For those of us who grew up around the time Japan began dominating US children's entertainment, I think enlightenment is best pictured as a combination of playing this Yu-Gi-Oh card, and understanding the ending of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's going Super Saiyan, but for your mind.

The one guy I know with a math PhD got recruited by one of the tech giants as he was finishing his dissertation for pay I am guessing has to be somewhere around that of a pro athlete. Not a star by any means, like a league minimiumish MLB bench player, but still above what you'd expect for a new dentist or Big Law attorney. I guess they are quite aggressive for some skillsets.

Not totally sure what he does, something with creating new algorithms. I think he had wanted to teach originally. I had no idea it was so in demand. AI specialists even more so; new PhDs are getting offered $500k to begin, and the stock options portion could grow a lot in this market. The established folks are fetching non-bench athlete salaries, but I hardly think that's the norm lol, and honestly if you're cutting edge in that area your share of a patent is probably the big money maker.

Might be a boom and bust like 90s programers though.

Anyhow, I would think if you enjoy mathematics and philosophy, then courses in logic would be pretty interesting.

Your sources leave something to be desired. Meat production produces 60% of the GHGs produced by agriculture, 14.5% of the GHGs produced in total by human activity. This leaves aside the local enviornmental effects of turning huge swaths of North America into a corn and soy ocean, and then blasting it with pesticides and fertilizer every year. When I worked for FEMA, this was a topic for Midwest flooding. Less than 1% of Iowa is native prairie grass. That land absorbs rainwater far better than corn and soy fields. It's no wonder flooding has increased. This also leaves aside the damage all the chemicals used in said agriculture does to the local ecosystem and to people who live near farms.

If you assume you'll just farm all that land currently being used for feed regardless of whether people eat meat, yes, the reduction in GHGs from removing cattle falls, but that's not a valid assumption because that farming would have to be undertaken at a steep loss. The land could instead be returned to open space, which sequesters more carbon and doesn't require industrial output to maintain.

Second, it's pretty disingenuous for them to just look at the total amount of cattle produced. The number of cows has fallen significantly, the amount of beef keeps rising. To be sure, larger cows produces less GHGs than many smaller ones, give the same amount of production, but the ratio is hardly 1:1 between the number of cows and the amount of GHGs, and GHG production from cattle is still rising with production. Not to mention the increased externalities of overproduction forcing meat to be shipped across the world's oceans while refrigerated.

I read a lot of Crowley when I was younger. Peter Carrol too, and the Kybalion. Early 20th century occultism is certainly interesting. You get a blend of emerging sciences, old occult traditions, esoteric Eastern philosophy, etc. all blended together.

As a whole though, I eventually found it a bit of a let down as a topic. Reason being is that these are synchretist blends borrowing from tradition to put a patina of authority on their systems. You get a lot of Platonism that is just dressed up in obscurantism to seem more mystical. I still like some, Meditations On The Tarot is a classic. Authors are careful to imply magick is more than just a psychological trick you enact upon yourself- that you can change the weather or the stock market with sigils and ritual, but are never explicit about it because it's a claim that is falsifiable. I find the whole scene to be fairly frustrating too, because if you call out these objections, you "just haven't understood" the esoteric writers.

The other problem is that the systems tend to cherry pick and bastardize other systems. So, Quabbalah in Crowley is not like actually reading a scholar on Kabbalah such as Schloem at all.

So is magick real? I suppose in some sense it is, in that there are practiced for creating mystical experiences. These experiences can lead to great insights. For example, Boehme's insight on the semiotics of sublation and the necessity of being to exist to define any Godhead. This in turn inspired formalized systems from Hegel to Whitehead.

However, I feel like Crowley type systems fall into the problem of moving beyond talking about mystical experience, and into making claims (never explicitly) that you can influence the physical world through magical processes that defy all confirmation.

You might be interested in this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220433962_Concepts_and_Semantic_Relations_in_Information_Science

I've also had luck following its citations and those citing it.

At first the classification looks like a basic semiotic triangle, but it goes into the numerous methodologies for classifying concepts, defining synonymity, etc. via different epistemologies.





I'm not exactly sure how you would model this purely mathematically, perhaps you can't. However, I have a pretty good idea how this could be networked in a SQL database and how one might connect it via DAX or something similar.

You could have, for each word, connected tables with lists of intension and extension, then you'd also need the words grouped into hierarchies in something like the arrangement you tend build for an OLAP analysis server. But of course, you'd need to do second and third order pairing because "three sided shape," would be equivalent to "triangle." Then you'd also want AND and OR relations logged in different tables.

Producing such a database, and getting it to run well with millions of text lookups and many to many relationships would be another matter. My guess is I don't understand the right tools here. You'd probably want to incorporate machine learning and include probability values for words following one another somehow, as well as a database of known contradictions (e.g., "a four sided triangle).

For the original example, you can think of the brain as just such a database, relating different sensory inputs and internal permutations of thought to each other.

I'm not sure if your example contradicts information being physical however. I think the large distances and variations in type might be confusing things.

I could have a computer database that lets me upload pictures to it. I can't speak the language of the person I need to talk to, so I upload a picture of a helicopter. Visual recognition software is already good at this sort of things, it recognizes "helicopter," from my photo and send it along. However, my interlocutor is blind, and speaks Arabic, so the database has to flip the visual representation over to one in sound, in the appropriate language, something computers can already do. If we need to transmit the message back into text, a visual medium, we can do so as well, all within a single computer system.

If information is some sort of non-physical being, how is it that every step of the transformation can be written out as code enacting physical changes in transistors? Brains aren't well understood and make things confusing, but microprocessors are well understood and can do the same things being done in your example. Or are they working with concepts as some sort of Chinese Room? Perhaps. Obviously they don't have subjective experience of the concepts, but that is the only difference apparent in the transformations of information through various mediums of storage that I can see.

Information science tends to focus more on electronic communications. I think there is something to the fact that the entropy of a message in terms of how many meanings it can have is less than the total Shannon Entropy due to synonyms (just made a thread on this point in this same section). Concepts aren't easy to define so they get ignored.

I use a Borges story as a point of reference there and I think another works here, "Funtes and His Memory." The basic plot point is a guy with perfect memory. He can spend 24 hours remembering a day exactly as it happened, fully reliving it. He grows frustrated with decimal systems and just wants to refer to whole numbers by random names, so for example, 7,891 is "Napoleon Bonaparte." The idea being, once he gives a number a name, he never forgets it. He has the ability for perfect extension in definitions. Why talk of dogs when you can refer perfectly to THAT dog, or THAT dog of THAT specific moment?

Unfortunately, Borges doesn't get into the role of universals in compressing information for communication or for predicting the future from imperfect information, where even for Funtes, universals would be useful.

Concepts are necissarily wide nets for groupings of different objects, that is from whence they derive their usefulness. Their ability to be sent via numerous different codes has to do with the fact that they reduce all the information about a particular, to a bite sized amount of information that can easily be coded and transmitted.

The role of concepts in cognition is a bit more interesting, since they help construct subjective experience, but that is neither here nor there.

