DocWatts

While there will be a lot from MAGA bitching and moaning about how they're going to start a civil war because their cult leader is finally facing legal consequences for his actions, the vast majority of them aren't going to do shit beyond whining about it online. The thing about stochastic terrorism though is that if you broadcast dogwhistle messaging that encourages violence to millions of people, a handful of those people will be unhinged enough to follow through on it. Only takes one person armed with a rifle to kill dozens of people, or to murder one of your elected officials. The FBI has been sounding the alarm on far right domestic terrorism for years. The manifestos left behind by these domestic terrorists after they go and shoot up a synagogue or a grocery store in a black neighborhood are basically bullet points of the conspiracism they've been hearing from Fox News, Alex Jones, etc.

Modern nuclear reactors are very safe, especially when compared to fossil fuels (air pollution leads to several million deaths every year), and nuclear waste disposal is a solvable problem. Instead, the main problem with nuclear energy is cost and logistics. A typical nuclear power plant costs tens of billions of dollars and more than a decade to construct. That and the fact that at the end of the day it's still a non-renewable resource (I've seen estimates that at our current rate of consumption, we'd have perhaps a century or two of uranium left before extraction becomes too cost prohibitive for nuclear to continue to make sense as an energy source). Which means that barring some major technological breakthrough, nuclear is at best a stopgap that can give us more time to transition to renewables.

Trump just got kicked off from the ballot in the state of Colorado after a ruling by Colorado's Supreme Court, due to to his role in inciting an insurrection. While Trump wasn't going to win Colorado, other states may be following suite depending on how the case is ruled when it gets reviewed by the SCOTUS in the next few weeks. https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2

While a criminal conviction won't deter Trump's MAGA cultists, those folks were already locked in for Trump, regardless of what he does. The election is instead going to hinge on what proportion of the other %70 of the country will bother to come out to support Biden and the Dems in the 2024 election. All signs are that it's going to be a closer election than in 2020, but that's a far cry from predictions that 2024 is going to be a disaster for Dems.

We're still close to a year a way from the elections, and Dems have electorally overperformed in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023. Overt religious extremism (such as abortion bans) and running incompetent, unlikeable candidates seems to be badly hurting the GOP as far as actual elections. Trump is facing multiple criminal indictments, and a conviction on any one of them could for all intents and purposes put an end to his ability to campaign (even if this ends up being something akin to house arrest, that'd be an end to his Nuremberg-esque rallies). Which isn't to say that Biden is a shoe in, but the situation likely isn't as dire as the polls will lead you to believe. Additionally, it's worth keeping in mind that political polls only capture the views of people who are willing to answer a phone call from an unknown number. Generally speaking, this tends to be people with landlines who are older and thus more conservative. As a personal aside, I know very few people under the age of 40 who would actually answer a call from an unknown number.

I tend to answer in a few different ways depending on their level of interest. For small talk, I'll just say that I pursue spiritually in a secular way, and leave it at that. If I sense that they might actually interested in discussing spirituality, I might say something along of: 'My practice involves integrating spiritually with insights from science and philosophy'. Or: 'I'm not religious in a traditional sense, but I'm highly interested in how the mind constructs its Reality.' Then they'll either find this interesting and we'll end up having a conversation, or they'll politely change the subject. 😆

If you want an actual answer to the question (as opposed to a place to vent about the portion of Americans who are hurtling us towards a possible Trump dictatorship in 2024), I'd recommend checking out Jonathan Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind', where he gives an explanation of how liberals and conservatives form the moral intuitions which are the foundation of thier politics and worldview. To massively simplify for the sake of brevity, he identities five basic foundations for morality that have been universals throughout human societies. They are: Care, Fairness, In-Group Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. He also demonstrates that the 'point' of these moral foundations isn't to make a just or equitable society so much as to allow us to live together as social animals and have functioning societies that can compete against other groups. Liberals tend to put more emphasis towards Care and Fairness as thier moral foundations. While conservatives tend to put more emphasis towards In-Group Loyalty, Obedience To Authority, and Purity as the foundations of their morality. Not hard to see how the moral intuitions behind conservatism make consecutives more susceptible to things like the racism, conspiracism, and cult behavior we're seeing in the MAGA movement.

