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#1. The ongoing decline of established gatekeepers of truth and orthodoxy, first the church and then the technocrats, hasn't yet felt its full influence on American politics.
The average Congressman elected pre-2010 will still be a voice of reason, and these people will be around for a long time (see Patrick Leahy, who took office in 1975). But these will gradually lose their majority as seats are replaced with a generation of personality-based ideologues who have little to no practical experience governing. The Republican Party is being affected sooner, but it's a general process that will eventually eat through both parties like a cancer.
As we see with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was born in 1974, this doesn't necessarily correlate to youth. When I say "generation" I mean generations of political leadership. There have been populist types for a long time, but they were simultaneously men of political experience who knew how to govern professionally. America has tolerated these personalities for a long time because they were simultaneously orators and governors, but the next generation won't know how to govern.
This is easy to mask, since no given replacement of an experienced Congressman with an inexperienced rookie has a measurable effect on the government's workings. But it adds up over time, like a frog slowly being boiled.
#2. The final decline of Reagan-style economic libertarianism in the Republican Party. What we see today, aside from a few principled voices, is selective lip service to economic libertarianism. "The government should stay out of it" sells when your constituents would be adversely affected, but "Our hardworking Americans deserve a helping hand" sells when your constituents would seem to benefit.
With that will come loss of serious Republican interest in privatization/deregulation as a solution to various problems. Systems that are bloated will only grow more bloated over time. Accordingly, the costs of college tuition, healthcare, childcare, etc., will only continue to skyrocket.
#3. Because nobody is willing to acknowledge political violence from their own side, there is no real consensus that political violence in general is unacceptable. We'll see a lot more of it. And by this I mean violence by individuals or small-ish groups of hooligans, not a full-blown civil war or coup d'etat.
#4. The final decline of Christianity as a serious influencer in American politics. It will be merely an identitarian label attached to other identitarian labels. There will be no serious attempts to roll back the dechristianization of America. Legacy conservative Christian media will decline and be replaced by secular or secular-ish firebrand media.
#5. So far as algorithms and self-segregation enable one to live in an online echo chamber of selective "facts", this will only intensify in the future. It will become harder for people to understand why the other party believes what it does. Similarly, fewer people will be able to give a coherent answer about what their own party stands for.
#6. The GOP will succeed in drawing in large numbers of minority voters and become less white.
#7. Increase in both misandrist and misogynist sentiments. Lower frequency of marriage. Lower birth rate. Even the hookup culture will decline. Neither will have practical policy implications in Washington, however.
#8. In another sense, there will be less of a generational divide between old and young. We'll have plenty of old people who grew up playing video games, continued playing video games as adults, continued to buy the latest games and install the latest gaming hardware, etc. More old people meming and hanging out on "young" spaces.
#9. We will not see a societal shift favorable toward pederasty, incest, and bestiality in the next 30 years, as these things are and will be associated with violent coercive sex. Americans react negatively to things that make them instinctually afraid, and I don't see this changing much. However, there will be an explosion in militant activism among the fringes who support legalizing and normalizing all of these things.
#10. As remote work makes it possible to live anywhere, we will see partial deurbanization. However, not everywhere is created equal; backward small towns will see little gains whereas scenic "tourist trap" towns/small cities will attract throngs of newcomers. States like North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, etc., will gain population.
Similarly, there will be a growing income divide between those who work remotely and those who work in offices (who'll be on fast track for raises and promotions). Those who work remotely will be disproportionately women and those who work in offices will be disproportionately men.
#11. As budgets shrink, more schools will adopt virtual learning as a cost-saving measure. Low income school districts will be the first targeted; while at present there's still a lingering digital divide (with not all low-income households having consistent internet), greater connectivity will change that over the next 10 years. Traditional schools will tend to yield better outcomes for students, and this will exacerbate the academic achievement gap between rich and poor.
Poor kids, on top of falling grades, will also be less socialized in their formative years due to learning in front of a screen instead of being around physical classmates.
#12. We will see more labeling on products concerning their environmental impact and greenhouse gas emissions.
#13. The rise of electronic currency microtransactions will enable you to, say, send 5 dollars to a homeless person's phone in 30 seconds.
#14. People will use self-driving cars to do things like pick up groceries for them. Wal-Mart will be among the first retailers to have employees go outside and stuff groceries in the back of a lone vehicle.
#15. Sales for anti-nausea medication will skyrocket in the short term during the transition to self-driving cars. It's a decent 15-year investment (hint hint).
#16. Smartphones won't be phased out from widespread use in the next 10-20 years. In 2032 they'll look virtually the same as they do in 2022. At the same time, smartphones will be used for mainstream video gaming; for example, it'll be possible to dock them to a TV like with a Nintendo Switch, and there will be gaming controllers that can be attached to the sides of a phone.
#17. The digital nomad lifestyle will explode in popularity. With it will come a renaissance in mobile homes.
#18. More solar panels on homes.
#19. Decent internet everywhere in the country, even in remote areas far from civilization.
#20. Fewer skilled immigrants will see the United States as an attractive destination.
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@SkepticalOne
Do you not understand the word 'implicit'?
I know what implicit means. But to answer your question, I don't want what you claim I want.
I'd be perfectly fine with an actually secular society. But not this dumpster fire where taxpaying parents have to pay for public schools while they're not allowed to receive a penny for religious private school. Not this dumpster fire where quasi-public institutions, considered authoritative by the government and society alike, are waging constant psychological warfare against this country's Christian population. Not this dumpster fire where the rainbow flag is flown on the grounds of American embassies.
