As an African who has over a year started acquainting myself with all things American I've come to a conclusion that the amount of propaganda and social engineering the American public has been abused with is enough to make a typical African dictator sqirm

1. It baffles me as to how a population that claims to be so obsessed with freedom is okay with the mass surveillance infrastructure that was setup with the patriot act and appears to have expanded so much ever since; is it hypocrisy?

2. Spend enough time in reddit and you'll get a sense that the so called "Incel community" is as organised and as big as the KKK or black panthers, after a time of dissecting this issue i came to a conclusion that its just another instace of propaganda that is being pushed to maintain or expand the schism between men and women; I just don't believe that with all the cheap prostitutes and alternative sexcapeds in one of the most hedonistic countries on the planet this is really an issue

3. This is the most obvious one and really grinds my gears that the population doesn't wake up from; being propagandized into sexual–gender and race issues that either affect a very miniscule segment of the population in the most insignificant ways (most of these problems are sociocultural and no amount of legislative action is going to solve them); I read on the "occupy wallstreet" protests and i was forced to conclude they were killed off and repurposed into pride parades and black lives matter marches; they killed an economic movement in place of sexual gender and race issues

Its not impossible to decouple from the programming,a good example is our neighbour country (Kenya) where for decades people were propagandized to hate each other over tribal diffrences but that strategy failed in 2024 where despite heavy tribal propaganda the youth regardless of tribes stormed the parliament and almost raided the statehouse over economic woes (in my country they tried dividing the country over religion and it failed spectacularly)

The modern GOP isn't a conservative party anymore; it’s a spineless, submission based personality cult that traded any semblance of constitutional principle, fiscal restraint, and state's rights for populist theater. Down ballot Republicans completely capitulated because they realized their voters don't want Burkean conservatism they want a Caesaristic strongman to worship, turning the party of limited government into a hollowed-out shell that rubber stamps whatever whim trends on social media today.

I've often thought about a Republican I could support because I'm frequently asked as an independent to justify that independence for whatever reason. It's not that some of the ideas supposedly behind the party can't support things that I also support, it's that decisions made generations ago have largely made the current options wholly unpalatable. So, what if those decisions were made differently for whatever reason?

What if the states-right conservatives actually supported the successes and efforts for the state government "laboratories of democracy" and had been supporting MJ legalization at the state level since the 80s, and the federal level since the 90s?

What if the Goldwater mindset of "you don't have to be straight to shoot straight" had led to full acceptance of open service in the military regardless of sexuality, and a similar corresponding acceptance of federal civil unions for the relationships between any consenting adults?

What if this reduced need to play to the votes of the religious right instead allowing for the "grand bargain" supposedly in the works for nearly a decade, a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to privacy, in theory addressing both abortion and gun rights in a way nothing else could allowing focus elsewhere?

This hypothetical US Republican candidate could be largely pro-MJ legalization, pro-gay rights, pro-gun rights, pro-reproductive rights in the 90s at a time when the US Democratic party was somewhat at war with itself on all of the above. Even something more conservatives support today like UBI, and small business grants would have been significantly to the left of the "welfare reformers".

Would that be enough for anyone to make that vote at that time?

If we take it a step further, and go even further back to a time when some conservatives still preferred union labor relations to government interference, would that level of labor support as the "lesser evil" be viewed as at least better than the long term gutting of the unions under blue and red neo-leaders of the era?

Other possible avenues to find surprising new support could be initial conservative rejection of for-profit prisons "The Government shouldn't get a deal on taking peoples freedom away", early rejection of militarization of policing, specially in the wake of federal incidents like at Ruby Ridge, and many more further afield.

Is it possible to construct a Republican candidate that you would vote for given the alternative that is still identifiably Republican? For those that already largely vote Republican, or would have, see if you can do the opposite and find a Democratic candidate you would vote for over this hypothetical progressive Republican, and tell us why.

Este principio, aunque es profundamente religioso y de raíz protestante, tiene también un origen en gran parte jurídico. Recordemos que el doctor Lutero, antes de ser un teólogo católico romano, estudió doctrina jurídica. Así, este principio bíblico —que nace en el contexto de la Reforma de 1517 y ve la luz en 1521— se vio influenciado por la formación previa de Martín Lutero. Entonces, ¿podría este principio remontarse o incorporarse en nuestras normas supremas (las Constituciones)?

