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Recent elections, to what extent is it all about global economics?

Some time back, elsewhere I saw discussion of a Financial Times article (non-paywalled copy) arguing that the US election, the UK election before it, and further recent elections, were all decided by global economics getting shaky due to pandemic after-effects, war, etc., bringing financial strain to populations. The good and bad moves made by the campaigning sides largely didn't matter at all, the argument goes. Regardless of the ideology of incumbents and which policies they push, they're automatically doomed to be rejected in favor of the opposition as soon as widespread economic shakiness like this sets in. Is this too reductive a view, or does it get to the heart of the matter? Are all the other things, the focus of nearly all debate surrounding the elections, dwarfed in significance? --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 18:54, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

The immigration/border issue played a major role too. Arizona was the reddest swing state this year, and it's also a state where people are very angry about the border. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 19:21, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Immigration has sure been a major political theme across the Western world of late. The article briefly touches on that as well, suggesting that instead of inflation+unemployment, a new idea of a "misery index" for how a population deems its situation could be inflation+immigration instead. Immigration is also linked to larger global developments much like inflation is, but policy can affect it more firmly and directly. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 19:31, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

I think the anti-immigration moves etc is a symptom of the wider disease, not the cause. And the cause is this: the advanced-democratic world never politically 'dealt with' the after-effects of the 07-08 'Neoliberal Crisis', and we've been slogging about that muddy field since then - the war, pandemic, inflation spikes etc have merely been exacerbating factors. For example, here in the UK we suffered worse in the pandemic because of 'Austerity' in the '10s [brought in after bank bailouts meant 'there was no money left'] made our nation in every respect a lot less resilient.

I will also argue that Corp interests and Third Way between them have proved simultaneously 'too strong' but 'too weak'. The former because there's enough strength left in them to resist any genuine 'left-wing'/'populist' moves to even simply getting capitalism functioning 'fairly' again but they have proven too weak/timid to be able to confront right-wing populism and the authoritarians who use them for their own malign dreams. A lot of shit we're dealing with now is due to their decisions way before 2008; the Big Public are susceptible to fake news because you for a generation encouraged a passive democracy where the voters only turn out to vote so you deliberately didn't bother building up voting blocs or even simply educating them, while the increasing hardening of class into caste while all the while pretending class no longer exists and the malign arrogance of giving poor people lectures in 'personal responsibility' while proving to be the biggest lazy welfare mamas in town [this is worse than it looks because it's reducing arguments to 'zero-sum games' which I personally describe as 'lifeboat politics' - throwing twenty people in a boat with 15 MREs and then showing them the dozens in the water swimming towards them...]

To quote Gramsci: 'The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.' And while history doesn't repeat itself, it does have a tendency to rhyme...

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3871147-the-21st-centurys-gramsci-problem/

KarmaPolice (talk) 19:35, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm getting towards the end of Brian Merchant's book Blood in the Machine, and as it happens, he mentions toward the end a Brookings Institute commentary. The commentary argues that automation in industry, which displaces workers, also increases the Red-Blue divide, with the displaced workers more likely to vote for "radical political change", whatever that happens to be.[1] The commentary is based on the statewide results of the 2016 election in which Shitler won the first time. The automation tech bro CEOs, for the most part, bought his second election this year with the help of his xenophobic rhetoric, that miscast their problems as "other" rather than the unrestrained tech CEOs who bought him. Bongolian (talk) 19:37, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Fascism is really appealing to the executive class because it redirects class resentment away from them and towards whatever minority they've decided to scapegoat. Carthage (talk) 19:39, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't describe that as a 'Red-Blue divide', Bongolian; I would call that more a divide between those who like the current status quo and those who don't - and this cuts through political lines; a huge amount of folks who voted Labour and Democrat this year did so not because they liked or supported their shitty Third Way, but because they hated the alternative more, just like a decent % of Tory/Reform and Republican voters did so because they felt the other side would take their advantages away. The problem with automation and coming AI is again, the old-fashioned Marxian 'Crisis in Capitalism' - aka capital has developed the means to make product with so little labour that labour can no longer afford to buy the products it makes, thus making the whole system gum up - the spiralling debt-mountains from corps to the state to the individual suggests we're increasingly only dodging this crash-point by constantly magicking up 'money' to keep the show on the road for a bit longer. KarmaPolice (talk) 19:58, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Looking at the longer-term picture, there's also now a rise in left-wing populism in Europe, as in France and Germany where a new left grows, and in the Nordic countries where the old left adapts and changes as in Denmark (and expect Sweden to follow along fully). But this is populism with features progressive people don't like, it is social conservatism mixed with economic left or sometimes just Third Way ideas (or a varying blend). It adopts the xenophobia of the right-wing populists so as to steal their appeal, and sometimes, like in Germany and France and in countries where it goes illiberal (like Hungary) it also goes "anti-West" and anti-EU and flirts with Putin. This may well grow to be the main competition to the old ideologies and the right-wing populist challengers. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:22, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

However, social progressivism as-is has compromised itself by a too-close linking with Third Way - after all, it was the hope of the folks like Biden in the 80s that if only we could 'have more social progress' we wouldn't need to actually work on actual economic inequalities. What's more, I think a decent % of said progressives have been angered/dismayed/saddened by the shallowness/ineffectiveness of their 'past reforms', mainly due to a) a lack of Big Public 'buy-in' and b) effective neutering by the NeoLib elites the moment it steps on their toes [or lessens their amount of money/power possessed]. In some respects, they tried a kind of 'revolution from above' with some very tepid allies.

It is perfectly possible to be on the side of 'societal progress' while not being 'a member of the woke brigade'; a lot of this is merely admitting that for a lot of your 'electoral friends' they are of limited to nil interest and as such we're giving it less priority in speeches, legislation plans etc. One good example of this was British Labour under Harold Wilson in the 60s; we had a lot of 'liberal social reforms' which dealt with a lot of the woke causes of this era [homosexuality, censorship, abolition of hanging etc] but Wilson officially rarely backed them - instead he merely gave room for senior politicians to 'make the case' for it and if they could snowball enough support for it to get it into law. In a way, he scored good 'cakeism' - he wasn't hugely associated with the 'woke reforms' by those who didn't like them but he got a bit of credit by those who did like them that he didn't actually block them. And we have to remember, a lot of the minorities progressives supposedly support are also poor and therefore, more left-wing economics would instantly benefit them too.

Put glibly; we tried your way for forty years and it didn't really work. It's time for another strategy to be attempted. KarmaPolice (talk) 21:17, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

We shouldn't throw advocacy for social minorities to the wayside. There's nothing stopping someone from being both a social and economic progressive at the same time. They kind of go together in a way, and lot of progressives are dead-set against "woke capitalism" because capitalists don't actually care about the changes needed to bring about equality. It's "performative wokeness." The fact that there are a few token women and people of color now in power does not do anything to end the structures of power that harm minorities. The takeaway to "woke capitalism" shouldn't be class reductionism and rejection of social justice, it should be to fight back against neoliberal co-option of social justice movements, and the hate mills that also have a vested interest in tying a perception of social justice activism to the socioeconomic elites. Carthage (talk) 21:25, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

There's a minority both socially and economically progressive. Indeed what I had in mind when I just wrote 'progressive' earlier. That however does not appeal to the masses, and is a way only tried before in the form of the "old social democracy" that's long gone out of fashion. It seems like there's currently a polarization in which the majority is split into two camps, where in one of them supporting the old "establishment" goes hand in hand with social liberalism or indifference, while in the other, social conservatism or even a socially reactionary attitude goes hand in hand with wanting change, regardless of whether the change is otherwise to the left or the right. Yeah, this seems to point to the most likely "new left" of the future. I don't care much for what I read a socialist describe and reject as the politics of "corporate feminism" either. It's just a shame that when a new way is to be tried, blind contrarianism and scapegoating of minorities has to be blended into the mix by popular demand, as that's what the majority craves. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 22:33, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

You're throwing terms out all over the shop. So, what socially would you regard as 'dead centre' of American social attitudes right now? KarmaPolice (talk) 23:52, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Dead center? The "dead center" is firmly in the right. But that doesn't mean we should give up activism for, say, trans rights. If you have a left-wing that's not motivated by a fundamental belief in solidarity and equality, then I would call that a left-wing that has betrayed its values. Economic justice is social justice. The New Left of the 1960s got this. The Black Panther Party got this. Hell, plenty of people today get this. Hbomberguy produced an entire video about how "woke capitalism" is merely just a marketing stunt. It's a recognized phenomenon in progressive circles that established structures of power will try to co-opt liberatory movements to rob them of their revolutionary value and bring them in-line with the status quo. We should combat the fact that the Overton Window is being pulled to the right by trying to pull it back left. We don't go right with it. Marginalized people don't stop existing just because recognizing that they exist and have their own grievances becomes inconvenient to politicos, and they won't stop agitating for their rights either. Carthage (talk) 00:08, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

But the centre can't be right-wing. The right wing is right wing, oddly enough. If right-wing positions were 'centre', that would become the new centre and I assume the 'further right' becoming the right. Overton windows shift all the time; for example the idea that women should be permitted to vote [or even all men should be allowed to] was a 'left-wing position' in about 1900, while the centre was a very tepid 'hmm, I'm not sure' and the right was 'over my dead body'. This is part of why social reactionaries are getting more and more shitty; American fundies are still peddling the same old shit they were in the 1980s and then it was perhaps 'a bit on the conservative side' but now is full-on 'reactionary' and they kind of know it in their heart of hearts [though don't want to admit it].

But now to the main point; a) what evidence do you use to believe the 'dead centre' is firmly right and b) can you provide a kind of 'example line' where you think they've got to socially? KarmaPolice (talk) 00:47, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

How do you define "left" or "right"? If they're just sections of a map, then I suppose you're right. In some cases, even antisemitism can be seen as a "centrist" position. And I myself have argued before that politics is ultimately contextual, so you're preaching to the choir. This isn't mutually exclusive with the notion that "left" and "right" also carry certain connotations with them, that can convey a person's general set of beliefs with a short label. So when I said, in response to "what socially would you regard as dead center of American social attitudes right now," the fact that I said "it's firmly on the right" has obvious connotations of "it's becoming more conservative." Was that a poor choice of words on my part in response to what I perceive as a "gotcha" question? Maybe. I don't appreciate games like this, KP. Trying to distract from my criticism of your contention that the left should embrace class reductionism, and that the "economic justice advocates are separate people from social justice advocates" talking point is, a) demonstrably an overgeneralization, b) the result of neoliberal co-option of liberatory movements a la "woke capitalism," and c) a reactionary talking point peddled by grifters who deliberately conflate woke capitalism with genuine social justice activism and then pass that conflation (and its associated connotations) off to their very big audiences. In case I'm wrong, then I apologize. Carthage (talk) 00:59, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Am I a person who plays games? Or engages in gotya? As you've seemingly completely missed the point I was trying to make, I'll spell it out.

Here in Blighty, I hear a ton of crud all the time about 'how the British people are conservative' and all that [I blame the fact partly because I watch GB News etc]. But it turns out when you actually do proper polling on their views they're more socially liberal than given credit for; that for example about two thirds are 'very worried' about climate change, 75% believe that 'government action' should be main/primary driver for change on that front and 49% think transphobia is a serious issue in the country.

