The Levite And His Concubine

The Biblical story of the Levite and his concubine, which is Chapter 19 of the of book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, is an odd and shocking story. (It isn't, however, part of the Torah, and is instead part of the collection of stories that make up the remainder of what Christians call  the Old Testament, after its initial five books).

Why the Hebrews, hundreds of years later, chose to preserve this piece of legendary history, when they assembled the Hebrew Bible isn't entirely clear. It may be because it has strong parallels in the story of Lot in the book of Genesis, another case where a bunch of random men come to a house and demand the the householder surrender someone for them to rape and the household complies. Or, it may be intended to demonstrate how lawless the Levant was for the Jews in the age of judges, before they established their own proper kingdom there, as Judges 19:30 suggests.

The story of the Levite and his concubine is also cryptic. It belabors seemingly unimportant details at length, while omitting context that help the story make more sense and explain why these people acted the way that they did. Three thousand or so years removed from the setting of the story, we are left to fill in the blanks by inferring what we can from what it does say.

The story

A Levite and his concubine (whom he acquired in Bethlehemjudah, apparently from her father) visit his concubine's father, where they stay for four months and five days and were urged by her father to stay longer. But the Levite insisted on leaving for his home, together with his two donkeys, his servant and his concubine. Judges 19:1-10. His next stop was to "the house of the Lord" (presumably, his home as the Levites are the priestly class of the Hebrews). Judges 19:18.

The Levite and his party consider staying overnight in Jerusalem, but decide to go to the Jewish town of Gibeah that was part of the tribe of Benjamin, instead, because at this time (before there was a Jewish King in Israel) there were no Jews in Jerusalem. But the Levite can't find a place to stay in Gibeah. Judges 19:11-15. However, a local farmer they meet agrees to take the Levite and his party in for the night, provides them with a meal, and stables the Levite's donkeys for the night, so that the Levite and his party don't have to sleep on the streets that night. Judges 19:16-21.

Some men from the area come to the farmer's house saying that they want to rape the visiting Levite. But the farmer refuses because the Levite was under the farmer's hospitality and protection, and instead offers the hostile crowd of men his own virgin daughter, or the Levite's concubine, instead. Judges 19: 22-24. 

It isn't clear if they want to rape the Levite because they are craving gay sex, because the Levite is a stranger in the town, or because they have animosity towards the Hebrew people's priestly class.

The implication is that if the crowd of men wasn't placated with a girl or woman to rape, that they would have taken the Levite and raped him by force.

The men ultimately accept the Levite's concubine instead of the Levite himself and gang rape her all night until dawn, after which the Levite's concubine collapses on the farmer's doorstep. Judges 19:25-27. But the concubine was unable to speak when the Levite asked her to get ready to go (perhaps because she is unconscious and dying as a result of the brutal gang rape), so he put her on a donkey, finishes his trip, and when he arrives there, cuts her body into twelve pieces, and sends one piece to each of the twelve tribes of Israel (presumably to express his outrage at the situation and to protest the mistreatment of the Levite priesthood). Judges 19:28-30.

Better Isn't Impossible, Other Countries Do It

 

English Language Annoyances And Musings

What features of the English language are deeply ingrained but add little value?

* Gendered honorifics and titles. There are Mr., Mrs., Miss, Mistress, Ms. which convey both gender and, for women, marital status. 

There is also "Master" which paradoxically can refer to either someone who has compulsory authority over someone who is greatly subordinate to them (e.g. a slave or servant), a boy with high social standing, or an expert. It is strongly gendered when referring to a boy with high social standing, is neuter when referring to an expert, and is only very weakly and residually gendered, with the feminine counterpart being "Mistress" when referring to someone in a master and servant type relationship. But Mistress can also refer to either the female companion of a respectable man, or to a concubine or partner in adultery of a man (especially a married man). Meanwhile "Lady" can refer to any female older than a toddler, can be a non-honorific description of a female adult, or can refer to an aristocratic woman or gentry as a feminine version of "Lord".

Yet, honorifics don't have to be gendered. 

The suffix honorifics of Japanese are not gendered. 

The professional honorifics "Doctor" and "Professor" are not gendered and this creates no problem at all. 

Historically the honorific suffix "Esquire" was so masculine that it is the name of a "men's magazine" and generally refers to men as the lowest tier of the British aristocracy that can also refer to esteemed non-aristocrats. But, as an American honorific suffix, referring to people who are admitted to the practice of law, is is gender neutral. 

The title "Chair" works almost as well as the gendered "Chairman" and "Chairwoman". "Policeman" has been replaced with "Police Officer".

One path to get there could be to convert historically male honorifics into gender neutral ones, just as many professional titles that were once gendered are now gender neutral. There used to be a Testator and a Testatrix, but the term Testator is now used in a gender neutral way. The same is true of Executor and Executrix. Actor used to be a strictly male gendered word with the counterpart Actress, but now a female who acts can be called an Actor as well. Even the word "guy" is only weakly male gendered, in part, due to the plural second person expression "you guys" that is a counterpart to the Southern "y'all" in the Northeastern United States.

On the other hand, the use of the gendered word "man" to refer to a person or all people, regardless of gender to include women as well, has become archaic and ambiguous.

* Gendered third person pronouns. We manage without them in the first person and second person. If the third-person pronoun could be narrowed down to gender neutral person v. gender neutral thing, that would be a win.

* Frequently confused words. Two combinations of words are particularly prone to errors: their, there, and they're, and it's and its. Interestingly, four of these mischievous five words involve third-person pronouns, but this time, the gender neutral ones. There are also to, too, and two. Really common words like these shouldn't have equally common homonyms, and instead, should be distinct, unambiguous words. Also, there should probably be different grammatical symbols for a possessive and a contraction, rather than trying to make the apostrophe do all of the work for both of these purposes. I'd favor keeping the apostrophe for possession, and finding a new one to indicate contractions.

* Agreement as to number. It doesn't add much clarity and is a pain when you are editing something and the number of the thing you are talking about changes.

* Spelling words with "qu" instead of just "q", most absurdly in the British English "queue" meaning to get in line or referring to a group of people waiting in line, in which all of the letters but the first are silent.

* The letter "c" which is almost always pronounced as either a "k" or an "s".

What are language features that we're glad are mostly absent in English?

* The formal v. informal second person pronoun that is present in most Romance languages, with the formal second person pronoun doubling as a plural pronoun, is not found in English (although there is residual royal "we" to indicate a formal first person pronoun rather than a plural first person pronoun). Closely related is the distinction, primarily in first person pronouns in Japanese, between speaking as an individual, speaking of multiple people, and speaking official on behalf of a group, which sounds in Japanese like "Wadi wadi" although that isn't the proper romanization (I tracked down the correct one once, but I have forgotten it).

* Abjabs. A writing system that omits vowels in its written version, such as written Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew (sometimes with notations such as accents or dots to indicate the missing vowels in ambiguous cases) is called an abjab, and I'm glad that English is not one of them as there is too much pronunciation ambiguity that you just have to know without being able to discern it from the text itself.