As to mathematics being known a priori, I would follow Quine on being skeptical on this. The definition of natural numbers requires a circular definition of zero. Parallel lines never met, an a priori fact, until non-euclidean geometries emerged. It seems just as likely that natural selection primes us to understand mathematical relations that reflect the physical world well (indeed, our brains would be based of these same mathematical relations), then that these relations are somehow existent outside their instantiation. Abstract mathematics has developed all sorts of mathematics that don't correspond to physical reality.

Sure, you can justify it in some cases.

Predation is necissary to ecosystems. Given we have killed all the wolves where I live, if we don't hunt the deer, they out reproduce their food supply and then suffer from starvation.

Second, we've killed off or greatly reduced the populations of large ruminates in vast swaths of territory. In some cases, introducing livestock there is, at least in the short term, one of the better options for the ecosystem.

Industrial farming and meat production is obviously absolutely terrible for the environment and produces diets that make people fantastically overweight and unhealthy. Obviously there are better solutions than the ways things are currently done. That said, there will still be some places where livestock and fishing make sense (Iceland is a hyperbolic example where growing is difficult but fisheries are plentiful and the climate is decent for sheep and livestock horses ).

Permutations for calculating entropy would be the number of possible outcomes in the message. So a 2 bit configuration like you described would have four outcomes, not two. Entropy for binary is just additive of log2.

Words represent an extremely marginal amount of possible combination of letters. With English, 26 letters ^ 8 for an 8 letter word represents about 209 billion possible combinations. English has about 80,148 8 letter words. Adding proper nouns might (optimistically) get you up to 320,000, which means the possible number of permutations of the string that equate to actual words is about 15 1/10,000ths of 1% of all possible combinations. Same would hold for particle configurations in relationship to each other in any system. I may have phrased that ambiguously above, but that's what I mean.

I get your point here, but the thing is, for that same brain, there are orders of magnitude more possible permutations of how the matter that composes it could be arranged.

If we had a magical blender that randomized the particles for us into all possible configurations, only an exceedingly small number would be functioning brains, most would be a soup.

So while I get that, just looking at synapses, you have an enormous number of permutations, this is nonetheless a small minority of potential permutations for the systems components to have. And of course, fundemental particles interacting still represents information exchange, so the entropy of our blended brain is higher than that of the functioning one. It's just that a huge number of permutations in the blended version are effectively analogous soups.

Otherwise, it seems we have to assume that the amount of information/entropy for individual particles somehow increases as an emergent phenomena of their interactions. This would be like saying a mashup of random words has more entropy than a equally sized mashup of random characters, which it clearly does not.

By the way, another interesting thing about the library is that there should be a size at which every possible thought or occurance is expressed. Borges' library seems much larger than this requirement, but it could be made larger still by increasing the characters used, characters per page, of number of pages per book. His library already seemingly has enough space to code the exact position of every particle in the universe in relationship to one another, in multiple code variants, but it could be larger still. On the small end, all possible books at just 60 characters and two characters per book yields a tiny 3,600 books. There is of course, the fact that a smaller library cannot code all the possible configurations of a larger one, but at a certain point you have to hit maximum synonymity for ideas other than the contents of libraries of larger entropy than the one you already have. That is, there will cease to be relevance outside entropy itself.

At what point does the library reach a size where it begins only producing duplicates of meaning? If time is infinitely divisible, you can't code the universe without an infinite library, but said library must also have infinite numbers of duplicates. If you take a minimum unit of time, then there is a finite code representing the universe (provided the universe is finite).

Would a library containing all possible codes and permutations of human thought contain all possible information, or would it only contain a part? Is it possible there is information that resists being coded as such, at least for man? Essentially this would be akin to the messages shown in indistinguishable wavelengths discussed earlier. Ideas that are different, but seem irrevocably synonymous to our minds no matter how they are expressed?

Right, you could have it, but obviously we don't have it at the macroscopic level, as entropy is observably increasing. However, given many worlds, the almost infinitely improbable universe of non-increasing entropy is one of the (almost?) infinite worlds and actually exists.

Whereas you as an observer in one world could expand the volume of a container of gas all day for a billion years and not see entropy remain static a single time, because the probability is incredibly low.

Since the vaccines don't prevent transmission of the virus, I'm not sure if they reduce the risk of mutations.

On the one hand, yes, people who have been vaccinated get infected at lower rates. On the other hand, evidence from livestock shows that partial immunizations that reduce the severity of a disease but still allow transmission between the immunized tends to make diseases more lethal. Variants that would otherwise die out due to killing their hosts too quickly are allowed to proliferate.

Marek's disease is a classic example. Through the 1950s it rarely killed chickens. Industrial scale vaccination allowed highly lethal variants to survive. The result is that the mortality rate for MDV climbed from less than 1% to virtually 100% in unvaccinated birds over 70 years.

COVID is somewhat similar in that countries with very high rates of inoculation are now seeing the highest spread of the disease.

So, the risk in the long term would be that you turn a not particularly lethal disease that overwhelmingly effected the elderly significantly into a more generally lethal disease. However, the cat is already out of the bag on immunizations so the best option would be to develop a vaccine that actually prevents transmission and holds up longer than a few months. And it's worth noting that chickens don't die off from waves of MDV, they just have to be vaccinated. But it does create a problem where disruptions in vaccine supply chains that weren't a major problem before can become dire.

I guess it depends on what type of multiverse you're talking about.

In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, every possible quantum outcome is physically realized, resulting in an endless multiplication of worlds.

This would appear to have strong consequences for probabalistic interpretations of entropy:

With a gas in a box, the probability that all the gas molecules are in one corner of the box at the same time is very small (for a typical box full of 1020 molecules or more, incredibly small): this is therefore a low entropy state. It is much more likely that the molecules are randomly distributed around the box, and are moving in random directions; this high disorder state is a considerably higher entropy state. The second law doesn't rule out all the molecules ending up in one corner, but it means it's far more likely that the molecules will be randomly distributed, and to move towards a random distribution from an orderly distribution, as opposed to the other way around.

If you take this at the quantum level though, and assume the Many Worlds interpretation, there are series of outcomes where entropy isn't increasing as the universe expands. It seems like you could have a uniform, organized expansion after the Big Bang and thus not have the asymmetry of time as a property of the universe.

If you're talking about the many universes posited by various anthropic principle claims (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle), then the 2nd Law is probably another of those constants that has to exist in order for observers to form, and for a view of the universe to exist. Without it, you'd have time symmetry and it doesn't seem observers would be possible. There could be universes with different strong and weak nuclear forced, a different speed of light, and static entropy, but they would never produce anyone to observe them and so the question would never get asked.

This is a very interesting thread. I've been mulling over just this idea for a short story I'm writing, set on China during the Cultural Revolution. I figured it's a good backdrop for this question because it is a time period of extreme dogmatism in favor of materialism, which of course, tends to entail a specific type of definition about what it means for something to truly "exist."




I think the invisible dragon can be said to exist in a number of cases, even if we assume it has zero possible interaction with our world.

A. If exists in its own parallel world, and there it interacts with shadow physical objects, and could be observed by shadow people there.