On Reddit and publications like the National Review, I often see conservatives enthusiastically bring up Chesterton's Fence as a perfect analogy to their core political instinct. The image that's painted is that we had a social order, a society that was good and we knew it worked, pesky leftists just trample around, changing things willy-nilly, and it's up to the conservative to stand athwart all this change and yell "STOP".

However, when I think of a classic suburban lifestyle a century ago to now, the biggest changes in life were not instituted top down from blue haired leftist bureaucrats, but often follow market changes. The invention of the telephone and television made it so neighbors stopped hanging out so much. These technologies coupled with air travel and the internet allowed companies to become truly globalist and detached from any stewardship of a nation-state. Smartphones and social media led to a more alienated, coarse, and divided society. Everything from people getting worse sleep due to screen time to flakier social ties.

From the large to the small scale, the biggest, most consequential changes in our society were spurred by capital trying to get a bigger return on investment, and selling new products to the world. And this is precisely the pattern that conservatism exalts and explicitly tries to encourage. I find that the change in society due to liberal bureaucrats is basically insignificant, a drop in the ocean, compared to the velocity and scale of change to society that the free market brings. And the market institutes these changes in a rapid, cold, manner, uncaring of any of the social norms that the Chesterton's Fence analogy was thought of to protect.

I know that many conservatives will say "Ah, but those changes were voluntary! No one forced you to stop writing letters to family, American businesses simply offered you a better alternative with email and text and consumers voted with their wallet". Firstly, the job market and career viability are often drivers that essentially force adoption of new norms and technologies. And secondly, Chesterton's Fence was supposed to agnostically be about change in general, whether voluntary or not. I think there's a strong argument that more than 50% voting for a politician that brings a new change to social policy is more voluntary than an employer pointing a camera at each employee and saying "If you want to work here, you need to consent to being recorded for AI training purposes".

When conservatives gesture broadly at how things used to be and how they are now, and say "ah, this is too much change, too fast. The left has really gone too far. I'm a Chesterton's Fence conservative, to hold on to what was time honored and traditional", why does their own closely held adherence to free markets get a pass in the full story of societal change? It seems to me that a privately developed technology released onto the free market can change society on a scale of 100 (to use arbitrary units) and if a left wing politician suggests nudging it 0.5 in the opposite direction to shield citizens from a negative effect of it, Chesterton's Fence conservatives immediately cry foul.

I've been wondering this lately, short of overhauling the entire socioeconomic and political system, how would you actually get money out of politics in our current society? Say a party/coalition came to power that was significantly motivated to do this, what kind of legislation would be needed?

I'm aiming this question more at multiparty parliamentary democracies like the UK or NZ rather than the US as the American political landscape seems impossibly messed up at this point.

On the extreme end you could take inspiration from Cuban municipal elections where theres no campaigning at all, no advertising, no debates etc. The candidates just post their resume at the election booth and thats it. But without reforming the wider society this would be very difficult to enact.

A couple easy targets would be to have parties funded directly by the government rather than being funded by donations/membership fees. Every party would receive an equal advertising budget that would cover all advertising expenses; TV, social media, bill boards, etc. And each party would receive an administrative budget depending on how many seats they have, this would pay for staffers/aides/campaign managers/volunteer coordinators, etc. This feels pretty basic and would probably be a popular policy if it was announced today.

But then you run into the problem of non-party campaigners. There are plenty of individuals, companies, and lobbyists who pay for independent political ads for/against certain parties. It wouldn't be too hard to legislate against this too but you might run into cries of freedom of speech from certain groups of people.

The biggest issue would be privately owned media companies. If they decide to run content that is pro-X party, how do you stop it? Sure you can legislate that they can't explicitly support X party, but media companies will always have certain biases and its impossible to remove them. You can say something like 'if they interview candidate from party X for 30 minutes on prime time, they also need to interview a candidate from party Y for 30 minutes on primetime' but that doesnt ensure the interviews themselves are even. It also has the danger of being biased towards unbiased content; by this i mean, there isn't always 2 equal sides to a story, sometimes there's 10, sometimes there's 1, sometimes there's none. If X party has 5 scandals a month, is the media then forced to report on 5 scandals by Y party even if they dont exist?

