Goodguy
2mo ago
Immediate happiness / life satisfaction is not the only scale on which outcomes should necessarily be measured. As I have said in the past, a 10 year old boy who believes in Santa Claus and has everything provided for him probably has more life satisfaction than the average 30 year old man who has to work for a living, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing for the 10 year old boy to become the 30 year old man. As women acquire more freedoms and responsibilities, naturally they will also in some ways become less happy. That is not a good argument for why the freedoms and responsibilities are a bad thing. There are so many men who understand this easily when it comes to other men, and even enjoy valorizing the idea of a sterotypically manly man sacrificing his happiness for some higher purpose, but then when they talk about women they make the argument that women should focus entirely on immediate happiness / life satisfaction delivered by things like pregnancy, without reaching for something that might be a maximum higher than the merely local maximum.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I think a male near-equivalent of what Vance said about childless cat ladies would be if Walz literally said "the Republican party is run by a bunch of incels". Many Republican supporters would be fuming, maybe even more than about the whole "basket of deplorables" thing. People tend to get touchy when their reproductive success is criticized, or near-criticized.
There are many factors explaining the decline of fertility rates in the developed world, but one that I feel like I don't see mentioned often enough is the simple fact that across animals, favoring K-strategy as opposed to r-strategy in reproduction tends to be correlated with high intelligence. Whales, elephants, humans, all are relatively K-strategic compared to the average animal. So it is not surprising that the world's most highly developed human cultures are dominated by K-strategists.
Also keep in mind that the effectiveness of modern medicine has made being a hardcore K-strategist more viable now than it has ever been before in human history. In pre-modern times, you kind of just had to have multiple kids to make sure that some of them were still around a few decades later. That is no longer as much the case.
I think that significantly raising fertility rates without turning a society into a primitive shithole is a pretty tough problem. Many societies of various kinds of political persuasions have tried to use social engineering to raise fertility rates, but it seems to me that the results have been mixed and the successes were largely negated as soon as the society further developed towards something that resembles what we in 2024 would consider contemporary modernity.
One approach that might theoretically work is to maintain a culturally primitive but genetically relatively high-quality subgroup of society that the rest of society essentially farms for offspring. Imagine the Haredim in Israel, but if half of all their offspring were somehow seduced into becoming more fully functional members of society once they got old enough. So then you would have some subgroup of the population that the broader society basically uses as breeding stock. I have my doubts that this would work, though.
In general, centralized "command economy" style social engineering is a blunt tool that does not seem to have a good track record when used to try to address subtle issues. Social engineering is good at doing things like ethnically cleansing an unpopular social group and stealing their resources, or cracking down hard on crime, or mobilizing a society for total war, but it is not good at more subtle things like creating an efficient economy, and for somewhat similar reasons I'm not sure that it would be good at encouraging reproduction.
I agree with much of this take. Two of the greatest anti-communist works ever written, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were written by a socialist. I know that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more broadly a critique of all totalitarianism, and that it was in part inspired by Orwell's experiences with English bureaucracy, but it also was clearly inspired by his experiences of being a socialist who came to realize that Stalinism was brutal and murderous.
And there have been many good anti-communist works produced by ex-socialists and ex-communists. David Horowitz's stuff is one example. He was a dyed-in-the-wool communist who ended up leaving communism once he realized that the radical leftist movements he was involved in both cared more about the success of "the cause" than about truth and reality and that some of them, like the Black Panther Party, had literal murderers involved in running things on a high level.
Goodguy
2mo ago
In fact, some famous capitalists have even argued that capitalism simply cannot be done without a state setting the stage for a market to operate such as setting basic rules and enforcing contracts.
To me a certain form of this idea seems so obviously true that I am sometimes surprised when people even act like it has to be argued for. A form of capitalism without a state can work in situations where conquering others is simply so expensive that it is much easier to just trade and forget about conquest. Imagine some old-school type of trading where you send gold to China and they send you back silk on the Silk Road, back in the day, for example. But in modern, dense technological civilization, with large population densities and powerful military technologies that can strike half-way across the world within minutes, what would happen if we attempted capitalism without a state is simply that warlord gangs would form, they would seize control of the capitalist structures, and then eventually one of them would defeat the others and become a new state.
