Ask Vosem Anything

[Aurelius2]

1. Thoughts on AI x-risk and/or immiseration caused by all-powerful AI? For some reason this seems like something you'd have thought about.

2. What's your take on the GOP presidential primary? Both in terms of horse-race analysis and what outcome you'd like to see.

[quesaisje]

You have argued that the GOP does best while campaigning against the federal welfare state.

What does this imply about the future of the Affordable Care Act, and why has it been so difficult for Republicans to replace it even in the face of rising costs of coverage and deteriorating access to health care?

It's striking that the country is experiencing much of what the law's more cogent opponents warned about (example for any doubters reading this), yet Republicans have failed to persuade the country that it has much to do with what is happening, let alone that their party has any idea of how to move beyond it.

[Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden]

I voted FF and stand by that, but I guess one pet peeve I have is that Vosem never explains how eliminating the social safety net will help poor people or why tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes. It's impossible to have a reasoned debate about that if we are only arguing from our own predispositions without any attempt at persuasion.

Sure: the argument is that the state, or any centralized entity, is a very poor manager of resources and very poor at creating innovations, because it is not subject to competition from any other entity, and we should instead want resources decentralized among many very wealthy people who can pursue independent agendas, because they will be likelier to compete in ways that result in real public gain. Most improvements to living standards under industrialism have not come from activism, but have instead come from technological improvements, resulting in cheaper food and more widely available medication. Tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes because the state will have fewer resources to prevent wealthy people from making investments which are much likelier to benefit the poor than state activity. I think human history very strongly bears this out.

Social safety nets are bad because they inevitably grow in size and take resources away from places where they could actually benefit people; public services in Europe have to ration healthcare much more than they do in the US, and the strain of supporting much greater public spending results in a population which is meaningfully less wealthy than it is in the US, with people subsisting on 2/3 of the income. I think this is disastrous and it is a scandal that the British population is not in the streets rioting and tearing the NHS down with their bare hands.

I appreciate your detailed answer and I wanted to square in on this. You seem to place a lot of faith in technological advancements. I'm curious how far your libertarian philosophy goes with regard to transhumanism. What do you think of Zoltan Istvan and his goal of empowering free enterprise in the name of obtaining immortality? Does your faith in technology extend to what some might consider fanaticism with respect to transhumanism?

[Upper Canada Tory]

I've made threads like this before, but I think the last one was several years ago. Also, with elections coming up soon, we have a lot more activity than usual, so hopefully we'll get more and better questions on this one.

Anyway. I'm a 25-year-old software engineer living in Ohio with a law degree and right-of-center political beliefs. I've been an Atlas user since 2009, or for well over half my life at this point. I speak fluent Russian, English, and Spanish, so feel free to ask questions in any of those languages.

This is likely going to sound like a strange question, but you mentioned you've been an Atlas user since 2009, so I'm going to go for it.

What was Atlas like in 2009, when you joined? How has it changed over the years?

I ask this as a relative newcomer who has only been here for 6 months. So, I'm curious.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've made threads like this before, but I think the last one was several years ago. Also, with elections coming up soon, we have a lot more activity than usual, so hopefully we'll get more and better questions on this one.

Anyway. I'm a 25-year-old software engineer living in Ohio with a law degree and right-of-center political beliefs. I've been an Atlas user since 2009, or for well over half my life at this point. I speak fluent Russian, English, and Spanish, so feel free to ask questions in any of those languages.

This is likely going to sound like a strange question, but you mentioned you've been an Atlas user since 2009, so I'm going to go for it.

What was Atlas like in 2009, when you joined? How has it changed over the years?

I ask this as a relative newcomer who has only been here for 6 months. So, I'm curious.

I am not Vosem, but I'm part of roughly the same generation of Atlas posters and I don't think this is a strange question at all. I'm looking forward to his answer!

[Sol]

Apologies if you’ve been asked this already, but you seem to have an extremely optimistic and positive outlook on life in general. Is that impression correct, and if so why do you think that is?

[TheReckoning]

Describe your religious/philosophical views.

[Vosem]

What are your opinions of the current communist movement here and internationally? What are their strength and weaknesses and what are they doing well or uniquely?