This goes to my point above - you are suggesting because group B does X, it is acceptable for group A to do the same.
Like I said, I don't want either group A or group B to do diddly squat. But hypocrites who use Christians' side of this to attack and slander my community while ignoring their own side of this rub me the wrong way.
There is a conflict of interest when a government is responsible for protecting religious freedom while also favoring a religion
There's also a conflict of interest when the government favors ideologies that harm religion. Why don't we get rid of all conflicts of interest?
State promotion of any religious view, including strong atheism, would not be neutrality
I'm glad we agree. But that applies to "weak" atheism as much as it does "strong" atheism. If the state is gently nudging you in the direction of abandoning the basic precepts of your faith, then it might as well be the Soviet Union so far as I see it.
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@SkepticalOne
Tu quoque fallacy.
If there are crumbs all over your own face, then you berating me for sticking my hand in the cookie jar doesn't exactly hold a lot of credibility.
you implicitly admit you don't mind distorting the Constitution to serve your own purposes
When did I say that I wanted this?
there is no such thing as 'atheist nationalism'
When atheists want the government to do their bidding specific to their position on religion, then yeah. Yeah there is.
the absence of religion in government is to the advantage of everyone
This very choice of wording is a malicious distortion. What the 1st Amendment assures is religious neutrality. "Absence of religion" could be construed to mean state promotion of atheism, which would violate religious neutrality.
The fact of the matter is that almost nobody understands what secularism actually means. It is not what exists in France, Turkey, or North Korea. If the government is run by people who think "that dagnab religious group should be less religious and conform to the values that set for them", then what you have in essence is a reverse-Taliban.
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@SkepticalOne
You shall have no other gods before me.
Um, okay. This has literally nothing to do with the topic, but okay.
1st amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
I mean, atheists and hardcore secularists are constantly trying to coopt the government to their advantage. They want a one-sided wall of separation where religious people can do nothing but the state can be used to promote viewpoints that tend to degrade religion.
If they can do that, then why is it worse for Christians to behave and aim similarly? And if/since it isn't, why is disproportionate attention and worry paid to the matter?
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Christian nationalism is as American as apple pie.
What is nationalism? Defined broadly, it's the political expression of identitarianism. We have black identitarianism, an umbrella POC identitarianism, a slowly growing white identitarianism, feminism, the LGBTQ movement, militant atheist political activism to shut down any whiff of a small town Christmas pageant or football game prayers, and so on.
Then there are a million other niche groups that haven't quite risen to that level: people who call themselves "survivors" of mainstream psychiatry. People who identify with the label of not being able to get a girlfriend. Eunuchs. Flat earthers. Anti-vaxxers. All of it's but a continuation of Alexis de Tocqueville's description of America as a place of endless voluntary associations.
I would be shocked if Christians weren't a part of this process. Especially given that Christians have some of the most noteworthy collective gripes and grievances in the country.
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@TheUnderdog
Sure. But then the birth rate plummets to South Korean levels, and reasonably hardworking people who could've afforded a kid in the economy of 30-40 years ago are now denied something that people across all of history took for granted.
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#3 is absolutely unfair. Mothers who depend on welfare don't get sterilized.
Nor should either. The modern economy is as such that you can do 50 hours a week and still need welfare to help you raise one kid. If the only alternative is not having any kids until some hypothetical point around age 45 where you're finally above poverty wages, then America would be screwed.
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@oromagi
I mean, he didn't actually cause the plane thing. You could say he was responsible via the butterfly effect, but that's not really the same thing. Walt never chose to push a button to make two planes collide.
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@oromagi
I've only seen YouTube clips of Season 6 so far, but the finale was something else. We spent 5 seasons of Breaking Bad rooting for Walt but this last episode framed it from the perspective of everybody else: he was an immoral drug lord and he and his co-conspirators (Saul included) were heinous criminals deserving of harsh punishment. This "antihero Western" was objectively indistinguishable from a glamorized documentary about a real-life cutthroat mafia cartel.
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On August 15, the series finale of Better Call Saul aired. Between Breaking Bad, the 2019 movie El Camino, and this, the Breaking Bad franchise has finally concluded after a legendary 14 year run.
Press F to pay respects.
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@FLRW
There's newer programming specifically dedicated to disputed paternity and the emotional reactions of the mother upon the results being announced. I wasn't aware that this was also a thing in the 90s.
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@oromagi
I admit that what I said was a little overly broad. Let me clarify.
Men will associate with each other for one reason or another, sure. But they will not (in particularly sizable numbers, anyhow) rally in solidarity in defense of the collective interests of men where women feel threatened thereby.
Example time. Suppose you're in a late night poker club. Bunch of jocks. No women in that group. You're tight with them all. A real men's club.
Then, one day, a female coworker at your office accuses you of sexually assaulting her. For the sake of argument, I won't say whether you're guilty or innocent (the answer is a distraction, as you're entitled to a fair hearing either way), but only that it could be either. Only you and that person know. In any case, you deny it as vehemently as she alleges it. You could be innocent.
Her female friends rally around her. They all believe that their friend is telling the truth. But what about your friends? Do they believe that their friend is telling the truth?
Hell nah. They'll kick you out of the club. And maybe they won't beat the crap out of you if they're feeling nice.
