That's true, but the ideology that's gathered around him wants to be post-liberal. Sometimes I think about the world Trump came from. It was a morally bankrupt, take no prisoners, greed-is-good NY scene. — frank

I've seen the term used a lot lately, but I'm not sure what post-liberal is supposed to mean exactly.

That NY scene you describe is similar to how things go in other more lawless societies, like for instance Putins Russia... I think that's pretty much the default way things tend to organise at least originally out of disorder... a more tribal structure with hierarchical organisation according to power.

Where does the pendulum want to swing? An idea I've been entertaining is that liberalism or cosmopolitanism is historically a set of 'empire-values', or a set of 'meta-values' to allow different cultures to live together under one larger super-structure. And perhaps it only really works or is useful for such an empire. Should the geo-political balance continue to swing further to the east, on might expect a new order starting to emanate from China, as they have the most to gain from it. If one listened to the different leaders speak at Davos, that was indeed the general trend, the US and other Western countries talking about resilience. self-sufficiency and strength, while China was putting the emphasis on cooperation and maintaining global order.

The trends of the Earth System are clear, easy to identify, and have many practical consequences that we can discuss in detail later. For now, I will simply list them to clarify what I mean: A propensity for life; diversity; fragile and ephemeral life; beauty; balance; freedom; intelligence; socialization; mutual dependence; complexity; and consciousness.” — Seeker25

Ok, I guess I just don't agree with this, not necessary that the things you listed aren't part of earth's trends, but that the list seems selective to me. Death, competition, conflict and war seem just as much part of it. It seems unlikely for instance that we would have ever had something like the UN Charter if it wasn't for the world wars.

As I alluded to earlier disruptions of temporary equilibria seems like a vital part of how life evolved... I don't think you can just do away with that part of the equation and expect things to keep on going well indefinatly.

But the radical changes in the 2010s (remember, Obama opposed "gay marriage" both times he ran for President) have made conservatives (or "ex-conservatives" if you prefer) radically unhappy. So what's emerging on the right is a rejection of "conservatism" for some kind of postliberal or neo-reactionary worldview, which is far from settled because the Trump administration really doesn't provide a coherent direction for it and, being populist, tends to instead be trying to get its direction from it. — BenMcLean

It's Pagan, that is pre-platonic or non-universalist. Trump doesn't have a coherent direction or principles other than doing or saying what keep him in power. In the West we have trouble getting our heads around that because we are so used to thinking 'platonically', but it was probably the norm for most of history, and still is in large parts of the world.

But as far as the Western tradition goes, it is pretty radical. It's a break from a tradition of more than 2000 years with only a few brief exceptions here and there, like the fascists in the first half of last century (not that I necessarily want to equate Trump with the fascists, but they do have that in common).

Hi Amadeus, no worries, thank you for the reply.

I generally agree with you concerning the factors that might go into the amount of greenhouse gasses we will be emitting. We won't be seeing a linear growth of population and probably also not of the economy, like we have had for say the past century.

In my original reply I was thinking about the climate sensitivity to changes in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. This might have been underestimated in the models. Basically, as I understand it, there are two camps in climate science. Those that think the sensitivity is a lot larger and warming has been masked by other pollution in the atmosphere, like sulfur emissions. And then there are those that thought the models have been correct by and large. But even the latter seem to think now that something is missing because anomalies in 2023 or 2024 that don't quite fit the models. Gavin Schmidt is one of those mainstream climate scientists that has been voicing that concern if you want a source to check.

And then there's tipping points and positive feedbacks which still seem like a bit of an unknown.

The greening effect is real, but it's unclear to me how this will combine with other factors like droughts and generally more extreme weather. Also apparently faster leaf growth because of increased CO2 seems to also have to effect of reducing the amount of nutritious substances in plants, which would mean we have to eat more of them to get the same amount.

But yes, I certainly can agree with the sentiment to stay open to all kind of information and arguments... it is a complicated issue.

A careful reading of these agreements suggests that, although this was likely not intentional at the time, they constitute a practical way of translating the trends of the Earth system into human governance. It is striking that two distinct lines of reasoning lead to very similar objectives. — Seeker25

I may have missed the argument for this, but what are the trends, and how do human rights and the UN conventions align with this exactly?

This doesn't seem prima facie evident to me.