In general, pretty negative. I think human prosperity comes basically from people responding to market incentives, and communism cuts against that pretty hard.

The Marxist-Leninist movement in the United States feels entirely moribund; it was only ever even kind of serious in the 1920s/1930s, but by the 1940s had become entirely proscribed and has mostly never returned to relevance. Abroad, I think its shape changed significantly with the transition from the Soviet Union as the largest economy with a Marxist-Leninist system -- since the Soviet Union was often willing to sponsor foreign movements that would profess loyalty -- to China, which is less willing to do this. Communist parties remain relevant in some parts of the world, as in particular Indian states, southern Africa, or particular parts of eastern Europe, but in many of these places they are often more about particular forms of social conservatism than about any structural change to the economy.

I think there is still quite a great deal to fear from powerful governments trying to restrict their citizenry from becoming wealthy, but communism in its mid-20th-century form seems pretty dead.

What if Gorbachev had implemented shock therapy? Basically, create a USR (no Socialism anymore)? How do you reckon that timeline would have played out?

I don't think the Soviet Union could really have survived glasnost, which unleashed a number of deep racial and ideological animosities, except with a Tiananmen-style return to authoritarianism. Part of the point of perestroika was trying to fight endemic corruption in Soviet society (which was so bad that there exists a thesis that central planning had collapsed by the early 1980s, because of the scale of illegal informal trade that took place between different industries), and this wouldn't work without some people being able to speak honestly about some things. People reach for the comparison with China easily, but Mao authentically did wipe out organized crime and alternative levels of power, while the later Soviet system tended, in practice, to devolve authority to lower levels of government -- which led to the collapse once any kind of dissent was allowed to be openly aired.

I'm also not sure that the appetite for large-scale economic reform -- shock therapy -- existed among the elite class until after the disasters of 1989-1991. There exists a famous incident, which Vladislav Zubok recalls in his book on the fall of the USSR, wherein senior bureaucrats in Gosplan visited Chile in 1991 to meet Pinochet and discuss details of his rule, because they had so abruptly become so disillusioned with Soviet economics. I think we have a tendency on this forum to assume Timur Kuran's thesis as true, with widespread preference falsification particularly in authoritarian societies, but I think it's underestimated how much public opinion really does shift when you have abrupt revolutionary periods. 21st-century Ukraine, one of the few countries which has had liberal democracy punctuated by actual mass revolutions, is a case study here in how public opinion during revolutions really does shift.

What’s it like growing up Jewish in Ohio and how big is the Jewish community in Ohio and what’s it like?

The specific part of Ohio that I grew up in has a pretty large Arab-American community; I think I've recalled here before that in 9th grade I was in a fistfight over Israel/Palestine. (I was also elected Vice President of the Arabic Culture Club two years in a row as a friendly running joke; my physical appearance can be very easily taken for Arab-American). I don't think I ever encountered anti-Semitism, though I attended high school from 2011-2015, and it seems like anti-Semitism is a larger part of the culture now; most young men my age can recognize and use some 4chan slang, which wasn't the case in 2015.

But I've always sort of felt pretty alienated from the American Jewish community as a whole; I tried making friends by attending Hillel, or Jewish-themed clubs, both when I first came to college and when I first came to law school, and neither time did I feel like the group was a good cultural fit. I've never been part of a Jewish congregation, which on the one hand isn't that strange given that I'm quite secular, but on the other hand is pretty weird given that in high school so many of my friends were part of a particular Catholic congregation that I attended church events occasionally, and in college I joined an evangelical congregation (initially a "home church" where eventually everyone started attending a giant local megachurch) that a girl I was talking to at that time was part of.

I feel like organized American Jewish culture at institutions of higher education often emphasizes very specific aspects of its history, or very specific values, that I don't share or necessarily like (to be blunt, it is politically active and pro-Democratic, and where it isn't it tends towards the very observant), and as a result it tends to attract personalities that I'm not interested in spending a lot of time with. Lots of my friends are Jewish (quite disproportionately so relative to the places I've lived in), but this has always been because of happenstance rather than some Jewish community thing.

