Did Trump clean up with blue collar voters? Neither set of exit polls suggest this.

You have to restrict your definition of "blue collar" to "older blue collar white voters," to make that claim, something the Republican Party does implicitly in order to make the "party of the people claim."

Now, Democrats routinely understate Trump's support with minorities. 1:10, roughly his share of the Black vote is a sizeable amount of any group. Imagine a backyard barbeque with 20 people; chances are two people would have voted for Trump at that ratio. 1/3rd for Hispanic voters is also substantial. He only lost people under 55 by around 7 points each time. The electorate isn't monolithic by demographic catagory, as it is sometimes portrayed.

At the same time, electorally, Trump loses in a landslide with the people below late middle age, let alone minorities. That's an important fact.

The income data for Trump voters is also skewed by their age. You can be 65 and have a low income from Social Security and your 401k, but have a net worth of $800,000 between your house and savings. Wealth data might be more telling (also very difficult to gather accurately).

The major irony for me is that in an election framed by the GOP as a fight against socialism, the GOP's base is of course the demographic that has universal healthcare (Medicare) and UBI (Social Security) that pays far above what Yang proposed.

That, and immigration is to my mind the unifying issue for populists in the West. Yet lower wages, and property values driven ever higher by mass migration, primarily benefit the elderly who most support the populists.

Are people too stupid to pick their leaders? I wouldn't call it stupidity. Too poorly informed and too emotional would be my verdict. Executives would be better picked like city and county managers, by a small elected panel who can vet and remove candidates based on credentials. Certainly in research, the city manager model consistently outperforms the mayoral model. Unfortunately no state has ever adopted this for the governor's seat.

I'm most familiar with Evangelical American churches. I don't see Nietzsche's thought meshing with them at all since, in general, theology essentially boils down to the precepts of:

1. All man kind is doomed to eternal torment.
2. Only faith in Jesus can save one from torment.
3. Salvation is by "faith alone," works are meaningless.
4. Once you are saved you are always saved.

These precepts are then taken to the logical conclusion, which is "go out and convert now! Convert! Convert! Convert! Everyone is doomed who doesn't accept Christ, but once they do they are good to go." You'll find churches where nothing else is preached aside from variations on this. There are, of course, variations in theology. For some, you can lose salvation through doubt, and for others, people who are not exposed to Christ don't go to hell. The latter creates the interesting contradiction where a generation could "take one for the team," and expunge Christianity from the world, thus saving all people from damnation.

However, I can see how elements of Nietzsche's thought could be worked in. If you look at his early work, particularly his Birth of Tragedy, you see the juxtaposition of the Appolonean (Aristotelian) mean and Dionysian ecstasy. The fact that, contrary to Nietzsche's bent, people tend to live happier lives cleaving to Aristotle's ethics of continence, the Appolonean, shows our fallen nature. Yet the ecstatic is the root of the religious experience. Nietzsche gets at something essential when he points this out.

I think our world reflects this simple truth. Hence the explosion of charismatic brands of Christianity, be they Pentecostal, or the new Catholic charismatic trend, big in Latin America today.

The conception of becoming more through overcoming does fit better with the Orthodox idea of salvation. Dostoevsky read and explicitly replies to Nietzsche with his Christian existentialism, and I'm happy I read the Brothers Karamazov soon after going through most of Nietzsche's work and Kaufman's excellent guide and biography. It's an able Christian response, the best I've seen.

Looking further afield, the idea of rejecting the morality of the world and chasing ecstacy and knowledge meshes fine with Gnostic Christianity, although Nietzsche clearly wouldn't agree with the asceticism of the Cathars or early Gnostics, or their Platonism. However, despite being so far off ontologically, they seem to fit together spiritually quite well.

The Gnostic pneumatic is similar to the Overman, stepping over conventional, worldly morals, and seeking truth above all else. They take a similarly dim view of the masses, of the great bulk of Christians and Jews as hylics. Nietzsche is obviously proselytizing for his ideas, so there are similarities there as well.

Nietzsche is writing about main stream Christianity in 19th century Germany and I never got the impression he studied theology let alone mysticism much, so his attacks won't bother all religious people. His description of Jewish morality is just going to seem surface level to the Jew steeped in Merkabah and Kabbalahism.

I suppose free will and the concept of choices in general presuppose temporality. There must be a before and after in which to make a choice.

However, if God is omniscient and contains within Itself perfect knowledge and experience of all things, then time to God is meaningless. God's perfect memory and prescience of all events, down to every last elementary partial, means that the the whole of existence is always at hand; It is atemporal.

I think Whitehead's envisioning of space-time as a descriptive relationship between events, as opposed to the Newtonian model of space-time as a recepticle/container is useful here.

