In fact, we can look at different cultures, too, and find that the Christians are not the sole possessors of morality. The following passage from The Tao, written around 2500 years ago, hints at the Golden Rule — Questioner

I know I quote or reference C. S. Lewis a lot, but he's just way too relevant to this whole topic. In "The Abolition of Man" (1943) Lewis actualy uses the term "The Tao" to refer to the universal moral concept of the natural law, referencing Laozi. Christianity -- and even the Israelite religion before it -- has never claimed to have a monopoly on knowledge of morality. You're not disagreeing with Christians here -- you're agreeing with them.

I think the more likely explanation is that we evolved something called biological altruism. — Questioner

That could potentially work as an immediate material explanation -- saying how it happened -- but it cannot work as a teleological explanation -- saying why we should obey this particular biological impulse and not other less apparently noble but much stronger biological impulses.

After all, our unreflective sexual impulses absolutely do not have words in them, especially not political words like "consent." Many atheists seem to think that if they believe hard enough, then humanity will have evolved to make "consent" part of their biology instead of being a very conscious political choice but in fact, that is a fantasy. Humans sexual impulses are in fact way, way stronger than their altruistic ones and it is only by keeping their sexual impulses tightly under conscious discipline and control that people -- men in particular -- aren't absolute monsters. The same goes for aggression and numerous other impulses we have. Why should we obey altruism and not these?

All theists (& deists) deny the existence of some or all gods except whichever one they happen believe in, or worship. — 180 Proof

Actually, no. That's not how monotheism works. As C. S. Lewis explained, the pagan gods weren't simply altogether false but are instead to be understood as distorted images of the real one. That's why you'll sometimes find the stories of multiple religions even in Christian works like William Bennet's The Book of Virtues, because not every Christian is so impoverished in their understanding as to simply reject anything not developed within their own social circle.

You got the right trajectory of events, but incorrect insight. Semiconductors have increased in production — L'éléphant

But the products all the increased capacity are going into are specialized hardware only for cloud data centers. Local compute is being phased out! That's my point, not which country is making them!

Also, false. In the last 20 years Islam has been the focus of almost all anti-religious thinking. Christianity is a footnote to the harm caused by Islam currently. — AmadeusD

What I've found is a strong tendency to comprehend Islam only by analogy to the same aforementioned WASP Evangelical demographic.

Of course that's not totally universal. Hardly anything's ever truly universal. But that's very common.

A-theism is simply "Not theism" — AmadeusD

That's a lie and has always been a lie. Ayn Rand is not any more welcome in popular atheist circles than Jerry Falwell. It's a very specific ideological stack behind popular atheism.

The entire apparatus of right-wing media outlets is Xtianity-positive. — AmadeusD

Except they don't run popular culture. We've only recently seen some penetration into the mainstream beginning to happen with Angel Studios and a few others. For the most part, Christian media has been siloed off in its own niche subculture with little mainstream impact.

No one (and I mean this quite literally) treats an eight-month fetus as "a clump of cells" — AmadeusD

This contradicts my direct observations. That happens all the time.

I could launch into an argument about the evils of the Sexual Revolution which are still very bad for humanity even from an entirely secular perspective but I think that might be wandering a little off topic. Such a thing would probably need its own thread.

Almost all atheists accept reasonable restrictions on abortion. — AmadeusD

In America, we're dealing with a zero-compromise demand for total absolute abortion on demand at any stage for any reason and that is the mainstream secular viewpoint. I understand that, in Europe, things are different depending on where you go, but that's the situation in America and you shouldn't need to beleive in God to recognize that's apalling yet somehow, you do need to.

If you ever wonder why the religious right in America is so much more panicky about everything than in Europe, it's because that's what they're dealing with as their opposition.

They may equip themselves with atheist arguments but the truth of how they came to be atheist is quite similar to what they mock or look down upon religious folk for. Ive met atheists like that. They are a minority in my experience. — DingoJones

Also here's the thing: Religious people aren't bastions of reason who are making a completely objective assessment either. The vast majority of people are in fact emotionally driven -- not just the vast majority of atheists.

Now it's obvious that your current administration is outright hostile to Europe, and Europe cannot at all rely on the US or it's military industrial complex. — ssu

Trump does represent a break from previous American foreign policy -- one that it appears had to eventually come by one side or the other because he's pointing out what is in objective reality a materially non-sustainable arrangement.

You should understand that the actual rent you have gotten is from your currency being the reserve currency. — ssu

Probably why it's no coincidence that just as the world is starting to move away from the USD as the world's reserve currency, the United States is starting to move away from being the world's police. It isn't clear to me which is effect and which is cause however.

But now Trump is dismantling it, so good riddance to Pax Americana. It's very sad, because the system worked. — ssu

No, it really hasn't. Whole generations of Americans have found themselves disposessed of their jobs, homes and status within their own land because of the international market our taxes make possible forcing us to be in economic competition with the entire world for everything. Maybe being the reserve currency benefitted the American government, but how exactly that compensates the American people for not just the taxation but the intergenerational economic degradation they've seen is not going to be clear to most voters even if you could make the case for it.

I'm inclined to see President Trump, even at his worst, as an effect of the inevitable direction of the American political system and not as the cause or instigator of a historically unique evil.

Another "expert" on the inner working of the minds of atheists, who has no practical experience in the subject matter. Consider the source. — LuckyR

Within your sarcasm, you are correct that I am putting forward a specific theory for describing or diagnosing or understanding the mentality of atheists. It can come out as hostile or polemical sometimes because I'm not an atheist myself, but at the same time, everybody forms some understanding or model of what their ideological opponents are thinking and having that out in the open where it can be examined or critqued is better than leaving it unexamined.

First, when popular atheists say "religion" they just about always mean Christianity (usually right wing American Evangelical Protestant Christianity) and nothing else. Everything they say or think about religion is filtered through an analogy to that specific demographic group who are their political enemies. When they say "religion" they do not mean Buddhists in Tibet or American Indian spiritualism on the Great Plains. They mean a group very specific to very modern and very local times. When they want to pin all of humanity's problems on "religion" that is the specific religion they mean.