Again, nothing's been proven and there's 50/50 odds that you did it/didn't do it. In the future the matter might get resolved with a decisive answer, but they showed no restraint prior to knowing the facts. If they're forced to choose between prioritizing a woman's interest (her demand that she be believed automatically) and a man's interest (his plea that he get a fair hearing and be presumed innocent until the moment something is proven), they'll side with the woman every time. Your male "friends".
Your association with them might be enjoyable. But 9 times out of 10 it's only skin deep.
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@oromagi
Sure. But this isn't a club of men. It's a club of debaters who mostly happen to be men. There's a difference.
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@Vici
Nothing is wrong with it in principle.
I've seen way, way, way, waaaaaay too much for anyone to convince me that women don't systematically mistreat men. Even the absolute most toxic corners of red/black pill, like incel forums, aren't actually more toxic than a lot of women's spaces which more or less get a pass. It's only that we're conditioned to treat misogyny as more offensive than misandry. Even if a man says something so utterly benign as "I won't hit a woman first but I have a right to hit back", people will scream and bitch as though the commenter had just run over a kitten with his truck.
I see no good reason why men shouldn't be allowed to treat the opposite sex with the same contempt and cruelty that women do. But most redpill bros aren't necessarily misogynistic anyway. Wanting to "get laid", as they might put it, doesn't equate to hating anyone.
My main critique is that redpill just...doesn't do any good. I mean, yes, they have every right to do it, but what's the point?
Men will rally around a tribal identity. That of their family. Or a national identity. A political party. A religion or religious identity. A race. An ethnicity. Sometimes even a sexual orientation.
But never their own male sex. It's like men are hardwired not to go there. More like, it can't be sustained in large numbers. Men will never enjoy widespread solidarity with each other simply for being male.
A guy who struggled his whole teenage and young adult life to be attractive to women, if for some reason that changed at 33, he would kiss his involvement in online redpill goodbye. Or if he didn't, only because he wanted to fleece people for money or a cult-ish following ("Tap into your inner king", anyone?) or to circlejerk himself on the internet to a bunch of applauding strangers.
Which is to say that it's too self-interested to effect any meaningful change. And social engineering by women attaches a stigma to participation therein, which is only amplified the smaller the group is. You don't want to be the next guy to join a group this relatively small and assign a stigmatized identity to yourself; meanwhile, 100 million other men are thinking the same thing.
Women, on the other hand, seem hardwired to easily rally behind each other in the collective interests of their gender. That's why feminism has been so successful and will only be more successful in the future. The only way for men to actually win this battle is to not fight it and instead move on with their lives the best they can under a passively matriarchal framework.
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@TWS1405
Trust me, things haven't gotten any better since the 90s.
There's a game show, that's either on TV today or was just a couple of years ago, in which a pregnant woman agrees to have the contested paternity of her child announced publicly. The result is usually that she bursts out into tears and runs off to cry somewhere; when this happens, a camera crew follows her and broadcasts her reaction to the world.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
Are you comparing rape to being drafted? You are starting to come off as a nut job.
WTF
I'm talking about not being able to have an abortion.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
The aforementioned men were all of draft-eligible age while the Vietnam-era draft was in effect. They all chose to seek deferments to avoid being drafted.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
How many ran for President?
Bill Clinton. Joe Biden. A couple of Republicans besides Trump. The list goes on. Whatever the means that they employed to avoid serving, the fact is that they avoided serving.
No, being subject to the draft. That rest of your comment is incoherent.
It's really simple.
When it comes to women and the possibility of being pregnant against their will, you would contend that "bodily autonomy trumps all". But when it comes to men and the draft, where the length of conscription is longer than 9 months and the risk of dying is much higher than for the average pregnancy in a 1st world country, you call it a duty of citizenship.
Either "bodily autonomy" matters or it doesn't. There's no reason to apply a different standard to men and women.
Authentic deferments are not immoral.
In the 1960s, college was largely a privilege for the rich and middle class/upper middle class. It wasn't like today where your average Joe from a $42,000 income household is expected to go off after graduating high school.
If you were poor and single, you likely couldn't afford to secure a lawful deferment. That was a privilege of the rich and the attractive. The best you could manage was to ask your local doctor to say you have some disqualifying condition.
According to you, these average men were immoral because they did exactly what the rich did but without it being legalized because they were rich.
My point is, the rules for deferment were bogus. They were laws but there was no moral dimension to breaking them, since the obligation of service was not equal between rich and poor Americans.
you have already made clear you would do anything to shirk your responsibilities of citizenship
And so, when the conversation doesn't go your way, you turn to insulting people.So much for everyone here being a partisan wackjob while you alone are rational and civil.
To be clear, in principle yes: it's my inalienable right not to risk my life if I choose not to. And it's my moral right to kill anyone who tries to force that risk on me, with this being unequivocal self-defense on my part.
In practice, however, if tomorrow Uncle Sam asked me to serve then I would. I actually did try to enlist back in 2019, though it turned out I'm medically disqualified on at least two counts. And probably three.
The guys fleeing to Canada were honest in taking a stand that they did not support this war
That wasn't the question though.
You said that, by declining to serve, Trump made somebody else serve in his place. How did the draft dodgers who fled to Canada manage not to do this? How did those who avoided serving through student deferments alone?
Biden had the same deferment as Trump but he really had asthma.
As it so happens, I have mild asthma. It's not debilitating, but I couldn't imagine being a star football player. Granted, I was never sporty to begin with, but this is something on top of that.