* Alphabets where letters used together combine into combination characters. This is something of an intermediate stage between an alphabet and a syllabary. For example, in Korean hangul, multiple letters in a syllable or word are combined in a fashion that looks superificially a bit like a Chinese character. Arabic cursive script and many South Asian alphabets also have this feature.

* Syllabaries. A writing system where a single symbol represents a single syllable, rather than a single sound, are called syllabaries. Japanese has two of them, and many languages use syllabaries rather than alphabets like the roman and Cyrillic and Greek alphabets where individual symbols represent particular sounds and are combined into syllables. As a result, syllabaries have more characters than alphabets do. When you are writing with a pen and paper, syllabaries can be more efficient, but in the digital age where you are mostly typing, alphabets are superior.

* Heavy use of logograms. Chinese has a writing system in which a symbol represents a whole word and there are many thousands of them. Japanese, Korean, and some other Asian languages use them to a lesser extent through direct borrowing from Chinese (although sometimes with semantic drift as these borrowings often took place during the Tang Dynasty (618 CE to 907 CE). Essentially every language has some logograms (symbols and characters such as emojis which are associated with a whole idea) and they have their place (e.g. the universal symbol for biohazards), but even these can get out of hand (such as the logograms used for fabric care on clothing and bed linen labels).

* Heavy use of honorific hierarchy. Japanese makes very heavy mandatory use of hierarchical honorifics in many forms of conversation, which ingrains hierarchal thinking into people who speak in it, which can cause undue deference to authority.

* Fuzzy gendered pronouns. In Japanese, which is overall a very sex divided culture, it isn't just honorifics that are mostly gender neutral. Some honorifics and pronouns have weak male or female or age or hierarchy connotations, but don't fit in a black and white way into one gender and/or age and/or hierarchy combination or another. They are used more often to refer to someone with certain particular combinations of those, but not exclusively.

* Gendered definite articles (the equivalent of the English word "the"), especially for nouns that don't have a natural gender, that is found in many romance languages.

* Heavy use of inflection. Latin is the worse offender, but many, many other languages also use it heavily. English, however, uses short additional words, such as articles, in lieu of inflection in most cases.

* Fusional languages. I am thankful that English doesn't combined multiple word fragments into very long words that are almost sentences the way that German does.

* Grammatical tone. Many languages of almost all language families, primarily in tropical areas, use grammatical tones as substitutes for additional vowels and consonants.

* Non-gender grammatical genders or cases. Many languages have multiple categories of nouns used in a manner similar to grammatical gender for words that don't inherently have a gender, only they refer to things like whether something is animate or inanimate. Sometimes there are as many as five or ten such arbitrary noun categories. This kind of system is found in the aboriginal Australian that is discussed in the linked video. 

* Dual number. English distinguishes between singular and plural nouns and requires agreement of number in many cases (with some notable exceptions), and requiring agreement in grammatical number is mostly useless feature of our language. But some languages are even worse and singular, dual, and plural in excess of dual grammatical number that works the same way.

* A surname shortage. Many cultures and languages have a serious surname shortage. 

In Asia, this is mostly because when one aristocratic house absorbed or conquered another aristocratic house, everyone subject to the subjected house took the surname of the dominant house, so as the number of aristocratic houses controlling most of the territory dwindled, everybody ended up with the same few surnames. Vietnam is the worst case, but China and Korea are both pretty bad.

In the Americas, this is partially a founder effect phenomena, with the surnames of the initial wave of Spanish colonists who had many descendants in the early generation becoming dominant. 

In other places (Scandinavia and many Slavic countries, for example), patronymics (like Johnson) and sometimes matronymics (like Marydaughter) were used in a transition period to fixed surnames and the existence of very common given names caused patronymics (or matronymics) associated with those given names to become very common among unrelated people.

Thankfully, in the U.S., there are a great variety of surnames, with none too dominant, so this has made distinguishing people by the names easier.

Romanization of foreign languages

It would be nice to have a consistent, global system of romanization of foreign language words and sounds that is consistent with how English words with the same letters are pronounced that is not redundant. So often, I subconsciously ask myself what the heck someone was thinking when they came up with these romanizations.

* Pronunciation of the letter "x" in Romanized words is not consistent. It is usually pronounced "ch" in words of Greek origin, and "sh" in words of Chinese and Mesoamerican languages. At end of French words, the "x" is usually silent.

* Pronunciation of "ph" usually in words of Greek origin, as "f".

* The letter combination "ng" in Vietnamese usually comes out as something like a "wh" sound. That isn't quite right, but few English speakers can get closer.

* The letter combination "wh" in Romanized Maori is usually pronounced like an "f".

* I'm not entirely sure what the letter combination "ts" which appears in Japanese and in many Slavic languages is supposed to sound like, and I usually end up just treating the "t" in "ts" as silent.

* It is annoying that "ll" in Spanish is pronounced basically as "y" (the consonant).

* It is also critical to know the source language when a word has a "j" or an "h" in it. The "j" in Spanish tends to be pronounced as an "h", and the "h" in Spanish tends to be pronounced like the "w" in "win".

* On the other hand, the nasal "n" with a tilde over it, in Spanish (or less often other languages) is completely unambiguous.

* There is a sound in Korean, for example, the initial letter in "kim chi", the ubiquitous fermented cabbage with hot pepper and garlic side dish, and "gim bop" (basically a sliver of what is also called a "California roll") that is more often Romanized with a "k" than a "g", but has a pronunciation that is closer to a "g".

* Another source of consternation in Romanization are the long consonant strings, that seem to be missing necessary vowels, in Welsh and Polish.

* Romanizations of Irish proper names, and British place names, are also incredibly fraught. For example, as a stand alone geographic division, the word "shire" is pronounced "shy-er", but as a suffix in a British place name it is pronounced "shir" which is almost the same as "sure". Many Irish proper names and British place names aren't even pronounced remotely like you would think that they should be given their spellings.

* The biggest problem with French spelling, famously, is that so many of its letters are silent, such as the "h" in the borrowed phrase "h'orderves", which also has the common French feature of being a contraction of more than one word that sounds like a single word.

* You could try to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. But, this requires learning a completely new script that is only vaguely related to the Roman alphabet, and it contains quite a few sounds that are early entirely absent from most English dialects, which makes them hard to both heard and pronounce, or are very hard to speakers of many English dialects to distinguish from each other.

* In contrast, Japanese has three different scripts in addition to roman letters that you have to learn, but is pretty easy to learn to pronounce well, because Japanese has fewer sounds than English, doesn't have tones, has virtually no sounds that are absent from English, and has more strict rules on how syllables can be constructed than English. If the sounds of a Japanese word are spelled out in roman letters, the main pronunciation difficulty is getting the flow and accent of long words or phrases that are spoken quickly correct.

* Some languages in Romanized forms have excessive numbers of accents, diacritical marks (like tildes and umlauts), often because there isn't a good equivalent to a sound in a language in the roman alphabet. When this is the case, combinations of roman letters or just whole new letters for sounds not found in English, are probably a better solution. Then again, using combinations of letters for novel sounds leaves you with hard to parse consonant clusters like those found in Polish.