Welcome to the 'centre' of the British people's social views. Not like you'd know this from our shitty media, politicians and that cess-pit which is social media, though! Thus me asking; 'what is the American people's 'centre'? Because I have a suspicion that here in the UK, a lot of the perceived 'right swing' socially was not because there were more of them, but they simply got a lot louder and the media etc amplified them. That in some way this is a positive development, because like with the 'woke capitalists', these fuckers have merely dropped the pretence, shown their true colours and god, it's horrible. It's like what I've argued before; that when it came down to policy there wasn't much difference between a 'moderate Republican' and 'MAGA' - only the style and tone was different, and now the latter has repeatedly fucked over the former in full view of all so we all know now where they really stand.

I admit, I am a bit on the 'Old Left' side of things, but not so hidebound to see anything that not class as 'false consciousness'. Just that ultimately, a lot of the issues regarding minorities and so on is about class - for example, one of the major issues facing Native Americans is the fact they have so little intergenerational capital because they were so violently shoved into an extreme underclass position and then held down there, while a lot of the anti-immigrant rhetoric is down to the 'labour aristocracy' fearful of competition eroding their relatively cushy positions. No, what I advocate is to primarily focus on 'economic justice' and to make that the centrepiece of campaigns, stressing universality over factional interests, telling any 'performative wokeness' to go to hell while doing some actual effective reforms which would help social justice [for example, police reforms which both increase it's competence and reduces the institutional racism] without it explicitly being labelled as such [I would ban terms like diversity, equity, inclusion and intersectionality from all official documents, for example]. Lastly, social justice half the time sucks when it comes to propaganda. I mean abolish the police? Come on, surveys show that even a majority of black Americans support the concept of policing! It makes us look like a bunch of out of touch cranky weirdos. KarmaPolice (talk) 02:50, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

You have to admit that when you bandy about terms like "woke brigade," and you react more harshly to my point that "the problem isn't as much social justice as it is the perception that woke capitalism creates and the right-wing exploits" than to "It's just a shame that when a new way is to be tried, blind contrarianism and scapegoating of minorities has to be blended into the mix by popular demand, as that's what the majority craves," (which you didn't comment on at all) that it's understandable that leaves a certain impression. I'll fully admit to being wrong with my impression that you're a class reductionist, but I think that impression is still an understandable one. Framing matters, and the way progressivism has been framed in this thread, as basically being "woke capitalism that doesn't give a shit about economic justice," (cf: "However, social progressivism as-is has compromised itself by a too-close linking with Third Way."/"And we have to remember, a lot of the minorities progressives supposedly support are also poor and therefore, more left-wing economics would instantly benefit them too.") is what I take issue with. From what I see, it's the progressives who are advocating for policies like a minimum-wage increase, universal healthcare, and public housing expansion/protection. Biden only promised student debt relief in 2020 because of pressure from his progressive flank. Carthage (talk) 03:03, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I reacted a bit harshly on this. It's a sore spot of mine, I admit. I hail from minorities that said brigade never really gave a toss about, from a class ignored by previous, have had to stomach many condescending lectures on 'my privilege' and similar and have had enough crash-ups with them over the years that it every well could have spun me into the arms of the hard right [let us remember, Mussolini was a socialist in his youth...]. Even now, the words 'social justice' conjure up in my head rainbow lanyards, horrible 'diversity' training, tokenistic corp crap, bourgeois women asking/expecting 'female solidarity' with the working-class women they exploit on a daily basis, 'degrowth' types demanding the poor consume less now and never aspire to have nice stuff, militant vegans, anti-policing cranks and the very earnest 'human gramophones' who talk in polysyllabic jargon and organise the occasional heresy trials within their little communities because they have little to nil power on the actual world.

Do the right-wing exploit the above? Sure. But all the above comes also from direct personal observation [and I'm amicable towards the goals of social justice]. More importantly, I came to the conclusion some time ago that all too many 'social justice' are distinctly iffy in smell - that all too often, it ignores the class divisions within the minority - the 'bourgeois woman wanting sisterhood with the working class women they exploit' and guess who's oh so often are the self-appointed leaders for 'their people'? I noticed this most glaringly in #MeToo; almost nil coverage of the millions of working class women who have to deal with all that disgusting crap day in/out and with even less of a platform to be heard or weapons to fight back with. Seven years later, what did it actually achieve apart from 'increasing awareness' and perhaps sending a very small clutch of slimeballs to the sin-bin? Almost fuck all, like most of the other social justice campaigns I've seen over the years.

It's why I say social justice got neutered because it was too tight with Third Way. That every time there has been a genuine 'revolutionary upsurge' [BLM, Grenfell, Banking Crisis] the movement's leadership has either decided, was persuaded and/or was tricked into funnelling it into supporting Third Way ends and means - directing folks to passively vote for the 'right' party and basically, let them get on with it [they don't] and that energy is then dissipated. And as a result, it now has a terrible smell about it and the term should be retired from folks vocab and that strategy book burned. KarmaPolice (talk) 05:26, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

OK, I can understand this. Thank you for clarifying. Carthage (talk) 05:33, 25 November 2024 (UTC)

KarmaPolice in a nutshell: Liberté, égalité, fraternité, not diversity, equity, and inclusion! LongStylus (talk) 02:54, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Hey, it's a good concept which hasn't been properly tried out yet. Plus, when it comes down to it social justice doesn't really have any answers regarding economic inequalities outside of it's designated minorities [ie the ones they like]. Lastly, this doesn't mean a party advocating this would have to be 'socially conservative' [ie more 'right' than the people's centre] - in fact, it can be cautiously socially liberal - I go back to my Wilson example, and here today the way the vote on assisted dying was handled [a Govt can make it a lot easier for liberal legislation to get done without officially coming out to support it, which can be in a way described as 'woke by stealth']. But this requires working out where the people's 'centre' is in the first place. So I repeat my question from above; where do you think the American people's 'societal/cultural centre' is right now? I mean above it was said 'it is firmly right', do you mean you genuinely believe that 'centrist America' has in fact become less in favour of stuff which had been accepted as 'generally okay' say, twenty years ago? KarmaPolice (talk) 04:09, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that's true. Social justice advocates are often the ones advocating for economically progressive policies: for economic democracy, for unionization, better work conditions etc. Economic justice and social justice are not separate concepts. I've gone on about this at length. Carthage (talk) 19:42, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

From my own experience, reading and hearing - no, they're not. All too often, their advocating for economic justice is only in relation to their own preferred minorities. It's part of the reason why the white working class hetro males are so fucking angry; they've fallen behind because almost no 'social justice' types have even bothered considering that they are also an oppressed group which deserve support [or worse, they are considered 'the enemy' due to their pasty skin, possession of external genitals and attraction to women]. Then there's the little issue that many minorities end up being led by self-appointed 'community leaders' who all too often are bourgeois and steer 'their movement' to their personal goals and then promptly desert, sell out or drive into a ditch once completed. To paraphrase Lenin on the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia - 'the bourgeois is only revolutionary to further their own interests' - that the moment they've got that, they're out the door quicker than you can say 'allyship'.

This argument isn't anything new - in fact, it's the one Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst had some 110 years ago and fell out over regarding the fight for Women's Suffrage. In short, Sylvia 'got' that many of the issues of women were class-based in origin and thus saw 'the true enemy' behind it all, while Christabel wasn't having a second of that rot and while militant to the point of extremism was very conventional in the respects that her goal was to extend the bourgeois revolution of the late 19th Century to women and then leave it at that. And while I can't say what your particular POV is on this, from my seat it appears that most things which come under the banner of 'social justice' has far too many 'Christabels' and not enough 'Sylvias' about. What's more, capitalism has become very adept in presenting minor cosmetic improvements to either trick or neutralise many Christabels.

Economic and social justice are related, yes; but experience tells me that social justice minus economic justice means precious little because in capitalist societies your 'rights' degrade and vanish the poorer you get - therefore, [for example] the poor woman shall continue to be shit on daily while her rich 'sister' gets to actually to enjoy those rights and freedoms because she has the capital to ensure they get given to her. Economic justice minus social justice? Well... we've just given those shit-on minorities the capital to allow them to fight [and fight well] for their own social justice. KarmaPolice (talk) 02:54, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

To me, that's just the distinction between liberal feminism and more class-conscious milieus of feminism. There are plenty of "class-conscious feminists" out there, so while there are probably more Christabels than Sylvias, that does not mean the Sylvias are by any means rare. The antidote to liberal feminism is intersectionality. Socialist feminists and anarcha-feminists tend to be intersectional feminists. TERFs are not. Carthage (talk) 03:51, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

The key problem is that 'Christabels' dominate the mainstream debate and narratives - so many of the Big Public think 'this is feminist social justice'. That even if we could weed out all the ones clearly mainly motivated by misandry and/or the ones so terrible at public speaking etc they'd help the cause by being silent there still is the issue that a lot of viewers will be thinking a) 'do you actually have an fucking plan for concrete change?' and/or b) 'so how does this help me, as an outsider?'. Sometimes instinctively, folks get that our Christabels have zero interest in any other cause save their own and that as they have zero desire to actually change the general structure of society their demands for 'more cake for women' equals 'less cake for men'. I remember reading a mission statement for such a Christabel group recently, and a key bit of their plan is 'convincing men to surrender their privilege'. How does this read to men? 'Take a pay cut so she can get a pay raise'. Yeah, good fucking luck with that, think it's gonna be about as effective as 'personal carbon footprints' are gonna solve the climate emergency.

These are the folks I'm saying to tell to go to hell. The ideology they're touting is fairly ineffective in genuine reforms, their rhetoric is offputting to most folks outside of the minority in question, may in fact be counter-effective because it pisses more folks off than actually helps and helps to reinforce the differences between the different groups for no real purpose. KarmaPolice (talk) 21:02, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

"I remember reading a mission statement for such a Christabel group recently, and a key bit of their plan is 'convincing men to surrender their privilege'. How does this read to men? 'Take a pay cut so she can get a pay raise'." Is that what they're actually saying, though? To the privileged, equality feels like oppression. Civil rights is not a zero-sum game, despite what reactionaries would have us believe. Gains for women do not equate at all to losses for men. I am actually going to assume that, since this is a libfem group from what you've told me, that they do ignore matters of class, but the statement "convince men to surrender their privilege" itself does not by any means imply a kind of reverse patriarchy (a matriarchy, if you will). Carthage (talk) 10:13, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

That site, like a lot of Christabels talk in so much bloody jargon I'm not exactly sure what they actually mean [sometimes to the point I suspect even they don't know what they really mean]. And the very word 'surrender' means 'to give away something'. It's at least shitty use of language - I mean when black campaigners call to end 'white privilege' regarding policing, they're not calling for them all to enjoy the daily experience of 'dealing with LEOs while black', are they [wait, perhaps they are]? And the right-wing ghouls have portrayed this as a zero-sum game both socially and economically [I call it 'lifeboat politics'] which means yes, a lot of men [esp the well-heeled and educated] do think it means less for them and yes, some do take this to the conclusion that 'the libruls' want to construct a society where they [white straight males] are on the bottom of the pile in all things. Of course they are gonna fight this; I would if in their shoes and it was portrayed in this manner! Now, you can try to talk them out of this until you've got a migraine or - as I do - avoid that angle entirely and instead focus on terms like 'fairness', 'decency' and 'respect' to lead those folks to a position where you can at least avoid making them an enemy.

