The algorithmic wasteland

A wasteland of dry earth and a dead tree

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”

—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

I logged onto Facebook for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how bad it’s become.

My feed was a torrent of spammy ads and irrelevant “suggested” posts from groups I’m not in. I had to scroll and scroll and scroll to find even a single post from one of my actual friends – i.e., the people I chose to connect with, the people whose presence is theoretically the reason for me to use this platform. I almost gave up before finding one.

On subsequent logins, the content-to-ad ratio seemed better, but only slightly. The site still felt like a wasteland, populated mostly by ads and spam, and only secondarily by human beings. I had to actively fight against it, dismissing or scrolling past a blizzard of annoying algorithmic junk, to see the content I wanted to see.

Using Facebook now is like wandering through an abandoned casino. The people are all gone; the gaming tables are collecting dust. But, somehow, the electricity is still on, so the signage is a tawdry blur of neon and scrolling marquees and chasing lights, calling out to you to play games whose dealers have long since departed. It’s the ghost of human interaction, lingering after the humans themselves have gone away.

What happened?

For one thing, the enshittification cycle is complete. Facebook’s algorithm has become hostile to its users, showing them more and more of the content advertisers want to show them, rather than the content they want to see. (I stopped posting my own content to Facebook a while ago, when it became clear that it was suppressing posts with external links. If I shared an article I wrote on my own site, no one would see it, even my friends who chose to follow me.) Under constant pressure for higher profit, the algorithm gets more and more aggressive about pushing ads, until the noise is drowning out the signal.

At the same time, they’ve given up on content moderation. Academic researchers and watchdogs who study social media have both noticed this:

Porn and nonconsensual imagery is easy to find on Facebook and Instagram. We have reported endlessly on the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work. Its own verified influencers have their bodies regularly stolen by “AI influencers” in the service of promoting OnlyFans pages also full of stolen content.

…There are still people working on content moderation at Meta. But experts I spoke to who once had great insight into how Facebook makes its decisions say that they no longer know what is happening at the platform, and I’ve repeatedly found entire communities dedicated to posting porn, grotesque AI, spam, and scams operating openly on the platform.

Meta now at best inconsistently responds to our questions about these problems, and has declined repeated requests for on-the-record interviews for this and other investigations. Several of the professors who used to consult directly or indirectly with the company say they have not engaged with Meta in years. Some of the people I spoke to said that they are unsure whether their previous contacts still work at the company or, if they do, what they are doing there.

…Meta’s content moderation workforce, which it once talked endlessly about, is now rarely discussed publicly by the company (Accenture was at one point making $500 million a year from its Meta content moderation contract). Meta did not answer a series of detailed questions for this piece, including ones about its relationship with academia, its philosophical approach to content moderation, and what it thinks of AI spam and scams, or if there has been a shift in its overall content moderation strategy. It also declined a request to make anyone on its trust and safety teams available for an on-the-record interview.

It appears that Facebook decided that moderation was just too difficult to solve at scale – and more important, it’s an expense rather than a profit center – so they got rid of it. It’s a naive cost-cutting measure, and in the short term, it might’ve produced a small bump in the stock price. However, anyone who’s ever run a personal blog could’ve told you what happens next.

When you give up on moderation, you don’t get a flourishing garden of free speech and enlightened debate. Instead, the worst characters emerge from their slime pits, and when they find nothing to stop them, they take over the comment section. Any real discussion gets overrun by spam, abusive racist and sexist bile, and conspiracy blather. It’s like weeds taking over a garden. Eventually, people who put actual thought and effort into their contributions are driven away, and only the trolls remain. Facebook (and Twitter) are experiencing that on a broader scale.

And chatbot AI has made this problem far worse. It’s knocked down all barriers to spammers, scammers, and astroturf influence-buyers. Without the necessity of having human beings involved, it’s trivial for them to churn out garbage content on a colossal scale. Whatever genuine human conversation there was, it’s swamped by clickbait factories grasping at monetization or trying to manufacture fake consensus. The end state is a wasteland devoid of humanity. It’s a zombie business, staggering along on inertia until someone realizes that there are no people left, just endless hordes of bots advertising to bots.

It’s not a universal law that this has to happen in any community. It’s the intersection of social media with capitalism that’s to blame. The profit incentive demands that social media companies push as much junk content as possible, in order to squeeze the most money out of every user they have. It compels them to do only the bare minimum for moderation and safety – or less than the minimum, if they can get away with it. (See also; Elon Musk firing Twitter’s entire moderation team.)

When social media is run for profit, overseen by algorithms that decide what users get shown, this is almost inevitable. That’s why I favor non-profit, non-algorithmic social media like Mastodon (follow me there!), where users are the customers rather than the product, and where you see only the content you choose to see. It’s not free of all these problems – there are still spammers and abusive jerks, as there always have been in every collection of humans – but they tend to get weeded out. More important, the network itself isn’t promoting them.

For the good of America, Biden should become a dictator

I wasn’t cynical enough about this Supreme Court.

When they accepted Trump’s outlandish appeal over the January 6 prosecution and then sat on it for months, I assumed the delay was the point. I believed that with a Democratic president in office, they’d see the obvious downside of ruling that a president is immune to criminal charges. But I thought their intent was to stall and drag out the process until there was no longer a realistic chance of prosecuting Trump before the election.

I underestimated their depravity.

Their newest ruling, divided exactly down partisan lines, states that a president is immune to prosecution for all “official acts”. In and of itself, this wouldn’t necessarily be outrageous. It makes sense that federal officials shouldn’t face prosecution for performing their duties under the law, the same way that members of Congress can’t be sued for anything they say on the floor.

