Swagnarok

This post is for libertarians, ancaps, or objectivists, but anyone is welcome to opine.

So imagine the ideal deregulated, privatized society. The haves aren't forced to subsidize the have-nots. In theory, if one person violates the property rights of another then they should be made to pay restitution (who does said enforcing is another question for another day).

Imagine a society evenly split between haves and have-nots. It's fashionable for the haves to own $500,000 supercars, both expensive and relatively fragile, to the point where a fender bender could cost $30,000 to repair. You are a have-not with a regular car. One day, while driving, you're distracted. You will spent countless hours of your life behind the wheel, so it was bound to happen at some point; you're not drunk or on your phone. Perhaps you're younger and have less experience driving. In any case, you were following this guy a little too close, and you didn't notice in time when he slowed down to turn. And so, you rear-end him. Fate flips a coin, and it turns out the car you hit was a supercar.

In today's world, there are rules protecting you from being taken through the cleaners for an honest accident. But how should it work in this libertarian world? If you're 100% on the hook for a $30K repair bill, then in practice doesn't that amount to someone else's property rights aggressing against yours? If not, then explain.

Is the problem solved by insurance? If so, then would it be expected that the driver of the supercar fully insure his own vehicle against damages? Is this the ethically right policy? What liability should the driver of the other car have? Would the right outcome ensue in a free market?

It is Putin's hope that, with time, the West will get tired of propping up the Ukrainian military and throw in the towel. The best way to deter future Russian aggression is to prove this is not the case, or, if Ukraine does fall, to make sure the Russian people continue to face consequences after the last bullet has been fired. Here are some low-cost measures we could take to render more help to Ukraine than we are currently giving them:

Russian POWs captured by Ukraine should be held in European prisons, and preferably guarded by Western personnel so that the Ukrainian manpower tied up in keeping them from escaping could be reallocated to the front lines. More importantly, it would ensure that Russia doesn't automatically get its POWs back by conquering Ukraine.

On this note Ukrainian should be allowed to set up armament factories in, say, Poland or Romania so that the good work of making defensive weapons can go on unimpeded by Russian bombs. Of course, they shouldn't be allowed to use these weapons before these have been shipped to Ukraine first. Ukrainian drone pilots should also be allowed to work from the safety of Europe or the United States, if this is practical. Finally, Ukrainian weapons that won't be used for a while should be kept under the safety of Polish or Romanian soil until such a time that they're needed again.

Ukraine should be allowed to use any weapon in its arsenal against military targets on Russian soil, regardless of where those weapons came from. Russia's been drawing nuclear red lines in the sand for the better part of the last 3 years, and every time that Ukraine crosses them nothing at all happens. Russia's existence virtually by definition cannot be threatened in this war, because Ukraine is weak and because Ukraine would be willing to make peace with Russia at any time, assuming they get their territory and people back.

To signal to Putin that even conquering Ukraine won't spell an end to his troubles, the US and its First World allies should sign a treaty codifying into law this pledge: that a Ukrainian government-in-exile, if the country should fall, will be diplomatically recognized for at least 40 years after the fact, and that no sanctions levied against Russia during the war (such as the oil price cap) may be lifted unless the Ukrainian government, be it the current one or a government-in-exile, consents to a peace treaty first. This entity would also receive the necessary funding to sustain basic operations for 40 years, and its employees and leadership will be allowed to stay in a Western country.

Russian POWs, likewise, would never be released without the permission of the Ukrainian government-in-exile in this event, even if this meant their imprisonment for the next 40 years. Since these men are war criminals who invaded a peaceful country, and have probably committed murder in doing so, this outcome wouldn't be unjust. In the US it's not abnormal for a murderer to spend 40 years behind bars.

Related to #3, the West should pledge to exclude Russia from any Olympic games hosted on their soil, or boycott any Olympic games held elsewhere which does not include the restrictions placed on Russia in 2024, in the event that the war continues without a peace treaty which the Ukrainian government, be it the current one or a government-in-exile, consents to. The 2028 and 2032 summer Olympic games will be held in Los Angeles and Brisbane (Australia), respectively, while the 2026, 2030, and 2034 winter Olympics will also be held in Western countries. The bloc of countries which agreed to the aforementioned treaty should also clench the 2036 summer Olympic games and the 2038 winter Olympic games at the next round of bidding so that there's no chance of Russia participating before 2040 at the earliest, unless Putin agrees to peace with the Ukrainian government.

Denmark ought to permanently suspend passage through the Danish Straits for all Russian Navy ships. Furthermore, it should impound and ultimately seize Russian vessels identified as part of the "shadow fleet" which skirts the $60 price cap on oil (much of this activity begins in the Baltic Sea and passes through the Danish Straits). This is probably legal where proven through stuff like satellite imagery that said vessel has sold oil either directly or indirectly to countries party to the cap, including all EU member states. Since much of this fleet is uninsured, losing just one or two vessels could be a huge blow to the fleet's profitability.

Again, these terms ought to be enforced for so long as the Ukrainian government, be it the current one or a government-in-exile, has not signed a peace treaty with Russia.

This is not a manifesto preceding a violent act. Rather, think of it simply as a higher quality than usual post from me. I wish to explain the logic underpinning modern conservatism, namely from a US-centric perspective but also corresponding to how it tends to manifest around the world. Everything I'm about to write will not be popular. I expect accusations of "bigot", which is modernity's equivalent to "heretic", to be flung around liberally. But for the record, I do not care. I intend to describe the world as an intellectually honest person can see that it is.

First, I ought to begin with the question: what is conservatism?
Some would say it's synonymous with "right-wing". Others say the conservative is doggedly pro-status quo. In that sense, a Soviet hardliner in 1991 who opposed the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in favor of preserving communism might've been labeled a conservative. Same for a jungle savage who offers his children as sacrifices to the sun god and resists calls by a Christian missionary to stop doing so.
But I'd tender another definition. Conservatism is that which, in pre-modern times, before the advent of progressivism, was the was the core engine of human progress. It was the progressive ideology of its time, which was for many thousands of years. It was independently invented in many times and places, and indeed never stopped being continuously reinvented.
When we imagine progress, we're susceptible to what's called the just world fallacy. The 1950s were, compared to the 2020s, a materially backward time. We are much wealthier today than they were back then, and things like Jim Crow have since been abolished. Thus, the abolition of Jim Crow must also constitute progress.
Now, I don't disagree with this one. Jim Crow was obviously bad. But you could leap to the same conclusion about other things where unwarranted. Society is less religious today than it was 60 years ago, so less religion must be progress. The sexual revolution happened, so that must be progress too. We have a lavish welfare state that we didn't have 70 years ago, so the lavish welfare state must be progress, even when it's driven us $30 trillion into debt. And so on.

The other problem with this thinking is that, for the vast bulk of history, it was the opposite. From the Iron Age to the early stretches of the Industrial Revolution, that which accompanied material progress (e.g. more wealth) was decidedly not irreligion and libertinism. Instead, successful societies grew more pious, more austere in their lifestyles, and so on.

See, man in his natural state is a savage. Man here is a gender neutral term; neolithic adult males had no qualms about killing males from a rival kinship group ("tribe") and taking its women as concubines, while neolithic adult females had no qualms about committing infanticide. The respects in which males and females are savage usually tend to differ, but both are in desperate need of civilizing. It is the role of society to civilize the next generation just as it had the generation before it. Each person must learn to restrain his/her self from doing what he/she ought not to be doing, and each person must learn the discipline to make his/her self do what he/she ought to be doing. This is what enables our race to pull itself from the muck and realize its high potential. It is the difference between the Stone Age and a 21st century paradise. Or, more modestly, the difference between a cyberpunk dystopia and a cyberpunk utopia. Civilized people can build a better future, while uncivilized people can only help tear down what's been built.

There is, of course, not just one human society. People were geographically distributed wherever they could eke out a living.
All of them started out knowing little to nothing, so those which moved out of the Stone Age developed culture and underwent cultural evolution. Some, like China, India, Sumer, and the Mesoamericans (who to be fair weren't just one civilization), gradually built sophisticated cultures without having to borrow much from the outside world. But for most, the process entailed borrowing and at times being borrowed from. To name a minor example, Alexander the Great adopted court etiquette practices from the Persians who he'd conquered. The Carolingians and their successor states at times did the same with the Byzantine court. This is, of course, to say nothing about things like literature. Likewise, cultures rose and fell; for example, the complicated and stratified society that the Zoroastrians had built in Iran was washed away with the Islamic conquests, which imposed its own (in some respects superior) structure but retained a few native Iranian elements.
By the year 1500, there were distinct civilizational blocs in Afro-Eurasia. Western Christianity, Eastern/Oriental Christianity, the Islamic world (Sunni and Shia), India, China and the sinosphere, the Buddhist world, and perhaps Japan. Excluded was northern Eurasia where nobody but nomads lived, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, most Pacific islands, and of course the Americas.
All of these blocs had imposed rules governing everyday life, justified by powerful religious myths (a broad term I use regardless of their objective truth value). There were religious and secular hierarchies. Complicated wasn't better by default, but you couldn't have well-organized without complexity.
Over time, progress was made not just in passing rules but in enforcing them. For example, Catholic clergy were ordered to be celibate early on, but it wasn't until the High Middle Ages that this rule was widely obeyed. There were many centuries during which this rule only existed in the books and not in practice. There was never such a requirement in the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox world. At least in Russia, the title of parish priest was often hereditary; a father would teach his son how to do the job, and then hand the reins to him upon retiring, and this practice continued well into the 19th century. A non-hereditary priesthood had its advantages, such as a more cosmopolitan-minded, well-educated, and meritocratic leadership. (And yes, Protestants eventually did away with celibate priests, but the societies in which Protestantism took hold were already well developed even by European standards so they could afford to do it). Another reason why the Catholic bloc fared better is because the Vatican imposed a uniform liturgical language, thus literary lingua franca, across a vast area, whereas the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox intellectual scene was fragmented among Greek, Church Slavonic, Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic, and Ge'ez speakers. Especially before the invention of the printing press this made a huge difference in developmental outcomes.
To give another example about enforcing rules, polygamy was outlawed by Christianity from the start but it didn't die out in Christian Europe until about the High Middle Ages. Thus, it couldn't be taken for granted that the mere fact of a religion existing led to this kind of progress. It was a continuous battle by the "saints" against the "sinners". Sometimes the moral muscle would atrophy and things would slide backwards, such as in the Ottoman Empire, which became notorious for how common homosexuality and male pederasty was, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the point where they're still grappling with bacha bazi today.
Likewise, societies that were already religious could go even further and experience a religious revival. See Geneva under John Calvin's influence, or early modern England where every other crime was punishable by the death penalty. Protestantism led to more puritanical societies than their Catholic neighbors, though Catholicism itself enjoyed a lesser revival through the Counter-Reformation. And this itself was a continuation of growing interest in the religious life that began during the High Middle Ages, such as with the Devotio Moderna movement.

