able to pull back from this owing to the fact that the Trump Administration's infamies were so outrageous and numerous that there was plenty of real scandal to cover. I certainly remember the Bush II era though, when it wasn't uncommon to hear the narrative that the administration had invaded Iraq largely for personal gain (remember the Halliburton) and knew full well that their nuclear program was dormant. Indeed, while there was clear evidence of the politicization of intelligence, there was virtually nothing on the diabolical scale that pundits threw out there.

Not to mention the "9/11 was an inside job," or "Bush let 9/11 happen so he could do some war," theories, which had little evidence but wide appeal. Hell, Noam Chomsky got popular on screeds ascribing Manichean evil to the US defense apparatus that would get him laughed out of an undergrad IR seminar. No review of policy maker's memoirs, interviews with principals, or reviews of declassified or leaked documents required. "The US bombed a medical facility in Sudan, and there is no way it was an accident as claimed because it seems suspicious!"

To date no evidence has ever come forward from what would be a major conspiracy involving far more people than could be expected to hold such a secret, while plenty of documentation shows how the botched strike occured, but of your a Chomsky reader this is all evidence of a cover-up.

Great example here. The "DNC hack was local," was actually an intentional hoax made up by a troll in the UK. The story ran in many major outlets because VIPS (the former intel officials you mention), signed on to it. Most never even published corrections. It's hard to find a hoax that has been more fully debunked than this one, because the person who ran it was found, and their methods uncovered, but it lives on.

There is a step by step analysis of what happened linked below if you're interested. It is interesting because normally someone doesn't get so completely caught, but in this case you can see step by step what happened. If you read it, let me know if it changed your mind at all.

Essentially, a tech worker in the UK falsified evidence that the DNC download was fake. He did it sloppily. He has been involved in similar antics in the past. His report on the "local download theory" was published under a fake name. He sent it to VIPS. VIPS has actually since admitted they were had and that this was a hoax. In fact, many of the members never wanted to associate their credibility with the report

The guy doing the hoax targeted William Binney, a disabled former NSA employee with a grudge against the agency. He has helped keep the conspiracy alive by continuing to advocate for it on podcasts, even after VIPS retracted their support for the theory. They pressured Binney into admitting that he had absolutely no technical qualifications for vetting the report. However, it seems a desire for fame and getting another big break and hit against his former employer, the way VIPS did with Iraq, eventually got him out pushing the conspiracy again. He's waffled on it depending on the venue.

The guy who did the hoax has also been involved in circulating EU leaks attributed to Russia. He could knowingly be a Russian asset, or just someone who likes to be involved in espionage and is easily used as an asset. In the history of espionage lots of recruits are made just because people want to be involved in something "cool" and feel important. This seems even more true in the digital age. The best assets are actually the ones who don't know who their handlers work for, and who see their handlers as on the same level as them, or even beneath them.

The meeting the Trump campaign had with Russian intelligence officials is a great example. Perhaps no one on the Trump campaign is lying and the meeting amounted to nothing. However, they showed up for a meeting with a Russian intelligence officer whose cover was already blown specifically to discuss "dirt on Hillary," a few weeks before the email leaks. Just them showing up looks suspicious and causes chaos. That alone is an amazing intelligence coup. They never had to get the campaign to collude, getting high level campaign figures and the President's son involved in suspicious activity is good enough. Sort of like the Hunter Biden saga, or Bill Clinton being paid $1M to do a speech for UBS shortly after Clinton settled a fraud case with them for State. If it looks bad enough, that's enough to spread discord. It helps too that top federal positions and Congress are exempt from the level of corruption law that state and local officals in most states are subject too. For many states it is illegal to engage in activities that give the perception of corruption, even if your aren't doing anything untold.

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252445769/Briton-ran-pro-Kremlin-disinformation-campaign-that-helped-Trump-deny-Russian-links

You can be intelligent and believe conspiracy theories. Intelligence, at least in the psychometric sense it is used in research on intelligence, is mostly about processing speed. Provided you grow up in a developed country and avoid disease and injury, it's mostly genetic. It can be measured pretty robustly.