On a side note, I think one nice argument against communism is that communist systems generally forbid people from practicing capitalism, but capitalism does not forbid people from practicing communism, except in the sense that capitalist systems tax people and thus pull some of their resources away from attempts to build communism. If you live in a capitalist society but you think that communism is a workable economic system, you are welcome to create a communist or communism-esque organization like a worker's co-op or whatever.
Goodguy
2mo ago
By the second paragraph you've already lost almost everyone who doesn't have at least like a 110 IQ or so.
I think it's hard for anyone to understand the problems with communism unless they either are above a certain threshold of intelligence and thus able to understand how communism affects incentives, or they are from a communist country and have seen the problems first-hand. And high intelligence is no barrier against believing in communism, as we saw during the 20th century when a large fraction of the entire world's intelligensia were communist. Many of them were very smart people, just deluded.
One of the biggest difficulties with trying to persuade people out of communism is the simple and basic undeniable fact that our modern social/economic/political system really is unfair, to an often ridiculous degree. There is no plausible moral justification for why some people should be born rich, and others poor, out of no merit or fault of their own. The problem with communism is that in practice, it does not actually solve this problem - instead, it makes social problems even worse. But the problem is a real one. There is no justifiable defense of our capitalistic system on moral grounds, you can only justify it by making fairly subtle although correct arguments about how in practice, it is the best system that has actually been proven to work in practice, and all attempts to replace that system with a theoretically nicer, more moral one, just end up actually creating an in-reality worse system. Plus you can try to teach people about how market incentives work, and how because the market has better information-flows and incentives than central planning, it ends up making everybody richer in the long term.
The whole communism/capitalism debate is so covered with mottes and baileys, is so entrenched, at this point, that it is like some WW1 battlefield. I don't think that frontal assaults work well in that context, it may be better to try to seduce people into taking a fresh look at their assumptions. Hours of arguing about politics may not be as effective as simply taking your communist friend out to some fun event and make them see that even though you are anti-communist, you are not a bad person.
It also helps if you support a good level of social welfare redistribution programs despite being a fan of capitalism, instead of being some kind of turbo-capitalist believer who is ideologically strict and is fine with orphans begging for bread in the streets. After all, our American system's success is not explained by the fact that it is turbo-capitalist, because in reality it is not turbo-capitalist at all. Our system is a deep hybrid of capitalism, central planning, and bureaucracy, with a blend of both competition and top-down control. No truly capitalist system, in the sense of how capitalism works in theory, has ever existed on a large scale. And if it did exist, I doubt that it would work well.
Goodguy
2mo ago
There are certainly patterns of behavior that are more adaptive for living in reality than other patterns of behavior are, but then to say that your individual natural rights come from those patterns is either extremely metaphorical or just inaccurate, depending on what you mean by "rights".
To have a "right" implies having a claim. And nature, from what I can tell, gives no-one any claims on itself. Why would any rights spring from a set of behavioral patterns that are adaptive for humans to follow?
Goodguy
2mo ago
A good apple has rich, complex overtones of flavor, like an entire symphony of flavor... even to the point of different aspects of the flavor manifesting themselves over time as you bite in, first one and then a second later another one becomes more prominent. And after you bite, the smell of the freshly bitten apple is heavenly, you don't even have to touch it with your mouth, the very scent manifests its complex beauty. If this seems erotic, that is because it kind of is related to eroticism, it is a deeply sensual experience to eat genuinely good food. A bad apple just tastes like sweet water, with no complexity.
I assume that by Gnon you mean god. But these are extremely bold assertions to make. The idea that there is a god, and that there is such a thing as rights in any sense other than that of a social contract, and that god gives you these rights... all these ideas should be justified by some kind of argument, I think, not just stated blankly. Because certainly not all of us here agree with any of these assertions. I personally agree with you about qualia. I think that in some sense of the word "god", there may be a god. The hard problem of consciousness is real. But I do not believe in a god who grants natural rights, unless by natural rights you mean something more like a striving for those rights that is inherent to being human.
My own opinion is that "rights" are a legal fiction. They are extremely important, but they have no existence outside the context of a society with its particular laws, habits, narratives, and power dynamics.
I think most Americans have no idea what an actually good apple or tomato tastes like, because virtually all produce grown here is terrible crap selected for its looks on a supermarket shelf, its easiness to grow, and its ability to withstand sitting in a truck for a few days.
