(Part 2) Top products from r/TheMotte

I apologize in advance if I don't do this right, first time posting here. I think this is culture since this is part of an ongoing arguementation between "Classical Liberals" and "Liberal Conservatives" vs "Religious/Social Conservatives" to "Post-Liberals"

The True Con

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>Though Will still claims to be a conservative, he has radically changed what he means by that term. In 1983’s Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will argued that government inevitably does legislate morality, and indeed “should do so more often.” He rejected “the idea that governments should be neutral in major conflicts about social values.” He denied that “the public interest is produced by the spontaneous cooperation of individuals making arrangements in free markets.” He confessed his “deviation from laissez-faire orthodoxy,” and announced, “It is time to come up from individualism.”
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>In 2019’s The Conservative Sensibility, Will employs the same gentlemanly prose—to opposite ends. He states that government should refrain from “imposing its opinions about what happiness the citizens should choose to pursue.” He maintains that men should be “free to maximize their satisfactions according to their own hierarchy of preference.” He concludes that the public interest can, after all, be achieved “in the spontaneous order of a lightly governed society.” He frets over the fact that the poor pay no income tax, and describes the rich and corporations as “unpopular minorities.” He champions “individualism and the rights of the individual.”
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>Will has remained remarkably consistent in his self-styling. In 1983, he lamented that America contained “almost no conservatives, properly understood.” Today, he again calls conservatism “a persuasion without a party.” His positions have changed, but his pose has not. He is still the lone True Conservative.
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>In both, America is conflated with liberal individualism. In Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will therefore concludes that America was “ill founded.” In The Conservative Sensibility, he instead celebrates the founding as the first inbreaking of Hayek’s transcendent philosophy. In both cases, America is not so much a nation as an idea. This is Will’s one fixed point—and his fundamental error.
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>Our foundations are broader and deeper than a single “founding” moment, tendentiously identified with the views of a few deistic slavers. William Bradford was one of our founders. So was Lord Baltimore. These men were communalists, not individualists; Christians, not liberals. For Will, they might as well not exist. He has spent his otherwise incoherent career propounding what Barry Shain, a professor of political science at Colgate University, calls “the myth of American individualism”—a myth that cannot survive contact with reality … the overwhelming majority of Americans at the time of the founding considered the individual “radically incomplete living outside an enveloping and ethically intensive community.” They believed that “the common or public good enjoyed preeminence over the immediate interests of individuals.”
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>These Americans believed that property was not an absolute right, but a trust received from God to be used for all. The Vermont Declaration of Rights stated that “private property ought to be subservient to public use.” Benjamin Franklin, the most commercial of the framers, believed men had a natural right to whatever property was necessary “for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species.” But he also believed that “all property superfluous to such services is property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it.”
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>...
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>Will labors to discredit Chambers and Kirk because they challenge his claim that America is univocally liberal and ultimately secular. Like many other True Cons, he has chosen to ignore ... what Shain calls the “enduring, democratic, Christian, and communal” tradition of America.
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>...
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>Will's praise of liberalism would be more convincing if he did not claim for it the virtues of other things. He opens his book by describing the Battle of Princeton as an “illustration of the history-making role of individual agency.” The selfless deaths of American patriots are thus enlisted for the ­ideology of self-interest.
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>He says that the universe itself is a testament to the godless miracle of spontaneous order, thereby giving his economic ideas an unearned religious sheen. He questions tradition, hierarchy, and religion, but seeks to drape their prestige around his ... philosophy

Well, the all-caps titles here are panel titles, the names quoted are panelists and the stuff quoted after their names are generally presentations or, at best, working paper titles. A lot of it probably doesn't exist anymore, outside the pages of these programs. I don't know where you could find an archive of these programs outside of the personal files of people who attended these things, except perhaps in a special collections department somewhere or maybe the NWSA archives. University libraries are gold mines but finding out what they even have can be tricky, and getting access to it can, too.

The books are a bit easier, often they are available on Amazon. Marxism and the Oppression of Women is still in print, as is The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Patriarchal Precedents is not, and so you can guess that it shows up less in the gender studies curriculum today.

I personally would be very interested in minutes from the panel entitled "BUILDING FEMINIST THEORY," since it was a discussion including Sandra Harding (now at UCLA), Mary O'Brien (who founded the Feminist Party of Canada), and Nancy Hartsock (who authored a book subtitled Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism), and they were talking about

> how feminist theory should reconstitute progressive politics in general--not just "women's issues"--while also transcending the limitations of Marxism.