To avoid this messy area of forcing media to report in a certain way, you could instead try introducing some legislation that provides a stop-gap between the owner of a private media company and the content it produces. This way, theoretically, the actual journalists are free to report how they see fit without undue influence from either the government or their corporate owners. However this would be very hard (maybe impossible?) to actually enforce.

There's also the issue of social media algorithms and the wealthy owners of those companies using the algorithms to influence elections. This would also be very hard to legislate away without first reforming other parts of society.

What are peoples thoughts on the topic?

Let's drop the pretense that the MAGA movement is genuinely fighting for traditional values or the preservation of the nuclear family. From a principled conservative perspective, the reality is clear Trump is fundamentally a 1990s Manhattan liberal who compromised entirely on social issues, and his supporters simply look the other way.

Where is the actual resistance to the normalization of same sex marriage and systemic moral decay? It is nonexistent. Rather than launching an aggressive effort to overturn the judicial overreach of Obergefell and restore traditional standards, Trump's platform treats the issue as settled law. He has effectively sidelined foundational moral principles as a minor administrative concern.

He did not challenge the underlying cultural shift; he accommodated it. His administration sidestepped a hardline stance, and he completely backed away from confronting these cultural changes when they conflicted with political convenience.

If you maintain that a society cannot survive without the traditional nuclear family, how can you support a figure who surrendered that ground to court suburban voters? He is a liberal on social issues, and the conservative base accepted a compromise. Change my view.

I tried to analyze it, and notices that as Trump has taken control of increasing parts of the business and technology establishment, a new faction, the tech right which is sometimes called “Thielian,” has emerged within the American right, influenced by Peter Thiel and his circle like blake masters. Unlike the populist right largely shaped by Steve Bannon and Michael Anton, which draws on nationalist working-class, grassroots nationalism, social traditionalism, and interventionist economics and a big state that punishes enemies, the Thielian right comes more from the world of capital, technology, and entrepreneurship. It does not seek to abolish capitalism or corporate power, but to harness it for a right-wing political system. A more tech-ish version of Orban's Hungary if you will.

From this perspective, the state is not meant to be just a neutral regulator but a tool for building a new balance of power. The goal is to use government, regulation, public contracts, industrial policy, and the defense establishment to strengthen industries, companies, and entrepreneurs identified with the right-wing camp, while simultaneously weakening institutions, companies, and elites perceived as enemies of the right. This creates a model in which the market remains private, you have capitalism and ostensibly competitive, but the state actively helps to create a structural advantage for a particular camp. For example, Blake Masters has argued that Republicans should embrace “entrepreneurial thinking” rather than reverting to old Reaganist dogmas.

This is particularly evident in relation to Big Tech. Masters is not arguing that the right should simply withdraw from economics and leave the market alone. On the contrary, he explicitly says that the government “sets the rules for the market” and that giant corporations cannot be allowed to control society as a whole. He even argues that the market is a means, not an end in itself, and that corporations should be fought when they become a supposedly liberal destructive force.

In this sense, “Thielism” can be seen as an ideology to build a political-economic monopoly for the right: not the nationalization of the economy, but the creation of an ecosystem in which capital, technology, communications, security, and government connect around that political camp. Instead of the right merely winning elections, it strives to rebuild the centers of power so that even after a change of government it will have a lasting institutional, economic, and technological advantage.

The economic approach of the populist right is different. The state needs to identify the economic forces that harm the nation - globalists, companies that move production abroad, the financial establishment, corporations that depend on China, and so on - and then use state power against them: tariffs, sanctions, regulation, blocking deals, favoring local production, and applying political pressure. In other words, the market is not a neutral arena. It has political enemies, and therefore the state should not be neutral toward them.

On the other hand, there are also people like Stephen Miller who combine both approaches.

Is it strong leadership?

Good institutions?

Competent civil servants?

Or simply having leaders who are willing to make unpopular decisions when necessary?

I keep thinking about this because elections can change governments, but institutions are what remain.

First of all, I'm talking secularism as a separation of church and state, although this idea came long before the coining of the word itself. It's just useful as a word to wrap up all the similar ideas.

Separating church and state protects religion because it, ideally, stops a government from imposing any *Correct* state religion on anyone else. Which stops people from trying to use government to simply oppress their religious rivals or force people to convert to what they believe is true. This idea came about after the on going religious turmoil in europe after the protestant reformation. Even after the 30 years war and peace of westphalia, where states were given the ability to choose their own state religion, civil war and state tyranny continued.