You're not entirely wrong - mutual decency and respect would be very fine. The problem, I suspect, is that many white Americans are essentially forced to obey a double standard. They are made to feel guilty toward their ethnic heritage and also to feel inhibited or hesitant to advocate in favor of their ethnic self-interest. In the case of America's mass media, "White American" is frequently written off wholesale and explicitly rejected as a valid ethnic identity. The media heaps abuse upon anyone who behaves otherwise. It may seem a trite exercise to compare phrases like "white pride" vis-a-vis "black pride", "asian pride" and so forth, but it demonstrates the point very clearly. One cannot simultaneously appeal to values like mutual respect, fairness, decency, and so forth and still take for granted this warped double standard. Consider also that in most contexts and instances (gender, to give an example), the concept of identity carries large privileges. Others are expected to respect and even humor one's identity. The one exception to all this begins to look very conspicuous and deliberate. It is profoundly irritating. This is the context in which many white Americans receive such lectures about their allegedly backwards and tribal way of thinking. It's therefore a small wonder that some are less than receptive - a disposition that is unlikely to change before these taboos and double standards are deprecated. It is no less legitimate than any other identity or heritage. While this isn't something that I stew over, I can understand why someone might. It is not my prerogative to tell someone how much value they may or should place in their heritage. To do so would be presumptuous and obscene, yet that is how we are so often spoken to or lectured. Hopefully I haven't labored the point too much. Incidentally, I have no idea who or what 'christabels' are. Accumulator (talk) 22:10, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

There's a problem with such calls is that so often the callers don't seem to either spot or care 'how it comes out' at the other end. I remember #MeToo and by the time it had filtered down into 'the ordinary world' a lot of men were talking about it in the vein of 'oh, because women are so fragile and touchy about shit, we have to be super-careful with them now'. What could [and in my opinion, should] have been a call for simple respect and fairness irrespective of the person's genital layout became a paternalistic doling-out of a bit of protection for 'the weaker sex' because they 'couldn't hack it' in the cut and thrust of 'real workplaces' etc. Even worse, because of this language they failed to make common cause to the other shit-on groups [disabled, minorities, LGBT, immigrants] for simple demands of equality of respect and chance. [I know I keep on mentioning #MeToo; it's because it was this which caused my 'final breach' with social progressivism].

Lastly, the other thing where an 'economic justice first' strategy is that as you're giving claws to all poor people so they can fight for their own social justice [because yes, each minority does have some particular issues which are not economic-based] you are also arming the minorities you either did not care about or even really know about. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:13, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘so i've noticed some people mentioned global economics and immigration. i think the two go hand-in-hand to an extent, as explained by this half-hour video essay. The G (talk) 19:29, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I am skeptical that one can divide social issues from economic issues so easily too. Society and economy are really not easily separable things, they are symbiotic processes. Carthage (talk) 07:42, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

How to handle Richard Dawkins and other former skeptics?

Hi people, noting his outrageous Xitter posts about eugenics, his apparent re-affirmation of Christianity, and "criticism" of what is really a new, a "woke scare"...wouldn't it be time to massively change the nature of his article? I'm not normally one for making articles on academics too negative, but he is so popular among self-described skeptics. This guy is clearly demented at this point and just about one step away from endorsing race science. It's not surprising if you remember his age and how things used to be back when he actually studied biology. We should really make sure here and potentially also on his main Wiki that he is not to be trusted anymore. His "classics" are old and stale rubbish anyway. Basically, the only people that still claim to read them are from the Muslim world, and I think they'll do just fine with one fewer old WASP teaching them about the universe, haha. I'm interested in what you guys have to say about my idea before I make the attempt.

It's a similar story with Michael Shermer bashing the excellent work of Scientific American, with James Randi, effective altruism grifter Peter Singer...and. it. just. goes. on. I think we should be a lot more decisive in our opposition to these people precisely because they have falsely adopted/attempted to shift the label of "skeptic". True skepticism means to deterritorialize the power structures of all sorts of supremacism. Kadashova (talk) 00:07, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, these things are being mentioned, but they really tarnish their "legacy" so much that they arguably should be the main focus of their articles. Kadashova (talk) 02:02, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Why don't you write an objective article and let the reader make up their own minds? Not that I necessarily agree with whatever Dawkins is on about these days, nor am I advocating "neutrality" per se, but setting out with the object of writing a "negative" bio isn't very different from a smear. Accumulator (talk) 02:04, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

There is no such thing as an "objective" article, every article is written from some point of view. No human being is capable of making content that describes things from a "view from nowhere". Factuality is what is important -- but that is stating a value judgement, nothing neutral about it. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 07:56, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

You were very recently accused of being a troll, were you not? Kadashova (talk) 02:07, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

You're deflecting. Address the point instead of calling me names. Accumulator (talk) 02:08, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

"objectivity" is precisely the kind of dog whistle that one should never take too seriously from potential trolls like you. Women for example were historically accused of being "less objective", "too emotional", and therefore not as good scientists! And de facto fascists like Peter Thiel talk about "free speech" all the time. Kadashova (talk) 02:10, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

The user Pinkerite has documented the race pseudoscience of some of these including Michael Shermer so may consider updating Dawkins article, you might want to leave a message on her talk-page. She also updated the Jerry Coyne page. It's just Shermer/Coyne/Dawkins who have jumped on the anti-woke wagon to gain more views. It's not an epidemic that is investing the skeptic community at large, it's just those influencers that are grifting. Dawkins is nearly 84 and doesn't look in good health, I doubt he will be with us for many more years. I listened to Dawkins debate Denis Noble on evolution last year, Dawkins knowledge about evolution is about 20 years out of date. He's unfamiliar with all of the recent work on epigenetics. Psychologist Guy (talk) 02:18, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I agree! Thanks for the details. Wiki has a really good article on Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Dawkins is so out of touch that I legitimately believe he has probably never even heard of it. Kadashova (talk) 02:21, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the point. Accumulator (talk) 02:22, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm a bit doubtful about basically turning his article on its head, with the emphasis on the bad stuff. Is there anything objectionable from a RationalWiki standpoint in his published books? I've only read two of his books. That said, I'm in no way endorsing whitewhashing the article, so if there's more to add or expand on about his bad or dubious qualities, then go ahead. I'm not so sure that age is the explanation either. With fame, there seems to be a great temptation towards ultracrepidarianism. Bongolian (talk) 02:31, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Hm, also makes sense. My comment actually sounds a bit ageist now that I read it again, sorry. What's certainly another possibility, is that he lost all the money he made publishing and now gets paid for appearances like that. Kadashova (talk) 02:34, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

And, yes, I'm very sure there are sources to paint a clearer image. Actually, I've heard that there'll be an article in a few months, discussing their ongoing super-grift. Kadashova (talk) 02:45, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

This video is a long one, about how to accept 'The Death of the Author' but it's Specifically about Neil Gaiman's unfortunate humanity. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T31HKuabyMA&pp=ygUOVGhlIGxlZnQgY29va3M%3D It is long, and rambly if you just want it to hit a couple points. But the main point is, when I was into Dawkins, he had some really good shit to say about theism. When I was less into Dawkins, he had some really stupid things to say about specific religions. And when he went full anti-Muslim, I was like 'I have some friends who are Muslim because you taught me all religions are equally incorrect, eat a Dick Richard.'. It's not that I'm less atheist or antitheistic now, but I understand he might have been caught up in that bullshit anti-muslim sentiment that also shone through with Sam Harris and Bill Mahr, like, get a spine. Apologetics for anti-religion bigotry targeted at Muslims is still apologetics for bigotry. And it's a huge bummer that Gaiman did the awful shit he did. I think it's fine to accept them as influence and do better. Torrent (talk) 05:45, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Dawkins has had a profound influence on both Skepticism and atheism and he has raised the profile of both in the public consciousness. There can be no doubt about that and this should be recognized. His books on these topics have influenced millions and he deserves praise for this.

Where his more recent comments have been offensive and wrong this should also be recognized. People change and nobody is perfect - I would suggest that all this be in his article. why wouldn't it be?Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 06:51, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Tbh I am a bit skeptical that his influence on skepticism and athiesm has been positive and genuinely deserves praise. It is figures like him that force me to caveat my belief in scientific skepticism by avoiding the personal label of "skeptic" because of the political and cultural baggage associated with it. I think the sort of "New Athiesm" association that figures like Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris share actually brings a lot of what is of epistemic importance in the value of skepticism closer to obscurity. I also don't think a lot of these figures were consistent about their self-proclaimed evidentialism. This has only become more aparant over time. - Only Sort of Dumb (talk) 08:08, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

This! Just think about Christopher Hitchens who already had certain tendencies. Soon enough, his brother Peter Hitchens came out as a crypto-fascist, even appearing alongside alt-lite grift-god Jordan Peterson multiple times. As we were told by comrade Brecht on a similar issue: "The womb he crawled from is still going strong." It's especially noticeable how intense all their islamophobia is. Many of them really hate Muslims both on a personal and ethnic level. I think the problem is a naive reading of skepticism not carefully structured and constrained by good institutions. In other words, they reason so much and all over the place, apply pseudo-deep math all over the place (like in the "eugenic math" of population statistics or the burgeois pseudo-science of neoclassical economics) and so on, just to fall right back into instinct in the end. So there is a clear line from the overly reflective talk of Dawkins to the vulgar "Noticing" bigotry of Steve Sailer. Kadashova (talk) 08:27, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I generally think that "New Atheism"'s influence died right around the time of Elevatorgate. The New Atheism movement had some elements that were welcome, but in retrospective, it ended up having a similar problem among other heavily upper-crust male-dominated sects (like, say, libertarianism) -- very little empathy and far too much bravado and macho posturing. Since it was unable to expand beyond this (and, as Elevatorgate proved, actually resisted such to some degree), it has become irrelevant, and even more so once much of New Atheism drifted towards bullshit like the alt-right / alt-lite or crypto (which, particularly the later, also have a "upper-crust male-dominated" flavor). Richard Dawkins may still be tweeting, sure, and his opinions may have drifted to the point where he swallows Russian transphobe bait hook line and sinker. But who out there actually cares other than the neo-Nazis that remain on Twitter?