And I mentioned baseball for a reason: that sport kicks up a lot of dust. The odds of Joe Biden knowingly having asthma and playing baseball at the same time are rather slim. And yet, he played baseball in the same age range when he allegedly had asthma.
Which is to say that the odds of Biden faking it are just as high as the odds of Trump faking his bone spur.
Believe or not, football is not as hard as combat.
So then, you admit that combat conditions are rough, and that something like a bone spur which wouldn't matter so much in civilian life could be a dealbreaker for the army.
Glad to hear it.
The bone spur that only existed during the threat of being drafted.
Says who?
The bone spur that Trump couldn’t remember which foot it was on.
Because, again, under civilian conditions it was a minor ailment and it happened decades ago. I likely wouldn't have remembered if I were him.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
You don’t know most of the guys in the War or most Americans would fake a disability if they had the means.
And yet, criticizing Trump for it actively assumes that most of them would not, which you similarly can't know.
That may be what you would do if facing that option
Ah. Making it personal, I see.
but most Americans do their duty
And plenty didn't.
and are willing to fulfill their obligations of citizenship
Giving up one's life is an obligation of citizenship? Perhaps, if you agree that being pregnant against one's will to give birth to the next generation of Americans is an obligation of citizenship. But if not...
There is no disputing, faking a disability was a fraudulent act by Trump
If the act of receiving a deferment is not immoral by itself, then if Trump broke a law to obtain it then it was a mere legality. Not a moral offense.
(You mention deferment for family, but that's arguably for someone else's sake; getting a deferment because you're a student is a self-interested reason indistinguishable from simply not wanting to go.)
Going to college or staying in college is not fraudulent
There is no moral distinction between getting out of the war through college deferments and getting out of the war through claiming a medical condition. Either way, one sought to take advantage of some kind of loophole to avoid serving.
That's what Trump, Biden (who played baseball and football in high school with no problem, and in fact was quite the distinguished athlete, then football again in college, yet cited "teenage asthma" when the draft came up), and millions of other guys did.
His lie meant someone else would be drafted and take his place.
And why wouldn't the guys fleeing to Canada accomplish this same thing? What's the difference?
It was very brazen for Trump to fake a disability to avoid the draft.
Just a reminder that I'm responding to this for the sake of argument; no fraud has been actually proven to my knowledge.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
What makes it sensational?
The entire narrative is sensationalized. People hurling insults like "Colonel Bone Spurs" at him as if he were some dishonorable cur when, assuming for argument's sake that he really did it, it was something that most of the guys in Vietnam would've done if they had the means.
Besides, this was a time when you could be exempt from service for being flat footed; Trump very well could've had some minor thing (minor under everyday civilian conditions) in his foot that he got a deferment for.
You are confident? So how did so many young men get drafted? That’s really nonsense.
Countless young men did get college deferments. If you already pursued one deferment, then it's not a stretch that you'd pursue another. Going to war is a pretty huge thing (and frankly, a draft that only applies to 50% of the population is immoral in the first place), and even risking a relatively short jail sentence for fraud might be a small price to pay for avoiding it. On account of, you know, people wanting to live and all that jazz.
Trump had already graduated college by this time so he needed another way to get a deferment.
There you go. A lot of these guys stayed in college long enough that the draft lottery ended before it could come for them. There's no way to prove that they wouldn't have taken that extra step had they graduated too early. In a worst case scenario, all that Trump's guilty of is what they probably would've done.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
I don't know. That sounds like a pretty sensationalist claim.
Even if true, a lot of young men got Vietnam draft deferments, and those who got less unscrupulous deferments (like for being a student) only did so because they had the luxury of a choice. If it was either fake a medical condition or go to Vietnam, I'm positive that most would've faked a medical condition.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
At this point, the internet is 50% clicking like on dumb political/religious memes. Old-fashioned debating is the domain of politicians, preppy high schoolers, and some miscellaneous wackjobs and oddballs.
But sure. I can be rational so long as the other guy reciprocates; if not, then I'll usually switch to "rhetoric mode" as my first priority is to one-up him (since that's clearly his priority too). Which is to say that I try to match the tone of the conversation the other guy wants.
If you want a civil discussion with me about something, then go ahead. What do you wish to talk about?
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@Ramshutu
Whether or not you think it's fair that the cost would be passed down to the average medical consumer, it'd happen regardless. Even the CBO stated as much.
If you want to do something about skyrocketing insulin prices, then support supply-side economics. Lower regulatory barriers so that more companies (heck, it could be a non-profit) can get into the market and mass-produce cheap insulin for varieties and products whose patents have expired. Break the triopoly. The more supply rises and the greater the number of suppliers, the harder it is to keep prices artificially high.
This article lays out some existing barriers: the FDA's reluctance to approve insulin biosimilars (none approved as recently as 2020), lack of legal interchangeability between biosimilar products, and "entry barriers and anticompetitive practices", (admittedly the fault of private companies). Support policies that would reform the FDA and curb efforts by the established giants to block new competitors. But price controls have a terrible historical track record.
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Who made this guy the spokesperson for 74 million Republican voters and how they all think? Why do you think that he qualifies as such?
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@Ramshutu
The Medicare Part D insulin cap would've applied to just that: beneficiaries of this program. These compulsory rebates would've come at a heavy cost for key companies and middlemen, and that cost would've been passed down to the average insulin consumer not covered by Medicare.
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@badger
Perhaps as a European you have a different perspective on this. I'm speaking as an American.
