"Who would really win a civil war?", ponders "Monsieur Z". Before I reveal what he says, let me preface it by saying in my mind, I always figured if there was a civil war in this country between the liberal and conservative sides (which sadly seems increasingly likely over the years), the liberal side would win. The "logic" behind this prediction, such as it is, is simply that all the economic growth for the last several decades has been concentrated in the tech companies and major cities of the liberal side, and economic growth ultimately determines the winner. That's not to say that a civil war couldn't be extremely bloody and worth avoiding because of the loss of life it would cause.

Ok, having said that, I never encountered this YouTube channel before, and I get the impression this guy is a conservative, since he seems to sympathize more with the conservative side. If you're familiar with this channel feel free to chime in. (Hopefully sharing a link to this channel won't get you in trouble -- I think YouTube keeps track of who watches disapproved channels.) It seems he's some sort of military historian. Anyway, he predicts a win for the liberal side. The greatest advantage the conservative side has, supposedly, is they control the food supply, but at a practical level, they cannot cut off the food supply to liberals because that would also cut off the food supply to each other in the process. More generally, the conservative side is too fractured and distrustful to organize into a combat force that could successfully take on the US military, even as a guerrilla combat force, and the military will, he predicts, be successful at purging conservative sympathizers from their ranks.

Who would really win a civil war? - Monsieur Z

#domesticpolitics

"Florida is on its way to banning -- and criminalizing -- alternative meat".

"'We're not going to have fake meat. Like that doesn't work,' Gov. Ron DeSantis said."

Eh. Why not?

"Cell-cultivated meat, to be clear, differs from traditional veggie burgers and meat alternatives like Impossible Burgers. As the Congressional Research Service (CRS) defines: Cell-cultivated meat 'is developed in a lab, grown from a sample of animal cells that does not require the slaughter of animals.' In other words, it's actually meat. The development of cell-cultivated meat, the CRS explained, happens in five steps: the biopsy of animal cells, cell banking, cell growth, harvesting, and food processing. It's an industry that has heavy oversight in the US by both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)."

Huh, wonder why they would care.

"As of today, the unknowns are so great. There are no long-term studies." Says the House bill sponsor Danny Alvarez, a Republican representative.

Yeah but that hasn't exactly stopped us from putting whacky stuff in our food supply before.

Florida is on its way to banning -- and criminalizing -- alternative meat - Food & Wine

#domesticpolitics #agriculture #startups

Is the US headed toward a second civil war? This is from 2 years ago but I just saw it today. Barbara F. Walter from UC San Diego led a research project for the CIA where they analyzed 30 factors that correlated with civil war in countries other than the US. They found that there were 2 factors that predicted civil war: when the government is neither a democracy nor an autocracy, but in an in-between state (which she calls "anocracy"), and when people organize around identity rather than ideology.

As an example, she cites the civil war in Yugoslavia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia tried to transition to democracy but never made it out of the in-between state. And in the elections, you might imagine they could have had parties organized around ideology, such as a communist party and a capitalist party, but instead what Yugoslavia got was a Serbian party and a Croat party.

So is the US headed toward a second civil war? Voting in the US is increasingly based on identity (which she defines as race, ethnicity, or religion), so the question largely rests on the question of how stable US democracy is or whether it is leading towards the in-between "anocracy" state. Which yo-yos up and down according to some index she cites where the strength of US democracy is estimated ("the polity scale"). In the end she seems to give an estimate of 4% odds per year. That means over a 20 year period, the odds reach 50%. I don't know about you, but 50/50 odds of a civil war in the next 20 years seems about right to me. [Insert sarcastic joke about 2024 election here.]

She doesn't mention that Yugoslavia didn't just have 2 ethnicities -- the country broke up into 7 countries as a result of the war. Thankfully the different ethnic groups have been able to live peacefully side-by-side in their own separate countries since the war. She also makes a point of putting the blame on Slobodan Milošević, the former ruler under the Soviet regime, and says that the group that formerly has power but sees their power decline are always the ones who start civil wars, not the downtrodden like people think. She doesn't mention that the US, NATO, and Russia got involved. I'm guessing I should interpret that as meaning that these details are not predictive factors of civil war in general.

If you're interested in more, she's published a whole book on the topic.

Kenneth N. Waltz Lecture in international relations: Is the US headed toward a second civil war?

#domesticpolitics #polysci #civilwar

"The school board of Mason City, Iowa has begun leveraging AI technology to cultivate lists of potentially bannable books from the district's libraries ahead of the 2023/24 school year."

"In May, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed, and Governor Kim Reynolds subsequently signed, Senate File 496 (SF 496), which enacted sweeping changes to the state's education curriculum. Specifically it limits what books can be made available in school libraries and classrooms."

"But ensuring that every book in the district's archives adhere to these new rules is quickly turning into a mammoth undertaking."