Is There A Method To The Madness?

There are annoying turns of phrase that strike me as ungrammatical but are becoming so common that they are now just slightly informal constructions. There may be some patterns and general rules lurking in them, but I haven't fathomed them yet.

* Using the word "gifted" to mean, having been given a gift (i.e. "gave") rather than to mean possessing great talent. I suppose that this is really a use of a regular form rather than an irregular infix.

* Say that someone "graduate high school" rather than "graduated from high school." I'm not sure what linguistic force is driving that and it seems to have its origins in a rural dialect.

* Saying that you "garnisheed" someone's wages or bank accounts, rather than "garnished". A "garnishee" is a third-party to whom a writ of garnishment is directed who controls and holds property for its true owner or who is indebted to the garnishee.

A lot of the other annoying phrased come from business slang or jargon.

Dreaming About A Better Future: Beliefs, Culture, And Political Economy Edition

It doesn't hurt to image a better future, even if you have no way of getting all of the way there very quickly at the moment. Technologically driven change is more powerful, more inevitable, and more common, but beliefs, culture, and political economies can progress as well.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world without the beliefs held by flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, evolution deniers, ancient astronaut believers, believers in lost high technology civilizations, faith healing believers, people who believe that demons are real, people who believe in possession by evil spirits, people who think that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, anti-fluoride activists, human caused climate change deniers, people who deny that men walked on the moon, and the pseudo-scientific beliefs of adherents to other forms of pseudo-science? Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where we didn't have elected officials and politically powerful individuals who took absurd conspiracy theories like government weather manipulation, Jewish space lasers, sex trafficking dens hidden by pizza parlors, 2020 U.S. Presidential election results denial, and Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs seriously? This isn't impossible. There are many parts of the world, and there are large subcultures in other parts of the world, where these beliefs are vanishingly rare and no one of consequence holds them.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where the vast majority of people saw the metaphysical worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism as myths akin to the predominant view held by modern people today about the pagan religions of the pre-Christian Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Norse people This isn't impossible either. There are parts of the world where this is the predominant worldview, even if there are fairly small minorities of true believers and many people still acknowledge cultural identities with roots in religion.

Wouldn't it be great to have a world where there was no place where women were denied access to more than rudimentary education? This is already true in most of the world. But it is not true yet Afghanistan, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, in tribal societies in parts of Southeast Asia and the Amazon, and in some Islamic countries (or at least parts of them). Historically, women (and for that matter, almost everyone) was denied access to more than rudimentary education. But most of the world has moved beyond that situation and it isn't impossible to change that in the last remaining hold out societies.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world free of misogyny and bigotry towards foreigners, non-white people, and LGBT people? This is possible too. There are, at a minimum, large subcultures in many places in the world where this is the overwhelming the case among members of that subculture.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world that is profoundly less corrupt? This isn't impossible either. There are multiple countries, and there are more subcultures within other societies, where this has been accomplished at well.

The way that a world like this arose would matter, of course. I am imagining a path that would primarily involve gradually converting people to new worldviews, not a path with mass slaughter or one secured with fear or harsh repression, although it wouldn't necessary be completely voluntary either.

Once achieved, this cultural change could be stable. There isn't anything inherently wrong, for example, with the people in Red State America. They just have a culture and belief system the remains in place due to cultural inertia, that in the context of a modern, scientific informed, technological culture with a strong state, is dysfunctional and undermines their own well-being (in addition to making the world worse for everyone who shares the flawed democracy that is the United States with them, and everyone who is subjected to American power in its foreign and military affairs).

John Lennon's song "Imagine", however, wasn't right. We wouldn't live without war in peace and harmony even without religion, countries, and possessions. 

Life without religion can work, but isn't a panacea. Life without countries and possessions, where people just share everything and live as a brotherhood of man, doesn't work. Countries and reasonably regulated ownership of possessions are necessary conditions to peace and a decent life for ordinary people. 

Life without countries promptly leads to anarchic warfare, violence, and warlords. It looks like Somalia over the last few decades, not the garden of Eden. Indeed, well run countries, and systems of strong nation-states in the context of a well-organized international community with widely agreed upon borders, tend to suppress military conflicts, which are resolved by politicians, diplomats, and lawyers instead. 

The last time U.S. states were at war was one hundred and sixty years ago, in 1865. The last war in the U.S. with American Indians ended more than a century ago in 1924 and was followed by legislation that gave Native Americans who were parts of Indian tribes full U.S. citizenship. If the part of North America that is now occupied by the U.S. had been made up of many different independent countries, there would almost surely have been more international wars in this territory in this time period. 

We could also have a global system that somehow prevented psychopaths and authoritarian dictators from gaining control of, or holding onto control of, nations. Some of the worst wars and circumstances for people on Earth exist as a result of a handful of authoritarian leaders and their inner circles of advisors. 

We could have international institutions that could discourage wars. We could have global institutions that prevented the injustices, corruption, and incompetence of national leaders and oligarchs from persisting and triggering insurgencies, violent coups, and civil wars.

All past attempts at life without possessions in the Soviet Union, in communist regimes in Asia, and even in large-scale communes, failed. And, their disavowal of property, and of any meaningful level of inequality, was an important cause of their own collapse. It wasn't just that communism wasn't done right in these cases.

The transitions to Communism in Russia, China, and other places like Cambodia, were some of the worse catastrophes and epic scale tragedies of human history.

In the former Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact, communism just died, producing a variety of successor regimes, none of which significantly disavowed large accumulations of possessions. Communist Asia has kept their Maoist style one party political systems, but they didn't keep its extreme prohibitions on private ownership of property to the point where it has the toxic concentration of extreme wealth associated with "late stage capitalism" despite being nominally communist. Communist regimes in Africa have had a similar fate. Communism is Cuba has been most of the most successful attempts at it, but has been seriously flawed and authoritarian nonetheless, and communism in Venezuela has been an unmitigated disaster. But we could significantly reduce poverty and other failures of capitalism without abolishing possessions and property and market based economic systems entirely.

It is possible to have a world that is peaceful, sane, rational, believes in science, with diverse populations, that is economically fair. The culture and worldview of Star Trek's society (although, of course, not all of its technologies), is not beyond the realm of possibility at a global level in the real world. Proof of the concept exists in multiple places. Expanding this set of beliefs and worldviews, and creating laws and institutions that support these kinds of societies is difficult but not impossible. 

Just because we failed to secure "the end of history" at the historical moment when it had seemed to pundits to be just around the corner, doesn't mean that this objective is fundamentally unattainable. Most great cultural and political revolutions have taken multiple attempts to finally gain hold.

France eventually secured a republic, despite the fact that it reverted to monarchy after the French Revolution and after some subsequent republics. The anti-monarchist uprisings of 1848 mostly failed, but a coupe of generations later, Europe was made up almost entirely of republics and constitutional monarchies in which the remaining monarchs were basically symbolic figureheads. Almost every newly independent country has coups and/or civil wars at some point fairly early on after gaining independence (the U.S. included). Some European countries have experienced coups and civil wars in the 20th century. A united India only lasted a few years before its Muslim territories were partitioned, the Muslim part was split by a civil war within a generation after that, and the Muslim successor states, between them have had multiple coups. A handful of monarchies transitioned peacefully into democratic countries, but these have been the uncommon exceptions and not the rule.

