Positions

How do you determine the validity of personal beliefs? Analyzing the logical structure and second order effects of holding certain political opinions. These pages skew toward logic, which is my personal version of centrist arguments, which many people consider biased. If you want to avoid being triggered best to keep away from these pages. It’s the internet so someone out there will definitely be offended with something. But I enjoy these topics and avoiding them in my opinion is a detriment to our society.

The overall position

• Compared with opinion today, these positions are near the middle. Compared with opinion twenty years ago, they would count as left of centre, because the set of opinions treated as normal has changed more over those twenty years than these positions have.
• Pro-America, meaning America as it has traditionally been. America is not perfect, and it is better than the other countries available.
• Generally in favour of Trump’s MAGA movement, without supporting all of it.
• On gun control, no strong view either way.

Belonging

• Mass Immigration - Cohesion: The people who came into the United States in the large increase in immigration that began in 2020 under the Biden administration should be sent back, and people who arrive should not get a vote on local policy. Whether a person who arrives belongs depends on how much of the American way of life they have adopted, so belonging is a matter of degree. The argument against mass immigration that persuades the public is that it lowers wages for the people already living in the country. A person can make that argument without being against business. The page asks which people are let in and whether they can live under the same rules after they are in.
• The Civil Rights Act - Freedom of Association: The law should not force anyone to do business with anyone. Freedom of association includes the freedom to refuse to associate. The act removed that freedom so that people could no longer refuse to do business with others because of their race. The page compares the loss of that freedom with what the act achieved.
• The Woke Retreat - The New Electorate Claim: Since 2024 the American left has been dropping positions it held in the 2010s, such as pronoun rules and men in women’s sport. One claim says the immigrants who arrived in those years caused this change, because they rejected those positions and their votes now decide elections. The claim has cause and effect in the wrong order. The groups that do not adopt the American way of life vote for the Democrats because the Democrats tolerate that. The party’s permissiveness came first, and those groups’ votes came after it. The page tests the claim and finds no connection between the immigrants and the left dropping those positions.

Gaps, and what is concluded from them

• Racial Egalitarianism - The Disparity Inference: A gap in outcomes between two groups does not by itself show that anyone discriminated against the group with the worse outcomes. Most of such a gap comes from differences in culture, in what families expect, and in what people value. The page examines the reasoning that goes from a gap in outcomes to an accusation of discrimination.
• DEI as Anti-Discrimination: Hire and promote on merit, and end the diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that hire and promote by race. Those programs sort people by race in order to correct earlier sorting by race. Race still decides the outcome, so the programs produce more sorting by race, which is what they were meant to end. The page assesses the business case for those programs and the moral case for them separately.
• White Guilt: Nobody is guilty for what their ancestors did. Guilt comes from what a person does. What a person is able to do is something they develop in their own lifetime, so it cannot be inherited, in the same way that a skill cannot be inherited. Guilt by descent is unfair. It also does not make sense. The page asks whether guilt inherited from ancestors can make sense at all.
• Who Gets Called Racist: People mostly call someone racist in order to end an argument. In most cases the word is not being used to describe the person. The page looks at the effect of the accusation and at how a person can answer it.
• The Grooming Gang Cover-Up: Gangs of men abused girls in towns across Britain for twenty years. The police, the social services, and the prosecutors hid the abuse. Anyone who named the men’s ethnic and religious background lost their job, so nobody named it, and nothing about it was written in the official records. The British press did not report it for the same reason: anyone who named the background lost their job. The page explains why people were rewarded for saying nothing and what harm came from their silence.
• Moral Language as Leverage: Moral words persuade only people who still hold the values the words express. They do not persuade anyone else, no matter who says them. The page is about how a society uses moral words to keep order.
• Schooling - The Format Filter: Sitting still at a desk all day suits girls better than it suits boys. When boys do badly at it, schools blame the boys and not the way the school day is arranged. The page describes what a school day arranged that way taught each sex about the other.
• The Woke Mind Virus: Young men who adopt woke ideology are harmed by it, because they learn from it that words are violence, that setbacks are oppression, and that their pain is an illness with a name. A person’s worldview is generated from their self-talk. Self-talk is the basis of mental health and one of the main things that affect it. The page compares that claim with every measurement, including the measurements that contradict it.

Faith

• What Faiths Demand of the State: The most important question about a religion is what its teachings require the state to do. Whether the religion is true is a less important question. These positions come from someone who is not Christian, who is secular and agnostic, and who holds that some Christian values are good even without belief in Christianity. A quote from the Bible does not count as an argument for these positions. Islam’s reformers are worth watching on the same question of what they want the state to do, and a non-Muslim can watch them without belonging to the faith. The page sets out what the teachings of Christianity and of Islam each require of the state.

Money and the state

• Socialism as Moral Correction: Socialists identify real problems, such as low wages and people left worse off than others. They propose to solve those problems by making the state bigger, but the state caused those problems. The page examines the moral argument for socialism, which is the basis of the economic argument.
• Financial Slavery: A debt that pays the lender more when the borrower misses a payment, and that cannot be cancelled in bankruptcy, lets the lender take the borrower’s work without owning the borrower. The page describes how this works across a whole population.
• The Organized Minority: No settled position, because it is still undecided whether an organized few always end up in control. The page argues that they do.
• The top and bottom two percent. If the most able two percent of a society are removed, the society stops working. If the two percent who take the most and give the least are removed, the society has higher income, less crime, and more giving. There is no page on this yet.

Pages with no position

• Democracy as Sacred Cow: No position. The page finds that two of the reasons given for majority rule are sound. The first is that an election shows which side would win a fight, without the fight taking place. The second is that one vote per person is the only system in which nobody has to decide whose vote counts for more.
• The Indictment of Europe: No position. The page responds to the three accusations made against European history, which are slavery, colonialism, and mass killing. It asks whether any of the three is true of Europe alone.
• Racial Fatigue: No position. The page is about how people become exhausted by a demand that never stops: the demand that they keep attending to black Americans’ grievances against the country.
• Validity and Truth: No position. It is the page that explains the method for reading the other pages in this list.
• Per Capita: No position. It explains how to reason about rates and totals.
• What Is the Virtue of a Proportionate Response: No position.

Positions with no page

• Being American. A person is American because of what they believe and what they do, so someone whose parents came from another country can become American.
• Givers and takers. Some people in America give more than they take, and some take more than they give. What separates them is what a person wants to do. A person can change from one group to the other, so being a giver or a taker is not a fixed trait.
• Who a person is. Who a person is comes from what they learn to do, and is not fixed by what they were born as. Nothing a person acquires can be inherited by anyone else.
• Abortion. Ban abortion after the first trimester instead of banning it completely, while still disliking abortion.