"As such, the Mason City School District is bringing in AI to parse suspect texts for banned ideas and descriptions since there are simply too many titles for human reviewers to cover on their own."

An Iowa school district is using AI to ban books | Engadget

#solidstatelife #ai #domesticpolitics #censorship

Peter Turchin interviewed by Aaron Bastani. Interesting to see Peter Turchin as I've read two of his book but never seen him before. Well, I don't know if "read" is the right term for one of the books. The two books are Age Of Discord and Figuring Out The Past. And speaking of books, he's got a new one out, which is the occasion of this interview.

Age Of Discord was about how societies go through cycles of cohesion and integration vs disintegration and internal conflict. But first I should mention that Peter Turchin is a "quantitative historian" -- he looks at history quantitatively, through numbers and math. The model he presents in Age Of Discord uses 44 variables in differential equations. You probably won't be surprised he found we're in a disintegrative phase. And he predicted it would not end soon.

Figuring Out The Past is a book of data. It has thousands of numbers and other data points on historical civilizations, hundreds of kingdoms, empires, and countries from ancient times to modern times, with all sorts of information on their populations, governance structures, taxation systems, economic systems, agricultural systems, methods of warfare, and so on. I can't say I've "read" this book as that would be reading data tables. It's more accurate to say I've "browsed" it. It's always interesting to flip around and read about the various civilizations that existed in history.

As for the current book, it's called End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. I've ordered it but haven't read it yet. Hopefully it'll be written in less academese language than his Age Of Discord book. That's the reason I haven't been recommending it to people. From this discussion, it looks like Peter Turchin isn't just predicting the current period of turmoil will persist for a while before things get better. It looks like he's predicting the turmoil will get worse -- possibly a lot worse, and that we might be in "End Times" -- the end of the current political order.

In this interview, he uses a lot of the concepts I'm familiar with from Age Of Discord but which people seem to frequently misunderstand, in part because of his lousy terminology. Turchin may be a smart guy and brilliant with differential equations, but, he's not very good at inventing terminology that resonates with regular people. One such terms you'll see pop up in this discussion is "elite overproduction". People frequently think this means, for example, too large a percentage of the population getting college degrees, then being upset when they don't get "elite" jobs but end up working as baristas. That's not actually what Turchin means by "elite overproduction", not at all.

What he's talking about is when a society becomes highly unequal in its wealth distribution, not only do the vast majority of people become poorer while a wealthy elite becomes richer, but the number of rich people increases. This might be counterintuitive. The number of rich people is still small compared to the masses. But the number of rich people is large compared with the number of positions of political power.

If you imagine a position of political power, such as a governorship of a state. If there is only one person who wants the job, then that person gets the job. If there are a few people who want the job, then there's competition for the job, but maybe not too much. But if a lot of people become very wealthy and, instead of setting their sights on escaping poverty and becoming wealthy, set their sights on political power, now suddenly you have thousands of people competing for that governorship. And the fight can become very vicious. In Age Of Discord, Turchin shows how this competition can be quantified, in, for example, the amount of money that has to be spent to acquire a political office, which the candidate must either have from their own wealth or be able to fundraise through their personal connections to other rich people. The "price" of political office has gone up and up and up, with Presidential campaigns costing in the billions. This is what Turchin is referring to when he uses the phrase "elite overproduction". And why he thinks "elite overproduction" leads to social division and disintegration.

It has nothing to do with how many people get college degrees. If you have a college degree but your ambition in life is to make more money and not political power, because you don't yet have so many millions that making more money for its own sake has lost its meaning for you, you don't count as "elite".

This is a pretty wide-ranging conversation, ranging from European and Russian history to current-day US politics. For non-college educated people, life has not just been stagnating, it has been getting worse -- purchasing power has been going down and down and down. It now takes 4 times as much money to put a child through college as it did in the 1970s. This is because more and more people want out of the declining 90% and into the 10% for whom life is getting better. Turchin has another term for this which won't catch on, "popular immiseration". This opens the door for elites to break ranks from other elites and try to obtain political power by becoming "populists", appealing to the discontent of the masses. It looks like in his new books, Turchin refers to these elites as "counter-elites".

Is the West heading towards social breakdown? | Aaron Bastani meets Peter Turchin | Downstream - Novara Media

#geopolitics #domesticpolitics #economics #demographics #history #cliodynamics

In 1937, when asked "Should the Constitution be easier to amend?", 28% said yes, 60% said no. In 1987, when asked a similar question, 20% said the constitution was too hard to amend, 60% said amending it was about as hard as it ought to be. In 2022, however, 41% said the Constitution should be more frequently reviewed and amended, and 7% it should be entirely rewritten and replaced. In 2022, survey results were also highly polarized: 72% of Republicans think the Constitution is basically fine as is; 72% of Democrats say it should be amended or replaced.

See links below for how the US constitution compares with other constitutions worldwide.

The United States' unamendable Constitution

#domesticpolitics #constitutionality #constitution