There's just so much to unpack there--obviously it's pretty silly to aim at "transcending the limits" of Marxism if one does not feel limited by it, and one would not feel limited by it were one not a somewhat conscientious adherent! And indeed feminist theory has in many ways reconstituted progressive politics in general since the 1980s. So it's very, very frustrating to me when people make these sweeping claims about what is or is not "influential" as if they have any real idea where ideological trends come from. Almost everything we think is the result of someone making a concerted effort to get lots of people to think that thing, but it is usually someone who has long since been forgotten (or memory-holed), and it is almost always an irrelevant academic before it is a politician who gets their name put into the books. Maybe it has always been thus; I sometimes wonder if we would be quite so cognizant of Aristotle, had there not been an Alexander the Great.

Anyway, I am rambling. If you have a particular thing you're looking for, pay a visit to a quality university library--state libraries might do in a pinch, but universities are the real repositories of knowledge. Inter-library loan is a researcher's best friend, second only to a good special collections librarian. Amazon is sometimes helpful also, though certain texts have gotten remarkable pricey over the years, I've found!

>I'm not much of a gamer in this sense, but 40K always sounded kind of interesting. Where does one start with such a vast shared universe? Even the books; there's what, a couple hundred tie-in novels at this point?

Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill's books tend to hold up pretty well as works of pulp sci-fi/planetary romance in their own right, and those are where I'd recommend you start. Abnett's Brothers of the Snake (currently free on audible) is a one-off that makes for an excellent introduction to the setting and I'm pretty sure someone has already recommended The Priests of Mars.

I expect a number of people to recommend Sandy Mitchell's HERO OF THE IMPERIUM and to be fair it is really good but it also depends a bit more on the reader having a working knowledge of the setting.

>Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man pretending to be a cis man to seduce a woman, and had hardcore-enough sex scenes to receive an NC-17 rating on its first cut.

There's a film called "this film Is Not Yet Rated" that examines the MPAA and how subjective it is as a control system for what gets into the public's eye. A segment of this film discussed the MPAA's issues with Boys Don't Cry.

From a blogger:

>In addition, the MPAA system often fails to take context into account. For instance - as director Kimberly Peirce comments in "This Film is Not Yet Rated" - the MPAA threatened Peirce's brilliant "Boys Don't Cry" with an NC-17 rating based in part on the very rape scene that is directly central to the movie. In the scene, the protagonist is raped as a brutal "punishment" for what her attackers see as her impersonation of a boy. Here, the MPAA's rating seems especially senseless: How could it hurt a sixteen-year-old's psyche to see a depiction of a brutal hate crime, presented as exactly what it is? If anything, the film is rightly educational.

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From Roger Ebert:

>"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is a catalog of grievances against the MPAA: The membership of the ratings board is anonymous, so the filmmakers have no right to appeal directly to the people who are judging their work. The ratings board is supposed to be comprised of "parents" -- but hardly any have children under 18, which is the only age group to whom the ratings apply. Although the MPAA ratings were allegedly created as a way of heading off government censorship, some say that has always been a ruse -- and, besides, a government system would actually require rules, documentation, transparency, accountability and due process. These are not things the secretive MPAA is fond of.
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>And although the MPAA ratings are supposedly "voluntary," agreements between the studios that fund the organization, the exhibitors who show their films, and the media in which those films are advertised, make it something less than optional for most films. Check your newspaper to see if "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is playing in your town. If that newspaper accepts advertising for unrated films ("This Film" was originally awarded an NC-17 for "graphic sexual content," but the rating was "surrendered"), you'll see that "This Film" is not playing at one of the studio-owned theater chains.
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>[...]
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>The whole kangaroo court is founded on a doozy of a Catch-22: The MPAA insists that it has procedures that it applies evenhandedly. But the procedures are secret so nobody can tell what they are. If something is not allowed, it's because it's against the invisible rules.
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>So, how do you make sense out of the MPAA's decisions? As "This Film" demonstrates, you don't. The Kafkaesque absurdity behind the movie ratings is beyond belief. Matt Stone ("South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "Team America: World Police") testifies from experience that studio pictures are treated a lot more kindly than independently financed and distributed ones. Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry") and Wayne Kramer and Maria Bello ("The Cooler"), intuit that the raters are uncomfortable with depictions of female sexual pleasure, while Allison Anders("Grace Of My Heart") suggests that orgasms of any kind are frowned upon (although women's do tend to last longer, and may therefore make the raters more uncomfortable), and that the male body is even more verboten that the female body. And everybody agrees that the MPAA is very liberal when it comes to violence, and conservative when it comes to sex.

