These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.

The US controls the ocean. They don’t need to fight a ground war. Trump’s play is very clear: “Give it to us, because you can’t stop us taking it.” So it’s weird he’d sell weapons to Denmark. Makes it look like he’s bluffing. I wonder if he’ll now very publicly stop the sale. That’d be the right move, even if he is bluffing.

How will you get them there? The US controls the ocean. I suspect they also control low earth orbit and so will be constantly watching.

Centrist here.

1. Fuck off with your anti-centrist bigotry and caricatured centrist views.

2. It is a both sides thing, because your fucking pussies of a Democrat party are showing what wealth hoarding, vote chasing cowards they are, by keeping their heads down and mounting zero opposition to your government being seized by a populist dictator. They are clearly not a viable alternative to this atrocity. We need to replace the whole two party, capitalism-corrupted system, not just ensure that your supposed “good guy party” wins the next election.

3. Being a centrist doesn’t make me a milquetoast appeaser. It means I reject the dichotomy that the only alternative to this populism is more capital-first liberal greed.

4. Your view of centrists, casting them all as people who can’t decide between the two obvious alternatives, rather than people who reject both, is the one thing that both the left and the right agree on. It’s propaganda to keep one of the two extractive elites in power and prevent us from ever even discussing actual alternatives.

5. Same thing, for math lovers: if you take a 1D slice through a n-dimensional normal distribution of views, the more perpendicular a dimension is to yours, the less correlated they are, the more those views will tend to map to the center of the dimension you’re insisting on, despite being actually just as distinct. It’s your insistence on this 1D view that creates centrists, and your dismissal of them is propaganda to prevent real change.

I’m not a fan of insurance companies, but the dental/medical insurance split makes sense. Insurance is fundamentally a risk hedging game. It matters what the risks are. Most medical conditions will only happen to a small percentage of people, so we can all put money into a pool and pay out to the unlucky people who, for example, get cancer. Almost everyone needs some dental work eventually, everyone’s teeth wear down. Dental insurance is more like a savings plan than a gamble on rare outcomes. It doesn’t make sense to pool those risks together.

Wait, how is “not equal to” a Nazi symbol?