Why should securing the "end of history" be any easier? It isn't. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

The Witches Road (Only Minimal Spoilers)

"The Witches Road" (2025) by Kate Elliott, can be summed up as The Apothecary Diaries x Shannara x Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. 

In typical Kate Elliott style, there is extensive world building that experiment with novel norms and social structures unfamiliar to many readers, there are richly developed characters, and cliche tropes and genre conventions are frequently turned on their head. 

It is part of a two book series, with the second volume to be released in November, and while it is not her magnum opus, something reserved for her seven volume pair of series in the Jaran universe, or her seven volume Crown of Stars series, it is still a very solid and immersive slow burn high brow fantasy romance in a lovingly crafted and fully realized world.

In this post-apocalyptic world, deadly instantly mutagenic spores associated with the "Pall" have enveloped huge swaths of land in a rigidly hierarchal empire with vague East Asian vibes. The empire is organized at almost every level to permit civilization to survive in the face of the scourge that is the Pall. It isn't entirely clear what lies beyond the oceans and the ocean-like barrier that is the Pall.

The part of the empire that we see, far from the emperor's palace in the heartland, is predominantly agricultural and organized around other primary industries like farming, herding, fishing, forestry, stone quarrying, and mining. The empire is a rigidly hierarchical, but intrigue filled, feudal society where aristocrats jockey for power united under a single emperor who has united all territory up to its natural boundaries. Many key professions like surveying, engineering, and serving as soldiers and as archivists, which one must enter something like a holy order at age seventeen, are also limited to children of aristocrats, above the level of servants assigned to support the professionals who may be commoners, although some professions, like couriers and midwives, need not be aristocrats, and meritocracy is creeping into upset the privileges of aristocratic rank within those professions. Education is limited mostly to aristocrats and the very promising commoner students of liberal aristocrats, with literacy being perhaps about as common as a college education was in the 1960s in the U.S. Themes of found family, sexual identity, servitude, child exploitation, overcoming trauma, and the role of single, adult, childless women in society, are explored in detail.

The empire has pre-industrial, roughly 17th to 18th century level technology (without gun powder, but with fairly easily available contraception and midwives that can safely assist women in obtaining abortions). It has steel, bows, crossbows, spy-glasses, portable fire starting kits, finely crafted clothing, precious metal coins (but not paper currency), accurate surveying and extensive written record keeping, carriages, Roman era grade plumbing and civil engineering, ships that can travel along ocean coasts, libraries but not printing presses, traveling theatrical companies, and significant amounts of travel and trade with all roads leading to the capital in the heartland. 

There are isolated elements present in the empire, like ancient triple towers of stone and a set of roads magically immune to spores and the Pall that are also conduits for telegram-like messages, which pre-date the empire and are associated with a legendary era associated in lore with ancient sorcerer-kings. Silk road style hostel-cities (also similar to inns along ancient roman roads), provided for when the roads were built, dot the ancient "witch roads" in enclaves that are also engineered to be free of the Pall and its spores if properly managed, although rural villages have far inferior defensive measures, and it isn't safe to travel at night due to spores, various forms and races of marauding bandits, and deadly wild animals. 

The current empire has a class of fairly modestly potent magic users under the strict control of the empire via its dominant religion, the Heart Temples, which is more pagan than quasi-Christian. But the people of the empire, who are apparently all nominally adherents to this religion, are not meaningfully more superstitious or religiously minded than their more magical than ours world warrants. Other, mostly lost and forgotten, magic exists as well.

While humans are predominant, their are minorities of several other sentient races - a race of indestructible giants that can read and write and understand human language but not speak it who go dormant at night, a race of three horned dwarves who ride wild cats in small groups through forests and sell themselves a mercenaries, a race of elf-like folk who can be hard to distinguish from humans broken into two hostile groups called the Sea Wolves and the Blood Wolves, and a more peaceful group known as Forest Wolves, and a couple of other sentient races who are mentioned by name in passing, but are not described or introduced in the first volume. Some of these humanoid minority races are refugees, sometimes more recently but often generations ago, from areas devastated by the Pall (as are, we eventually learn, our main character and her deceased sister). Aristocratic messengers riding griffins provide limited air mail service. A few kinds of fantasy creatures, as well as magically powered animal golems, fill the place of heavy machinery, for example, pulling fast carriages. The more advanced, prosperous, and magical days of the sorcerer-kings of legendary history also apparently had dragons and various kinds of powerful chimeric warriors.

The visible presence of, and attitudes towards, LGBT folks (several of whom are important or secondary characters) is comparable to that of the 21st century in the U.S. (with attitudes mixed between more liberal and more conservative aristocrats), although acceptance of concubinage, indentured servitude, roles of women, and the like are more or less in line with those of 17th-19th century East Asia albeit with gender equality approaching late 19th century to early 20th century Western levels or what is seen in modern Islamic countries, and attitudes towards psychology and appropriate interpersonal interactions to deal with people's emotions that are very modern.

Refreshingly, the main character is neither the 17 year old young man about to declare his profession, nor the handsome but arrogant prince who is second in line, together with his sister who is trying to undermine him, to the throne, after the incompetent and ill tempered young crown prince. Instead, it is the young man's 31 year old never married aunt who has served for ten years as a deputy courier, delivering messages by foot over a route that takes weeks to walk while keeping her eye open for spore outbreaks in order to stop them immediately before they get out of hand, and reporting generally on local conditions to the local junior aristocrat who runs the local way station along the imperial road and provides county-level type governmental supervision to the local rural villages.

Most of the characters, including our main character's sister who died a couple of years earlier in an avalanche while on bad terms with her child, have deep dark traumatic pasts that are only revealed bit by bit.

The nominal core plot revolves around our main character guiding the handsome prince with a secret mission on a shortcut past an avalanche blocked canyon (a problem his rival sister hid from him in an effort to one up him, or to create an opportunity to assassinate him in royal succession politics), off the safe and ancient witch roads, together with her nephew, both of whom are urgently escaping their dark pasts trying to catch up with them. But this mission gets a new twist when a charming, wiser, more open minded, and ancient "haunt" temporarily possesses the prince so it can travel to the same destination as the one where the prince was bound on a mission of its own.

I have no quarrel with the fact the she introduce many important terms and concepts long before they are fully explained. But, a small nitpick is that she invents many proper names and creature type names that it is hard to know how to pronounce, such as Xilsi, for which the pronunciation is the "X" is unclear. Given the neo-East Asian setting, I pronounced it in my mind as if it was a transliteration of Chinese with an "sh" sound, rather than the "ch" sound used for X as an initial letter in words of Greek origin. But the proper pronunciation of this name, and several other names and terms used in the book, is less than clear.