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the MPAA is important to this discussion largely due to their rating influence which affects the marketing and release of a film. This is why you hear so much about the studio trying to get a 'PG-13' rating instead of an 'R' (or in the case of Boys Don't Cry, trying to get an 'R' rating, settling for 'NC-17' after making cuts to shake the 'X' rating). The biggest issue issue sin't necessarily the rating system, but the power enshrined in a select group of anonymous and unaccountable influencers. It's pretty eye opening to see how much power they have over culture.

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link to film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpbxzP2mkoA

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Great write up!

Also, I'm a Gen-Xer and recall all of thee films and the milieu very well. It's interesting to see analysis from a younger viewer.

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If you like this topic I'd also suggest "Pictures At a Revolution" which discusses the 5 Best film nominations of the 1967 Oscars, and how these films changed the Hollywood. It's a nice context for how we got to 1999.

>In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins swept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and box-office bomb Doctor Doolittle signaled a change in Hollywood-and America. And as an entire industry changed and struggled, careers were suddenly made and ruined, studios grew and crumbled, and the landscape of filmmaking was altered beyond all recognition.

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As a supplement, I also suggest Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" which goes into detail about the rise of various media, how they supplanted the old media (i.e. telephone vs. telegraph; broadcast tv vs. Cable tv) and were in turn supplanted by other technological industries. There is a bit about the various takeovers of the film industry in the mid 90's that set the stage for the making of these films and the subsequent dawn of the Internet age. It's probably in need of a new edition now, but I really enjoyed reading about media and technological history in this context.

Ah, you beat me to sharing this by a few minutes. I've deleted my top-level post, but I'll keep it as a comment here, because my reaction was opposite to yours.

A fun interview to take you into the weekend: "[UK interviewer] Andrew Neil DESTROYS Ben Shapiro!" Lest you're thinking that quote is too boo-outgroup...

Shapiro was the one who tweeted it.

I'll cop to my bias prior to writing this. I've been hoping to see someone else post this, because Ben Shapiro is not my favorite, and this interview really doesn't present him at his best. I find myself enjoying this a bit too much to really be a credible neutral source, but I'll take a shot at summarizing nonetheless.

I had no idea who Andrew Neil was prior to this. Some context I have since heard: he is one of the leading conservative commentators in the UK, previously working under Rupert Murdoch and writing for the Daily Mail, currently chairman of a media group that runs some of the most influential center-right media in the UK. He's provided some passionate commentary in defense of western values, and is famous for hard-hitting interviews with a wide range of people. A great moment between him and Alex Jones: "This is half past eleven. You're watching the Sunday Politics. We have an idiot on the program today."

So what happened? This is one of the only times I'll actually encourage watching the video over reading a summary, because it's fast-paced and frankly pretty entertaining. Neil comes into the interview pretty aggressively, pushing back against a lot of Shapiro's positions and focusing especially on the contrast between Shapiro's commentary about the ways discourse is being degraded and the ways Shapiro himself degrades discourse at times. Shapiro responds largely by firing off questions and accusations about Neil's motives.

A couple of highlights:

1. Neil asks Shapiro about titles of videos like "Ben Shapiro Destroys The Abortion Argument" and "Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Transgenderism". Shapiro responds by saying he can't be held accountable for what random people post on YouTube, not mentioning that the videos in question are, well, posted by The Daily Wire itself.
   
   
2. He asks about the recent Georgia anti-abortion law in pretty harsh terms, asking for a defense or response from Shapiro. Shapiro's response: "My answer is something called science. Human life exists at conception. It ought to be protected," then asking why Neil won't admit he's on the left and his questions are motivated by bad faith. I was disappointed with Shapiro's answer here, since I'm broadly pro-life myself and would like to see the position represented well, but "something called science" doesn't really do it for me.
   
   
3. In the end, Shapiro tersely cuts the interview short after one too many hardball questions. Final words from Neil: "Thank you for your time and for showing that anger is not a part of American political discourse."
   