So I'm not necessarily the best person to ask about this. I am Jewish, but any discussion of my ethnic background has to start with things like "non-native English speaker" and "first-generation American" (and, well, "post-Soviet"), and this just isn't true for most American Jews.

1. Thoughts on AI x-risk and/or immiseration caused by all-powerful AI? For some reason this seems like something you'd have thought about.

I tend to be very skeptical of those advocating for slowdowns in technological progress; in the past, all such progress has helped humanity in the long run (one can argue about the effects of some kinds of weapons progress in the very short run), and if we are to expect further increases in living standards we will need more technological progress. (AI is also not something like nuclear energy or biowarfare or even drug development, which require access to intricate lab equipment and a knowledge of chemistry that can only be attained by professionals; if you, dear lurker, wish to spend your time doing something better than reading me answering any question, you can and maybe should go learn how to program your own simple AIs.)

I'm not sure the human project, understood broadly, has a choice other than to take the risk; the alternative is one where you have rising authoritarianism to prevent anyone from doing so (...someone will no matter what; we might as well pull off the Bandaid) and a stagnation where progress slows and people's lives stop getting better; preventing people from acquiring the compute to build AI, which is the most logical way to do this, will also stunt growth in a huge number of other data-intensive fields.

Not building the AI is certain doom over a long enough time horizon; building the AI is only a possible doom. So I think we have to build the AI.

2. What's your take on the GOP presidential primary? Both in terms of horse-race analysis and what outcome you'd like to see.

Trump will win absent some enormous unforced error. His presidency was authentically popular among conservatives -- it was authentically the most in touch with the actual conservative movement on the ground since Reagan -- and the electability argument is bunk when he is leading in the polls. The chance of an unforced error declines over time. I still think Trump is unacceptable because he does not respect the democratic process, but this is obviously not a widely held perspective and in many ways the Biden era has made me more sympathetic to Trump.

I liked Ramaswamy's early campaign; I think his point that many undesirable cultural practices are downstream from being afraid of particular lawsuits, and could be fought with executive orders, is true and important. That said, he seems uninterested in foreign policy and after the success of his initial campaign he has fallen back into a series of silly gimmicks. Haley seems like she has a good grasp on the principles that can be used to build successful domestic and foreign policies, and like she has some understanding of the challenges facing the modern GOP, so I suppose I'm supporting her, but I think her chances of winning are pretty remote and she is probably angling to be Trump's VP.

DeSantis's support came, from the start, from people who approved of both him and Trump, and he has not been able to get ahead of Trump on 'the vision thing' (to quote one of those presidents between Reagan and Trump), where Trump has a decisive advantage over him. In the absence of a clear message differentiating him from his opponents, he's deflated. His favorables are still quite strong and leave me wondering if he might not be underestimated if/when he runs in 2028/2032, much as McCain was initially considered a second-tier candidate in 2008, but this year is pretty clearly not happening. (Many of the issues he's chosen to try to use to differentiate himself from Trump are very dumb -- vaccines are paradigmatic here -- but it's also mostly stuff that it wouldn't be that hard to pivot away from, I don't think).

You have argued that the GOP does best while campaigning against the federal welfare state.

What does this imply about the future of the Affordable Care Act, and why has it been so difficult for Republicans to replace it even in the face of rising costs of coverage and deteriorating access to health care?

It's striking that the country is experiencing much of what the law's more cogent opponents warned about (example for any doubters reading this), yet Republicans have failed to persuade the country that it has much to do with what is happening, let alone that their party has any idea of how to move beyond it.

I'm not sure it implies anything; large-scale federal legislation is hard to enact even when you actually do control trifectas, as the first two years of Biden have reminded us. Prior to 2009, Americans actually probably had supported universal healthcare for decades, but concrete attempts to enact it had always gone to horrible political failure. It's also hard for me to tell you with a straight face that the GOP has a coherent plan for repealing it at all (much as the 2019-2020 Democratic primaries showed no coherent plan for pushing beyond the ACA existed on the Democratic side); there are various conservative think-tanks and members of Congress who have detailed thoughts on the matter, but trying to aggregate these into one particular bill will lead you to something very much like ACHA all over again (which I  suspect, in the event of a Republican trifecta in the next half-decade or so, will turn out to be less dead than had been expected).