I can't speak for other countries, but from my American perspective, the biggest "advocate" for atheism was not the New Atheism bros, but the overall transformation of the American Christian church into an intolerant political cult, as exemplified by the Religious Right. Over the last 20 years, I see this as the primary reason why "nones" (including agnostics and "nothing in particulars") have transformed from a rather small minority of Americans into a little under a third of the American population. BobJohnson (talk) 15:18, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Also religious dones, which are people who left religion because of bad experiences associated with it; A lot of queer people fall under this category, and I know a few. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 18:49, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I all just goes to show that you can be "a skeptic" and also an arsehole. Aloysius the Gaul (talk) 20:18, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Credulously repeating transphobic talking points doesn't seem very "skeptical" to me. If skepticism is to be a brand to flaunt and not a mode of inquiry, then sure, Dawkins is a skeptic. And skepticism has lost all meaning. Carthage (talk) 21:02, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

What - one has to be skeptical about absolutely everything, and can't hold other (crap) positions on various topics? Doesn't sound like anything/one I would recognise as a human being - a robot of some sort perhaps.Aloysius the Gaul (talk) 00:46, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Skepticism is about accepting as "true" things for which there is good evidence. The fact that an individual skeptic might not follow this process in some cases says nothing about the validity of skepticism. Claiming skepticism has "lost all meaning" because a particular individual individual who self-identifies as a skeptic gets some stuff wrong - well, that would seem to be the reaction of a human being.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 09:43, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Did Dawkins really 're-affirm Christianity'? I might be mis-remembering here, but I thought it wore a qualified positivity towards cultural Christianity, which was perhaps said in regards towards the tame Church of England variant rather than fundies. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:44, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I believe that he said that he was "Cultural Christian" - making a distinction between someone who believes Christianity is true and someone who likes the trappings of Christmas like Christmas Carols.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 09:16, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Assassination of UnitedHealthcare Executive Brian Thompson

NBC News Link. While the specific motive is still unknown, obvious internet speculation is that it is vengeance/justice against the company and the executive. My initial reaction is that it seems long overdue for such an event to have happened; I've read articles and stories about the atrocity of American private healthcare, and have seen the many memes (if they're any indication of general public opinion and state of things). Checking close to a dozen different subreddit posts regarding the assassination and top comments are users agreeing or outright praising the killing. Will the assassination cause industry leaders and politicians to take real action to improve things? Or simply double down and increase security for such executives? I'm of the opinion that with America's general decline, especially with other recent events, the latter will happen and more violence against business executives can be anticipated. Impiricism (talk) 22:17, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Taking "the pulse of America" from social media is a fool's errand in some ways, but the one thing I noticed is that, on the socials, the CEO grave-pissing comments actually were spread pretty in a relatively bipartisan fashion. Both certain very Trumpism oriented boards and more liberal / progressive boards were, if not engaging in "Fuck UnitedHealthCare" stories, making jokes about "pre-existing conditions" and "out-of-network" hospitals and other things insurance companies use to jack up bills. And there was very little push-back at all. If there was, it often was more in the style of that famous Clarence Darrow quote about obituaries.

Now, er, the polls on American healthcare don't *quite* reflect the !!!SOCIAL MEDIA ANGER!!!, which is what you'd expect (social media attracts blowhards like lamps attract moths). But they do reflect the reality of American healthcare: a meh-quality system with outrageous expenses due to entrenched monopolies jacking prices for the benefit of the ruling class. The overall "pulse of the people" is probably not as brash and bloodthirsty as the always angry socials, but American healthcare being shit seems to be one thing most Americans agree on these days.

(I'll wait on the actual motive, if it comes out at all that is, to comment on anything on that angle.) BobJohnson (talk) 00:32, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

The result will be simple; they'll withdraw more behind gated communities, bodyguards and bulletproof glass believing that 'it's not safe anymore'. There shall be little to nil actual introspection on how this situation ended up happening, even when they one day wake up and realise they're living in a horrible 'rich person's paradise' like say, South Africa or Brazil where you've always got two sets of razor-wire and an armed guard between themselves and 'the ordinaries'. A few years ago I started to wonder whether at least some of them had started to appreciate actually living in a land where class tensions were sufficiently low enough to allow them to say, go shopping or walk in the park without having a real risk of being robbed/kidnapped/attacked [ie have a smaller bit of cake with a smile rather than a bigger bit with a knife in it] but I don't think they are either smart enough or give enough fuck to actually think this through. KarmaPolice (talk) 01:08, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

The United States corporate elite is legendarily short-sighted and callous so I agree with KP-learning from this assumes they have the capacity to realize or care their actions might somehow be harmful to a lot of other people. Can't wait to see this used by private health insurance apologists to say anybody advocating for expanding healthcare access is a terrorist. "BRIAN THOMPSON 12/24 NEVER FORGET"-Flandres (talk) 01:30, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

A bit of a tangent, but this reminds me of an interview with a person who's job is to make retreats/redoubts/bunkers for the ultra-rich I read a bit back. That one of the questions they keep on asking them is 'how could we keep the staff in-line when normality ends' ie they're suspecting the say civilisation crumbles said staff will turn on them [esp say, their security detail]. When they suggested that, y'know perhaps treating them like fellow human beings with worth and generally being 'a good boss' now to ensure loyalty in the future, they usually got looks of confusion and amazement - they wanted to hear about shock collars and loyalty drugs instead. Says a more about their thought processes than anything else. KarmaPolice (talk) 03:00, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Can you send a link to the interview? I wanna read it and share it with others. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 16:16, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Alas, I read it a while back on my phone [which is Incognito'd up to hell] so I don't have it to hand. I'll try to remember how I found it last time and hope the links still exist... KarmaPolice (talk) 16:19, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

@KarmaPolice Did you find it? TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 00:57, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Was this the interview in question? Your description rang a bell. Carthage (talk) 09:24, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

All I have to say is that the memes on Twitter about this incident are a bunch of bloodthirsty cringe. Le sigh. LeCapraGrande (talk) 04:06, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

US v. Skrmetti

So, I'm sure you know that SCOTUS is about to allow states to ban gender-affirming care for minors soon, no doubt about that. But I am confused, the article linked in WIGO world implies that SCOTUS could go a step further and decree that all gender affirming care is banned for all individuals, regardless of age, nationwide. Is that true? Why didn't they use this same line of logic for Dobbs to grant zygotes personhood to ban Abortion nationwide? That would've saved the forced-birth movement a lot of time & headache. If this Skrmetti shit is true, then it looks like the timeline of eroding human rights is gonna be a lot shorter than anticipated. I am a trans man who can't leave the country due to a criminal record. I've resigned to the fact that I'll likely die soon, either facing the barrels of a firing squad or the clawed-marked metal interior of a gas chamber. At this point I gave up fighting for my rights, I accepted that it's not worth fighting in a world that rejects me for who I am. At this point I am sitting back and enjoying these last few months I have left. SpongeyRobert (talk) 04:23, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

The only reason firing squads exist is because killing a human takes a psycholocical blow on the psyche. Having multiple people take the shot ensures that no single shooter has to take full personal responsibility for taking another human being's life (also sometimes they use blanks except one, thereby making it ambiguous who shot the killing shot.)

Republicans have suffeciently dehumanized the 'other' to the point that I believe that none of them would have qualms about personally killing an 'other' in fact a lot of them seem eager to do so. There won't be any MAGA firing squads. We know Nazis were A-okay shooting people one-by-one into a grave they were forced to dig, and did not suffer psychological effects from hearing people screaming in agony in the gas chambers, simply because they don't believe those are people being murdered. US Republicans have already reached that point. ^{— Unsigned, by: 2001:67c:2628:647:9::6c / talk / contribs}

this is the dorkiest thing I've read in a long time. Nobody hates nerds, geeks are fine, why are you being total dorks? It's fine, it's fun in its own way but man. Do y'all need a group wedding? There are people not doing well, I imagine you haven't thought about that yet. Torrent (talk) 09:33, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

The SCOTUS does not have the power to ban gender-affirming care for everyone. That can only be done at the national level, and with the narrow Republican majority in the House and a Senate that is not filibuster-proof, I would expect no such thing. What they do have the power is to "shape narratives" and essentially say states can make this law or can't make this other law. We'll see in the end what the main decision text ends up saying as far as the scope of this goes. (We'll probably also get yet another insane "concurrent opinion" from Clarence Thomas since Ketanji Brown Jackson compared the case to Loving v. Virginia, tee hee.)

In other words, from my perspective, you don't have to leave the country. You just have to, if one can, move out of states addicted to culture war bullshit into more minority rights protecting ones. (Fortunately, in my opinion, most of the states addicted to culture war bullshit are shitholes. Sometimes naturally beautiful shitholes granted, but shitholes nonetheless.) BobJohnson (talk) 15:02, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes; courts only have power of interpretation of existing laws - they can't simply make new laws on a whim. What's more, the higher 'batshit' rating their interpretation is, the chances of a shout of 'Clarence Thomas has made his decision, now let him enforce it!' rises and there's only so many batshits they can shit out before their very legitimacy becomes hugely compromised with not just large swathes of the Big Public, but even some actual judges and lawyers. Like with Congress and President - I strongly suspect SCOTUS very well might end up going 'too far', mistaking juryrigging and small swings of public opinion to be a 'huge mandate' to 'reshape America'. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:23, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

While it is de jure true that ”courts only have power of interpretation of existing laws” and thus ”can't simply make new laws on a whim”, the kind of tortuous (re)interpretation the current SCOTUS applies does indeed de facto amount to what is derisively known as “legislating from the bench”.

The right wing SCOTUS judges obviously don’t care a fig about what the legislation says and have little to no respect for either the legislative or the executive branch if the politics of these branches don’t chime with those of the judges, or if they act in ways the judges don’t like. As long as the judges think they can get away with such “judicial legislation” they have proven that they will apply it.

For instance, I would not be surprised if they decide to resurrect the Comstock Act, despite it being a dead letter for decades, which, in practice, would likely amount to legislating a new national ban on shipping abortifacients and thus in effect amount to a ban on at least medical abortion (which is the most prevalent form).

In addition, such a “Comstock resurrection” could also possibly include a practical ban on contraceptives (because they can’t be shipped either) and might also be used to crack down on whatever these judges consider “obscene” online, as well as in physical format by making physical shipping or online transmission of such material illegal.

The practical difference between such radical “reinterpretation” and actual new legislation is minimal, because the societal effects are largely the exact same. In this regard, it’s also worth noticing that Robert’s in particular likes to play the long game and thus only incrementally whittle away at legislation he doesn’t like in order to keep up some degree of professional judicial facade.

Yes, this specific case is “only” about whether gender affirming care can be legally banned at the state at all, and as such the result would not amount to a national ban. However, if the right wing SCOTUS majority does find such state bans to be constitutional, we have already seen a template in how the next act plays out by what happened in the case of abortion. If, at some later date, the SCOTUS’s right wing majority can find some way to “reinterpret” some federal law to say that it constitutes a ban on such care, I would not be surprised if it did.

However, I think it would be more in line with the SCOTUS ratfuckery, if they end up targeting the drugs needed for gender affirming care, rather than outright banning such care itself. But the end result will basically be the same: Sure, you have the right to a treatment (abortion might very well see this development, if the Comstock Act is resurrected), just a shame you can’t get the drugs needed to actually treat you, because they have either been banned or can’t legally be shipped to you/your provider. ScepticWombat (talk) 04:53, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't disagree that the Roberts court tries to actively legislate from the bench etc. However, a couple of comments.

A) The specific case involves transgender affirming care, specifically hormones and puberty blockers, for minors. I think it will be tougher to try and do a more generic ban on these drugs; these same drugs are used for quite a number of applications, such as fertility medicine, various (older) age related treatments, and some cancers. There's a little bit of a "dog and pony show" element to the minor hormone therapy bans, because the number of minors currently on hormone treatment is relatively small. Not that these bills aren't obviously bullshit (because there's definitely a few cases where such is needed, of course, and legislatures are trying to override doctors / medicine here) but it's a "safer" target for the culture war assholes to rage on since minor hormone transgender therapy is not terribly common. (Now, as demonstrated with the abortion debate, many culture warrior politicians seem to be total dumbfucks on medicine, so I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more shithole culture warrior states try to go on a full ban path... and, similar to abortion, accelerate the brain drain of medical professionals out of the shithole state as a result. The "smarter" culture warrior assholes would not do this, though.)