I think that many Democrats think that they are being smart by eating so-called organic food or local farm food. I've eaten that organic food and local farm food, to me it mostly tastes more or less the same as supermarket stuff. Maybe like 10% better at best, and more frequently indistinguishable. It's really bad compared to actually good produce.
America does have a food problem, and it's unfortunate that most Americans do not realize it. The quality of American produce is despicably bad, it's basically trash. The meat seems okay though. And Americans are famous for not eating fruits and vegetables much anyway, maybe this is why people have not rebelled yet against the fact that their fruits and vegetables are terrible. The meat is laced with chemicals that are put in animals for various reasons, but that does not automatically make it bad of course, it depends on what exactly the chemicals do.
Goodguy
2mo ago
That's a good point. Trump has the advantage of having an established reputation as a lothario playboy. Cruz doesn't, although given that he's a wealthy famous politician I'm sure that if he wanted to go that route he would have no shortage of opportunities.
Goodguy
2mo ago
New Zealand does seem pretty safe, but its violent crime rates are significantly above those of places like Japan and even, to some extent, Germany. I suppose that the Maori have a lot to do with that.
On the plus side, New Zealand seems pretty unlikely to get nuked in the case of WW3, because there would be very little benefit in nuking it.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Yeah, accelerationism is fun to think about but I am skeptical that it actually makes sense. Places like Venezuela and North Korea show that you can get pretty close to the bottom and just linger there for years upon years, with no coming out the other side.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I hate to say it because I would prefer that it didn't matter to people, but given how politics actually work, I'm not sure that Ted Cruz has the looks to win the Presidency. Trump looks weird too, but the difference is that Trump has figured out how to own his looks and make them work for himself. Almost everything weird about Trump's looks plays into his "the blue collar man's billionaire" macho persona. His obesity, his cheap-looking spray tan, his thin hair. I don't know if Ted Cruz would have been able to pull off making his looks work in alignment with his persona.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I agree. After McCain and Romney both failed, it's kind of hard for me to believe that any of the other 2016 Republican primary candidates other than Trump would have beaten Hillary. It seemed like the Republicans needed to try something new, because what they had been doing was not working.
To be fair, Hillary is no Obama in terms of charisma - so it would have been easier for a Republican to beat her than for one to beat Obama. But the field was pretty bad. Jeb Bush was dorky and a Bush, Marco Rubio was goofy, Ted Cruz was easily made fun of and memed on by Democrats. Maybe Kasich could have won? I don't remember much about what he seemed like.
Goodguy
2mo ago
What do you think excited people about Obama? From what I remember of my perceptions of 2008, I think to me it seemed that basically the only substantive thing exciting people about Obama was the idea that he would replace the administration that gave us the Iraq War. Other than that, it seemed to me that people just liked him because he was a handsome, eloquent, intelligent young black man (and thus, basically, a character straight out of a Democrat's dreams) and that he spoke of hope and change.
To be fair, I watched very few of his public appearances on the campaign trail, so it is possible that I missed a lot.
Goodguy
2mo ago
To me "coup" implies coercion. And, while I don't know what happened behind closed doors to get Biden to step down, so far at least I have not seen any evidence that there was coercion.
Granted, I don't understand economics very well, but I don't understand the argument that the dollar is the world's reserve currency because the US can militarily dominate huge regions of the world. I can potentially see some indirect and relatively weak mechanisms that would connect the two, but I don't see any clear direct mechanism by which the military power would have a dominant impact on the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. Isn't the dollar the world's reserve currency because the US economy is huge, fairly dynamic, and - most importantly - stable?
If the US became isolationist but retained a very strong and stable economy, why would other countries switch to using some other currency other than the dollar as the reserve currency?
I'd also like to briefly address your point about Trump as a destabilizing factor. In my opinion, while he is destabilizing, the impact of this is effectively contained by our political system. The chances of him becoming a dictator, as you at least somewhat agree, is extremely small. Meanwhile, the Democrats are also a destabilizing factor. For example, I personally think that the combination of weak law enforcement in Democrat-run cities and frequent leftist street riots is significantly more destabilizing than everything that Trump has ever done put together, since it contributes to a sense of physical insecurity and a sense that one is living in anarchotyranny. The destabilizing effects on people are both directly physical - in the sense of street crime - and mental, in that living in such an atmosphere can make one rather grim, pessimistic about the country's future, and bitter at one's political opponents.