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@badger
So how will ever regress when today we have more structure and transparency than we have ever had before?
America has morally devolved in the last 50-60 years. Ending Jim Crow was pretty much the last thing it got right, and the rest has been downhill.
There was an explosion of crime, including murder and sexual assault, around the 1960s and it's remained high to this day. Every day, somebody makes the news for getting caught with a jerkoff video of a 2 year old getting raped. A huge chunk of this country's citizens have no drive to better themselves and they die from obesity after 35 years working for $9 in a crappy fast food job or whatever. Opioid addiction and overdoses are through the roof. Parents walk out on marriages and leave their kids with developmental issues as teens.
A common left-wing critique about the right is that it embraced a guy who serially lies, and that it no longer cares about preserving democracy. Since you likely believe both charges, it only demonstrates my point.
And if we could agree that abortion is the killing of a person, well, that would end the debate altogether. There've been more abortions since 1973 than deaths from WW2.
All of this despite "more structure and transparency than ever before". Because structure and transparency only matters if people decide that these things are important. If there's no unquestionable religion-level significance ascribed to them, then some generation eventually won't. And if you do ascribe unquestionable religion-level significance to them, then you're quasi-cheating in calling yourself an atheist as you do hold to a secular religion. Perhaps not a religion that includes God but still.
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@badger
I want you to name them.
Don't steal. Don't kill. Don't lie. Don't mistreat other people. Rules that humans born and raised in an anarchic vacuum don't typically care much about.
I hold that society i.e. people around you is the civilising force.
Sure. But where did society get these values from, given that prehistoric and bronze age societies lacked them? And what's to stop society from changing for the worse?
Sex stuff?
People tend to blow off the sex stuff as unrelated to morality. But how many players sweet-talk a young woman, use her for a night or two of sexual gratification, and then coldly dump her though she has come to love him? How about after he got her pregnant? Sexual harassment of random women in the streets, to the point where said women might have to fear for their safety? How much underage pornography is floating around on Pornhub?
How much of this could be avoided if Christian ethics were applied to sexuality?
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@badger
Religious people are, in general, shittier people than atheists.
By what metric? Crime statistics that don't adjust for socioeconomic privilege?
Your personal experience with religious people? Because that cuts both ways: every religious person on the internet has come across a complete a$$hole who talked crap about them in the name of atheism.
We never needed morality; we already had humanity.
You inherited moral traditions from the religious or religious-until-fairly-recent society in which you were born. Let's not pretend otherwise.
I mean it's a funny idea that atheists are only good because they've got something to prove.
I didn't say "only" that.
But it's true that by and large, first generation atheists base their positive self-image off of the definition of being "good" which comes from the traditions that they've inherited, even if they overtly reject the religion from whence it arose. Since 50% of that definition is properly submitting to God, they often feel like their positive self-image is under threat, causing them to double down on the other 50%.
And by "double down" I mostly mean avoiding bad stuff; there's no evidence that atheists are, say, more likely to devote at least X percentage of their income to charity compared with their religious counterparts.
Maybe it's just a religious person has dark things in his heart needing accounted for.
I see atheists throwing this spiteful accusation around a lot. But their own claims on the matter are self-contradictory: as they make a point that Christians who convert to atheism don't tend to commit heinous crimes shortly afterward, it can't be simultaneously true that Christians are only Christians to morally restrain themselves.
I mean you only gotta look in the religion forum right here to find that religious people are hateful.
I don't dispute this. Though, again, it's a two-way street: the atheists on here and on classic DDO's religion forum are/were just as terrible as their religious counterparts. Discussions of religion on the internet are plain toxic.
I think the failing here is to think religion is only taught. We find morality of our own ability to act in this world. Tie in love and empathy and we were always going to be complicated that way.
This mindset, while it sounds nice, largely disregards history in practice.
The story of our species is a slow progression from brutal savages to mostly restrained modern people. Those who lived 3,000 years ago were just as human as you and I, but they were significantly less likely to "find morality in their own ability to act in this world".
Most people require some kind of structure before they can consistently choose to behave morally. That structure neither magically appears nor magically sustains itself without collective effort from societies.
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"International law" assumes that said laws actually enforce an order. If an existing framework doesn't fulfill that requirement, then no alternative is illegitimate that does, all other things being equal.
If the UN is perpetually gridlocked, then it cannot be the source of legitimacy for intervening in foreign countries wherever there's need to intervene. Similarly, it cannot forbid countries from intervening if a non-gridlocked UN probably would intervene. The ethical and legal mandate to take action shifts to whoever is willing. If the US unilaterally invaded North Korea tomorrow, freed the concentration camp prisoners, restored civil liberties, and reunified it with South Korea, nothing that the UN did could make it unlawful.
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Everyone who says "atheism has no morals" is correct.
Suppose that the current generation of atheists chooses to behave morally. Heck, let's even suppose that, due to factors corresponding to privilege like a good education, they seem to be "the most moral" people of their time.
Nonetheless, everyone who's alive today will die and be replaced with new people. Such as, for example, the children of today's atheists. Not having been taught religion, or even having been actively taught by their parents that religion is false, they won't feel burdened to prove that they're simultaneously good people and atheists. As such, they'll have their own choice to make about morality: act like it's extremely important even though it's just a social construct, or do whatever they want?
Eventually, some generation will choose to do what they want and disregard morality. And once that happens, that's pretty much it for society. Given that standards for education, a key driver for atheist morality, are steadily declining in the West or at least in America, and given that atheism is gaining in popularity among the non-privileged classes, I suspect that this day won't be so very far off.
