If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
This problem has already been solved. The legislature creates the laws, the executive executes the laws, and the judiciary interprets the laws. But now we're in a situation where the executive does whatever it wants including illegally shutting down congressionally created programs, the legislature lets it happen despite not having the votes to legally change the law, and the judiciary is also letting it happen when they aren't inventing new constitutional amendments. If you're asking how to prevent society from descending into authoritarianism, they've been trying to figure that out since Caesar at least.
Caesar was assassinated because the Senate was jealous Caesar's wealth, power, prestige and love by the people. Also because he wanted to redistribute land, threatening their own power.
I don't think that is the consensus view of why Caesar was assassinated:
>...According to Suetonius, Caesar's assassination ultimately occurred primarily due to concerns that he wished to crown himself the king of Rome.[13] These concerns were exacerbated by the "three last straws" of 45 and 44 BC. In just a few months, Caesar had disrespected the Senate, removed People's Tribunes, and toyed with monarchy. By February, the conspiracy that caused his assassination was being born.
So Republicans create, execute, interpret, and enforce the laws. Congratulations on discovering how the party system works. Guess you're Big Poland (PiS) now. You can watch this on the news: Fox (R-Murdoch), CBS (R-Weiss), or read about it in the Washington Post (R-Bezos)
(snark aside, the situation where there's popular demand for authoritarianism is very dangerous, difficult to unravel, but like in Poland, it can be done once the public realize their mistake)
Doing things puts you on the hook when those things fail. Politically it's much better to keep the limit in place so that you can make virtue signalling votes that are guaranteed to fail. That way you're seen as "doing something" but without having to be responsible for it.
>> The legislature
>Congress 53/45 R; House 219/215 R
It's the Senate, not "Congress". Colloquially, "Congress" usually refers to the House of Representatives.
>SCOTUS (5-4 R)
> interprets the laws.
Actually, it's 6-3, not 5-4.
I get that you're not from or live in the US. Please understand, I'm not trying to insult or demean you. But you're making statements that are not true.
> Colloquially, "Congress" usually refers to the House of Representatives.
"Congress" is the name of the whole bicameral legislature, not either one of the houses, though "Congressman" or "Congresswoman" refers to a member of the House of Representatives.
But there is a way for even an aligned federal government to fight back against the slide into authoritarianism, even with an authoritarian president expanding the powers of the executive, and that is for the other branches to strongly advocate for their own power. The problem as I see it is that Congress literally does not care that they are ceding more power than ever before to the executive. Mostly I think this is due to the cult of personality aspect of Trumpism and the idea that you're basically either with him and in the party or against him and out of the party, so it's impossible to drum up support within the party to fight back against the wresting of power. But also it's because the Republican party has no interest in actually passing legislation because most non-budgetary directions they can go will result in incredible cross-pressure (healthcare reform, federal abortion bans, etc). They believe they are better off not doing policy and letting Trump do whatever.
You need a mutex to constrain the natural tendencies. The mutex is regulation. Regulation has been defeated and we live in oligarchy (see: Gilens and Page).
Ironically Caesar was merely the culmination of the ever-increasing centralization of wealth & power into fewer hands. He wasn't assassinated in order to restore freedom to Rome, he was assassinated by former elites who resented that they weren't in charge like they used to be. Civil rights actually improved, somewhat dramatically, during Rome's Imperial age.
Which is largely why presidencies do not mess with the order they inherit too much (subjective statement I know). Most institutions and projects are not stressed and the government branches just keep doing what they always did. The current administration is an outlier, but we all know that.
More to the point, it's why our political system does not give unilateral control over most of this stuff to the executive branch. That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place.
> That's the reason why the courts are regularly ruling against the administration -- they're pretending to legal authority they don't have in the first place.
Lower courts. The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.
> The track record of this administration at the SCOTUS is 90%.
Its not quite that high of cases (21 out of 25 where the administration is a party in 2025, per [0], with one additional loss since the beginning of 2026 (Tangipa v. Newsom [1] seeking an injunction barring the CA redistricting map, where the administration wasn't in the heading but was a party as a plaintiff-intervenor.) Note that all of the decided cases at issue are interim orders (orders concerning actions before the final decision on the case, where the Administration either wants an injunction or wants to not have an injunction against it, mainly), and reading the track record of the cases that actually get decided on the interim docket neglects the effect of the Administration's losses there on which cases it could appeal it chooses not to so they never reach the docket at all, as argued in [2].
The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws, which is insane and not supported by the Constitution in any way, but directly lead to what's happening. If you tell somebody they won't ever be held accountable for breaking laws, why follow them (except for your internal moral compass, and we've established that Trump doesn't have one).
> The Republican majority on the SCOTUS announced that Trump is immune from all laws
This is factually untrue; the Court, in Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), held that the President has:
(1) absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercises of core constitutional powers,
(2) presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts,
(3) no immunity from criminal prosecution for unofficial acts.
This is—while still problematic—very far from the President being “immune to all laws”.
Lower courts have a lot more activist judges than SCOTUS. SCOTUS has fewer activist judges than they used to, and are now busy interpreting the law based on the constitution, not on what their own personal grievances are.
Federalist society is supporting textualist interpretation of the law. If you want the law to be different, then change the constitution. Having overly expansive interpetations of the constitution to make the law what you want is being an activist. Textualism is just going by what the law says.
They decided that the 14th amendment prohibition on insurrectionists being able to hold Federal office did not apply to Trump because he is not an officer of the United States (despite the fact he holds the "Office of the Presidency"). If that isn't deliberately misreading the actual words of the statute to get the result you want, what is?
This was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court and I think a large part of it was that an individual state could use this for political gain. As Kagan said during oral arguments: "I think the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States..."
They're interpreting the law based on how much they can contort the constitution to divert as much power to King Trump as possible while not completely thrashing their credibility.
Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially, as that would bind their hands with a future Democratic administration.
Like, whatever happened to the Major Questions Doctrine?
> Importantly, they're using the shadow docket so that they don't need to decide officially
The Supreme Court doesn't choose which docket to “use”; the interim docket (sometimes calls the “emergency docket” or “shadow docket”) is where applications for immediate action on cases that have not reached a final decision in lower court are handled. Decisions on the interim docket are more likely to be unsigned orders, but that's as true of the ones the administration has lost as the ones it has won.
The fact that it’s possible at all to inject plausible doubt, for even a few weeks, means that counterparties will be much more wary.
They will simply have less goodwill when an American team is on the other side of the table, and give less benefit of the doubt. (as compared to say if a Swiss team is on the other side of the table)
It doesn't matter I'd they hold back or not. The perception of political instability is enough.
If, as an investor, I'm asked to throw billions at a multi-year project, political risk is going to be on the PowerPoint.
You may think this current administration is an aberration, but it serves to prove that aberrations can happen. That the levers supposed to prevent this (congress, courts) are creaking. Sure a judge ruled for now, but this is a long way from finished.)
And that's enough to create doubt. Lots of doubt. The impact of this on long-term future infrastructure projects cannot be over-stated.
(Let's leave aside that this project was 6 years in the planning, during his first term, before construction start in 2022... which just makes the current behavior worse, not better.)
Which is exactly why Orsted will now focus on European wind projects instead. American projects will have to be that more profitable/expensive in the future to compensate for the political risk. But I guess this is exactly the desired outcome for big oil, no outside competition.
Like say you can develop a 1000 windmill offshore wind project. At "market rate" for performing that activity they lose you money or make you very little, say a percent or two, because offshore is just harder.
But with government partnership and doors opening they make money at a low estimate 3%.
This causes you to forgo the 200 windmills in a field project that would make you a positive 1-3% regardless of which way the political winds blow because why do that when you can deploy 1k of them in some bay and make money hand over fist simply by joining hands (more tightly than the land based small project would) with government?
And as a result nobody can do the 200 windmill project because, between you and all the other people chasing the 100@% projects the cost of engineering, site prep, permitting, other fixed costs for such projects, etc, etc. are based on what the market will bear, and it can bear a lot more when your amortizing things over 5x as many units.
So maybe the things that do get invested in are more sustainable and financially conservative, which would improve public perception of them vs these megacorp-government joint venture type deployments we have now.
Political instability is a bad thing regardless of what is being invested in. It's just as bad for everything, not just windmills or sea windmills or whatever.
nothing is safe if the project can fail because the political winds change. Much less the political tantrums of the guy in charge who doesn't think you bribed him enough.