Trump might inspire a future Caesar, but the way I see it Democrats are already, right now, working on ripping apart our social order in a deleterious way. That's not what the vast majority of them think they are doing - they think that they are working to make the world a better place, but I believe that is what the actual consequences of some of their policies are.
The last few years have been a bit rough for me politically speaking, in that although I have since childhood intellectually understood that most people are unthinking morons when it comes to politics, the last few years have really viscerally made it apparent to me.
I am no Republican, but at this point I also cannot imagine myself voting for a Democrat. After the 2020 riots and the way that Democrat supporters ran cover for them, after all their soft-on-crime policies, after their years of childish propagandistic attacks on the right and on Trump... no, can't do it. Obviously the Republicans are also guilty of a lot of bullshit, very much including childish propaganda, but then, I'm not about to vote for them either.
The last few weeks have been sobering for me, I intellectually understood that electoral politics is about optics, not about anything substantial, but it has been rough to see the signs of the vibe shift that you refer to happening on social media. Especially, I am annoyed by the completely blatant astroturfing that both sides engage in. Pretty much every prominent political account on X, for example, is either an astroturf account or is run by someone who is so partisan that their writings are indistinguishable from an astroturf account.
I will echo what @plural said:
Really, below Trump imo because Trump is a liar and a blowhard and I certainly don't take his insults as the dead serious "I would murder you and it would be completely fair and right" attitude that people have about Trump.
I feel much the same way. While Trumpists are guilty of many things, they do currently not worry me on the visceral level that the left does. It is quite likely that part of this is just because the right is not as strong as the left, and if it was, the right would worry me just as much. But for someone who has read as much about history as I have, the hardcore lockstep groupthink of the modern left is very concerning. It raises alarm bells in that it is reminiscent of totalitarian leftist movements from history. Maybe this is just my version of what leftists do when they worry about Trump creating a fascist dictatorship. I am not sure.
Another reason why the left currently worries me more is that their delusions are deeper than the right's delusions. The left tends to believe in grand systemic delusions like "hardcore socialism is a good idea" or "modern America is horrifically racist against black people". The right, on the other hand, tends to believe in more surface-level LARP delusions reminiscent of thriller novel plots, like "the Clintons are running a pedophile organization and Trump is just pretending to spend all his time on Twitter, he is actually leading a secret special ops campaign to round them up" or "Klaus Schwab wants to make us live in pods".
Both of these types of delusions are ludicrous, but the left's delusions actually worry me more. Leftists actually believe their delusions deeply in some important way, whereas the right-wingers who have bought into typical right-wing delusions are largely, I think, just doing it for fun on some level, although most of them are not consciously aware that they are doing it for fun. The way I would put it, and of course these are generalizations: the left think that they are engaged in a deep meaningful struggle against an evil enemy, which has to end with the complete overthrow and eradication of that enemy from the earth - meanwhile, the right think that they are in an X-Files episode about wacky conspiracies. Clearly the former is much more likely to lead people to fight hard politically than the latter.
The right is also easily satisfied. The left is never satisfied, if they win one battle against what in their delusional world-view is the evil oppressor, they immediately find another level of supposed oppression to battle against. The right, on the other hand, is happy any time they get some kind of win, and they immediately start relaxing and celebrating. The left is deeply committed to the fight, they are in it to win it. Their entire perspective of the world is that it is an epic and grueling battle of good against evil, and the evil must be destroyed. The right, on the other hand, kind of just wants to relax and go watch some football, even if the football is interspersed with ads containing left-leaning propaganda. The left is not like this - if they go watch some fun TV show that is interspersed with ads containing right-leaning propaganda, they will form ranks and march on social media against it.
I find it interesting that the entire alt-right, the whole ecosystem ranging from 2016 Trumpist meme populism to hardcore 4chan /pol/ white supremacy, is both notably leftist in some key aspects of its psychology, and also clearly more committed to the fight and in many ways better at fighting it than mainstream right-wingers are. I say leftist because the alt-right, in their populist economics, their sense that they are oppressed by shadowy elites, their obsession with race and sex and the cultural meanings of both, is very reminiscent of a leftist movement. Forgive me Curtis Yarvin! It is too long that I did not understand one of your central points, but I do now, and the point seems to be true - leftism is, simply, politically more effective. Even people with right-wing views become more politically effective if they adopt a leftist psychology and political attitude.