The alternative was that religion should become a private matter. You can believe in everything you think is right. You can even go out of your way to persuade others of your view of life and religion. But you'll never have to fear that the government will impose its religious views onto you. And you wouldnt seek to use government in this way.

Even on matters like gay marriage and abortion, its not the matter of the state to choose which view is morally correct or religiously correct, it should only be used to achieve a civil peace. Yet the individual themselves is free to think about these issues however they want and can persuade people as much as they want to try. You cant just use the government to force everyone else into a view you think is correct. And the government wont force you into gay marriage or force an abortion.

So in simple: The religion continues to exist and be practiced by people. The government doesnt suppress or impose any religion so that people can continue practicing.

All of this is to avoid religious turmoil and protect individual consciousness.. or freedom of thought when phrased another way.

~ ~

There was a post the other day expressing that hardcore religious folk are a threat to democracy and I found it surprising, but not completely surprising, that so many people interpreted this post as an attack on religion entirely. That it was actually trying to advocate for religious oppression.

It was a surprise because so many governments today are secular. They do separate church and state. They do allow for individuals to practice their own religions and do with them what they will. And generally no one has a problem with this.

But it goes the other way that if someone is hardcore religious and begins to build a power bloc to impose their religious beliefs, through government and law, over the wills and beliefs of everyone else.... this IS a threat to democracy. What is the purpose of free thought if im being told that there is a correct world view and that im demonic if i dont believe in that? What does my representation and worldview matter if the law outlaws it?

If democracy is a government by the people, the will of the people, then it would make sense that ideally free expression is upheld and the state sticks to matters of civil peace and well being. Not as a battle ground for ideology and religious view.

~ ~

And yet when its said that hardcore religious folk are a threat.... this doesn't all the sudden mean You need to stop believing in what you do. It just means you cant use the government. And you can trust the government wont be used on you.

Your religion is kept safe. And civil peace is maintained.

Every few months, the debate over student debt forgiveness resets to the same starting point: should the government wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in loans, or should borrowers simply pay back what they owe? Framed that way, forgiveness looks like a radical departure from how debt is supposed to work. It isn't. It's already the system's default setting. We've just built it to be slow, opaque, and miserable, so that almost no one notices it's happening.

Every federal income-driven repayment plan on the books today, IBR, PAYE, ICR, and the new Repayment Assistance Plan rolling out this year, ends the same way: borrowers pay a percentage of their discretionary income for two or three decades, and whatever is left over gets cancelled. That's not a hypothetical. It's federal law, and it has been for years. The only real questions are how long someone has to wait, how much interest capitalizes in the meantime, and how much of their twenties, thirties, and forties get spent paying down a balance that the government has already decided, structurally, it does not expect to fully collect. A one-time cancellation isn't a break from that logic. It's a faster, less punitive version of a policy that already exists.

The argument against forgiveness usually comes down to a fairness claim: people took out these loans voluntarily, so they should pay them back, full stop. It's a clean argument. It's also one that conveniently stops applying the moment you look at how debt functions for people with real leverage.

Corporations restructure and discharge debt through bankruptcy routinely, as a normal cost of doing business, not a moral failing. Congress authorized nearly a trillion dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans that were, by design, forgivable, and the overwhelming majority were forgiven. Banks and their creditors were made whole after 2008 rather than left to absorb their own losses. None of this required an appeal to individual hardship. It required leverage, and the ability to structure a transaction so that a "loan" behaves less like debt and more like a grant with extra paperwork.

That's the part the "just pay it back" argument leaves out: the surest way to never have to pay something back is to make sure it was never structured as debt you were personally on the hook for in the first place. Wealth doesn't just mean you can pay your obligations. It means you have the legal and financial architecture to make sure fewer of your obligations are structured as debt that follows you personally. Telling an individual borrower to simply pay up, while entire categories of institutional debt get restructured, forgiven, or absorbed elsewhere, isn't a principle. It's a rule that only binds people without the leverage to get out of it.

The other piece of context missing from "you signed up for this" is what changed underneath borrowers while they were signing. Public university education used to be substantially subsidized by state governments, keeping tuition low without students needing to borrow much at all. Over the last few decades, states have steadily pulled that funding back, especially after recessions, and rarely restored it afterward. Public colleges responded to shrinking state appropriations the only way they could: by raising tuition and shifting the cost onto students.

