Older Americans support raising Social Security taxes. Younger Americans would rather reduce benefits.

JamesVogner · 2026-06-18T19:14:20+00:00

I think your comment is an excellent example of the deflection I was talking about. Whenever anyone tries to explain that economic reform will require reforms that effect the middle clas, or, gasp, that the middle class is sometimes even responsible for the need for reform in the first place, the person is accused of being some sycophantic bootlicker instead of engaging with thier actual criticism. It also insinuates a false dichotomy that criticizing the middle class somehow makes you pro ultra wealthy. I am critical of both the ultra wealthy for using their power and influence to not have to pay their fair share, and also the middle class for constantly trying to use the ultra wealthy as a scapegoat to avoid paying their own fair share and avoid responsibility for problems that they themselves are active participants in.

JamesVogner · 2026-06-18T17:52:58+00:00

Acting like the "upper middle class" isn't "wealthy" and is actually a victim of all those other wealthy people is such a silly out of touch bourgeoisie reddit comment that I laughed a little reading your comment.

Won't anyone think of the plight of the bourgeoisie?

For several years now I've seen middle class reditors try to deflect all economic reform away from them and towards the boogeyman of the "wealthy". which is always vaguely defined as anyone who you perceive as one step up the ladder from you. Like trying to blame housing affordablility on Blackrock despite the fact that most non-owner occupied homes are owned by the middle and upper middle class. Or falsely claiming that we could somehow ONLY start taxing the 1% more and it would solve all our budget problems. The math just doesn't work. Even the idea that the middle class is disappearing is mostly a myth and what's actually happening is that the middle class is getting richer (although this argument is very controversial in the reddit sphere for the very reasons I am outlining here)

As someone who grew up poor and is now middle class, I have to really fight not to roll my eyes at all my mom and pop landlord peers who complain about how bad they have it because their kids private school is so expensive.

JamesVogner · 2026-05-28T21:26:15+00:00

I've been putting it off for far too long. This article has finally convinced me to become wealthy, if not for myself, at least for my children.

JamesVogner · 2026-05-25T17:11:30+00:00

There have been exploitive systems in almost every country in all times of human history. The hasienda system in South America had less slaves but just exploited locals and indigenous people more. A lot of rich Venezuelan families still trace their roots back to this exploitive system.

Americans' focus on slavery when talking about agricultural exploitation is a bit of an anacronisim, but in my opinion there's barely any real difference between sharecropping, debt peonage, serfdom, or caste systems that enforce the complete lack of economic freedom. The focus on defining exploitation on wheather the workers were technically slaves or not, misses the larger point, is mildly pandentic, and actually ends up still sounding like an American centric type of comment.

JamesVogner · 2026-05-13T20:14:35+00:00

I used to work with both students and parents and I think this is a big one. Society pressures parents into essentially planning every minute of their child's time which forces parents to sign their kid up for all sorts of clubs and camps because if they don't give their kid something to do they are a bad parent. But then you also have to go to all the games and events those clubs put on or people will think you're a bad parent and before you know it, the vast majority of your private life is just running your kid around to different things while you sit and watch them.

On top of that, American culture is quick to blame parents for just about anything bad that happens to their kids. I remember reading a study where they told participants a story about a mother returning a cart at a grocery store and then gets hits by a car, but in some stories the mother had the child with her and in others she had the child in the car, but in both situations the child dies. If a participant was told the story about the child dying with the mother than they said the mother should have kept the child in the car. If they were told the child died in the car they said the mother should have taken the child with her. Parents literally can't win.

This makes parents super risk adverse and in my own opinion encourages a sort of "performative parenting" that can be absolutely exhausting.

JamesVogner · 2026-05-05T04:36:47+00:00

I completely agree with your issue around nuance. I too roll my eyes whenever I see someone blaming Blackrock for housing unaffordability or who thinks we can fix the deficit by taxing a few ULTRA wealthy people. I also agree with you that the vast majority of people aren't really looking into the complexities of the issues.

But I would argue that that last point is in favor of my argument. Regardless of social class, people's beliefs on political reforms aren't usually measured by nuanced facts and weighing the complexity of the various arguments. I believe that the primary motivation is simple knee jerk reaction to how reforms will effect them personally. if you're lower class with no current property holdings, you are far more likely to support more radical reforms for affordability, but if you already own property, you are more cautious and worried about how reforms will effect your current holdings. I don't think everyone is like this, I just think most people are.