B. It has one way interaction with our world. We cannot ever see the dragon, but it can see us.

However, if you turn the dragon into a non-observer, a sort of fundemental particle that interacts with nothing, not even other particles of its own type, what can be said of its potential existence then?

The way I see it, the problem for some contemporary forms of materialism, for example eliminative materialism, is that they base their claims to knowledge in empiricism, and correspondence definitions of truth. However, the limits of empirical verification are necissarily the limits of observation, and so the role on an observer becomes inextricably tied up in definitions of existence.

Leaving aside tautologies, Kant's analytic knowledge, Hume's relations of ideas, etc. (these are quite limited and I'm of the opinion that Quine dealt them a serious blow) - to verify a factual statement e.g. "Socrates is standing," requires an observation to assess if the factual statement corresponds to reality. Saying it is true something exists, requires an observer. But obviously this is different from saying existence requires an observer. Pluto existed before anyone observed it, but there was always the ability for it to be observed.

So, the limits of what can be, appear to become the limits of observation. Otherwise, if you posit that things can exist that cannot be observed (i.e. they cannot interact with anything observable), it seems like existence as a whole becomes non-sensical as a term. Things that exist can be indistinguishable from things that don't exist. Existence is reduced to a brute fact, but a brute fact that relates to nothing and can't be verified

On the other hand, if you allow that the potential for observation is an essential component of defining existence, doesn't the existence of an observer become an essential element of what it means for something to exist?

Generally materialist models get around this by positing a sort of hypothetical God's eye view through which the world can be viewed, detached from the messiness of finite observers. Limitless observation means that the limit of observability doesn't need to define what it means to exist. The problem here, is that you now have God in your definition. However, these systems generally want to define existence outside the role of an observer, and they definitely don't want to have to resort to God, even as a hypothetical, to define reality.

I don't see how you get around this, aside from moving towards a sort of pragmatist definition of truth, which feels more like a punt.

I think you're right. The deeper problem for me is that such fuzzy definitions, applied to core concepts like "alive" or "having being" seems to not only uproot bivalence, but the Law of the Excluded Middle entirely, and then what's left of your logical systems?


That's why the problem seems related to mathematical Platonism to me. Numbers don't exist in the sense that quarks and leptons do, but they're an essential facet of existence you need to explain anything, and obviously get instantiated in the physical world. Ideas follow a similar mold, although they only come into play at much greater levels of complexity and emergence, within sentient beings and their cultures.

Some physicalists would say they are just abstractions, and they can be eliminated from scientific dialogue. Indeed, even the existence of more apparently existing phenomena, for example qualia, have become candidates for elimination. I just don't know if this is correct. How do you ground the social sciences on the physical without looking at the physical instantiation of ideas, which are necessary components of explaining social systems?

I assume you mean returns on the stock market? I'm not super familiar with the period like I am with 2008, which I've read a lot of books on. My understanding is that was blue chips being over valued going into the crash and then inflation beat down stocks into 1980.

When inflation goes up, generally so will interest rates, because lenders assume they will get paid back in currency that is now worth less than what they gave out.

Central banks also raise interest rates as a means of combating inflation. Higher rates basically equate to raising the price of cash, which in turn weakens demand for it. Less lending means less money changing hands (velocity in macro models), which should reduce inflation, all else being equal.

The combo led to very high rates in the 70s. The Federal Reserve had rates at 20% by 1980, which is wild. If you can earn 20+% on money markets and bonds, you don't really have much incentive to stash your cash into stocks. Inflation also makes the potential yields on speculating in bonds a lot hotter because real bond yields shift more over time with volatile inflation rates. Meanwhile, stock value needs to keep up with the high inflation rate just for your asset not to lose value.

Also, if the company you now own runs into problems, a likely issue with high inflation and low economic growth, it has to either borrow at high interest rates, which will burden it with debt service, or it will choose to issue more stock because selling debt costs too much, which devalues your asset since each share is now less of the total.

Wealth and income equality was also much better back then. Now the top 10% own 90% of stocks, and that's weighted to the top 0.1%. So we see stocks booming despite inflation because the rich need assets to stick their cash in, but fixed income has garbage yields because interest rates are so low, so money pours into other assets (unfortunately single family real estate has become a major investment class, and it is killing regular citizens). If money is more evenly distributed, less is available to flood into asset classes like stocks.

I think the mental danger of inflation in the biggest challenge right now. People fear rising prices more than they should. Because wages have stagnated for so long, they don't have faith that their wages will keep up with prices, but in the past that has absolutely been the case in tight labor markets. For the first time since 1979 I believe, the bottom 50% are seeing bigger raised than the top 10%, and their wages are beating inflation growth.

Not only that, but about 29% of Americans have more credit card debt than cash savings. That share grows if you include mortgage debt, student debt, car loans, etc. People with more debt than savings tend to be poorer obviously. The thing about inflation is, it makes your debts worth less. You're paying them back in currency with less value. So low income Americans are winning on both sides of the equation.

But the top 10-20% is getting hurt, and that's who tends to lobby best, and who makes calls in the media, so we can expect to mostly hear about the bad side of this. It's a liability for the Democrats aside from them just holding power as this happens, because they've shifted so far on migration that they no longer have any coherent criteria for when anyone shouldn't be allowed to move to the US outside them being a violent criminal. However, I think this will be a big wake up to workers that businesses having access to an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor isn't favorable for them, and that there are reasons outside of racism to control migration.

A lot had been written about that. Appears to be a combination of things. First, the demand side. Part of that was too much government spending going up too quickly due to the Great Society and Vietnam War. That was new demand that couldn't be met by new supply quick enough. Also an increase in consumption as Baby Boomers started to hit adulthood and buy their own cars, homes, etc.

The supply side was probably a bigger issue. Immigration reform had been passed but was slow to start and illegal immigration was nothing like the 1990s to today, with a metropolis worth of mostly working age people entering the labor force each year (and at a large disadvantage in negotiating wages, which keeps wages low). Women were joining the workforce but the peak of the transition hadn't hit yet. So the supply of labor to meet new demand wasn't elastic enough to avoid price increases. And since labor is a major component in almost all goods, change in labor costs often result in changes in prices (although people drastically misunderstand when they think the correlation is 1:1, that only holds if demand is perfectly elastic with price, which is basically never is, hence $15 minimum wages don't drive the price of Big Macs up much).

You can see this in how productivity gains and wages used to go up together in lock step. Since 1979 wages have flatlined, going down for the lower income (along with life expectancy), while the gains flow to the owners of capital. Women entering the workforce and mass migration was a seismic and sustained expansion in the labor pool that probably helped keep inflation so moderate from the 90s on.

Obviously the gas supply shock was another major cause. Gas is used to transport goods and rub machinery so it is an input in the price for everything, so the 1973 shock had huge ramifications. Today the US is a net petroleum exporter, but back then we were way more sensitive to oil price shocks. Absolute supply mattered because vehicles had nowhere near the fuel efficiency of today. A modern heavy truck gets more miles per gallon than a 1970 passenger car (passenger cars averaged 13.75 MPG at the start of the shock, trucks today sit around 24 MPG and cars are up around 33 MPG). Obviously new production methods also help with supply shocks since domestic production exceeds demand even with Americans all driving SUVs and light trucks as commuter vehicles (of course that leads to other, larger problems than inflation).