Why Is David Brooks Wrong About Why People Admire Donald Trump?

Brooks On Why People Admire Trump

David Brooks, a pundit who also writes for the New York Times, who is a former conservative who later in his career transitioned to being a moderate, has a new article today in the Atlantic magazine, entitled "Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?" that is also an engagement with the life work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed in May at the age of 94.

MacIntyre argued that from at least the time of the classical period, communities ("a dense network of faily, tribe, city, and nation") created duties and expectations about how to live your life and act morally according to your social role ("soldier, farmers, merchants" and mothers), which people generally accepted and made it their life's work to live up to as well as you could. Judaism, Christianity and Islam tweaked these duties and expectations to give greater weight to compassion and humility, but through the Middle Ages maintained the same social structure in which morality and your duties in life were societally imposed. The wars of religion at the end of the Middle Ages convinced people that maybe religion was not the best thing to organize societies upon and in reaction to that came the Enlightenment period of the 18th century centered upon reason and science, and relegated morality to a matter of individual choice.

MacIntyre argued that this produced a decline in shared morality, although Brooks himself would put this moment in the mid-1960s. The narrative continues with Nietzsche famously saying that "God is dead" because we'd killed him and made ourselves our own gods. In this narrative, Hilter, Lenin, and Mao fill that moral vacuum with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, "and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

At this point it becomes less clear whether it is MacIntyre or Brooks talking. But the two solutions to a moral vacuum that Brooks presents are coercion or manipulation. Either coerce others to believe what you believe, e.g., with corporate DEI, or manipulate people with the kind of lies and sleaze that Trump and Fox News are known for utilizing. The battle of these methods in the 1980s and 1990s "looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared to today", Brooks argues, because in the last thirty years people have sought righteousness instead through their political identities and politics permeates everything.

Without a firm universal ground in "the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness", "People are rendered anxious and fragile" and without a moral foundation, they "fall apart when setbacks come."

He sees Trump as a man "who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality", doesn't care about weakening "our shared moral norms" with his example, speaks a language of preference "I want" and a language of power "I have the leverage", and a language of self, of gains of acquisition, of benefitting himself, instead.

Brooks argues, within the framework of MacIntyre's philosophy that Trump is "just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create." He also argues (inaccurately, in my view) that if Trump was on their team, most Democrats would like him too, and that you're lying to yourself if you deny it.

Brooks argues that pluralism is the answer to to resolving the tension created by incommensurate values, but that we need to recalibrate it to make people "more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community" and to provide rigorous moral education to the next generation (which sounds a lot like the coercion he condemned earlier in his argument).

Why Is Brooks Wrong?

I don't think this rings true, and find better answers in psychology and economics than in philosophy, which I've always considered something of a dead end and historical curiosity that recalls long since superseded proto-science, than something of real value today as anything more than intellectual history.

In my view, Trump, a psychopath rich in "dark triad" traits, is an archetypical figure familiar to observers of politics and public affairs and history since classical times, if not earlier, who is a constant threat to every organization from families to empires. There is nothing novel or surprising about him, himself. 

Demagogues were something that the Founders of the United States, at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, worried about. Democracy and the Bill of Rights were their answer to the narcissistic mad kings and equally dark leaders of established religions with whom they were very familiar, both from the 18th century world and from the history that they knew from the classical era through the Middle Ages. The Founders were familiar with Roman Emperor Nero. Machiavelli in "The Prince" wrote about how dark triad tactics might be advisable to a leader seeking to gain power for his people. They were intimately familiar with the tyrants of British history, right up through King George. The believed that people whose rights were guarded by law would not vote for such scoundrels. Lest we forget, George R. R. Martin, in his Game of Thrones series, a fantasy series that draws heavily on the War of the Roses, history that was much more fresh in the minds of the Founders, reminds us of what that was like and why it is best avoided.

It wasn't a bad plan. 

The Constitution adopted in 1789 lasted without an insurmountable constitutional crisis for 72 years, when Civil War broke out. After the crisis over slavery that manifested in the Civil War was overcome in 4 years of brutal deadly fighting (that still leave the nation deeply divided) was over, followed a 12 year Reconstruction period, and in turn followed by 77 years or so of de jure segregation but a fragile peace. We then went on to have another 70 years or so of the constitution working more or less as intended. 

We are in the midst of another constitutional crisis now, which their plan may or may not be good enough to overcome. 

The United States of America, including its 13 years before the current constitution was adopted, is 249 years old, making it the oldest fully non-hereditary democratic governmental regimes still in existence on the scale of a large nation. But the Founders, as one of the first countries to have a full fledged democratic Republic at a large national scale, lacked the historical experience or foresight to plan for every potential eventuality and their plan is now clearly not the optimal design, although it may be that our Republic's woes are such that no formal constitution would have been sufficient to prevent them.

The times and places in history where tyrants arose also doesn't match up. MacIntyre's framework suggests that we should have seen a breakdown in a sense of duty and morality in the Enlightenment. But we didn't see this happen across the board. Yes, the moral divide in the U.S. may be traceable to the moral fight over slavery that emerged in the Enlightenment. But, this was not a general, individualized loss of community norms, it was a divide that arose between two coherent and vital cultures, that of the slaveholding South on one side, and of the abolitionist North on the other, sustained, as much as anything, by the perceived economic needs of each region, with clergy serving of cheerleaders of each side and framing these economic imperatives with moral justifications.

Why did we get Hitler in Weimar Germany, and Lenin in Russia, while France, England, and the United States were not similarly afflicted?

Hitler is the clearest example. Germany's defeat in World War I, the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and economic collapse, radicalized many Germans, making them crave an authoritarian strong man to save them, and causing them to abandon the luxuries of caring for their fellow man whom they saw as their competitors, or as a drag on their society's ability to overcome the malaise that they faced.

Similar economic forces drive American politics today. After a couple of decades of remarkable shared prosperity, economic growth, which make the liberalism and the care for their fellow man of the Civil Rights movement possible, ceased to be shared starting sometime around the early 1970s. Since then, mostly educated, urban elites have captured almost all of the economy's economic growth for a half century, while less educated folk in rural areas and small towns have seen their economic prospects stagnate. The Civil Rights movement improved the economic lot of non-whites and women. New immigration laws welcomed foreigners. Free trade allowed manufacturing to be offshored to markets with lower wages, fewer labor protections, and weaker environmental laws. The U.S. de-industrialized and the Rust Belt came into being. Free trade rules, environmental rules, protections for unions, automation, birth control and abortion have, in their view, destroyed an economy fueled by domestic manufacturing and fossil fuels, in which men received good pay that made them heads of their families.

Half a century later, counties that vote blue have more than double the per capita GDP of those that vote red. Red America has captured almost none of the economic growth of the last half century, while Blue America is more prosperous than almost any other place on Earth. Prosperous Blue America extended its inclusive shared affluence mindset to allow the LGBT community to live publicly and in dignity, and to make it safe to be openly secular. 