In layman's terms, I'd say there is a big difference between intelligence and wisdom. Wisdom isn't something we measure in psychology or neuroscience. It's probably a mix of things we study; personality and intelligence. I'd imagine that people who tend to have high levels of the Big Five personality traits "Openess to Experience," and "Conscientiousness," along with high IQs tend to be "wiser," and generally more resistant to conspiracies. Knowledge is a huge factor too. If you actually work or have closely participated in politics, the idea of shadowy elites who always get their way is pretty laughable. Things are often a mess and generally no one involved is happy.

Finally finishing William Durant's The Age of Faith, which is on the Middle Ages. Durant covers the history of the West from antiquity to the death of Napoleon in his 11 volume "Story of Civilization." Although it focuses on the "West" it covers history as far afield as Persia in detail. Even at 1,200 pages, the Middle Ages get the shortest amount of detail. Greek antiquity and the Roman Empire to Constantine each get their own book.

Fantastic prose and insight. A joy to read. It covers all topics, going into art, poetry, theology, science, trade, war , and politics.

There are great aphorisms spread throughout. On the topic of decadence and societal decay: "every civilization is born a stoic, and dies an Epicurean." On the foibles of war "ever must the fertility of woman struggle to make up for the foolishness of man and the bravery of generals." Aside from Gibbon I don't know if I've ever read such keen insight and quality prose in history, and I read a lot of history. Which is not to say the long sections on architecture don't get to be a bit much.

It's taken me forever because it got me rereading the Canterbury Tales and Beowulf.

Now I'm reading Le Morte d'Arthur. It isn't on the level of the Iliad in art, nor as enjoyable as the distinct stories of The Arabian Nights, but it has a certain appeal. It's rough around the edges, which is part of what makes it really capture the feel of the high Middle Ages. It's an irony that chivalry truly peaked at just the time that gunpowder and mercenary armies would soon make it go extinct. I don't know if I'm going to read it cover to cover, most likely not. More of a cool archetypal story collection to dip into, like the Arabian Nights and Grimm's Fairy Tales, which I also pick up from time to time. The Witcher short stories (Last Wish and Sword of Destiny) are also pretty good collections for that sort of reading. I found the actual novels underwhelming though.

No, but I find Many Worlds the most philosophically interesting.

From a practical standpoint, I highly doubt we will approach anything like a "Grand Theory of Everything." I appreciate the positivist project from a pragmatic standpoint. It's damn useful, and the answers science gives are interesting. However, I'm definitely not a follower of Dewey and the pragmatists in terms of my epistemology.

I suppose there are other ways to think of determinism. "Reality" in any sense can't exist without understanding. You need something having some sort of experience. As Sausser said: "a one word language is impossible." You need differentiation to have meaning. It's a pretty redundant statement, but I think it gets to an essential point about the basis of what has to exist for anything to be said to exist. You need an interpreter in there to provide differentiation. So you could say the universe is determined by the very loose requirements of meaning.

I think the universe has some elements of determinism. For instance, it appears finite.

If were infinite, with infinite matter disbursed within it, the chance of any human experience being a Boltzmann Brain would be equal to the probability that it was the experience of a human who was born on Earth.

Quantum phenomena are not random, they're stochastic. The universe would then be determined by its finite nature, and would have a finite number of outcomes. Under the "many worlds" hypothesis, where in all possible quantum outcomes occur in an ever dividing set of universes, I suppose we sink back into a more deterministic system, since the output of possible new universes is determined by what comes before.

In a certain sense, all existence is deterministic. There is an infinite potentiality of what could be, and existence is the reduction of all those possibilities to what is. What isn't, is excluded.

With that in mind, quibbling over the randomness of particles just doesn't seem that big a deal. Potential outcomes of being have already been bottlenecked on an infinite scale into what is.

That's sort of how I understand mainstream modern Christian thought. I've been to a lot of Baptist churches, since that's what my wife grew up with. I've seen many takes because I like very few of them so we keep switching.