With this in mind, I'd divide atheists into converts and adherents from childhood, just like any other religion. Adherents from childhood absorb the worldivew from popular media, where there often seems to be an iron clad rule that a church cannot appear without somebody getting killed in or abused by it and a priest or minister cannot appear without their being some kind of a psychopath. A scientist can appear without being Dr. Mengele but a minister cannot appear without being Jim Jones. This propaganda is absorbed at an early age as just the baseline default description of the world so that sexual abuse scandals involving religious people are seen as the norm rather than as the aberations they actually are.

What's more interesting is the converts. Their devotion to the atheist worldview is almost always rooted in two things: 1. the desire for sexual liberation and 2. deep seated resentment towards a father or at least parental authority figure, whether present or absent. Even if they aren't out enacting extreme promiscuity, they really don't want anybody telling them what to do specifically about sex -- and it usualy isn't any of the other rules in Christianity that they resent. They're usually fine with not stealing, not worshipping idols, etc. It's just about always "Thou shalt not commit adultery" where they have a problem. And that's just about always connected with the parents (especially the father figure) being seen (rightly or wrongly) as overbearing or neglectful or both and therefore as abusive. (sometimes but not always having actually been abusive)

I really think the science stuff just isn't the real motivator in the vast majority of cases -- especially not for the really intelligent atheists. I suppose some people can be fooled by any ideology dressing itself up in credentialism and that's what scientism does, but I'm inclined to believe a lot of these people are actually too smart to have really based their life choices on that, which a few years of solid propaganda could erase or redirect in any ideological direction.

I think that converts to atheism are actually navigating a very emotional thing because a lot of these people really have been hurt by their life experiences. Nevertheless, I still think God exists.

This doesn't go into why I think atheists don't have morals and it's this: atheists generally do not care and do not want to listen to the medical facts about abortion. They make a big show about believing in "The Science" for things that they claim occurred hundreds of millions of years ago but what's physically happening in their local abortion clinic this week they're in denial about, indulging in the anti-scientific "clump of cells" myth even at eight months.

This is because any degree of restriction whatsoever on abortion -- even a careful one on completely secular grounds -- carries with it the cultural implication that somebody, somewhere should be able to pass moral judgements on sexual activity, which is something they just will not countenance. It undoes the whole reason they wanted to get rid of God. It's a core dogma and it's not just immoral but blatantly anti-moral. (opposed to morality as a category)

A lot depends on what you consider socialism to be, and opiniions differ on that. — Ludwig V

Absolutely and this is a point I am consciously very confused about right now. I know I've gone way too far to the Right on economics my entire life and need a radical change on this to move to the Left on economics -- apparently to become what is these days called "postliberal" -- but I have not yet worked out how far I have to take this. I also know there's some truth to the historical liberal critique of the Soviet Union and that America's Founding Fathers did have significant (although not infallible) political wisdom and I do not yet see how to fit all these facts together, other than to recognize that there does need to be some limiting principle on how far to the economic Left I need to go in order to avoid Soviet style tyranny. My position is very unstable right now!

But it isn't true that nothing can be done. — Ludwig V

In context, I was explaining the unacceptable doctrinal implications of libertarian orthodoxy in policymaking. Certainly something can and should be done, but doing anything whatsoever which would actually address this problem requires abandoning the Cold War era Baby Boomer libertarianism on economics which has been a core part of the self-identity of the Republican party for nearly half a century.

You are both asking for dogma which runs the risk of invalidating and erasing transgender persons. — Questioner

Transgender persons do not exist. The very term "transgender" is an anti-concept.

This doesn't mean I want anybody rounded up or punished or whatever: just that logic comes before politics.

as if identification by others should supersede self-identification. — Questioner

Identity is always socially negotiated. People aren't necessarily always what they say they are just because they say they are. Just because I say I'm an Olympic gold medalist or a world chess champion doesn't make it true.

The experiences of transgender persons tell us that the definition of “woman” or “man” cannot be based solely on the physical body at birth. — Questioner

Since they don't exist, this is not true.

Do tell. — L'éléphant

I thought I'd said some of it in my post. Consumer RAM prices exploded by about 500% recently due to "AI" data center demand. This wouldn't be such a huge concern in itself if we saw a market correction to deal with it by increasing supply coming soon but instead, Micron / Crucial decided they're leaving the consumer computer hardware market altogether to focus exclusively on cloud and the clear indication across the whole industry is that they are going to intentionally reduce consumer computer hardware supply across the board, specifically to force everybody onto cloud subscriptions for everything. It seems to be happening. Maybe there'll be some minor retreats before the final advance on this trend but without some kind of policy change to prevent it, this seems to be the inevitable outcome of prevailing market conditions.

The CHIPS Act is subsidizing American semiconductor manufacturing -- but it looks like that capacity is going to be poured entirely into cloud compute hardware that uses my taxes to accelerate this trend. The only computers people might be able to buy in just a few years might be stripped down thin clients only good for accessing cloud services.

Maybe you think I'm being paranoid, but for the computer gaming market to actually reduce its baseline spec -- not just to freeze it for a few more years, but actually cutting the RAM requirement in half -- is a lot worse than the death of Moore's Law. It's an actual, literal, objective technological regression, for the first time ever in the entire history of the computer hardware industry. I don't understand how this isn't front page news for everyone rather than only something PC gamers are alarmed about. If I'm wrong then I at least have the excuse of having to analyze a totally unprecedented situation.

So servers will become obsolete?
Big companies use a hybrid of their own servers and public cloud. — L'éléphant

The oncoming industry trend I'm afraid of is for all local compute -- including all on-premises servers -- to be considered a legacy technology fundamentally and not continued. Your company will go on the cloud because it will find that replacement parts for the kind of machines they need to not be on the cloud are simply no longer made or sold anywhere at any price.