The massive, frightening problem is that this ruling is sweepingly vague about what does and doesn’t constitute an official act. It seems to suggest that any action taken with the powers of the presidency would count, even if it’s for clearly self-serving or nakedly dictatorial motives. Issued as it was in response to the January 6 prosecution, it implies that even attacking Congress and trying to steal an election is an official act!

For all intents and purposes, this is saying that a president is above the law and can’t be punished for anything he does. That’s not just my opinion. It’s straight from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s searing dissent:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor made this argument in her sharply worded dissent, which Mark Osler, a University of St. Thomas law professor, called “the most chilling part” of the opinions released today.

Sotomayor wrote that the decision “effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding…. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune…. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

Under this court’s logic, Richard Nixon shouldn’t have resigned, because he did nothing that was prosecutable. Concocting a plan to spy on his political rivals and secure reelection is an official act for which a president can’t be charged.

This is the clearest sign you could imagine of the bottomless contempt that the Republican justices have for the rest of us. They’ve granted Biden near-unlimited power – and they weren’t concerned about it, because they believe our side will play by the rules and theirs won’t. They believe that liberals are civil and polite and nice, that we’ll follow the rules even when we don’t have to. Meanwhile, the next Republican president will be freed to abuse his power to its full, terrible extent.

There’s only one possible response: Biden has to call their bluff. This isn’t the time for kindly Uncle Joe, this is the time for Dark Brandon.

One example I thought of would be his student debt forgiveness plan, which has been repeatedly blocked by Republican judges. Biden should announce that the plan is moving forward in its original form, and the courts no longer get a say in it. What’s anyone going to do about it? He’s immune to consequences for an official act, and if any lesser official faces prosecution for defying the court, he can just pardon them.

Another possibility: The Defense Production Act allows the president to take over civilian businesses for purposes of national security, specifically including energy and infrastructure. He should commandeer fossil fuel companies and have them start making windmills, solar panels and geothermal power – a WW2-scale mobilization to reorient the American economy toward a green transition. The Inflation Reduction Act is good, but this would be better.

One more obvious move, one that was even floated during the trial itself, would be for Biden to declare his political rivals “enemy combatants” engaged in terrorism, and have the military whisk them away to Guantanamo Bay, beyond the reach of the law, where they can be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial. He should do this to all the Supreme Court justices who voted for this decision and then appoint their replacements. It would be a fitting taste of the medicine they sought to give to others but never expected to take themselves.

These suggestions sound outlandish, and maybe they are. But it’s a long, frustrating pattern in American politics that the progressive left only cares about the moral high ground, while the religious right cares about power. They ask what they can get away with and who’s going to stop them – and if the answer is no one, they have no hesitation in brushing aside any rule that stands between them and what they want. That’s why we lose more often than we win.

We need to fight as dirty as them. Playing by the rules when your opponent doesn’t amounts to unilateral disarmament. The Supreme Court has ruled, almost literally, that when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal. They’ve handed our side a weapon, trusting that we won’t use it against them. Biden has to make them regret it.

Let them eat the Ten Commandments

A stone monument with the text of the Ten Commandments carved on it

Not edible.

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”

—James 2:14-17

Call me a godless atheist, but I’m in favor of feeding children.

If morality has to start somewhere, this is a good place to plant that flag. No child should ever go hungry; no parent should ever have to worry about where their family’s next meal is coming from. If we allow kids to go hungry when we have the power to feed them, that’s our collective moral failure as a society.

In the U.S., a lot of kids get free meals at school. That raises the question of what happens to them over summer vacation. The Biden administration addressed this with the Summer EBT program, which was expanded during the pandemic and then made permanent by act of Congress in 2022. Low-income families get $40 per child per month, only usable for groceries. States have to share administrative costs, but the federal government funds the benefits.

It seems like a win-win. Yet in 2024, 13 states turned down the money and refused to participate. Guess what they have in common:

All states that declined the opportunity are led by Republicans. Those states are: Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming.

One of them was Louisiana, whose Republican governor said this:

Louisiana’s new DCFS secretary, appointed by Gov. Jeff Landry, said the benefit program would have distracted from his agency’s mission.

“Every child deserves a safe home, first and foremost, and families deserve a pathway to self-sufficiency,” David Matlock said in a statement. “Staying focused on that mission, without adding piecemeal programs that come with more strings than long-term solutions, is what will deliver the biggest impact for the children and families we serve.”

The cruelty and callousness of this takes your breath away. The Louisiana state government wants to take food away from children, to teach them some kind of twisted Ayn Rand lesson about how they shouldn’t rely on anyone but themselves.

But at the same time they were making sure hungry kids won’t eat enough over the summer, Louisiana was also doing this:

Signed into law earlier today by Gov. Jeff Landry, HB 71 requires schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom on “a poster or framed document that is at least 11 inches by 14 inches.” The commandments must be the “central focus” of the display and “printed in a large, easily readable font.” The bill also requires that a specific version of the Ten Commandments, which has been dictated by the state Legislature, be used for every display. Displays that depart from this state-sanctioned version of scripture would violate Louisiana law.

If I was writing a novel that had a religious-right demagogue as the villain, and I wanted to make them as cartoonishly evil and over-the-top as possible, I’d have a scene where they sanctimoniously put up a scripture display while taking away food from hungry kids. And I’d feel like a hack, because it would be so heavy-handed. Louisiana Republicans are doing it for real.

These conservatives are making it extremely clear – to those kids, and to the rest of us – that Christianity isn’t about loving your neighbor, helping the needy, or showing compassion. It’s about exerting raw power, forcing your will on others, and proving that you can do what you want because you’re the biggest bully around. (Which is very much the lesson of the Ten Commandments themselves: you should worship God because he’s the biggest and the strongest, and he gets extremely angry and jealous if he doesn’t feel like he’s getting enough flattery.)