There is an element of Christ as a blood sacrifice for mankind's sin. Crime and punishment isn't the analogy I've heard the most. It's more like the sacrifices in the Tanakh/OT, or the human sacrifice Abraham was prepared to make early in the Torah. Christ is without sin, and blameless, but sacrifices himself as the ultimate sin offering.

There are philosophical issues here too. Ethically, why does God need this sacrifice to let humans into heaven?

Looking back at Medieval takes, Christ was often seen as having accomplished a sort of legal feat here. The laws of morality dictate that man must be punished for sin, but Christ is able to create a sacrifice greater than any human's capacity to sin by sacrificing Himself. The sacrifice of a God is greater than the sacrifice of the entire race.

It's hard to mesh this with modern ethics. Which I suppose is why a lot of churches have very Evangelical takes, focusing far more on the contrast of eternal suffering and eternal salvation, and the need to have faith and convert. I've certainly been to churches that preach:
Saved by faith alone
Once saved always saved
Thus conversion in the most important thing so go do it.

Every Sunday. You start questioning ethics from a human standpoint, and things get thorny.

The Reformed theology textbook I read made salvation much more about grace. So it isn't being forgiven for a crime, it is receiving a gift freely given.

Different denominations and churches within the same denomination preach different things about Hell. It's common to hear in some Baptist churches that people who have never heard the Gospel get to go to heaven. Think people born before Christ, or Native Americans before Columbus. How could they have know?

The logical problem here is that, by this logic, our generation could "take one for the team," destroy all the Bibles and erase Christianity from all memory, and in doing so secure salvation for the race.

Plenty of other Christians have non-Christians going to heaven. Even the Pope has floated this idea. Catholics also have the Purgatory to reform in.

I guess my point is that it is hard to submit the doctrine of salvation to logical analysis because it is amorphous and changes for people over their lifetimes. It certainly isn't defined well in the Bible.

For the Gnostics, salvation wasn't even a form of redemption. Rather it's a state of enlightenment where one recognizes the immaterial, pure truths of God, and can reject the fallen physical world. They used Paul too. The surviving Valentinian texts use an exegesis on I Corinthians to make Gnostic points, which is more fair than you'd think since John has straight up Gnostic points in it, and Paul seems open to some Gnostic ideas.

The doctrine your describing seems more mainline Evangelical. I think part of the appeal there is that that doctrine elevated the importance of faith conversions, which is the center of their communal worship.

Under your criteria, what sort of statement wouldn't qualify as opinion?

I suppose it's the difference between deontological and pragmatic ethics. Yes, any consumption of factory farm meat or use of automobiles can be seen as unethical. Cars are a more interesting topic. There is nothing ethically wrong with a single person, or even a few hundred thousand driving cars, provided the production isn't exploitive. However, when the number of vehicles climbs into the hundreds of millions, you end up with major externalities in terms of global warming, ocean acidification, etc.

In terms of the effects on people's live and human cost of outright doing away with vehicles, you end up with a moral quandary trying to do away with cars too. Smaller more fuel efficient vehicles seems like an obvious way to mitigate the economic and social impact of removing access to transportation, while also drastically reducing emissions.

Again, I like the market idea. Make gas reflect the true cost of global warming and military intervention to stabilize prices. If gas is allowed to slowly rise to $10 a gallon, you'll see most households switch to more efficient vehicles. Truck and SUV production did fall dramatically in the mid-2000s. Now we're back at 69%.

There is surely some ethical reason to mitigate your impact though, right? For instance, you might eat meat, but not eat it for every meal the way many Americans do. If people just ate meat 2-3 meals a week instead of up to 21, the nation as a whole could be healthier, drastically reduce carbon output, and return millions of acres of land to prarie (which also absorbs way more water and would reduce flooding, while the reduction in pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizer would improve water quality). From a policy perspective, externalities should be priced into the cost of meat. Instead we subsidize meat and dairy over production at a high rate.

