Ultra-patriarchal ways of life are characteristic primarily of settled, agricultural, and urban societies that have property, inheritance, surplus production, and institutional hierarchies. If by indigenous we mean societies that have a lot less of that, including hunting and gathering societies, then it seems to be the case that they are and were mostly more egalitarian and less patriarchal. — Jamal

There is no way in which that is anywhere even slightly close to true.

The closer people get to the harsh, brutal realities of survival in nature, being unsupported by large scale institutions, the less egalitarian they get. Hobbes was right about the state of nature and it's frankly amazing that Rousseau lived before air conditioning because otherwise you have to be on a hell of a lot of laudanum to believe some of the stuff he said.

Perhaps the past admired by progressives is "mythical" -- but so is the past conservatives admire. Both pick and choose. — Ecurb

European colonization is clearly the relevant past. If you press them, they will define pre-colonial societies as oppressive also because they all believe that, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." That is something only the Left believes. They will make up bullshit about "We wuz kangs" but the real, functional, defineable past is always framed as oppression.

"Make America Great Again" worships a mythical past of working class prosperity, but African-Americans and Hispanics did not share in it. — Ecurb

Neither did Austrailian aboriginees or the theoretical inhabitants of distant galaxies but when the majority population of a society prospers then that is, without qualification, a historically massive achievement for any society to ever be able to claim anywhere. Most societies cannot justifiably claim this: they can only claim prosperity for a minority population.

The "liberal" individual rights proponents the modern right admires (Locke, Mill, Rousseau, etc.) borrowed "liberally" from Native American philosophers. One Jesuit missionary wrote, "They (the Montagnais-Naskapi) imagine they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage anyone whomsoever, except when they like." — Ecurb

The modern Right does not admire Rousseau and it's questionable the extent to which they can be claimed to admire Mill. Also, none of those guys ideas were genuinely based on American Indians. They projected the theological ideas they wanted to believe in onto them.

A great example of how the National Science Foundation's pronouncements already blew away when the political winds shifted is how a 1996 episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy that was directly funded by an NSF grant absolutely stated in no uncertain terms that XX and XY chromosomes determine whether people are male or female. The NSF no longer believes this, so the episode has been retroactively censored because the political winds shifted. Obviously, they would never fund anything which would say that today and might even fund propaganda to say the opposite. This demonstrates how every scientific authority is downstream from funding which is downstream from politics. They will all change their tune if the money changes its alignment. Everything they say is subject to change depending on whose money determines what they're allowed to say.

"Progressives" often laud the pasts of indigenous peoples: matrilineal and egalitarian Native Americans, for example. — Ecurb

No, they really dont. The category of "indigenous" means "oppressted by whites" and nothing else. Their only interest in so-called "indigenous peoples" is simply anti-white: they do not want to roll back feminism to return to the ultra-patriarchal ways of life that were in fact the near universal historical norm for humanity before the age of European colonization. They just think that "indigenous peoples" are a manipulable voting block suseptible to the ideology of very rich, very white women from California with blue hair.

Personally, I dislike the label "Progressive", because it implies "progress" toward a predetermined goal, and marching in lockstep to reach the goal. I picture jackboots stomping in progressive unison down the street. The old-fashioned "liberal", on the other hand, suggests open-minded generosity, acceptance of new ideas and differing opinions, and a willingness (but not a necessity) to change. — Ecurb

I have argued before that, in the politics of the United States, the conservatives have been the only liberals.

How do you make the leap that being progressive means you hate the past? — Questioner

That doesn't seem like a leap: that seems to be implicit in what "progressive" means as a basic concept. Not that a progressive necessarily has negative emotions about the past and definitely not that a progressive doesn't enjoy nostalgia as entertainment, but that a progressive fundamentally thinks of the world as having an overall trend of "progress" where things get better over time, which unavoidably entails that things were worse in the past, especially as regards government. Not because we've done any survey of progressives to find out that they think this, but because this is why we call them "progressives."