Their choice to use a specific version of the Ten Commandments reinforces this. As I’ve written before, there’s not just one set of Ten Commandments. There are two conflicting decalogues in the Bible, depending on which verse you believe. Even when it comes to the set of verses that everyone knows about, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant believers divide it up in different ways to get different lists of rules.

Ordering schools to post one in preference to others is an assertion of pure sectarianism. It’s not just promoting religion over non-religion or Judeo-Christian religion over other belief systems, both of which violate the First Amendment, but promoting one specific sect of Christianity over its competitors. Under any other judiciary, this law would be struck down swiftly. With the current makeup of the Supreme Court, which endorses Louisiana’s view of naked Christian supremacism, I’m not so sure.

I’ll say that the Summer EBT story has a happy ending, of sorts. After the decision was announced, there was enough of an outcry that Louisiana lawmakers caved in and reapplied for the federal funding. Regardless, the fact that there even had to be a fight about this – that feeding hungry children isn’t a self-evident proposition, but a source of controversy and polarizing debate – proves how morally broken the conservative religious faction is. They think they’re sending a lesson about morality, and they are. But it’s the opposite of the one they intend.

Image credit: Kenneth Freeman, released under CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Heat horror at the Hajj

As you probably know, the Hajj – the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca – is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. It’s a religious obligation for every observant Muslim to perform it at least once in their lives.

During Mohammed’s lifetime, when Islam was a smaller, regional faith, this seemed manageable. Now that Islam is a worldwide religion with almost two billion adherents, the logistical challenges of getting every one of them to the same place on the planet are becoming more daunting. And in a rapidly warming world, with a holy city in the middle of a desert climate, it’s getting outright deadly.

2024 is a case in point.

The Hajj is supposed to be performed during Dhu al-Hijja, the last month of the Islamic calendar. Because it’s a lunar calendar, the date drifts over the course of a solar year.

This year, it happened to fall in the middle of June, during a brutal Mideast summer. The weather was exceptionally hot even by Saudi Arabian standards, reaching temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit at the Grand Mosque of Mecca.

The heat was more than just extreme. For over a thousand people, it was lethal:

Saudi Arabia said Sunday that more than 1,300 faithful died during the Hajj pilgrimage which took place during intense heat, and that most of the deceased did not have official permits.

“Regrettably, the number of mortalities reached 1,301, with 83 percent being unauthorised to perform Hajj and having walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.

What compounds the problem is that the Hajj is a cash cow for Saudi Arabia, which sells permits to would-be pilgrims. It generates billions of dollars for their repressive theocracy every year.

But many Muslims can’t afford to pay, so they try to do it unofficially. That means they don’t have access to buses, air-conditioned tents, water stations and other amenities supplied to paying customers. Some people reported “motionless bodies on the roadside” as pilgrims collapsed while walking from one holy site to another.

The world is getting hotter each year, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels that Saudi Arabia, among others, has drilled and sold. A study published last month found that average temperatures in the area are rising by almost 1 degree F each decade. When the climate was already near the limit of what humans can tolerate, even a small increase can push it over the line to unsurvivable.

The Saudis have a firsthand view of the climate crisis and its consequences. But even as their pilgrims collapse and die from heat stroke, they’re blocking all attempts to do something about it.

At the COP28 climate talks, Saudi Arabia was one of the biggest foes of a global agreement to phase out fossil fuels. Whenever there was an opening, they pushed for poison-pill language that they knew would be seen as unacceptable; when they couldn’t do that, they purposefully stalled for time and delayed every point of agreement. When even that didn’t succeed, they just flat-out stonewalled negotiators from other countries by refusing to meet with them:

“Most countries vary on the degree or speed of how fast you get out of fossil fuels,” said Linda Kalcher, a former climate adviser to the United Nations who has been in negotiating rooms this week. Saudi Arabia, she said, “doesn’t even want to have the conversation.”

Obviously, this is for economic reasons first and foremost. The Saudi petrostate is addicted to fossil fuel money. It’s their only industry of any size, despite lackadaisical efforts to diversify.

However, I think there’s a deeper problem: the attitude of religious fatalism – also on display at the last Hajj disaster, a stampede in 2015 – which holds that death is God’s will and there’s nothing humans can do to stop it. Thus, in the face of mass casualty events like this one, Islamic authorities respond with a shrug, even when those deaths could unquestionably have been prevented.

This fatalistic, hands-off attitude is intersecting with climate change in the deadliest way imaginable. It’s the literal collision of religious myth with the reality of a physical world that can’t be denied or wished away. And, with climate change still gathering momentum, it’s likely this isn’t going to be the last time this happens.

“God the Original Segregationist”

A black-and-white photo of racists protesting against desegregation

I’ve written about a phenomenon I call “the march of progress” – the way organized religion is consistently on the wrong side of moral change, from democracy to feminism to secularism to LGBTQ rights, and consistently pretends otherwise after every loss.

Because religion is inherently conservative and resistant to change, religious apologists defend every popular evil of their day. And when that evil is finally defeated and a new conception of human rights takes hold, those same apologists rewrite history to pretend they were on the correct side all along. They take credit for the outcome they fought to prevent. Then the next human rights movement arises, which religious apologists fight against fiercely, ignoring all historical parallels… and the pattern repeats.

One prominent example is how the Confederacy was a Christian theocracy. During the Civil War, prominent Confederates loudly argued that they were on God’s side, that slavery was God’s will, and that abolitionists were “undeniably atheistic” – and that because of this, God was sure to grant them victory.

Of course, the Confederacy was defeated and chattel slavery was abolished. After its loss, Christians memory-holed these inconvenient facts. (The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination, would very much prefer people not remember that it was founded to protect slavery.)