Then the solutions, Nixon era price and wage mandates, just distorted the economy more. Taking the currency of the gold standard, while clearly the right thing to do long term (fiat has proved far more stable than gold backed currency for developed nations), probably also hurt simply because it hurt consumer perceptions of the risk of future inflation. Hell, even after 30+ years of well controlled inflation there are still goldbugs raving about how all our fiat money will be worth nothing any day now, but when it was a new shift the fear effected behavior far more.

But the thing with inflation is, it doesn't necissarily stop when the thing that started it stops. So current inflation is obviously due to the Pandemic and supply shocks, but the wage/price increase cycle is a positive feedback loop sans other factors. With stagflation back then, you had inflation kick off during economic expansion, but then the feedback loop continued during slow growth due to continued supply shocks and lack of adequate policy solutions.

For it to be stagflation GDP growth needs to be flat with inflation. But GDP growth is the highest in decades, 6.7%. Plus, a good deal of that inflation is rebound inflation. Recall oil having a negative price back in 2020? The year over year % increase is misleading because the year you're comparing to had huge deflationary pressures. Same for GDP growth. We only have China levels of growth because the economy contracted last year. It'd basically two years of growth and inflation at once. Averaging from 2019, things look much less extreme.

Real wages, so controlling for inflation, are rising for the bottom 50% faster than any time since the 1990s. Median checking account balances are up a whopping 50% since 2019. Inflation going into a spiral is a very, very real risk, but the initial bump has more to do with supply chain shocks (e.g. used cars up 40% on chip shortages for new cars, gas going from super low to 2019 levels). We had Great Depression level unemployment as the entire service sector dumped its staff and now they are all trying to hire back at once. Is it any wonder they have trouble filling spots? But if employee leverage causes wage increases that increase prices, a spiral can still start from the initial shock.



Defense spending to GDP has fallen by almost a third since 2010. 3.5% of GDP is not particularly high. Comparisons to Europe are somewhat unfair because they benefit from US protection, but even there the gap has shrunk. In the 1950s, when economic equality and growth was way better, defense spending was 11.5% of GDP. It was over 5% as recently as the 1980s.

Deficits are being driven by repeated cuts to revenue and transfer payments to seniors. That's where all the huge shifts are. Three rafts of large tax cuts since Reagan are probably the key issue.

Transfers to seniors (SS and universal healthcare through Medicare) are 38% of the budget. Interest on the debt, also a transfer to seniors since it's stuff they got in earlier years that younger generations will pay for, is another 8%, so 46% goes to seniors. The next largest group is transfers to low income people. 8% for non health welfare, 10.2% is healthcare for low income folks.

Defense is 11% and falling. Almost 15% of defense spending is on services and transfers for veterans, which could fall under pensions and health sliced another way.

The idea that America can fund things like universal healthcare out of the defense budget just doesn't make sense. Our super high medical spending/GDP from the private system does way more harm to deficits than defense spending.

Comparisons to other countries are also spurious because of unique ways in which the US operates. Healthcare is private so defense, and everything else, grows as a share of the budget since healthcare isn't a national expense. Most of the day to day stuff the government does is done by state and local government, roads, K-12 education, etc. Those expenses almost equal Federal ones (pre-stimulus).

So comparisons of the Department of Education and DoD budget is disingenuous as a talking point. States run colleges, counties or cities rub K-12, and they spend far more than the DoD.

No one has actually pushed the US to default on its debts when they had the votes to do so, and the logic there is clearly that sparking a financial panic is not going to make voters like you more. Nor does it make sense to plunge the country into chaos if your goal is to improve people's lives.

Second, progressives sorely lack the support for those sort of antics. The Republican Party is fairly unified, at least when it comes to voters showing up to the polls and voting for their candidates. Obvious exceptions abound, Trump saw a huge swing down in his share.of the White male vote in 2020, largely on educated voters getting tired of his antics specifically. At least that's how I'd interpret the fact that Trump's support among White men plunged, almost all driven by those with degrees, but that those same voters hewed much more Republican down ballot.

But Trump had a surge elsewhere, particularly with Hispanic voters without degrees, outperforming any recent Republican with Hispanic voters by a wide margin with 38% of the vote despite Democratic prognostications about a Blue Wave driven by Hispanic voters.


https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/30/new-trump-poll-women-hispanic-voters-497199

This is important as regards Progressives claims because they often like to speak as if they represent the overwhelming popular will of anyone who isn't White. In fact, more Hispanics vote Trump than identify as progressive, a margin of 38-25, and more identify as conservative (35) than progressive. Nor is the gap particularly large for Black voters, (25% conservative, 28% progressive).

https://news.gallup.com/poll/275792/remained-center-right-ideologically-2019.aspx

And whereas dyed in the wool Trumpists might have similar margins of public support, they can count on a unified voter bloc to come along with them.

Progressives are stuck with 20-25% support, and not even majority support in the Democratic party (obviously not in seats and positions, but not even in popularity either). How do you play hardball with a quarter of the vote, when half your party is willing to defect or not show up if you go to far on ideology? Progressives claim they are the "people's will," but the people they claim to represent speak with a different voice at the polls (I'm sure the rhetorical answer is that this is "internalized oppression...")

Not to mention, the primary system, particularly closed primary states, give a massive outsized advantage to radical voices on both ends of the spectrum. If the US primary system wasn't such an antiquated mess, it seems unlikely that Trump could have won the nomination, but similar changes to make it more representative of the general public would also make Sanders a non-contender. Fact is, progressives already benefit from systemic overrepresentation of their priorities, to the detriment of Democrats actually winning elections.

2020 ,with the huge expansion of mail in voting, ease of access to the polls, and absolutely historic sky high turn out, should be a major warning sign to Democrats in general. They got every election reform they could dream of to go their way outside district maps, and a noxious opponent on top of the GOP ballot, and preformed underwhelmingly given that big advantage. Democrats have plenty to hope for in how much the win the young vote (70% of Millennial women, Bush II took 50% of the 18-24 vote in 2000, Trump took just 36% in 2020, Trump lost voters under 55 by 9 and 11 points in each year respectively, landslide margins). But support in people polled =\= votes, and if you can't get proportional turn out in a year where everyone gets mailed an early ballot and can drop them off by drive through, you're never going to get it. Enthusiasm just isn't as high.

Or basically, you can't play hardball when you're the least popular faction in government, which progressives are in polling, in votes, and in seats.

My guess is no one. He's part of an "old left" with an ideology based mostly on class. Not totally sure what to call it, maybe "classical socialism." The new left has somewhat similar policy aims, but identity plays a core role in ideology. Since that side is ascendant, I think the "new Bernie," as in leader of the far-left in the US, will come from that outlook.

In terms of their success though, that might not be a good thing, because what research there is on identity framing, it makes people less likely to support a policy, even if they benefit from it. That could always change though with a culture shift though, it just hasn't been electorally appealing so far.