Take out subsidies and add in a carbon and water pollution tax and the price of ground beef goes from $4 to $12, and people will eat less beef. You could also use the revenues to support social welfare programs.

Cars are a great example. Yes, America's low population density means many people need cars. Do 69% of people need to drive trucks or SUVs? Most never go off road and rarely ever haul anything. The truck for American males is like a $45,000 handbag. You gotta show you're rugged with your truck and $5,000 SCAR-H and body armor, but you can't run a mile, do a single pull up, or tie the knots to set up a tarp. Gas is also heavily subsidized in that gas taxes are well below the cost to maintain roads, so that people who make a free choice to drive heavier vehicles don't pay for the extra wear and tear. The US military also has to engage in expensive adventurism and distasteful alliances to keep gas cheap, because people can't afford to drive their trucks if gas prices go up (or afford the payments on said truck, because again, for most owners it's a $40k handbag they can't really afford).

IT is the same way. You can at least recycle your old phones and computers instead of throwing them in the trash.

It probably wouldn't be. You would have to show that he knew of the plans for violence and took steps to enable it.

The January 5 date was all over extremist site like /pol/, 8kun, The_Donald, etc. weeks before the event. You had catalogs full of discussions of people talking about strategies. List of which Democratic Congress people who, if executed, would be replaced by Republican governors. Copius threads of people posting their load outs, armor and weapons they would be bringing.

The FBI and DHS certainly knew about these. The sites have shown up in numerous court filings, so they definitely monitor them. Dylan Roof posted on an extremist sub-Reddit. The El Paso shooter posted his manifesto to 8chan. The Christchurch shooter used the same sites.

They also had prior incidences of violence, as previous Stop the Steal protests in DC just weeks prior ended in stabbings and vandalism.

The question is, was this shared with the President. I'd argue it's implausible it wasn't since the campaign also keeps close tabs on these sites. Trump himself did a Q&A on the_Donald, although this is before it was banned from Reddit and was bear as radical.

I find it impossible to believe that political advisors didn't earn him of potential violence and blowback. It is possible, given his terrible relationship with intelligence and the FBI that he either wasn't briefed on the threat, or simply dismissed it.

The National Guard and other back up being restricted from sharing intelligence, or even being issued gear is troubling. Multiple calls for reinforcements were delayed, and the Guard sat ready to deploy for two hours, only being mobilized after it was clear no lawmakers were captured. The claim that this was done to avoid bad optics is clearly full bullshit. You could supply the Guard and place them out of sight in Federal buildings close to the Capitol instead of keeping them across the Ptolemaic and unarmed.

You'd have a much stronger case for sedition if the President was involved in delaying law enforcement. He purged his national security staff after the election though, and I doubt any of the remaining loyalists would say anything if that was the case.

We do have some evidence of what he was doing during the riot. He accidentally called Mike Lee, looking for loyalist Tommy Tuberville during the siege. As protestors were seeking out lawmakers he lobbied to use the event to delay the certification of his loss. He also didn't call for peace until news outlets reported that all lawmakers were safe, waiting hours.

Still, it isn't a strong legal case without people going on record to say he expected the violence and interfered with the response. Impeachment doesn't require the same legal standards and is political though. Obviously the optics are bad enough for Republicans to vote to remove him. I doubt they get 17 Republicans to vote to impeach though. The only way that happens is if Mitch leads them. Mitch is 78, and will be 84 to start his next term, so he might take that step, but given his generally craven attitude towards Trump, I highly doubt it. He'll likely try to run for a term to be Senator at 84-90 years old. Fienstien is running again at 91. Congress, particularly the leadership are incredibly old, and almost all very wealthy, which is why they seem so disconnected for reality.

I've read almost everything Nietzsche published, listened to a course on him, and read Kaufman's superb guide. I would say if you're going to read one to start, go with Beyond Good and Evil. Generally, Nietzsche's mature thought is considered to begin with Thus Spoke. Thus Spoke is a difficult, more artistic work, and it's easy to misread with no background in Nietzsche. Beyond has his bombastic, highly enjoyable aphorisms, but also lays out his philosophy in much clearer terms. Geneology flushes out the thoughts in Beyond in a more concrete format, but I found it drier. Kaufmann is a great resource for Nietzsche, going over his thought and personal life.