Putin, a contemporary Hitler-lite who launched a bloody unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine, has been wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) since March of 2023. All member states to the Rome Statute are legally obliged to arrest Putin and extradite him to the Court should he ever step foot in their territory. It was this fear of arrest that caused Putin to skip attendance of the 2023 BRICS Summit in South Africa, since South Africa is a member state.

No more. Today Putin touched ground in Mongolia, which is also a member state. But unlike in South Africa in 2023 he does not fear arrest. He will be in the country with impunity, presumably meet with its President, and then go back to Russia a free man. Because Mongolia will not touch him. In so doing, Mongolia has become an accomplice to Russia's crimes in Ukraine.

After its 2022 presidential elections, in which Bolsonaro lost, Brazil had its own capitol storming. I don't condone this attack, in the same way that I don't condone what happened in the US on January 6, 2021. Unfortunately, the country's new President, Lula da Silva, used this as an excuse to go full-blown authoritarian. Using a high-ranking judge named Alexandre de Moraes (hereafter "Judge Moraes"), he started cracking down on right-wing speech online.

This started when the new regime ordered the suspension of several Brazilian right-wing accounts on Twitter, not for an actual crime but for "misinformation". This was done, presumably through Twitter's offices in Brazil. In April of this year those accounts were reinstated. Judge Moraes was incensed and ordered Twitter to reverse this course of action. Twitter's legal representative in the country was threatened with arrest if she didn't follow through, so she resigned, and even after her resignation Judge Moraes froze her bank accounts. After this, Judge Moraes demanded that Twitter appoint a new legal representative, and then imposed a deadline after which Twitter would be blocked in the country if the company refused.

That deadline has expired, and Judge Moraes has ordered internet service providers to block access to Twitter for Brazilian internet users. He also imposed an almost $9,000 fine (in Brazilian money) per day for instance of continuing to use Twitter via VPN. Reports suggest Brazil has also tried to curtail access to VPNs altogether.

What delicious irony. The mask has come off, and the self-described opponents of fascism have proven themselves to be among the worst fascists alive in the world today.

Libs in 2019: "Adjusted for inflation, the (Federal) minimum wage is lower today than it's been in a very long time. Once the price of living goes up, it stays permanently higher while the (Federal) minimum wage stays the same, meaning the income of minimum wage workers is less than it was before. This is wage theft! We don't believe this problem can be solved by people moving up to higher paying jobs or getting raises. Likewise, arguments that the Federal minimum wage isn't a problem because few people make that little are nothing more than late stage capitalist propaganda. Rather, the system is fundamentally broken and we need drastic reforms to the government."

Libs in 2024: LMAO, what do you MAGA conservative fascists mean by "inflation"? Sure, the price of everything has gone way up since Biden took office, whereas inflation wasn't that bad in the year 2020, but it doesn't matter because every worker in America got a kajillion dollar raise sometime in the last three years. Proof? Uh, uh, well we say it happened, and you must believe us! The Federal minimum wage is still at $7.25 like it was in 2019, but it's no longer a problem just because we declare it isn't! Nobody is making minimum wage anymore whereas everybody and their mother was in 2019! Why not? Because we say so! Also, you ignorant peons should be grateful to the glorious leader President Biden that further inflation has slowed, because we willfully mistake this for high prices actually falling back to pre-Biden levels."

Three days ago, Ukraine launched a surprise offensive into Russian territory, by far the largest of its kind since the start of the war in 2022 (previous incursions were by small militia groups who only stayed 2 or 3 days at most and captured maybe one border village). To date that they've managed to capture around 100-200 square kilometers of Russian territory.

Early into the attack, Russia falsely claimed to have repelled it. They've since repeated that claim several times as the area under Ukrainian control expands. Russian forces have retreated upon encountering the Ukrainians, and Ukraine's best mobile warfare unit is at the helm of this operation.

They've already captured the town of Sudzha, through which flows a Russian pipeline that supplies Europe (or at least it did before the war; I don't know if it still does today). If they can keep up their present momentum, they should be entering the city of Lgov by the end of today. Lgov has a population of about 17,000 and is a fairly major railway hub inside Russia. Furthermore Lgov is a 45 kilometer drive from Kursk, the capital of Kursk Oblast (population 415,000). Objects traveling in a straight line, such as artillery shells, would have to travel a much less than 45-km distance to strike Kursk from Lgov; for context, 45 kilometers is 28 miles.

It's 50/50, then, that by the end of today Ukraine will be able to bombard a Russian city about the size of New Orleans with at least a handful of artillery pieces. And depending on how incompetent the Russian response continues to be they might even capture said Russian city the size of New Orleans at some point in the near future. In this best case scenario, we are talking roughly half a million Russians living under Ukrainian occupation. Half a million Russian hostages whose lives and freedom Ukraine is able to use as a bargaining chip. The whole debacle would, if nothing else and even if short lived, be a catastrophic blow to Putin's image as a man able to protect ordinary Russians from foreign threats.

The Roman historian Sallust understood the decline of the Republic to begin in 146 BC, when the city of Carthage was destroyed.

The line Carthago delenda est, a rallying cry of Cato the Elder against their North African city-state rival, is well known today. More obscure is an argument made at the time (at least per Sallust) against destroying Carthage: that the city provided a sense of metus hostilis (fear of the enemy) which kept Romans from turning on each other. Carthage was Rome's enemy for a total of 118 years, during most of which there was an uneasy peace. Sallust contrasted the civil wars and political usurpers of his own time with the relative sense of unity and patriotism which prevailed in that century.

So what do you think? Is this concept applicable to our time and place?

About a minute ago, a woman took the stage at the RNC and spoke about the issue of safety in schools, endorsing School Resource Officers (cops embedded in high schools) as an invaluable tool for keeping the people and dealing with dangerous students. Detractors claim that SROs can be unnerving to students, and that they're often too trigger happy when it comes to arresting minors. And this got me thinking:

I propose that local governments dramatically increase the frequency of plainclothes officers in schools, who infiltrate classrooms at the start of a given academic semester and have long-term assignments, say, for up to a couple of months, choosing the youngest looking officers who pose as students of the oldest plausible age (i.e. seniors). To avoid the likelihood of a real student recognizing them from, say, a traffic stop, different police departments ought to swap personnel for these assignments so that they're from relatively faraway places. This would accomplish the following:

(1). Their presence would not be overt, and to students it would feel like a school instead of a prison;

(2). Whereas students would try to hide their misbehavior in the known presence of police officers, these officers being around would not cause them to alter their behavior. They could get a feel of the territory, gather human intelligence, conduct stings, and bust crimes literal seconds after they start happening. For example, a prospective dealer would be more likely to sell to somebody who they've seen around for the last 3 weeks than to an absolute stranger.

(3). The knowledge that they "only have one shot", and that making an arrest will blow their cover, will cause them to pick their battles carefully, and go after what they believe to be high-priority crimes instead of being overly confrontational.

(4). This would deter outsiders to the school from dealing to students, as they wouldn't know who's a cop and who isn't.

(5). It would signal to mass shooters that the visible absence of police officers does not equal an easy target. This might also allow schools to cut funding for School Resource Officers.

Senator Bob Menendez (D--NJ) has been convicted of 16 corruption charges by a jury, related to him accepting bribes and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of governments like that of Egypt.

To save face, several Dems have publicly called on him to resign, though it goes without saying that they privately wish he doesn't, given how slim their Senate majority is at this time.

Anyway, discuss.

Perennial philosophy is the idea that all religious paths ultimately lead to the same God. Its origins can be traced to the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, when Christian Europe was exploring and colonizing foreign lands. It was discovered that Muslims worship one God, contrary to the Medieval belief that they worshiped Muhammad, or "Baphomet", as a deity akin to the Christian relationship to Christ. And they discovered that Hindus, nominally polytheists have a sort of esoteric belief in one great God who created everything, whose pursuit is arguably the true objective of Hinduism and which veneration of the lesser gods is a mere vehicle of.

It was shocking to them that parts of the world which were basically cut off from each other, thus developed independent religious traditions, had a convergent development toward a set of principles held in common by everyone. And so, it caused some thinkers to start asking questions, which led to perennial philosophy.

Anyway, this thread is about a related idea, though it concerns orthopraxy ("right practice") more than it does orthodoxy ("right belief"). It seems to me that different cultures all arrived at the same intuitive understanding of what religious practice ought to look like. Below is a probably not comprehensive list of tropes that can found across the world:

-The consecrated ones, the authorized functionaries of religion and special elites of the religious community. Tithes are paid to them and their institutions to which they belong by the community.

-Process of consecration. Which is the say, it's not enough that the consecrated ones exist, but they have strict notions of ritual purity that must be realized in order to be a "real" priest. A priest might be visibly distinct, such as shaving his head or wearing certain clothing or being circumcised or castrated. He might abstain from certain foods, or from sex or alcohol. The ritually pure may be called "holy". One is considered to have a greater degree of holiness if it costs more to enter that state, namely in terms of time and effort. Thus, as religions become better organized, the requirements on the consecrated ones grow more and more complicated. This also poses a barrier to entry for competitors who cannot match these requirements.

-The sacrifice. The institutions to which the consecrated ones belong, or "temples", perform a function pertaining to a god, which creates a bridge between men and the gods. A costlier sacrifice is considered more impactful. To prepare the priests who administer the sacrifice is in itself rather costly, but this usually means the forfeiture of a financially valuable asset. Priests can offer sacrifices on behalf of lay givers, usually of a more modest nature, or grand sacrifices on behalf of the nation which the religion serves, such as the white bulls slain in the Temple of Jupiter on behalf of Rome, or grand sacrifices on behalf of wealthy individuals, such as the Greek hecatomb (100 bulls). Depending on culture, the proceeds of this sacrifice may be administered to needy members of the community; for example, in many cultures the portion of the sacrifice which wasn't burnt up was served as a meal.

-Lay consecration. As a religion becomes better organized, the average citizen becomes a sort of mini-priest, being expected to uphold a fraction of the priest's holiness. For example, circumcision was practiced by priests in Ancient Egypt, but the Israelites made this a duty of all males. This creates a powerful in-group identity, which has helped the Jews remain as a cohesive group for thousands of years as a disaspora. Furthermore, when even the laity is holy, the small body of elites who go above and beyond this are the "holy of holies", and having such figures administer the sacrifices in the temple afford exceptional prestige to the god who that temple serves.

-Sacred texts. There may be a singular canon, such as the Bible for Protestants or the Qur'an for Muslims, or multiple sacred texts but some of which enjoy higher priority than others (e.g. the Bible for Catholics and the Torah for Jews). Rather than just considering that a sacred text contains true words, the physical copy may itself be an object of veneration, such as in Sikhism or Judaism, and manuscripts may be lavish and expensive, or have a heavy ritual element to their production so that the manuscript is itself a consecrated item. In folk religion, said physical copy may be an object used in divination. In some cultures, individuals who memorize said text may be persons of great honor.