And when those obvious bribes are simply ignored by congress and the courts, thus validating it, the landscape for large projects of any kind get worse.
There is a historical tide rolling in and out of presidential power. We’re currently in a high-power executive moment that began with the AUMF for Bush 2. The courts and Congress can act to curtail that authority somewhat and hopefully will. But a lot of the EO activity is ultimately just performative unconstitutional action that will be reversed, damaging as that process may be.
Indeed, the post-Trump period will have a choice to make. Either they continue the chosen path and dont regain trust no matter the next president, or congress and court add some serious limitations to the presidential powers so future dems and reps will never go Trump again.
I wonder if both parties see the need for that at this point. There still seems a lot of 'but we are the good guys' in both partys blocking deep reform. If I'm honest, it took 2 world wars to partially whack that attitude out of Europe, and it's slowly coming back.
> The current administration is an outlier, but we all know that.
No, it isn't. This administration is a rupture. It is the beginning of a new normal. Future presidents will try to emulate this guy.
You could say "outlier" when he lost in 2020. You can't say that after he came back. The American people wants this authoritarian populism. The SCOTUS enables it. And the world shouldn't trust both the American people and its crumbling institutions.
The thing is that wether the ruling party is right or left there are limits to what they can do based on the real world we live in. For example there is a limit to how much they can lower or increase the tax. There is a limit to how much they can save on one thing and invest in another.
Often when a new party takes power, no big real changes are seen as it is not so easy to implement considering the real world. They have to go down some kind of middle path.
Disagree. There are effective strategies for creating more sustainable economies and societies. Affordable housing, education, universal healthcare will make us all happier and healthier.
We know how to fix lots of problems, and money is orthogonal to the issue.
Sentences like "They have to go down..." are really a symptom of a static "there is no alternative" view.
>Affordable housing, education, universal healthcare will make us all happier and healthier.
The past ~100yr of state policy has made a lot of economic winners out of people in these industries by putting it's thumb on the scale in their favor.
Any reversion to a "natural market state" or perhaps beyond, where the government weighs in to the advantage of those who do not make money on housing or healthcare would necessarily make loser out of all the people who right now benefit from the government having its thumb on the scale where it is currently positioned and they will fight tooth or nail to prevent this.
Its harder to implement change than to promise it, of course.
However, historically it made a lot more difference which party was elected.
In the UK in the 80s you knew that if you voted Labour things would bet nationalised, and if you voted Conservative things would get privatised. Since the centrist consensus (e.g. Blair and Cameron) emerged it makes a lot less difference.
That, IMO, is evidence that what has changed is not that the two parties are constrained from pursuing very different policies, but that they no longer wish to.
I think they have adopted a common ideology. The people in the parties have become more similar over the years, as have the voters they appeal too.
A few decades ago a very high proportion of Labour politicians were former trade union leaders, for example. Conservative voters tended to be more rural and more affluent.
Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.
> Now a very high proportion are professional politicians who have never really done anything else. They are all people who have done well through the status quo and do not want to change anything.
I really dislike that this is a thing. Politics should not be a profession. That being said, the obvious way of fixing this (term limits) would just end up giving more power to the civil service bureaucracies, which has problems.
A healthy state is an oil tanker - slow to steer, predictable in its direction, and it's broadly steered by public opinion rather than voting. With a large mandate you get to push a few polices through. Ideally if you get a leader pushing through a policy against his party's natural proclivities it's more likely to stick.
If you have a jetski which changes direction every 5-10 years that's terrible for long term investment, and terrible from a personal point of view too. Legalise gay marriage, then 5 years later it's oh no, lets make that illegal again.
Best to move to a stable country which isn't run by the whims of a dementia-laden madman.
This applies to the UK particularly as a result of privatisation. Utilities, pensions and transport are completely dependant on previous government agreements that commit the public to long term expenses that sit outside tax. It takes debt of the government books, but also defuses responsibility. And becomes a necessary evil for getting anything done.
The US occasionally has mayors & governors who spitefully or corruptly trap their successors contractually in long-term commitments with private parties which are obviously bad financial decisions.
I argue that we have a reasonableness standard we can apply here - "Lack of consideration" is what might void a contract indenturing a 20 year old idiot in an unpaid MLM scheme.
Consideration of the public is a factor.
> "Chicago's 2008 parking meter deal, a 75-year, $1.16 billion lease to private investors, is widely criticized as a lopsided, "worst practice" agreement. The deal, pushed through in 72 hours under Mayor Daley, forces the city to pay "true-up" fees for lost revenue, resulting in over $2 billion in revenue for investors [so far] while the city continues to settle costly disputes."
I am getting the feeling that Americans love "leadership without oversight". In my country we have a parliament on the national level whose single job is to make life miserable for whoever is in power and on the local level there are city councils who do the same.
The pattern I’ve observed throughout the US is that we have all those same things as well as citizens who can go to speak at various council meetings.
People are ignored, councils seem to rubber stamp things and the tactic at higher levels is to make a terrible decision and then attempt to use courts to delay any attempt to stop whatever the decision was. When it’s finally stopped, it will be done again slightly different and restart the lengthy court process.
I do not think it is those big and visible privatisations of utilities and transport that are the real problem (I am not sure what you mean about pensions though).
The big problem is long term outsourcing contracts, that serves to get the debt off the government’s books. If anyone else did it they would be required to show the debt under off-balance sheet financing rules, but the government gets to set its own rules and gets away with hiding the real situation. Gordon Brown did a lot of this so he could pretend to have balanced the budget.
Apart from central government a lot of local authorities have done this too. Sheffield's notorious street management contract (the one that lead to cutting down huge numbers of trees) is a good example.
Political parties are mostly relatively small and under-funded huddles of second-rate individuals, who get told what to do by billionaire-owned media.
It's interesting how many and varied "minor parties" which are more genuinely grassroots have persisted in the UK despite the difficulty in scrounging up funding from the actual public, and despite FPTP being theoretically stacked against them. It's very different to the US, which despite all the talk of Federalism doesn't seem to have local parties at all?
The US seems to restrict the ability of minor parties to stand for election far more than the UK does. It varies by state but from what I have read you need thousands of signatures just to stand in many states.
FTTP does also favour parties with a geographically concentrated base such as the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the NI parties. Geographical variations in the US seem mostly to be about which of the two big parties people back.
>Its going to take decades to recover from the whims of the US population (the plurarity of whom voted for this)
What does "recover" even mean?
Are we supposed to back to the good ol' days when the <pick federal agency> could hold a press conference announcing some grand new plan with <pick industry group> key person and <pick billionaire> standing in the background smiling because they know their people ghost wrote it to their benefit and the press would unanimously gush about how good it is if not copypasta the press release entirely?
Institutions are basically bankrupt of trust in the eyes of the public. Between that and the modern information distribution landscape the status quo circa like 1930something-2010something where the administrative parts of the state could "just do things" without organized resistance by the parts of the public that were on the losing end is likely never coming back.
Whatever you, and everyone else, wants to use state power to accomplish will likely have to dial back their ambitions and prioritize in accordance with the new reality of how much you need to fight for each thing, basically realign policy targets to be closer to the fat part of the "what everyone wants" bell curve. Maybe from there there will be a decades long re-accumulation of trust, but we don't know what the world will look like in the future and that may bring us to a very different status quo than the one we're exiting.
I know we all like to whine and screech about billionares and moneyed interests, but I think the new status quo is probably a bigger problem for them and other "string pullers" than the median member of the public who's getting shafted by it. Remember, the "status quo" of the last 100yr is what created the problems we have to clean up today and in the future.
Yes, let's go back to when BigCo just removed mountains to get at coal, Dick Cheney's friends all got rich in Iraq and the Sacklers sold us all pills because they had convinced the relevant agencies that doing so was in accordance with the laws, rules and policies and well, the rest is history.
All this crap has been happening forever. It may very well be happening more now (probably is, IMO), but it's happening in the open. It's all being litigated. Every capricious decision that would have sailed right over the heads of the non-thinking morons with a simple stamp of approval, maybe a small lawsuit in particularly offensive cases, is now being scrutinized and seriously litigated, because the agencies and other "legitimizers" involves have burned through their stored trust, and now everyone is watching everything they do.
_How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?_
You can't, and US history is full of that. It's deeply rooted in US culture !