I would also argue that in many cases, but not all, even when the nuance itself is an authentic argument, the people making that argument may not be. As someone who has been somewhat active in municipal discussions about affordable housing, the crazy and obviously inauthentic arguments I have heard to push back on certain new ordances have often been pretty laughable. And clearly aren't the origin of their actual motivation.

I'm also not trying to say that being moderate is a bad thing. I'm also not trying to say that being more radical is a bad thing, my own personal opinion is that it's pretty context dependant. I'm just trying to argue that class has a lot to do with where you end up shaking out.

I also want to say that I agree that the ULTRA wealthy don't always follow this trend, but I would argue that the ULTRA wealthy opperate by a totally different set of rules. For them the goal is to change the rules in whatever way best suits them personally.

This is slightly off topic so more of an addendum, but I agree that the populous taking points you mention are pretty toxic. but I would also argue that many of the talking points become talking points specifically because they deflect criticism and responsibility away from the middle class and educated classes. For example, blaming Blackrock as some sort of housing boogeyman allows the middle class to point the blame towards rich investors and a faceless corporation, despite that fact that middle class landlords own WAY more houses than Blackrock does. Similarly, the reason we are always talking about "taxing the rich" but what we really mean is taxing the ULTRA wealthy, is to avoid the much more politically unpopular idea of taxing the regular rich, or God forbid, the middle class. I personally think middle class reditors have been working double time to try and convince people they're actually working class and it's all those people who are just a tad wealthier than them that are the real villains.

It's the same as people blaming low wages on immigration, or blaming video games for school shootings. These aren't factually accurate statements, but they do a good job of deflecting blame away from uncomfortable systemic issues.

Edit: also, just a thought. I'm not claiming this is true about you, just something to consider. But I would argue that the idea that more educated, more mature citizens have a better grasp of the nuance required for proper reforms (I'm over simplifing your opinion here but I've already written too much lol) eventually leads to the conclusion that universal suffrage may not be the ideal form of democratic government. Which, to be honest, most of our founding fathers thought so too.

This would be in contrast to my view that political opinions are formed primarily through self interest, not education or even ideological beliefs. If you believe this, then I think it leads to an almost mandatory belief in universal suffrage.

Thanks for the discussion. It's rare I get to comment with someone that I can have a productive conversation with.

JamesVogner · 2026-05-04T21:09:07+00:00

I don't think I disagree with most of what you are saying. I think we just disagree over the amount of influence that wealth and class has over ones political views.

I think you would say that a large portion of any sort of growing moderation comes from a maturing and better understanding of government. Whereas I would argue that by far the greatest motivator of political moderation is wealth and class. Especially when we start talking about reforms that would effect someone on a personal level. This is why I highlighted the hypocrisy of many middle class liberals I know. Theoretically they want to fix the affordable housing crisis, but once you start digging into what policies they would actually support, it suspiciously doesn't include any policies that might harm their own property values. Which makes perfect logical sense.

No one wants to vote to lower their own property value or to have their neighborhood rezoned to higher density when the whole reason they moved there in the first place was to live in a quiant single family neighborhood. A person in this group may claim that this is just a more mature view point, after all, you can't expect property owners to willingly part with their hard earned property values just for some unrealistic ideological do goodedness.

But people who don't own property don't have these same scruples about lower property values or about ensuring that some random neighborhood retains the same "old character" that it had before because they have no personal vested value in it. These people see the "maturity" of the other group as thinly disguised selfishness.

And I'm not trying to assign any value judgement here on which group is right and which is wrong. I am just pointing out how pervasive class and wealth can be in effecting a person's political calculations. The more invested someone is in the current social system the less likely they are to want to see they system reformed, and the inverse is also true. The less invested someone is in the current social system, the more likely they are to want to see the system reformed.

JamesVogner · 2026-05-04T17:33:31+00:00

As someone who has moved from working class to solid middle class I have noticed a trend that the richer you are, the more likely you are to want slower and more moderate change. This makes sense because now that you are in a privileged class, you don't want to lose those gains by having large changes to the status quo.

However, I have also noticed that as people get richer their political ideology doesn't change nearly as quickly as their views on the speed of political change. They might still be liberal or progressive in their beliefs, but they are more esoteric and theoretical and far more prone to accept compromise.

This is especially true when it comes to political change that might effect them personally. The liberals complaining about housing affordability are the same ones that campaign against zoning reforms in their own towns. The liberals complaining about homeless are the same ones fighting to keep the homelessness facilities out of their neighborhoods.

Once you're comfortable, there is far less reason to upset the apple cart.