Even if modern civilization is prepared to fully and sustainably replace religious morality with an effective atheist morality, all of that will go flying out the window should civilization collapse and a new prolonged Dark Age set in. Even in a best case scenario, then, atheism is only prepared to thrive in a wealthy modern neoliberal society, which we cannot merely assume will continue for sure (see peak oil, the rise of communist China, America's rapid and unstoppable accumulation of national debt, etc).
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There is no civilization in the Universe more advanced than what exists on earth right now.
What people underestimate is how weird the human brain is. Many of the foundational ideas and concepts that we take for granted are random, idiosyncratic oddities that probably won't be repeated elsewhere by sheer chance. But without these weird ideas being taken for granted, whatever life might exist will remain primitive.
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@Greyparrot
If California, a member of the union, suddenly made an attempt to secede today, then yeah that'd be a serious problem. There can be no toleration for someone trying to run off with our land.
But if, in some alternate universe, California had already won independence before my parents were born, then whatever. I wouldn't support bombing 40 million people who did nothing to me to restore a map from 75 years ago. And I would be a murderer if I did.
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@RationalMadman
That's cute. It's all sovereign like Texas wanted to be when Abe blackmailed the Confederate States to stay part of the US.
You mean the civil war from 160 years ago that freed millions of black slaves? That civil war? You really think President Lincoln should've sat that one out?
All Sovereign really means is neither a good or a bad thing,
Sovereignty is a good thing.
If nobody respected sovereignty, countries would be invading each other left and right. Tens of millions of people would die.
But furthermore, if all countries on earth were already unified, then that would just be terrible. Governments degenerate, either into oppression or incompetency, and if a degenerate government rules everybody then the entire world will suck.
Sovereignty means there are other countries around. If your society is developing and moving in the right direction, then under a Westphalian framework they won't interfere with that by attacking you. But if your society is going backwards, then those other countries will set you back on track by toppling the bad government responsible for this and installing a better government in its place. Or, at the very least, you as an individual can move abroad to get away from tyranny and dysfunction.
what it means is in the past some bullies out bullied the other bullies and claimed it as their land.
Sure. But no country today will give up the land it's had for a century or several centuries. The best that can be managed is to not allow further bullying. Otherwise, progress can never be realized for the human race.
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@Greyparrot
The only flavor of Democracy the US will allow in Taiwan is one where Chinese sympathizers are not allowed to vote. "Land of the free, home of the brave" my ass.
Taiwan holds its own elections. We have minimal ability to influence much less interfere with these.
Support for reunification, either immediately or in the hypothetical future when political conditions change, is currently below 12%. This strongly suggests that no voter suppression is necessary to preserve the status quo on the island; in fact, said suppression would only raise support for the mainland by undermining faith in democracy as an idea. Neither Biden nor Tsai ing-Wen has anything to gain from this.
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@Intelligence_06
People's Liberation Army is MUCH more well-equipped than military trained in Taiwan.
Per the Global Firepower Index (a measure of military capabilities), Russia is ranked 2nd while China is 3rd. Taiwan is ranked 21st whereas Ukraine is ranked 22nd.
What this suggests is that the difference in strength between China--Taiwan is about the same as for Russia--Ukraine, if not slightly narrower. If Ukraine can hold on after 150 days of fighting, then there's little reason to think that Taiwan can't do the same.
If the US is getting into this, this will turn into a much larger warfare(with the US more well-equipped) and could possibly lead to WW3. What Pelosi is doing is escalation.
Pelosi's visit requires no response from China whatsoever. This isn't even an official administration visit to Taiwan, but never mind that: if, hypothetically, the US were to officially recognize Taiwanese independence, China would be perfectly free to just ignore it and reiterate the PRC's stance on the issue.
If this unofficial visit is a provocation, then it's an objectively minor one. And in the first place, it's only because of China's unabashed sense of entitlement to somebody else's country that they view this as a "provocation" at all.
Which is to say that China makes its own choices. The US isn't forcing them to do anything.
At this point, what Peace is for the US is to just keep out for all potential wars
"Peace" as defined by the aggressor, not by the peoples and countries being attacked. The UN is still too weak and gridlocked to stop countries from invading, conquering, and forcibly annexing each other, or to stop one government from genociding its own people, so the absence of the United States is almost by definition the absence of peace.
The US has turned regional conflicts in Korea
The United States freed 50 million South Koreans from northern enslavement. This much is self-evident based on what we know about how North Koreans live today, 70 years after the end of the Korean War.
Vietnam
Again, a response to the north invading the south.
the Middle East
You're going to have to be more specific.
into a larger-scale bloodshed
That's only if you take the narrow view of things. If the US ignored Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, it would encourage other countries to invade each other, since they would observe that they could do so with impunity. Before long, the entire international order would break down completely. This would prove much bloodier than how history unfolded the last 70 years in reality.
Just a few islands in the ocean
"The nine-dash line encompasses approximately 90 percent of the three million square kilometre South China Sea."
So assuming 2.7 million square kilometers, this is an area roughly the size of Kazakhstan. And China is taking over this entire area by force.
and a few disputed areas with India or something
China is also trying to steal territory from neighboring Bhutan.
China DEFINITELY would not want to act first in a war.
In that case, they just shouldn't do it. Nobody's making them.
They haven't for like almost a century.