Straight white Christian men in Red America without much education have seen every other demographic but them improve their lot in the last fifty years, while they have seen almost no improvement in their real wages, increased unemployment, and an inability to maintain stable and solid marriages and families. In relative terms, they seem themselves, and the rural and small town communities that they live in, as the losers, and see the economy as a zero sum game in which non-whites, foreigners, and women have taken what was theirs, and in which atheists and gays have ripped apart the moral framework that held their parents and grandparents families together. They want to throw out everything that they see as having driven their half century of eroded status with no end in sight, and return to the days when their relative status was vastly greater, no matter how unfair that may seem to everyone else. 

They are so frustrated over this sustained defeat that they are willing to turn to an indiscriminate authoritarian who breaks the rules that they see as having held them back, and are even willing to resort to violence, to get it. Their concerns about good character and process values and fair play have dissolved in the face of falling life expectancies, deaths of despair, regular unemployment, disability from the manual work that they are qualified to do with the economy doesn't need anymore to same extent, and their inability to hold onto wives and children that really arises not from an immoral society but from their own failures of economic providers. Faced with their conditions, they want to burn the system down and start over from new foundations that elevate their relative socio-economic standing.

Not everyone who votes for Trump has experienced this, and not everyone in red counties and red states has supported him. Some have supported Republicans simply out of thoughtless, long ingrained habit, or because they think that they are among the rich who will benefit from tax cuts. But peer pressure from enough people who matter in their little small town and rural communities, and in the working class underworld of Blue America, have made their political views (stripped of any reasoning behind them) normative in their communities, won over their wives, and caused religious congregation to which these men have been drawn because they are saying what these men want to hear to thrive and reinforce these men's views.

What we see today is more a product of capitalism, appropriately regulated but with only modest redistribution, doing what it does naturally: increasing GDP as fast as it can, while leaving the productive better off than the less productive who are worse off. But capitalism has done its thing to an extent greater than the political system is willing to bear, bringing us to a breaking point. 

It's worse in the U.S. because we have done less to cushion the blow for those who are less productive either by finding them places in the new economy or redistributing wealth and creating a stronger social safety net (in part, because racism has left the U.S. with a weaker sense of solidarity). But the same pressures are present in Europe, with somewhat different targets to fit local changes over the last half century, and are strongest in the places that are economically struggling.

Democrats Are Predominantly More Correct Than Republicans

The main sin that the Democrats have committed is not taking seriously enough the grievances of the working class, especially working class white Christian men, who have not shared in the improvement in relative or absolute prosperity that much of the rest of the nation has enjoyed, and who are lashing out at people they see as competitors or as people undermining morality, when neither of these things is the real problem. 

Despite adopting many policies that substantively benefit Red America more than their own base, they didn't go quite far enough, and left this constituency economically struggling, and equally importantly, feeling like they didn't matter and were neglected.

Progressives gets this and have tried to secure radical economic reforms to address this problem, so they don't have to resort to the injustices towards innocents that Trump has inflamed his supporters to think they want. But progressives do not make up a majority of the American public, and the bigger tent necessary to secure the majorities needed to reach a position of power where change can be enacted, and a constitutional framework and political system that tends to create gridlock and too strongly defends the status quo, has thwarted their efforts to secure more than incremental change, which has not been enough. Sometimes the frustration of progressives over their insufficient clout and numbers to achieve the full measure of their goals in a system that already makes it too hard to do so, when they rightfully believe that their proposals are urgently needed to keep far right tendencies at bay and secure economic justice, even boil over into claims that Democrats are no different than Republicans, since both are controlled by big business, despite the fact that this just undermines their own cause.

Contrary to Brooks' assertion, Democrats wouldn't fall for a Trump. They aren't desperate in the way that the MAGA Republican base is, and so they are happy to purge people like him from their ranks when they are caught. The Democratic Party isn't full of criminals, and is much less corrupt than the Republican Party which has had vastly more criminals and is now openly corrupt. 

Democrats and progressives are right that a manufacturing based fossil fuel economy isn't coming back, and that even if manufacturing did come back that 21st century manufacturing is so automated and skill intensive for most jobs, and so unproductive and low paying for others, that it wouldn't restore the economy and related societal consequences that flowed from it anyway.

Democrats are right that the rich aren't taxed enough, although they are mistaken that unions are a leading cause of the shared prosperity benefits that came from a tight labor market, rather than a symptom of that tight labor market that more efficiently utilized economic power that workers already had.

The Democratic effort to create working class clean economy jobs was the right idea, but was too little, too late.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that putting the Ten Commandments in schools, embracing religion, restricting abortion and birth control, making it legally harder to divorce, and squashing gay rights and transgender rights will restore morality and strengthen working class families.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that economics is a zero sum game, in which gains for non-whites, women, educated people, and immigrants, and imports leave white native born men without higher education, their communities, and the U.S. economy, generally, worse off.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that taxes and government spending are bad for the economy or bad for them. They are particularly wrong in thinking that reducing social safety net spending which disproportionately benefits them, will leave them better off, or that tax cuts for the wealthy, big businesses, and people with high incomes weaken the economy or leave them worse off. They have also forgotten (or never knew) that the era they seek to return to "when America was great" was characterized by high taxes and lots of government spending (as well as a very militant union movement).

Republicans are wrong in thinking that they don't benefit from the world order that foreign aid spending and our historical military alliances supported, and are a waste of money, and in thinking about military strength purely in terms of U.S. military might standing alone when wars are almost always won by the side with the most allies and "soft power."

But It Takes More Than Facts And Logic To Change Minds

Of course, as we've learned very painfully, mere facts and logic are enough enough to change political views, and in particular, are not enough to change the political views of a base that holds those views precisely because it has not prospered in an economy based upon knowledge and intellectual ability, and has had wealthy, amoral elites manipulate the information that has been imparted to them.

People's political identities are fundamentally social and are deeply shaped by economics and the information, however untrue it may be, that they have chosen to listen to when forming their world views (something that is itself influenced by their economic circumstances, as well as their ancestral culture).

You have to quash fountains of disinformation and fact resistance that have been gradually taking hold for decades. You have to either get people to admit that they have been conned, or find a way for people to change their political views that allows them to deny that this has happened. You have to make their views uncomfortable for them to hold in their own personal lives, but must do so in circumstances where converting from them is less painful than retreating into their denial with likeminded victims of the con. You have to be able to show them in terms that they understand and believe that your proposals are better than MAGA's and to back that up with an ability to produce tangible results for them. You have to address their needs and hardships, and not merely show that the other side is worse.

Those are tall orders, and it isn't clear that Democrats are up to the challenge. 

Democrats best hope is really that the Republicans, at a time when they are undeniably in complete control, are making the lives of the MAGA base tangibly worse, or convince the MAGA base that this is imminently about to happen, and to undermine any hope that they have that burning everything down will lead to a future that leaves them better off in relative terms, if not in absolute terms. Trump and his allies, as they attempt to govern in a purely ideological manner, are their own worst enemies here.