I truly don't understand the sentiment here because upgrades are available. — L'éléphant

Maybe you haven't been following recent news in the computer hardware market?

I think that just as the cosmological argument proves the existence of God from knowing the existence of tables and chairs, so too the moral argument proves the reality of God from knowing the reality of right and wrong.

However, just as atheists can believe in the existence of tables and chairs without believing in the existence of God (despite this not making any sense) they should also be able to believe in the reality of right and wrong without believing in the reality of God without any greater difficulty.

The trouble is, most of them in fact don't.

You can thank the U.S. for coming up with the idea of that arrangement. After World War II, the United States did not reluctantly assume responsibility for European security because Europeans refused to pay for it. The arrangement emerged because Washington actively wanted to control the terms of European rearmament and, initially, to prevent it altogether. Demilitarization, especially of Germany, was a central American objective. — Joshs

As I undersatnd it, the major explicit policy goal of the Pax Americana was to undermine international Communism. The policy could have been argued to make sense until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. That's when it stopped making sense and everybody knew it. Where before, there was a clear case of, "We're defending you in order to defend ourselves against the Soviets", 1991 changed this to an unresolved question of, "Why exactly are we doing this?" which didn't have as clear of a rationally self-interested geopolitical answer.

The United States should have started charging some kind of rent for reliance on its defense network at that point, not because we don't want to be generous, but simply because no system, no matter how strong, can survive a permanent downward trend. The more our citizens have to be taxed to maintain this network, the more advantageous it becomes for business to move away from where the taxes are into places that recieve the benefits without paying for them. The very system which makes it possible for business to move anywhere also incentivizes business to move away from the United States. Thus, the trend over time is for the United States economic ability to maintain the network to be hollowed out. We're strong but nobody can keep something like that going forever. We don't mind sending our sons to be the world police, but we have to pay them. That means we have to be either getting paid or deriving enough benefit from running the network that it pays to keep running it. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Furthermore, the claim that European welfare states would have been unaffordable or impossible without U.S. military spending is not supported by historical evidence and collapses once you look at cases like Britain, France, or Sweden. Europe built welfare because it prioritized social insurance, labor protection, and decommodification in ways the U.S. did not, not because it was freed from defense obligations. — Joshs

You'd have to prove this: in particular to prove that the lack of the economic burden of defense wasn't necessary to make that whole system possible.

Trans men are men. Trans women are women. — Questioner

What is a woman?

I'm seeing some posts online about Foucalt being a really hardcore pedophile. That true?

Basically European social democracy attempts to run exactly like that: these "socialist" understand that market capitalism does work, but the excesses have to be cut. Then the question simply becomes just what is "excess" and when has capitalism gone "too far". Issues that people can have differences. — ssu

My instinct for most of my life has been to categorically dismiss any contemporary economic idea from Europe, not only out of a doctrinaire devotion to free market ideals which I've now (recently) grown out of, but also because Europe fundamentally does not pay for its own military defense. It isn't completely devoid of military spending and is improving in this area but Europe is still heavily dependent on the United States for security its taxes do not pay for and ours do. As long as that is the case, all of Europe's economic ideas appear to be luxury beliefs for which our economic system is footing the bill to make possible.

I probably shouldn't be so dismissive, because this is a space I'm only just learning to navigate and am in a process of re-examining my old assumptions right now, but that particular one doesn't seem to depend on Reaganite free market dogmatism: it's realpolitik.

What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that a socialist or quasi-socialist system could actually pay for itself without turning into Soviet style tyranny the way the libertarians assume?

I ran some of these ideas through an LLM and its response was that my ideas are essentially in the category of "postliberalism" and that I need to read up on Distributism because apparently a "Digital Distributism, updated for the 21st century" is the economic model my existing thoughts are already gravitating towards. This may have been a blind spot for me for years, probably in part because my friend "The Distributist" on YouTube never really made it a project of his to adequately explain to non-Catholics like myself exactly what Distributism is and how exactly it's not just Catholic socialism.

I think that in different ways, both the Left and the Right are equally to blame for this.

The Right are to blame for this because of their blind unthinking Cold War dogmatism about economic policy -- which I used to support and now feel guilty for having been wrong about. And Trump is the closest they've ever come in my lifetime to making even a partial break with this.

The Left are to blame for this because they prioritized corporate controlled identitarian politics, to make everybody fake and gay, over their older anti-corporate economic policy. All genuinely anti-corporate thought has been pushed out of the American Left ever since it was discovered how easily identitarian politics could transform dangerous left wing movements into becoming financially non-threatening. The working model was how they derailed the economically driven ethos of the Occupy movement with the woke bullshit. A classic divide-and-conquer move by Wall Street. Anti-liberal wokeness isn't just inherently wrong in itself -- although it totally is -- but is also a distraction from what having a left wing should be good for: being suspicious of capitalism. Keeping megacororate power in check. The Left should have listened to Bernie Sanders.

At the time of the Occupy movement, I did not recognize the wokists and the Bernie bros as separate left wing factions. Or, to be more accurate, I thought the Marxist/socialist types were the ones steering the ship and that the critical theorist types were the useful idiots -- not a faction in their own right. But wow, the Occupy saga showed that I was wrong. The critical theorists steer the ship and Marxist/socialist types are the useful idiots!

Sex in space needs to be explored, for sure. Pregnancy in space we can do without. — BC

Uhh ... no? Did you get that backwards?

Being able to bring a full pregnancy to term in space means that inter-generational space voyages are possible in principle. Being unable to means they aren't. Thus, pregnancy in space -- not sex in space, which is a luxury -- will determine whether interstellar travel is a coherent goal for humanity or is a physical impossibility we can and should dogmatically ignore.

If you liberals really want that "Star Trek future" you've pontificated about for most of the past century, ("The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" -- Larry Niven) then this is the only question that matters.

I think it comes down to Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.

3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

These describe why the basic moral impulse behind conservatism will occur in every political system somewhere, no matter its form.

For farmers specifically, I think the first law works the strongest for them. The third law also explains the suspicion of the cities by the country.