In my opinion, the entire argument makes sense: We are a small part of a system that is moving in a specific direction that we cannot change. — Seeker25

I would say

1) that the direction is not entirely fixed, and that we are an increasingly larger part of that system, if you look for instance at the percentage of biomass and other impactfull activities that are directly linked to humanity (human beings themselves, our life-stock, the impact of industry etc etc...).

2) that even if we were to assume there is a more or less fixed specific direction of the whole let say, that this will have different effects locally depending on where you find yourself geographically. The effects of for instance Global warming, eventhough it is caused by a global proces of more greenhouse gasses, will have wildly different effects depending on where you will find yourself on the globe.

What I would caution for is to not only look at it from a ten thousand feet perspective in search of universal shared principles. Not only is human agency typically located at more regional levels as a result of how we tend to organise, but we will also interact with and feel the effects of different parts of the system.

The system as a whole devellopped as it is not because there was some overarching intelligence making informed decisions for the whole, but because the parts were acting from their partial and limited perspectives.

What I'm advocating for is something more like a bioregional approach instead of a universal or global one.

The idea that we understand the whole is merely a feeling Seeker. All life views things from a perspective, we are no different.

The ecological/systems thinking/limits to growth perspective is also merely a perspective with a lot of value-assumptions baked in. For one it has grown out of an universalist Platonic-Christian and later Scientific tradition which was a specifically western thing and not at all necessary.

In a previous post I already alluded to the problems with the idea of a kind of unified universalist human agency. I think at best it's a kind of fantasy that won't happen because of the kinds of biological beings we are, and at worst it could become another universalist idealism that tends towards tyranny in practice.

I suppose in the end I have issues with the idea that we can capture the whole in concepts with our consciousness, as if we can stand apart from or above it somehow.

Instead of viewing consciousness as this crowning acheivement of evolution, I think we suffer from to much consciousness, from to much cognition in terms of universals. As Nietzsche pointed out already a while ago, to much of that ultimately becomes life-denying... because all life is necessarily perspectival.

Trump and various other similar movements in the West are a (perhaps poor) attempt to reckon with the failures of that universalist project.

Which just goes to show: we humans exist because of adversity. If we had utopia, we would just sit there. — frank

Yes and this is, as you probably know, one of Nietzsches main issues with a purely utilitarian view on morality. We need some adversity to be able to grow. The quest to reduce all suffering would ultimately also reduce what we can be as human beings.

Here's maybe something to ponder.

The history of life on earth has been one of punctuated equilibria, where you had on the one hand longer relative stable states where evolution went relatively slow. And then there also were shorter periods of dramatic change in the earths system that made entire branches of life die off and enabled those that remained to recover and to evolve rapidly to fill vacant ecological niches.

Part of what caused life to evolve in all its diverse forms was these periods of dramatic change. If we are saying that we want to conserve the current iteration of earths system, we are essentially saying we want to remain in the equilibrium state indefinably. But since that is only part of the equation that drives evolution, aren't we essentially trying to freeze that process in place? And from an evolutionary point of view wouldn't that be a kind of stasis and ultimately less interesting than letting the equilibrium be punctuated now and then?

All of this to say that the following is probably also still an essentially human perspective on things:

The “Earth system” to which we belong, generates life, diversity, intelligence, and other emergent properties. My purpose is to debate the long-term trends of this Earth system and examine how we, the humanity, must adapt to them to avoid instability, or potentially catastrophe. — Seeker25

The "Earth system" is a changing system, and instability and catastrophe was historically part of it.

Humanity will eventually disappear. Our Sun, like many other stars, will exhaust its hydrogen fuel, then expand and engulf part of the Solar System. Fortunately, this is expected to occur in about five billion years.
However, we could disappear much earlier if we persist in imposing our own criteria while ignoring the evolutionary trends of the Earth system, which has—fortunately—endowed us with consciousness: the ability to understand ourselves, our place in the world, and the needs of others. — Seeker25

Yes ultimately nothing is sustainable. Or put another way, sustainability is a matter of shorter or longer duration.

All other things being equal, most would probably agree that longer is better. But in practice all other things probably wouldn't be equal. Longer probably implies a lower energy less technologically advanced and less populous world. One could for instance imagine humanity surviving until the sun expands to far, living like we did most of our history up to the agricultural evolution, where nothing much changes... Or one could go the other way where we do shoot for the stars in a shorter less sustainable burst but reach higher heights.