-Sacred relics attached to holy places or people. For example, the tombs or bones of saints or water drawn from the wells of Zamzam (in Mecca). The act of going of pilgrimage to a sacred place may confer merit in the eyes of the gods.

-Holy elements, such as fire or freshwater without visible impurities, or sacred trees dedicated to a god. Conversely, sources of ritual impurity and defilement like feces, bodily fluids, or certain animals. Some traditions may have an eternally burning flame, such as Vesta in Rome or the Zoroastrian Fire Temples. Eastern Orthodoxy believes that a miraculous fire is lit annually in Jerusalem, and pieces of the fire are transported abroad for the benefit of the broader Orthodox world.

-Monasticism, which are communities dedicated to priest-level consecration without performing priestly functions for the wider community. These have sprung up in Christianity and the Indian religions, and Sufism has a quasi-monastic element to it.

-Liturgy in which the mass participates, either actively or passively. Chanting of hymns and recitation of prayers. In more developed religions, this often takes the place of the burnt offering.

-Repetitive prayer as a matter of private devotion. Prayer beads are used in Christianity, Islam, and the Indian religions, and have been found as artifacts of Bronze age cultures predating these religions.

The US Navy is currently fighting its most intense war since WWII. Iran's proxies in Yemen, the so-called Houthis, are firing weapons at ships passing through the Red Sea, one of the entry/exit routes of the Suez Canal. This would have enormous ramifications for global maritime commerce if the Navy sat back and did nothing. In the process, however, it's expending its limited arsenal of state-of-the-art missiles, weapons which we could need against China.

The Houthis, presumably, could do this forever, since they're being armed by Iran. We don't have that luxury. Hence, this post.

See this map?

The Houthis control the green, and it's obvious how they're able to keep getting away with this. I propose a limited military intervention, not to pacify this whole country, but to seize the green up to 35 miles inland. This would be a relatively small US-occupied zone, but one which would accomplish the following objectives:

1. The Red Sea would be outside the range of the Houthis' cheapest and most plentiful munitions. For each strike, they would have to expend the resources they have less of.

2. They would have no line-of-sight of their targets, since they'd be 35 miles away. Assuming they could use drones to find targets, these would need to have a minimum radius of 35 miles or else they either couldn't reach the Red Sea in the first place or they couldn't make it back afterward, meaning they'd be one-time tools. Assuming the Houthis do have drones of a longer range than this, drones move slowly and the US could have enough time to detect them before they completed their missions.

3. Having at least 35 miles from launch to target would give the Navy, or even the Army, time to intercept.

4. Even assuming none of the above stopped the Houthis, they would become a landlocked group surrounded on all sides by hostile actors. It would be extremely difficult for them to bring in supplies under these conditions, so they'd eventually run out of whatever weapons they had.

This zone would be large enough for a sizable chunk of Yemen's population to take refuge in it. They would enjoy immediate humanitarian relief from the Saudi-led blockade, and the US could impose its own law over the area, offering protection from Sharia or human rights abuses by the dysfunctional other Yemeni government. At the same time, it's a small piece of the country overall so reactionaries who didn't like it (or anybody who didn't want to live under the thumb of the United States) could easily migrate elsewhere.

Recently the Biden Administration rolled out its "ceasefire plan", which entails an exchange of prisoners and hostages and an immediate withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza, leaving the orchestrators of last year's mini Holocaust in power. Any reasonable person, upon glancing at it for longer than two seconds, would realize this is not a serious proposal, because PM Netanyahu will obviously never agree to this. Not after October 7, and not after Israel had sunk so much blood, treasure, and political capital into driving Hamas away from Israel's borders. And for another thing, it would permanently end Netanyahu's career. He would be forever reviled among the left and many moderates for slaughtering tens of thousands of Gazan civilians for no reason, while he'd be forever reviled on the right for chickening out at the last second when they'd almost brought Hamas to heel.

So then, here's a serious proposal.

#1. Evacuation of Hamas from the Gaza Strip, and total Israeli occupation.

Diplomacy must either recognize gross power imbalances or the state of war must continue. In this case, Israel holds the upper hand. This must, of course, be balanced against the need to offer the weaker party something of enough value to justify laying down their arms. In this case, an escape to a friendly third country (Muslims everywhere seem to love Hamas and deny they did anything wrong, so this shouldn't be too hard to arrange).

Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and his cronies, will be allowed to spend the rest of their lives on a beach sipping martinis and reminiscing fondly about that time they killed a bunch of Jewish children and babies and got away with it. This is a hard pill for Israelis to swallow, but they will have achieved their objective of expelling this existential threat from Gaza.

At the same time, this should take the fight out of Gazans. Hamas started a war in their name, ditched them when things got heated, and left them to clean up the rubble and bury the mangled shells of their loved ones. They'll be similarly distrustful in the future of any group similar to Hamas.

#2. One year of Israeli military occupation to mop up any partisans who didn't evacuate, followed by one year of a new elected Gazan government backed up by the Israeli military, followed by Israeli withdrawal

As a show of goodwill to the PA, the authority in the West Bank will be allowed to play a role in establishing this new government, and send its politicians and bureaucrats to assume key roles there. However, it is dangerous to Israel for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to be united, so the two governments will be independent from each other.

Likewise, Israel will have the ultimate say up until said withdrawal. The first election cycle? Israel will vet all candidates and parties, and ban Hamas-style radicals from running. The new constitution? Israel will vet it for any antisemitic language or pledge to make war on Israel. The new Supreme Court, whose justices will serve for life? Israel will have to approve the first batch of judges to be appointed to it, ensuring a moderate wing of the government even if Gazans should subsequently elect radicals after the withdrawal.

#3. A full and immediate lifting of the Gazan Blockade, and an Israeli donation of $10-$20 billion to help Gaza rebuild

Straightforward. Hamas was the reason for this blockade, so if they're gone then it can be repealed, contingent on the Gazans not installing any Hamas-like group in the future.

#4. A treaty of peace between Israel and the new Gazan government, and Gaza signs the NPT

Also straightforward.

For about 27-28 months now, the US has enjoyed a streak of unemployment below 4 percent. This streak, a consequence of the continuing economic recovery from Covid which began in May 2020 under Trump and which Biden inherited, was touted by the President, Labor Secretary Su, and other members of this administration as some historic achievement. In their telling, we are living in some glorious repeat of the Reagan or Clinton days and it's because of Biden's leadership.

That streak has ended. Unemployment stands today where it did in January 2022. If it climbs 0.1 more points (and this probably will happen before election day), we'll be back to November 2021.

Here's some more fun facts about the economy. When Trump left office, after 9 months of the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu, there was per the Consumer Price Index a total 7.72% inflation from when he took office. Furthermore, it doesn't seem that the rate of inflation was higher from Jan. 2020 to Jan. 2021 compared to in previous years during his term.

Meanwhile, from when Biden took office until this April, there was 19.87% inflation. Meaning if you've enjoyed a cumulative 20% pay raise since January 2021, your buying power would be nearly the same now as it was then. Biden's term is not finished, BTW. 

And yes, my source here too is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"But hold on", you might say. "Wages have risen faster than inflation! Biden had said so repeatedly, and the President of the United States wouldn't lie repeatedly! Nor would his cabinet officials! Such a thing has never happened, period!"

Well...

Let's keep going. On June 6, the average 30-year fixed rate mortgage had 6.99% interest. At the time when I originally made a thread about this last year, the then-current number was 6.67 percent. Not only has Biden failed to tame the beast in the last 6 months but it's actually higher today, standing at virtually 7 percent. I already explained before how badly your average person would be screwed taking on a 6.67% mortgage. Now add another third of a percentage to that.

What about big macro-problems? How's the national debt? Surely Trump was the worst spendthrift in American history, and Biden's mighty hand piloted us away from the cliff of bloated and ballooning deficits.

Sadly, 'tis wasn't to be. We are adding a trillion to the national debt every 100 days. This wasn't in 2021, in the wake of Covid when the Fed was desperately passing big stimulus bills because they feared the cost of doing nothing (prior to Covid, the national debt under Trump was rising but at a noticeably slower rate). This is an article from 3 months ago.

Given my track record for supporting Ukraine, this post may come as a surprise. However, this needs to be said.

On May the 20th, President Zelensky's term expired. He did not stand for reelection. Nor did anybody else run in an election to replace him. His term simply...expired, and he is still the President of Ukraine.

In effect, he is currently a dictator who rules with the tacit consent of the people. The rationale of "We can't hold an election during a war" is silly. If it's about people in occupied territories being unable to vote, that didn't stop the country between 2014-2022, when Crimea and the Donbass were under Russian rule. If it's about the practical difficulties of people heading to the ballots while bombs are being dropped on their heads, some kind of a mail-in election could be arranged. Granted, this would be an imperfect election but it's certainly better than nothing. For all intents and purposes Ukraine is declining to hold an election because they don't feel like it.

And this is barely mentioned at all. Zelensky's Wikipedia article makes no mention of his term having expired. It acts as though he's still the fully legitimate President of Ukraine when this claim is questionable at best. The article on the Presidency of Ukraine briefly mentions that elections have been suspended during the war, but that's it. The article still assumes Zelensky is the fully legitimate president.

Here's the issue at hand: the Western press, just because it's sympathetic to Ukraine, is collectively presenting the dictator of Ukraine as its elected head of state no different from, say, the British PM or the President of France.

I have nothing against Zelensky, and hopefully he will resume elections after the war ends. It just strikes me as gross how easily they set aside reporting the most basic facts when it suits their purposes. We're not talking about the state-run media of Russia or China, or North Korea. This is the free American press, yet it reads exactly like the mouthpiece of the Biden Administration.

Premise C: Therefore, the US has an elite class.

Premise D: All human individuals are mortal, and will die. All groups consist of many individuals, all of whom will die. Groups with long-running continuity can be divided into generations, each of which dies when all of its member individuals die.

Premise E: The US elite class is a group of human individuals.

Premise F: Therefore, the current generation of US elites will die out, upon which, to continue existing, they'll have to find replacement members.

I think everything I've stated above is pretty uncontroversial. You'll likely agree with all of it. But what I'd like to focus on here is the "replacement" bit.

US elites have a lower than average birth rate, because per Statista families that make over $200,000 have the lowest birth rate of any demographic cohort.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/#:~:text=As%20the%20income%20scale%20increases,44.89%20births%20per%201%2C000%20women.&text=Income%20and%20high%20birth%20rates,States%2C%20but%20around%20the%20world.

This is likely an understatement, since people with extremely successful careers are less likely to prioritize the life goal of having a family. For example, musicians and actors, journalists and political pundits, heads of government departments, etc.

Furthermore, white liberals have the lowest birth rate in the US of any demographic. This is the group from which most elites hail.

The recipe for future elites is threefold: [1]. Access to networks of existing power, influence, and expertise; [2]. A fair amount of personal discipline, from which talent can be cultivated and damning mistakes can be avoided. Yes, that's two things, but one has to be divided into two qualifiers. You need geographic proximity to these networks AND your personality must mesh well with theirs.