I think the second law is actually the weakest, because sometimes organizations that really are explicitly and constitutionally right-wing still end up becoming left wing anyway. Human communities in general seem to change to become more left wing over time and relative right wing movements will always spawn to resist this change, which in the long term seem to be always doomed.

It was nice that the world made international treaties saying to not put weapons in space back when they couldn't afford to put weapons in space anyway, so they got good PR out of saying they wouldn't do something they couldn't do.

But the reality is, all it takes is one nation with the industrial base to put weapons in space doing it and then everyone who can must do it. It isn't a choice.

Robotic equipment can't tell us about the long-term effects of being in zero-gravity. We might want to have space stations orbiting the earth, and if we do, we need to know what zero-gravity will do to people on board. — BC

Yeah, but like I said, this is the 21st century. We've done that research already. That was what the International Space Station was for. The only big question still remaining in that field AFAIK is pregnancy in space.

That's a big risk and I'm not advocating for taking it. But I am saying, if we aren't doing that, then manned spaceflight can wait until we're serious about actual colonization and we've got the nuclear + hydrogen infastructure to power such a vast civillizational project.

If you do not value exploration or pushing limits then I guess you do not value this — I like sushi

The objection isn't to the value of scientific exploration, but is specific to the value of manned vs unmanned spaceflight. In the 1960s, manned spaceflight was necessary to really get anything done due to a lack of computing power -- only the human brain could make the decisions necessary to achieve the scientific objectives of the mission. But in the 21st century, this is simply not the case.

It's dangerous and so if we aren't ready to send pregnant women to start a genuine colony, then we should be sending robots. Period.

They're not just cheaper, but also safer, while achiving all of the scientific and economic objectives of space missions, only lacking in propaganda pizzaz.

I'm a Trump supporter and even I disagree with the Trump administration on this. I am not seeing the value of manned spaceflight at this time.

What I think should happen first is that we should be investing in a nuclear + hydrogen energy future here on Earth. That infastructure which solves our terrestrial energy problem and supercharges our economy is also, thinking long term, the only really viabe path to space colonization.

Social media censorship to suppress views that are not approved by the federal government, — Samlw

I would question: is this happening? What I see on X is a pretty good mix of left and right. I see more right wing stuff because, being a right wing guy, I have gone out of my way more to click "follow" on other right wing accounts. But left wing accounts do show up and I get a feeling that I am going to be seeing what their take is on things which is good because I don't want a right wing media bubble to distort my perception of the news. (and really wish progressives would learn to avoid a mirror identical left wing media bubble)

What I'm not seeing is a lot of bans or topics that are totally banned from discussion. X does tend to "Community Note" left wing posts a lot more because, let's face it, X is a right wing site now. But critically, it doesn't ban opposing views which I think makes a huge difference. While not perfect, I think X really has made things better, re-opening the marketplace of ideas like we used to have before 2014.

The other social media sites have in 2025 started to comply with the GOP's demand that they open things up somewhat but of course not as much as X. They do all remain left wing sites fundamentally. But what X has changed for the whole American media landscape is that now news stories right wingers care about can no longer be suppressed. Leftists get to put their own spin on them like they always did for most of my life, which is fair enough, but they can't outright suppress & delete major stories anymore. They at least have to explain unfavorable stories now, which is actually good for them to keep them honest, which I think I would still believe even if I agreed with them. You can't fly an airplane with two left wings!

Lawsuits against opposing news outlets, — Samlw

They absolutely did libel the guy. There are actually several of these suits and they range in how much merit they have, but saying there's zero merit to all of them seems dishonest.

Deportation of activists due to their speech — Samlw

Is it really due to speech or is it due to specific, already illegal actions undertaken as political tactics? My undrestanding is that student activists who were guests of the United States but who physically interfered with university access for American students because of political activism were the ones being deported. You can say whatever you want but if you seal off the library so American students can't study to pass their exams, then deportation is getting off lightly IMO.

Pressure on Educational institutes to avoid certain topics / remove books, — Samlw

This has happened and its been a bit clumsy. Essentially, for many decades, it has been normal for the Left to be able to use the public, taxpayer-funded universities as seminaries for their political propaganda and activism. Entire displines have been constructed which essentially exist for the sole purpose of replacing scholarship with activism. How do deal with this is a huge problem for the Right. Any attempt to address it is going to be clumsy and potentially misdirected in some cases and I have a hard time even concieving of how to construct a policy which could address the intended problem while avoiding that side effect. Replacing scholarship with exclusively left wing activism as a conceptual move has become so normalized and pervasive in academia for so long -- and has been so interlinked with legitimate scholarship -- that it's difficult to even start curbing it or reducing it without at least some legitimate scholarship getting damaged in the process because of how deeply embedded in academic institutions this practice is. It's like separating conjoined twins. And of course, making this difficult to oppose was the whole intent of the tactic of the activist-scholar from the beginning.

I do believe very firmly that something has to be done to reign in crazy activism having displaced legitimate scholarship in academia but at the same time, recognize that any attempt to deal with this problem is likely to cause some collateral damage. So I'd be looking at this from a perspective of finding ways to address the problem while minimizing that collateral damage.

The supposed "ideological crisis" is a result of dropping any pretensions of acting ethically, in favour of just openly being inconsiderate, narcissistic twats. — Banno

This seems like you're not thinking. Both sides for the most part really believe in what they're doing. Nobody ever sees themselves as the bad guys, or hardly ever. Where they do some things that are morally compromised sometimes, they will usually see it as a necessary compromise. No matter which party they're from. That's a reality I think you're failing to take into account.

There are a few issues where I do doubt that the other side is acting in good faith, where they agitate for causes they know aren't actionable or say they care about reducing emissions while opposing nuclear power. But I think they do see themselves as the good guys in their own story most of the time and understanding that about your opponents is absolutely vital to keeping your views grounded in reality.