See for example the numerous wars against native Americans in the 19th century; even in some Washington US museum they admin the natives were not wrong when they had to assume any peace treaty was not worth the ink it was written with (and meant "we're only regrouping and will attack again in less than 5 years").
China doesn't have flip-flopping like this with its attendant massive waste. Instead it has endemic corruption which siphons off funds all over the place, perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
> perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
This is notably an area where the US is massively crippled. States can manage many year projects easier, but the federal government must conceal all such projects behind defense spending. Even that is wildly mismanaged (see: all the canceled naval purchases over the last two decades, and we still have an outdated, if large, navy)
> Instead it has endemic corruption which siphons off funds all over the place, perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
We also have endemic corruption siphoning off funds all over the place, ESPECIALLY in the big projects that have the attention of the current administration.
From the business perspective, endemic corruption is preferable. Generally speaking, on societies like that, you know exactly how much you need to pay to which people to get things moving, so it can be budgeted for predictably.
Yet somehow they've managed to eliminate extreme poverty and challenge the U.S. in GDP. Sounds like cope to me. They couldn't do that with extreme corruption like we tolerate in U.S. allies.
China is literally going through an "anticorruption" purge of the PLA right now. Zhang Youxia et al. The corruption in China has a very different shape than in the US.
(not sure what you mean by "corruption we tolerate in US allies"?)
Do you know who the U.S. allies with and funds? Every right wing dictator and criminal gang on the planet. We just don't like independent nations and left wing factions.
There is extreme corruption in the U.S. as well, but we've legalized it so it disappears in statistics.
They "eliminated" extreme poverty caused by communist control in the first place, by going to a capitalist system.
There were tons of economic low-hanging fruits by building out large infrastructure projects, which corruption happily siphoned off of.
The ROI of these infra projects have been gone for a while, yet they continued. Also it's been stealing intellectual property, trade dumping, exporting deflation. Soaking up the manufacturing oxygen of everyone else through subsidies, elite capture, then using the leverage gained and veiled threats against others to force them to yield resources, market access and political control.
China benefited greatly from the US-led globalism order that's been going on since WWII.
Another way of saying it is China took the most advantage. And it has gone way overboard in taking advantage. So the backlash is expected and necessary.
Part of fixing things involve doing things that seem like it's destroying the order that the US created itself.
By racking up debt of epic proportions, with no return on investment in sight.
All the while going into a demographic death spiral. Partly cause by the draconian 1-child policy, which attempted to fix the pronatalist policies of Mao.
"debt"? You mean the balancing item from money creation? Question: To which bank does the government owe the liabilities created when it creates the money? (clue: the government owns it).
Nothing is really stopping other countries from doing the same, to be honest. People are just scared to give legitimacy to what China has done for their citizens in a very short amount of time, because that would be against their own beliefs and morals.
I'm not saying China is the best and whatever, just saying they've proven every "China is about to fall" headline that has been circulating around for the past 15 years. Maybe we should learn some things from them.
Debt is not fundamentally bad. But the financing has to be justified by positive return, be it in the service itself that makes money back to pay off the debt, or as a public good, returns in the form societal benefit as a result of the service.
When you have massive buildups with no hope of returns, it's a a bad financial decision and the public carries the debt burden.
The disadvantage in their system, is if the the leadership makes a wrong decision, it will stick for much longer than 4 years, and it won't be challenged.
Now, recently, they had a very good run. This must be admitted and even celebrated.
But the aforementioned flaw is still very much present.
It depends what you mean by work. Technology - among a myriad of other things - enables the worst dictators to stay in power, even if the country as a whole doesn't work.
You can have a functional democracy and still do long term planning, the problem is the current US government. Its not a fundamental flaw in democracy.
>You can have a functional democracy and still do long term planning
Sure, but that's contingent on
1) the voters being well educated and not easily brainwashed by various types of propaganda pushing them to vote against their own interests (see the Germans being anti-nuclear and pro-Russian gas since the 80s) and >
2) the voters being trusted and having an actual ownership in the country so that their votes affect them directly and also having a say in how their country is run, because if whoever gets voted into power just does the opposite of what the voters want "for their own good", then you're not a democracy anymore, you're just a well functioning state (if that).
Other than Switzerland, and maybe Denmark, I don't know any democracies that constantly function well and aren't plagued with issues.
Populism is always a danger, but the current US administration is all about spite, no matter the cost. It is uniquely, outstandingly bad. Lots of places have working democracies that have managed to do long term planning.
Also, China can lobby indirectly through media manipulation, and relatively cheaply disrupt our already clunky-feeling Democratic governmental processes.
It's a double edge sword. If the Boss has decided that the country should do X, it's much harder to make him reverse course if it's a bad direction. Zero covid and return to good old communism are two recent examples. For all their flaws and ineffectiveness, democracies are self correcting.
By only doing projects for which there is sufficient political support across the board, not the ones that are supported by a tiny vocal minority of the electorate.
Either we live in a democracy or we do not. Democracy determines the correct path by wobbling between two incompatible options - implementation and repeal. That which is implemented by one side, but not repealed by the other survives as the appropriate path.
There is no alternative to this - without abandoning democracy and universal suffrage.
Remember that democracy is the worst way to run a country, except for all the other.
Dozens of new GW+ wind farms came online in the last four years. This concerns a few projects in a few particular locations that are exposed to federal interference. It has impacts on the market but the market is larger than these minor disturbances by an order of magnitude.
> while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.
We have private business in this country. They're doing just fine.
> Dozens of new GW+ wind farms came online in the last four years.
Thats not that much is it given the size and energy demand of the country? And that's over the past 4 years, you'll only see the true impact of this in the next 6 years.
> This concerns a few projects in a few particular locations that are exposed to federal interference
Markets are driven by a lot of feelings too. If you're trying to build a wind farm now, why on earth would you do that in the US? There are just many better options.
Your private businesses will happily skip over the US if they understand markets. Don't row upstream, find a place where your investment is wanted
Electricity doesn't travel continents the way shipping containers do. So it's not like anyone wants to build a wind farm and wonders where in the world they are going to place it. Plus if you are a major single customer (eg datacenter, factory), you need reliable energy, so would be odd to build a wind farm. As far as I am aware wind farms only makes sense when you sell to the grid, and where there is an alternative on demand source of energy to take over the weeks there is no wind.
> So it's not like anyone wants to build a wind farm and wonders where in the world they are going to place it.
No, but there's demand everywhere. So it's all down to how likely you are to get your money back?
And this is for adding power to the grid, if you have a major single customer you're already adding a ton of risk to your project... What if the datacenter is no longer needed after a few years or isn't completed ever?
> Thats not that much is it given the size and energy demand of the country?
What is it relative to these 5 projects?
> you'll only see the true impact of this in the next 6 years.
Are these the _only_ new projects that could _possibly_ be built in that time frame?
> a lot of feelings too
The feelings of those with money not of the general population.
> If you're trying to build a wind farm now, why on earth would you do that in the US?
You just said. "The size and energy demand of the country." Or are you proposing that no one would build unless we remove absolutely all risk for them? I'm not sure you and I mean the same thing when saying "private business."
> happily skip over the US
I believe this is a worn out trope. Please show some evidence this has actually occurred.
> find a place where your investment is wanted
Ah.. the "amazonification" of America. "Businesses shouldn't compete or take risks!" You seem to say. We must bend over and make them happy before they can deign to take our dollars. Perfectly modern and utterly ridiculous.
> Are these the _only_ new projects that could _possibly_ be built in that time frame?
No, but a lot of the coastal waters are federal land (water? :D) which is why this is a problem to begin with. Wind at sea has a lot of benefits, no neighbors, nothing to interfere with the wind, typically very predictable power generation. So yes, you can build a lot on land, the US has plenty of space for that but that'll be subject to a LOT more pushback from the general public.
> The feelings of those with money not of the general population
And those with money are the ones making the investment decisions, no?
> You just said. "The size and energy demand of the country." Or are you proposing that no one would build unless we remove absolutely all risk for them? I'm not sure you and I mean the same thing when saying "private business."
You've followed all the rules, got all the permits, you're building and have invested x amount. And NOW the rug is pulled from underneath you? That's not a very comforting world to be investing in.