   All told, it's a pretty fascinating crossover between American and British politics, and probably not Shapiro's finest moment.
   
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   That was my top-level comment. I'll take a moment to respond to your main question as well: Why throw old things at him? Because the UK isn't as familiar with him as the US, and snark is still a huge part of his brand. I'm fully and deeply on board with the message that there's too much hate in politics, but even as he writes condemnations of that hate, I see Shapiro as a vector for and intensifier of it. The video titles above are a good example, alongside his pinned tweet ("Facts don't care about your feelings"), his comments in the interview... this sort of combativeness is a huge part of his brand. If he's approaching things from that combative of an angle, I expect to see him prepared with thoughtful responses to combativeness directed at him. He didn't do that here.

Very cool article. As someone who's passionate about meditation and has studied it intensely I think it's important to realize that meditation is (1) not for everyone and (2) to be very cautious about what mindfulness has actually been able to help with. Mindfulness Based Stress Relief and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy have repeatedly been shown to be effective. However, these types of studies rarely have adequate controls so it is difficult to make the strong claim that mindfulness itself is the cause of these seen benefits. Likewise, claims that mindfulness can treat more extreme disorders like PTSD are often banded about, but the research on these claims is thin.

Two books on this I would recommend:

Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism:

>Practicing mindfulness can be an effective adjunct in treating psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, and addiction. But have we gone too far with mindfulness? Recent books on the topic reveal a troubling corruption of mindfulness practice for commercial gain, with self-help celebrities hawking mindfulness as the next "miracle drug." Furthermore, common misunderstanding of what mindfulness really is seems to be fueled by a widespread cultural trend toward narcissism, egocentricity, and self-absorption.

>Thomas Joiner's Mindlessness chronicles the promising rise of mindfulness and its perhaps inevitable degradation. Giving mindfulness its full due, both as a useful philosophical vantage point and as a means to address various life challenges, Joiner mercilessly charts how narcissism has intertwined with and co-opted the practice to create a Frankenstein's monster of cultural solipsism and self-importance. He examines the dispiriting consequences for many sectors of society (e.g., mental health, education, politics) and ponders ways to mitigate, if not undo, them. Mining a rich body of research, Joiner also makes use of material from popular culture, literature, social media, and personal experience in order to expose the misuse of mindfulness and to consider how we as a society can back away from the brink, salvaging a potentially valuable technique for improving mental and physical wellbeing.

Joiner is one of, if not the most famous researcher on suicide in the world. One of the things he talks about, for example, he talks about how many depressed individuals struggle greatly with rumination, and not much has been done about the fact that meditation tends to make rumination worse for many people.

I also greatly enjoy Daniel Goleman's Altered Traits. Many are quick to point out that "thousands" of research articles have been published on mindfulness meditation. These guys are upfront and critical of the fact that, well, most of these studies are absolute trash with either biased experimenters, poorly defined definitons, and lack of proper controls (They're extremely critical of their own somewhat sloppy mindfulness research in the 70's - a refreshing moment of humbleness). They review over 1,000 studies and do a literature review of the 50 or so highest quality ones.

There really does seem to be an effect at work here with mindfulness. However, people often fail to differentiate between state effects and trait effects. For many beginners, Mindfulness is no different than a drug - you get a bump of relaxation and positive feeling when you're meditating, and then no difference when you resume your life. Real, permanent, lasting change is seemingly, but only after long, continued practice - not just glancing at a 10-minute mindfulness app on your phone three times a week.

They also mention how easy the news media and other snake oil salesmen can misrepresent research: a famous finding like meditation can increase the length of telomeres, a process related to cellular aging is reported as "Mindfulness is going to make you live much longer!!" And of course there's always companies trying to make a quick buck: A related example is the company Luminosity, a company that vaguely throws around the word "neuroplasticity" as proof playing their games will make you smarter, a claim not supported by much evidence.

Above all I think it helps to have a skeptical eye. Mindfulness has become an extremely hot topic in the past 15 years. Unfortunately, there is a bit of a self selection effect where most researchers really, really want mindfulness to be scientifically valid, and so they aren't really as critical of the research as they should be. Combine that with the fact that science journalism generally isn't great at actually reporting science, and marketing companies even less so, and that leads to a lot of misinformation floating around.