The GOP's hold on Congress is tenuous. In 2026, flipping 4 seats out of a 53 GOP seats would flip the Senate, and flipping 3 seats out of 220 GOP seats in the House (and reclaiming three currently vacant democratic seats in vacancy elections) would flip the House. Trump is the least popular President since Trump, and many of his particular policies, including his recently passed budget, are wildly unpopular with voters. The public is no fan of Congress and a lot of Republicans in Congress have voted for measures that are unpopular with the people who elected them (even though the final budget bill retreated from many of Trump's demands) and will actively hurt the people who elected them. Some of the gerrymandering that influenced the results of the 2024 election will also be remedied in 2026. Elon Musk's proposal to create a new "American Party", even if it wasn't terribly successful, would split the conservative vote in a way that could benefit Democrats immensely. The U.S. Supreme Court has also never had less popular support in the history of modern polling, and conservative voters no longer need to support Trump and the GOP to keep in that way (or to have their tax cuts for corporations and the rich made permanent).

It is unlikely that Republicans will hold both Houses of Congress in the 2026 election. They will probably lose control of the House and at least lose ground in the Senate, barring a major escalation in the steps that Trump has tried to take to erode democracy in the last sixteen months, with lukewarm but significant support from the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority which has significantly impaired the ability of other federal courts to restrain Trump.

Time will tell how it turns out in the midst of the constant political chaos and societal unrest that Trump have actively stoked.

Left leaning forces don't have to keep MAGA's dictatorial power grab at bay forever. The MAGA base is in demographic decline. The Democratic base is growing. If the left can endure this crisis and thwart full on totalitarianism until Trump is dead and his MAGA agenda has been discredited by its own failures severely enough, for enough years, the crisis will be overcome and the Republic can be saved. It may be bruised, battered, and irrevocably harmed in many ways, but it would not be beyond all saving. 

But history is also not without precedents, like Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, where progress is dramatically reversed when totalitarians succeed, and this backward state continues for forty years or more with minimal progress. And, unlike the case of people subject to the Axis regimes in World War II, no other country or alliance will be coming to rescue us, because we are too big and too militarily mighty. Another civil war might save us if that happens, but that would be a horrible price to pay.

Anti-DEI v. Meritocracy

One very inclusive way that conservatives could have pressed their agenda in opposition to "woke" culture in the American establishment could have been to push meritocracy and race blindness in opposition to racially sensitive affirmative action in areas like employment and higher education admissions.

But, they didn't. Donald Trump's MAGA movement has instead taken an "anti-DEI" and nearly synonymous "anti-DEI" (DEI is an acronym meaning "diversity, equality, and inclusion" and many institutions have bureaucrats charged with advancing these ends in order to comply with civil rights laws), even though MAGA can claim (not very credibly given his actions) that this is what it is doing.

Some of the actions that make this not credible are the administration's installation of large numbers of manifestly unqualified political appointees, the way it has tried to freeze and defund scientific and academic research and high education (and even K-12 education), and its purge of references to minorities or women or non-straight people to the point where even "female" was on a list of banned words in government websites and sponsored grants, and references to the "Enola Gay" (the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb) was removed from government websites because it had the word "gay" in it.

Basically, rather than arguing rhetorically for color blind, meritocratic neutrality, the anti-DEI push has been a declaration of war on everyone who isn't a white, non-disabled, straight, Christian male, and on cultural recognition of people who don't fit that mold. It is seeking to activate and legitimatize racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, rather than to take the much more moderate stance of trying to tame excess discouragement and penalization of white, non-disabled, straight, Christian men. It is seeking to accentuate tribalism rather than seeking to end it, and to undo the entire civil rights movement. 

The fact that Trump's movement is overtly pro-racist makes it particularly problematic that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to apply Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to allow states like Colorado to disqualify him from the Presidential ballot, contrary to its clear language and the structure and history of the U.S. Constitution and 14th Amendment jurisprudence in particular.

This tactic is probably a good one for mobilizing an aggrieved base that feels persecuted politically. But it profoundly undermines the popularity of the administration's actions with the larger population and the legal system, which have deeply internalized the important of meritocracy in lieu of on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex (including subjective gender), nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Crossing those lines comes across to a large swath of voters and judges as unAmerican.

Christianity's Prospects

Globally, Christianity faces different issues in different places. In Europe (including heavily colonized formerly British Australia, New Zealand and Canada), in the U.S., and in South Korea and much of Asia, trends away from religion entirely are the biggest issue. In Latin America, the Catholic-Protestant divide is more prominent as Protestantism eats away at Catholicism although secularism is an issue too.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and much of the rest of Asia, the conflict between Christianity and Islam is center stage (except in Israel with its Jewish-Muslim conflict taking center stage and Christianity taking something of a bystander role).

As an aside, Iran despite being formally a theocratic Shi'ite Islamic state, is actually quite religiously divided and has surging levels of irreligion. This is atypical in predominantly Islamic countries which tend to be dominantly Sunni Islamic and more religious on average, by far, than predominantly Christian or Jewish countries. I have less of a finger on the pulse of the Sunni Islamic world and its prospects, however, than the religious tendencies of other parts of the world (despite having considerably more factual knowledge about Sunni Islam and these regions than the vast majority of Americans, even those with college educations). Secular, communist trends in predominantly Islamic places like Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq seem to have reversed.

Christianity in the U.S.

The continued decline "market share" of Christianity in the United States in the coming decades seems highly likely. It may drop to less than 50%, if not by the end of my life, during my children's lifetime.

This is almost certain to persist because young people are much less likely to be Christianity adherents than older people, so as older people die, the share of Christians falls, even in the absence of deconversion. 

This fall seems to be somewhat stalled in the last few years. But, there is a much lower tendency to convert to Christianity after leaving it than there is to deconvert from being a Christian. And, shifts in the percentage of people who follow a religion tend to follow a logistic curve, with the highest rate of change when the relative percentages of each category are most equal. 

We also have the precedent of Europe which is much less religious than it was shortly after World War II. So, this is almost sure to continue.

Of course, some new religious movement, more adaptive to current conditions, could change the picture dramatically.

Further, in accordance with the maxim that religions that protect threatened cultures thrive. Part of why Christianity declined in Europe is that most of those countries had state established religions which were particularly aligned with the secure, establishment culture, with exceptions like Ireland, where Catholicism was protecting Irish culture from English Protestantism, and Poland, where Catholicism was protecting Polish culture from secularizing communism.

White Catholics are on a trajectory close to that of White Protestant with steady decline associated with age, while Hispanic Catholics are on a different, more religious track, mirroring the predominantly Catholic but emerging Pentecostal trend of Latin America, as the establishment Catholicism with no culture to protect in Latin America loses it's shine but does better in the U.S. where it is protected Latin American immigrant culture.

In another illustration of this tendency, in the U.S. (and in Europe) religion thrives among recent immigrants whose homeland culture is threatened by the very different culture of their new homes, but fades as waves of immigrants assimilate.

The U.S. is more religious than Europe, in part, because it has never had an established religion, which left religious denominations from becoming as establishment, and in part, because it has such high levels of foreign born people who have non-U.S. cultures that are threatened in the new homeland that religion can protect.