Federal loans were supposed to be a backstop for the gap, not the mechanism that let the gap keep growing. But once loans were freely available, colleges had far less incentive to hold the line on price. There's real academic disagreement about how directly federal aid dollars translate into tuition increases, but there's much less disagreement about the basic sequence: state investment fell, tuition rose to cover it, and federal loans expanded to cover that. Students didn't choose that sequence. They walked into it already in motion, and then got told the debt was a personal decision made in a vacuum.

Strip the moral framing away entirely and forgiveness is still a good idea, because of where the money goes. A dollar sitting in loan servicing, moving from a borrower's bank account to the Department of Education, is a dollar that isn't being spent on a down payment, a car, childcare, or a small business. Cancel that debt and the same dollar starts circulating: rent, purchases, investment, formation of new households. That's not a subsidy that vanishes into the ether. It's money redirected from debt service into consumption and investment, which is exactly the kind of stimulus policymakers usually have to manufacture through far less direct means.

If the objection to forgiveness is the national debt, that objection needs to be applied consistently, and it currently isn't. Gross federal debt crossed $40 trillion in August 2026, having grown from roughly $36.2 trillion when the current administration took office in January 2025, an increase of nearly $3.8 trillion in about a year and a half, driven by tax cuts, tariff refunds, and rising entitlement and interest costs. That is a debt increase on a scale that dwarfs any realistic estimate of what loan forgiveness would cost, incurred with essentially no political price. Fiscal discipline as a reason to deny relief to individual borrowers, while trillions in deficit spending pass with a shrug, isn't a principle. It's a decision about whose obligations are allowed to be inconvenient and whose aren't.

It's worth asking why loan forgiveness draws this much resistance from the right in the first place, when the dollar amounts involved are small relative to what gets approved elsewhere without controversy. Part of the answer is straightforwardly electoral, college-educated voters, and particularly recent graduates carrying debt, lean away from the GOP, and there's little incentive to hand a financial win to a demographic that isn't voting for you anyway.

The other part is the belief that universities function as ideological pipelines, that students arrive one way and get talked out of it by professors. That story gets the mechanism wrong. What actually changes people in college isn't usually a lecture. It's proximity. College is one of the few remaining institutions that puts young adults from different regions, income brackets, religions, and political households into the same dorms, classes, and social circles for years at a time. Sustained contact with people who are different from you tends to be the thing that erodes caricatures, not curriculum. Students don't leave college "liberalized" because someone indoctrinated them. They leave having discovered that the people they'd been taught to see as the other side are, mostly, not that different from them. That's a much harder thing to legislate against than a syllabus, which may be exactly why the response has shifted toward making college itself less accessible.

None of these arguments depend on debt being erased by magic. They depend on being honest about what already happens slowly, who else gets debt forgiven without controversy, how we got to prices this high in the first place, where the money goes when debt is cancelled, and who benefits from convincing borrowers that any of this is unprecedented.

Even when we think about a fixed tax, for example 10%, if you take someone who makes 100 he will pay 10, someone who makes 500 will pay 50. The higher income person already pays 5 times more, meaning he contributes 5 times more to the budget, and in case of the emergencies, whether it would be something like natural disasters or war he will be significantly more valuable for the cause to keep the state functioning, yet in democracy he should be viewed as equal when it comes to decisions to the ones who contributes less. So, without getting any benefits, that person gives more and gets nothing in return.

And it gets even more interesting with an additional progressive tax, where the majority of people of lower incomes can dictate the amount of income that should be enough for the higher income earners that are usually an absolute minority in the number of individuals despite contributing more.

And I don’t understand the argument, that they are getting taxed more, because they already have more than average. I mean it doesn’t sound that bad, but on a more personal level it sounds a bit discouraging for the people with ambitions, the people that are willing to put more effort, take more risks or just people who were born into high income families. No matter how hard you try, you will be dragged back to average more and more higher your income gets.

The war is spinning out of control, and I'm worried we are approaching a point where Iran won't want a peace deal, if we haven't reached that point already.

The US has already rescinded many peace deals, and even used them to make surprise attacks on Iran. In all fairness to Iran, who would make a deal with people as untrustworthy as the US government, particularly the Trump administration?

