- Christianity is on a quick, steep decline
- Parishioners are bringing their politics to church with them
- For liberals, the answer to “Who is in charge here?” should be “No one”
- The system is not perfect but tends to get better over time
- They are seen as godless
- Making money is the only value on the rise while most other values are in decline, especially faith
- The US Founders thought being virtuous would help make people more governable
- Four foundations
- Mortality
- Morality
- Murder
- Miracles
- “People have a perfect right to believe that we exist for a reason even if that reason is not scientifically provable. We are, of course, not entitled to believe whatever we want.”
- Being ubiquitous does not make it inherently right
- “Any unlikely natural explanation is inherently more plausible than a miracle.”
- Democracy depends on religion that desires to support democratic society; Religion depends on a democracy that supports moral values
- Liberalism is inherently anarchy-adjacent
- Conservatives characterize liberality as too much freedom
- Locke and others knew that there needed to be limited freedom for both persons and government
- “Religion does best when it adapts to the needs of actual people”
- We should move zeal out of politics and back to religion
- “Evangelic” became synonymous with “conservative”
- (true) Christianity can be summed as
- Fear not
- Imitate Christ
- Forgive each other
- “Christian nationalism” is not religious but political
- “We are to be governed by laws, not individual people”
- ‘What we gain by accepting what is already de facto law is insignificant compared to what we gain by working together’
- We should be navigating to increasing moral agency
- Mormon theology drives its approach to politics, most churches are the other way around
- “You can’t beat something with nothing”
- Many churches are missing “adults” to help keep the church in the spiritual realm and out of politics
- Christians should avoid the “Church of fear”; “fear not” is the most common admonition in the New Testament
- We should not pass laws “because Jesus said so” but we also shouldn’t be “allergic to religion”
- De-escalation is a benefit in itself
- Christians practices would be benefited if they realized they not in the promised land but are exiles
Blog
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“Cross Purposes” by Jonathan Rauch
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“Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery” by Lee Alan Dugatkin
- Too many mice kills the society
- With eel grass, starfish live lone lives, without it, they clump together
- Rats in human cities tended to self-regulate their populations
- Fighting takes place on the way to the feeder, but not at the feeder itself
- Hypothesis that small mammals have frequent aggressive interactions; as the interactions drop, the mammals move in the direction that is most likely to increase such interactions, thus spreading out
- Generations of leisure impairs the ability to care for young
- Morning songs may be how birds take a census
- Dominant rats did not mind pan-sexual and homosexual rat advances on themselves
- Culture helps manage the abundance of social interactions we have today
- An “invisible college” allows for important topics to be discussed and foment so answers are ready when they are needed
- (This is something the internet can help with but does not necessarily)
- Rats with low social velocity have more randomized patterns that might be better adapted for changing environments
- Connectivity decreases entropy but adds stress
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“The Spinach King” by John Seabrook
- “Truck” comes from “bartering or produce growing”
- Marel is a prehistoric chemical that made the northeast growing really productive
- East Coast farms were slow to adopt irrigation, hampering their productivity
- Road building is naturally connected to farming because they need to get their farm goods to where the people are
- National road building was originally under the Department of Agriculture
- During WWII, people were encouraged to pick frozen foods to let canned goods support the war
- There is a difference between having money and being rich
- Farming + Contractor work = Year-round work
- Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a therapy system that is an internal analysis
- (Damaged people exude power to distract from the weakness inside)
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“Samsung Rising” by Geoffrey Cain
- Korean national pride and Samsung are often synonymous
- Samsung wanted to be taken as seriously as Apple
- Focused on generalist in the early years
- “I don’t tell them. They’re supposed to notice.” On note taking habits
- Buying a newspaper allowed them to aggressively manage their public image
- In the revolution, banks were pulled from corporations and leaders had to manufacture their way into good graces
- Korea is open and still nationalist
- If Samsung failed, much of Korea’s economy would also collapse
- “Change everything but your wife and kids”
- In the 90’s, Samsung started to look for a coherent design
- Samsung started looking for products and designs that could be distinctive
- At the height of the Asian Financial Crisis, Samsung started exporting phones to the US
- “Running a big company is like running a cemetery. There are thousands of people beneath you and no one is listening.”
- Samsung’s chairman executed a sketchy stock trade, after which there was intense legal scrutiny
- Legal problems continue to plague the company