B) A full revival of the Comstock Act would require legislation as well, I believe... which means it won't happen. I also think that signs point to Donald Trump not making the fundie wishlist a priority this time. So... while Trump could fuck up some things abortion wise with executive orders and budget thingies... I'm not sure he would. This does not mean, though, that the Roberts court will not fuck things up abortion care by allowing clearly un-Constitutional anti-abortion state laws to pass muster (such as, from my perspective, Idaho's "abortion travel ban"). It's just another situation where the Democrat led states are not going to back down without a fight. In fact, if the Roberts court *really* goes overboard, I can see this something akin to a Dred Scott situation where some states start actively raising their middle finger towards the Supreme Court and carrying on. Anti-abortion blowhards are a minority after all. BobJohnson (talk) 15:04, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Which I alluded to above: 'Thomas and Roberts have made their decision, now let them enforce it!'. State DAs could refuse to investigate. Jury nullification is a thing - in fact, one of the reasons English law got reformed in the 19th Century was the increasing cases where juries refused to convict on cases they knew carried the death penalty. Judges, even if put in a position where they had to convict someone on an 'odious law' could effectively nullify it themselves by making the punishment paltry to non-existence. State-level politicians could order all LEOs they have control of to not assist investigations regarding it. How much of this is legal? Well, that's for SCOTUS to rule. Now we get to the position where Washington would have to in effect decide whether to force the recalcitrant states into line on this. However, I'm more pessimistic than BobJ on this because it doesn't take a genius to work out that the Venn overlap of 'open defiers of Dominionist SCOTUS' and 'hates the Orange One' is gonna be about 98% and it's quite possible that some swamp-critter in his court slithers up to sat 'this is the time to sweep your enemies out' and 'they're all libruls so they won't actually fight'. And unfortunately, I could see this happening because a lot of MAGA etc don't seem to think 'the left' will ever really fight back for their rights/freedoms [while I think they will].

If the Comstock Act is still on the books, then it is the law. In legal terms, it doesn't matter one jot whether the parts being used were last used last week or last century. Here in Blighty, we've had situations where 'dead letter laws' have had legal necromancy applied to them; off the top of my head there was gay sex [1950s], witchcraft [1940s] and blasphemy [1970s] - and before you say it, the legal principles which led to said necromancy are also in American law. The threat is not 'legislating from the bench' [this happens all the time in Anglo legal systems, it's called case law] but the risk that SCOTUS pulls some blatantly politically-biased decision out of sync with both public opinion and legal precedent and does not really have any decent legal arguments to why they've torn up perhaps decades of case law is in my judgement, very real. Again, this comes down to asking 'does the MAGA SCOTUS have enough self-awareness to not go too far, to not trash their own legitimacy in the eyes of the general public/wider legal system and not fuck off so many that 'SCOTUS reform' becomes a rallying cry in the next election?'

I charge Democrats with legislating laziness on this part. That like Roe/Wade, they relied on a 'mud foundation' of SCOTUS case law rather than putting down a 'concrete foundation' of actual legislation - every Democrat President since then has enjoyed a period of trifecta [though often not long] which means they could have put in, for example a 'backstop provision' of 'rape/incest/unviability' abortion law. KarmaPolice (talk) 16:06, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Is it laziness, or is it calculated? Abortion is/was a useful wedge issue to drum up voters. Carthage (talk) 06:51, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

It's the worst of both worlds, Laziness by the Democrats in the face of calling them baby eating, election rigging, gun taking, FEMA camping, absolute villains. They are nonsense arguments, but they have stuck. Ratfucking lasts generations, it's amazing how much longer a disprovable notion lasts on the conservative side, church coffee circles talk nonsense, that was the Falwell gambit and it's still paying off. Torrent (talk) 08:07, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

One could certainly point to many examples of gun taking, if not baby eating. Accumulator (talk)

I say it was laziness. That they didn't want to put in the effort of fighting the antis, even though in this particular case I believe there would have been enough 'moderate' pro-bumpers who would have been 'convinceable' to support this hypothetical bill [after all, being pro-bump doesn't automatically mean you're a callous fuckwit who thinks all women should be forced to carry to term something which would literally kill you - even the fucking Catholic Church accepts this!]. But this is pure Third Way again; 'never do anything which might give a reason to someone to not vote for you'. KarmaPolice (talk) 17:15, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to the tenth amendment the states/people already have the authority to do so. Prohibiting states from making such laws/policies is not among the powers granted to the federal government to begin with. Accumulator (talk) 11:57, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

You're wrong. All sane-ish legal bods say a 'Federal abortion ban' would be a) constitutional and b) override any state legalisation. Therefore, a 'Federal abortion backstop law' would also be equally constitutional and overriding the state level because it's the exact same case but reversed. Only pro-bump biased lawfare types would use your 'Originalist' argument, which I personally respect a bit more if they also accepted the 'right to bear arms' meant 'the right for white men to own a Brown Bess musket or other weapons existing as of 1791' because that's what the authors were thinking of at time of writing.

If such a bill came into law and then SCOTUS struck it down using the above argument, there would be hell to pay. Mainly for them. KarmaPolice (talk) 16:08, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

How's that? The amendments are right there in black and white. It's one thing to say something like "the government is capable of doing this in spite of the constitution" or perhaps even "they should do this even though it's unconstitutional", but quite a different thing to condone an obvious falsehood. There's nothing vague or unclear about those amendments. Accumulator (talk) 19:51, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Duh, Supremacy Clause. Fuck loads of case law of SCOTUS upholding that. The only work-around which isn't total batshit is to rule that it's unconstitutional. And that's only partly batshit, and would cause a political shitstorm which I suspect the MAGA court would ultimately not survive.

And stop inserting your comments within others. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:27, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

The supremacy clause would only apply to the powers that the federal government is explicitly granted by the constitution. "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.", "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The supremacy clause is obviously not a carte blanche provision for the federal government to impose its will upon the states. Accumulator (talk) 02:53, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

The Constitution says whatever the SCOTUS rules it says. That is why 'it said' abortion was a right in the 70s but it wasn't in the 20s. The Federal Government has assumed powers over shit which to an Originalist reading of Da Rules it shouldn't have. You're missing the point; that if a political trifecta has signed a bill into law and SCOTUS waddles in and says 'it's unconstitutional', giving iffy reasoning for this ruling, it has divided on clearly partisan lines and contradicting perhaps centuries of precedent - what, you think all those politicians will hold their heads in shame, peg forgiveness from the court and pledge to never speak of it again? Like fuck they would. A lot of the public would be fucked off too - because it would reek of ideological 'judicial activism'. KarmaPolice (talk) 03:04, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

"what, you think all those politicians will hold their heads in shame, peg forgiveness from the court and pledge to never speak of it again?" No I don't, but they've all taken oaths - if they neglect to uphold the constitution or violate it outright, they commit an act of perfidy. That this has become routine and commonplace is not something I would consider a mitigating factor in their favor. Only courtiers and toadies defend this sort of behavior instead of simply calling it what it is. Accumulator (talk) 04:32, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

What do you think of this youtuber I want to see some balanced opinions and your thoughts on him.

The youtuber is called Think Before You Sleep, he does political videos and has some points I can agree with such as the oversexualization of media being annoying.^{— Unsigned, by: 3.25.191.5 / talk}

Isn't that the guy who led to Illymation being doxxed because he spread misinfo about her? TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 18:41, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

And also an alt-right anti-woke channel that also spat on Noah Samsen. His opinions are so perfectly balanced. (Why does such scum exist?) 🇷🇸 Serbian Arbiter (What would you have your arbiter do?) 20:28, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

From what I understand, you got it backwards. Illymation launched a campaign against him because she didn't like his video about her, including false allegations and a bunch of false reports from YouTube. In response his followers went after her. -Cory 47.16.116.201 (talk) 21:40, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

That said, as long as you can avoid using him as your central world view and too much of the manosphere stuff, he has some points

"Addicts are liars; so are food addicts"

"Willpower is a limited resource, if you want to lose weight get rid of temptation; get rid of snacks, prep meals in advance so there's 0 thought, etc."

"Learn to cook, start with simple things like X and Y"

"Toxic people WILL destroy you if you let them"

"Learn the signs of someone with childhood sexual trauma, e.g. childlike high pitched voice"

etc -Cory 2600:1017:B42F:C7D5:0:4:80DE:A601 (talk) 22:24, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

What exactly is he talking about when he says the "oversexualization of media"? How women are objectified in media? Or that "there's too many goddamn queers in my fucking video games now"? Carthage (talk) 23:08, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

The headline video is "why woke people are making everything ugly". Anyone who uses woke as many times as this YouTuber does can be safely ignored. Also: gym bro and gamer that seems to hate women and is obsessed with fat shaming. Whee.

(Helpful hint to people obsessed with .1% bodyfat and all the "Hollywood body image" that is far from healthy for men and women alike: many men and women actually prefer a little bit of cushion on their mate! It's more cuddly.) BobJohnson (talk) 02:43, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I suspected as much. Carthage (talk) 02:47, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

It's actually more important than merely 'preferring a bit of cushion'. Depending on age, genetics, ethnicity and activity level, the 'athlete' band for bodyfat is about 10% for men and 15% women. To push it under this [be it as a supermodel, bodybuilder or dancer] is dangerous; it starts to really fuck up your ability to heal from injuries and so on. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:04, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Woke scolding is such a disingenuous frame. The original term 'woke' was from black communities to nudge them towards code switching and police compliance to stay literally alive. It never had anything to do with a liberal agenda. Just like Climate change is a made up term because Global Warming was too specific, but now we are experiencing global warming. Much like being woke actually means watch out for racism. Much like being a person who labels anything woke, or critical race theory (we haven't heard that in a while) or blame DEI on anything but corporatism, it's okay to let these terms go away from their snarl uses. Stay woke. But also, what is this argument about people and body types? It's not related to being 'woke' in its original form. Torrent (talk) 07:40, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

That's what snarl words often become: generic insults that have no real meaning, other than "wah! I don't like it!". It's been part of the Republican propaganda tactics for a long time. The previous terms were things like "politically correct" and "liberal" in the 1980s-1990s. However, unlike what I remember of those terms, "woke" and "DEI" in particular are more frequently used as substitutes for your more egregious Other demonizing insults (like "nigger" and whatnot). Also, the word twisting involved with the 1980s-1990s terms were not so spectacularly weird ("DEI" is even weirder than "woke" as it originally was a business strategy pushed by highbrow MBA types).

A significant too-loud part of the gaming community seems to sadly hate women as a whole (hi, Gamergate!)... and my impression reading the socials is that, while this YouTuber might not go *quite* as far as the worst cellar dweller (according to the Wikis he actually dated another YouTuber... but very briefly, natch...), it's pretty close, at least from the video titles. There's a lot of bitterness about women, feminism, "fat acceptance", and fat women (one notices the lack of fat dudes in his complaints about the fat). If he stopped making angry hateful YouTube videos (and stopped being angry at women in general), maybe he'd get more dates... but as of now, he seems to firmly be in that self-reinforcing so-called "red pill" mindset. The generic brainless "wah! I don't like it!" woke insult fits perfectly with this type. BobJohnson (talk) 18:40, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Actually, TBYS made a video mocking Illymation for doing a "fat acceptance" video (even editing her avatar on his video thumbnail to potray her as mentally unstable), insulting her personal appearance and saying she was "endagering children by telling them is OK to be obese" (evidently, her videos being animated mean they're made for kids), in turn, his followers started harassing Illy and that's why she asked on Tumblr to report his video. Of course, TBYS played the victim and said he was being "deplatformed" and all that crap. Illy wasn't wrong in that, the guy is an insufferable asshat who just by his voice alone is probably a Stonetoss-like smug punchable face. Takenouchi Sora (talk) 03:58, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Question on editing etiquette

I've been interested in helping the Socialism article, like trying to find citations and change what might be contradictory or wrong information (considering the amount of pages which link to the Socialism article, I think it would be good to at least put it on par with the average article, even if it might not be particularly missional).