Even in the west, it depends enormously on context. Vern Bengtson has been running a longitudinal study of faith transmission over the past 35 years and touching on four generations, and he concludes that the overall inheritance of faith has been stable at approximately 60% since 1970, but higher for evangelicals, mormons and jews and dramatically lower for the mainline protestant denominations, who seem to be the source of most of the growing "nones" category that Robert Putnam described in 2011. This still sounds like it's bad for religion, but remember that "none" is a category of parental faith as well - which means that a fraction of children raised in secular families turn to religion as adults, and the "prodigal" phenomenon of adolescent wandering followed by a return to the faith in adulthood is common.

I do expect the "nones" to increase into the immediate future at the mainline protestant denominations continue to secularize, though this growth curve is likely to flatten as the baby boom echo of the millennial generation enters middle age and the prodigals begin to return. The evangelical churches seem to be stabilizing with the assistance of immigration and will likely persist well into the future when reproductive competition becomes more of a factor.

Finally, the God Gene may have been a bit overblown, but religiosity as a personality trait is unequivocally heritable in part (as are other personality traits), with limited twin studies indicating an approximately 40% heritability in adulthood. If reproductive trends persist into the future, in the long-long term, society may undergo a genetically determined shift towards increased religiosity.

This all sounds correct to me.

Miller is gunning pretty hard for a particular kind of poly configuration, one with a committed primary partnership and rotating secondary partners. One problem is that this seems like a much better fit for men's average-case sexual preferences than it does for women's. In particular, this argument of Miller's does not sound like a realistic account of most cishet women's preferences to me:

>Polygyny makes it harder for lower-mate-value men to find partners, but polyamory actually makes it easier, because these guys don’t have to be good enough to be a woman’s primary partner.

As Regnerus observed, gay male sexuality resembles straight male sexuality, and lesbian sexuality resembles straight female sexuality. So it's not a coincidence that Miller is citing the popularity of Dan Savage's "monogamish" norm among gay men, as opposed to lesbians, as a model for straight marriage.

I do think you're romanticizing and overestimating the extent to which other countries have a coherent 'natural' ingrained ethnic/national identity by so rashly describing
> Nowhere else in the world is your identity conferred through bureaucracy

I mean, read a book like The Discovery of France that talks about the mapping of France and construction of the French national identity by the government. Up to WWI, the majority of the population wasn't even fluent in French, all the little villages had their own dialects. Spain still has smoldering independence movements and unique languages besides Spanish, from in Catalonia to the Basque region. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson is another great book that talks more broadly about the beginnings of the concept of nationhood, tying it in Europe to the rise of the printing press which enabled a national language for the first time.

And you mention India, which probably wouldn't even be a unified country if it weren't for the conquest under the British empire and subsequent independence. India is culturally and ethnically divided in the extreme, up to and including their caste system.


Not to mention the great success and relative stability of very divided multi-ethnic societies in countries such as Switzerland or Singapore in the first world. Many of these peoples have a longer shared history than the ethnic groups in the United States do, but I don't see why that makes a huge difference in terms of the strength of identity. In either case, the memory of that shared history has to be constructed anew for each generation. Our shared history up to this point is more than enough to serve as a basis to construct national identity on; these days few Italians or Irish descendants of immigrants have any other primary identity than 'American'. Imagining a shared national community such that it is a primary identity isn't easy but the American government has played a large part with mandatory public schools and other measures. Bureaucracy is a large part of forging national identity, no doubt, your mistake is thinking that this is isolated to America.


So your description of America as

> not a serious country

on these grounds says more about your unique antagonism to it than anything else. If America is particularly notable on these grounds it is that as a relatively young nation compared to many of these older countries, our national identity ambiguities and contradictions stand out more. You're doing a negative version of American exceptionalism, which I think is just as incorrect.

Just some interesting notes regarding IQ, intelligence and g;

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If there is hardly any consensus on what IQ tests measure or what ‘intelligence’ is, then construct validity for IQ seems to be very far in the distance, almost unseeable, because we cannot even define the word, nor actually test it with a test that’s not constructed to fit the constructors’ presupposed notions.