Going beyond that point is hard; there will be a shortfall in the budget for Medicare Part A starting in 2025, so I think after that point the conversation will shift in ways that are difficult to predict.

I voted FF and stand by that, but I guess one pet peeve I have is that Vosem never explains how eliminating the social safety net will help poor people or why tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes. It's impossible to have a reasoned debate about that if we are only arguing from our own predispositions without any attempt at persuasion.

Sure: the argument is that the state, or any centralized entity, is a very poor manager of resources and very poor at creating innovations, because it is not subject to competition from any other entity, and we should instead want resources decentralized among many very wealthy people who can pursue independent agendas, because they will be likelier to compete in ways that result in real public gain. Most improvements to living standards under industrialism have not come from activism, but have instead come from technological improvements, resulting in cheaper food and more widely available medication. Tax cuts for the wealthy are good for the lower classes because the state will have fewer resources to prevent wealthy people from making investments which are much likelier to benefit the poor than state activity. I think human history very strongly bears this out.

Social safety nets are bad because they inevitably grow in size and take resources away from places where they could actually benefit people; public services in Europe have to ration healthcare much more than they do in the US, and the strain of supporting much greater public spending results in a population which is meaningfully less wealthy than it is in the US, with people subsisting on 2/3 of the income. I think this is disastrous and it is a scandal that the British population is not in the streets rioting and tearing the NHS down with their bare hands.

I appreciate your detailed answer and I wanted to square in on this. You seem to place a lot of faith in technological advancements. I'm curious how far your libertarian philosophy goes with regard to transhumanism. What do you think of Zoltan Istvan and his goal of empowering free enterprise in the name of obtaining immortality? Does your faith in technology extend to what some might consider fanaticism with respect to transhumanism?

Yeah, sure. I think technology enabling people to live longer and healthier lives is good, and while 'immortality' is a very high bar to clear it seems at least possible that we could try to fight senescence, and keep people feeling young for longer periods. (Bryan Johnson is particularly famous for taking this very far, but hormone supplementation among the ultra-wealthy to try to lengthen the period of time in which you feel young is very much a thing). While immortality is a pipe dream, I think this sort of attitude is very valuable, and people that experiment on themselves are heroes.

'Fanaticism with respect to transhumanism' -- more than some and less than others. I am pretty fanatically pro-surrogacy, which I think is underrated as an important political issue today; enabling others to carry your children for you constitutes successfully overcoming a limitation that had held people back for thousands of years, and I think attempts to fight it are extremely misguided and lead very quickly to evil places. (Or are just evil themselves; stopping women from being surrogates is literally not just an anti-market preference but is also understandable as the perspective of someone who wants there to be fewer people or families). Of current First World governments, I find Giorgia Meloni's particularly offensive -- it's been a litany of attempts to fight progress combined with zero effort allocated towards the priorities of the people that elected her (kind of famously, illegal immigration into Italy has skyrocketed under Meloni) combined with the overtly-fascist imagery. It's literally soured me on far-right movements in general -- I largely didn't support PP/Vox in the 2023 Spanish election purely because Meloni thought they were good.

I've made threads like this before, but I think the last one was several years ago. Also, with elections coming up soon, we have a lot more activity than usual, so hopefully we'll get more and better questions on this one.

Anyway. I'm a 25-year-old software engineer living in Ohio with a law degree and right-of-center political beliefs. I've been an Atlas user since 2009, or for well over half my life at this point. I speak fluent Russian, English, and Spanish, so feel free to ask questions in any of those languages.

This is likely going to sound like a strange question, but you mentioned you've been an Atlas user since 2009, so I'm going to go for it.

What was Atlas like in 2009, when you joined? How has it changed over the years?

I ask this as a relative newcomer who has only been here for 6 months. So, I'm curious.

It was smaller and more intimate; more posters had brands which were immediately recognizable. There was less of a political consensus; the right at least felt larger and opinions which would be censored today, like pro-Confederate sentiment, were fairly common. The banning of opebo was a turning point here and not in the correct direction, even if he was personally terrible out in the real world.