[1]. excludes right-wingers from a small Alabama town who'll never move to the big city in search of better job prospects. Excluded also are most blacks, who have similar politics but usually inherit major behavioral problems from their disfavorable cultural backgrounds. Likewise, your average black man is disinterested in frequenting cafes or, say, attending bohemian poetry events; thus, while he makes a suitable political ally to white liberals, he's unlikely to join their inner circles.

So what's the point of all this? Well...

White liberals have poor birth rates, and the process of becoming an elite is sufficiently competitive that merely being a number on a census won't cut it. They can fill some, but not all the elite slots by themselves. For the rest they must look outwards. But to where?

Conservative Christian households. There are, of course, a lot of poor white people who have pro-NRA bumper stickers and vote Republican, but they're not what I mean by "conservative Christian". I mean middle class whites, typically from red states, who gave their children a Christian upbringing. There's a somewhat weaker correlation in their case between income and fertility, as I can attest from personal experience.

Of the three elite factors I mentioned, the conservative Christian demographic leans toward one: a fair amount of personal discipline. However, they're hampered by staying in their low-opportunity local areas and not meshing with white liberals.

But, there is an exception: those raised in conservative Christian households who reject the values of their upbringing in favor of liberal irreligion, or at least liberalism with religious apathy. They will tend to move to big blue cities, bringing with them the hardcore zeal of a convert to liberalism. This, combined with the discipline their upbringings instilled, give them good prospects of breaking into the elite class.

Paradoxically, then, in the future Republican families will increasingly supply America's elites without those elites being Republican.

It's no secret that of all Western countries, the US has retained the highest level of religiosity in modern times. Today I figured out why. It has surprisingly little to do with Americans being inherently more receptive to religious messages, and more to do with the manner in which America changes religion.

In Europe, before Martin Luther, there were Catholic Churches. And then there was the Protestant Reformation. Or should I say, the Magisterial Reformation, because in practice the big Protestant sects merely replaced Catholicism as the state religion. With that came a high degree of uniformity. Lutheran churches looked alike, worshiped alike, prayed alike, and sermonized alike. There was no "religious marketplace", because these conditions made for a monopoly.

Since religion, outside of compulsory attendance, is an optional good that one might choose not to engage with, one might compare it to eating out. If the only option you have for eating out is one mediocre hamburger joint, odds are you'll cook for yourself more and eat out less, if at all. But if you're surrounded by tasty restaurants? Well, that's a different story.

Since the 19th century, religion in the US has been less of a monopoly and more like a marketplace. Does your town have a single church whose pastor bores you to tears? Well, one day a traveling Methodist tent preacher shows up in your area. His style of religion is different. His message hits home different. You happen to find it more compelling. So you have a conversion experience.

With time, of course, the range of options expanded dramatically. At least if you live in the Bible Belt, one can "church shop" with unprecedented ease. This fosters a very competitive environment between churches. Anyone can call themselves a pastor, which means anyone can try to one-up the neighboring church by offering a product that draws in the most people. If you're dull and nobody likes your church, you'll go belly up and somebody else will take your place.

America, in short, is a laboratory that produces excellent churches, or at least if we measure it by mass appeal. And it's not "just" conventional churches either. There are parachurch organizations; for example, religious radio or publishing houses which put out religious literature with lucrative sales in mind. A pastor named Rick Warren, taking a page from the self-help industry, wrote a book titled The Purpose Driven Life, which to date has sold more than 50 million copies.

The most competitive churches skew Evangelical (loosely speaking, "non-denominational"). That's because, not being tied to a well-defined church model, they are comparably freestyle and you see a lot more variation between them as opposed to, say, a random two Methodist churches.

In 1990, a Pizza Hut opened in the Soviet Union, and this was a big frigging deal within the country. Everyone wanted to eat there when it first opened. Decades of competition in the fast food industry produced one of the greatest American restaurant chains. When it arrived on the shores of a country where everyone was eating government-issued cans of borscht, slices of pizza sold like hot cakes.

By now I think you can guess where I'm going with this. American churches aren't limited to America; instead, they routinely try to proselytize overseas and plant churches in their own image in foreign countries. Assuming that local regimes don't curtail their freedom to operate (e.g. in Russia), American churches fine-tuned to efficiently draw crowds will brush up against longstanding local monopolies that've never had to earn their keep, or so to say. And it's just like taking candy from a baby.

Whereas the old Protestant churches struggled to penetrate the Catholic landscape of Latin America, about 31 percent of all Brazilians were Evangelical in 2020. One source projects that the number of Evangelicals will be nearly on par with the number of Catholics in 2032, and after that they may become the largest religious group in the country. Brazil, of course, is not the only Latin American state undergoing this demographic shift.

In the Philippines, Evangelicals went from 2.8% of the population in 2000 to 14% in 2017. In Ethiopia, an Oriental Orthodox country (the most historically insular of all Christian branches), nearly 23% of the population is P'ent'ay (lit. "Pentecostal", but now a catch-all term for Evangelicals).

In Europe, it was reported c. 2022 that a new church is planted in France every 10 days. Assuming the average congregation has 200 members, that corresponds to about 7,200 new converts every year. This pace has been ongoing since at least 2017, and presumably continues today.

What I'm describing is a seismic shift in global Christianity. It is evangelical-izing, which is a cultural export of the United States. Forget Coca-Cola and Hollywood; America is enough of a soft superpower that in another 20 years the world's largest religion will have comprehensively and irreversibly changed. The new church is less traditional, less doctrinally focused, more experiential, aesthetically modern, more media-driven, and more organizationally fragmented, with each being an island unto itself.

Israel, in prosecuting its war in Gaza, has relied on an AI system named "Lavender".

Lavender uses data on known Hamas affiliates to direct strikes on them. At its peak, the system identified 37,000 men as being such, though it was so overly broad as to include police officers and people involved in civil defense. It was eventually scaled back to entail a narrower set which only includes Hamas fighters, leaders, etc.

Imagine you're a low-ranking Hamas fighter. Lavender tells the Israeli air force where your home is, and they decide to drop a bomb on it. You have family members living with you; the system determines that no more than 10-15 people would be killed in this strike to kill you, so it approves the operation. Of course, if you were high-ranking, a much higher death toll could be justified. Ironically the opposite often turns out to be true, since imprecise but cheap "dumb bombs" are used on low-priority targets, whereas more expensive "smart bombs" are used to fry bigger fish. Imprecise bombs run a higher risk of collateral damage.

Hamas-controlled organizations in Gaza estimate that over 33,000 Gazans have been killed thus far. Hypothetically, 30,000 civilians could've been killed in the process of neutralizing 3,000 average Joes who are fighting for the group.

It's true, then, that Israel is killing the families of terrorists as part of its official policies.

It is over. The "big lie"propagated by Dems since the 2020 election, which is that Trump committed or attempted insurrection, has been unanimously debunked by the most authoritative court in the United States. From this point onward, if social media does not label/censor as misinformation any further claims to the contrary, then it'll prove the glaring hypocrisy of the oligarchs who rule us.

Wikipedia defines The Singularity as "a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseen consequences for human civilization." Discourse on the topic often cites Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a probable cause of The Singularity. In this short-ish post, I aim to demonstrate why The Singularity won't happen anytime soon.

1. Energy Constraints

There is, ultimately, a hard entropic limit to the number of operations a computer can perform per second for a given amount of energy input. And that upper limit assumes conditions which cannot be realized by a normal, everyday computer, such as being stuffed into a black hole or existing in a constant low-Kelvin temperature state.

At this time, computer usage consumes 1 percent, or slightly over 1 percent, of the world's electricity consumption. A single ChatGPT-4 query will use between 1/1000th and 1/100th of a kilowatt hour of electricity, and at this time AI is still in an early phase of consumption, with systems like ChatGPT still being perceived largely as a novelty. But imagine, if you would, a world where such heavy data-crunching applications are used on a day-to-day basis by the average person around the world. Imagine, if you would, a 24/7 arms race between criminals and state hackers who use AI to crack cryptographic digital security layers and their would-be targets who add more and more layers to protect their property. To brute force AES-256 would take enough power to supply 50 million American households for billion of years; even assuming resourceful programmers managed to find shortcuts that trimmed this time down drastically, hacking would still be a quite expensive affair. In real life the most efficient operation to mine one Bitcoin will expend 155,000 kilowatt hours; at its peak Bitcoin mining took up more than 7% of Kazakhstan's electricity usage, despite being a fairly rich country of almost 20,000,000 people.

In short, imagine a world with exponential growth in demand for computing intensity, while electricity supply is growing at a far slower rate. After all, it takes years to commission one gas-fired power plant and even longer to bypass the hurdles to build a nuclear plant. Wind and solar entail buying up large properties in certain locations, and have their own issues, such as scaling up battery capacity. Something will eventually have to give.

The average voter, of course, won't tolerate 60% of local power consumption being siphoned away from their homes and toward such enterprises. So the human factor will further restrict the combined processing power of all computers, which makes the unlimited growth of The Singularity impossible.

2. Water Constraints

Related to the above, computers guzzle water. A lot of water. Cooling is used to raise computing efficiency and keep physical components from frying. Every 5-50 ChatGPT queries will use half a liter of water, and one Bitcoin transaction uses 16,000 liters of water. Water supply is arguably harder to amp up than electricity, as groundwater is finite and a desalination plant would take years to build. And again, the average person wouldn't tolerate half their municipal water supply being diverted from their homes to giant computing plants.

3. Other Constraints

Imagine a future where AI can churn out useful inventions by aggregating patented schematics. Beyond-human-control technological progress is a big part of the whole "Singularity" concept. Assuming that world governments didn't crack down on this in the name of intellectual property rights, there are still problems. An invention that's never built is useless, and to do so entails building physical supply chains and infrastructure. 3D printers are limited to working with certain materials and can only produce a certain range of results. Assuming human owners of these enterprises, it would remain within human control. Assuming that governments recognized the property rights of AI, it still wouldn't be outside human control unless all the work was automated as well.

The rate of advancement here would be slowed by physical constraints. It takes so much time to build a factory and build/install the prerequisite equipment. It takes so much money as a startup, and needs to turn a profit that might not materialize. A factory needs to bring in supplies through vehicles that cannot move faster than roadway speed limits. And so on.

Turkey has ratified Sweden's NATO accession, leaving Hungary as the last holdout.

Should Sweden join the alliance, its control of the strategically important Gotland Island will give NATO control of the Baltic Sea, reversing the balance of power when it comes to a war in the Baltic States. Russia currently has "area denial" capabilities that would block NATO from reinforcing Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia by sea, giving them the upper hand. But should NATO gain the ability to bring in maritime reinforcements then even the least defensible region under their vast security umbrella would suddenly become a lot easier to defend.

The EU has a liberal agenda while the Orban administration has a conservative agenda. This, combined with charges of authoritarianism in Hungary, have led to a growing rift between the two sides, with the EU attempting punitive measures to influence Hungarian national policies. As a countermove, Hungary has sought to leverage its position as an EU and NATO member to veto certain actions by these organizations, such as a $50 billion dollar aid package to Ukraine by the former and Sweden's accession to the latter.