But, just as historical precedent predicts, they learned nothing from their error. The next time civil rights erupted into national consciousness, Christians were once again on the front lines to stop it.

I saw this tidbit in an essay by Peter Wehner, “The Motivated Ignorance of Trump Supporters“:

In his book The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy, J. Russell Hawkins tells the story of a June 1963 gathering of more than 200 religious leaders in the White House. President John F. Kennedy was trying to rally their support for civil-rights legislation.

Among those in attendance was Albert Garner, a Baptist minister from Florida, who told Kennedy that many southern white Christians held “strong moral convictions” on racial integration. It was, according to Garner, “against the will of their Creator.”

“Segregation is a principle of the Old Testament,” Garner said, adding, “Prior to this century neither Christianity nor any denomination of it ever accepted the integration philosophy.”

Two months later, in Hanahan, South Carolina, members of a Southern Baptist church—they described themselves as “Christ centered” and “Bible believing”—voted to take a firm stand against civil-rights legislation.

“The Hanahan Baptists were not alone,” according to Hawkins. “Across the South, white Christians thought the president was flaunting [he probably meant “flouting” —Adam] Christian orthodoxy in pursuing his civil rights agenda.” Kennedy “simply could not comprehend the truth Garner was communicating: based on their religious beliefs, southern white Christians thought integration was evil.”

Just as modern-day Christians claim that outlawing abortion and fighting wokeness is God’s will, Christians of the civil rights era claimed that segregation and interracial marriage bans were God’s will. They argued for Jim Crow with the fervency of the true believer. White Christians wrote lengthy theological arguments backed up by biblical citations to make their case for segregation:

A decade earlier, the Reverend Carey Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas, Texas, had delivered a sermon titled “God the Original Segregationist,” in response to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It became influential within pro-segregationist southern states. Daniel later became president of the Central Texas Division of the Citizens Council of America for Segregation, which asked for a boycott of all businesses, lunch counters included, that served Black patrons. In 1960, Daniel attacked those “trying to destroy the white South by breaking the color line, thus giving aid and comfort to our Communist enemies.”

You can read the full text of that sermon. It’s a vile blast of old-timey Christian racism:

New Testament Text — ACTS 17:26,27

*And (GOD) hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, AND THE BOUNDS OF THEIR HABITATION; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.”

Our Lord God Himself was the Original Segregationist.

When first He separated the black race from the white and lighter skinned races He did not simply put them in different parts of town. He did not even put them in different towns or states. Nay, He did not even put them in adjoining countries.

HE PUT THE BLACK RACE ON A HUGE CONTINENT TO THEMSELVES, SEGREGATED FROM THE OTHER RACES BY OCEANS OF WATER TO THE WEST, SOUTH AND EAST, AND BY THE VAST STRETCHES OF THE ALMOST IMPASSABLE SAHARA DESERT TO THE NORTH.

So… God didn’t intend for people to cross oceans? Did he not know about boats?

This racist theology poses huge questions about the way its author saw the world. If God’s plan was that each race would stay where it originally arose, does that mean it was against God’s will for Europeans to settle and colonize the rest of the planet? Shouldn’t we give the Western Hemisphere back to the Native Americans?

Daniel is so certain that racial integration is against God’s will, he doesn’t feel obligated to provide any reason why it’s bad. He just asserts that it is, and expects his audience to agree with him. His deepest horror and loathing is reserved for the prospect of interracial relationships, which he slurs as “mongrelization”. Obviously, there’s a subconscious bigotry he can’t put into words that’s driving his conclusions, not any process of reasoning.

The feeble efforts of the integrationists to support their views by God’s Word are not only pitiful, they are often ludicrous. When pressed for Bibical authority many of them can be no more specific than to quote such general moral principles as “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ and ‘Do unto others as you would be done by, etc.

But as I loving my white neighbor as myself if I am working for a society which threatens to mongrelize his children or grandchildren? Am I loving my black neighbor as myself if I am trying to change his God-given skin-color into something contrary to both nature and Scripture?

Daniel thinks that it’s “contrary to nature” for people of different races to mingle – but obviously it’s not, because people are part of nature. Anything we choose to do is natural in that sense.

If God existed and didn’t want people of different races to have children together, he could have made us genetically incompatible with each other. Daniel never questions why God gave humans the ability to do something he doesn’t want us to do.

The reality is that, at a genetic level, all humans are the same species, and our DNA is virtually identical. The differences between us are, literally, only skin deep. They have no bearing on intelligence, moral character, work ethic, or anything else that matters.

Most Christians today, I’d wager, would say that they reject Daniel’s grossly bigoted theology – even though they believe in the same god and read the same Bible that he did. That’s exactly the point. It proves that religion doesn’t provide any inerrant or consistent morality, nor does it give us access to a source of wisdom outside ourselves. It only puts a gloss of divine approval on whatever prejudice is popular in each era.

This is why the march of progress happens. There’s no deity revealing what’s right and what’s wrong. There are only humans, arguing and fighting it out amongst ourselves. Some people cling to the prejudices of the past and resist change, while others try to pull humanity into a more enlightened future.

Fortunately, the friends of enlightenment have been winning this battle. The net effect is that – slowly, over many generations – we’re outgrowing ignorance and superstition. Moral progress is a long stairway, but we’re scaling it one step at a time. That’s an achievement to celebrate, but it would be happening faster if regressive religion weren’t trying to drag us back down.

Image: A 1959 protest against school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. One of the signs reads, “Stop the Race Mixing March of the Anti-Christ”. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Religion and capitalism are their own worst enemies

After January 6, it seemed as if America had a moment of clarity. People from all walks of society were horrified by how close we came to the destruction of democracy. Many of Trump’s rich donors expressed remorse and promised never to support him again.