Invasion of Tibet? How about their 1979 invasion of Vietnam?
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@Intelligence_06
China's Mainland plots if any occupation by military, the goal is to make Taiwanese separatist politicians(who apparantly controls the province) surrender, not to convert this into a further hell(but some hell might be induced, for the sole purpose of surrendering.
How will China do this?
Consider 2003. Saddam Hussein was utterly screwed. As soon as the American invasion started, the power difference between the US and Baathist Iraq was so great as to make his defeat a foregone conclusion.
And yet, the Iraqi army didn't immediately surrender. They put up a fight as long as they could, and then switched to a permanent insurgency. When the dust settled, a million Iraqis were dead.
In contrast, Taiwan has an actual chance of repelling a Chinese invasion. Seeing especially how Ukraine survived Russia, they are well aware that it's possible to successfully defend the Republic of China. Their terrain is easier to defend than Ukraine's, and given the >81 mile length of the Taiwan Strait, China would have to use expensive weapons every time they attacked (as opposed to cheap artillery like Russia). Which is to say that nobody will even think about surrendering.
But no matter the outcome, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Taiwanese will be dead either way. The only way to avoid this outcome is for China to not invade in the first place.
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@Intelligence_06
Uhh... not even Taiwan openly state this view.
Yeah. Because they and their children will be murdered by the PLA if they do. Keeping silent from threat of violence (concerning the sovereignty that they already exercise openly) doesn't mean they aren't a sovereign country.
Only 1 party agrees with this
Only 1 party agrees that Taiwan by itself is a sovereign and independent country. The other agrees that the Republic of China (ROC), which encompasses Taiwan, is a sovereign country. Either way, all of Taiwan agrees that they aren't a part of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
And as for the issue of Taiwanese nationalism, even the Kuomintang is starting to come around. It's not inconceivable that the party will undergo a radical platform shift within the next 10-15 years.
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@Intelligence_06
I do.
Taiwan is a sovereign country by every metric, and it's only because of persistent diplomatic/economic bullying by China that the world doesn't formally recognize this simple fact.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, it should be clear that the authoritarian powers won't refrain from invading their neighbors if there's no provocation. Rapprochement has failed and we need a new approach to deterrence, which means signaling that we will stand with free countries should their rights be threatened.
The Taiwan visit doesn't amount to formally recognizing Taiwanese independence. Both Washington and Taipei are too smart for that. But the fact that the US would openly risk the safety of Speaker Pelosi for the sake of showing support for Taiwan sends a strong message that America won't back down if things escalate. This, in turn, will prevent miscalculation on Beijing's part that could escalate to WW3.
I have never respected Speaker Pelosi as much as I do right now.
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@thett3
school is pretty much just actively harmful, especially for boys. Sit down and shut the fuck up for 8 hours isn’t always the easiest thing for a seven year old, and drugging them if they have issues with this is asinine, but around 1 in 5 boys have to take drugs (adderral, Ritalin, etc) as children to cope with schooling.
Millions and millions and millions of people on both the left and right would agree with this. There was never a more politically agreeable statement than "We shouldn't be drugging little kids because they won't sit still."
On top of that children spending most of their waking life in a social system that’s never replicated again—everyone being exactly the same age and competing for the attention of one authority figure—probably isn’t good preparation for life.
I disagree to an extent. In a workplace setting, you have a job to do. And you must do that job to the specifications that the boss wants while cooperating with your peers regardless of their ages. Imparting this trait is an outsized function of post-industrial pedagogy.
And homework must be abolished.
Definitely disagree. School is "structured time", in that you must do X because there's somebody breathing down your neck and making you do X. But it doesn't teach you how to manage "unstructured time" when there's nobody around to make you do stuff. It doesn't teach you self-control when nobody's watching. But homework does.
Of course, there's plenty of room to argue that students receive too much homework, but homework in principle is a good thing.
The best thing that can be said about the system is that it if it’s done well it truly does prepare you for the academic life of college
This is what schools nowadays are designed to do: prepare students for college. Standardized curriculum and exams are in place to prepare students for passing SAT/ACT and having a uniform baseline of knowledge upon admission to a college. Nobody would argue that it's designed to adequately prepare you for the real world.
I considered making a separate thread about this, but I think that the "classical education" model could be a much better fit for some households. In the past, you learned Greek and Latin and then studied authors like Euclid** and Aristotle in their original language. It was incredibly rigorous and it also taught you how to think. This was how upper-class Victorian preppy kids learned and then they went on to become the next generation of elites.
There are reasons why this isn't widely done today; namely, its difficulty would mean a lot of students don't make the cut and don't graduate. But if you were a committed parent who could force your kids to study hard and make passing grades, it could produce well-rounded citizens immune to fads and myopic propaganda while also setting them up with the discipline to accomplish anything they set their minds to.
**For context: Euclid's Elements was the textbook for geometry well into the 20th century and is still sometimes used in classrooms today, albeit in updated English with illustrations. This 2,300 year old book was so brilliant that it would still satisfy the needs of high school geometry instruction in the year 2022. Euclid's geometry emphasized mathematical proofs, which many classrooms still do today but is being slowly phased out in practice.
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@badger
A pedophile is somebody who's attracted to children. A child molester is somebody who has taken action to molest an actual child. The former is somebody who could offend whereas the latter is somebody who has offended. We should distinguish capacity to offend from being already guilty.
Also, chemical castration doesn't involve cutting anything off. It's a pill or an injection and nothing more.