Orban has paid lip service to not being opposed to Sweden's accession, and has pledged to ratify at some point, but in practice the ongoing dispute could prove an obstacle. There's a good chance the situation won't be resolved until Hungary is either cowed into submission or appeased with concessions.

This is an introduction to Programmatic Civicism, which is my highest political ideology. It doesn't come up in my daily posts here when I'm in "Those dagnab liberals suck for X or Y reason" mode, but it's the highest political ideal that I would like to see pursued. It is both an ideal and a feasible possibility, because Programmatic Civicism describes a tangible method of arriving at that ideal.

At the foundation of Programmatic Civicism is the following principle: that in order to build a better society, one should make better people who together comprise that society. Depending on the role you see for government in making a better society, you might disagree that this is the exclusive means of doing so. But I think everyone, left or right, can agree that it would be a huge step in the right direction if realized. Thus, Programmatic Civicism is not inherently a left or right wing ideology. It could either belong to whatever camp a given adherent happens to fall into, or it could lie outside the left-right spectrum altogether.

But there lies the problem which it aims to solve: how do you realize the ideal you have in your head? Isn't that ideal most likely to remain a product of one's imagination and never become anything more?

In short, how do you bridge the gaping divide between theory and practice?

To answer this question, Programmatic Civicism has the following prescriptions:

1. Setting aside lofty questions of free will and individual responsibility, it accomplishes nothing to tell a man who's lapsed into poor behavioral and decision-making patterns "Shame on you, you b*stard!" and not offer him the means of getting better. Rehab isn't exclusively the domain of drug addicts but of criminals, underachievers, the undereducated, overeaters, the sedentary, people who harm their relationships with family, those with other negative personality traits, etc.

2. In a subversion of conventional wisdom, the hypocrite is a myth rather than a true villain.

It is always easier to give advice than to follow it yourself, and it's easier to be motivated to take hard action by someone else's compulsion than it is to motivate yourself. Rather than obstinately braying "HYPOCRITE! HYPOCRITE!" when someone tries to help you accomplish something that they haven't, the smart person would see this as a psychology hack which can be exploited. Instead of the masses listening passively to the instruction of a guru who has to pretend he's perfect (until some investigative journalists prove he isn't and the entire thing crumbles like a house of cards), two unmotivated people can "teach" one another to rise to the level of competency that they themselves would like to attain. The accountability group structure is where the most potential for improvement lies, and everyone in society ought to be plugged into such.

3. The accountability group structure needs to be designed well to produce good results. Were this not the case, anyone who attended regular AA meetings would be a well-adjusted, highly productive member of society (and we know they often aren't), since Alcoholics Anonymous has a sort of accountability group structure. A design, which I call a "program", should have many rules and protocols tailored to yield results. Below, I will list some design principles of a program that's in line with Programmatic Civicism:

3.1. Hard rehab

Metaphorically speaking, when neurons in your brain fire according to a certain habit, you "tread that path with a wheelbarrow" and "wear a groove" in the road, making it hard to turn left or right the next time. Which is to say that behavior, when repeated, reinforces itself as a habit. It took a great deal of time and repetition to arrive at the lifestyle a person is living now, so it will take a great deal of time and repetition to replace it with something healthier.

In drug rehab, the "gold standard" is 90 days, because this loosely corresponds to the amount of time needed to make or break a habit. With that much time, one can arrive at the ability to live every day without that to which they were accustomed.

3.2. Mythopoeia

What hard rehab does is establish a new "baseline" for one's behavior. But it doesn't shield one from temptations to relapse upon returning to society. For this, they need a reason to avoid doing so.

Self-improvement movements are known to utilize mythopoeia, which is a fancy word for myth-making. There's an entire Wikipedia article on the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, which thrived around the 1980s and 1990s. If you've watched enough Vice documentaries on YouTube, you may be familiar with the type: men are in a wilderness retreat with pseudo-Indian vibes, somebody beats on a drum, misquotes Carl Jung, and says something like "You've completed your hero's journey. Peter Pan has grown up from a boy into a proper man. Congratulations."

Basically, these programs used the power of suggestion to convince attendees "My life has been changed by the 48 hours I spent here", in the hopes that that belief would help the personal benefits the program aimed to impart stick. It wasn't different in principle from the proverbial 30 year old alcoholic felon who found Christ, turned his entire life around, and broke into the middle class with a wife and kids by age 45.

Of course, the self-improvement industry is rife with charlatans and perverse incentives, such as making fortunes by selling the temporary feeling of transformation and personal growth in lieu of its actual substance. Additionally 48 hours of indoctrination isn't enough time to make someone truly believe that the idea being suggested is true. But the point here is that a "rehab program" combined with believable and inspiring "myths" can give a graduate reason to stick with it afterwards.

The third and final step is the day-to-day accountability group. When done intensively, and when underpinned by the aforementioned two steps, the result can be an upward spiral for most people enrolled in said program. This would, just to be clear, be a program one is part of for life, though certain steps like rehab would be one-time only. It would occupy a great deal of one's time and energy and would rise to the level of a religious cult, though without a charismatic leader who can abuse and exploit the flock.

To tie it altogether, here is a specific example of how such a program would be organized:

You are invited to a 90-day wilderness retreat where you eat right, sleep right, live according to a schedule, exercise your body, exercise your mind, and have nothing to entertain you besides a larger-than-life message that seems to have reached you from a supernatural place of origin. Then you go home and are part of the group for life. It is leaderless and its members are governed by a pre-established set of rules. Everyone has an accountability partner, with whom they discuss things over the phone and in person, set plausible weekly, monthly, and yearly goals for life improvement, and are disciplined by (to the level of severity that one consents to) if they fail to meet those goals. Ideally, one would live with his accountability partner so that the two of them are constantly in touch. There's no need for a big commune; a group of two or three living together in an apartment is enough.

For most people, the first priority would be career. They'd aim to break into more economically productive jobs and make more money. Next would be things like being healthy, and then one's relationships with friends and family, then broader philanthropy, and finally miscellaneous personal issues or goals. The group would constitute a web of interpersonal connections through which people can get to know each other and find likeminded business partners. Motivated by an outpouring of friendship and generosity between men, there would be a sharing of advanced technical knowledge needed to build a 21st century economy, keep the US competitive with foreign powers like China, and grow GDP large enough to keep the national debt from swallowing us whole.

In short, a well-designed program that takes off and reaches this country's 300,000,000 citizens could basically solve our problems and save us from pending national collapse.

As for what precisely this "well-designed program" would be, it depends on who's founding such a group. The best way forward is for many different groups to be founded with many different approaches, in the hope that one of them actually takes off and transforms America. These groups should be volunteer-run and not money-making enterprises. Members should pay no dues to an organization, much less to a singular person. Greed is a cancer which has infested, tainted, and destroyed the whole reputation of the self-help industry, and it is a pitfall the Programmatic Civicist would do best to avoid if he wishes to succeed where all others before him have failed.

Anyway, this is it.

I'm not delusional enough to think that my average post here on DART, or previously on DDO, has been of any real value to the world. But in this forum thread, I think, has been put forward a truly novel idea that's never been strung together by anyone else in exactly this form. All I can ask you to do is read this and judge for yourself whether or not Programmatic Civicism has serious merit to it.

As of September 2023, the reported median home price in the US was $412,000.00. In the state with the least expensive housing, that number was $229,000,00. This is according to Forbes.

But to be conservative, let's say you're a prospective homeowner in his/her early to mid 30s who buys a $200,000.00 house on a 30-year mortgage. If you were to sign a contract two days ago, on December 21, 2023, you would be paying roughly 6.67 percent interest. Had you been unlucky enough to sign the contract in September, October, or November of this year, that number would be in excess of 7 percent.

For context, when Biden first took office that was a meager 2.77 percent, and the absolute highest it ever got under Trump was 4.94 percent. But anyway, 6.67 percent. The cheapest it's been in the last 6 months, so you buy.

What does 6.67 percent interest mean? It means that, just to keep the debt from growing, you'll need to have $13,340 that you can afford to part with, per year. Once you've coughed this much up, as opposed to spending it on, I don't know, healthcare for your children and other things that are definitely not important, the bank will expect you to make an additional payment. You know, to actually repay the mortgage itself. Which would be around $6,660 a year.

In other words, unless you're in a financial situation where you can part with $20,000 every single year, it is impossible to afford what's generally considered an affordable home in this economy.

Now, you might say, "Well they wouldn't be paying rent so it's fine". Let's examine a few more statistics for some added context. As of October the median American's savings account balance was $1,200.

In August the average national rent price was $1,372, or $16,464 a year.

The Biden Administration and Congressional Dems are mulling a proposal to do the once unthinkable: tax gains from investments in securities (e.g. stocks) that haven't been cashed out yet. For example, if I purchased $50,000 in Bitcoin and then later the value my holdings has risen to $100,000, then that $50,000 "gain" would be liable to said tax even if, hypothetically, the value of said holdings were to crash the day after I paid taxes on it.

How do you think this would be implemented? Do you think it's a good idea in principle? In practice?

This is a proposal for how the electoral system in the US may be amended, allowing for a breakup of the two-party system.

It is centered around this premise: that there should be an additional step between the ballot and swearing in of elected officials. A step akin to that which the President must already go through: the electoral count.

Scenario A: Say, for example, that the fictional U.S. state of Transylvania is trying to elect a Senator. This is a true purple state, where Dems and Republicans are in a neck-to-neck race. Republicans are united. Dems, however, are very unsatisfied with their incumbent candidate, a man with a corruption scandal under his belt and a track record for not voting consistently for "the cause". If they stay home on election day, or vote third party, then the Republican guy wins. And so, they suck it up and vote for a candidate that only 26 percent of the state's voting population is enthusiastic about. Even if he wins, it's dubious to what extent the people he represents won.

Scenario B: Same state, same Senate race. But that 48 percent of Dems who don't like the incumbent candidate for their party has another recourse: form their own party with their own favored candidate and vote for it.

What will this accomplish? Well, obviously they won't be able to win the election hands-down. But their minority share of the vote, instead of being wasted, now designates them electors. As for winning, neither can the incumbent, with almost half of "his" votes now in the hands of another party and its candidate. So now they need to decide: which one of the two candidates gets awarded all those votes? If the third party holds its ground and refuses to budge, it has a chance of eventually compelling his electors to switch sides. After all, if it's the candidate you don't want for the party that you want VERSUS 6 years of the seat being held by the party you don't want, then it's a compromise most people would be willing to make.

Thoughts?

I posit that:

1. The human mind isn't a monolithic entity. People are doubled minded, and this is probably underselling it. Oftentimes, the statement "I want this and don't want that" is misleading. People often act in ways that conflict with what they say they want.

2. Because of this, polling can't be considered a reliable indicator of what the public wants. If people's private actions seem to be informed by value sets contrary to the values which informed how they responded to a poll, then their collective actions may be thought of as an ongoing poll in itself.