I'd highly recommend John Verveake's recent book on the subject, Mentoring the Machines, where he helpfully differentiates three types of AI, and the domain of problems each is suited to. 1) Narrow AI is suited for well defined problems. Makes use algorithms to solve problems. Self driving cars are a good example of this. 2) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is suited for ill-defined problems that are combinatorially explosive (ie can't be brute forced), and require a novel approach. Makes use of heuristics to solve a wide range of problems. All animals (including humans) are examples of general intelligence. 3) Super Intelligent AI is a hypothetical type of AI that would purportedly be able to address undefinable or existential problems that don't have a solution (ie 'what is the meaning of life'). Unlike the earlier two, this category is more akin to religious belief than something that we need concern ourselves with in our lifetime. Ray Kurtzweil's 'technological singularity' pseudo religion is a good example of this. I've found that this differentiation can be helpful in how discussions around AI are framed. For example, it's helpful to keep in mind that the forms of AI that are already having a noticable impact on our society are Narrow AI. It's an open question as to whether we'll see AGI in our lifetimes, but it's impact on the world has the potential to be orders of magnitude more consequential than Narrow AI. IMHO super Intelligent AI is a fantasy and not worthy of serious discussion or consideration, when it's not even clear whether or not AGI will prove to be a practical possibility.

If you want to be the modern day equivalent of someone voting to end democracy in 1930s Germany I can't stop you, but I question what you're doing on a conscious politics forum if you're unable to recognize that Trump is an completely unhinged and unprincipled authoritarian con-man.

If you value being able to vote in future elections, voting for Democrats is essential since the Republican plan is to essentially install Trump as dictator. Look into 'Project 2025' if you want details on MAGA's plan to dismantle democracy in America. https://accountable.us/right-wing-network-plots-to-undermine-democracy-with-project-2025/ “...democracy experts view Project 2025 as an authoritarian attempt to seize power by filling the federal government, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, with unwavering Trump supporters, which could potentially erode the country’s system of checks and balances.”

As an interesting aside, this was the view of Marx as well, whose view was that socialism needs to be be built on top of the massive increase in productivity that developed as a result of capitalism. Something that actual 20th century Marxists often ignored as they tried to implement socialism in feudal societies like Tzarist Russia, to disastrous results. (Note that I'm not saying that ignoring this developmental aspect of Marx's theory is the only reason why communist experiments didn't work out in practice).

Robert Evans (the person who's informing the other two guys on Kissinger's history in that podcast) is a journalist who's covered military conflicts around the world, and has also written about online extremism and political violence. Which is to say he's very well informed about the geopolitical topics he covers on his Bastards podcast. The other two guys are guests, who happen to be comedians that run an American history podcast called The Dollop. I've listened to both podcasts for years, would highly recommend both.

Understanding Marxism by Richard Wolfe is a good starting place, as he does a good job of taking Marx's theory and updating it for our modern era. Might be a bit basic if you're already very well versed in Marxism, but I found it to be highly helpful. Marxism A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer is also a good summation of some of Marx's texts.

I'll fully admit that most of my reading on Marx comes from contemporary sources who translate his ideas into a format that's understandable for someone living in our modern era, rather than banging my head against something like Das Kapital directly. (By this I mean people who attempt to give a good faith interpretation of his work, rather than someone like Jordan Peterson). As someone who's read lots of philosophy (including some very difficult primary sources), I'll almost always recommend that people get the gist of a philosopher from contemporary sources, rather than trying to decipher highly difficult texts that were written in a different era. For instance %99 of people are better off getting the gist of someone like Immanuel Kant from contemporary scholars, rather than trying to wade one's way through Critique of Pure Reason. As for your analysis of Marx in your original post (apologies for not addressing this directly), I'd argue that his Labor theory of Value, along with his depiction of the Alienation of Labor, are generally true, at least in a broad sense (especially so under unregulated Capitalism). I won't go as far as Marx as to say that the CEO of a company adds nothing, but the vast majority of the value that's created by a company like Tesla comes from the actual workers who engineer and build the electric cars, not from Musk or it's board of directors. Which why I say that his critiques of capitalism are largely valid, even if his idea of a classless and stateless society isn't a realistic or workable solution.

The primary flaw of Marxism is that it makes an analytical rather than a moral mistake, in that it fails to adequately account for how its proposed alternative to capitalism could also develop its own coercive power hierarchies which consolidate power into a small, unaccountable elite. Which is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, and just about everywhere else Communism has been tried. In practice, what happened is that private capitalism was simply swapped out for a version of state capitalism, with worker ownership over the means of production never materializing. The root of why this happened is that this proposed alternative to capitalism was mired in a form of Game Denial, which is to say a denial of the ways that aspects of society are a zero sum game, and a denial of how human beings are in competition with one another in unavoidable ways. That doesn't just magically go away in a post-capitalist society where everyone is meant to be working for the common good of all. Failing to account for this and build safeguards inevitably leads to abuses of power, which is exactly what we see in societies which tried this experiment. Note that all of this is a separate issue from the largely valid critiques that Marxism makes of Capitalism. One can be correct in the diagnosis of a problem and mistaken in how that problem should be addressed.