AOC would be the front runner now IMHO. Best name recognition, charismatic, young. Maybe Ilhan Omar, although she's had some missteps with part of the base over comments on Israel. AOC also seems better with the Twitter zingers, which is now a key asset for leaders, lol. It also seems like she is getting groomed more, which might just come down to personality and networking. And there is Rashida Talib, but I'm less sure of her. I might be biased by one segment of C-SPAN of her trying to grill staff for the Federal Reserve that revealed she really had no idea how central banks work and hadn't taken the time to find out before going for a grand stand.

In retrospect, it probably would have been in the best interest of the progressive caucus to blink on the infrastructure bill before their party lost the Virginia governor's seat and almost losing New Jersey. Based on the narrow margins, it could easily have made the difference.

It's a weird thing. The two wings of the Republican Party obviously hate each other much more on a personal level. By all accounts, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump absolutely despise each other and aren't on speaking terms. However, because Trump never really cared about policy, they never had these big fights on policy. The closest they came to this sort of crisis was on the ACA immigration, and ultimately they were fine doing nothing in both cases. Certainly it was sort of spitting in the eye of their base. You run on immigration as an apocalyptic crisis of national Identity, you get the House, Senate, White House, and Court, and then proceed to hold not a single vote on migration, not even token legislation about deporting rapists or something. However, it never blew up for them.

The old GOP and Trumpists are way further apart on policy than the progressive and center Dems, right? I mean, in their own words, Trumpist policy basically sounds like fascism. State intervention in markets is fine, neoliberal policy, a pillar of the GOP for a century, is the enemy. But because the Trumpists are so beholden to what Trump focuses on, and what he focuses on is generally not legislation, they avoid blowups.

Meanwhile, the Democrats really aren't that far apart except on the importance of deficits and the need for government action in social change (e.g. federal curricula based on the 1618 Project, that sort of thing). However, they can't seem to get along.

I think it comes down to the charismatic leader. Biden just seems empty. Him coming down on one side of an issue doesn't hold weight for AOC or Manchin. I think this is showing his weakness.

As much as Obama wasted a lot of his super majority time trying to be a both sides of the aisle guy, I think he'd be a lot more able to sway his own party now. Not to mention that without term limits we'd almost certainly have seen Trump lose almost every swing state in 2016, and might be seeing a more seasoned negotiator Obama in his fourth term now. Term limits certainly seem like a mistake now, especially as we gave an octogenarian rematch for 2024.

As I read Obama's book, it just hurts. I can certainly see him winning in 2016, Trump had razor thin margins, and maybe again in 2020 depending on what happened. We'd have the American Solon we really need, the level headed reformer who idealized liberal democracy and doesn't rely on simplistic ideology to appeal for support.

I suppose one take might be that salvation is sort of like anesthesia. Since we don't know how conciousness works, we can't really say how anesthesia works. Normally it is a cocktail of drugs that reduce pain, prevent mobility, cause sleep, and cause anterograde amnesia. It's actually possible a good number of people experience pain during surgery, but aren't able to build memories of it.

As someone who woke up in the middle of the one surgery I've had, and definetly remember it as extremely, extremely unpleasant, I'm open to the possibility that it might not be putting people out as much as making memory formation difficult. After all, it takes a pretty deep sleep to not experience someone burning a wound in your throat closed (what I woke up to). I'm also a bit weird in that I tend to remember deep sleep dreams, which is less common, but not totally unheard of, as a sort of disjointed conciousness. This makes sense from my understanding of neuroscience. The systems that make up conciousness don't shut down during unconsciousness, else we would die, they just desynchronize and act at different levels (frequencies of brain waves).

Whole point of this tangent being, suffering in this form of life might be akin to anesthesia. Yes, you experience it in the moment, but the memory will fade. And as with surgery, the process might be to help one.

Why do we need suffering? Perhaps it has something to do with a sort of ontological semiotics. No pleasure without pain. In Dostoevsky, suffering is a part of the process through which the soul can come to know God. It's the sort of question it isn't easy to answer. However, I'm not sure if "imagine being, that is being and contains the things we think are good, without anything negative coming into being," makes sense as a supposition. How do I know something without the negativity (in the definitional sense of negativity, not the good/bad sense). Meaning is essentially differentiation, and the power of differentiation is the negative.

The whole doctrinal elements of salvation are, in my opinion, a red herring because sects vary quite a bit in how they define it. For Christians at least, it is worth noting that Jesus didn't come to Earth to write a theology book, but spoke in parables open to interpretation on many levels.

I always find myself a bit lost in the doctrine debated vis-a-vis salvation because Revelations specifically has the revival of the dead before their judgement. So the focus on actions before the "hard deadline" of death in many doctrines never made sense to me. For that matter, Hell as it appears in the Bible, is a lot different from Hell as generally understood in culture, which takes more from Dante's fan fiction (admittedly one of my favorite works of fiction) than anything else.

I hope this is his rationale for saying he will run again at 83. I do wish he had picked a more charismatic heir apparent.

I wouldn't say hopeless, those jobs do exist, they are just hard to come by. It's easier if you aren't picky about where you live and can move anywhere in the country.

I always liked teaching. Nowadays, more and more programs hire teachers with professional experience so I figure I'll try to pivot to that once I've had more time in the professional sphere. They do generally want people from management positions (e.g. city managers for public policy, business owners for business, etc.), so the bar is still high but there are more ways to meet it.

Community college is an overlooked option. I got approached for a teaching position in economics there, which only requires graduate work, not a PhD, but I just left government for a start up and the hours balloon too often to make it feasible. But, particularly in rural areas, they have a hard time filling those. I would expect demand goes up as plans for cheap or free CC get implemented, so it's a growing field in a way traditional university positions are not.

I can only echo this. I went to undergrad before neuroscience was a common major, so I got degrees in biology and psychology. I graduated summa cum laude in just three years, which, in the economy of the Great Recession, qualified me to walk dogs and work as a fry cook for a year. When I finally got a research job it paid $13.50, in Manhattan, so effectively living on minimum wage once cost of living was adjusted for. I used to see posting for visa positions: masters required, but a PhD would be good, publications, research experience, and a salary of $18 an hour for locales like Boston or San Francisco. Obviously the visas weren't about lack of degrees and training, which were overproduced, but about employers having employees they have absolute leverage over.

Pure research fields are extremely difficult, even STEM ones.

I had a similar vision of the field as the economy began to recover and I started graduate school. The advice I got from tenured professors when considering a PhD was not to consider it unless I got into one of the five or so most selective programs. Given the market, getting a job would be difficult otherwise (and even still with the pedigree). I taught sections as one of the top ten most selective schools in the nation and adjuncts made about $18 an hour. The reward was the university name on your resume.

Which is all to say, study what you enjoy but pick up practical skills. Area knowledge doesn't have a premium. This is probably harder for philosophy, but for social sciences at least you can invest time into learning R and Stata. Knowing the principals of statistics is also not marketable. Being able to code R, Python, and DAX is. Learn a SQL query language too. Or aside from coding, one of the State Department critical languages. The most marketable stuff I got out of grad school was connections, coding skills, and Arabic. The fancy name on the resume and content area knowledge isn't all that useful, after all, you can pick that up with a library card.