Or to put it in more general public sense. You want to build a house in city X. You get a plot of land, get an architect to draw up what you'll build, you get all the permits and are halfway through construction and THEN the city revokes your permit. You tell me, but I wouldn't try building anything there again because they are just unreliable. You go to the city next door.
> I believe this is a worn out trope. Please show some evidence this has actually occurred.
The US is basically just switching to gas power. And if you look at % of energy mix you'll see that wind is mostly flat as a % of the whole electricty generation. So yes, much much more money/investment is going into renewables in Europe. And as unpredictable as policy can be there too, they typically have the understanding to only change rules for NEW projects not existing ones.
> Ah.. the "amazonification" of America. "Businesses shouldn't compete or take risks!" You seem to say. We must bend over and make them happy before they can deign to take our dollars. Perfectly modern and utterly ridiculous.
Businesses should take risks and be rewarded for them. But take the building a house example above, would you agree that in general rules shouldn't be changed during the game/on existing projects?
Private industry is not doing just fine, it's barely holding on due to massive uncertainty caused by erratic tariffs and farcical government overreach and direct meddling with corporations. All from Trump and his supporters, who are very nationalist but also appear to love socialism when it is national, such as with a 10% purchase of Intel by the US government.
If the Fed falls and monetary policy is subject to the political whims of a tyrant that only cares about himself, then we lost reserve currency stays and we are ducked so hard by simultaneous inability to continue the deficit and a need to pay back interest at far far higher rates. It would cause a spiral in the US economy like we have never seen. Or in the best case just a gradual switch from USD to other standin currencies causing a decade or two of recession in the US, best case.
So far most businesses have not jacked up prices from tariffs because they are hoping they can have the US Supreme Court overturn what look to be obviously illegal tariffs that should have been enacted by Congress rather than the king (we fought an entire revolutionary war over this!). If the Supreme Court doesn't overturn tariffs then we are at risk for inflation going up to 1970s levels.
The state of private business in the US is best represented by the meme of a dog sitting at a kitchen table saying "this is fine" while the house burns down around him. The firefighters may come, but they had better come soon.
I'm not sure I follow the questions. The success of a long-term project can be ensured through the procedures described in the source article: you set up a durable judicial system, and invest them with the power to require that the country uphold its end of the bargain, no matter how much its current political leaders might want to change course.
>success of a long-term project can be ensured through the procedures described in the source article: you set up a durable judicial system, and invest them with the power to require that the country uphold its end of the bargain, no matter how much its current political leaders might want to change course.
That's an abuse of the judicial system. Politicians are elected exactly because the voters perceive a need to change the execution of government's functions.
The thing is, you cannot beat human moral qualities with formalist means. People who come to power by raising hatred towards their political opponents will always find a way to subvert policies even if not cancel them.
Long-term policies should be established through consensus among all parties, not though legalistic bureaucracy.
Perhaps you don't think legalistic bureaucracy should matter, but the voters' representatives in Congress don't agree. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, government agencies must produce legalistic bureaucratic reasons for their actions; they may not act capriciously to suit the whims of political leaders or transient desires for a change.
Congress certainly has the power to change this if they want to. But without something like the APA, private businesses exposed to federal regulation would struggle to make any plans beyond the current US Presidential term. So they do not want to.
>Under the Administrative Procedure Act, government agencies must produce legalistic bureaucratic reasons for their actions; they may not act capriciously to suit the whims of political leaders or transient desires for a change.
Well, this is sort of against the spirit of the US constitution, at least as explained in the Federalist. I might even call it an abuse of the Legislative system.
I'm not speaking very confidently here, but by the spirit of it, the Congress should not do this much of micro-management of the Executive.
Surely the Congress should pass the laws which _prevent_ the Executive from doing stupid things, in particular collecting too much taxes, but it shouldn't really tell the Executive "do this, in this particular way".
To be honest, I suspect that the actual _reason_ every administration tries to undo as much of the actions of the previous administration as they can is because due to the amount of limits imposed on them by the Congress they they cannot do much else. Fighting the Congress is much harder than fighting the previous administration.
I seriously suspect that if the amount of regulation is decreased, it will actually be beneficial to long-term policy stability, because instead of fighting the decisions of the previous administration the current one would be busy with it's own projects.
you set up a durable judicial system, and give them their own army.
That's the only way to work around Trump. According to the Constitution, no one can actually make the executive branch do anything it doesn't want to do.
No, that's not accurate. The courts frequently make Trump and his cronies do things they don't want to do, and prevent them from doing things they do want to do. Multiple such cases are described in the source article.
> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an
appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted.
This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.
This is absolutely nuts to read, and yet isn't the first time we've read such kind of language in court opinions and publications with this administration.
If Trump defies 1 in 3 of the court orders against him, that still means judges successfully stopped him 2 times out of 3. I'm not interested in a discussion where we equivocate between what's true today and worst case scenarios that could become true in the future, sorry.
Yes, this particular court case could end up completely against Trump, that would be better than zero progress when it comes to making energy more affordable.
>raises the possibility that the order halting construction will ultimately be held to be arbitrary and capricious.
But guys like Trump aren't arbitrary or capricious.
There's a pretty good consensus that he would have to be a lot more sensible by nature to reach that level of sophistication.
you should have learned by now what trump et al are doing… these “cases” they are “losing” are just smoke&mirrors for the general public to go “see, they obey the law” on things they do not particularly give a hoot about. the ones they do care about no one is “stopping” - the way you can tell which one is which is when they completely ignore the constitution and any existing law(s) or when they hit up the judicial extension of their party - the scotus - to rubberstamp something. even there, once in a while, they’ll make a call to (often temporarily) “lose”
It seems to me that we're seeing precisely the opposite. Trump enjoys the appearance of inevitability, so whenever he finds something he cannot force through, he pretends that it doesn't matter to him and he never really cared about it in the first place.
I'd encourage you to make a list of the top 10 things you're worried he's about to do now, and check back in a few months to see how many of them came true. One big transition point in my thinking was in July of last year, when I remembered how much he'd bragged in March that the Department of Education would soon be shut down. He does a large number of terrible things, yes, but he also can't do most of the terrible things he says he's going to do.
I'd encourage you to make a list of the top 10 things you're worried he's about to do now, and check back in a few months to see how many of them came true.
I don't have to "check back in a few months." Look at what he's accomplished in only one year: https://www.project2025.observer/en . Far more than he was able to do in his four previous years in office.
Trump is basically doing all the things that he wanted to do in his first term, but that were slow-walked, stonewalled, and sandbagged by the so-called "adults in the room." There are now very few if any of those adults left, and that includes judges who are willing and able to put a leash on him.
If you're not deranged, you're not paying attention.
I looked at this site, and a number of the items have a big red gavel marker with a label saying "Court Orders: Blocked". To me this sounds like it's saying court orders are capable of blocking Trump and have in fact blocked Trump from completing the marked items. Am I misinterpreting?
I don't see that tag on a significant number of items.
In any case, once again: yes, some of Trump's actions are being blocked by the courts, and the Republicans are working to fix that by installing captive, corrupt, or incompetent judges.
No, this is the core of a particular brand of politics: neoliberal politics. Where the financialization of everything is what's most important. There was a time, still in lived memory, where the US government was able to complete many types of projects and it also coincided with the period of lowest economic inequality (the great compression), the expansion of civil rights, and had the highest taxes against the elites this country has ever seen.
Obviously if you hate democracy you'll want to destroy this system, which is what they've been working at for the last 50ish years.
Tax rates are not the same as effective taxes paid, and US taxes as a percent of GDP are at an all time high. This is besides the fact that gdp is many times higher, growing geometrically.
It is an interesting question of what changed in terms of ability to execute, but lack of funding isn't the answer. I suspect it is a combination of scope creep, application to intractable problems, and baumols cost disease at work.
Every regulation, whether it's environmental, DEIA or anti-fraud, adds a few steps to each project. With enough regulations and enough steps, things just slow down to a crawl.
As governments and legal systems get older, they get into more and more situations where a bad thing happens, and the politicians must show that they've done something to stop a similar thing from happening again. Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call. This results in more and more layers of regulation being added, which nobody has an incentive to remove.
> Nobody can publicly admit that it's fine to letting a 5-year-old kid die once in a while, even if that would be the right call.
Sure, there are such cases, but a lot of regulation was written in blood, and the price that affected individuals or even our whole species paid was often monumental:
Having cancer literally eat the workers faces is not acceptable (=> radium girls), nor are mistakes like leaded gas or CFCs.