It's worth going back to his early works to see how he developed his final thought. If you've been reading the Greeks, you will find the Birth of Tragedy interesting. It gets skipped often because it is his first work, and far from his mature vision, but you get to see how he is diagnosing problems. It's also significantly different from later works, which makes it fresh. There is a great take on Hamlet in there too, which is super short, but poignant.

It's worth also reading Notes from the Underground. Dostoevsky is a titan of Christian existentialism in his own right, but he read Nietzsche and Notes has the benefit of being a response and much shorter than his other work. The Brothers Karamazov is my favorite novel and is also a great book on existentialism.

Camus' works benefit from being short. I would say The Myth of Sisyphus is the best to start with as an example of existentialism. The Stranger is good too. The Plague is looking more into politics.

If the religious side interests you, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard are good placed to turn.

Being and Time is another hugely influential work. Probably the most timely as philosophy has found a new practical niche for itself in neuroscience/cognitive science. I found it to be interesting the frame of the Hard Problem of Conciousness.

They have a razor think majority in the Senate that relied on holding the VP spot, so I don't know how much will get done. Manchin is the swingiest vote, so expect a lot of pork going to West Virginia in the stimulus, the way Iowa made out on the ACA.

Murkowski is abandoning the GOP due to Trump and I can see others (Collins) doing this too. Between the House GOP not whipping votes for impeachment and McConnel potentially going along with, or not resisting impeachment, I imagine the GOP could fracture into traditionalists, and the Q Anon believing Trump worshipers. I doubt it though, Mitch will probably lose his spine and try to get a unanimous vote against impeachment. They might not try to block evidence and witnesses again though.

I do think the filibuster will go if the GOP won't vote on a stimulus. However, I doubt much gets done outside of that. I can't see a public health option, large climate change bill, tax increases on the wealthy, or certainly court packing or the Wyoming Rule to make the House and Electoral College more representative to population passing.

The pandemic will get worse before it gets better. Stocks and housing are in a full bubble. Housing prices are massively outstripping rents.

The US really does not need any more unskilled labor, and immigration is obviously massively destabilizing urban housing markets and the entire political system, but I can't see them doing anything to fix it now that the Democrats have marched so far towards open borders to combat Trump, that immigration restrictions are seen as a hate crime. I mean, if the GOP couldn't hold one vote on immigration in two years of total control, why would Dems.

So we will continue to add a large city worth of people who get sucked into an underclass each year. Immigration from the third world also necessarily increases inequality since they are coming with low skills and no assets. It keeps wages low and rents high, hence why neither party will touch it, but it's a major issue they should tackle and never will. You'll never get widespread support for expanding social welfare programs, affirmative action, etc. so long as we are trending towards 25% of the population being foreign born by 2050 and about half either foreign born or with at least one foreign born parent. There will be no cohesion. Plus, it only benefits a tiny minority of people in the developing world (Bangladesh alone could supply more migrants than Europe could absorb), while it's also destabilized politics across the West, which is hurting developing nations.

It won't remove him. Only one GOP senator has said they would vote to impeach. 7 in total signalled they might flip. They need 17. A large proportion of Republican law makers voted to overturn the election and make Trump President from 2021-2025 after the shitty crowd sourced coup attempt. It has absolutely zero chance.

If anything, it will vindicate him by letting him "win" a trial over his involvement in the attempt. Better to hit him with criminal charges later.

The media has repeated over and over that fraud allegations are ridiculous. The courts, including Republican elected judges and those appointed by Trump wrote scathing opinions about his team's challenges. Even Fox News news program lay this out.

Hell, his obsequious Attorney General Barr said point blank that there was no evidence of fraud, as did former Trump supporting Republican elections officials in Georgia.