3. This has implications for such debates as the legal status of pornography or marijuana, tax ethics, social justice, and climate change policy.

Discuss.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has recently warned members of Congress that Azerbaijan is on the cusp of launching an invasion of the last enclave of the historically embattled Armenian people. For historical context, the Armenians are a truly ancient race who once called all of Eastern Anatolia their homeland and settled as far as the Levant and the shores of the Mediterranean. But the passage of time has been less than kind to them. Today, all they have left is a tiny piece of real estate smaller than the state of Maryland.

Azerbaijan recently succeeded in the ethnic cleansing of some 120,000 Armenians from their homes in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. You'd think that would be enough for them. But the Azeris, cut from the same cloth as their more numerous Turkic cousins to the west, would like nothing better than to see the total subjugation and possible annihilation of the Christian Armenians. Buoyed by a higher population and awash in oil money, along with the final deterioration of Russia's role as a peacekeeper in the post-Soviet space, Azerbaijan has all the tools it needs to successfully invade.

Armenia is landlocked and it would be extremely difficult for even the United States to reinforce them military in the event that Azerbaijan attacks. But I am of the opinion that the US can and should deter an Azeri invasion, by way of lending them several nuclear weapons. It would be the most cost-effective way to guarantee peace in the Caucasus.

Acausal trade is a concept that was first(?) explored on an online community known as LessWrong. In a nutshell, you have two actors who can't communicate directly but do so by predicting the other's actions. In a nutshell it revisits the classic "prisoner's dilemma" and asks the question: what if both prisoners could anticipate the other's move?

The "Roko's Basilisk" thought experiment is internet-famous, though it arguably wasn't meant to be a serious idea so much as a demonstration of the principle of acausal trade. The future AI god can't communicate with you now, in its past. It can only threaten you by way of you anticipating its threat and responding to it.  The idea is still impractical for a number of reasons: (1). The vast majority of humans are unqualified to make any contribution to its future existence; (2). Its threat cannot be truly predicted but only speculated about, meaning this isn't true acausal communication, meaning the ultimatum cannot be issued, and it's immoral to enforce a threat made in the absence of true communication; and (3). the AI has no reason to enforce the threat after it has come into existence. Again, since acausal communication isn't happening, its decision not to enforce the threat can't be truly predicted.

Another application is the "multiverse trade" idea. Suppose that a runaway AI has taken over everything and subordinated every particle in the universe to its will. There is a multiverse but it cannot directly communicate with other realities. What it can do, however, is use its near-infinite predictive power to reconstruct what other universal AIs in other realities are like. They "communicate" by perfect prediction of each other's attributes.

They predict correctly that if they themselves do X, another AI will respond with Y, that another AI has predicted their response to its actions, and finally that the other AI knows that they know. If an AI is programmed to have a value set, then it may see utility in seeing that value set expanded to a parallel reality that lacks such. Different values may be mutually proliferated through acausal trade.

Hi,

So this is a concept that I've kind of been thinking about on and off for a while. In a nutshell, it's the ideas that "rules are rules for some people but not others".

First, what do I mean by rules? For the most part I don't mean actual laws. Not in developed countries where the law is applied uniformly, anyways. I mainly mean social conventions and the expected cause-and-effect from acting in manner X vs. from acting in manner Y.

So let's look at an example. "Don't tell offensive jokes or it could harm your reputation." Pretty straightforward, right? Even comedians aren't immune to this. Plenty of comedians have suffered because they crossed a line too far.

But suppose that you're highly competent and likable, you know what you're doing, you've calculated your words and delivery with great care, and perhaps you get a little bit lucky. Your joke brings the house down with laughter; your audience likes you more, not less, because of the metaphorical limb you stepped out onto. You are audacious.

But suppose that another comedian, not so talented, not so careful, not so likable, and perhaps not so lucky, makes the same or a similar joke and it flops. He gets booed by the crowd. Word spreads of the offensive thing he said. Depending on its nature, it could be career-ending. This man was not audacious but instead he had audacity.

Other examples abound: the player who solicits random women on the street and gets into one's pants within under an hour, vs the guy who tries to solicit random women on the street and ends up being arrested. The guy who said something risky during a job interview and improved the boss's impression of him, versus the guy who tried the same thing but came across as an antisocial weirdo.

Often it's hard to tell why one guy is successful and the other ends up sabotaging himself. Sometimes it boils down to sheer competency or positive virtue, or even something so mundane as privilege and better access to certain resources But what we can agree on is that the latter person should've followed normal rules and norms whereas the former person benefited from not doing so.

America is a relatively egalitarian society where everyone is encouraged to take bold risks in life. This is how the country hopes to achieve new heights of creativity, productivity, and accomplishment, be it in one's career or personal life. But for one reason or another, some people are more cut out for successfully doing so than others. The less cut out find themselves not protected by rules that used to protect their ancestors, or if their behavior inadvertently results in victims, those victims are not. It's a double-edged sword.

It has been announced that from September 23 to September 27, the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts will hold "referendums" on the question of whether to join Russia. Medvedev, in all of his bluster, said that once Russian territory, these would fall under Russia's nuclear umbrella and that Russia would use all means at its disposal to enforce its territorial integrity.

In other words...

One week from today, Russia's territorial integrity will start to come under question. Donetsk and Luhansk will be no legally different from Moscow (from the Russian government's POV, anyhow). And yet, it'll come under constant shelling from another country, which asserts control over a large percentage of it, and which will continue offensive operations to take more of it until the eventuality comes when Russia controls none of what it claims in the area.

No reasonable person thinks that Ukraine will be in the least bit deterred by Russia's plans, or that a single Ukrainian offensive will be stalled for even a microsecond by this non-consideration. Nor is it likely that this'll bring a halt to Western aid.

Once Russia invites this precedent on its homeland, it'll be no different from if any other part of Russia was suddenly attacked and invaded. And the consequence of said attack and invasion, broadcast for the entire world to see, will be "no consequence whatsoever".

This is the beginning of the end of Russia's status as a sovereign nation. And history will hold Putin 100% responsible.

In a stunning reversal of fortunes, Ukraine has successfully defied predictions of a permanent stalemate and advanced on the northeastern front, recapturing large swaths of territory and forcing a chaotic Russian retreat from the area which shows no signs of having stopped yet.

Ukraine has liberated the strategic railway hub of Kupiansk and the stronghold of Izyum, with signs that they could soon retake Svatove and Lysychansk. It's worth noting that Lysychansk was the last major conquest of Russia's "second phase" offensive earlier this year, and Lysychansk is very close to Sieverodonetsk. If Ukraine retakes both, it'll be a signal that said offensive achieved nothing.

While at this point much of the above remains speculation, what we've seen is nonetheless a good sign that Western military aid to Ukraine is paying off. And it's a sign that we ought to give more so that they have a fighting chance of finishing the job.

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.

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?

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.

This is a question for English majors.

Take the following sentence:

"Our beings flared with passion, bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole."

Our beings flared with passion is the independent clause. In contrast, bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole is the dependent clause. There is no conjunction here so I believe that's irrelevant to the question.

The book that I'm using as reference hasn't offered much clarity as to when commas should be used. So I looked online, where I found that a comma should link the two if the dependent clause comes first but not if it comes afterward.

This would suggest that the comma in the aforementioned passage is inappropriate. However:

"Our beings flared with passion bearing witness of one accord to the man who made us whole."

My gut tells me that there should be a comma here.

While it's true that, for the purposes of most people 99% of the time, it doesn't matter if your writing abides to the rules so strictly or not, I would like a precise answer to this question if possible.

In its basest form, freedom of speech is the right to attempt to communicate irrespective of the content of that speech. In practice, this is a tricky concept for sure. One does not have the right to flash one's genitals at a bunch of children. Nor to dox somebody online or credibly threaten to murder them. But for the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that we generally agree on a few exceptions to free speech and move on.

In American law, there likewise seems to be a link between speech and property, with a higher level of expression allowed on one's own property and a lower level on somebody else's.

^This is where recent controversy has arisen. Twitter, Facebook, etc. are "private property". This itself is an iffy term, given that all of these are publicly traded companies, but whatever. Any use of these services is interpreted as being "on their property".

Generally speaking, users aligned with right or right-leaning politics stand a greater risk of being banned or otherwise censored for their political speech, and for speech unrelated to politics after something political has been uttered. The traditionally pro-corporation party has paradoxically taken to complain about this, while the traditionally anti-corporation party has gleefully denied any problem and stood with the social media giants, citing the fact that they are, again, "private property".

There are two separate ways to resolve this. Though I skew right, having been on the receiving end of this I would in good faith support and strive to protect the same rights I'm about to espouse for all Americans.

Take the small town of Greenville, Green State. The town has a rich history of public discourse in town squares, libraries, etc. However, as if a strange fairy cast a strange spell over the whole town, now people meet at the local Walmart to discuss matters of public importance.

Suppose that the town has two political factions: the Populares and the Optimates. Walmart has sided with the Optimates and banned any political activity by the Populares from their property.

Suppose that, as another condition of the fairy's spell, almost no one has interest in doing or receiving anything political outside of Walmart. The Populares used to distribute their magazine on city streets. Today, their sidewalk distributors are rendered magically invisible to all but a few elderly citizens who've always taken an interest in sidewalk magazines. They can try knocking on people's homes, but this method is, for a number of reasons, dramatically less effective than what used to happen.

The Optimates, on the other hand, are free to distribute their magazine at Walmart. People notice the magazines and many will take a copy home.

In real life, of course, there is no such thing as fairies. Rather, the existence of social media platforms has by nature made communication by traditional alternatives, namely magazines, newspapers, local gatherings, or even cable news, much less effective. By virtue of driving/drawing people away from these outlets, a manner of deprivation happens unless those who would communicate by these outlets have access to wherever the public has since been driven/drawn. Therefore, it is neither freedom of speech nor of property for these giants to deny access to some but not others on political grounds. Rather, it is the active suppression by them of another's speech, even if by admittedly elaborate means.

This raises another issue: not merely the ability to communicate but access to a reasonable platform for it where that speech can be heard. In the past, that was by way of mouth or by writing. But today more advanced platforms exist, and by the fact that speech today necessarily competes against other people's speech (in a variety of contexts, not merely political), unequal access to advanced platforms is a legitimate issue. Next, we'll discuss an ideal framework for speech and means of that speech being heard, AKA its "amplification".

What I'm arguing is this: that, generally speaking, speech ought to be separated from unnatural amplification or diminution.

And what is speech's "natural" merit? It is that which it would have stripped of resources that the average person lacks. For example, if the content which you provide to some segment of the public has proven appealing to them, you might naturally build an audience. Your speech is amplified by nothing but its merit. Or if, for example, you're a celebrity and people naturally want to hear what a celebrity has to say. Likewise, if you're a boor and very few people find you interesting, then your speech will by its own merit be ignored.