This is not accurate. Psychology is widely considered a science because it uses objective, empirical methods (observation, experimentation, and data analysis) to study human behavior and mental processes. It is recognized as a science by the US National Science Foundation. — Questioner

And where does the NSF get its funding? Oh that's right, from taxes, which means that any pronouncements it makes blow away as soon as the political winds shift. What the NSF says is a function of what the government wants people to believe.

Haidt's "ideas" are not unsupported conclusions, which yours seem to be. — Questioner

Haidt's research must presuppose some definitions in order to be able to do research. All research must, not just some. This is not a criticism of Haidt: it's an unavoidable part of the nature of research. Look in his early chapters. You will find that he either presupposes the definitions of Left and Right or else he presupposes the definitions of some other terms that are then later used to define Left and Right. I know this not beacuse I have read his particular book, but because I can read.

If I was claiming Haidt is wrong here, then I'd definitely have the burden of proof on that claim, but I'm not. I think you're dogmatizing Haidt's framing as the only way to look at things rather than merely adopting it as a useful model like that how kind of research should be applied.

If, as hypercin asserts, "Even handedness is not a strength of a model that is supposed to be rooted in fact." then there are a number of facts I could absolutely bring up which would be pretty damning for the Left: especially statistics about race along with brute forcing an understanding of what "per capita" means so that Leftists can no longer pretend to not understand.

It's not in the interests of my specific political goals to bring up these facts other than to demolish the Left, as I normally don't find these facts especially relevant to my goals, but noticing them at all is fundamentally incompatible with Leftist political goals.

And if we want to totally abandon even-handedness for partisan insult then of course two can play at that extremely stupid game.

But this is not true. the division between left and right is not thinking the past is good or bad. — Questioner

To disprove it, you would need historical counterexamples, not psychology. A historical movement which is indisputably left wing which is anti-progressive in the sense of evaluating the past as benevolent rather than as oppressive. A historical movement which is indisputably right wing which is progressive in the sense of rejecting the past in order to advocate for a radical break from all past known social order to fundamentally reorder society against all precedent with no past golden age to be restored. Find me any countereamples and I'll have to either mark them as outliers, adjust or even completely abandon my model.

With all due respect, if you ignore the research about moral foundations supporting the left and the right position, your analysis will be shallow indeed. — Questioner

I was being polite. Psychology is fundamentally not a legitimate science in the modern sense, having more in common with theology. That's not an insult because I actually respect theology within its proper scope and am here merely categorizing it as non-scientific. Psychology gets closest to a modern natural science when it incorporates aspects of neurobiology, but to a large extent, it heavily depends on ideological framing which blows away as soon as the political winds shift.

My idea here doesn't necessarily conflict with Haidt's but Hadit's idea is in fact not hard natural science. But then, neither is mine. The kind of work I'm doing here is definitional: it would define what "Left" and "Right" would mean first, so that someone like Haidt could come along later and ask, "Why do people adopt Left or Right leaning political views?" based on a pre-existing understanding of what those terms mean so that they even can be researched. You can't even ask why people hold Left or Right leaning views without already knowing what Left and Right means.

I don't believe in AGI. If it's possible then there's only one man who can do it: John Carmack at Keen Technologies. But I don't think even he's going to do it.

I go back and forth on how urgent I think this local compute problem is. For a while, I started thinking that in order to fuel subscriptions to make the LLMs profitable, they will of course need a robust local compute infastructure along with cloud and that eventually, a downturn in subscriptions caused by nobody being able to afford even the thin client machines to even access cloud services must put the brakes on this train and make either corporations or governments realize they will still need local compute. That's optimistic.

But I suspect that what we're going to end up seeing is some very shrewd hardware calculations of the absolute minimum amount of physical electronics necessary to authenticate with an online service and then stream absolutely everything -- no local apps as a concept and only a fixed amount of local storage of the absolute minimum amount necessary to store network credentials and nothing else. And only one set of network credentials, because all the other ones will be in the cloud behind that one.