However, capitalists have a short attention span. Predictably, they’re going back on their word:

“Many high-dollar donors at banks, hedge funds and other financial firms had turned their backs on Trump as he spun unfounded claims that the 2020 election had been stolen and savaged the judicial system with attacks. Today, they’re setting aside those concerns, looking past qualms about his personality and willingness to bulldoze institutional norms and focusing instead on issues closer to the heart: how he might ease regulations, cut their taxes or flex U.S. power on the global stage.”

…[M]any Republican donors – including those who had said they’d never support Trump again after Jan. 6 — believe the current regulatory climate for businesses is also an existential danger. Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City — a nonprofit organization representing the city’s top business leaders — said Republicans have conveyed to her that they consider that “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”

The only excuse they have for breaking their promise is a limp, pathetic “well, both sides are bad”. This is an insult to everyone’s intelligence. No one can argue in good faith that Biden is a threat to capitalism, the way Trump is a threat to democracy.

As a skeptic of capitalism myself, I only wish Biden were more anti-capitalist than he is. The reality is that he’s a thoroughly normal Democrat. At most, he has a mild progressive lean on economics.

He was the first president to walk a picket line, and his administration has been strongly pro-labor in general. He’s also active in antitrust enforcement, which is a welcome development and something we haven’t seen in too long.

But none of that is the same as being against capitalism. On the contrary, the golden age of American capitalism was famous for high union membership, steep tax brackets and trust-busting presidents. Moreover, studies consistently show that the U.S. economy does better under Democrats – and indeed, Biden’s administration has continued this pattern. Hs economy keeps setting all-time records for job creation and GDP growth.

Clearly, capitalism has nothing to fear from Biden’s re-election. So, why are business leaders putting on a show of concern for its survival?

I see two main reasons for this. One of them, well-known in politics, is the “working the refs” strategy. If you constantly criticize one side, there’s a chance they’ll be more inclined to take it easy on you, so as not to appear biased.

If you claim your vote is set in stone and nothing can sway you, the politicians on the side you’ve declared for have no incentive to cater to you. On the other hand, if you make a show of being undecided, both sides have an incentive to make promises to win your support.

However, I think there’s a deeper reason, which I saw put well on Mastodon by Loukas Christodoulou:

So the Republican party and similar fascistic movements have convinced themselves they are fighting for the soul of western civilization and capitalism against the antichrist and the whore of Babylon.

Not because Joe Biden or Kier Starmer are actually trying to destroy capitalism, but because capitalism and western civilization are having their own crises and this search for existential enemies is an attempt to marshall followers behind a failing system.

I think this is exactly right. Conservatives and business leaders know that younger generations are more hostile to capitalism, religion and nationalism than ever before. They’re deeply worried about these trend lines, and they should be.

But in trying to find the cause, they’ve looked everywhere except inward, at themselves. They can’t fathom that their own choices or their own actions have anything to do with it. They can only imagine that it’s caused by some external enemy. The truth is, it’s a self-inflicted wound.

Freethinkers and secularists should be familiar with how this has played out in organized religion. Church membership and belief in God are in freefall throughout the Western world – and it’s the churches themselves that are to blame. Catholic and Protestant alike, they’ve stayed stuck in the past: digging in against moral progress, promoting deeply unpopular policies on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. In the era of Trump, they’ve taken a hard-right turn, doing a colossal flip-flop on whether personal character matters, all for the sake of defending a greedy, adulterous criminal.

Understandably, people of conscience and good sense are repelled by the churches’ cruelty and hypocrisy. Millions of them quit organized religion, or never join in the first place. The atheist movement has contributed by providing a safe harbor for people to speak out and express their doubts, but our growing numbers are largely an effect, not a cause, of religion’s decline.

Something much the same is going on with capitalism. In the last few decades, we’ve seen what kind of world out-of-control capitalism is creating, and it’s not a pretty picture.

Inequality has soared to eye-watering levels. The basic prerequisites of a good life, like housing, health care and education, are increasingly out of reach for millions of people. The corporate hunger for profit is causing planet-destroying climate change: melting the ice caps, flooding the coasts, and choking cities with smoke from burning forests. Younger generations are afraid that civilization is in danger of collapsing before they grow up.

And when the plutocrats look around, they have the gall to wonder why people don’t love capitalism like they used to. It’s an abominable mystery to them – but they just know it must be Joe Biden’s fault!

The religious right is the tail that wags the GOP dog

[Previous: The Christian cult of embryo worship]

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court declared (in an explicitly religious ruling) that single-celled frozen embryos were people, with the same rights as any other person. The effect, which was intended, was to shut down all IVF clinics in the state for fear of prosecution. It was the next, predictable step in the Christian right’s long campaign to strip people of reproductive freedom and impose its own theocratic vision of God’s will.

This is how the religious right always operates. They pilot their most appalling policies in safe red states, where they don’t have to worry about it costing them support. Once it’s become normalized in the media and people have gotten used to it, they start lobbying for copycat laws in other states. Once that happens, they move for a federal ban. After the repeal of Roe, they must have thought the public was ready for the next rung on the Overton ladder.

But, as it turned out, they badly misjudged what voters were willing to accept.

If you’re a Republican, you essentially have to be a child molester to lose an election in Alabama. But the backlash against the anti-IVF ruling was so fierce, even Alabama Republicans were spooked. They hastily passed a band-aid law that didn’t overturn the ruling, but nullified it.

After this stinging defeat in the court of public opinion, you might think the religious right is chastened. You might think they’ve recognized that banning IVF is a political dead letter. You might think they’ll back away from this position and try something else next time.

Yes, you might think that. But you’d be wrong:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., on Wednesday voted to condemn the use of in vitro fertilization, signaling the campaign by evangelicals against abortion is widening to include the popular fertility treatment.