Everytime people advocate for big immediate gains from abolishing regulations, you can be almost certain that they are selling toxic snake oil.
Current US admin seems no exception, especially when comparing related promises with actual results (e.g. Doge).
edit: I'm not saying that pruning back regulations is bad, but it needs to be a careful, deliberate effort and big immediate payoffs are often unrealistic.
> Tax rates are not the same as effective taxes paid
Correct, but the tax system is nonetheless quite effective at setting behavioral incentives and disincentives. Higher income and estate tax rates incentivize capital being locked up in investments instead (for lower capital gains taxes); those investments put people to work and are subject to Labor negotiating higher compensation. Allowing donations to non-profits to deduct from other taxes allows private individuals (compared to a government bureaucracy) to more efficiently fund social welfare programs, which incidentally, also put people to work in the administration of such programs.
Funding government is not the sole goal of higher taxation rates, but rather, also how incentives in society are shaped.
It looks pretty steady around 17%. It was as high as 20% in the late 1990s. However, this does not include state and local taxes. I could not find a source for it. What is your source of information?
However, my main point was to refute the idea of some mythical past where the government was massively more funded, and therefore more competent and capable.
This also ignores the effect of the growing pie over time, but that is somewhat a tangent.
If someone is referencing back to the 1930s tax rates, those total receipts were closer to 10% of GDP when things like the Hoover Dam and Interstate System were being built.
Today, the rates are closer to 30% and the GDP being taxed is 25-30 times larger, controlling for inflation.
To me, this suggests that the reason we can't perform infrastructure projects is not lack of funding
By way of analogy, imagine someone making a $20k salary that can do big things while spending 10% of their salary projects. However, someone making $600k, spending 30% of that on projects can't get get meaningful work done.
These are the proportions we are talking about. It begs a lot of questions.
Are the projects really comparable? Did competence change? Did the working environment?
Ideally they don't change course every 4 years, they change only people who become more adept at maintaining course as they go along.
Quite simply the US had founding fathers who were ahead of their time, and some uncharted waters ahead of it.
This set the example for the decent navigators who took the executive positions, but momentum can only last so long.
You need decent people to come along on a regular basis to refresh the progress.
The very system that allowed for a gifted individual to have an outsized positive outcome, has always posed a real vulnerability if the decency is compromised. Whether that is a "natural" lack of decency or if compromises escalate over time, that's a weakness which is magnified when it does show up.
Different presidents have had this problem from time to time.
When you start with a country where the big advantage is being ahead of its time with an emphasis on more decency than average, it doesn't take somebody completely behind the times or absolutely disgusting to do serious damage. Even dropping the ball one time can be a major setback.
> If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
Sadly this is an inherent weakness of the US constitution. It's old and it was written at a time where we didn't have enough experience with democracies.
In a modern parliamentary democracy you vote parties which form coalitions and settle on one of the party leaders (in general the one with most votes) as prime minister.
This means that:
- other parties are still involved in the legislative process. In a presidential republic with the president holding executive power, other parties are not represented at all. Trump doesn't need approval on his actions neither by opposition nor his own party. In a parliament, many members will support continuity on many topics rather than change if it doesn't make sense. They still vote based on their conscience, not just on their affiliation.
- the executive depends on its effectiveness and for staying in power on the support of its parliament members. If some members of Giorgia Meloni's coalition don't like the direction she's taking they are not gonna vote her proposals and ultimately she may need to resign if she gets a vote of no confidence. Removing a president in countries like US is extremely difficult in comparison, and the executive has no checks, neither from opposition nor its own party to go in whatever direction a single individual decides to go.
Seriously, what Belarus, Turkey, Hungary, Russia, etc, all have in common? They are presidential republics. Single individuals hold too much power and have little checks from their own party members, let alone a parliament. It's no coincidence that the last parliamentary democracy to turn into authoritarian state has been Sri Lanka over 50 years ago: it's difficult for individuals to grab power, as there is a long checklist of things that need to happen. In a presidential one?
It's very simple: a single individual can claim popular mandate, building a personality cult is simple (you don't vote parties, you vote individuals), a single individual holds executive power and is very hard to remove.
Presidential republics are more effective than slow parliamentary ones, but we should ask ourselves if our focus in 2020s, in advanced economies where things are objectively fine, isn't slow refinement instead of sharp turns.
> Sadly this is an inherent weakness of the US constitution. It's old and it was written at a time where we didn't have enough experience with democracies.
(I'm not even American and I know this)
The constitution was meant to be a living document, adjusted over the years as the world changes.
But the very opposite happened, it became Holy Scripture, unchanging and never evolving.
The whole American system was based on the idea that the ruling class cared for "reputation", "honor" or "legacy". It was wholy unprepared for people who just don't give a fuck about all that and actively wipe their asses on existing rules and conventions.
Like going in front of Congress and just ... lying. Provably, verifiably lying. Zero recourse, the shame of lying used to be enough. And because of ancient decorum rules, the congress can't even say "you're lying" and google the facts right there and then, they have to do this idiotic perfromatic dance of asking the same question repeatedly and getting a word salad non-answer back for hours.
Or just not going for the inquiry because, why would you? There's no penalty past "losing face" for not going. Why bother.
The system was flawed from the start, but the people were still in there for the best of everyone so it held together and mostly worked. Politicians respected one another as people and humans, even though they differed in opinion.
I personally can't see a way back for USA without a massive purge in the government followed by actual ironclad laws and processes set in stone to prevent anything like this from happening again. Let congress google basic facts, let them call people liars to their face, give them their own execuitve branch that can drag people for hearings by force if needed.
And copy the German Federal Constitutional Court[0] system, they have term limits and people are nominated through multiple channels.
It's also interesting how the constitution is only a holy grail when it comes to stuff the particular individual you ask about cares for.
So you end up talking with individuals where "the 2nd amendment says I can have guns, it's in the constitution" and "my favorite president should go for a third term, the 22nd amendment is just a technicality".
The 2nd amendment was only carved out to cater for school shootings and manly displays of virility on Facebook. I suppose maggats thought they would need it to rise up against a tyrannical government that protects minorities, but now that they have a fascist government, they tell us that the 1st, 2nd and 4th amendments aren't actually serious. You have to be nice to the members of the gestapo, if they get offended, they can kill you. if you hold a protest, they can kill you. if you carry your gun, they can kill you. they will face no consequences other than getting doxxed and going into hiding for a bit of a break.
> how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
Well, for one by ensuring that 'long-term' means it starts at the start of a term and ends before the end of that term. At most that only rules out nuclear, at least wrt long term energy projects. And it's not like recent dem administrations were unfriendly towards nuclear. Vogtle 3/4 were approved early in Obama's term, and finished under Biden's.
"Long term" means decades when it comes to energy strategy, major infrastructure initiatives, and decarbonization. Four years is woefully inadequate for strategic planning, you’re operating on a tactical level at best.
There is no reason to do long term projects with public funds. Private companies are not subject to the vagaries of democracy and can plan as long-term as they want.
Except funding is not everything that's needed for long term projects. There are other resources - workforce, supply chain integrity, legal entitlements and approvals, etc, that are all contributing to "plannable delivery" of long-term projects. And quite a few of these are very much subject to the vagaries of democracy.
Unless, of course, you assume (the ideal to be) an entirely anarchist business environment where whoever-with-resources can do whatever. Democracy, though, is not that.
4 years gets you, historically, an 8-plex built in San Francisco. If you’re lucky. The ship is slowly turning, but that’s what institutional investors would call a short-term win in the most economically productive state in the USA.
I’m a supporter of it regardless of the cost, but for a “long term” project look at the California HSR, which was directly approved by voters 19 years ago and we’re still debating how to fund the majority of it, let alone actually build what we voted to construct and open in its entirety within 10 years.
> If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?
Simple. You begin constructing an offshore wind park when someone competent is president, pause the project for four years during Trump's term, and then resume work to complete it.
Could you summarize some practical takeaways from all these books? To be honest I've become a bit skeptical of how much this sort of stuff helps. From what I see, our society has become much more well-versed in all this psychology-therapy-trauma material in the last 20 years, yet despite this we're taking more anti-depressants and seeing more therapy than ever. Mentally and spiritually we seem to be doing worse than ever before, especially kids.
Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff. I can honestly say the people I know who are more knowledgeable in all this psychology-trauma material seem to be the least well adjusted. Conversely, my more religious friends (Catholic, Muslim) seem happier and more resilient psychologically. Maybe it's just correlation. Maybe if we didn't have all this academic literature on trauma becoming mainstream people would be doing even worse. But it also seems possible that over-analyzing and over-pathologizing 'trauma' can have exactly the opposite effect we hope it to have.
You might think it's getting by, but you've got no idea of how much damage this attitude unwittingly propagates the trauma on succeeding generations.
I've seen this firsthand in my own family, a family beset with undiagnosed ADHD and trauma from a violent patriarch, who was no doubt subject to the same abuse, lying about his age to join armies on BOTH sides of the conflict in WW2 to escape and eventually emigrate.
As for the difference in psychological resilience: it's more much more likely those who have been traumatised are seeking understanding, rather than healthy then traumatised by their curiosity. Conversely, it's been shown religious people are, as a whole, more psychologically resilient, largely due to community and the accompanying support system it provides. However, there is also a strong element of suppression within those communities, which directly contributes to the very trauma of which I speak.
If there is no communication, the abused, very often, become the abusers. And so the wheel turns.
> it's more much more likely those who have been traumatised are seeking understanding, rather than healthy then traumatised by their curiosity
The fact that trauma is now everywhere sort of de-legitimizes it to the point where there's no way of knowing in the average case. Also the fact that it's essentially a business at this point
> but you've got no idea of how much damage this attitude unwittingly propagates the trauma on succeeding generations
Sounds like you're saying: become emotionally pure or else. Personally I'd rather have "trauma" than play this little head game. And imo the younger generations will be better off, on average, not playing it either
If anything, we're doing significantly more damage by teaching upcoming generations to trust the pharmaceutical industry
> The fact that trauma is now everywhere sort of de-legitimizes it to the point where there's no way of knowing in the average case.
I can tell you that trauma is very real for the person experiencing it, and it's this kind of flippant dismissal that stops people from seeking help.
Trauma everywhere, in what fashion? Perhaps because more people are talking about it, more people are getting the courage to talk about it.
> Sounds like you're saying: become emotionally pure or else.
Emotionally pure? What does that even mean? It was phrased as a warning, because I've experienced this attitude within my family, and seen the damage it's caused, and continues to cause. Eventually, the damaged start damaging others, people put their hands over the ears pretending nothing's happening, and the cycle continues.
> Personally I'd rather have "trauma" than play this little head game.
What head game is being played?
> If anything, we're doing significantly more damage by teaching upcoming generations to trust the pharmaceutical industry.
The argument I was making had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry. It was about how trauma gets suppressed, and how that can institute a cycle of trauma, so be wary of how you approach it. It's all about taking care of people.
> Trauma everywhere, in what fashion? Perhaps because more people are talking about it, more people are getting the courage to talk about it.
Social contagion is a thing. Just because more people are taking about something doesn't mean it's true
> Eventually, the damaged start damaging others, people put their hands over the ears pretending nothing's happening, and the cycle continues.
It doesn't take therapy or a bunch of trauma ideology to know that hurting people is wrong. Someone could have a perfect upbringing and still be a piece of shit. Alternatively someone could have a shitty upbringing and be a good person. The latter case doesn't require the person to "come to terms with their trauma" in the methodology that gets dictated to them by this decade's version of psychology
> The argument I was making had nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry.
Maybe not directly, I was suggesting a more productive alternative than the one in the comment I was responding to
I suspect that your anecdata results from the community that organized religion engenders. Irrespective of all the criticisms leveled at religion, the simple fact of the matter is that if you feel like you belong, that your struggles are not unique, and that you can talk to people who have come through similar struggles apparently intact, you will likely heal from the experience faster and more completely. That the religion can provide some explanation for why you had to experience the trauma is a neat side effect.
The veteran suicide rate is an evergreen cause of concern, but one of the major stories amongst veterans is that they leave this community where they had a very clearly defined role, with very clearly defined acceptable modes of behavior, and when you leave, all of that is stripped away. The sudden absence of community and sense of purpose is, for many veterans, an unbridgeable gap.
There absolutely are insidious downsides to such tight-knit communities (especially in response to threats to the community - vis how often the victim of clerical sexual abuse encounters further attacks from members of the church). But e.g. religious organizations have persisted for so long because there's a sort of cost-benefit analysis occurring, where the community decides that so long as the community continues to function, its OK that a few members of the community are sacrificed to protect it.
To be clear, its not like PTSD is a new thing. Catatonia, combat fatigue, etc, are stress responses that have been recognized for centuries. Its just that only fairly recently we've concluded that hey, maybe writing people off when they hit that point is a bad thing, and maybe we should invest some time in helping people before they reach that state.
You asked for practical take aways, so I'll say this:
Get good at communicating and being vulnerable. I know online spaces will tell you this is dangerous, and that your partner might leave you. Someone with this sort of background needs to be 'seen', and loved for who they are, and the only way that happens is if they truly know you. Second, realize that your partner is not the sole source of all your feelings about them. You're seeing the world through trauma colored glasses, and it often helps to take a step back, take a breath and ask yourself why you're feeling what your feeling rather than acting on it immediately.
> I know online spaces will tell you [being vulnerable] is dangerous, and that your partner might leave you.
The possibility of being rejected by being vulnerable is definitional... It's not being vulnerable if there isn't the possibility of rejection, it's just being transparent. So yeah, being vulnerable is dangerous. You might get rejected. But then again, you might get accepted, too.
(This isn't a critique of the parent, it's more of a critique of what the "online spaces" allegedly say.)
People who learn not to trust as children retain that into adulthood. Thats the core issue with many problems. It’s even a driver for PTSD - not everyone goes to war or experiences something terrible and leaves with a disorder.
Consider 100 years ago it was acceptable to beat your wife. It was not considered socially unusual for a working class man to have his children underfed after drinking his salary away. Thats an example of how humans poorly cope with the inhumane conditions of industrial society.
Trauma is in the eyes of the beholder.
I’m part of a catholic community that is a loving and supportive place. I’m not a dogmatic or “good catholic” by any means, but I find inspiration and meditative comfort in prayer. And having gone through some horrific challenges in my life, my friends and family there have helped me get through. There’s no magic imo, your “tribe” will help you get through things.
> Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.
In very different societies. Our societies have gradually become less and less like what we evolved to fit into: small groups, time out doors, lots of face to face contact with people you are close to etc.
Some past societies were pretty miserable for many people. I am pretty sure slaves had lots of trauma and other psychological problems, but not one cared. Even where people were cared about there were no consistent records kept so maybe we do not know.
> Conversely, my more religious friends (Catholic, Muslim) seem happier and more resilient psychologically.
I think religious faith and practices probably do help. However, that is not a practical solution because it is not something you can fake. You cannot just decide to believe something, and you may need faith rather than just belief to get the benefits. The benefits are a side effect of the aims of the religion (developing a relationship with God, achieving nirvana, etc.) and will not happen unless you are sincerely following the aim.
Religions have practices and ideas that help resilience, and sometimes those parallel ideas in psychology and therapy - but for the reasons above will not work out of context.
That is even without taking into account the possibility that (some) religious beliefs are true and, for example, God will (at least sometimes) answer a sincere prayer for the strength to cope with your problems. Maybe your Catholic and Muslim friends are receiving divine support - or just believing in a constant loving and perfect parental figure is a source of comfort that promotes resilience.
Religious Faith and Belief are choices. They have to be because they are fundamentally about unprovable things. So in one sense they are absolutely practical. However if you don't want to choose a religion then it may not be practical for you. It is in no way the case though that Faith is something that just happens to you. It's a personal choice.
Of course not. Religion is a choice if one becomes religious as an adult. However, for the vast majority of religious people, they become religious at a young age, when they cannot make any choices.
You certainly have the choice whether to continue being religious as an adult. Also, there are plenty of children who reject religiosity (although that may not get a chance to express itself until high school / college)
I don't think it's a choice. If you don't believe something, no amount of trying to make yourself believe it is going to make it so. A whole lot of people raised in a religion who are now atheists can attest to the extreme mental turmoil trying to do so during the deconversion process can cause. You either believe, or don't believe in any given brand of supernatural unobservable phenomenon.
I wouldn't want to assume the details or the difficulty someone else has or is going through related to this.