I think that the best posters today are authentically much better than they were then; there are more effort-posts and you can learn much more by being part of Atlas, particularly about foreign elections. (I've had lots of disagreements with Hashemite, but much of the material from his Welections blog getting reposted to Atlas sparked hugely informative threads about many countries (and, particularly for Latin America, in many of these places I now try to keep up with elections); none of this existed in 2009. (Alternatively, I might just notice better-quality material more now, since I am 26 years old rather than 12). But there is a sort of ambient community spirit which is gone, and people are now much more hostile. In 2010, a neo-Nazi pedophile could create a thread for cursing out the mods and nobody immediately rushed to call for his banning; I think there was a healthier attitude towards terribleness.

Much of this is just a reflection on changes in the wider culture, not just Atlas. We are more knowledgeable today, but also more uniform and more suspicious.

Apologies if you’ve been asked this already, but you seem to have an extremely optimistic and positive outlook on life in general. Is that impression correct, and if so why do you think that is?

I don't really think I have a very optimistic and positive take on life; I went through an extended depressive period between about summer 2019 and summer 2021. (That said, I often get this comment on forums where I am active, and I'm sometimes surprised, reading very old text conversations -- or Atlas forum conversations -- just how upbeat I sound, because I am not that upbeat in my memory. I think it has something to do with how I approach the written word.) I more commonly post about things where it feels like 'my side' is winning, whatever 'my side' might be in some context.

That said, if there is a 'Vosem Secret to Happiness' (or even just a 'Vosem Secret to Happy Writing'), it's that you should root for things to play themselves out naturally. In politics, rather than building huge institutions to do something which require constant maintenance, you should think about incentive structures leading to the outcomes you want. (It is always better to achieve your aims by breaking institutions rather than creating new ones or fixing existing ones, because nonexistence is a much more stable state. If you are working on fixing something -- and most work is on fixing something -- then make sure that fixing it is worth it.) In your personal life, you should try to set yourself up such that activities which help you (whether that's study, exercise, or whatever else) happen naturally, and activities which hinder you don't. Make tiny wins easy, and big losses difficult.

Describe your religious/philosophical views.

Oh, come on now. I've been writing on Atlas for 14 years and -- not to contradict my meme about happy living immediately after posting it -- they've actually not changed very much at all. If you've been here any length of time then you know exactly what they are. If you want me to elaborate on something, then ask a more specific question.

[PSOL]

Well I at least got a reply

What are your opinions of the current communist movement here and internationally? What are their strength and weaknesses and what are they doing well or uniquely?

In general, pretty negative. I think human prosperity comes basically from people responding to market incentives, and communism cuts against that pretty hard.

The Marxist-Leninist movement in the United States feels entirely moribund; it was only ever even kind of serious in the 1920s/1930s, but by the 1940s had become entirely proscribed and has mostly never returned to relevance. Abroad, I think its shape changed significantly with the transition from the Soviet Union as the largest economy with a Marxist-Leninist system -- since the Soviet Union was often willing to sponsor foreign movements that would profess loyalty -- to China, which is less willing to do this. Communist parties remain relevant in some parts of the world, as in particular Indian states, southern Africa, or particular parts of eastern Europe, but in many of these places they are often more about particular forms of social conservatism than about any structural change to the economy.

I think there is still quite a great deal to fear from powerful governments trying to restrict their citizenry from becoming wealthy, but communism in its mid-20th-century form seems pretty dead.

The notion that the Soviet Union was more zealous in promoting communism is a false statement that I and the leftist bastion that is RAND corporation have thoroughly debunked every time this topic arises. The communist movement, itself peaking in popularity here in the 1870s and then late 1910s/early 20s and then in the 1930s, was not entirely removed from the development of relevance it once had in the 1960s and then lastly today.

If you want to call the USSR’s style of governance Marxist-Leninism, sure, that model died in long ago with the western capitalist economy taking precedence over the State’s monopoly of power by that time you proscribed. The errors of such a thing were of vital importance to Chinese leaders, whom moved far slower in trying to ride the gravy train that was the international market system out of fear and popular resistance.

The news that the communist movement is just active as a relevant presence in those three areas, and reflects the wants of social conservatism, is not a reply worth responding to but in the dismissive tone that I’m giving now.