…The IVF resolution before the thousands of leaders gathered in Indianapolis noted the pain infertile couples encounter but said that “not all technological means of assisting human reproduction are equally God-honoring or morally justified.”

…The resolution called on “Southern Baptists to reaffirm the unconditional value and right to life of every human being, including those in an embryonic stage, and to only utilize reproductive technologies consistent with that affirmation.”

The message that the Southern Baptist Convention is sending, especially so soon after the Alabama debacle, is clear: they have no intention of backing down. They’re devoted to the religious dogma of embryonic personhood, and they want to make it into law if they can. If they succeed, it would outlaw not just IVF, but abortion and most forms of birth control. That’s always been their goal, and it still is. They want us to hear that loud and clear.

Obviously, the SBC doesn’t have to worry about blowback the same way Republican officeholders do. They don’t have to answer to voters outside their own denomination. They can make demands without concern for political viability.

But it would be wrong to disregard this resolution as symbolic. The Republican party is in thrall to the religious right. The SBC and similar church groups are their base of support that gives them their marching orders. If conservative Christian groups want IVF outlawed, it’s a good bet that Republican politicians will try to do it, whatever the cost. They’re eagerly passing abortion bans, even though those are massively unpopular among voters even in red states like Kentucky, Montana, Kansas and Ohio.

Here’s a case in point: Just this week, Senate Democrats held a vote on a bill that would protect IVF nationwide – and Republicans blocked it.

If Republicans truly had no intention of taking away IVF, they’d have no reason to oppose this bill. Whatever they say, they clearly believe they’ll want to ban it at some point, and they want to leave themselves as much room to maneuver as possible. They don’t want to tie the hands of red-state legislatures that want to give this another try.

Whatever lies Republicans tell to avert voters’ wrath, it’s obvious that reproductive choice in every form is on the ballot in 2024. If you’re a voter who cares about abortion, birth control, or IVF, you’d better get fired up. The religious right is pulling the GOP’s puppet strings. If they win, they’ll ban them all – public opinion be damned.

Cars shouldn’t be a necessity for living

A cityscape at night, with highways densely clogged with traffic

Once again, my state’s elected leadership has let its people down:

The MTA is pushing “pause” on New York City’s first-in-the-nation congestion pricing plan indefinitely, according to an official briefed on the plans. The toll program, years in the making, had been set to roll out later this month.

No new start date has been set.

After years of fighting, New York City was finally about to implement congestion pricing. The plan was to charge a $15 toll to drive into Manhattan below 60th Street during the daytime. All the agreements had been struck, all the technology had been put in place. There were roadside billboards advertising that it was set to begin on June 30.

Then, at the last possible minute, Gov. Kathy Hochul – who’d previously been a supporter of congestion pricing – flip-flopped and pulled the plug on it. She gave no explanation for her sudden change of heart, other than mealy-mouthed excuses about how more studies were needed.

The revenue from congestion pricing had been earmarked for the MTA, New York’s transit agency. The cancellation blows a $15 billion hole in their budget, which Hochul’s plan to fix was… nothing. The legislature convened to debate the problem, but they too threw up their hands and went home without doing anything.

I can’t be the only one who finds driving unpleasant. It’s expensive, tedious, stressful and dangerous. We lose countless hours of our lives to sitting in traffic or circling to look for parking. We spend huge sums of money on car payments, insurance, registration, gas and tolls. Most of us put up with this because we’ve grown up with it and we think of it as normal – but, like many popular assumptions, it pays to question it. There’s a better way to live.

In an ideal world, walking, biking, and mass transit would be the default ways of getting around. We’d live in pleasant, human-scale neighborhoods with dense housing, amenities like shops, restaurants and libraries within easy strolling distance, and public parks and green space for recreation. When we had to travel longer distances, there would be a wealth of clean, quiet, efficient options: electric buses, streetcars, subways and trains on convenient schedules.

Instead, we’ve designed a society where cars are the only feasible way for most people to get around. This causes all the evils of car culture: perpetual traffic jams, impassable highways bisecting neighborhoods, huge swaths of valuable space devoted to parking, huge amounts of precious time lost to commuting, and a steady toll of deaths and injuries in crashes.

And the costs aren’t only borne by drivers. People who live along those gridlocked roads have to breathe the air pollution that’s belched out by cars and trucks idling under their windows. Some neighborhoods in the Bronx are called “Asthma Alley” for their high rates of respiratory disease. And of course, the more cars are on the road, the more damage is done to the climate by burning fossil fuels.

The only way to fix this is to make driving a less attractive option, by raising tolls and parking fees, and make the alternatives more attractive, by investing in mass transit. If the costs of driving are high enough, people will switch to something else. It’s a win-win: less traffic for the people who truly have to drive, less pollution for all of us. This is the reasoning behind congestion pricing.

The problem is the psychological tendency of loss aversion. People get angry when they have to pay for something that used to be “free” – even though driving isn’t free and never was. Arguably, it’s the most expensive means of traveling. But because many of the costs are externalized onto society, individual commuters perceive it as better than mass transit. Naturally, they’ll protest if they perceive the cost of driving as going up (even though it’s not a new cost, it’s the true cost, which congestion pricing would have put on the responsible parties for the first time).

Politicians like Hochul are terrified of that anger, especially from white surburbanites who are shaping up to be a critical swing vote. But if they let fear of backlash drive every decision, nothing will ever change. For the world to improve, someone has to have the imagination to envision how the world could be better, and the courage to fight for that vision and turn it into reality. This debacle shows that even many allegedly liberal politicians lack that imagination and that courage.

Empty vessels

An assortment of clay pots in various sizes

The biggest privilege that anyone gets in life is the chance to teach another person.