Now, explaining the non-existent validity of IQ tests is very simple: IQ tests are purported to measure ‘g’ (whatever that is) and individual differences in test scores supposedly reflect individual differences in ‘g’. However, we cannot say that it is differences in ‘g’ that cause differences in individual test scores since there is no agreed-upon model or description of ‘g’ (Richardson, 2017: 84). Richardson (2017: 84) writes:

>In consequence, all claims about the validity of IQ tests have been based on the assumption that other criteria, such as social rank or educational or occupational achievement, are also, in effect, measures of intelligence. So tests have been constructed to replicate such ranks, as we have seen. Unfortunately, the logic is then reversed to declare that IQ tests must be measures of intelligence, because they predict school achievement or future occupational level. This is not proper scientific validation so much as a self-fulfilling ordinance.

Construct validity for IQ does not exist (Richardson and Norgate, 2015), unlike construct validity for breathalyzers (Landauer, 1972) or white blood cell count as a disease proxy (Wu et al, 2013; Shah et al, 2017). So, if construct validity is non-existent, then that means that there is no measure for how well IQ tests measure what it’s ‘purported to measure’, i.e., how ‘intelligent’ one is over another because 1) the definition of ‘intelligence’ is ill-defined and 2) IQ tests are not validated against agreed-upon biological models, though some attempts have been made, though the evidence is inconsistent. For there to be true validity, evidence cannot be inconsistent; it needs to measure what it purports to measure 100 percent of the time. IQ tests are not calibrated against biological models, but against correlations with other tests that ‘purport’ to measure ‘intelligence’.

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IQ tests “test for the learned factual knowledge and cognitive habits more prominent in some social classes than in others. That is, IQ scores are measures of specific learning, as well as self-confidence and so on, not general intelligence“ (Richardson, 2017: 192).

In terms of the "conventional" view, and also as an example of good sociology, I would recommend MacKenzie's An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

The reason I hate the Nazi analogy, besides the fact that it’s overused, is that it just is not apt. 1920’s Germany was pro-Jewish, only compared to other countries. Being anti-Semitic was not a career ending move and plenty of people in power vocally hated them, even if something like Holocaust was not on their mind. People should actually learn something about early Nazi history before making this comparison. Even if they weren’t popular before right before their rise to power, they were considered more like rabble rousers, not pariahs. I recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans to get an understanding of what led to their assuming and consolidating power.

Have you seen Gangs of New York? There is a short scene in there about the moralizers of the upper class coming into to clean out 'dens of iniquity' and fix the 'moral problems of the lower classes' like by fighting against alcohol or drug consumption. Those sorts of movements by upper class people that see poverty as a sort of moral failing and that people could simply 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' if they work hard enough and follow something like the Protestant work ethic are as old as time.

The modern 'SJW' type of identity politics from the upper class isn't really new, it has has a long pedigree and lets the upper classes feel less guilty about their wealth in times of increasing income/wealth inequality and poverty, as they conceptualize it being about moral failings of some kind rather than them being the recipients of the real unearned privilege and propagating the systems the not only keep it in place, but in fact deepen it.

On the right wing side of things there is also a history to try and enhance the position of wealthy through populism that this book covers: https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Peoples-Movements-Grassroots-Development/dp/0199928991

Apparently they even tried to use the women's suffrage movement at one point.

>He's been wrong as long as he's been dead.

As Scott (I think) put it, the alternative perspective is Malthus was right exactly up to the point that he wrote it down, rather an inverse of the Pinker jinx an SSC commenter brought up. Malthus accurately observed a trend, and a technology he didn't predict adjusted the trend.

For a book length treatment, there's The Wizard and The Prophet. Vogt, the Malthus of the mid 20th century, "versus" Borlaug, plant breeder extraordinaire. Famines were already starting in Mexico and India, and if Borlaug's dwarf wheat hadn't succeeded when it did, Vogt would've been right about just how disastrous it would be for the developing world.

Technology has always saved us so far, but that doesn't mean we'll keep finding those solutions in time, every time.

>I, along with many others, have been concerned about Trump's behavior here. Gary Brecher has been shouting that the long-awaited betrayal of the Kurds is upon us (to be fair, he's said that before several times).

I don't have anywhere else to share since no one in real life knows who Brecher is so this sub gets to be subjected to my random factoids.

My girlfriend was reading a horse training book. Knowing these type of communities I was sure there are people who hate Monty Roberts and his methods, and that interested me for some reason. One of his greatest nemesis is John Dolan, they have hated each other for decades. I google John Dolan and my mind is blown to find out that John Dolan is Gary Brecher's real name.

TLDR: The War Nerd has been in a decades long feud with my girlfriend's favorite horse trainer.