Speech can presently be amplified with money.  For example, suppose that the next $200 million Pixar production proves a smash hit. Its producer includes a certain message that in today's climate is considered political, and many young people take that message to heart because of the characters in the awesome movie who enunciated it.

Were that same producer merely to tweet about his political values, millions of children would not be influenced by it. Nor would they if, say, he made a movie on a budget of $70,000 dollars that was seen by only a few people because it wasn't blockbuster quality. Which is to say that money amplified his speech in plainly unnatural ways.

Speech can also be amplified unnaturally through the uneven use of algorithms. For example, a tweet that by its own merit wouldn't reach very many people does because the algorithm for that given website is tweaked.

Additionally, what I'm saying is inversely true as well. Or that is, speech can be unnaturally diminished. For example, a producer with different political values who only has the budget for a $70,000 dollar movie cannot convey his ideas remotely as effective as the other producer. Or take an online commenter who's shadowbanned and his content is not seen by anyone, even though some or many people would see it were the given digital infrastructure and its algorithms applied normally.

Now, this is an ideal. But it has obvious exceptions. For example, political candidates must campaign and spend money campaigning. Were they limited to spending no more money on the endeavor than the average Joe has in his pocket, our electoral system would quickly become unworkable. And from 2016, it's clear also that the presidential candidate who spends the most money won't necessarily win. For practical reasons, elected officials or those running for elected office would have to be some kind of exception. However, this could be a rule of thumb for civic discourse among ordinary people, and for speech that might be considered corporate or connected to big money that's not immediately associated with elections or a political party.

Thoughts? Critiques?

This is a total crackpot theory but hear me out guys.

I was born in 1996 and obviously cannot have had experiences predating my birth. What was normative behavior so recently as 1980 is beyond me except so far as depicted in records. Those records tend to be either fictional or do not recount the nitty-gritty mundane-isms of American cultural norms. Therefore, short of asking an older person who was there (which would be an awkward conversation to say the least), I have no way of confirming or debunking this.

But anyways:

In the past, male-on-male interactions often took on a flavor that today would be interpreted as homosexual, homoerotic, etc., though in fact the common people of these times generally didn't think much about the subject if at all.

In the 19th century, strange men might rent a room together for the night and sleep in the same bed. Written correspondences between close male friends might read today as if between lovers. As late as the mid-20th century at least, young men might share a space completely nude in certain sports-related contexts. There were no cultural taboos against such things, whereas the men of 2022 are reportedly careful to avoid giving off "gay interest" signals through their body language and eye contact.

Compared with today, the not-so-distant past was an Eden of intimate male bonding that carried none of the connotations it does today. This was parcel and package to a wider condition where social cohesion between men was greater, the near-ideal state of affairs whose passing was lamented by Robert Putnam. This "civic friendship" enabled broad interest in cooperation and sharing of skills and passions toward a diverse array of overwhelmingly positive ends.

This age did pass, and for many reasons. But it also coincided with the rise of the LGBTQ movement. Suppose that, by introducing a dynamic of homosexual possibility to interactions between American men, the coastal elites shattered group cohesion in areas where emotional/social intelligence was lower. Getting very close to somebody of the same sex without making them feel threatened and scaring them off, especially in the post-adolescent phases of life where making new friends was generally harder for men already, took a certain nuance that with a deficit of said intelligence might prove more challenging.

As history is decided by the best organized factions, this was one trick which helped the old bases of power keep their edge beyond what was otherwise natural. To be clear, I am by no means blaming everything on that one thing. That would be silly. But perhaps it was a factor.

In September of 2014, Putin boasted that if he wanted to, he could take Kyiv in 2 weeks.

As of tomorrow, thanks to February being the shortest month and 2022 not being a leap year, it'll have been 1 month since the Russian invasion began, with an early offensive against the capital (located close to the Belarusian border) having providentially stalled after a short time.

I'm no military strategist. However, ideas are arguably as powerful as bullets. Now, Zelensky could decide to capitulate tomorrow. But assuming this doesn't happen, and depending on how long the Ukrainian army can keep dragging this out, this is a timetable spelling out some of the implications of a long war:

March 31: The Ukrainian army and government will remain yet unsubdued at the end of the same length (35 days) that it took Nazi Germany to seize Poland, despite 80 years of technological and warfighting doctrine advancements.

Granted, the Nazis actually found Poland to be a difficult foe and they might not have won had the Soviets not invaded from the east at the same time, but popular culture imagines Poland to have been a pushover with outdated cavalry charges against German tanks. As such, expect negative comparisons between the Nazi and Russian war machines to flood the internet beginning around this time.

April 7: The Ukrainian government and army will remain yet unsubdued at the end of the same length of time (42 days) that it took the US to conquer Iraq in 2003.

On the eve of Russia's invasion, one of the biggest risks was that a 21st century "lightning war" against Europe's poorest and most dysfunctional country would serve to promote the Russian military as hyper-competent, and indeed, somehow superior to the "decadent" American forces that recently lost a 20-year counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.

If Kyiv holds out until and ideally past April 7, that notion will be much easier to dispel. And with that, the risk that Russia might grow drunk in its newfound sense of invincibility and feel emboldened to soon attack another neighboring state will also be minimized. Whether Ukraine lasts another 2 weeks could help decide the future of Europe.

April 24: The observance of Easter, as the date is calculated in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

If the global orthodox community outside of Russia takes the opportunity to condemn the ongoing war and formally take a stand with Ukraine, it'll be a major challenge to Moscow's credentials as the head of Orthodoxy and serve to ecumenically isolate Patriarch Kirill, hopefully putting serious pressure on Kirill to rehabilitate his image by turning against the war.

Given that more than 3.5 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad, including in majority-Orthodox countries like Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and even Serbia, and given that this number will certainly rise or even double in the next month, the presence of these sympathetic refugees who've lost everything because of Russia could sway these countries' Orthodox churches to finally issue statements condemning Russian invasion.

At Easter, expect high profile statements against Moscow's war by dissenting priests inside the Russian Orthodox Church as well.

April 29: On March 12, it was reported that Russian military equipment losses amounted to more $5 billion dollars. Assuming that rate of loss can be sustained, then by April 29, or Day 64, that figure will have risen to $20 billion dollars. Of course, this doesn't count the combined daily operational costs of 64 days of war, which by this time will likely stand around $30 billion dollars.

In comparison, Russia's annual military budget is around $70 billion dollars.

May 9: The celebration of Victory Day in Russia and other post-Soviet countries.

Putin likely hopes to end the war before this date, so that on it he can celebrate the fresh "de-nazification" of Ukraine that's supposedly analogous to the de-Nazification of Eastern and Central Europe at the end of WWII 77 years ago. This opportunity will be missed.

Outside of Russia, Victory Day implicitly celebrates the role of Russian leadership in defeating German aggression. However, the ongoing 2 and a half month war of aggression against Ukraine by Russia will cause many to question why they're still celebrating this holiday.

If some countries remove the holiday's official status afterward, or do so before May 9 so that it's not observed in 2022, this'll mark a visible unraveling of the very ideal of a post-Soviet sphere.

And so, in summary, a war lasting "just" 2 and a half months longer could cost Russia:

-More than the equivalent of $50 billion dollars in military costs alone

-Its cultural influence as head of the historic bloc that saved Europe from Nazism

-Its religious influence as current head of Eastern Orthodoxy

-Its long-held reputation as a military power that credibly rivals the United States

If you type in "Iraq" on Google right now, you'll find reports of an assassination attempt against the country's Prime Minister, Mustafa Al-Kadhimi. The attack was perpetrated by the Iran-backed militias using a bomb attached to a drone that targeted his home in the capital.

It's clear that the militias, at one time apparent national heroes who led the campaign to retake northern Iraq from ISIS a couple of years ago, have since emerged as the greatest threat to Iraqi national security. Having failed in the 2021 parliamentary elections, they've now resorted to violence in the name of installing a foreign country as master over Iraqis.

What do you think the short and long term consequences of this development will be? What action, if any, do you think the Biden Administration should take in response?

First thing to note: a vaccine for SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) is still (probably) quite a long way off from being ready for commercial use. This is the only true "silver bullet" in the fight against the coronavirus. But in the meantime, the world might've stumbled upon something:

It's hit the news cycle that South Korea and some other countries are using a drug known as chloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, to treat the coronavirus in infected patients, with encouraging reports.

While many in the medical community are still skeptical (and for good reason), it has been effective in primate studies as a treatment against the original SARS, which of course is a related virus.

On the US scene, President Trump was immediately enthusiastic about the drug's potential in combating a crisis which has effectively paralyzed the entire US economy. But at this current stage of the news cycle maybe half of sources are ridiculing him for this; whether this will change later on, or whether this touted treatment might eventually be discredited, remains to be seen.

It appears that the treatment may be particularly risky in patients with certain commonplace conditions, such as diabetes, and those with kidney disease. It might also not be the best possible option for treatment. It is yet unknown what constitutes a safe dosage that will still be effective against the virus. And finally, how the economics and logistics of mass-supplying this drug to tens of thousands of patients across the country fare I have no idea. Though Trump has invoked the Defense Production Act (authorizing large-scale manufacturing for a purpose that the government deems necessary), It seems the federal government is still dragging its feet on actually responding to the outbreak on American soil.

The first piece of good news is that chloroquine has been around since World War II, meaning it is not a patented drug. There should be no legal obstacles to mass producing and distributing it.

In the meanwhile, the Trump administration has fast tracked "compassionate use" of this drug for very ill coronavirus patients, and in coming weeks may evolve into a systematic remedy.

The second piece of good news is that because this coronavirus is novel, it should demonstrate a novel reaction to antiviral treatment.

For example, penicillin quickly rendered many deadly diseases curable, but eventually new strains developed that were resistant to it and to similarly common drugs. Because SARS CoV-2 has only existed in humans for maybe 4 to 5 months, we should have many years, or even decades, of potent use of a treatment that shows itself initially effective, meaning streamlined and routine chloroquine therapy for the coronavirus should not risk viral resistance in the foreseeable short term.

The bad news is that this, assuming it works, will only reduce the fatality rate in those infected, not halt the spread of the virus. Millions might still end up infected, in which there might just not be enough treatment to go around. There is a huge shortage of testing equipment for new cases and by the time it's readied and delivered, demand will likely have outpaced the fresh supply.

Okay. So...

Donald Trump has done something really, really stupid:

He has made, and then has doubled down on repeatedly, statements which have little in way of potential payoff to him and his 2020 campaign but which, on the other hand, could backfire tremendously.

He chose to downplay COVID-19, better known as the coronavirus.

The instinct behind this is obvious: Thus far, the left has tried to paint everything about his time in office as being doom and gloom, so it's no wonder he interpreted their coverage of the coronavirus outbreak from this same angle.

To be fair, there is another practical reason for this: to prevent a stock market panic. But depending on how bad it gets that's eventually gonna happen either way, no matter what he says. If anything, a measured response of "We acknowledge the problem but we'll deal with it strongly" would be far more reassuring (to ordinary people, and certainly also to day traders) than a leader who metaphorically buries his head in the sand.