It’s not that the GOP can’t supply a philosophy, so much as that supplying one would be instrumentally pointless given the current incentives. — Banno

The problem isn't that the GOP can't supply a philosophy: it's that it can't narrow down the field to just one which is internally consistent! The historical narrative I gave showed how there used to be an ideology that was constructed piecemeal out of the concerns which were most important to each of several factions but then also described how that contract has broken down. It's not that there's a lack of people with ideas or priorities: it's that there's a lack of a unifying synthesis between numerous competing factions and ideas right now. The Trump people don't clarify things, but in order to keep hold of power past 2028, they will need to. The present ambiguity and lack of a unifying ideological synthesis cannot last.

Many of the same people who once fiercely supported Reagan and opposed moral relativism and nihilism have come to embody the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who insists that justice has no intrinsic meaning. All that matters is the interests of the strongest party. “Injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice,” he argued.

Yeah, I know the Republic and he's right that Plato was right that this sophistry is bad.

The United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless. It has become, in the words of Representative Ogles, a predator nation.

Yeah, right. We're a predator nation. Our taxes pay to secure the international shipping of the entire world for free -- which this guy insists we keep on doing forever -- but we're a "predator nation."

I think you are giving a pass to behavior that would make you apoplectic if the other side were doing it. — RogueAI

Except the other side was doing it repeatedly. Politically motivated violent rioting, invading federal buildings, even trying to set them on fire. All of it. And supported by Democrat rhetoric. That was the summer of 2020. That had been going on for the whole season prior to the January 6th incident. That moment was the Right going apoplectic about the Left's behavior.

Any Democrat politician has to toe the line on certain policies to win the primaries. No matter how telegenic a person is, they're not going to the Democrat nominee if they don't check certain boxes: pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration, etc. — RogueAI

You'd think so, except that, as I've pointed out, Harris was rhetorically aligned with America's longstanding immigration laws, not against them, not trying to change them. So ... maybe not on immigration.

Also, nobody's anti-environment. But blocking oil pipeline construction just burns more oil to transport the oil. Electric vehicles are just coal-powered cars. Corn based ethanol was idiotic. Wind and solar do not scale. If any of you really believed in any of this climate change alarmism stuff at all then you'd be cheerleading a fast track to a nuclear+hydrogen energy future because that is the only real, scalable answer to it, assuming it is a real problem and not just a scam. But Leftists are so hostile to nuclear and so duplicitous on multiple other issues and so obviously using the same tactics on this one that you should be able to understand why I, not being a scientist, would get suspicious.

If Trump doesn't give the stolen election "fight like hell" speech on the morning of Jan 6th, do you think the rioting still happens? — RogueAI

Look, there was some rioting. Rioting's bad. The people who did that should have been treated the exact same way as the rioters from the George Floyd protests of the previous summer -- the exact same way, to the detail, because they did the exact same thing.

Before January 6th, I would have absolutely said, "Leftist riot. We don't. That proves we're morally superior." Which makes January 6th uniquely embarassing for me as a moment when my side did lose the moral high ground and showed we belonged right down in the same filthy dirt as all those rioters from the previous summer. It did make me ashamed to be a Republican.

HOWEVER, January 6th was not an organized plot to carry out a coup against the United States government. We know this from lots of evidence but more fundamentally, anybody who's going to be honest about right wingers in America knows that these are not the kind of people who are going to try to do anything like that and leave their guns at home. I could believe that some right wing protesters might have tried to take over the government by force, but not if they weren't armed. These are the kind of people who think you should take your guns with you to the grocery store and you're telling me they intended to take over the government without guns!? That simply did not happen. It's not in their character. To be absolutely clear -- they might do it, but absolutely not without bringing their guns. It's not something they would forget, if this was the plan. Anyone who really knows these kinds of people knows they are absolute gun nuts. It's not just a stereotype, I swear.

As for Mr. Trump, his clear intention was to hold a peaceful demonstration outside the Capitol, asking Congress to vote against election certification which is a real decision made by Congress and therefore within what American citizens can demonstrate about both legally and morally if they want to. But I personally wasn't and wouldn't have been out there because I don't believe it would have done any good even if they did have a peaceful protest at that juncture.

The narrative that Trump encouraged a violent attack on Congress is libelous and relies on deceptive edits of his speech, linking remarks from about an hour apart to digitally construct a whole new sentence. That is a really vile lie. What Trump actually said might not have been the wisest or the truest, but he never said that crap. Furthermore, Trump tried to get on TV to tell the crowd to dispurse and go home. Maybe too late, but he did, because a physical invasion of the Capitol building was not anticipated. Maybe it should have been anticipated, but it wasn't. They couldn't see the future and didn't think of it, unfortunately.

Understand, they had a mindset that Republicans just don't riot ... because they're Republicans. It's conventionally just not something Republicans do. It just wasn't thought of by the Trump people as something they even needed to worry about. And I wish that had been true. I mean imagine, a "conservative riot" -- it sounds like a contradiction in terms! I really think part of what happened that day was a failure of imagination.

Some of the Jan6 prisoners got sentences and treatment far in excess of what they actually did. Understand, these people deserved some time in jail. But not years. Not in solitary. It did get really disproportionate, especially when compared to how the George Floyd riots had been handled the previous summer -- a context which was in every single rioter's mind that whole day. Rioting had been normalized as a political tactic and "the hell with the rules if the Democrats don't have to follow them." That is what every single one of them thought. And you should be able to see why a reasonable person could get to thinking that.

1) What if there is no right or left in any meaningful sense? — Mikie

There just is, and this might be a good topic for a new post: to explain why the old category model that originated with the French National Assembly is still very, very applicable to the present day and indeed is more poinient than ever now that the Nick Fuentez types are going explicitly anti-liberal and so are more clasically right wing than the Buckley fusionists were.

I might also make a case for why we need to replace the "Libertarian - Authoritarian" scale on the Political Compass Test with a "Liberty - Security" scale, because the "Libertarian - Authoritarian" naming convention is a dead giveaway that the compass and test itself is designed by and for exclusively libertarians. Nobody calls themselves an "authoritiarian" but concern about security is a human universal, just as at least some concern for liberty is. The Political Compass Test should be a diagnostic tool for ALL political beliefs, not a polemic one to argue for libertarianism.