It is the President himself who led the charge of fraud allegations. He has been screaming about fraud since six months before the election. The media boosting him is Fox's non-news commentary programs, and propaganda outlets such as Newsmax and OANN. There is a reason the President has been personally attacking Fox since the election and telling his followers to stop watching news and only watch propaganda outlets.

These aren't news programs. They are the right wing equivalent of Jacobin magazine.

Anyone else think this impeachment is a terrible idea? It's totally doomed to faliure and it will dominate Biden's first month in office while he should be focused on the economy and pandemic. It will also hold up cabinet appointments.

His term shouldn't start off dominated by Trump. The guy is off social media and most media outlets won't let him on. Let him fade away. He's an obese 74 year old so its entirety possible nature takes away the 2020 threat, and in any case, it seems not improbable he might be in state prison or have fled the country by then.

When did John Oliver claim that there were fraudulent votes and that Hillary actually was rightful winner of the election?

Seems like false equivalency to me.

There is certainly bias against conservatives in academia to some extent; although it varies significantly by field. Francis Fukayama (my personal favorite political theorist), is a conservative associated with the Bush I years and is highly respected in his field. "Conservatives," seem more set upon than they are, because Trumpists have decided that people like Fukayama, who live in a world of nuance and complexity, are degenerate RINO scum, particularly since they won't sing Trump's praises. Hell, Mitt Romney, a successful and popular Republican governor in the unfavorable landscape of Massachusetts, who was Republican voters' choice for President in 2012, and almost unseated a Obama, is now considered a RINO, deep state liberal. Hell, half the people Trump himself picked for main cabinet positions, Mattis, Tillerson, Sessions, etc. flipped to being craven closet liberals and morons as soon as the cult of personality began taking criticism.

Point being, people don't have near as much a problem with conservatism as they do Trumpism. The reason is that Trumpism mostly relies on ignoring nuance and enforcing a worldview of Manichean struggle through a steady stream of abject lies. Conservatives who have the audacity to criticize Trump are apparently no longer conservative in this context. No one is going to debate anyone who just restates lies.

"Dems called the 2016 election fraudulent," for instance, is a Rush Limbaugh tier comparison for the reasons I listed above. You can't say "I don't have one single example of Democrats saying the vote count was wrong or that Hillary really won and should take office," and then claim the two cases are parallel. At best you can argue that the complaints over foreign intervention and the FBI's actions were overblown and eroded norms, but those norms were later ripped to shreds Trump himself.

Same goes on every other issue. Trumpists will swear up and down he curbed migration before COVID, despite the fact that illegal border crossings demonstrably hit a 13 year high under his leadership and that his party had control of both chambers of Congress, the Court, and the White House for 24 months and did not hold one (1) vote on migration, not even token changes to make enforcement slightly easier. If Trumpists go with "alternative facts," and people call them assholes and a morons, I don't blame them. There is no point in arguing with people who refuse to accept reality.

Who are you talking to then? Why charge for your courses? Why tell this to anyone?

Well, if you assume free will isn't real either, they don't really have a choice. I imagine being a determinist solipsist is depressing, but it's not like they have a choice.

I don't recall any major outlets or Democratic politicians saying that votes were inaccurately counted in 2016. Do you have an example?

Hillary Clinton conceded within 24 hours.

Objections to the election were:
1. The claim that the Electoral College system is antiquated, undemocratic, and unfair. No one claimed it wasn't the law of the land, they said it should be changed, a reform that had bipartisan support and almost happened under Nixon.

2. Hillary Clinton's campaign was negatively affected by a hack of her party's email server and selective leaks of internal communications. This action was traced back to Russian intelligence. Foreign intervention in elections always happens, but the level of espionage was unprecedented. The complaint against the Trump campaign was that he broke norms by not condemning said foreign intervention, and indeed publicaly applauding it. Later, it was revealed that Trump's campaign manager and son met with a member of Russian intelligence after they had suggested in an email that they had "dirt on Clinton." This meeting was scheduled shortly before the hacked emails were released. The claim was that the campaign had known about the espionage and supported it.