And then who's to say what is better, this seems like something that can't be derived merely from evolution without some prior value-judgement.

From this point onward, it is up to us, exercising our freedom, to decide what attitude we choose to adopt. — Seeker

The issue with this point of view is that it assumes a kind of unified human agency, a universal 'we' that can collectively decide a direction for humanity as a whole.

That seems 1) implausible considering our history, there always have been competing groups of people with different interests. Geo-politics probably won't just go away any time soon.

And 2) it isn't entirely clear that a kind of unification of principles and goals would even be all that desirable to begin with. Competition between different groups of humans is a driving force that keeps us sharp and propels us forward. And from an evolutionary point of view, real diversity of groups is probably a more successful strategy than a unified humanity anyway, because then you have a bigger chance that a least some of them will be fit for changing circumstances.

Convention, the social contract, can have a similar function as 'objective/intersubjective truth' within a particular group for the atheist... but nobody wants to hear about that.

As for morality: to the degree any person – atheist or theist/deist – has unimpaired empathy, s/he will tend to 'do no harm' to anyone (i.e. behave morally) even without "commandments" from On High or threats of eternal torture. — 180 Proof

How did you come to that conclusion? It's not that I don't want to believe it, it's that it seems to me that if you look at our history that seems like a very hard case to make, unless one would also make the claim that an enormous amount of people had impaired empathy. And in that case empathy doesn't seem like something that necessarily comes natural, but maybe needs to be cultivated, by something like a religious tradition, or perhaps a secular tradition.

"God" is neither a metaphysical explanation nor an ethical justification (re: e.g. Plato's Euthyphro, Epicurus' "Riddle", Hillel the Elder's "Golden Rule" ...) — 180 Proof

It's a motivation psychologically, compelling people to follow certain norms without questioning them. Euthyphro was willing to prosecute his father for murder.

Piety seems to me like a kind of training in observing the norms of a certain culture. The question is what happens if you do away with that training?

1) That people will naturally default to behaving empathically seems contentious to me and
2) It isn't entirely clear to me that people deciding how to behave based on empathy is necessarily sufficient or even desirable to begin with.

And now the Russians are "alarmed" by the troups Europe is sending to prevent the US from taking Greenland, under the guise of "defending it from the Russians and Chinese".

I never really took the Trump being a 'Putin agent' all that seriously, and I still think that is somewhat farfetched, but some form of collusion between the two of them against Europe does begin to make more and more sense.

Trump clearly wants to own Greenland because as @Tzeentch points out they possibly want to anticipate a split between Europe and the US.

What Europe should do is sent a stupid amount of troups to Greenland in order "to defend it from the Chinese and the Russians".

That would both render the US justification of Chinese and Russian takeover impotent and also make any US military take-over more problematic.

One could say that indirectly the Dutch are the root of the issues of the inuit greenlandians because they invented capitalism. Or maybe more accurately one should say they were, literally and figuratively, bedfellows of the English in that devellopment.

You could be right. Geo-politically and culturally it does make sense that they would want to go that direction (the Anglosaxons nations that is), but ideologically the gap seems rather big at the moment.

Yes that's what I was thinking too. It's part of where they see the world going, they want to insulate themselves from an increasingly chaotic outside world, with fortified borders, a protection dome etc... and Europe is definately not part of that. But Canada would have to play along with that idea, otherwise you have a giant leak in the north from the perspective of fort USA.

If he needs Greenland for his Golden dome, then I presume he will need Canada too, otherwise there would be a hole in the dome.

The latter.

I am neither.

I think a 'you' already implies a particular biological being so that you cannot just transport a non-physical kind of essence of a 'you' that stays the same to another body.

The concept of a 'you' that is not embodied is the issue. 'You' cannot be Alice and Bob without real physical changes in the world.

Oh, he is really willing to do it. He needs Greenland, he needs to expand the territory of the US. — ssu

What makes you think so? Haven't you noticed that a lot of what the Trump administration does is performative. A lot of them are podcaster, newsanchors, social media-figures... even Trump made his name in showbizz. A lot of the time there's a 'show'-element to it.