The problem is that the mostly Baby Boomer professors have no idea how the modern job market works or that their value largely has to do with the stickiness of wages and are terrible at advising on this sort of thing.

Joe Biden will be almost 83 by the time the next election rolls around. It's not unreasonable that his party wants someone else. He wasn't an overwhelmingly popular pick for the position. He was chosen because the center of the party needed someone to coalesce around to defeat Sanders. It's entirely possible that his success was largely due to his staking out a position that he would refuse to drop out of the race, thus tanking the Democrats chances of winning the election (in the minds of centerists at least) unless other candidates dropped out to endorse him. Basically, he won by playing chicken. Now in office, he has little of the charisma and energy the crisis moment calls for and can't even get his own party to pass his agenda.

I mean, it seems highly probable that any of the several other centerists candidates would be President right now if they had been given similar support. What makes Biden the one?

On the upside for the Dems, a sizeable minority of Republicans hate Trump. He really tanked in the suburbs last time around. Picking shit fights with D list celebrities on Twitter at 2 AM on a work night only plays well with a certain crowd. A meaningful minority of the party thinks Trump lost the election fair and square, and then tried to subvert the democratic process to stay in power. Seeing as how he seems unable to move on from the defeat, he is now in the position of having to run on a claim that a around a fifth to a third of his party thinks is an abject lie. It's a terrible idea.

But then again, the Dems seem intent on continuing to push education reforms like getting rid of gifted programs that have extremely low support, so they have their own issues. That they are losing, not gaining support with minorities through the era of Trump, also seems to undermine some of their core claims about society.

This logic holds if one assumes the unit of analysis for guilt is the individual, not the people. However, in the doctrine of Original Sin, mankind as a whole is condemned for the actions of their progenitors, Adam and Eve.

We use the collective as a unit for assigning guilt fairly often. Corporations are punished as a whole for bad acts. The German people were to pay reparations to the Jews as a whole for their collective, not individual actions. Arguments in favor of reparations for American slavery often also invoke a similar idea of collective and inherited guilt.

The other interpretation that resolves the issue of infants' innocence is that God knew man would be sinful before It made man. Or, on the individual level, God knows the infant will become sinful in the future. So the guilt precedes the action of the guilty.

We can question if this is fair, but we have to bear in mind that time is perhaps a meaningless concept to apply to a transcendent God. Perfect memory means that the past is perfectly accessible to God, able to be experienced as fully as the present. Perfect knowledge means the future, or perhaps knowledge of infinite possible futures, is also as accessible to It as the present. Thus, God exists outside the conventional boundaries of time, in which case temporal cause and effect can't be understood the way we understand it conventionally.

Or, if you posit the God of the pietist tradition, God is coming to evolve and understand Itself through the coming into being of the world. Thus being, or more accurately, "becoming," is the process of God attaining the Absolute; reality is being coming to know Itself through itself. Thus, being is necissarily out of balance since difference is a prerequisite of definition and meaning. If you posit a Heraclitian semiotics of the tension of opposites, you shouldn't expect a balanced world, but one out of harmony so that meaning can be constructed. Hence pain, darkness, and evil- these must exist to define their antipode.

The same logic holds true for demiurgic cosmologies (one shouldn't expect a balanced world because the material realm is not within the Pleroma), or for cosmologies where an evil god of equal, or almost equal power to a good one, struggles for control of reality (Manichean cosmology, Zoroastrian, etc.).

I get the logic. What I am rejecting is the premise that humans could somehow be guilty outside of their relationship to being in the world.

The problem is one of causality. The world can't be bad because man is bad, if man doesn't exist before the world does. For the justification of evil by guilt to work God must:

A. Make the world bad prior to man's existence, because he knows man will be bad. In which case the guilt proceeds the crime and can't be the cause of it.

B. The world was originally good, but was changed because man was bad. This only makes sense though is human guilt is collective and hereditary.


The view that the evils that befall man are due to man's transgressions is taken up and rejected in the Hebrew Bible in an interesting way. Job's friends are found guilty by God for claiming that evil only comes against those who are evil, and for claiming to speak for God vis-a-vis condemnation. The problem of evil is addressed and the response isn't an argument about greater goods or guilt, it is given after several books of disputation between Job and his friends, when God suddenly appears and joins the conversation:

Job: 38
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said:

2 “Who is this who darkens counsel
By words without knowledge?
3 Now prepare yourself like a man;
I will question you, and you shall answer Me.

4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements?
Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 To what were its foundations fastened?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
7 When the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?...

[God proceeds to question Job on the causes of all manner of natural phenomena from the evolution and behavior of animals to the cause of light and rain]

Job 40:

6 Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said:

7 “Now [a]prepare yourself like a man;
I will question you, and you shall answer Me:
8 “Would you indeed annul My judgment?
Would you condemn Me that you may be justified?
9 Have you an arm like God?
Or can you thunder with a voice like His?
10 Then adorn yourself with majesty and splendor,
And array yourself with glory and beauty.
11 Disperse the rage of your wrath;
Look on everyone who is proud, and humble him.
12 Look on everyone who is proud, and bring him low;
Tread down the wicked in their place.
13 Hide them in the dust together,
Bind their faces in hidden darkness.
14 Then I will also confess to you
That your own right hand can save you.

That's the answer Job gets. Also worth noting that some sort of Dr. Pangloss's best of all possible world's never shows up in the Tanak:

Ecclesiastes 4

Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:

I saw the tears of the oppressed—
and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors—
and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
But better than both
is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
that is done under the sun.

And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Fools fold their hands
and ruin themselves.
Better one handful with tranquillity
than two handfuls with toil
and chasing after the wind.

Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:

There was a man all alone;
he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
yet his eyes were not content(J) with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
“and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
a miserable business

I'm not sure how this logic works. Surely we are the result of our enviornment, no? Our morals are shaped by our culture. Our personalities are hugely influenced by our DNA. Our appetites and desires are inborn. Our will, generally weaker than said desires. If we are guilty, how can you be sure we're not guilty because of the world we live in? If the world were perfect, maybe we would be too?

It seems a fundemental issue here is that it isn't possible to talk about us existing outside of existence, and the existence we have, the one in which we come in to being, is filled with all sorts of evils.

Perhaps it makes sense if we assume we existed outside this world before, sinned, and have been thrown into this one for our transgressions- with our memories wiped obviously. Then a guilt sperate from a reality awash in evil makes sense.

This, of course, is largely what Abrhamic faiths accept. We existed in the Garden, and were thrown into the fallen world for our sin. Our blame is grounded in a world without hurricanes, cancer, or 9 minute long Meatloaf ballads. Only in that case, our guilt is a shared one as the descendants of rebellious ancestors.



Plenty of conceivable divinities are consistent with this world. The only one that isn't is an omnibenevolent, anthropomorphic God who operates doing whatever people assume a really smart, really powerful God would do to induce maximum "good."