 

The stall in deconversion is also related to the extent to which the large coalition of subcultures at odds with the establishment which is the Southern/Appalachian/rural subculture that is associated with the Republican party has members who find themselves in deep distress as their members are two to four times less economically productive than the members of the American establishment that is currently associated with the Democratic party, which is distinguished by its embrace of science, its acceptance of racial and ethnic diversity, its feminism, its acceptance of LGBTQ people, its acceptance of alcohol and recreational drugs, its globalism, and its lack of a culture of honor. 

Members of the Southern/Appalachian/rural coalition of cultures make up a third to half of the people in the United States. Its members are older than the rest of the U.S., whiter, less connected to the global economy, and more distrustful of science and education. One large share of them live in places that have very little racial, ethnic, religious, or immigrant sourced diversity. Another large share of them live in South and are deeply divided between conservative whites who identify as "American" and blacks who are the descendants of slaves and have not migrated to big cities who make up a large minority of the population.

Christianity in Asia

South Korea is one of most Christian nation in East Asia and Southeast, with about 23-31% who are Christian and about 60% who espouse no religion (historically classified by geographers and demographers as "Confucian" although younger generations may be less strictly Confucian than older generations).

Those only other countries in the region (and arguably these are Oceanian countries) with such a high percentage of Christians are East Timor which is 97% Roman Catholic (and 1% other Christian for a total of 98% Christian), the Philippines which is 79% Roman Catholic and 13% other Christian (for total of 92% Christian) with a notable Muslim minority.

Countries in East, Southeast and South Asia with smaller but significant Christian populations include Singapore which is 19% Christian (and about 31% Buddhist), the former territory of Hong Kong within China which is about 12% Christian, Indonesia which is about 11% Christian - about 8% Protestant and 3% Catholic (and 83% Sunni Islam), Brunei which is about 10% Christian (and 81% Sunni Islam), Malaysia which is about 9% Christian (and 63% Sunni Islam), the former territory of Macau within China which is about 9% Christian, Vietnam which is 8% Christian and 70% irreligious, Sri Lanka which is about 8% Christian and 70% Buddhist, Myanmar is 6% Christian and 89% Buddhist, Taiwan which is about 5% Christian and 35% Buddhist, China which is about 4% Christian and 65% irreligious, India which is about 2% Christian and 80% Hindu (with most of the rest split between irreligious people, Muslims, and a variety of other beliefs like Buddhism and Sikhism which originated there), Mongolia is about 2% Christian and 53% Tibetan Buddhist, Japan is about 2% Christian and about 77% a syncretic mix of folk Shinto and Buddhism. The rest of the region is less than 2% Christian.

Indonesia is a huge country with great regional variation, with Christianity being most common in Northern Borneo, West Papuan areas, and its smaller eastern islands, as well as regional pockets in its larger, eastern, predominantly Muslim islands (and with a notable Hindu enclave in Bali and a small Buddhist enclave in central Borneo).

Map from here.

In central Asia, Kazakhstan is 25% Christian and 70% Sunni Muslim, Turkmenistan is 9% Christian and 89% Sunni Muslim, Kyrgyzstan is 7% Christian and 86% Sunni Muslim, and Uzbekistan is 3% Christian and 90% Sunni Muslim.

Christianity in Africa

Islam is common in Africa in the Sahel, the Sahara, North Africa, and along much of its eastern coast. 

Map from here.

But Christianity is flourishing and growing in sub-Saharan Africa, which was historically animist. Twenty-seven Sub-Sarahan African countries (including Ethiopia and Eritrea) are majority Christian and many more have large Christian minorities or pluralities. It isn't unthinkable that Africa could be home to a plurality of Christians within the lives of my children.

More Random Thoughts

* What if the Younger Dryas extra-terrestrial impact didn't happen? 

Pleistocene megafauna might have survived. The Clovis culture would have lasted longer. Native American cultures in North America might have been more patriarchal. Göbekli Tepe might not have been built at all, or might have been very different. The Neolithic Revolution might have arrived 4,000 years earlier. The genetics of European hunter-gatherers might have been more diverse.

* There is more than one scenario by which brain evolution could be next level. 

One is exemplified by the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica who have essentially the three main layers of the human brain plus a new one on top of that - dolphins come close to that. Another is exemplified by octopi who have a completely different brain structure with is decentralized with many sub-brains throughout their bodies. Yet another would be the cyborg approach (perhaps exemplified by Ghost in the Machine) where brains would be part human and part computer (perhaps the most likely as it has already been done at a very limited level).

* “Eternity is two people and a ham." - Irma Rombauer in The Joy of Cooking. But the price is right. You can get so much red meat for so little money when there are holiday ham sales.

* I visited the Colorado History Museum today and saw, among other things, the 90s exhibit. It is actually fairly stunning how little fashion, music, and movies have changed in the last 35 years, even though technology has changed dramatically. There was a much smaller generation gap between me and my children, culturally, than there was between me and my parents (or my wife and her parents).

* I still don't really understand why the dust bowl of the 1930s happened, or what the risk of it recurring is.

* My son is in Mexico City with his (serious, long term) girlfriend. He is almost exactly the same age that I was when I went there on my honeymoon.

* The U.S. Navy has been quietly developing unmanned surface and undersea ships that are just about ready for "prime time" as important components of our overall naval fleet. Here are some recent examples:

For example, the Australian Eureka unmanned or minimally manned ship has a 1,150 mile range, a 44 ton payload, can travel at 50 knots (60 mph a.k.a. 100 km/hr), and can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and anti-ship Naval Strike Missiles (NSM). But is fairly small at 36 meters in length.

The Lionfish UUV (i.e. drone submarine) is about to enter service.

Lionfish is designed to address critical undersea warfare needs, including mine countermeasures, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), anti-submarine warfare, and electronic warfare.

The REMUS UUV family delivers critical advantages across modern naval operations and the autonomous systems have been proven to operate independently or in conjunction with crewed platforms — such as Virginia-class nuclear submarines — to extend mission range, reduce detection risk, and limit personnel exposure.

The U.S. Navy has a 100 foot long, 100 ton, unmanned surface vessel (USV) in the works (confusingly the same article seems to describe it as a 180 foot, 240 ton USV). It would have a range of thousands of miles.

The vessel is envisaged to be multi-role, capable of transporting logistics payloads, conducting ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) missions, or supporting naval munitions delivery without human oversight.

* My wife is currently watching White Lotus. One of the striking parts of the show is how aptly it captures the ways that men and women completely misunderstand each other because they have very different communications styles. To oversimplify, men are much more direct. Men rely far less on implied meanings and expecting people to "take a hint" than women. Women, in turn, overthink what men say, trying to look for hidden meanings in what men say that aren't there. Women, meanwhile, underestimate how much men can be hurt when they take what women say literally, when what women really mean is different, and is supposed to be implied from context. It also puts the lie to the notion that women are better communicators. Both are men and women are bad at communicating with members of the opposite sex. This mirrors differences in national communications styles. Germans, for example, are much more direct than Americans, while the Japanese, for example, have a much more indirect communication systle.