I do not think that either side is currently strong enough to overthrow our liberal, small-r republican system of social organization, but the left currently seems stronger than the right, and both sides are alarming in different ways, so I am currently more alarmed by the left. Also, while I find a large fraction of right-wing policies to be insane or just simply unappealing, the right is currently - and again, this might just be because they are weaker - more open to intellectual dissent than the left is. I find a large fraction of left-wing policies to also be insane or just simply unappealing, but at least on the right there seems to be a bit more room for thought, a bit more space for dissenters, whereas on the left it is "either you are with us, or you are with the enemy".
My deep political offline conversation with the average committed right-winger is kind of like "Hey man, we don't agree but whatever, it's fun talking about this stuff". My deep political offline conversation with the average committed left-winger consists of me trying to get them to question their ideas while gingerly ballet-leaping my way over the various minefields that, if I stepped on, would cause them to classify me as Adolf Hitler. Don't get me wrong, I also often just straightforwardly speak my mind with leftists in the mode of just "chatting about politics for fun", and this has not brought me any harm. Most leftists I know in person are not about to go report me to the thought police, they are not totalitarian. What I mean is that in those occasional really deep political conversations that one engages in, the ones where both people actually care about talking about the politics in a meaningful way rather than doing it just for fun or to vent, I have found that right-wingers are generally more easily accepting of disagreement, whereas with left-wingers you have to slowly seduce them into letting go of their instinct to assume that your disagreements with them mean that you are Hitler.
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan. For all their macho posturing, the reality is that today's right-wing is soft, easily bullied, and unstrategic. Think of when Greg Abbott bussed those migrants to blue cities. Didn't it seem like a brilliant political move? Well, part of why it seemed that way is because that was one of the very few things that any right-wing politician has done in the last few years that actually seemed like a good chess move. It's hard to name any others. Also consider that despite years of bluster about how guns are a bulwark against oppressive government, pretty much nobody on the right who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (which I do not believe, but many do) did anything about it with their guns. The bluff has been called, and I think on some visceral level the left understands that they can push the right a lot harder than they currently are pushing before the right would actually react with anything other than online whining.
Goodguy
2mo ago
One of the most effective arguments for criminalizing consumption of child pornography is that the consumption encourages production, including in places like the Third World where it is very hard for any law enforcement authorities to put a stop to the production.
When it comes to this argument, child pornography is not like beheading videos because when it comes to child pornography, consumption encourages production by funding it with money - however, people who make beheading videos generally make them not to sell them, but because of ideology and to try to intimidate others.
Goodguy
2mo ago
Probably not indefinitely, but it is at least possible to keep something of that magnitude under wraps for a long time and effectively enough that the few occasional whistleblowers get dismissed as cranks or ignored until finally one day something comes out that is too big to be swept under the rug. Take the NSA domestic surveillance program, for example. It was successfully kept secret from the public for many years.
Goodguy
2mo ago
I suspect that outside of a very small handful of genuine Yudkowsky-types, almost nobody who claims to be concerned about AI destroying the world is actually worried about AI destroying the world. They may say they are worried, but they are not actually worried deep down. The idea of AI destroying the world is abstract and distant, on the other hand getting tens of millions of dollars is very real and very visceral.
And for every one person who is genuinely worried about AI destroying the world, there are probably a hundred people who are worried about AI allowing Nazis to write bad no-no things online. Because Nazis writing bad no-no things online feels real and visceral and it pushes the deep buttons of ideology, whereas AI destroying the world sounds like a sci-fi fantasy for geeks.
Well for one thing, an award like that would have very powerful totalitarian connotations, since both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR did very similar things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_Mother
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
Closer to the modern day, Putin's Russia is also doing things like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/18/russia-offers-mother-heroine-medal-and-16800-for-having-10-children.html.
It is worthwhile, I think, to note that even though Putin's Russia has been trying to encourage the fertility rate to go up for many years now, the fertility rate has been recently slumping after hitting a peak around 2014: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010528/number-of-live-births-in-russia/. Perhaps not coincidentally, that slump coincides with a slump in GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=RU.
I agree, I will just note that I don't think that "women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try" is a particularly reactionary opinion. To me this opinion seems like it is actually kind of the consensus on all sides of the political spectrum. People just disagree on whether the education + contraception is a good thing or a bad thing.
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