An evil God, an incompetent God, an incompetent or evil demiurge, an unknowable God, etc. are all compatible with this world. I don't know of any faiths that propose a God that extends maximum joy and pleasure to creation, perhaps because it is rather unbelievable.


God as the Absolute, being positing that-which-it-is-not in order to define itself, is certainly compatible with suffering and pain.

---

Anyhow, back to the idea of guilt. I think the idea of sin and guilt were a major historical progression. In ancient philosophy, you really don't see the concept of the will. You see prohairesis in Aristotle, but that is too narrowly defined to be our "will." You have some degree of subdivision in the Stoics, with the distinction of desires of the mind and appetites of the body, but still, this does not include the element of intentionality key to the will.

The will, as that part of the mind which desires, decides, chooses, and acts, comes far more into focus with Saint Paul and particularly Saint Augustine. With the coming of Christ, you have the need to differentiate actions based on the autonomy and choice of the actor. After all, it only makes sense for one to be condemned for one's choices if they are truly choices. At the same time, the concept of redemption only works if one chooses to turn from sin and to Christ. You have to be damned to be redeemed, and redemption through forgiveness requires a will to contrition.

In the Old Testament, choice is less of a focal point. God "hardens the hearts" of sinners and stays their course in sin. When God becomes man, the burden of control shifts, and man becomes responsible for his own redemption. He must choose redemption precisely because he is damned; if he was free from sin, the concept makes no sense.

To my mind, this marks a progression in the religious understanding. From fearing God, "wisdom is the fear of the LORD," to choosing God, even to the point of self-negation, "to die in Christ I count as gain." And obviously here, self negation also means the negation of the will, "not my will but your," which has to exist to be negated.

So I've come around on the OP, if maybe not in the sense it was intended: guilt is essential.

But it is true, he fairs worse with independents than Trump did during a major crisis for him: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/04/bidens-polling-numbers-are-even-worse-than-they-appear/

I only have an anti-progressive bent in that they frustrate me because I tend to agree with their policies, but then their political execution in enacting them is usually terrible. They also tend to greatly over estimate their own support, leading to rhetoric and maximalist positions (a good example is the push to abolish talented and gifted programs from public schools, which is misguided and horrendously unpopular) that cost the elections.

I find it likely that Democrats lose the House and Senate because:

1. That historically happens during mid terms.
2. It is even more likely to happen if the country is doing poorly, which it most certainly will be due to heavy drags on the economy.
3. Biden's approval rating is absolute bottom barrel. It is worse than Trump's during the same week of his Presidency, and this was the week of Charlottesville and the news of Manafort's Russian corruption ties, which tanked his polls. It's worse than it looks because Biden's approval rating is -17 in Arizona, and similarly bad in every swing state, with his remaining support concentrated in electorally meaningless places.

And I get it, the country is in crisis and we have a dotard mumbling off in his speeches unable to wrangle his party in his second meaningful vote (and the first, the stimulus, was a softball). Not great for turnout.

Potentially a great thing. It's 50/50 that they in fact pass absolutely nothing as progressives vote down the infrastructure bill and then can't get the rest through the Senate. I would say it is trending towards more likely that they get nothing, in which case it is more likely than not that Biden will have no major legislative achievements in his term, as I highly doubt the Democrats hold on to their razor thin margins in 2022.

In retrospect, letting Progressives pack their wish list into the House bill was a mistake, since it seems to have given them the sense that they can make policy with just 25% of the seats in the legislature by threatening to tank everything, and what is more likely is that they get nothing.

But this is less of a problem for true believer progressives because the worse things get for the people, the closer some glorious revolution is to coming, where a great utopia will be swept in by popular discontent. In reality, it will increase destablization and make everyone's lives more shit.

The Democrats are at risk of proving they share Republicans inability to actually govern due to their own unrealistic base.

I feel like that's a very myopic quote. Plato and Aristotle didn't start being forgotten with the rise of Christianity; the process began soon after Aristotle's death. Stoicism and Epicureanism would come to overshadow them soon after, and while both certainly made contributions to philosophy and logic, I think it's fair to say things actually took a step back through antiquity. Plato doesn't come roaring back until he is reintroduced in a religious context himself, with Plotonius as a grand theologian / scholar. Point being, philosophy had already pricked it's finger back in the time of Alexander and only woke up in fits and starts. Hence most philosophy surveys barely skimming the years between Aristotle and Plotonius, then going back to sleep until Decartes- but that's centuries before the rise of Christianity.

Plato's work itself is also filled with wacky theology, but that doesn't detract from his philosophy. By the same token, it was priests and monks, with their obsession with nominalism versus realism who began seriously unpacking Plato and Aristotle in the West again. Not to mention that they can hardly be seen as zealots given the wide spread influence of Averroestic deism in the academy. In any event, no scholasticism, no Decartes, no Renaissance, and no industrial revolution. The germs of thought and intellectual systems that would become the sea change in Western philosophy that would spur on the Enlightenment and scientific method all started up in the high middle ages with Ockham, the other Bacon , Duns Scotus, Erasmus, etc.

Only a few I can think of. Bacon, Saint Augustine if you count Bishops, which I think you can. Marcus Aurelius obviously, the equivalent of a US presidential writing philosophy. I believe Abelard had some serious secular responsibilities at some points.

Democrats have an easy way to raise the debt ceiling alone. The entire "crisis" is fabricated bullshit, the type Dems are supposedly "above." Mitch looks hypocritical, ok, but that doesn't matter, he had already maxed that out filling RGB's spot.

The problem lies solely in the Democratic Party, which seems likely as not to shut the government down on its own President, and not pass any infrastructure bill, giving the people nothing, because a minority of the party seems to think their party's razor thin majority gives it's most progressive members the ability to dictate terms. It doesn't.

To be sure, the fact that reconciliation only comes around once a year, combined with the filibuster is part of the problem. A Congress gets one and only one chance to pass new laws with less than 60 Senate votes before the next election, forcing any hope of reform into this one bill, but they knew that back in January. They didn't need a crystal ball to know Mitch would lead a vote for default to keep the pressure on. They needed to hammer out what they wanted back in the summer, not spend all the time grandstanding. Biden can't be the new FDR because Democrats aren't popular enough to win big, they need to realize that. Democrats aren't popular because they keep embracing suicidally unpopular positions like getting rid of gifted programs in local schools, and seem wedded to a race based advocacy of their programs that, when tested, makes voters of all demographics less likely to support them.

I find this doubtful based on the evidence from Landslide, and various other interviews. Trump's Jan 6th involvement with the crowd was quite limited. He wasn't particularly interested in the protest beforehand, seeing brow beating Mike Pence as his route to staying in power. His speech, filled with ridiculous lies and grievance, was basically the same speech he had given in the preceding weeks, given with less energy than usual.

There isn't anything showing intent for Trump. He treated Jan 6th as another rally, and wasn't particularly pleased that he didn't get to plan it. With no planning to incite the riot, or use it to his advantage, and indeed, only a minority of the crowd originally planning to enter the capital, there just isn't much there.