The problem with the political compass isn't the left vs right axis -- it's the other axis!

2) I’m surprised you didn’t give much time to the financial crisis and the Tea Party movement that followed. I think that (and Occupy) accounts for the different “populist” streams we currently see, with Trump riding the wave of one and Bernie the other. — Mikie

This is very true, but this event only caused immediate political change for the Left. The Right did not have an immediate reaction other than to scramble to fit it into their existing narrative: blame any problem on government overreach, no matter what's really happening. That's what the libertarians did in response to the 2008 financial crisis and, at least for the short term, the other right wing factions let them do it. So, for the Right, it wasn't a catalyst for major political change. But wow, on the Left it sure was! This is, again, something I have difficulty articulating without getting polemic, not being a Leftist myself, but if I was writing the story of the current American Left, instead of the Right, then the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy movement would be a major transformative event!

Remember how popular Sarah Palin was for a large group of people? — Mikie

Oh, hell yeah. I felt like I wasn't really even voting for McCain -- I was voting for Sarah Palin. She brought all the energy to that campaign and putting her in the forefront of it was smart, because having a woman in charge broke every negative stereotype. That was strategically brilliant. Too bad it didn't actually succeed.

That’s where the ruling power is. Trump — for however different he is in many ways — hasn’t really strayed from the very policies that have been championed for decades: tax cuts, deregulation, small government, privatization. Same old, same old. — Mikie

I know. You're not wrong -- and this is the real problem with Trump. Not that he's a Nazi. Not that he's secretly a Russian asset. Not that he's a pedophile with Jeffrey Epstein. Not any of that stupid crap. That he's precisely all the things he says he is -- a rich New York real estate mogul and reality TV star.

If the Democrats had a young, handsome, non-gay white male version of Bernie Sanders to say that, especially if he had a legit family with kids, then he'd be in the White House right now. Policies wouldn't matter. Appear normal, be JFK, appear genuinely more in touch with the voters than the other guy, that's all.

I'm not afraid to give that advice because I'm pretty sure the Democrats aren't going to do it. Because aesthetically, the person I'm describing is pretty much J. D. Vance.

This is always strange to me, and before we go further, I want to ask if you think the 2020 election was stolen and if you think Trump tried to steal that election. — RogueAI

Q: Was the 2020 election stolen?

A: Technically yes, but crucially, not through mass vote fraud. That is Trump's mistake. An electoral college majority of American voters really did vote for Biden. However, real American elections involve more than just counting slips of paper on election day. The whole 2020 campaign season was heavily manipulated by mass social media censorship, more than any election ever was before and by every major social media company in one exclusively partisan direction -- for Biden. The most obvious smoking gun we have on this is the Hunter Biden laptop story. The October Surprise of 2020 -- the most explosive and entirely true political story of the whole campaign, brought forward by the New York Post, a 200 year old bastion of American journalism founded by Alexander Hamilton -- was systematically suppressed by this totally impenetrable megacorporate monopoly / cabal all acting together in completely aligned and coordinated ideological lock step. That's where the election was stolen -- not on election day, but by depriving the American people en masse of the ability to talk to each other, deliberate about this election and make up their own minds. The gatekeepers of truth utterly failed us during that whole period, putting their own agendas over any sense of objectivity or integrity. And the subsequent buyers remorse during the Biden administration was real.

Maybe Trump's response to this problem has been misguided and disproportionate. But he's not wrong in the basic belief that something fishy was going on -- not just on that one day, but for that whole year.

I see Elon Musk buying X as an attempt to address this problem and it has been making a difference, but one billionaire breaking the monopoly doesn't address the underlying systemic causes of this mass institutional failure. I was once a true believer, but Boomer Conservatism cannot address see or think in systems and that absolutely kills it for me. Long term, policy is going to have to address this large scale civilizational problem that is far bigger than just one election.

Q: Do you think any of that constitutes an illegal effort on Trump's part to stay in power?

A: I don't care about it very much frankly. I think Mr. Trump was acting foolishly but I can also see why he and many around him thought there was something fishy going on. I think Mr. Trump sensed something really crooked was going on in this election -- and it was -- but he misidentified where, probably because he's an old guy who doesn't understand technology. And it is a huge problem that he didn't and apparently still doesn't have enough responsible people around him to push back and stop him from going as far as he has on this whole mass vote fraud thing, no matter what evidence comes out. For him to keep hammering on this and not shut up about it is embarassing, I admit it. Even if he was right, which he isn't, it's a bad political strategy and a distraction from the real villain of 2020 -- BIG TECH!

I actually respect how Mike Pence said no to Trump's alternate electors scheme. Alternate electors, as I understand it, would be a way to address mass vote fraud if it was in fact going on (which it wasn't) and Pence was correct to identify that this was an inappropriate move by Trump, not because it was illegal or even immoral but because it was based on materially false premises.

I just wish Pence hadn't then gone on to keep making a big stink about it for years afterwards. That kind of tarnishes the achievement in my eyes.

I also feel like we need to recognize the world that Trump was acting in. We were dealing with a situation in which the people involved had materially substantiated reasons to distrust the institutions of consensus generation across our whole society. There was a system-wide cascade failure of epistemic credibility, where no one could trust anyone anymore -- one from which we still haven't fully recovered.

You should know that from the outside BOTH parties in the US are very much Right Wing. — I like sushi

This only means that neither party is explicitly Communist nor socialist in its policies. On the one issue of economics, libertarianism has dominated in both parties for a long time.

But the American Left is very, very far from center on social issues -- and that's what I care about. It gets its leftism not direct from Marx, but from the Frankfurt School & critical theory. Which is, despite not being economic, still very far from anything any reasonable human on Earth could consider centrist.