Also, the US has killed children and their teachers, negotiators, bombed civilian infrastructure, killed the current Ayatollah's family, and more war will only lead to more anger. And as we know the war is still going, Iran and the US bombed each other over the weekend.

The best hope for the US is that the Iranian government has the most power hungry people ever in charge, to the point they would make a deal with the US no matter what happens just to preserve their power. Considering how evil the Iranian government is, that wouldn't surprise me. But even if this is the case, the Iranian government still has to keep legitimacy among its population that is currently furious at the United States.

If the Iranians decide to not make any deal with the US, can we still leave the war anyways? What if they refuse to open the Strait of Hormuz indefinitely, or start a massive toll system?

I'm new here, paste article here I assume.

When Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type in 1450, he didn't just automate transcription; he inadvertently fractured a centuries-old monopoly on information, sparking generations of political and religious realignment across Europe. Four centuries later, the rapid industrialization of the Gilded Age concentrated unprecedented economic leverage in a new class of corporate titans, triggering decades of friction before society could establish basic labor standards and antitrust rules.

Today, it feels as though we are experiencing both historical disruptions simultaneously. The digital age has combined the rapid information shifts of the printing press with the immense wealth and logistical concentration of the industrial era.

As we approach the 2028 election cycle, this convergence is moving from a theoretical debate into a direct question of economic survival for the electorate. When automated systems begin entering the daily workflows of both blue-collar factory floors and white-collar office spaces, tech governance stops being a niche issue. It becomes a universal concern about livelihood, security, and the future of work.

If hyper-partisanship continues to reduce these complex challenges into standard culture wars, we risk passing reactive, short-sighted policies that either stifle innovation entirely or leave the public exposed to unmitigated displacement.

This is where we might consider a different approach: The Tech Contract.

Instead of treating the state and the technology sector as permanent, gridlocked adversaries, the concept focuses on how a tech-literate, pragmatic leadership can align private enterprise with the public interest. We see early blueprints of this at the state level—where leaders in tech-heavy hubs like California and Washington must balance the economic engine of Silicon Valley with the immediate needs of local communities.

A modern "Tech Contract" wouldn't seek to dismantle innovation. Instead, it proposes a stable framework for co-existence: transparent guardrails for workplace transitions, mechanisms to ensure productivity gains help fund continuous workforce retraining, and common-sense rules that integrate advanced technology into our shared civic fabric rather than isolating it in private fortresses.

History suggests that whenever technological shifts rewrite the rules of wealth and power, a period of deep societal friction is inevitable. The question heading into 2028 isn't whether we can stop the technology, but whether we can build a collaborative framework to manage it—or if the systems we've created will simply outpace our ability to govern them.

The U.S. inherited its “winner-take-all” voting system from Britain, but the U.K.’s 2024 general election produced an interesting example of what winner-take-all voting can do.  Labour received about 34% of the nationwide vote but won 63% of the seats in Parliament.   https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2026/jul/22/how-britain-would-look-proportional-representation-local-mp 

As a result, a post-election survey found that 60% of Briton’s support changing to a proportional voting system.  https://electoral-reform.org.uk/support-for-proportional-representation-hits-record-high-according-to-new-research/ 

So now Britain's new prime minister, Andy Burnham, openly supports proportional representation.   https://electoral-reform.org.uk/in-andy-burnham-we-have-the-first-prime-minister-who-openly-backs-proportional-representation/ 

And Britain's Liberal Democrats are pushing Burnham to change the voting system before the next general election.  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c79y9qy9y2go 

If the U.K. thinks its own voting system needs an upgrade, should the U.S. consider the same? 

If someone walked around believing that the feelings of fairies and gnomes was important to people's everyday life they would be medicated and sent to therapy. Yet we accept that deeply religious people have a high influence in everyday politics. Again and again their beliefs stand in the way of the development of a humane society, hindering individual freedom. How can we still accept this?

I don't care what you do privately. I have no clue if there is a god on the other side of the big bang, but again and again organized religion has stand against human development and again and again religious people have tweaked their stories to fit a modern narrative. Superstition doesn't have a place in a modern society and definitely not in the decision making that influence our future.

Am I wrong?

This isn’t an argument against immigration. I’m talking specifically about **open borders**, where essentially anyone can move to a country permanently, combined with a large taxpayer-funded welfare system.