But I'm not really sure how the editing etiquette works. I've already read the Help:Etiquette article, but from what I've seen lurking in Rationalwiki, it seems like user often make what should be "controversial" edits without bringing it to the Talk page first. Should every kind of edit like this be brought to the Talk page, even ones which only change a few sentences?

I'm still new here, so I'm still figuring out how things work. Thanks! -- LunaAHHHHH 00:01, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Purely personal opinion here.

If you are expanding existing text, adding better refs, prettyfying it etc - don't see the need to Talk it before hand. If you're doing a significant rebuild, changing the meaning of the article and/or suggesting anything 'major', then yes - Talk it first. In this particular case, I would suggest splitting the whole article so the main 'variants' can be covered in greater detail but the main page doesn't become a doorstopper - for example how I did Technocracy a few months back. This also allows you to work on it over time - for example, you could sort out the 'précis paragraphs' on each main variant now, while saving the more detailed 'daughter' pages later. This is where the Talk pages are helpful; you might be able to find another RWian to tackle the 'Democratic Socialism' daughter, while another does 'Marxism' etc. KarmaPolice (talk) 01:23, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, but I'm not sure if I understand. By checking the Fossil Record of the Technocracy article, it seems like the rebuilding process was done with a single edit and no major discussion in the Talk page about the edit proposals and rearrangements. I've also seen other article revamps which share this trait, like the one which happened with 2016 United States presidential election (although the edits are more spread out). Right now, what I've been trying to do was really just making new topics on the Talk:Socialism page about a few of the problems I've found, although I think this strategy seems pretty different to the ones used in those other revamps. I feel like doing something similar to what was seemingly done in those other article reconstructions would risk many potential controversial edits considering the nature of the topic and the varying different opinions on the exact definitions and interpretations of the subject and its branches, but following my current strategy would get annoying for everyone quite quickly due to the amount of proposals which would most likely need to be discussed (if the revamp proposal was on the level of Technocracy or 2016 United States presidential election at least, which might not be fully the case with the Socialism article). Am I missing something or was the former strategy the one used for those reconstructions? -- LunaAHHHHH 02:08, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Be bold. There is also the work in progress template you can slap on the article you're currently revamping. So in this case, it would be {{WiP|LunaAHHHHH}}. Carthage (talk) 02:15, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I think to some extent you can afford to 'be bold' on Socialism, as it is fairly problematic, and one of those reasons is from what I can tell it never had a single editor look at it as a single text [which is why you're finding inconsistencies and your 'to do list' is lengthening each time you look at it] . I also found this with the George Orwell article I overhauled earlier this year. I cited Technocracy only on the idea of how you might be able to lay Socialism out - in that a lot of the text on 'variants' and so on can be split off from the main page and tackled later / by others. I didn't Talk about Technocracy because I encountered it as a barely-useful semi-stub, I did Talk about Orwell beforehand because it was a Silver article. If I found an active-ish user was fairly committed to a particular page [they'd created a lot of the content etc] I may be inclined to drop a line on their own Talk page about it. KarmaPolice (talk) 02:53, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I see, thanks everyone for the help! I think I might experiment a bit with a copy of the article on one of my sandboxes beforehand, though. I still have to plan out some of the edits more. -- LunaAHHHHH 03:20, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

forget the sandbox. just do what i do: make the edit (or a bajillion, if you so feel you need to tweak stuff) and then explain yourself on the talk page. The G (talk) 07:14, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Just make the edits and, if you feel a little unsure, explain what you are up to on the talk page.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 12:16, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Draftspace/sandboxes have their uses; for example if you're doing a complete rebuild of an article but don't want to have the WIP go over the existing one yet. You might also desire folks to comment etc on the draft while you're doing it - esp if for example, you're tackling a controversial subject and want to suss out where the right angle is [though you can also use the SB for that; I did once when I needed help in the Corbyn/antisemitism thing]. KarmaPolice (talk) 17:09, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

I was mostly making edits on a sandbox to plan out before editing the main article, and maybe getting some new feedback as well. Would making a draft rather than a sandbox be better for feedback? I wasn't sure if making a draft of an already existing article was allowed or not. Or maybe it actualy is just better to edit the main article directly instead of a copy. I'm still not sure how to approach this considering all the different strategies. I hope that doesn't matter much as long as the result is good enough. -- LunaAHHHHH 17:52, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

To my knowledge, there's no rule of having both a main/draft of the same article, though if you leave it too long the draft may end up being put up for deletion. The only operational difference between draft and sandbox is that the former is still editable by anyone, so it's possible that someone might come in halfway through and do something completely different. Sandbox, in this case might be best if you're forking the content in mainspace to work on and don't want anyone to mistake it for the original. Both have the advantage over tinkering with mainspace that we have some 'prettification' editors here [sorting out bare URLs, spellchecking, grammar etc] which means they won't start doing their stuff on your work until you sent it off into mainspace.

As a rule, RW is not that fussed over 'the ways and means' of article-creation, as long as the final end product is better than what came before it. I've used three different methods myself - the 'bit by bit' style in Orwell, the 'all at once rebuild' with Technocracy and the 'hiving off to a daughter page' with Metrication in the United Kingdom [originally intended to merely be an improvement to the UK section of the metric system page, I soon realised there was too much and should be a solo page]. However, make use of the 'show preview' box while editing - nobody likes to see a fossil record which has like six pages showing us you were dicking about formatting or something. KarmaPolice (talk) 18:32, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Question about the latest Clogosphere WIGO

New York Post: "Cali counted votes until Republican lost — do Dems just not care how bad this looks?"

Why is this getting downvoted, exactly? From my perspective, it seems like the WIGO is meant to point out and criticize the New York Post's article, but the amount of downvotes makes me second guess if it's actually taking the article seriously. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 22:36, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

It's getting downvoted because the source is shit (a tabloid), and because it's an opinion piece, not news. Bongolian (talk) 00:26, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

"This is RationalWiki's snarkilicious take on some of the more "WTF?" or egregious blog posts, editorials, videos and social media posts out there." I would think that NY Post article fits right in then. Carthage (talk) 00:28, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes, true. Maybe it's just people voting up or down for different reasons. The WIGO World page has this at the top "Voting is meant to reflect the quality and relevance of a news item — not whether said item brings good or bad news.", but the WIGO clogs has no equivalent. Obviously, quality is not relevant to the clogs, but relevance is. Bongolian (talk) 06:03, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

I would advise people not to pay too much attention to the WIGO voting system. Carthage (talk) 07:40, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Collapse of the Assad regime in Syria

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/dec/08/syria-bashar-al-assad-damascus-rebels-latest-updates-live

Looks like a government collapses. What is next? --Trans Fem Agenda 12:51, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

While the collapse has been less 'sudden' than outsiders think [here's a Foreign Policy thinkpiece from July which shows how the regime was clearly crumbling and it's economy has been falling to bits for years] I suspect it was still too sudden for the opposition forces to really start thinking of the 'post Assad regime'. There's two complicating factors; the fact the opposition was not in anyway a 'unified front' [unlike say, the Afghan Taliban] where senior members can simply have govt posts distributed to them and the looks that part of said collapse was due to significant defections from the ruling regime.

In short; classic power vacuum. We have a rag-tag of Sunni opposition groups with no guiding ideology past 'get rid of Baathists', a load of defected Baathists who are hoping to retain as much power as realistically possible to stop revenge/justice, the 'sectarian' forces of Alawites, Druze and Christian fearing future pogroms [esp as a lot (esp Alawites) are heavily tainted by being part of the Assad regime], a load of very well-armed Kurds which have no real interest of being in this 'Syria' thing [which Turkey also hates like poison], a few 'technocratic' types who'd like to simply 'get shit running again' and a plethora of organised crime groups who will fight to either coopt, defang or destroy anyone who resists their control of whatever they fucking want. What else? Oh, remains of ISIS still wandering the desert [literally] and a load of prison camps filled with those cargos of poison which might end up being 'opened'.

The only 'good' thing in this case is that due to lack of Western resources, bandwidth and in Trump's case, actually giving a shit about the situation that a neocon/lib 'installing of democracy' is very unlikely to happen. Which sounds cuntish, but let's remember this shit does not work. Perhaps the most realistic 'best case' is that within days, we see a troika of major faction leaders form, install a somewhat 'rough and ready' power structure and then successfully rope in the majority of the minor 'acceptable' factions in a kind of modern feudal system. KarmaPolice (talk) 15:54, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Al-Julani has made a remarkable rhetorical transformation these last few years. Let's see how sincere it was.-Flandres (talk) 16:42, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

It wouldn't surprise me if the Kurds went for a separate Kurdish state. That was the de facto position before the fall of Assad anyway. On the other hand, Erdoğan would have a fit. ^{— Unsigned, by: Bob M / talk / contribs}

There's rumours that Assad is either a) dead or b) in the UAE. It seems only two 'trackable' planes left govt-controlled areas yesterday - an civilian Airbus going to Sharjah and a military Il-76 which seemed to be heading towards the Russian naval base on the coast, but then veered eastwards, began to lose height and then vanished from the long-range radar. It could have been shot down [the Syrian military had this capability so rebels could have got their mitts on it] but it's also possible they turned the transponders off and were going to make a run over northern Iraq into Iran.

At last report, Assad has taken "asylum" in Russia. This makes sense. If nothing else, it would look bad--even for Putin-- to abandon the man they have supported for years to the vagaries of revolutionary "justice", which could mean anything from exile (already done?) to a firing squad. Kencolt (talk) 19:28, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Totally irrelevant, I know. But I have a bit of a morbid curiosity to topic of the 'end of dictators'. KarmaPolice (talk) 17:55, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Why does Syria matter? I'll be honest and say all I know of the country I learned in the last hour skimming RationalWiki and other pages about the place... doesn't seem to be any "good guys" at all in civil war that was occurring... so why the need for any foreign intervention? Innocents are dying, yes; and more would likely, and have died, with interventions. Is Syria so important for economics or the nonsense "balance of power" chess game that politicians play? The country is in ruins from the prolonged fighting anyways apparently. If a nation bordering Syria wants to get involved for their own security, I could understand that reasoning... though it could be argued how positive doing so would be compared to going after domestic organizations that are involved and profiting off the situation. Countries like Canada and the US, truly why does Syria matter? Better to let the country have some time to fix itself, one way or another. Impiricism (talk) 18:34, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Realpolitik time.

1/ Syria has a butt-load of advanced military kit we wouldn't like to see fall into the wrong hands.

2/ It's believed Syria has chemical/biological weapons we really wouldn't like to see go walkies.