I bet if Europe stands united together and doesn't blink first on Greenland, nothing happens.

I think he understands more that you give him credit for. I think he sees everything as a negotiation to get the best deal... that's why he never rules anything out. If you rule out military action for Greenland then that is something you cannot leverage to bargain for it. That doesn't mean he is willing to do it.

Part of his base traditionally were the isolationalist, who don't want the US engaged in endless conflict. No doubt another part of his base would rejoice in it... I don't know, I think he knows he can't take it to far, and taking over an allies territory with aggression seems like it could be a step to far.

And look, my sense is that he thinks he can push around Europe because it is weak in a number of ways. But I don't think he wants to push it that far that the US effectively loses all its allies, because that is part of what makes the US so powerfull.

The amount of investment going into arms production in Europe will fuel an economic boost. Also if more energy is required in the short term, it will also act as a stimulus. These effects are probably already showing in Poland which is ahead of the curve in this process. — Punshhh

Poland has and is still benefitting a lot from entering the EU market. Their economic trajectory is not comparable with that of Western European countries that already had developed their economies a lot earlier.

The militarisation could be some kind of economic boost, but I wouldn't know how this factors into the whole of the economy which has been stagnant for a while now.

I don't see how energy shortage, or a higher need could be a stimulus in itself, because cheap energy is a prerequisite for economic growth.

Why would this above be illogical? Trump already has declared that he is in charge of Venezuela, which he isn't in charge of. This would be a totally similar action. — ssu

He could do that and might do that, but 1) legally nothing has changed then. After his term, the next administration would have to affirm their willingness to enforce it over and over, because there is no agreement. And I know notions of legality might seem a bit silly in the world we seem to be heading to, but it does still matter to some extend.

And 2) he does still have to consider his political base somewhat. Even the Venezuela intervention is not all that supported, and I would imagine that taking over territory of an ally that isn't run by some crummy regime that is backed by US-rivals, would be even less supported.

Yet here's the issue: if those high prices of energy happen because of pressure from another country, if let's say the US halted energy shipments to Germany in order to pressure Germany, that backfires.

You see, people are angry if the economy is tanking because of government mismanagement. If we in Finland would start to have cuts in our energy production in the middle of the winter suddenly, we would be angry and likely the present administration would lose in the next elections. Yet if Putin would start, out of the blue, bombing or sabotaging our energy power plants and thanks to that we would have blackouts, the blame wouldn't be on the government. Heck, then you just put on clothes, use candles and buy an aggregate!

Germany and the European countries aren't poor. If they have to buy with a higher cost energy from somewhere else, they will do it. Trump pressuring Europe will simply just backfire in this case as every move to pressure Europe into something that it doesn't want will reinforce the need for strategic autonomy. (Hence Trump demanding that Europe would spend on more on defense was taken happily on by the Europeans.) — ssu

I agree that people might accept some amount of price increase in the short term if they see that it's necessary to defend the interests of the country. But companies typically will not be swayed by patriotic sentiment, but by their bottom line. They will just stop investing in Europe and relocate because the numbers don't look good. Governments already pay certain industries 'energy subsidies' just so they wouldn't leave. It's the longer term consequences politicians will have to consider too. In 5 years people will have forgotten all about the thing that caused industries to leave and the potential economic crisis that followed it.

So like I said in my first post here, whether or not they turn over Greenland will probably also depend on how much economic pain Europe is willing to accept for it, if the US wants to play it that hard that is.

They lucked out because we had a very mild winter in Western Europe. And the point is not that people will die of the cold, but that energy became much more expensive. You cannot be competitive if you pay a lot more for energy compared to the rest.

That German economy is tanking is becoming more obvious with the day. The last thing Merz, feeling the heat from the right AFD, will want is energy prices potentially going up even more.

Europe - thinking that appeasing Trump and just waiting three more years will make this self-destruction of the US built alliance system and international order to stop.

The US Congress - both the supine Republicans who assume that there's a huge support for Trump and the Democrats who seem to assume that it's business as normal with Trump and all they need is to wait for the next elections starting this November.

Trump - the real idiot who is voluntarily following Kremlin playbook on how to destroy the US Superpower.

the MAGA supporters - cheering all the way this destruction that Trump is doing. — ssu

It was a rhetorical question, I was thinking Europe.