My concern is pretty simple: welfare programs depend, at least to some extent, on limiting who qualifies for benefits and how many people are drawing from the system.

The U.S. already spends well over **$1 trillion a year** on major means-tested programs. If anyone who moved to the country could immediately qualify for the same benefits as citizens and long-term residents, the cost could rise significantly.

Gallup surveys have also found that **around 150 million adults worldwide say they would like to move to the United States if they had the opportunity.** Obviously, saying you want to move somewhere is very different from actually doing it. But even if only a fraction of those people came under a true open-borders policy, that could mean population growth far beyond what current housing, healthcare, schools, and public-benefit systems are built to handle.

There also seems to be an incentive problem. If newcomers can immediately access generous public benefits, that makes moving to the country more attractive and puts additional pressure on the system. But if newcomers are excluded from those benefits for years, then you’ve created a system where a large part of the population works and pays taxes without having access to the same safety net.

That may be workable, but it’s no longer a fully universal welfare system.

This also seems to be reflected in how countries actually operate. Countries with large welfare states still have immigration controls. Even countries that are relatively welcoming to immigrants generally regulate who can settle permanently and when newcomers become eligible for public benefits.

Again, I’m not arguing that immigration is bad. Immigration can grow the economy, fill labor shortages, increase the tax base, and bring plenty of other benefits.

My claim is narrower:

**Truly open borders and a generous welfare state don’t seem sustainable together over the long run.**

As far as I can tell, the main ways around the problem are to either:

Allow very high levels of immigration but restrict welfare eligibility for newcomers, at least for some period of time or Maintain immigration controls and decide who can legally settle in the country, while offering a more generous safety net to people who are admitted.

I’m open to being convinced otherwise. What would a sustainable system with both genuinely open borders and a generous welfare state actually look like?

Religious freedom is something of a false premise.

By singling out “freedom of religion” as a special category, we almost seem to take it for granted that people are supposed to have a religion in the first place. It is only when you specifically look up what the term means that you discover it also includes the freedom not to believe in any religion.

But is religion really something objective and impartial? Is it not, in fact, an entire worldview built around excluding those who reject its beliefs?

A secular government may recognize and accommodate religion, but devout believers will not truly recognize secular authority on the same terms. At most, their attitude toward it can be one of non-interference or tolerance, but not genuine acceptance.

Religion itself has monopolized a great many things. For example, when people think of beautiful architecture, churches and other religious structures are often among the first things that come to mind.

And by monopolizing beauty, religion reinforces its own nonsense. We should remember that the foundation of religion lies in faith, not aesthetics. It lies in the claim that those who reject its beliefs will go to hell, not in charity, psychological support, or anything of that sort.

Religion exploits people’s fear of death to expand its influence. A person not only has to face the fear of death itself, but also has to be threatened by religious believers with the idea that if they do not believe now, they will go to hell later.

Religions without a hell tend to build their appeal on the appropriation of certain concepts. Buddhism, for example, appropriates the ideas of serenity and inner peace. The implicit message is that a Buddhist will be more serene and peaceful than a non-Buddhist. That is the advertisement they are selling.

I think atheism should be the default position for a rational person.

Average millenial is 57k in debt

Average gen Z is 94k in debt

Average gen A may be less in debt than gen Z, but that may simply be because they will not qualify for loans.

The US is 40 trillion in debt. The UK is 3 trillion in debt. French debt is 116% of its GDP. Italy's is 137%, Japan's is 260%.

The job market is ravaged by AI, oil shock and recession.

Interest rates are climbing, a new wave of defaults is on the horizon and with it, more foreclosures, evictions, asset confiscations. War is raging in the Middle East and Ukraine. There's no money for interest payments, rearmament and obligations the state has to its citizens. The citizens increasingly have no disposable income to tax at higher rates.

Meanwhile the ultra rich pay effectively no taxes. The Duke of Westminister has $12 billion in a trust fund, he does not pay inheritance or CGT on any of it. Every 10 years a trust tax of 6% is levied but the meticulous legalistic structure of his enterprise makes it so he pays 60-80 million in taxes every 10 years. That's 0.8% of his net worth, equivalent to you paying $800 on a $100k salary. Once every 10 years.