What I have found helpful, when I went through something like this, is to distinguish between the "feeling" of certainty and the "choice" to put my faith in something. A lot of the time, we talk about "faith" and we conflate those two. I can choose to trust something and not feel confidence in it until after the fact. How much confidence I feel in a choice varies for a lot of reasons, but I may still choose to accept the risk and act on the little information I do have because I don't have better alternatives.
In that sense, you can choose what you believe. Or at least, you can choose what you put your faith in.
Not provable to others. Many people are religious on the basis of religious experiences experiences, some on philosophical or other arguments that others find unconvincing. some even do not want to believe - CS Lewis described himself as 'the most dejected convert in England' for this reason.
For what it's worth, I'm mostly in agreement with you that contemporary therapy is overrated. I did have one quibble:
> Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.
In fact, and this is especially true for men, the correct response to this line of reasoning is basically "well, actually, no they didn't." The genetic lineages of most men over the entirety of human history, are extinct - we are descended from the comparative few who aren't. For example Ötzi the iceman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) has no living descendants. He is typical.
Not only that, but there is no reason to think that the surviving genetic lineages are remotely optimized for individual happiness, or for that matter individual industriousness or productivity (esp in the context of modern productive relations) or whatever other metric you want to measure people by.
All of which is to say, that even accounting for the fact that basically most people who ever lived have no living descendants, we just don't value, individually or collectively, even the attributes that would have been selected for among human populations in the bronze age, neolithic, whatever. So if we want to make those things happen (i.e. if we want people to be happy and productive) we need to create the conditions for it and we need to give them significant help in doing so, as well. That "significant help" is probably going to be something like what we call "therapy" today - though, as I mentioned above, I think contemporary therapeutic practices are doing a horrible job at it. But, there is a job to do there, IMO.
Those religions mandate women to submit to the male or they are kicked out of the group. Of course things are more orderly when there is a chain of command and severe consequences (like losing your whole family) for demanding equality, asking questions, or questioning authority. Don't confuse the order for happiness. Ask a Muslim or Catholic what happens when you're gay, for example. Or review what the Churchs response was to child sexual abuse. In that case the social order actively contributed to more trauma!
> Somehow, humans managed to get by for thousands of years without any of this stuff.
By “humans” do you mean 50%, 75%, 90%, 99%, or 99.99% of the population?
By “got by” do you mean “lived mentally strong and resilient and healthy lives” or “just managed to do enough labor to not be ostracized and cut off from resources” or “maybe they couldn’t, but nobody wrote about or wanted to remember those people anyway” or “nobody had the vocabulary to describe their state or behavior as anything more than ‘unpleasant/unbecoming’”?
Survival is not the same as thriving. Survival is the bottom rung on Maslow's hierarchy and below that is death.
Being versed in the terminology of a subject is not the same as being an adept practitioner.
The next few generations will become better practitioners while us graybeards (encompassing down to those in high school now) will suffer from the consequences of not receiving a better education in mental wellness and lacking the structural supports necessary for that.
There are still a lot of barriers to widespread mental wellness from taking root in American culture: homelessness, poverty, class, conservatism, regressive religions, et cetera.
You could be seeing correlation and not causation. People with psych issues want to get better. Those that are intellectually curious tend to read up on underlying causes and possible solutions.
I will say, that while I've read a lot of these sorts of books, they've mainly helped me identify my predispositions in temperament, my blind spots, etc. If you really press a therapist on the question, they will tell you that the only real way to 'treat' this is having loving and stable friends and romantic partners. I imagine being religious can help as it grants you easy access to a welcoming community, and frankly 'god' is the ultimate parental figure for those that believe.
Religion and psychiatry hardly seem opposed to me. It's popular to see Buddhism as actually a kind of therapy, although certainly not 100% correct, and that's sort of what prayer is meant to do too.
I prefer to keep them separate. The christian councilor I saw was very big into 'everything happens for a reason' and 'god has a plan' and given my background it turned my stomach. If what i went through was 'part of a plan' I have some very pointed questions for god when I meet him.
I hope the reason given was something like "people have free will and sometimes they use it to do evil" (which is why forgiveness is a thing), and that "God has a plan" includes a plan to heal and restore (for instance, Jesus saying "I came that [my sheep] may have abundant life" or "I came to destroy the works of the evil one"). If it's just "everything happens for a reason" but nothing more, that's basically saying "I don't know how to help you".
Possibly off-topic rant: If the reason is "it was God's will, because God is sovereign and therefore everything is his will", I think that is bordering on function heresy. Christianity (and life) has all these tensions: God is one, but God is three; Jesus is a man, but Jesus is God; God is sovereign, but he gave us free will. The temptation is to resolve the tension by cutting off one of the ends of the tension. The original heretics chopped off one of the ends of the tension about Jesus: Jesus was only man and not God (for example, Adoptionism, Arianism) and Jesus was only divine and not man (for example, Docetism, Apollinarianism). The view that evil is God's will is similarly chopping off our responsibility, so it is doing the same thing that the original heretics did. In my view, the biblical view is that people doing evil is NOT God's will, but what he wants to achieve requires that he give us free will (and his plan of resolving our choice to do evil is to put his spirit in our hearts).
Some clergy are well educated, others are not. Likewise, therapists vary a lot. I’ve been fortunate to have known some priests very well who are nothing short of amazing, wise people.
Someone leaning on the “everything happens for a reason” in a counseling context is gross - I almost took a swing at someone bleating that when my wife died.
It's hard to reconcile needing friends and romance with advice like "you should work on yourself before dating" and feeling like I'm often subjecting others to myself
Pure "woundology" may indeed make things worse. There's another book which I haven't read yet about the dangers of therapy and underestimating the people's intuition and resilience - "Bad Therapy, Why the kid's aren't growing up", but the podcast with the author seemed reasonable.
It gives lots of evidences on what you've just said.
Just simply living a life, focusing on goals and targets, making mistakes and learning from them - this works too. In my case, personally, I just couldn't ignore the problems anymore. I've also made this mistake of dwelling into wounds burning out people around me and being unavailable for them instead of trying to focus more on something good.
I think, we barely scratched the complexity of human psyche, and there lot's of moving parts in person's development. There might be a bit of dehumanization and modern over-materialistic somewhat arrogance perspective - how can I stop feeling what I feel, so I could continue my business as usual?
A few things why religion helps, out of the head:
- it's an empirical study of human psyche over thousands of years
- highlights importance of intentions behind actions
- emphasizes on connection with the world
Sounds totally reasonable?
The universal practical tip would be "just live your life, pay attention and genuinely try to make good out of it", but if being specific and speaking from personal experience and a keeping it small:
- studying violence (the last book in the list) significantly reduced anxiety, risk seeking behavior and moral rigidness (e.g. what is it: "social anxiety" or "embodied situational awareness"?)
- "woundology" and focus on trauma/pain without keeping healing as a target in mind, will, most probably, just make it worse; but studying the topic still has advantages
- try to pay attention to intuition, it seems like psyche tries to heal itself naturally or at least to draw an attention to yet not understood problem/information gifted to a person about the world/life; try to find out what is the center of what draws you onto it (or maybe scorns you off way more than you yourself would expect normally): Eugene Gendlin's Focusing is a quite good tool for that
- combine both inner and external healing - with a grain of salt, as some people I've met have better outcomes with focusing on actions/thoughts (CBT), while for me a deeper body/intuition oriented inner work seems to suit better; but it's good to try and keep both in mind
- it's ok to reach for medication when it's really bad as a temporal support on the path; don't replace everything with meds, but don't reject them completely either - it's always possible to get back on track later
- things seem to get better over time, even if it doesn't feel like that in the moment: new realizations, some knots are untying, sometimes something changes radically and sometimes for the good, and it's difficult to predict that; it's obvious since it's like a personalized empirical search - it needs practice and time, although a possibility of a downward spiral is here as well
- relationships have a degree of power to both devastate and heal
>"Bad Therapy, Why the kid's aren't growing up", but the podcast with the author seemed reasonable.
I had this book in my read queue, until I saw a podcast where she basically outted herself as an anti-vax covid denier. She may well have a point but after that I could only see her as an unhinged contrarian.
I’m not saying this to try to start a fight or anything. You strike me as a kind person, so I’m going to give this a shot.
I am a bit of a contrarian about lots of things. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known were major contrarians.
Are Linus Torvalds or RMS contrarians? What about Richard Feynman or Tesla?