Most of the people we meet come to us as fully formed adults, with their own opinions, their own values and their own outlook forged by their experiences. We can converse with them, we can exchange ideas with them, but we rarely persuade them.

More often, when we encounter someone we disagree with, we strike sparks. We each come away more convinced: us of our beliefs, they of theirs. In the face of cognitive dissonance, people grow stubborn. They reject advice, they harden themselves, they cling tighter to what they think. It’s extraordinarily rare to say something to another person that makes a lasting change in the course of their lives.

But when it happens, it’s a feeling like no other. It’s a blossoming, something huge and wonderful arising from something small, like dropping a pebble that changes the course of a river, or planting an acorn and seeing it grow into a towering tree. It’s a ripple that spreads outward forever, passing through the world and leaving it changed. It’s attainable immortality, not the fantasy versions peddled by religion: lasting proof that you lived, that your life mattered to someone, that you made a difference.

This, I’m convinced, is the thrill of being a cult leader. Having people like putty in your hands, hanging on your every word and treating it as holy truth, is an incredible rush of power. It’s a temptation that few people can resist. But, of course, most of us will never get to be the head of our own cult.

The other, at least slightly more attainable, way to have this privilege is to have kids.

Children come into the world, if not as blank slates, then as empty vessels wanting to be filled. They have a boundless, instinctive curiosity, understandable in the light of evolutionary history. They’re hungry to learn everything about this place in which they find themselves.

In my almost eight years of being a parent, I’ve found this out for myself every single day. My son bubbles with questions, effervescent, like a glass of champagne. He wants to know everything there is to know. And I’m doing my best to oblige him.

I’ve taught him about religion and mythology, about the immense tapestry of human imagination with which we’ve peopled the heavens. I’ve taught him about science, about evolution and cosmology, the scientific method and skepticism. I’ve told him about history, from the Roman Empire to the Vikings to the colonial era to civil rights. I’ve taught him about literature, music, art and chess, and probably more things I’m forgetting.

In short, our kids are empty vessels, and it’s our duty as parents to fill them. We pour ourselves into them, our ideas and our knowledge. We hope (as every generation before us hoped) that we can pass on our accumulated wisdom so they start on a higher step than we did, so they don’t have to learn through painful experience.

As an inevitable part of this, we also pass on our values. Any good parent aspires to teach their kids the difference between right and wrong – and that seemingly simple task brings with it a whole cosmos of moral reasoning. Whether we teach that morality is utilitarian happiness-maximizing, or following universally applicable rules, or obeying tradition or religious dogmas, either way it makes a huge difference in how they conceive of good and bad. Even if you try your hardest to be value-neutral and to let your kids make up their own minds, you can’t help but pass on your values by demonstrating what you care about.

Getting to do this is both a privilege and an opportunity. It’s an unparalleled chance to shape the life of another person in lasting ways.

However, some parents – especially religious fundamentalists and other cultic belief systems – make the mistake of thinking that means they can make their kids turn out any way they wish. It’s the logic of the famous Jesuit saying, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.”

But it’s not true. Kids may be empty vessels, in the sense that they initially lack knowledge which we can impart to them through our teaching and our example. But they’re not soft clay that we can mold into any form we choose. Vases can all hold liquid, but they’re not all the same shape. Just so are our children. They come into the world with their own unique mix of traits which parenting can’t alter. The lessons you impart, when poured into them, may yield something completely different than what you expect.

Many parents resist this conclusion, but I don’t. As an atheist, I believe in individual freedom, and I try to parent in accordance with that philosophy. Of course, I want my son to grow into a good and ethical person, to be successful in life, and to be happy. But I’ve already accepted that he won’t be a carbon copy of me.

And that’s a good thing! Unlike religious dogmatists, I’m not so arrogant as to believe I’m infallible or that I have all the answers. We should all hope that our kids will know more and do better than we will. We shouldn’t want them to echo us, but to surpass us.

I see my role as a parent not as mapping my child’s course through life, deciding their beliefs and their interests in advance. Rather, it’s helping them figure out who they want to become. However my son turns out, I’m sure it will come as a surprise – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t wait to see what that empty vessel will become when it’s filled.

Pro-natalism: New rationalist cult just dropped

Rationalism is leading people to weirder places than ever. A case in point is Malcolm and Simone Collins, a Pennsylvania couple who have four children and hope to have at least seven, and founded a nonprofit to convince more people to do the same. They’re in the news frequently, including an interview in the Guardian where they explain their natalist philosophy.

The most attention-getting part is that the Collinses are atheists. They don’t belong to Quiverfull or any of the other patriarchal religious cults which teach that God commands us to have as many children as possible. Quite the opposite:

The Collinses are atheists; they believe in science and data, studies and research. Their pronatalism is born from the hyper-rational effective altruism movement – most recently made notorious by Sam Bankman-Fried – which uses utilitarian principles and cool-headed logic to determine what is best for life on Earth.

As with effective altruism or longtermism, reading about their philosophy gave me intellectual vertigo, because it starts off with seemingly-reasonable premises but ends up in a bizarre place. At a generous estimate, I’d say I agree with about 70% of what they say – but the remaining 30% jumps the tracks and becomes ludicrous nonsense.

I’ll start with the good. They claim to be gender egalitarians; both of them agree that Malcolm does all the parenting after their babies turn 18 months old. They also say they’re pro-choice and in favor of flexible work policies that are easier on working parents.

The Collinses argue that their natalism is rooted in concern for the future of human civilization. As more people delay childbearing and have fewer kids, many industrialized countries, from the U.S. to Europe to China, are having children at lower than replacement rates. If this trend continues over decades, populations will shrink, even crash. Social welfare programs and pension funds will run dry.