The situation is definitely in flux. How do you see it playing out? — frank

I was thinking about Rome too. Civil war eventually let to the end of the republic, with Ceasar (a populares) appealing to the people to set aside the elites by effectively neutering the senate going forward.

Trump is a similar figure, in that he came in as a populist from outside of the ruling elite class to 'drain the swamp'... and he also is trying to bypass congress for the most part. The shift towards more emphasis on the executive power isn't new either.

How it will play out exactly in practice is hard to say really, but tensions on the system will presumably only get bigger because of certain evolutions that already baked in (shift of geo-political power to Asia, the effects of Climate change, demographics etc etc).

There is an initiative led by the government to boost domestic chip manufacturing. It's not like the US doesn't have the ability to make them. Manufacturing has been outsourced because it's cheaper. My guess is that will be navigated by the bottom line. In other words, when it becomes too expensive to maintain ties with Taiwan, the US will make more of its own chips. — frank

Can they pivot fast enough and make them at a reasonable price will be the question. Maybe automation will help because wages (and regulations) are typically the issue for manufacturing in the West compared to Asia.

What I'm most tuned into is an abiding isolationism that's been pretty potent since the Iraq disaster. When Trump promised isolation, he was definitely playing to the crowd. When you asked if an empire can remain democratic, I was thinking of Rome. Rome's empire building was the result of armed aristocrats who gained financially from foreign conquest. The US works the opposite way. American aristocrats feel no ties to the US itself. They can just leave and be global entities if they want. So they use the American military, but they don't pay back into the system to reimburse the US government.

In a way, severing ties with the rest of the world would allow the US to recover from this situation. I'm actually thinking out loud, so criticize at will. :grin: — frank

Yes when we are talking about elites these days we are really talking about capitalists. There's free flow of capital over national borders, and so they can relocate wherever they want to find the best conditions for their enterprise. That actually puts nations in competition with eachother to provide the best conditions for them... to lower wages, to get rid of environmental and other regulation etc.

In the West, but especially in the US with politics being directly financed by capitalists, the incentives are such that their interest are being served a lot of the time. Even MAGA, originally a more populist movement, has essentially been co-opted by the tech-bros with Vance as their future candidate, even though I presume a majority of the people wouldn't support their agenda's.

I'm not saying we should emulated them, but in China for instance this is different in that they have something that stands above corporate interests. I'm not sure what would be the best way to go about it in the US given it's traditions, but It seems to me it cannot be that capitalist interests are the most important force driving the politics of a nation.

Well, this actually varies by country and do remember the change in energy production happening now. For example France gets a huge share of it's power needs from nuclear energy and my country gets 90% of it's electricity from nuclear power and renewable energy. Oil isn't so dominant as it was during the 1970's. — ssu

Germany is the most important one, 'the economic engine' of Europe. I presume things will be looked at and negotiated in the context of NATO, not by looking at countries separately.

You have more faith in rational self interest than I do. Even if NATO continues going forward for now, that doesn’t mean it isn’t already being dismantled as an effective force. — T Clark

Steven Miller and Marco Rubio seem to be signaling that a real conflict is certainly not what they want, even if they can't explicitly say so because of negotiation reasons. And most of European leaders certainly would prefer keeping NATO if the US doesn't make it impossible.

It seems to me that aside from the purely political, the organisation does still function reasonably well in practice.

I don't think it's making the US difficult to govern. Most Americans are fairly sheep-like in person. They just want to feed their families and, so far, this hasn't been a big problem. At this point, I don't think anybody has a firm understanding of what the Republican party stands for. As an apolitical moderate, I miss the old conservatives. I understood them. — frank

Sure. But isn't that part of the issue though that parties seems to be radicalising each other over time. And congress basically seems to have become mostly ineffective as it can hardly pass any new laws that can really reform where necessary. That does seem to be an issue at a time the world is changing so fast.