A sane reading of Jesus's Golden Rule includes its context as part of the larger Christian ethic to inform its meaning. In Matthew 7, Jesus asserts:

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

The Golden Rule should be understood in this context about what "good" means -- this clear indication that Calvinists are deeply stupid and wrong about "total depravity" because Jesus clearly states that humans generally do in fact know what "good" means and aren't confused about the matter, so that God's idea of "good" does in fact align with the universal human idea of "good" (the natural law) on a basic level. The Golden Rule is thus not an abstract, ontologically empty formula, like, "Do WHATEVER unto others that you'd subjectively prefer be done to you" but is instead saying to do good (which may be punishment in some cases because justice is also a good) unto to others clearly and unambiguously. It isn't, "Treat your neighbor according to some abstract formula" -- it is to love your neighbor with this fully informed specific concept of love.

you are entering the realm of motivations — Questioner

That's not motivation because it doesn't get into why they think of the past as good or bad. Those are conclusions, not motivations for the conclusions.

My model just says, "Here's what they think" and then Haidt can come along and say, "Here's why they think that" without a total flat irreconcilable contradiction as far as I know. But I must confess that, while I was aware of "The Righteous Mind" before today, I only got a "cliff notes" summary of Haidt rather than reading the book for myself so he may be bolder than I am aware of.

This position is not grounded in the research. I suggest you read The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt — Questioner

Haidt is attempting to psychologize the motivations behind political ideology. I'm merely categorizing political ideologies by content. While I do not go out of my way to endorse Haidt in the points I make here, I see these endeavors as attempting to explain different things and so as potentially compatible rather than definitely incompatible.

Also, Haidt's argument pre-supposes Left and Right as coherent categories so that he even can psychologize their motivations. He can't do that without first defining them as a basic assumption for, and not a result of, his research.

The right favors and serves the elite — hypericin

This is self-serving Leftist rhetoric, trying to redefine the terms in a way that's complimentary to the Left and insulting to the Right. A major strength of the model I have outlined is that it does not do this -- in either direction.

As for a counterexample to your claim that the Right serves the elite, take immigration. Mass immigration is slave importation, which is being done with the specific intent to drive down labor costs (wages and benefits) in order to serve the elite. So, on this issue, we have the Left serving the elite. Or this argument is at the very least within the realm of rational discussion, which the definitions of Left and Right should not be interfering with by pre-judging.

Common terms should build bridges that make meaningful debate and negotiation possible. That's what they're for: not to score points for your own side.

A second axis? is it going to be named Up/Down? Top/Bottom? Can't wait to read it. — NOS4A2

My argument there, instead of defending the current second axis, will be to advocate for changing it, at least nominally, to a more useful one.

I am planning a second part to this essay which will deal with the Political Compass's second axis. For now, I can say that your fringe anarchism is not half of any axis but will instead be a tiny extreme margin in any useful schema or chart.

Conservatives should logically occupy the center. What you describe as conservatives are actually reactionary. However, reactionary and progressive really are two sides of the same coin - they both want to see a significantly different society. — Tzeentch

I meant to define "Left" and "Right" and not to adjudicate conservative vs reactionary or progressive vs radical. The Left-Right schema as described here does not actually make a ruling on what the past was actually like: it instead describes how political ideologies view the past.

1. the "current" standard - what would cartoonishly be illustrated by piercings, blue hair etc.. and all the beliefs and hopes that tend to come along with that caricature (notice, I am not saying this caricature is right - but the expectations that underlie it do seem to be highly, highly relevant to the cohort I'm discussing) - essentially socialism lite with some un-examined social liberality, unexamined "trust the science" type thinking spurred by having never read the science; — AmadeusD

I'm not convinced the wokists actually are socialist at all. I mean, they do support welfare programs, but they infest Big Tech and seem to have no interest in turning Big Tech away from being a profit-seeking private enterprise.