Did you vote for Trump in 2024? — RogueAI

Over Kamala Harris? Over any Democrat? Hell yes I did. I had to hold my nose a little because of some problems with Trump, but as far as I am concerned, if your reality denial is so deep that you can't say what a woman is then you have to be kept out of power over anything anywhere ever, no matter how trivial.

You didn't mention the conspiracy theory lunacy that has taken over much of the Right. Don't you think that's a big problem? — RogueAI

Frankly, no. Ever heard of Snowden, Wikileaks, GameJournoPros, JounoList, Madoff, Epstein, Sam Bankman-Fried, the laptop from Hell or the Twitter Files? Hell, have you ever heard of Watergate?

How many documented credible disclosures does it take for basic pattern recognition to start working for you?

The age of conspiracy theory is over. We are now living in the age of conspiracy fact.

he had our Dear Leader pegged as a narcissist years ago — Ciceronianus

Conflating Trump to Kim Jong Un is just ridiculous. In another twenty years, you will see Trump in the same way Democrats currently see George W. Bush, as who you'd prefer to have over the current guy. Not because the future guy will be genuinely more extreme but just because you have no real long term perspective.

Who is a good exemplar of non-libertarianism on the right? Do Trump’s tariffs count? — Joshs

Nobody's real consistent on this and I see this as a newly emerging political category. It's not strictly identified with Trump but there are a few things Trump has done that push this way which I see as positive -- but also mixed in with other negative stuff from Trump which pushes the other way too sometimes.

One thing I see as positive is Trump's proposal from just this week that big institutional investors buying up single family homes should be regulated. That is NOT OK with the Buckley types! That is NOT "free market" at all! But it seems like it could be the right direction, depending of course on how it's implemented becuase we haven't found out a lot of details yet.

On the tariffs, I'm not sure. Tariffs definitely aren't libertarian, because tariffs are taxes and libertairans are for cutting taxes. So raising tariffs is definitely a non-libertarian move -- I'm just not sure it's the right one because Trump's version may be going too far on it and may not be adequately judging which imports to levy the tariffs on strategically enough. On top of this, Trump kept going back and forth on his public plans for tariffs, probably as a negotiating tactic when dealing with foreign leaders, but this did cause a lot of short term economic damage, possibly more than was necessary. So while I'm not opposed to tariffs as one tool of government in principle, I'm not sure Trump is going about this the best way he potentially could and remain reserved about it because it could backfire. I don't know. Tariffs as a policy are inherently a long term play with known short term costs.

I do think some kind of digital bill of rights for Americans which outlines what we do get to be able to do with technology would be something we need for the future. It should involve loosening up IP law (which libertarian philosophy says we should do but the libertarians themselves will almost never talk about) and placing mandates on technology companies which guarantee user rights for repair, customization, backups, tinkering, etc. Something that aligns incentives to structurally protect free political speech online and to foster innovation by preventing technological enclosure. That's really important for me personally -- and that's really really not "free market" compatible.

They’re despicable to you not because they aren’t taking an honest, principled stance but because they aren’t as conservative as you are. It shows how fringe Trump is that even you don’t like him. — Joshs

No, it's because their criticism isn't constructive. They're bitter about their ideas not being in vogue -- specifically because their libertarianism on economics, which you also oppose, has manifestly failed in practice and they still haven't accepted the reality of that failure. The rest of it is all camoflage IMV

(later edit: OK, maybe not every one of their critiques is non-constructive, because heaven knows it's easy to point out real flaws in any administration, but this is definitely the overarching impression I get of the current National Review types)

The Left finds them useful now not just because they hate Trump but because the Left has internalized the same libertarianism on economics, so long as they agree with the sexuality and color of the people on the executive board of the corrupt megacorporation and the DEI quotas are met.

If I thought these people were ever going to be able to truly revitalize the Buckley fusionist coalition and it could work and they had a viable strategy to reign in Big Tech and if all it cost was contracting a case of TDS then that would be great news for me! It'd be a very high reward, low risk proposition. The trouble is that I know they can't do that -- libertarianism CANNOT meaningfully coherently explain what's wrong with Big Tech. Nothing they can propose which fits within their ideological framework can address the problem.

Now I don't think Trump necessarily solves this problem either. But Trump functions to widen the Overton window, which is desperately needed if anyone's ever going to emerge with a plan that actually can solve this. These old guys are trying to narrow the Overton window, which is precisely the opposite of what's needed right now to face the real problems of the current generation.

I think first it should be noted the fears that are typical for present day populism: take the replacement theory, for example: that the evil elites want to replace ordinary people. — ssu

The Great Replacement exists in a quantum state.
If you say that the Great Replacement is real, but is a good thing, then this is an argument that is allowed to be taken seriously and given real credence.
But if you say that the Great Replacement is real, but is a bad thing, then that is dismissed as a racist conspriacy theory which is beneath rational discussion.
The exisence of the phenomenon as a statistical fact is subject to epistemic uncertainty a lot like Shrodinger's Cat until the moral evaluation is brought forward to frame it, thus collapsing the waveform. Only once the speaker's morality is observed do their statistical facts become distinguishable as reality or conspiracy theory.
In this way, the fact of the existence of the Great Replacement is determined, not by statistics, but by moral evaluation and rhetorical framing.

That aspect of the Left's argument on this is utter bullshit. Settle whether it's happening or not first, which should be strictly based on the data, before we go evaluating it as good or bad or neutral.

Here's the thing on the demographic shift: I am perfectly happy to replace certain categories of whites whom I don't like with browns. If the browns coming in are family oriented Catholics while the whites getting replaced are wokist vegans with alternative sexuality from San Francisco, then I say hell yeah, let's have more browns. What I really don't want is criminal or slave class browns coming in to replace blue collar working class whites, in a way that I think of as more about class than race. I'm OK with bringing in non-whites as long as they are the kind of non-whites who are going to help build a civilization and not the kind who are going to tear one down.

But fundamentally, completely apart from any ideology which says there's anything particularly special or superior about whites, absolutely nobody should be expected to just accept a system which is deliberately, maliciously stomping on their people's faces, no matter what color they are, no matter what period of history it is and no matter whether academic elites say they get to count as "historically marginalized" or not.