I think some destabilization was implied by the end of the Cold War. The world has just been cruising on old ideas. Millennials are just now becoming old enough to take power and direct policy. They don't look like hawks to me. I don't think maintaining an empire is on their radar. And if you notice, neither Venezuela nor Greenland are about empire. It's about the stability and defense of things close by. If the US was threatening to take Denmark, that would be empire building. But there's no percentage in taking Denmark. — frank

The US did still bomb Iran, Nigeria and Yemen outside of its hemisphere just last year. It doesn't seem to want to leave Israel and the middle east (the younger generation does I'm aware). And I don't think it can give up control over the pacific and the Chinese sea because losing Taiwan would mean losing control over most of the chips produced in the world. The Monroe doctrine, focus on America first etc sounds nice in theory, and I'm sure many of the younger generations really would want to prefer that, but it seems to me geo-political realities would still steer the US into a more global direction, certainly as distances have become effectively shorter or irrelevant because of technology.

Defense procurement is long term thing. And that's why something like SAFE does tell a lot. — ssu

I didn't really know much about this. I certainly applaud the initiative, because we do need more independence from the US. But it's always hard to tell with these initiatives if it eventually gets realized or gets stuck somewhere in bureaucracy and/or disagreement among members.

But yes in general I would say this Trump administration has fundamentally changed something within Europe in that we all became more aware of what our more pressing challenges are. If we will be able to rise to the challenge is another matter.

Is there for Trump so much? If he get Greenland and the cost is NATO, why would it be for him a problem? Let's remember that this guy truly thinks that it's a great idea to go to Venezuela and take their oil and the US has been cheated by it's allies. — ssu

Because he sees himself as a kind of mob boss of his corner of the world, with Europe as a part of his turf. And Xi and Putin as his only peers. But as any mob boss he does need his minions to increase his importance. The issue with Europe in his mind is I think not that we are on the same team, but that we don't pay him enough respect.

I'm not sure what you refer on energy, because the US doesn't export much. — ssu

LNG, the US is our main LNG supplier, which replaced the Russian pipeline gas. And also oil.

With digital services, Europe is starting to be aware just how dependent they are on US tech. Basically the real issue here is that the US is an untrustworthy ally, and is capable of freezing the essential logistics and supplies of advanced weapons systems. This is one of the reason why the heated F-35 vs Gripen discourse in Canada, for example.

And then there's the case of France and it's independent defense industry, something again on the lines of "strategic autonomy". — ssu

It's not only in defence, every digital and computer service we use is American. They could literally crash our entire economy overnight if they really wanted to. Probably not going to happen, but you know, a lot of unexpected things seem to be happening lately.

Yes, but it is becoming a problem more and more. Not only does it make the US difficult to govern, but it's also destabilising for its allies and the world to have wildly oscillating election cycles every 4 year. Can an empire really stay a democracy longer term?

I just wrote this in the Venezuela thread on the topic:

I actually don't think NATO will be dismantled over Greenland, I changed my mind on this. Europeans are a bit shocked at the moment about it all, but will slowly come to the realisation that they really don't have anywhere else to go in the short term. And the US will realise that they can't take on the world on their own after all, so my guess is they will find a way to make it work, at least for now.

I don't think there will be a military conflict over Greenland in any case, to much is at stake for both parties, it would essentially be mutual suicide in a geo-political sense. Trump will try to negotiate for Greenland, and probably thinks he has a decent chance of succeeding as he has the better cards to play. But it also depends on how far Europe will want to take it, not in a military sense, but in terms of the price they want to pay economically, as the US is the main energy and digital services provider etc, and in terms of the Ukraine negotiations where they need the backing of the US.

It does matter in that it will prompt China and Russia to a lesser extend to reconsider their strategies going forward. It's a kind of crass reminder that we do still live in a world of spheres of influence.

I actually don't think NATO will be dismantled over Greenland, I changed my mind on this. Europeans are a bit shocked at the moment about it all, but will slowly come to the realisation that they really don't have anywhere else to go in the short term. And the US will realise that they can't take on the world on their own after all, so my guess is they will find a way to make it work, at least for now.

But I think a lot will depend ultimately on how much China and Russia will back Venezuela against the US.

That could actually be the biggest miscalculation of the Trump administration in all of this.

Yes I would think Delcy Rodriguez will be inclined to accommodate the wishes of the US otherwise she will befall a quote unquote 'worse fate' than Maduro.

There's a difference between turning a country into a vassal state and trying to install a democracy from scratch.

Destroying the Ba'ath Party in Iraq left a vacuum which created the conditions for ISIS. In Venezuela they left the regime intact... minus Maduro.