2. the 90s type of lefty - new-agey, hippie, and generally traditionalist in the sense that things like sex and sexual roles/energies are highly important, self-determination is important, skepticism of "big pharma" and similar concepts, skepticism of any government, rather than just right-wing ones among some other stuff. — AmadeusD

Yeah these were the baby boomer liberals. They want the liberty of the sexual revolution for themselves personally without the sexual revelution actually changing society on a large scale. This is less consistent than the wokists but it ends up at the same place, because you can't have everybody doing something for themselves personally without everybody doing it, thus the whole society doing it, thus getting society-wide impact and change.

Populism is surely not conservatism. — ssu

Yeah, that's what my original post said. Trump is disconnected from conservatism. But also, conservatism itself has proven unable to deal with the problems of the 21st century for the reasons I outlined, resulting in the need for a replacement. Populism can't be that replacement permanently.

I'm surprised that Ukraine has held out as long as it has. I thought the Ukraine war would have resulted in a Russian victory years ago. Not that I wanted that outcome: only that I had predicted that outcome.

For me, it would heavily depend on some very sharp distinctive specifics on what "blasphemer" means in this hypothetical. If "blasphemer" means "Anyone who says false stuff" then getting such a message ostensibly from God would cast doubt upon the authenticity of the message, because as I see it, checking against the natural law (in ethics) is part of the process for authenticating messages from God as genuine or false.

And this actually matters for me more than for other religious people because I'm a Latter Day Saint, which means I believe in continuing revelation. New messages from God in the present day are a very real possibility in my worldview -- just hedged against the possibility of inauthentic messages by strict processes.

The result is a worldview that's actually very open-minded -- but never so open that your brains fall out.

Where are the libertarians, the neoconservatives and the old republicans? Seems to be that not many are with Trump MAGA crowd. It might be just the algorithm that US policy commentaries that I read from conservatives are highly critical of Trump. — ssu

A lot of people, including myself, have changed their views significantly in response to the high tide of Leftist domination that occurred civilization-wide in the 2010s, culminating with the COVID panic measures which were just too far for many. This means that a lot of people were made very unhappy by the evident policy failures of the neoconservative and libertarian factions to have prevented those excesses and are therefore now open to more radical stances than they previously were.

Traditionally, conservatives are happy and progressives are not. Conservatives are conservatives because they are happy (they oppose change) and progressives are progressives because they are not happy. (they support change)

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.

I'm asking you if you will commit to being moral regardless of what the moral facts actually are. — Michael

One's personal moral convictions are always, always opinions about what the objective moral truths are and nothing else. They cannot avoid being so by definition. This question assumes that one's personal moral convictions are somehow about something else when they aren't.

One does not have a perosnal mathematics misaligned with objective truths about mathematics unless one is simply wrong. One's views on mathematics are personal opinions about what the objective truths on mathematics are -- and are not about anything else. Thus, one cannot accept that the objective truth about mathematics are different from one's own peronsal opinions about mathematics without having changed those opinions.

In order words, everyone thinks their own opinions are correct because otherwise, they wouldn't hold those opinions.

I think that if it is fair to say that a naturalist-materialist-atheist can posit the existence of tables and chairs meaningfully then they can posit the existence of moral principles meaningfully.

They would lack an account of why exactly the moral principles they posit are true -- lacking any further justification behind them -- but since they also lack an account of how the material universe came to be, this shouldn't in theory be any more of a problem for them.

The reason why they don't is because the real practical upshot of atheism is in order to get rid of Christian sexual morality specifically. The other nine commandments are no big deal but, "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is the dealbreaker for them. Without the desire to get rid of Christian sexual morality, they'd probably fall in line with some minimalistic, shallow, lax approach to Christianity as being the path of least resistance, which is the historical norm in the Western world.

Something like henotheism does appear in some of C. S. Lewis's fiction, but what the apologetics works say is in fact monotheism. Saying that all or most religions have some degree of truth in them does not mean all the different gods in them really exist as discrete entities.

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.