Sometimes I jokingly wonder if with Elon's handling of Twitter, we're watching a real life version 'The Producers' (where a shady producer intentionally sets out to make a terrible Broadway musical called 'Spring Time For Hitler', in the hope that it will bomb so that he can commit tax fraud). But that would probably be giving Elon too much credit. I think he really is just as dumb as he seems

Would highly recommend the Behind the Bastards podcast about Kissinger, if like me you were unaware of the full extent of this guy's devilry. Growing up I associated him with Richard Nixon and the terrible decision to needlessly extend the Vietnam War for another 5 years, but the totality of his influence on US foreign policy was so much worse than that.

A 'meta' (as in a metamodern) way of framing the conflict would be one that uses systems thinking, game theory, dialectical/developmental models as framing devices to try and understand the perspective and motivations of the different sides of the conflict. It doesn't entail having to take a 'middle of the road' stance on every issue, especially when there's a clear injustice that remains unaddressed.

David Foster Wallace on postmodernism:

I'd argue that attempting to 'both-sides' a conflict where there's an obvious and overwhelming power imbalance at work, and where one side is clearly more responsible for the state of events that led to the conflict, is a misuse of whatever framework you happen to be using to arrive at your 'neutrality' (be that Spiral Dynamics, Integral, spirituality, etc). Because the power dynamics are so overwhelming in favor of the Israeli state, the primary responsibility for taking the first steps to end the conflict is also in their court. Recognizing the obvious injustice of the current situation doesn't mean wanting israel wiped off the map. Instead, it means an end to Israeli's illegal military occupation and forced ghettoization of Palestinians, and support for steps to begin implementing a two-state solution that would be a first step in ending the conflict. Obviously any political solution isn't going to be a 'quick fix'. Intergenerational trauma and decades of brutalization doesn't disappear overnight, but the process has to start somewhere.

Thing is that genocide doesn't always look like a group of people being rounded up and sent to death camps (ie how a typical Israeli is likely to understand genocide). Sometimes an indigenous people just happen to have the misfortune of being in the way of a more powerful entity who feels entitled to the place that they've been living, which is what happened to the Native Americans and is a closer analogue to what's happening to the Palestinians. In both instances genocide is a byproduct of the policy goals of these more powerful entities, but in both cases the result is the systematic destruction of a way of life, along with appalling conditions for the survivors of this process. Gaza has been described as the world's largest Open Air Prison, and the long term goal of Israeli's far right has been to make life so unlivable for Palestinians that they lose hope of ever changing thier situation, and try to find a way to leave as a result. Basically, make life so hopeless and unpleasant in Gaza that the life of a refugee would be preferable to remaining under Israeli military occupation. Of course the irony is that making life for a minority so unpleasant that the hope is that most of them leave the country as refugees echos policies that have been weaponized against Jews in the early years of Nazi Germany and elsewhere (such as Tzarist Russia).

Might as well say that you can't figure out whether you're for or against slavery. Does humankind have a long and complicated history with slavery, and is there a ton of nuanced understanding that can be applied to slavery as an institution? No doubt. But figuring out whether or not slavery should be abolished is not ethically complex (at least not for a person living in our modern world). Likewise, figuring out where you stand on whether the Israeli state should be given a free hand to commit a slow genocide against a disempowered ethnic minority is not an ethically complex question. That's not to say a sustainable solution is obvious or straightforward, but recognizing that the current status quo is absolutely unacceptable should be easy.

I'd heavily caution against using Spiral Dynamics (or Integral) as a personal development model, since it's all to easy to decieve oneself into thinking that you're much more 'developed' than you actually are. Much better to frame Spiral Dynamics/Integral as a sociological model that attempts to work out some of the dialectics behind how worldviews work, in a very broad sense. It's certainly not a replacement for understanding specific domains in a more contextual way

We're still a year out from the election, and the Democratic Party has been consistently overperforming Polling predictions since 2018. Biden won by 7 million Votes in 2020, no Red Wave materialized in 2022, and Dems did very well in 2023. Trump is undergoing 4 criminal trials right now, and there's a non-negligable chance that he'll be removed from the ballots of some states (such as Michigan) for inciting an insurrection. Don't get discouraged by the polls. Vote. Encourage others to Vote. Get involved in the political process by canvasing.

Ursula Le Guinn really is an amazing writer. The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossesed are both highly recommended if you're looking to check out her novels.