Trump doesn't scheme or lead. He riffs at members of his court in an angrier version of his public speeches and people act based on his rants to please him. It makes intent very hard to prove. It also makes me doubt he can be tied to his organization's financial crimes because he lacks the patience for tax fraud. Maybe his call to Georgia will go somewhere, but proving intent will also be difficult.

The bar for white collar crime is probably too high, but it's also Trump's management style (not managing and just ranting emotionally) that keeps him safe.

If you want a check on bad leaders being elected, a body of people chosen for party loyalty and donations who only meet once every four years, with no deliberation, is really not what you want. Even if the Electoral College was supposed to serve some function at one point, it has no instructional legitimacy in doing so and no functional ability to vet candidates, or even its own membership. You'd have something even more chaotic than the election, a bunch of small business owners who donated to their state party getting to choose the future leaders.

I don't even have to think far outside places I've lived for bad Democratic elected officials. Charlie Rangel, censured by the entire House, a rare unanimous Republican and Democratic vote, for corruption. Bob Mendez, corruption he was able to avoid prison for (reasonable doubt standard) but can surely be held to have been involved in (preponderance of evidence standard). Rod Blagojevich, almost comically incompetent corruption trying to sell Obama's Senate seat. Bill Clinton, if a decent executive, also with multiple sexual harassment and assault claims against him, made more credible by his confirmed behavior.

Whereas there have also been competent Republican leaders. George Bush Sr. responsibly raised taxes when deficits rose, had realistic, limited war sims in the Gulf, managed the collapse of the USSR expertly. I would argue he was the best foreign policy President since Truman developed Containment.

I'll be interested to see how mid terms go. Trump voters are mad at the GOP leadership, rightly intuiting that they despise their "God Emperor." Meanwhile, the party is following him on campaigning on an election he clearly lost, not a good issue. Sure, 60% of the party will at least tell pollsters they think he won, but having 40-50% of your party split on your main campaign issue, indeed, having them think you are telling bald faced lies about your main issue, does seem disastrous. And as we saw in Georgia, railing about fraud that hasn't occured kills your turn out. So a big upset could be on the way.

The GOP doesn't need the Electoral College. They win majorities of House votes. The Democratic dream of minority votes surging against the GOP has never materialized, and by the third generation, new immigrants are far more attracted to the party. Their problem is that their loonies keep winning primaries, and their variously insane and racist messaging is killing them in national elections.

However, the President's party usually loses in mid-terms, the economy faces major risks in the form of historically high corporate debt, the pandemic won't go away, and worst of all, the Democrats seem unable to govern, so I can see them getting wiped out. It looks 50/50 that the AOC bloc of the party tanks an infrastructure bill that was already passed by the Senate and ends up giving people absolutely nothing. That bloc seems unaware that if a race was run with Trump, a centrist Republican, a centrist Democrat, and a hardcore progressive, they would almost certainly come in a distant last place. Like Trumpism though, this can all be explained by the oppression of their base, the evil media, and voter suppression, clearly it couldn't be that they just aren't that popular and need to compromise...

I don't totally disagree with the sentiment but there are a few things to consider:

1. The GOP base would be the one less likely to be dissuaded by a test. Democrats have far more low propensity voters. Additional barriers, such as having to vote in person versus via mail or drive through, needing to get some form of official ID, etc. all hurts Democratic turn out more than Republican. Trump likely squeaks by on narrow swing state margins if a new, major barrier to voting is implemented. As is, the mail in voting boosted turn out rates arguably cost him a second term, although they also surely boosted his vote total, which he is so proud of.

2. All the same problems hold for minority turn out.

3. A test that successfully weeded out Trumpism would have to actually be rigorous, something analogous to the FSOT with its wide range of questions on basic historical, legal, and economic issues. The test isn't super hard, yet it has a 1% pass rate. People not particularly interested in politics already self select out of voting, so any test that would uplift the quality of candidates would necissarily restrict suffrage, probably by more than half. Your median Trump voter his higher income and more likely to be educated, so education as a metric fails.

4. The plan is going to be accused of racism due to the history of poll tests being used to eliminate Black voters. Although, I don't know if this is particularly fair since those generally weren't actual tests anyone could pass, but Kafkaesque riddles designed for failure. You'd almost certainly end up with disproportionate exclusion of minorities with any test though, which is a real political issue.

IMO, a much better system would be to not let people vote for the chief executive. Professional city and county managers vastly out preform elected officials at the local and regional level. Professional managers already administer large US political units with millions of people living in them, mostly out West. You could avoid the problem of elections being popularity contests by having people elect a small panel (based on popular vote and region, maybe 6/5 seats) who in turn hire a president and have the power to fire them. Selection is then done by merit by a party small enough to actually deliberate. This keeps regular accountability via elections and removal, but introduces a buffer to populism.

Also, I wouldn't put it all on the GOP. If a liberal Trump could exist (far harder because everyone would try to cancel them to out flank them), I don't doubt many Democrats would love them.

I look forward to pitching my system when, following Rome and Byzantium, and Avignon and Rome, we have new systems inaugurated in Mara Lago and Washington. I will say, the "Mara Lagonian Empire" does have a cool ring to it. Rather than the legal titles of Caesar and Augustus from the Dominate, the rulers shall be proclaimed the formal titles of "Donald" and "Trump," but maybe it can be reformed from the inside after the death of the king.

US elections wouldn't be polarized dumpster fires if we didn't have such an incoherent and broken election system.

If we went via the popular vote, the GOP would have won one election in a third of a century. The one election they did win was by the slimmest margin in that period, with the benefit of an incumbency they picked up despite losing both the popular vote in 2000, and, based on the most comprehensive recounts released, also the electoral vote.

So, the GOP would be forced to rebrand in a more democratic system because they simply aren't capable of winning national popular votes anymore. What was once a quirk of the US system that appeared every 30-50 years, is now the entire GOP strategy.

But then the certification process, which allows room for myriad constitutional crises, like state legislatures overturning their elections, or the old Congress that was conceivably just voted out getting to throw out the electors and pick a new candidate, opens up a whole list of horribles. It's possible for a party to lose, and still use majorities from a previous election to overturn the current one.

A majority of Republican House members did indeed vote to throw out the electors and appoint Trump president. Of course they did this safely knowing it would never happen, but one could see it happening next time around. Nor will Democrats be immune. Their leadership is obviously losing hold of the party to the extent that it now seems possible they will pass absolutely nothing in terms of infrastructure or a budget, because a small minority of progressives wants their perogatives to come first, despite representing a fraction of the country.

I certainly could see a Democrat making the case that the Congress should throw out Republican electors because of voter suppression, or because they won the popular vote in the future, now that norms around the process are broken. Indeed, Democrats helped erode these norms by pulling stunts requesting George Bush and Trump electors get thrown out and replaced previously.

I'm big on Presidential histories, but I always avoided the Trump ones because it seemed like so much leaked that they wouldn't reveal much.

However, I read Landslide, which focuses on the efforts to overturn the election, and it is absolutely hilarious. Comedy gold.

Apparently Trump wanted to make Guliani Attorney General, or a nominee for the Supreme Court. Think of all the comedy we missed!