Also useful is the example of Gnostic cosmology. For the Gnostics, the Monad was omniscient, but also ineffable. Space-time and the entire material world itself was but the flawed emmanation of an imperfect being. The concept of time, and thus choice, is simply a by-byprosuct of the demiurge's shoddy work in manufacturing an ersatz existence. Platonic forms after all, don't change with time.

I was referring to metaphysical antirealism which is the idea that "nothing exists outside the mind"

Solipsism is the general term for this I believe.

Even if I happen to be a brain in a vat at this moment—all my memories are false; all my perceptions are of a world that does not exist—the fact that I am having an experience is indisputable (to me, at least). This is all that is required for me (or any other conscious being) to fully establish the reality of consciousness. Consciousness is the one thing in this universe that cannot be an illusion."
- Sam Harris

I used to buy this, even though I had done a neuroscience degree for undergrad, which should have made me skeptical of this claim. What is conciousness? If you damage areas of the occipital lobe you can not only destroy vision, but the ability to imagine it, even in people who previously had sight. In someone who has had the major connections between both halves of their brain removed, you can get two distinct answers for what their ideal career is, one from each side of the brain. The sensation of volition when you decide to intentionally make any movement comes after the action has started. The sensation of volition itself can be damaged, so that the movement of leaves in a breeze around you can seem an extension of concious will. The qualia that make up conciousness seem to be fairly illusionary, distinct (not part of any comprehensive whole), and our perception of conciousness itself something retroactively fitted together.

In the cases of ego loss under nitrous or salvia I've had, I think I could still talk about experiencing, experiencing purely in the sense of some sort of loose cascade of qualia, but not of any I observing it as a being that could declare that something exists. If you keep upping the volume of gas in the blood, you get anesthesia, medically, the lack of conciousness, but there is no hard dividing line between the states.

The fact that we don't actually know how anesthesia works, and the reason it is so hard to determine the physical correlates of conciousness, to me, speaks to conciousness as a compound thing, and one that is likely far more illusionary and fleeting than we generally suspect.

>Prosecutors are bound by ethical rules that prohibit them from pressing charges they can't win

Such as? The entire US justice system would grind to a halt and collapse if all, or even half the accused demanded trials. A pillar of American prosecutorial strategy is to overcharge people and use the threat of hefty penalties to secure guilty or nolo contendere charges. For example, only 2% of cases in the Federal system go to trial. Prosecutors readily admit to this strategy. You bring cases you likely can't win as common practice, because the risk to the accused if they are convicted will by high enough to compel a plea. You use the plea to give them the lesser punishment you think they deserve.

However, politics and ambition are involved too, so it's not uncommon that prosecutors will be more/less aggressive based on personal gain or political considerations. The fact that the Feds don't go after marijuana producers in states where it is legal is an example where prosecutorial discretion based on political decision has functionally rewritten the law as exercised. Those are winnable cases they don't pursue. Charging all the protestors who went to the Kentucky AG's house to protest the Breonna Taylor case with felonies was making unwinnable charges to punish and threaten people. An unwinnable case they did pursue, before reversing thanks to politics.

Politics are key. 88 unarmed people sitting on the AG's lawn? 88 felonies as a statement; taking away their right to bear arms or vote. Dozens of armed protestors on the Kentucky governor's lawn to protest social distancing, pointing weapons at the house and hanging the governor in effigy to protest social distancing requirements? No charges.


Having worked in local government for years, no case against police is ever apolitical. Even bar room fights.

Perhaps there is free will, or perhaps existence is at least stochastic, as quantum mechanics suggests? Maybe it's that the omniscient deity conceives all possible realities.

The deity would represent all potentialities. We would perceive but one path.

I like this passage I happened across:

Another way to put this is to say that a wavelength of zero, where there are no ‘features’ to be seen, is akin to the situation where no statements are overtly made, but in which all possible statements are inherent. The silence that we are talking about here is not therefore impoverished, or lacking, but rather it is a like a ‘pregnant pause’ – it is like the Gnostic conception of the ‘fruitful womb of Eternity’, the ‘Pleroma’. If a particular statement is made (a particular rule) then this is all very good and it might look like a ‘step forward’, it might look like an act of creation, like as the positive act of creation whereby God created the world in Genesis, but from the Gnostic point of view this was not ‘creation’ at all but arbitrary limitation masquerading as creation since the particular positive statement can only stand as a particular positive statement if it implicitly denies the existence of any competing positive statements.

Don't know about God, but a quick look at our world, of the cruelty of sticking qualia into a being whose actions are ruled by determinism, of shoving Atman into a sea of Prakrati, definitely demonstrates the existence of Yaldaboath.

:cool:

Isn't all postmodernism about a transvaluation of values?

Maybe Ayn Rand goes beyond Nietzsche in transvaluation. However, I also think she's dumbing now what Nietzsche is saying, and adapting it to a much more shallow world view.


That's true. In terms of ethics, Heidegger, when talking about the authenticity of dasein, does seem to be talking in almost ethical terms.