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Apologies if you’ve been asked this already, but you seem to have an extremely optimistic and positive outlook on life in general. Is that impression correct, and if so why do you think that is?

I don't really think I have a very optimistic and positive take on life; I went through an extended depressive period between about summer 2019 and summer 2021. (That said, I often get this comment on forums where I am active, and I'm sometimes surprised, reading very old text conversations -- or Atlas forum conversations -- just how upbeat I sound, because I am not that upbeat in my memory. I think it has something to do with how I approach the written word.) I more commonly post about things where it feels like 'my side' is winning, whatever 'my side' might be in some context.

That said, if there is a 'Vosem Secret to Happiness' (or even just a 'Vosem Secret to Happy Writing'), it's that you should root for things to play themselves out naturally. In politics, rather than building huge institutions to do something which require constant maintenance, you should think about incentive structures leading to the outcomes you want. (It is always better to achieve your aims by breaking institutions rather than creating new ones or fixing existing ones, because nonexistence is a much more stable state. If you are working on fixing something -- and most work is on fixing something -- then make sure that fixing it is worth it.) In your personal life, you should try to set yourself up such that activities which help you (whether that's study, exercise, or whatever else) happen naturally, and activities which hinder you don't. Make tiny wins easy, and big losses difficult.

Would you mind elaborating on what this looks like in practice?

[Libertas Vel Mors]

Separate question: do you think there are genetic racial differences in intelligence? To what extent, if any, do you believe government policy should be impacted by this if you do?

[Dr. MB]

Separate question: do you think there are genetic racial differences in intelligence? To what extent, if any, do you believe government policy should be impacted by this if you do?

Do you?

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

To what extent do you feel a disconnect with the Online Right? You alluded to it in what you said about Meloni, but we're very clearly at a point where the kinds of political issues that right-wingers talk about on Elon's Twitter are very much the ones you either don't care about or have more "liberal" positions on--immigration, LGBT rights, etc. When they get closer to your level and talk about opposition to expansion of government, they talk less about how the free market will naturally embrace alternative energy and more about how (((Soros))) will force you to eat bugs and live in a pod in the 15-minute city in the name of the Chinese climate hoax. You also don't seem to be very much into conspiratorial thinking compared to people ideologically adjacent to you.

[lfromnj]

What is your opinion of the trans "rights" movement and their common connection to movements you strongly oppose such as communism? You harbor hate of the Palestinian liberation movement but I want to see if you make the same connection here.

[Kamala's side hoe]

Apologies if you’ve been asked this already, but you seem to have an extremely optimistic and positive outlook on life in general. Is that impression correct, and if so why do you think that is?

I don't really think I have a very optimistic and positive take on life; I went through an extended depressive period between about summer 2019 and summer 2021. (That said, I often get this comment on forums where I am active, and I'm sometimes surprised, reading very old text conversations -- or Atlas forum conversations -- just how upbeat I sound, because I am not that upbeat in my memory. I think it has something to do with how I approach the written word.) I more commonly post about things where it feels like 'my side' is winning, whatever 'my side' might be in some context.

That said, if there is a 'Vosem Secret to Happiness' (or even just a 'Vosem Secret to Happy Writing'), it's that you should root for things to play themselves out naturally. In politics, rather than building huge institutions to do something which require constant maintenance, you should think about incentive structures leading to the outcomes you want. (It is always better to achieve your aims by breaking institutions rather than creating new ones or fixing existing ones, because nonexistence is a much more stable state. If you are working on fixing something -- and most work is on fixing something -- then make sure that fixing it is worth it.) In your personal life, you should try to set yourself up such that activities which help you (whether that's study, exercise, or whatever else) happen naturally, and activities which hinder you don't. Make tiny wins easy, and big losses difficult.

How did you come to adopt this mentality, and how have people in your life been part of it? This is something I've heard in various forms from multiple people who've popped in and out of my post-high school life. Although I've never heard it described in as stridently libertarian (or rather ideological) terms as you've put it here.

What are your thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates' philanthropy initiatives and general views? They've both been contrasted with Biden-era Musk in a political sense.

[DavidB.]

Has Biden's response to the war in Israel made your opinion of him more favorable?