3/ We don't want another massive Syrian refugee wave hitting Europe.

4/ We don't want a prolonged power vacuum because it may lead to the restoring of 'peak ISIS' [remember when they got powerful enough they basically 'marched on Baghdad', the Iraqi Govt shat itself, armed anyone who would resist and thank fuck, actually did?]

5/ The fall of Assad cuts of a main supply-line to Hezbollah and we'd prefer it not to be restored.

6/ If we can get a mildly anti Iranian/Russian regime in Damascus this means those Russian bases are gone and weakens their power/status in-region.

7/ If we can get a mildly anti Israeli regime in Damascus this means outright war is unlikely [the other option being 'rabidly anti-Israel'.

8/ It's probably best that Syria does not become an obvious puppet/vassal of Turkey.

KarmaPolice (talk) 19:08, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

There are other points - some associated with what you have said. On (2) the reason that it is believed that the regime had chemical weapons is because it used them various times against it's own people. On (3) it is entirely possible that we will see a wave of Syrian leaving Europe and returning to Syria. That's that's going to depend on how the other points play out but it would only be a good thing it it happened.

It's also important because it demonstrates the current weakness of Syria's erstwhile supporters- Hezbollah, Iran and Russia.

I would argue that the secular groups fighting to get rid of Assad and the Kurds who fought against both ISIS and Assad (before Trump left them in the lurch) are the closest thing to "good guys" in the conflict.Bob^{"Life is short and (insert adjective)"} 19:29, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Do a foreign intervention to get rid of "weapons of mass destruction"... that sounds familiar; how did a backwater third-world country get such advanced weaponry in the first place again? For the other reasons listed, they are literally the bullshit "balance of powers" chess game mentioned. I know that a nation is likely putting itself at a disadvantage not playing such games when other unscrupulous entities will play... it does not make it any better though. The reasons are bullshit but I know that they're valid too... I just wish the world and people were different where those reasons would not exist. Impiricism (talk) 01:06, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Adding to the significance, the two bases that Russia has in Syria, one air and one naval, are Russia's only two military bases that are not located in a former Soviet state. The likelihood that Russia could retain either of those bases at this point is slim given that the leader of the strongest rebel group (HTS) has spoken against future foreign intervention in Syria. The loss of those bases would seem to significantly weaken Russia's global reach, particularly in Africa. Turkey would also benefit from the return of most of the 4-million Syrian refugees to Syria, and this is probably why Turkey was backing HTS despite, along with the US and Russia, labeling HTS as a terrorist group, and despite recently trying to negotiate their return with Assad. Israel also participated to some extent in Assad's downfall with regular bombings of the Syrian militia in Syria, probably adding to the existing demoralization. Why did the Syrian military collapse so quickly? Syrian military officers were reportedly being paid as little as the equivalent of $10/month! Russia has to be rethinking who they can cooperate with in future: it doesn't look like Israel or Turkey are possibilities in the near future. Three (Hamas, Hezbollah, Syrian Army) of four (Houthis in Yemen) of Iran's proxy armies are now greatly weakened or eliminated. It must be causing rethinking the wisdom of these decisions. There were more moderate politicians in Iran who questioned their wisdom in the past. The cost of supplying Hezbollah was very high for Iran over the years, particularly for a country under sanctions. Iranians have often complained about the cost of living, which is directly related to the sanctions and the adventurism. Bongolian (talk) 03:21, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Turkey's designs for Syria are just as self-interested as Iran's are/were. Turkey massacres Kurdish populations in Syria, Turkey has used Syrian mercenaries to conduct war crimes in Artsakh, and has engaged in forced deportations of Syrian refugees. If I was a Syrian Kurd, I would be very nervous right now. And while it is indisputably a good thing that Assad is gone, the group that has replaced him are literally just "not Al-Qaeda." We should be careful not to engage in whitewashing here. Carthage (talk) 08:16, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Israel is stealing more land in Syria. They just can't help themselves, can they? Carthage (talk) 08:08, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Just a note on the notion that pre civil war Syria was ”a backwater third-world country”. Syria was a fairly well educated society (as seen by a lot of the resourceful refugees who tended to have better chances of getting to Europe and often quickly found work).

Damascus used to be seen as one of the cultural and educational centres in the Arab world and the Ba’ath Party tended to look for inspiration to the USSR and its penchant for solid technical/engineering education, as it would both allow the training of industrial engineers more broadly and specifically those needed for a domestic arms industry.

You don’t have to be some industrial superpower to produce the kind of chemical weapons Syria was pursuing. As long as you have even a moderately sophisticated chemical industry and decide to dedicate state resources to it, getting chemical weapons is a lot easier than going nuclear.

As Syria had worked on its chemical weapons programme for literally decades (since daddy Assad took over in the 1970s) and had decided to arm itself to the teeth for yet another possible rematch with Israel (realising what that would mean in terms of crossing the US), it’s not a huge mystery that a state with a fairly well educated pre war population of more than 20 million (or at least enough of its workforce having the necessary qualifications), along with its own petrochemical industry and able to rely on oil exports for hard currency could and would field such weapons.

Indeed, you could argue that the large Syrian stockpile of chemical weapons was a move analogous to the massive stockpile of conventional weapons and extensive fortification programme in communist Albania when that country ended up being run by a dictator (Enver Hoxha) who had alienated the major surrounding powers. While Syria was never as isolated as Albania or had pissed off all of the major powers as much, it did end up not being that closely allied to any of them either and with a dictator (the elder Assad) who was keen on not being too reliant on foreign support, either. ScepticWombat (talk) 17:37, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Middle East question

I am not a Middle-East specialist - but is the Middle East likely to revert to the situation prior to the creation of the modern state system there? Anna Livia (talk) 00:21, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Prognostication is a fool's errand. Bongolian (talk) 06:22, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

We better throw out all that predictive science, then. In view of getting a plumber's quote before they do any work being the act of an idiot, I shall prove my foolishness by providing an opinion.

I'm not a middle east specialist, but I did live there for a bit in my childhood, in particular, on the Arabian Peninsula. (Next to the ARABIAN gulf. That country over on the other side? What country? I ran? what kind of name is that for a place? Purr sha? For cats?) That part of the middle east largely seems to be generally stable monarchies, so I doubt there'll be statelessness there any time soon. Further north, I think you'd have to figure out if a stateless region can survive when completely surrounded by belligerent regional state powers. But who am I to say, induction is for dum-dums! Namako (talk) 21:02, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

As various of the states have dissolved into 'local-religious-tribal-other groupings and factions etc (some of which overlap with persisting states) the possibilities can be considered. The alternatives might include the Ottoman Empire revived/some equivalent regional entity. Anna Livia (talk) 00:22, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Thoughts on this YouTuber?

Recently, I discovered the work of a guy named N0rtist who has been trying to do a creature-collector game project about various science topics, and I wanted to hear the community's opinions on his work. LeCapraGrande (talk) 03:33, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I watch him sometimes, and I like his designs; I don't get why you are asking this here of all places though. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 15:12, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Because enthusiasm about science is one of RationalWiki's things. LeCapraGrande (talk) 22:30, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Percentage of Atheists

I'm curious about the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and religious believers on RationalWiki. I feel like that would be a fun and interesting poll to do and help learn more about each other, especially for new members.

ModeratelyR3 (talk) 07:47, 9 December 2024 (UTC)ModeratelyR3

There was a RationalWiki community survey back in 2017 (RationalWiki:Saloon bar/Archive280#RationalWiki Community Survey 2017 (sticky)), for which that was one of the questions. Results are here:[2]^{— Unsigned, by: Bongolian / talk / contribs}

I might make my own survey for 2024/2025 since it's been 7, almost 8 years since 2017. TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 15:14, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Doctors and tyrants

Engineers and woo, meet doctors and dictators. Carthage (talk) 10:35, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Thinking about how surgeons and that are able to hold things together when assisting with nightmare injuries or illnesses, I've always thought that they must have some type of detachment from the people they're seeing (i.e it's just a piece of meat with maggots in it, definitely not a living person's gangrenous arm). Impiricism (talk) 15:30, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Hm. That does sound like something we could write an article on if we can find more sources to confirm that it's an actual trend and not some weird coincidence. LeCapraGrande (talk) 22:32, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I was recently in India on a work trip, and my much younger coworker and I were talking (through a translator) to a man who had 25 year old burns on both legs that never properly healed; our job was to ask what people could do to help him. When he showed them, scarred and sloughing off flaps of skin all over, we had opposite reactions. She's never seen anything like this, and was so upset she had to leave (which was fine, there's a reason we were together); I have seen a few gory things before, and I figured if he'd been the one with his legs burned raw for 25 years, I could stand there and talk to him for a couple minutes. As hard as it was to see, I was so much better off than he was that I owed it to him to stay there and hear him out. At the end, though I couldn't do anything right then and there, he thanked me and said it meant a lot that we were the first people who'd ever bothered to just ask him how someone could make his life better, that made it worth having done it. Takes a certain personality and mentality, for sure. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 06:31, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

In more general terms, I'm reminded of a comment from a reporter over the British doctor's strike earlier this year - 'negotiating with doctor's unions is terrible. They're full of doctors, who are hugely arrogant. I suspect it's due to them having to make life-death decisions over people every day'. Part of this could be a 'piece of meat' mentality caused by case-hardening but I also suspect there's a [mild] case of 'institutionalised narcissism' going on, partly because doctors need to make said judgement calls all the time and you can't do this if you're constantly riddled with doubt. From what I can tell, a lot of medical establishments [esp traditionally] are very hierarchical and frankly authoritarian - patients don't question staff, nurses don't question doctors, doctors don't question the dept heads etc. Like military people, this might indoctrinate a 'respect chain 'o command' mentality which ends up being in dictatorial regimes.

Lastly, we need to be a little wary in thinking all our doctor-tyrants wanted to be doctors. Some of the 'third world' examples might have become doctors because it was one of the very few chances of getting an advanced, Western education for free, and/or that they saw the 'respect' being given to the white coat. For a long time, a 'medical degree' was one of the few you could actually get from a university [the other one being 'theology', with the resultant effect of lots of not-very-religious imams/priests/etc taking positions of worldly power]. KarmaPolice (talk) 20:51, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

What do they mean by the Universe is nonlocally real?

So I saw a video that mentioned how physics showed that local reality isn't true, and I googled it to find the that Nobel Prize went to 3 scientists who had proved that in 2022. Apparently from what I understand it means that particles are impacted by other ones that aren't in the same area as them if they are entangled. But trying to sort out what it means exactly has been...knotty. I get conflicting accounts on how it says that reality can be real or local but not both.

Some posts I read suggests that it's proof of anti-realism: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/106476/what-are-the-ontological-implications-of-that-the-universe-is-not-locally-real#:~:text=Quantum%20mechanics%20is%20said%20to,a%20defined%20state%20before%20measurement.

Which I have personal doubts about since doesn't science posit an external reality to study. Also it would seem counterproductive to argue against measurement standards while citing one of the most precise and exacting sciences there is. From what I know about QM the math is rock solid, and also super advanced, so I'm not really sure that means anti=realism (nor am I really convinced by the other examples that top answer says).