I don’t really know if any of those examples would be widely considered contrarians, but my point is that people are multi faceted. Dismissing a person in a broad manner for unpopular opinions in one arena, strikes me as a religious mindset.
Does everyone have to pass a purity test before their opinions are able to be considered? Is that healthy?
Thank you for any consideration you can give this. I truly do not mean to start a flame war. One more thought experiment: is it ok to learn woodworking from an Amish person who likely would have wildly diverging views from most people?
So, I divide things into two camps. I think one can hold an unpopular opinion about subjective things, and it's fine. I won't judge you for preferring tabs over spaces, even if I think you're wrong. I won't weigh that opinion against your other work either. It's like preferring sweet potato to apple pie. You're still wrong, but again it has no bearing on objective facts. :^)
When you're outspoken about an objective fact that has been proven out by a mountain of evidence like vaccines being safe, or the earth being round, that's when I become very skeptical of any of your other opinions.
The amish woodworker is an interesting question. I wouldn't judge him for being wrong about things outside of his domain as I'd assume ignorance instead of malice, but if he started popping off very wrong theories on the nature of oak vs pine I'd probably be leery.
Are you advocating for comprehensive moral purity tests -- if a person holds a particular view that you disapprove of, they ought to be canceled in general and everything they've ever said or done banned, no matter whether their other work is good on its own merits?
It seems there are very, very few people in the history of the world whose work would survive. Perhaps none.
I am a layman, not a psychologist with sufficient education to prove or disprove her claims. When I judge someone's credibility, I take into account whether they've spread misinformation in the past. In this case, she has. Or at least she holds those beliefs and believes them strongly enough to speak openly about it on a public podcast.
Yes. I judge people on that. We all have the freedom of speech. We do not have freedom from the judgement of others.
That doesn't address the argument at all. You claimed that although her views on one topic seem reasonable, you believe they should be canceled, no longer promoted in society, buried.... because you strongly disapprove of her views on an unrelated topic.
Are you prepared to extend this practice universally? Are you aware that practically nobody can survive this sort of puritanical Maoist cancel culture? Look at what happened in China or Cambodia for recent examples of how that goes.
I disapprove of her views because they were provably false, yet she still espouses them. Yes, I do extend this universally. I won't take advice on orbital mechanics from someone who thinks the earth is flat either.
If that's 'puritanical Maoist cancel culture' so be it. You told on yourself with that phrase. This isn't a good faith discussion, and I'm out.
If someone shows they’re either stupid or dishonest I will deprioritize reading their books. I have infinite books to read before I die. I have to cull the list somehow.
I agree that just marinating in a trauma and victim mindset isn't healthy. All you do is re-traumatize!
But that's why any therapist worth their salt will focus on engaging and healing those issues. Yes we engage with the trauma response, but in a safe space so that you can walk out of being trapped in it.
I think your impression has merit and labeling people as 'sick' or 'broken' or any of the diagnoses in psychology literature, that imply just about the same, can keep people stuck identifying with their afflictions. And that there's some great value in religion that we've not found a good replacement for.
I also believe that one can go without facing deeply traumatic events for an entire life and seem to many on the outside to be doing much better than one who goes the difficult path of deconstructing oneself and their family history.
And I think our unhappiness and that of our children is well explained by our late-stage-capitalist, individualistic cultures and the rise of technology that profits from (ill-)serving our social needs.
'It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' - Jiddu Krishnamurti
“some great value in religion” takes a long time of filtering through stories and metaphors to find the actual point.
I get it, some lessons are hard to teach and it’s easier to present the framework of the lesson in a story, then people make connections as they grow.
But you also have to consider all of the harmful misinterpretations that come with it.
If most people come away from religion less ethical than nonreligious people, let’s see if we can take the good parts of the texts and throw the rest away.
E.g. learning about mystical buddhism versus just going to therapy and breathing for a while.
> If most people come away from religion less ethical than nonreligious people
How do you test that? You cannot do a double blind test because you cannot induce religion in people to order.
> let’s see if we can take the good parts of the texts and throw the rest away.
I do not think you can do that. Each religion is largely shaped by a few key ideas. Remove one of those and you change it radically (losing the good) remove anything else and you will not change anything significant.
You can reform and improve religions, but I think history shows that is not easy nor are the results predictable.
I think you over-emphasise the importance of texts to religions in general. Texts are the foundation of American evangelical Christianity and (to an extent I am worse equipped to judge) Islam, but much of Christianity and at least some schools of Buddhism are really based in a very small core of ideas.
I take it as a fair enough assumption for my judgements that all people have the same average personality potential at birth.
I’ve been around a lot of very Catholic people. I’d say half are well intentioned, whereas half are belligerent antivax etc.
The ones with good intentions prop up and obey the bad actors.
The ones with good intentions end up feeling trapped by the community and the religious trauma. Sometimes the good ones end up taking it out on their spouses/kids, perceived as units of the oppressive structure (though they are victims alike).
The difficulty of reform is all the more reason I’m happy for the slow decline in religiosity.
People in prison have more 'community' and 'support' just by the fact they are surrounded by others in a communal setting than the average person out on the street in the USA. How f'd up as a society is that?
Not to deny your experience with it, however looking up the author and the book I notice that it has drawn some serious criticisms for inaccuracies and lack of empirical data backing up claims.
Doesn't that describe almost all books on psychology?
Psychology studies tend to be so hilariously unscientific that I'd rather get the coherent opinions and gut feelings of an experienced practicing expert, rather than half-arsed studies.
You could level some pretty damning claims against hard science as well due to the ongoing reproducibility crises in academia (LK99, the "faster than light" accidents that have been reported,the "EM Drive"), or the enormous amount of money (and people's brains) sunk into string theory. Somehow those are/were considered science even though there is no evidence.
You could see the bibliography of the book itself. You could google a bit and see the guy is a leader in this field, and a pioneer of this research. Answering a request for sources of your assertion with a request for theirs isn't done in good faith.
I made no such assertion? I was following the thread and I think its a fair request. It was an easy google search to see that he was fired for bullying and creating a hostile workplace a few years back...not sure where that landed. And I saw a number of articles relating to pseudoscience that he recommends in the book. It was a simple ask for their simple ask.
I found “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” extremely revelatory. It was a great introduction to the concept for me.
Funnily enough, I picked up up thinking this stuff was nonsense. Then it hit me like a bag of bricks. It was very humbling.
Since then I’ve also found writing by James Hollis very useful. One which stood out for me was “Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men”. It’s quite insightful about how modern life can afflict men, and how men can learn, adapt, and overcome these challenges. It’s refreshingly well-rounded and takes seriously the idea that men can suffer just as women do, patriarchy or not (and even because of it), and offers tools to work towards making things right.
In general his work is a great stepping stone from understanding CPTSD to then finding more nuanced models of the internal mechanisms, how to understand and articulate them, then ultimately grow beyond them. Some may find the Jungian psychology overwhelming or off-putting (I did initially), but there is real substance there.
A very approachable work on the subject, exploring the four attachment types (but recognising that they are on a multi-dimensional spectrum), with real-world examples and practical strategies for coping.
Yes, except the "Focusing" practice and the last one about the violence.
Attachment is a weird thing, because it usually happens so early in life where there are no memories yet.
However, infants still internalize everything, they can feel, react to the environment and understand consequences of what their feelings tell them. "If I'm scared, then there's a high probability of something bad to be happen to me".
So, there are may not be rational memories to be linked to the problem 20-30 years later in life.
P.S.
Speaking from the personal experience - during the focusing practice I was able to verbally conceptualize these old feelings which became a part of my identity.
In the end, the crux was being an infant, a sensation of being blind, overfocused on touch and sounds, high sensation of exposedness and nakedness, sensation of mother's touch and realisation that she's unable to attune to me emotionally, like it's still a human touch, but similar to touching a stone.
Hence, the futile cry and scream to draw her attention out of fear to be protected.
To paraphraze, it felt like if now, I'd get tied (immobilized), blindfolded and left naked in the night Luisiana swamps.
It's weird, but I think, I actually understood why infants may cry and have a need to be seen and connected to. It seems to be so logical for me nowadays - they are humans too, after all.
Similar in Canada and strangely it’s tax free, so prostitutes don’t have to pay tax on their “work” despite the activists saying sex work is real work.
And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?
This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.
Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.