To be honest, I think it's entirely possible that this meeting was set up solely to falsely implicate the Republican campaign and sow internal division. It was safer than letting them in on it and had the same effect on national unity; it's a damn genius move.

Notably, they tried the same thing in several European nations and had far less impact because all domestic parties condemned the leaks and foreign interference.

3. There were the perennial complaints about voter registration purged, gerrymandering, abuse of the justice system to disenfranchise minorities by giving them felony status for crimes such as non-violent drug use, for which White citizens rarely lose their right to vote (and bear arms).

4. James Coney's late announcement that some of the infamous "emails," might have been found days before the election. (The politicization of investigations was a long time coming, so I'm not sure how unprecedented it really was).

I hope you can see the difference between these complaints and claiming that you did in fact win the election you lost, "in a landslide," and that millions of fake votes were submitted. No one claimed that less people in key states voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and Hillary Clinton conceded, rather than claiming that Trump had to "prove there wasn't fraud to enter the White House." Clinton never called elections officials in swing states to personally lobby them to reverse the results. She never called state legislators and asked them to pick electors in line with her candidacy, rather than the results of the election. She never asked Congress to toss out election results certified by the states.

I found the Women's March protests distasteful and embarrassing, but it's hard to take GOP lawmakers and conservative pundits seriously when, after their loss, they've thrown a hissy fit an order of magnitude larger.

The investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was unfortunately politicized by both sides, although I'd point out that the President began calling it a hoax before the investigation had even started, putting political expediency ahead of national security. This behavior is an issue that John Bolton and General Mattis, among others, hardly liberal partisans, say was perennial. The Democrats for their part undermined their credibility by jumping on half baked conspiracy theories and stretching the evidence available. By focusing on Russia, they distracted from the fact that multiple Cabinet members have come out on the record saying the President put personal gain above national security in myriad other, provable situations.

Yeah, but it always astounds me the huge proportion of people who leverage up on debt and spend everything they earn on a year and then some. There is a reason Baby Boomers had the most advantageous economy in US history (hell, maybe world history), and median savings for people 55-64 is $15,000.

I certainly know people who say they couldn't go two weeks without a check who redo their kitchen every 3 years and have a brand new truck in the driveway.

Still, you at least need a middle class income to get approved for those loans.

Trump voters in 2016 and 2020 were wealthier than average.

The idea that the median Trump voter is a poor blue collar white worker simply doesn't line up with data. That is branding.

Trump lost support with lower income voters this time around even as he gained ground with minorities and higher income voters.

That's not to say millions of low income voters didn't vote for him, but his core base is middle to upper middle class. And they're old. He lost voters under 55 by landslide margins in both elections, so the core of his support isn't the generations (Millennials and Z), who are more downwardly mobile. Indeed, their the group cleaning up in terms of government spending, getting both UBI and universal healthcare through federal entitlements.

It's not even skills. Population density is far too high to sustain people based off small scale agriculture.

That said, I think people wildly underestimate how redundant supply chains are and how much surplus food the developed world creates, the USA in particular. The US could loose half its agricultural output and still easily feed everyone if it shifted away from livestock and towards staple grains. It could still manage national supply chains on domestic oil alone.

High rates of myopia in modern urban populations would be a problem in some sort of total collapse scenerio for sure.

I think I'd be ok. My neighbor has enough cattle on my property to last us years if only we ate it, plenty of deer around, catfish in our pond, and a lot of geese come there. I have hardly any ammunition in the house, but I am pretty sure I could get these geese with my recurve bow. They are stubborn enough that you basically have to kick them out of the way. I could throw some bread down and then get them from 2 feet away. Gardening without running water would be harder, but I actually have rain barrels, I'm just too lazy to use them all the time.

I had a shit ton of pumpkins by pure accident in my last batch of compost that lived without watering.

I'd be thriving on an all pumpkin and deer diet until the raiders got me. Maybe I'd get bored enough to finally finish The Phenomenology of Spirit...