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

He posted a lot of threads on Trump and Trump or Rs aren't gonna win

[WalterWhite]

Is your favorite political philosopher Ayn Rand? Your parents seem to have a similar backstory to her, and your politics seem to align closely to hers.

[Vosem]

Please feel free to ask me more questions -- there are also still a few in the backlog I will get to eventually. Basically wrote until I had to wander off for these.

~~

The notion that the Soviet Union was more zealous in promoting communism is a false statement that I and the leftist bastion that is RAND corporation have thoroughly debunked every time this topic arises. The communist movement, itself peaking in popularity here in the 1870s and then late 1910s/early 20s and then in the 1930s, was not entirely removed from the development of relevance it once had in the 1960s and then lastly today.

If you want to call the USSR’s style of governance Marxist-Leninism, sure, that model died in long ago with the western capitalist economy taking precedence over the State’s monopoly of power by that time you proscribed. The errors of such a thing were of vital importance to Chinese leaders, whom moved far slower in trying to ride the gravy train that was the international market system out of fear and popular resistance.

The news that the communist movement is just active as a relevant presence in those three areas, and reflects the wants of social conservatism, is not a reply worth responding to but in the dismissive tone that I’m giving now.

I think the USSR was quite active in trying to promote its model of governance: even besides its client states in eastern Europe, the fall of the USSR was marked by the falls of regimes around the world (from Nicaragua to Congo-Brazzaville to Afghanistan) which it had supported with substantial foreign aid, where that aid was no longer forthcoming. (In a few places, such as Cuba, these regimes even survived).

I'm not sure what the distinction you're trying to draw between communism and Marxism-Leninism is. In the parts of the world my family is from, such as Russia or Ukraine (this also goes for Moldova, and I think applies to the Hellenophone or the former East Germany), where not illegalized remnant Communist Parties have become socially conservative organizations primarily advocating for the interests of pensioners (often with a geographic twist here where it's pensioners from some specific part of the country which was favored under communism or disfavored under fascism), and reflecting their interests and opinions.

I think that it is true that before the 1960s or so, communism usually promised that it would deliver more individual freedom and more economic growth than capitalism, but the former promise became risible after the details of Stalin's rule became known, and the latter promise also became risible once Hayek popularized Mises' theories. If your version of "communism" is one that still makes those promises, then I don't think we can ever go back to that, because that can only exist in a world where people don't have information which is now freely available.

Apologies if you’ve been asked this already, but you seem to have an extremely optimistic and positive outlook on life in general. Is that impression correct, and if so why do you think that is?

I don't really think I have a very optimistic and positive take on life; I went through an extended depressive period between about summer 2019 and summer 2021. (That said, I often get this comment on forums where I am active, and I'm sometimes surprised, reading very old text conversations -- or Atlas forum conversations -- just how upbeat I sound, because I am not that upbeat in my memory. I think it has something to do with how I approach the written word.) I more commonly post about things where it feels like 'my side' is winning, whatever 'my side' might be in some context.

That said, if there is a 'Vosem Secret to Happiness' (or even just a 'Vosem Secret to Happy Writing'), it's that you should root for things to play themselves out naturally. In politics, rather than building huge institutions to do something which require constant maintenance, you should think about incentive structures leading to the outcomes you want. (It is always better to achieve your aims by breaking institutions rather than creating new ones or fixing existing ones, because nonexistence is a much more stable state. If you are working on fixing something -- and most work is on fixing something -- then make sure that fixing it is worth it.) In your personal life, you should try to set yourself up such that activities which help you (whether that's study, exercise, or whatever else) happen naturally, and activities which hinder you don't. Make tiny wins easy, and big losses difficult.

Would you mind elaborating on what this looks like in practice?

Sure -- I think when I was younger I had a problem of rejecting good things in favor of perfect things. There probably exists a best exercise regimen for your personal level of physical development, but instead of figuring out what that is it's better to adopt the perspective that the best exercise regimen is the one you will actually do. (My physical fitness improved a lot not once I figured out the best routine for myself and pushed myself into it, but when I started working out with others, because then the activity became much more enjoyable). The second part of this might require a higher level of nerdery and attention-disorder than even most people on Atlas Forum could manage, but if you have a very strong interest in something (...and for me these sometimes basically appear overnight), see if you can parlay that into a career or academic focus instead of forcing yourself into things you don't enjoy.