I gave you a chance to get beyond the ‘you guys vs us guys’ rhetoric when I gave you a long list of the kind of people you said in your OP that you endorsed as thoughtful role models of Buckley-National Review political thought. I explained that none of them had any problem making a distinction between executive overreach and straight-out autocracy. They all placed Trump in the latter category. Most of the figures on that list have explicitly singled Trump out as exceptional among U.S. presidents in the degree, explicitness, and persistence of his autocratic instincts, not merely as “another flawed president” or an intensification of familiar abuses of power. — Joshs

What they're really doing, in my view, is kind of despicable, because National Review today would rather flat out side with the rabid lunacy of the woke Left than work with a flawed but politically viable Right-leaning leadership. I don't see today's National Review as genuinely constructing anything new: all they ever do is criticize and their criticism is empty.

Trump is not a "threat to democracy" unless the term "democracy" means "permanent, one-party rule by the Democrats." There's going to be an election in 2028. There's going to be a peaceful transfer of power, no matter who wins. Things are going to be normal.

They repeatedly emphasize features they regard as unprecedented in the modern presidency: the open denial of electoral legitimacy, — Joshs

That's only because it's usually the losers who waste oxygen on complaining about the legitimacy of past elections they lost. But complain they do, as the Democrats in fact did in 2000 and again in 2016 when "Russian bots" and Cambridge Analytica were the reason for Trump's victory, not Americans dissatisfaction with the status quo.

the personalization of state institutions, — Joshs

Trump is a real narcissist, naming things after himself instead of after past historical figures, which is in real bad taste but not deeply significant long term.

the systematic attack on independent courts and the press as enemies of the people, — Joshs

About the courts: You attack the courts whenever Trump appointees didn't rule your way, most notably in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. That's normal whenever the ruling doesn't go the speaker's way and not significant.

As for the press, Trump is absolutely right about the press and you're even willing to accept that as being right when the same words, with nouns swapped out, come from leftists regarding FOX News, politicall talk radio and anywhere else that isn't perfectly aligned with your politics.

I've seen firsthand the kind of lies the Leftist press constantly do, where a gathering of thousands versus a tiny contingent of 16 was selectively photographed and narratively framed to make the sides look evenly matched. They are the enemies of the people, they chose to become the enemies of the people and it was past time someone said it.

There's no such thing as a political independent, let alone a politiclly independent journalist.

the use of office for personal loyalty rather than institutional fidelity, — Joshs

This is something Democrats have always done and which Republicans, if they ever want to do more than setting speed limits on Democrat policies, cannot avoid doing. Frankly, Trump can't do this fast enough as far as I'm concerned -- not based so much on personal loyalty to Mr. Trump, but making appointments based on ideological alignment with the larger project of the American Right is something that strategically cannot be avoided for them if they like still existing culturally in the long term -- and it's something Democrat administrations have never shied away from doing.

Will, in particular, has framed Trump as the first president to govern as though the Constitution were an inconvenience rather than a binding structure. — Joshs

Actually, I would identify that as not being the most recent Republican President, but instead as having been the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln.

And I actually like Lincoln. I think naive Constitutionalism is one of the false premises that has to be let go of on the American Right. The Constitution was made to serve the people, and not the other way around.

I have no problem in accepting that a broad swath of the American public always harbored autocratic instincts, but that until the past 50 years this segment was hidden within a mixed electorate characterizing both parties. — Joshs

When FDR massively expanded the powers of the executive branch and when Obama said, "I have a pen and a phone" you clapped like a circus seal and never gave the implications of that expansion a second thought. This is just pure partisanship, not rooted in a genuine suspicion of executive power. The same thing is good when your guys do it but bad when the other guys do it.

On the other hand, you do have a legitimate insight that there seem to be "two Americas" -- and the division is not just about means nor even about ends, but is increasingly about epistemology. We don't even have shared facts anymore.

They are extremely far removed from any political, ethical, social or scientific values that I and the majority of those living alongside me in my urban community relate to and thrive within. — Joshs

Oh please. Science is downstream from money which is downstream from values. You get whatever science you fund. If the Nazis fund science, you get Nazi science. If the Communists fund science, you get Communist science. If the Capitalists fund science, you get Capitalist science. There are no such things as "scientific values" produced independently of the real deciders of the kinds of questions scientists will be given the funds to research. Scientists are trained monkeys in lab coats with delusions of grandeur, not leaders.

One area where I see the American Left as correct is that Trump really did lose the 2020 election and his continued insistence that he really won it is blatant reality denial -- always a serious problem. On the other hand, I'm not really prepared to take this critique seriously when it is coming from people who are themselves so deep into reality denial that they cannot answer basic questions of trivially observable mundane everyday reality like what a woman is.

I guess the big elephant in the room I haven't talked about is immigration -- but the reality is that immigration is not officially a partisan issue. Officially, Kamala Harris argued not that American immigration law is inherently racist and evil, but that American immigration law is just fine and that the Biden administration was doing a great job of enforcing it. Look it up: that was her stance.

As such, if I was to do apologetics for the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, it would seem like I am arguing with a strawman, because Democrat politicians have not been willing to explicitly embrace the open borders rhetoric of their base. The press will do it, but never the politicians.

Trump's actions on immigration are just a more consistent enforcement of existing laws that both parties voted for and neither party was willing to repeal and that's all.

Some of the rhetoric and new policy direction has been trying to reform the system in order to make enforcement practical, because we can't spend months arguing in court to deport every individual when it took only minutes for them to enter. The policy will need to adjust for the reality that the overall migratory flow direction needs to be outwards, not inwards, at least until we've got things settled. But none of it has been all that radical: it is all based on existing American law with longstanding bipartisan support.

This isn't just a right wing action and it's ridiculous to smear Trump as extreme for doing the exact same stuff as Obama and Biden, just more consistently.

You can have a welfare state xor you can have open borders, but you can't have both.