Garfielf
7mo ago
I don't think by 2300 we'll all be Amish. I do think that by 2300 there will be practically no seventh-generation secular humanists, though.
Garfielf
7mo ago
That the groups that dropped religion are in the process of dying out, through hilariously low birthrates.
Garfielf
7mo ago
I hate to oppose a good blackpill, but as far as I can tell, the Rule of St. Benefict remains the entirety of SQLite's Code of Ethics. https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
Garfielf
10mo ago
if Christianity will continue bleeding to death.
A bit parochial - Christianity is in decline in affluent countries but continues to expand in Africa and Asia, often accompanied by what most in those affluent countries would consider bizarre superstition far more fantastical than motivated reasoning against carbon dating.
Garfielf
11mo ago
Can you tell me more about this? Googling it just brings up links to legalese on government websites.
Garfielf
11mo ago
Does this mean eventually Ukraine will elect a Nayyiyyb Bukyyeyyle, who will rocket their safety and standards of living upwards through a revolutionary policy of incarcerating criminals?
Garfielf
11mo ago
The FBI? Who work for the president? Whose director is appointed by the president? Who's going to order them to do that?
This gets into the coordination problem again - even if every bureaucrat to a man was a diehard technocrat, if all the bigwigs who give orders according to their technocratic rules are not organizing resistance to the President because those same bigwigs are appointed by him, there's no one with the authority to actually kick off the great #Resistance Coup, even if they'd like to.
Even if they're all fanatics, Joe TrustTheScience, non-ranking FBI agent, can't just declare "I am now the Anti-President, all Experts rally to me!" and then the two million other fanatics who have never heard of him swear feudal homage to him on the spot.
Compare how the Soviet coup attempt in 1991 fell apart. The new junta tried to establish themselves as the new authority on the strength of their communist bona fides, but because communism was all about Party Discipline and Obeying the Great Comrade, military units in Leningrad didn't listen to them because nowhere in the Communist Party Bylaws does it say a coalition of losers and has-beens can become the new dictatorship if they feel like it.
To put it another way, maybe the two million experts can all agree they hate [Republican President], but I doubt they'd all agree on who should be [Unelected Democrat President].
Garfielf
11mo ago
You don't think Trump could find one Republican ICE supervisor willing to march on the EPA? One?
It seems like your big mental hurdle is this dogmatic assertion that a Republican president couldn't find even one DC cop to escort an uncooperative bureaucrat out of the office. It's true, if all federal employees are under a magickal gaesa which prevents them from percieving the President, his influence will be limited. But if (as I suspect is more true) the President could convince some dudes with guns from the most red agency he can find that Uncooperative Agency X are disobeying legitimate orders, then somebody is "coming", and now the near-minimum wage contractor mall cops at EPA headquarters have to decide whether they believe in the Invisible Dictatorship of the Experts enough to die for it, or if it might just be better to go home because men with bulletproof vests are shouting at them very angrily.
Garfielf
11mo ago
You've shown counter-examples to me of liberal lawfare where the institutional left has to regroup and find another angle of attack, but what about my example, which is much more recent than either, of showing dissent in their ranks?
Garfielf
11mo ago
In that scenario, even with a deeply hostile media, the Republicans would have a field day excoriating the managers over this. The judicial system is not partisan enough to go along with this, and judges tend to deeply resent being threatened in their own courtrooms. Look at the Governor of New Mexico, who was informed by her also-Democratic Attorney General that he was simply not going to enforce her gun-grabbing executive order due to its blatant unconstitutionality for a very recent example where establishment liberals will stop each other when their actions become indefensible to the public.
Garfielf
11mo ago
The other vision for the future of the church, that the Trads like to point out, is radical downsizing and refocusing around the core of conservative believers with a positive birthrate, instead of chasing wishy-washy modernists leaving the church for the religious experience of protesting anyway. While this would ensure slow-but-steady positive growth, it would also entail becoming a peripheral pseudo-ethnicity minority religion in many lands, like the Copts or Mormons. The only difference is their leader would still technically have an itty-bitty country to run.
This would also make the Pope less of an Important World Leader all the presidents shake hands with, and that the Church would have to sell a lot of its very nice things, a terrible fate in the minds of reformists (and many conservatives too, which is why they don't talk about those parts being necessary as much).
Garfielf
11mo ago
Okay, but we're talking about a future GOP govt repealing these laws. I get you're a big doomer, but surely the idea of a liberal DOJ apparachnik charging a Trump appointee with a law that isn't on the books anymore and threatening the Republican judge that if he doesn't pretend like the law is still real, the two-million-strong army of Democrat-voting mailmen and receptionists will hold him accountable must sound farcical even to you.
Garfielf
1yr ago
That being said, the historical record shows that in 1965 very few people who supported Hart-Celler envisioned that the level of demographic change would be what it turned out to be.
But how many civil society groups, including the Church, have changed their minds at all, knowing what we know now?
Garfielf
1yr ago
In Germany, at least, the standard operating procedure is for an illegal immigrant to falsely claim asylum, have his application rejected, and then not be deported.
Garfielf
1yr ago
I thought the bits where the non-Trump candidates were sputtering all over themselves weren't funny, but I laughed out loud when Trump started reciting in heroic hexameter and the TRUMP: Trump bit.
He said "my church refers to God as the Heavenly Father most times", which is both a factually accurate statement and hardly hiding the fact that he's mormon to anyone who's moderately familiar with it. That is not "hiding" his mormonism, unless you think online mormons should preface discussion of their religion with "My church (THE KOOKY HERETICAL MORMON CULT, WE'RE NOT NORMAL CHRISTIANS) calls God Heavenly Father"
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