In general, find ways to benefit from things you already enjoy doing.

What is your opinion of the trans "rights" movement and their common connection to movements you strongly oppose such as communism? You harbor hate of the Palestinian liberation movement but I want to see if you make the same connection here.

I tend towards a vaguely trans-friendly positioning, actually -- I think people changing their own bodies is basically good and we should strive for a world where everyone is not just healthier than they are today, but also smarter, stronger, and more beautiful. The attitude that your body is yours to do whatever you want with, even if that thing is vaguely ridiculous, is therefore one I have a lot of sympathy for.

I think the trans rights movement as it actually exists is often incredibly stupid and wrong about many things, and many of the specific questions that get debated in the US either seem to be of incredibly low consequence (as about women's sports) or not actually about trans rights (much of the discussion about transition at young ages seems to be better understood as a discussion of how much control parents have over their minor children, and at what ages).

I tried to write a paragraph a few times about why the LGBT movement is of the left at all (what is the 'connection to communism'), but I'm not sure where to start it historically -- certainly the association already existed by the time of the October Revolution, but I'm uncertain whether it did as late as, like, the 1890s -- and I think it's really difficult to discuss without knowing the biological cause of, uh, 'gayness' (the quality of being LGBT, where 'the LGBT movement' is a political thing). The rise in support for LGBT rights since circa 1990 is actually one of the strangest things about modern society compared to most historical societies, and I don't have a good story as to why it happened timed that way (why shouldn't it have started 10 years earlier or later?), and almost every story I've heard, whether from pro- or anti-gay sources, strikes me as very 'just so'.

(Nonsense science fiction speculation paragraph: I also kind of wonder whether widespread use of IVF or genetic engineering might not actually very rapidly lead to a largely-LGBT society. 'Gayness' is selected very very very strongly against by evolution -- even beyond the statistics of gay men having very few children, the 'gay uncle' hypothesis requires each gay person to have an extra four surviving nieces or nephews just to break even, which is totally infeasible in a Malthusian environment -- but nevertheless it persists, so whatever causes it must be fairly virulent to not die out under those conditions. If you remove the barriers to same-sex couples reproducing, then you remove a very powerful thing keeping it from spreading, so it might be that a world where everyone is a genetically engineered test-tube baby really rapidly turns into a gay world unless the straights can both identify the actual cause and then also organize to suppress it, at least among some people.)

How did you come to adopt this mentality, and how have people in your life been part of it? This is something I've heard from multiple people in various forms who've popped in and out of my post-high school life. Although I've never heard it described in as stridently libertarian (or rather ideological) terms as you've put it here.

I think I went through a pretty bad depressive period around 2019-2021 and this sort of thought was a big part of what led me out of it, both by accepting the help of others who were trying to help me and also allowing myself to make unorthodox career choices. I think I am blessed with many good real-life friends who were willing to put substantial effort into helping me overcome that, and part of my advice is to accept help from others, and to freely give help to others as well.

I don't know that strident libertarianism has much to do with this: I was a pretty strident libertarian before 2019, and then still a pretty strident libertarian during that period, and a pretty strident one afterwards. If anything I became more ideological during this period, but that had more to do with outside events, like the Venezuelan collapse and the general First World response to COVID, than anything that happened in my personal life. I still think individualism is good and was an integral part of this -- you need to be an individualist to accept that improving yourself is a worthwhile goal at all.

[Upper Canada Tory]

I will ask another question and if you want, feel free to ask something at my AMA thread.

You have mentioned that you are Jewish. I am wondering, how observant are you? Do you ever go to synagogue, even if it's a few times a year? Do you observe holidays like Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, at least to some extent?

[wnwnwn]

Do you think Ohio will be a long term republican state or that the dems have a path to make it competitive again?

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Once Trump is off the ballot TX, OH will become competitive it's just FL that's long term. Vance will be defeated in 28

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

There's times I have thought I was "bizarro Vosem", similar in many ways to you while having an opposite political worldview. Do you feel such a comparison holds up?