I read the Scientific American article but was kinda disappointed by the sensationalism behind it, how physicists are "up in arms" over the upending of reality as we know it and how these three scientists made enemies in the scientific community, blah blah blah. It doesn't really get at the hard of why this is so massive, especially since it seems like knowing this doesn't really change our daily lives. Anyway here it is:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/

Popular Mechanics was the most disappointing one because it felt more like wild speculation than what the research actually showed, plus something about a paradox:

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62697436/quantom-paradox-not-real/

I feel like every new discovery in the field gets muddled by thousands of people who try to run away with it and draw conclusions that it's not saying. I'm pretty sure physics doesn't really have anything to say about realism, anti-realism, or idealism, but that hasn't stopped folks from trying. I just want to know what it means, because from the little I was able to parse it doesn't seem that disastrous.47.5.66.54 (talk) 19:00, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

(Non-expert opinion below)

So, the above relates to the concept of quantum entanglement -- where, unlike classic physics, individual quantum particles (we're talking things like photons / electrons / etc.) cannot be described independently... and in fact, two particles can behave the same without necessarily being near each other. Now, exactly how does this happen? Even one of the Nobel winners, John Clauser, has no clue how it works. But it is a real phenomenon, and apparently those physicists who are really good on these subjects are able to take these concepts and apply it to manipulating quantum entanglement states, which opens up some actual applications in actual cutting-edge things like quantum computing. I think the Nobel Prize website write-up on the 2022 physics prize is pretty good in giving a "pop science" explanation of what they did.

To me, there is a "toolbox" element to lots of science. Some things only make sense when looking at a certain level, some at another. Classic physics, for instance, works very well for many many things, but some observations and equations fall apart when you start looking at the "particle" level. This is where quantum physics comes in. "Locally real" is a special term in physics. Local = things can only be affected by other things in their immediate vicinity; "real" = the principle that objects have definite properties even when they aren't interacting with anything. Classic physics is for the most part a "locally real" phenomenon. Quantum physics, on the other hand, has "quirks". Of which the not-very locally-real quantum entanglement is one.

I personally wouldn't push this phenomenon towards anything philosophical (like general "anti-realism" or something) or applying to a higher-than-quantum level, given what I know (which admittedly is far from quantum expert, but still). Sure, quantum entanglement exists at a particle level, but once you get above that level, there is no such equivalent that I know of. It's a very specific thing. And one I guess we don't know a whole lot about the whys yet, even if we figured out that we maybe can use it as a tool. BobJohnson (talk) 20:10, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I guess it's not really anything to worry about on the classical level from what I see, I just get lost in people drawing crazy speculation every time something new comes out of it. I found another source that I think explains it decently, but I still don't get what is meant by the realism bit: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/733500/is-my-interpretation-of-the-underlying-idea-behind-this-2022-nobel-prize-story

Also at the classical level stuff doesn't seem to behave like this, so I'm not sure what to make of it.47.5.66.54 (talk) 01:05, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Some of it was about hidden variable approaches, but those get thrown out by a variety of theorems from the sixties. In that case, from a mathematical perspective it SOUNDS like maybe there can be no real manifold containing the system in a continuous way, but as far as I know, it's more about the EPR paradox and the implications of entanglement in general than something strictly mathematical.

I think the problem is exemplified by quantum teleportation. In view of the quantum teleporter, the nonlocality problem seems to come from the question: what state is the receiver's qubit in before they measure it? HOW and WHEN did that information get to it?

If you look at the whole process, it's kind of irrelevant - between the measurement we took to get the classical bits to send to the receiver and the final transformation, the receiver has no way of determining that they have the right state, and since the sender didn't know what it was anyway, there is no way for them to verify the experiment at any time. (Recall that in quantum mechanics, you can extract no exact information about a particular quantum state other than that it had a component that was not orthogonal to an eigenvector of the measurement operator corresponding to the outcome of the measurement).

Furthermore, the final qubit need not even have the same physical existence as the original. You can, in theory, teleport an electron spin into the polarity of a photon, for example. Or perhaps something exotic, like, 'this system has an even or odd hadron number'. More than nonlocality, I think the whole thing raises the more serious question 'what exactly is anything, anyway'?

Quantum field theory does still have essential mathematical problems that answers to these weird causal questions might help solve, but when I'm thinking about these things, I usually go with Dirac's "quantum mechanics is a calculus of results", where this kind of question is largely irrelevant, but that might be because I was taught this stuff in a maths degree. Namako (talk) 20:50, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Any Good Places For Rational AI-Focused Info/Discourse?

Anybody know of one? Most places are absolutely drowning in one flavor or another of either denialism/shillism/doomerism/etc without even attempting to be remotely objective. LessWrong in theory tries to be, but in practice...

The only decent place I've found over the last two years is https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ but it's almost strictly a population of folks putting currently available models to work right now and discussing the best ways to do that (not that I'm against that, it's very helpful), which means there's little discussion of where the tech might reasonably be going and social/economic/philosophical implications of it, outside of a marked preference for non-corporate controlled models and fear that the big players like OpenAI will get government to regulate them into non-existence under the guise of "safety" and "think of the children".

Glitch (talk)

“They” control the weather; a new conspiracy phenomena?

I don’t know if this topic has been discussed here before, I’m just noticing a new conspiracy thread on some social media feeds about “controlling the weather”. Majorie Taylor Greene and other conspiracy theorists/climate change deniers have spewed this in the past but it seems to have gained some traction even outside of conspiracy theorist cirles in the past few months. I have heard errounous argument claiming if one can do physics than they can most ceratin control the weather.SensaurC-137 (talk) 17:31, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it's new, but this is the first time I've heard of it from an elected person. Koafox (talk) 17:37, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Ah, another instance of "research paper abuse", again, something seen commonly with conspiracies. It sort of goes along with this old PHD Comics panel on the "science news cycle": how a small inconspicuous element in a dry research paper gets transformed to the point where Grandma is wearing a tin foil hat to protect herself from the evils of said research paper.

In 2014, there was a research team in a couple of universities who published a paper in Nature Photonics entitled "externally refulled optical filaments". This was a fairly dry paper about merely extending plasma channels in the air through lasers, with a wide variety of applications listed. Somehow, by the time CBS News got to talking about this paper, the headline changed: "Scientists think they can control weather with lasers". LOLWUT?

To be fair to CBS, both one of the researchers (Matthew Mills) and the University of Central Florida press release department over-focused on the "cloud seeding / induce rain and lightning" aspect of this for their press summaries... which, if you get a hold of the research paper, is barely in the text. Of course, the UCF press department has the nuance in the terms ("inducing rain and lightning", "artificially seeds") that the CBS News article ("control weather") does not.

I am guessing that since 10 years have passed since 2014 and the Google suggests nothing more after that date (edit: except for some early 2020s experiments done by the UAE), laser assisted cloud seeding has ended up proven to be more difficult than expected. Let alone controlling the weather or some bullshit like that. But I guess the story lives on in conspiracy land as "proof" that THEY CONTROL THE WEATHER (instead of "proof" that sometimes CBS News is a bit... sloppy.) A reminder to reporters to take care when making a headline. BobJohnson (talk) 18:47, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

The established and long-successful method of doing cloud seeding is to dump one of a range of substances into the air from an airplane to stimulate cloud formation.

To stimulate RAIN or other precipitation - not cloud formation. All those cloud seeding systems require the clouds to be present first. 20:20, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

As a general idea for use in conspiracies, controlling the weather is an ancient theme -- though traditionally ideas have been more religious and esoteric, with a shift towards sci-fi in modern times. Francis E. Dec for one believed the atmosphere had been re-engineered by an omnipotent "computer god", but had little to say about specifics in preserved rants. But more mainstream, well, it's not really about conspiracy theories and trends in them, as much as it is about politics and trends in it -- where conspiracy theory talk is generally becoming mainstreamed in some camps. The earlier stages of that Overton window shift involved conspirituality a.k.a. kookery (especially conspiracy stuff tied to good-vs-evil spiritual stuff) becoming visible online and gaining a much bigger audience. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 20:03, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Not that I mean to sound glib, but so what? Accumulator (talk) 18:00, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Its the sci-fi angle that intrigues me. Technological advancements and AI seems to have really sparked these conspiracies as of late.SensaurC-137 (talk) 21:53, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Does history rhyme?

'Don't repeat our mistakes'; Biden to Bibi.

The 'original mistake' being the 2003 Iraq War, where the Americans obliterated the Iraqi military, which meant that a huge power vacuum and knocking out perhaps the only pillar to national integrity. Result; twenty years of civil disorders, rebellions, factionalism, weak governments and external meddling. Is Israel making this mistake again?

Israel attacks Syrian air bases.

Israel destroys Syrian Navy.

Israel attacks hundreds of military bases.

The intention is clear; to 'while we can' to use the disorders to smash out/pull out as many of Syria's teeth and claws as possible, so no future Syria could really threaten Israel... well, for the foreseeable, at least. And when you think of some of the rebel's political ideology, some of the gear Syria has and the experience of Afghanistan... you can see their reasoning.

But let me present another side; the reasoning why I think this will ultimately make Israel less secure, not more.

Firstly, it is destroying what might be the last existing 'anti-fundie' faction in the land - after all, those officers in command etc stuck to Assad basically 'to the end' and thus hated groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. It means that a fundie takeover is more likely now as they hold a much bigger % of the weapons in the country now.

Secondly, it threatens to make Syria a 'hyper Lebanon'; because the remaining military will be so weak it will be unable to stop factions a la Hezbollah from bedding in and then turning their sights on Israel itself.

Lastly, it is going to utterly outrage not only Syrian opinion but general opinion within the wider Mid-East - that of a colonialist, 'Zionist supremacist' Israel deciding to dictate shit at the point of a sword and only a sword. That even if some folks intellectually accept 'it had to be done', emotionally they will be hugely angry - like the French are still sore at us Brits for Mers el-Kibir in 1940. The logic was correct - had to make sure the Germans didn't get a blue-water fleet - but the French felt it to be a betrayal, an attack by your own ally, another entry in the volume titled 'Perfidious Albion'.

KarmaPolice (talk) 19:42, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Writing Advice

I wanted to ask if anyone on the wiki has writing advice. I don't know if the wiki has some artists among scientists and academics, but if there are some then what would be good tips to writing a good story? I'm 25 and starting from almost scratch. Does anyone have advice for fiction and/or creative writing? And for academics, does anyone have advice to improve academic writing? Especially from someone who never learned what paraphrasing was in college and only used direct quotes. I'd like to do better with my writing. ModeratelyR3 (talk) 00:23, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Black Lives Matter supporters advocating for violence

Source? TheOneAndOnlyCirrusMan (talk) 03:25, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Right-wing fever dreams, no doubt. LeCapraGrande (talk) 03:26, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Not entirely a right wing fever dream, actually, but from what I can tell the word "supporters" needs to be changed to "supporter" (and only sort of). Hawk Newsome, who apparently founded a Black Lives Matter New York thingy but per the Wiki has a very tenuous relationship with other BLM organizations, did call for violence after the verdict and performed other shenanigans. While his calls for "black vigilantes" to target oppressors was enough to get something in Newsweek (as well as the usual right wing rags), judging by the Wiki entry, this guy is seriously cuckoo, and not differentiating between Newsome and the rest of the movement (as Newsweek failed to do) seems like nutpicking. (IMHO, that Newsweek article is further demonstration about how far that news rag has fallen...) BobJohnson (talk) 04:13, 11 December 2024 (UTC)