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We shouldn't treat people like monsters merely because they were born pedophiles.
If a pedophile is not known to have personally exploited or abused children, but he is found to be in possession of child pornography, regardless of how graphic or disturbing, the first emphasis should be on his rehabilitation as opposed to his punishment.
Rehabilitation should generally mean chemical castration. Similarly, however, we should not place any stigma on eunuch status. It should be a widespread option in society, especially for religious people who want to curb their sexual urges which they interpret to be sinful. There should be strong support networks to help the castrate, be they pedophiles, religious, for medical reasons, or other, to live fulfilling lives.
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Religious private schools should be afforded the same taxpayer benefits as their public school counterparts.
In fact, given that public schools regularly teach material harmful to religious communities, the only way to avoid violating the Establishment Clause is to eliminate the public-private school distinction, with all schools being private but supported by key public infrastructure and quality controls. The sectarian/nonsectarian nature of a school will reflect what the parents of that local area want; if most want a nonsectarian school then that's fine. If a sizable minority wants, say, a Catholic school, then one would be erected with funding proportionate to the size of its student body. If there are too few parents to justify their own school, then they could homeschool/outsource the homeschooling job to an instructor, and it wouldn't cost them substantially more than for the school option.
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Radical but not controversial?
That's a hard one. I'm on the right. The media selectively labels things "controversial" based on whether leftists might dislike them, while not considering the reverse to also apply.
But alright. I'll give it a try.
Contingent upon them undergoing HRT for some minimum length without skipping treatments, and upon completing the full range of cosmetic surgeries relevant to their genitalia, all transgender people should be allowed to change their sex on legal documents and use the bathroom facilities of their newly assigned sex. This is a historically radical proposition. Nigh unthinkable before 40 or 50 years ago. But I don't think this to be unreasonable and probably most people don't either.
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This is a pretty crazy idea, but one that's been floating around in academia and pop culture since the 1970s:
That until c. the late Bronze Age, humans were generally incapable of complete self-awareness. Instead, one part of the brain ("independent" of a person's core consciousness) signaled information to the rest (constituting a person's core consciousness), and people didn't understand this "voice" as originating from themselves but rather believed it to be an external voice.
It was analogous to modern-day schizophrenia and people thought they were communicating with the divine. This was not due to anatomical differences from modern humans but instead it was a cultural phenomenon. Or, that is, when civilization attained a certain level of sophisticated thought via the development of language and so forth, it altered the way that people perceived their own consciousness.
Thoughts?
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@sadolite
In the last 3+ years I haven't played through anything that wasn't on a Nintendo Switch, so I'm probably not qualified to answer a question about the PS5, but:
Have you considered Elden Ring? It has a combination of Japanese visuals and storytelling by George R. R. Martin (the Game of Thrones guy).
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@Shaheerfromhaveli
Communism is a bad idea.
It always begins with a period of violence and civil war. This is because it necessarily denies powerful stakeholders a place in both government and society, and naturally they will use their power to resist.
Russia fought a civil war of around 4-5 years to establish communism. For China it was more like 20 years. By the time the dust settles, Pakistan would be in a state of ruins and very poor. A decade or two will have been completely wasted that could've been spent developing.
Look at Syria. In 2009, it had a GDP per capita (PPP) of $4,700.
Not great, but better than Morocco, Indonesia, Iraq, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, etc.
Today, after 11 years of civil war, numbers for Syria are hard to come by. But from what I was able to find, it looks as though every single aforementioned country has surpassed Syria.
I won't call communism an efficient system of government. Communist China floundered its first 30 years before embracing foreign capitalist investment in their country. But assuming for the sake of argument that communism could be efficient in developing Pakistan, it'll necessarily be ruinous for the country before it becomes efficient.
Had Pakistan turned communist in the late 1940s, that would be one thing. But they'd have to start from the bottom and undo huge amounts of existing progress if they wanted to begin today.
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The earliest Christians were harshly persecuted by their Jewish neighbors.
The most likely outcome of persecuting this new sect was its eradication, not its spreading to Gentiles. Even if in hindsight that's not what happened, there was simply no way to have known this at the time. Thus, if (hypothetically) there were such a plan, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population couldn't have been let in on it. These few (hypothetical) conspirators, in turn, couldn't have been very powerful if they failed to dissuade their fellow Jews from said persecution.
In the end, anyhow, Christianity united the civilization of the Roman Empire around both the spiritual and political authority of Rome, which went more or less unchallenged for another thousand years after the Western Roman Empire fell. Palestine remained in Christian Byzantine hands, and firmly out of Jewish hands, until the Muslim conquests of the mid-7th century.
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Ukrainian defenders have evacuated their last major positions in Lysychansk, ceding pretty much all of Luhansk Oblast to Russian aggressors.
Going into the war, Putin had the stated aim of securing the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukraine; with today's development, he is substantially closer to being able to announce that Russia has accomplished this. Whatever its tangible impact on the situation on the ground, it is nonetheless a huge symbolic victory for the Kremlin.
It's of some consolation that, from the start of its Donbass Offensive around mid-April, Russia took about 2 and a half months to get to this day. Their gains have been slow and it has always meant giving up men and resources in exchange. However, the Russian army has successfully defied countless predictions of imminent collapse. There's no telling what straw will be the one to break the camel's back, or if that day will indeed come before Kyiv is made to capitulate.
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"This is not the end, or even the beginning of the end; rather, it's the end of the beginning."
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