I don't mean to imply Trump's policies or ideology are similar to Nazism, but if you read Evans' Third Reich trilogy (a very comprehensive history), it's impossible not to see parallels in the petty corruption, infighting, disdain for expertise, and ability to plug any and all issues into a simplistic ideological format.

I just drove across country and am in the final book and this stood out to me.

They aren't the same process. The appeal to the House is the appeal for a second recount.

The requests from Trump since he lost his recounts haven't been for additional recounts, it's to have state legislatures award him their electors despite him losing the certified vote, or to somehow have a judge appoint him as President. The difference is "I think I may have won, count them again," vs "it says I lost but there was foul play, so I should be awarded victory anyhow."

The House and Senate probably shouldn't be in charge of recounts, but that's how the Constitution is written, and it makes more sense in the very poor quality of some state governments going back to the 19th century.

she will forgo further legal challenges in Iowa and instead appeal directly to the U.S. House for additional recount proceedings.

Trump is no longer asking for recounts. He is asking for either state legislatures to appoint electors for him, despite the fact that he gained fewer votes in the state, or for the SCOTUS to somehow directly appoint him as President.

That's a fairly crucial detail. The other major detail would be his telling supporters he has air tight evidence of fraud, despite being unable to produce any. If he was dragging out recounts and not publicaly claiming he had won, people wouldn't be as upset.

The rhetoric certainly isn't apples to apples. The Arizona GOP showed a clip of Rambo and asked if Republicans were willing to give their lives for the effort to overturn the election. Trump's former National Security Advisor among others said Trump should have the military seize control of the country, abrogate the election, and that the military should be allowed to run a second election.

Trump is himself not appealing to non-partisan forces. He had made appeals to elected state judges and officials from his party and judged he appointed. His problem, and self-proclaimed lovers of liberty would know this if they actually read the filings, is that he has no evidence. Whilst the GOP says there is iron clad evidence on TV, the filings don't show that. The new Texas led suit does not allege evidence of fraud. Rather, the argument had to be reduced to:

1. Changes that allowed more mail in voting were illegal under states own laws;
2. The changes made it so hard to detect fraud, that you can't prove there wasn't fraud.

It's a shifting of the burden of proof, making someone prove a negative.

And, the remedy they want, Donald Trump appointed President by the judiciary, doesn't follow even if the other two were true. Wouldn't another election necessarily follow, since there is no evidence of wrong doing?

There is some surreal level of cope by GOP moderates too. "He's not trying to overturn the election, he is just pursuing all legal options to ensure the voted are counted correctly." The man has been Tweeting "RIGGED ELECTION!," and "#OVERTURN" every day.

Ha, I'd consider myself both a centrist and a moderate. I guess that's because I'm not very ideologically motivated.

I totally get people drifting away from "democracy," as kind of golden ideal. Democracy hasn't helped the developing world or former Soviet Bloc in and of itself. Hell, polling shows a majority of people in most former Soviet states say they were better off under communism, and that's with the negative connotations of foreign domination for the non-Russians.

Accountable government is shown to be an important mechanism for successful states, but accountable government can take many forms. The people need a formal way to pick and remove leaders. However, this can be done in far better ways than a the current US system, which got us a moronic reality TV start as leader, followed by a cognitively declining octogenarian. Ideally you'd vote for a small council of people to pick and remove a chief executive so that they can be carefully vetted and chosen based on qualifications for the job. That's how city/county managers are picked, and they routinely outperform mayors. You could have people on the selection council elected at large for a majority of the seats, and then give carve outs for cultural regions. Keep it to 9-11 people so actual discussion happens.

Our legislature is way too big too. The percentage of people who know their reps is terrible. I'd reduce that and make it based solely on population, not arbitrary state lines.

Technocrats make better governing decisions than demagogues.

Hell, at this point, Xi Jinping Thought seems like a fat superior model for tackling the incoming climate crisis.

Americans are too dumb to pick their leaders directly. Just look at the shit that is popular on TV.