What’s worse, against a backdrop of shrinking population, the cultures that prosper could end up being the ones that have the least concern for women’s autonomy:

The Collinses say women’s rights will suffer unless the birthrate improves. “The only cultural groups that survive will be the ones that don’t give women a choice. And that’s a terrifying world for us,” says Malcolm, wide eyed. “People are like, ‘You’re bringing a Handmaid’s Tale into the world!’ – that’s exactly what we’re trying to prevent.”

One more thing I agree with is this: they reject the mindset, born from capitalist marketing, that parents have an obligation to pay for every possible activity that might give their children an advantage (some people call this Ivy League Preschool Syndrome):

“People say this to themselves. But – speaking as someone who has a lot of wealthy friends – people just upgrade their lifestyle as they earn more money. We want to have tons of kids, but as a result of that, we’re not going to be able to send them to private school. We’re not going to be able to pay for them to go to college.” The Collinses plan to home school all their children.

“We also don’t raise them like they’re retired millionaires, which is what many Americans do: driving them like private chauffeurs to soccer, to juggling and robotics class. We’re just not going to do that,” says Simone, still folding vests.

“When people say, ‘I can’t afford kids,’ what they mean is, ‘I cannot afford to have kids at the standards that I find to be culturally normative,” Malcolm continues.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s mandatory to send kids to private school, or to sign them up for other expensive extracurriculars to pad their resumes. Those mostly serve to perpetuate class privilege. I do think it’s good to make sure you’re in a position to give your kids some assistance with college, if that’s where they choose to go.

Those are the good, or at least less objectionable, parts of their philosophy. Now for the bad ones.

All the Collinses’ children were conceived through IVF. They’re using genetic screening on their frozen embryos to pick the ones that supposedly will be the most intelligent and successful. I doubt whether this is knowable, and it recalls a long and ugly history of eugenics.

They’re also involved in politics – as Republicans. Malcolm says he’s not racist, but he’s shown few qualms about sharing the stage at conservative conferences with white supremacists pushing great-replacement conspiracies. In fairness, he says he’s doing it to convert them; but also in fairness, it’s typically overconfident – some would say arrogant – of a white rationalist to assume that the influence only runs one way.

I have a simple policy: I won’t share a stage with racists. If you want to debate them, you should do it in a way that doesn’t give them a public platform to spew hate. What does their vaunted rationalism say about the likelihood of converting the general public to their philosophy, if they’re willing to rub elbows with white supremacists?

Then there’s the most infamous part of the Guardian article. It’s the slap heard round the world:

Torsten has knocked the table with his foot and caused it to teeter, to almost topple, before it rights itself. Immediately – like a reflex – Malcolm hits him in the face.

It is not a heavy blow, but it is a slap with the palm of his hand direct to his two-year-old son’s face that’s firm enough for me to hear on my voice recorder when I play it back later. And Malcolm has done it in the middle of a public place, in front of a journalist, who he knows is recording everything.

…Smacking is not illegal in Pennsylvania. But the way Malcolm has done it – so casually, so openly, and to such a young child – leaves me speechless.

…Maybe he noticed how appalled I was when he hit Torsten. On the way back to the farmhouse, Malcolm tells me that he and Simone have developed a parenting style based on something she observed when she saw tigers in the wild: they react to bad behaviour from their cubs with a paw, a quick negative response in the moment, which they find very effective with their own kids. “I was just giving you the context so you don’t think I’m abusive or something,” he says.

Above and beyond the cruelty of striking a child, this is all the more shocking because it’s so incongruous. I can concede that the Collinses at least have reasons for most of the things they’re doing, even if they’re reasons I disagree with or find bizarre. This – his willingness to smack a toddler in the face because tigers do it (!?) – is the stark exception. Is this a rational strategy?

Nature doesn’t exist for us to draw moral lessons from. Tiger males kill cubs sired by competitors, but that doesn’t make it OK for us. You’re not allowed to hit another adult to make them do what you want; that’s a crime. Why should it be different with children?

If anything, it’s worse to hit a child who’s small and helpless. Robert Ingersoll said this in 1877, and he’s still right:

I tell you the children have the same rights that we have, and we ought to treat them as though they were human beings. They should be reared with love, with kindness, with tenderness, and not with brutality. That is my idea of children.

…Do not treat your children like orthodox posts to be set in a row. Treat them like trees that need light and sun and air. Be fair and honest with them; give them a chance. Recollect that their rights are equal to yours. Do not have it in your mind that you must govern them; that they must obey. Throw away forever the idea of master and slave.

To be clear, I don’t think every instance of swatting or slapping a child should be prosecuted as abuse. Parents are human beings with emotions like everyone else, and parenting tests your patience to the limit. I’ve never hit my son, but I understand it’s possible to lose one’s temper. However, there’s a big difference between doing it in the heat of the moment, and recognizing it’s wrong, versus doing it on purpose, coolly and with forethought.

My biggest question to all natalists, religious or secular, is: How long do you expect the population to grow? Where does it stop?

Infinite growth is the mentality of a cancer cell. The population can’t increase forever on a finite planet, and right now, space colonization is nothing but sci-fi fantasy. It has to level off eventually. If we do it by choice, by voluntarily reproducing less, it will be better for us than if we slam into natural limits and die back like any other species that overshoots the capacity of its environment.

Natalism is unnecessary. We’re in no danger of running out of people. Even with slowing birth rates, the population is forecast to plateau around 10 billion by 2100. That’s plenty of humans to accomplish anything we might desire, if they’re all educated and lifted out of poverty.

As I said in my post on the decline of West Virginia, the only barrier is getting people from where they are to where labor is needed: in other words, immigration. I don’t know what the Collinses’ view on this is (although, again, they seem happy enough to share a stage with white supremacists). But if you’re concerned about population shrinkage, but against open borders, that’s the number-one giveaway that you’re a racist.