Bezos has no salary, does not get a dividend or sell stock. His taxable income for several years is zero. Yet he can miraculously conjure up $5b to fly around in a rocket. Musk is paid in stocks he borrows against. A loan is not income, he does not get taxed on it. Meanwhile you're on a salary trying to make ends meet slaving away under 30% taxes. Nothing in your country works anymore, and you now have to fasten your belt because the goverment spent too much and is fighting wars and needs you to contribute.

The % of 30 year olds still living with their parents has doubled in the last 20 years

The % of 30 year olds married and with a house has fallen from 50 to 10%.

nobody is having kids anymore

it is now normal for 40 year olds to move back with their parents

it is now normal for people to take out payday loans

doomspending is a new thing

flock cameras are going up all around

The strongest El Nino on record set global temperatures to 1.79 degrees above 1850s level, far ahead of schedule for global warming. out of the 12 times the temperatures hit 40 degrees (103F) in France in the last 100 years, 7 were this summer.

Where is this all going? Where will we all be in 10 years time if these trends continue

Do you agree with me?

I am not particularly political or read much but I was always fascinated by Anarchism from a cultural/vibe perspective, the idea sounds alluring in specific context but I don't think that's necessarily a good thing from my limited understanding at least, when answering me please keep in mind I am not well read I just know surface level information or lack of.

Assuming I have the correct starting points;
- No Hierarchies
- No Rulers, No Ruled
- Voluntary Association
- Direct Action
- Spontaneous Change

So by extension I assume this means no borders, no monopoly on violence, no currency since community owns everything you just grab based on your need or the community judges you for excess? This is where my confusion starts;

P.S I write as I think so if I accidentally repeat myself or ask same questions, forgive me lol

Question 1
If "governance" (preventing people from slaughtering each other, lack of contribution to the community, another community does something that harms this community, so on) is supposed to be horizontal instead of vertical so the community votes collectively, what stops it from simply devolving into mobbing? or one person very good at convincing everyone else makes his say go every time? and if the answer to that is to make a group of wise people who vote only or a specific elder or a standard such as a theological/civil codex...then isn't that an authority that's vertical? and since legitimate violence isn't under control of a single person, what happens when the community splits on a decision and one side decides the other is a danger? and if other communities are a potential danger then why wouldn't you have armed people who only do train as their service to community and fight when it's time? that's a soldier caste who will likely form their own sub-community and will have a say that the community they are in would feel pressured to accept because that soldier caste can leave.

Question 2
What is a "Community" when do you start being part of this community or that one (just association? geography? religion (if any) language?), if it is by voluntary association, can't a single entity just lure everyone into their association and then all other communities crumble or get absorbed by that same association, isn't this sort of like globalism where you will end up with one big community? if that's the case then what happens when I don't want to associate with this one big community and want to start my own or join a different one, where would I go if it ends up being one huge singular entity? because it is communal rule or sort of, what if the rules of the majority do not fit me and that's why I want out? And if there is a "max" size of a community, who enforces that? What makes my community safe from that bigger one who might have wants that collide with mine?

Question 3
If I understood "Direction Action" as solving problems yourself by bypassing others including authority (before achieving the anarchist society at least) then..what stops it from being vigilantism? and what if what you think is correct is a danger to others but you are not aware of it? What if your wants harm everyone else? I think this can be used to moralize/justify a lot of bad actions even with good intentions, if you give the individual the validation to do anything then that's just rule of the jungle isn't it? whoever one person sees right and is strong enough to accomplish is what the others should accept and act on?

Question 4
Spontaneous Change, If I understood that correctly as well, to achieve an anarchist society everything must change at once everywhere all at once, before we get into the logistics of achieving that, would the aftermath be truly worth it? (the previous questions) because this would likely cause years or decades of lawlessness because if the average person sees the the authority body that was the government, monarch or religious authority gone poof, then that average person is going to be afraid of his neighbor, is going to worry about water, food, and security that "good intentions" will not enough to carry everyone through the transition period, disorder, sacking, murder, group violence, whatever dislikes people had against each other from the old world are going to explode, what community is going to suddenly keep order like that? because the government is not likely going to step down nicely even on hunger strikes or peaceful protests, even if it makes the country cease functioning momentarily, what stops the elite from coming together and using their resources to stop it OR incentivize people to not follow along? I don't know, I would need someone to explain the transition to me.

I am open to learning about what I misunderstood! I hope I wasn't too confusing.