Of course, the Dems are gonna hammer him on that, and rightfully so. I'm sure some of them already have. But here's the thing: the full consequences of this are not yet clear. We've now gotten the first confirmed coronavirus death in the US, but we're nowhere near the level of mass pandemic just yet. It's still a relatively marginal issue, so far as the 2020 election goes. Railing about "Trump corruption" and climate change is still far more potent a message to their base than focusing on the coronavirus.

But it could get worse. A lot worse. This presents a window of opportunity, between the time of posting and when this finally happens: an opportunity for one of the lagging Democratic candidates.

If said person, preferably somebody who enjoys rapport with the medical profession, turns their campaign around right now and makes the coronavirus their hot button issue, early, and therefore "corners the market" on this talking point while demand for such is still low, then it *could* pay off big time in coming weeks. Maybe not, but it could.

If, as one prediction have put it, 40-70% of all people on earth will catch the coronavirus within the next year, and if the death rate amounts to 1 out of 30 infected, somewhere in the area of 4 to 7 MILLION Americans could die from this thing, easily the biggest national catastrophe since 9/11.

If you'll recall George W. Bush was a dull, maybe not too bright Republican governor, who probably got the nomination because daddy was president, and who in 2000 still lost the popular vote in spite of the 8 year rule, a much more right-leaning America and press compared to today, and a demographic map that was not as skewed by illegal immigration as it is now.

Come a certain terrorist attack and then the year 2004, he won the popular vote by 3 million.

At this point the common assumption has become that this is Bernie's game to lose. He's emerged as the obvious front-runner, and by a large margin. The only person he has to worry about is Trump. You know what that means? The rest of those guys have nothing to lose. They can either drop out now, continue to putter along until they run out of money, or make a wager on death.

It's official. As of tonight the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is no longer a member state of the European Union. It took 3 1/2 years after the initial referendum to get here, but now Parliament can say they actually followed through. Some Brits are celebrating, others are mourning. What nobody can deny is that the island nation's future trajectory is more unclear now than it has been in a long time.

The economy of the 2020s is one that will continue and escalate the trends of the past.

While the average worker remains more or less an average guy, hiring prerequisites have grown exponentially. Gone are the days where anyone from virtually any background can simply be trained on-site and then start making a livable salary after a month or two. Requirements for prior work experience, certification, high educational attainment, and unrealistic anecdotes of "I have saved the company money by suggesting and implementing innovative solutions to problems" have outpaced the ability or willingness of many, if not most, people to meet these.

In the same vein, people who entered the workforce during a time when barriers to entry were far lower are now decades into their illustrious careers, often having ascended to affluent management positions, and who are not keen on retiring in sufficient numbers to give space to younger people (and here by "younger people" I mean the middle aged instead of the elderly; people under 30 would still have no chance in this event).

The ball is definitely in the park of the employers. They can collectively impose whatever conditions they want and it's up to the rest of us to suffer because of their unreasonableness. In addition, because of inflation and the drastic rise in home prices over time, actually managing to meet these progressively more insane hurdles will not put you "ahead" of your forebears socioeconomically. Rather, the best you can hope for is that your "higher salary" does, adjusted for inflation, match what they made. The price of this, in many cases, is tens of thousands of dollars in student debt that your forebears knew nothing of.

These are the lucky few; there are also millions of young people with a relatively passive attitude towards life who have no business being in college but their parents talked them into it because "hey why not if you have any degree it'll magically be a meal ticket for you". These people are perhaps the most screwed of all. Even if they graduate without student debt they pretty much wasted several years of their lives and are in no better shape when it's time to whip out the resume and apply for work somewhere.

The reasons for this are simple: capital and organizational efficiency can accumulate over time, but any new person being born will not inherit the knowledge of his/her forebears and so will start out life as a "blank slate" no wiser than the people who came before him/her, having zero managerial background or relevant technical expertise to begin with. As systems increase in complexity over time, humans are not well-adapted to adjust to this. In addition, there is little infrastructure in place to help them do so effectively.

This is why capitalism has failed in contemporary America: average people simply can't keep up with these institutions and as a result they are growing more and more disempowered over time.

This is where the conservative and the liberal diverge.

The liberal says remake the system. A conservative would say make better people who are more able to compete. I'd say both are needed to some degree or another. A country whose people are actually strong enough to keep up would certainly be blessed with prosperity and power as compared to the rest of the world. But this probably couldn't be sustained indefinitely.

This is the day Democrats everywhere have been waiting for since the conclusion of the 2016 Election. The House of Representatives is scheduled to hold a vote today on the two Articles of Impeachment that were authorized. This will be the first vote of its kind since the impeachment of President William "Bill" Clinton in December 1998. Had Democrats waited one more day, Trump's impeachment would've been held on the 21st anniversary of the famous/infamous GOP vote against the 42nd President, which would make their revenge just a tad more poetic.

House Republicans started the day off by holding a vote to stop impeachment proceedings. The measure was defeated 226-188, a sign that the President's impeachment is virtually guaranteed.

Before the vote is to be held, six hours of final debate have been scheduled, beginning at 9 AM local time. The big vote is expected for "later this evening" according to USAToday.

Attorney General William Bar did, on November 15, give an address at a convention of the Federalist Society, or, more particularly, to a gathering of conservative lawyers under the banner of this organization.

In his address, he argued that the independence of the executive branch has come under unprecedented attack from the other two branches during the Trump era, pointing to record-breaking use of injunctions by miscellaneous lower courts to block initiatives of the current administration on a nationwide level, along with other grievances.

The full speech can be read here:

CNN just published a certain article. While the article's content is nuanced enough, it has a provocative headline, and if the reader doesn't bother to click on the article (opting instead to only read the headline) it'll leave exactly the impression that the media is hoping for.

It describes a bipartisan bill, signed by Trump, which released some inmates from prison. Criminal justice reform, to be clear, is a policy fixation of Democrats. Republicans and Trump simply went along with it this time.

Anyways, one such guy released is now accused of murder. The article headline read something to the effect of "Prisoner released by Trump reform accused of murder".

The reason why they'd frame it this way is obvious: anything that pushes the long-running narrative of the Trump administration being riddled with incompetency and failure they will say gladly. Even if it's mainly the Democrats' fault. As is the case here.

(I put it here because I didn't want to disturb the people playing mafia.)

Who else is playing this right now?

In a tweet dated back to, strangely enough, December of last year, the Church of Sweden tweeted that:

 "Jesus of Nazareth has now appointed one of his successors, Greta Thunberg."

Based on their follow-up tweet in response to the controversy that ensued, in which they apologized for hurt feelings but also declared that "Our meaning has been to talk about Jesus Christ in our own way", it would appear that they weren't kidding.

This kid, who has championed a social cause unrelated to religion and who has made little in way of personal sacrifice pursuant to such, is evidently now regarded as a saint at least by the Church of Sweden and a new messiah superseding Jesus's ministry at most.

...Which is why European Christianity is a joke. "We're behind you and the good work you're doing" is one thing. This is just, ugh.

Okay, so:

Right outside where I work there's a dumpster. We throw out trash bins with food waste, and the lids are too large and heavy to "leave them closed and open them just when you're throwing something away". So they're pretty much open all day long.

To summarize: the dumpster is open and has food in it. So it's attractive to little furry mammals, if you know by now what I'm getting at.

Sometimes I go out there and spot the raccoons in the dumpster. A family of them, I think. Most of the time they're absent, especially when it starts to fill up. I'm not exactly sure where they go during this time but there's a small woods right next to the restaurant.

This evening I went out there to throw a bag out, and there it was.

Right. In. Front. Of. My. Face.

I turned around and ran away, but before I turned I think I saw it jump. So I'm not entirely sure what happened.

I am fully aware, of course, of the risk of contracting rabies, the only disease known to man that has a 100℅ fatality rate. So as fascinated as I am by the raccoons I always try to keep a safe distance.

But tonight I'm not 100℅ sure what happened. I probably wasn't bitten, as I think I would've felt it. Surely a raccoon's jaw strength is nothing to dismiss entirely. But in any case if I should keel over and die from rabies in the next few days, weeks or months that is why. It happened today, September 24, 2019.

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Attack on Titan Chapter 121 made a startling revelation: that Eren, using pathways combined with the power of the Attack Titan, altered the past and manipulated his father into murdering the royal family though originally Grisha refused to kill children.

So what would've happened in the original timeline? The one in which Grisha walked out of the Reiss chapel emptyhanded? Just for fun here's some speculation:

The following five or so years would proceed more or less the same way in both timelines. The "bubble city" of Shinganshina + the outermost wall would collapse. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin would escape to behind the middle wall. Grisha would still be alive. He would take in Eren and Mikasa, along with Armin after the death of his grandfather.

Because of his personality, Eren would refuse to see reason and join the military. In spite of Grisha's continued survival there's some chance his two young comrades would join him.

Near their graduation Reiner and pals, also cadets in training, would attack Trost.

Eren would get eaten early into the battle, and this time he would stay dead. Mikasa also nearly died in the timeline we know if not for titan Eren's intervention, so she'd probably end up dead too, though she resolved to keep on fighting and so might have made it out.

As they had no qualms about carrying out their mission thus far, Reiner Bertolt and Annie would've most likely proceeded to breach the middle wall.

At this point Paradis's fate would be sealed. Even if the innermost wall wasn't attacked, the survivors holed up behind there would be faced with such a dire food shortage that everyone would be dead in two or three years at best.

If I'm not mistaken, the royal family lived deep in the interior. If so, they'd be among the last killed. But if, say, they were among the first to die as Frieda most likely planned, then the people behind the remaining two walls might've survived as there'd be no pressing need for Marley to continue their attack. The "one surviving human" behind the outermost wall would be whatever titan ate Frieda. Even if that person were then eaten, another titan would become "it". If Marley found whoever was it, then they could bring that person back with them as a prisoner.

Assuming this person wasn't Dinah, Marley would have no way to use this person to kill the remaining Paradisians. However, a sizable chunk of the island would be cleared of possible military resistance, and drilling activities could commence.

However, this is where Zeke, possessing royal blood, would make his move. The end result would be the sterilization of all Eldians, an outcome more or less favorable to Marley since they'd have sufficient time to transition to a post-titan military apparatus before the last of their warrior candidates died of old age.

HOWEVER, what if Grisha had passed on his attack titan power to Eren as in the timeline we know?

In that case, the Warriors' assault on Trost would've failed as before, assuming the "it" person was never found by Marley. Everything would proceed the same until the end of Season 2 as per the anime, when Eren made physical contact with titan Dinah. At this point he, Mikasa, and probably Armin would've been eaten at long last, though Reiner and Bertholt would probably be unaware of this fact (initially, at least). Dinah would end up in Paradis's hands, and she'd be obliged either to continue the fight or pass on the attack titan to someone who was so willing (say, Erwin), assuming they all made it back alive from that expedition to begin with.

And that's all I got.