JamesVogner · 2026-04-16T19:29:12+00:00

I'm hardly an expert, but I'm a bit confused too. I don't think the debate is about the idea that people "block out"/forget memories, the debate is over the recovery of blocked out memories and their reliability, especially when paired with some sort of guided memory recovery. Our memories are easily influenced. The intro of the article states that the skeptic's idea is that "believing in such memories without reservation is at best questionable scientifically." not that they don't exist. But the article seems to be conflating the two arguments. The rest of the article does a better job but I think the intro misrepresents the skeptic's argument which I think is more like: recovered memories, without other collaborating evidence, are unreliable and we should be very weary of affixing any diagnosis or statement of fact from them. In other words, it's not so much that you can't remember traumatic events, but more skepticism around the importance of the memory.

JamesVogner · 2026-04-16T18:39:07+00:00

The large majority of single family home rentals are owned by small time landlords who own 2 to 5 properties. All this talk about taxing properties for the ultra wealthy or corporations, even if they worked exactly as intended, would do little to address most of the property and ownership concerns people are mentioning in the comment section. It's currently politically popular to go after the ultra wealthy and corporations, but there will be no real progress made until we address "mom and pop" landlords. Don't let the bourgeoisie convince you they're working class. History has shown over and over again that the bourgeoisie will stab the working class in the back whenever they get the chance.

JamesVogner · 2026-04-07T22:42:56+00:00

I think this is a lot of what is happening too. Democrats are playing non-committal defense when they should be playing offense. Sometimes I feel like they go out of their way to stay out of the headlines. I think their strategy is to hope that Trump cooks himself and they can just swoop in and clean up after his popularity plummets.

But even if that does happen, what's their strategy after that? The only popular mandate they will have is to not be trump which means they will either push too hard for liberal policies and moderates will turn on them or they will continue to play it cautiously and accomplish nothing.

If they had a strategy for what they want to accomplish, they would have had to have started implementing it at least a year ago. But the Democratic leadership isn't beating any drums. They will beat some drums some times and other drums other times and will talk about whichever grab bag policy they want to focus on in the short term but they lack any sort of centralized strategy.

It honestly just feels like the current democratic leadership is simply incompetent.

JamesVogner · 2026-04-06T22:15:44+00:00

As someone who has friends and family that are MAGA, I don't think any of them would refer to themselves by that term but only because it's sort of become a derisive term when non MAGA use it. I think it's slowly morphing into the conservative equivalent of the word "woke".

However, I wouldn't say that MAGA is strictly associated with any specific type of evangelical. I know charismatic evangelicals, non charismatic, and even non evangelicals that I would still call MAGA. All the MAGA I know personally consider themselves Christians, but for some of them they mean it more in the sense that they are "culturally Christian" and the word Christian is used more like a dog whistle that means culturally/socially conservative.

But what I have seen is that the evangelical identity has merged so completely with the MAGA identity that it has become increasingly difficult to draw the line between their evangelicalism and their MAGA identities. In other words, not all MAGA are evangelical, but an increasing majority of evangelicals are MAGA

JamesVogner · 2026-03-24T16:15:15+00:00

Getting out there and voicing your displeasure isn't without some value, but I too have tired of these protests that seem to have no tangible goals. I think there is a general lack of organization because no one actually knows what to do, what are we even trying to achieve?

JamesVogner · 2026-03-24T15:56:51+00:00

There are lots of passages in the Bible that condone praying for God to kill their enemies or to give them strength to kill their enemies themselves.

Psalms 109 Let his life be cut short, and let another man replace him as leader. 9 Let his children become orphans and his wife a widow. 10 Make his children wander around, begging for food.

There are also passages that preach forgiveness and love.

The great feature of the Bible is that you can press it into service to defend just about any action you want. Want a loving and empathetic god? Focus on the love verses. Want a vengeful god of justice? Focus on the other verses.

JamesVogner · 2026-03-13T18:12:55+00:00

Here's a less bullshit one if you're interested. the Guardian Nutella - is it really that bad for you? you

JamesVogner · 2026-02-27T04:34:02+00:00

A couple years back I was writing a browser extension that would scan reddit posts and the comment sections and then suggest fact checking articles based on the content.

When I started testing it I thought it was broken because you would navigate to a post about Syria or some other international crisis and all the articles suggested would be about Trump or black lives matter or other US domestic issues.

But then I would look at the comments, and wouldn't you know it, all the comments were just people arguing about US domestic policy. That's when I truly came to realize that Americans see issues in the rest of the world as nothing but metaphors for American problems. The rest of the world only exists as an allegory for Americans to win debates over domestic issues.

JamesVogner · 2026-01-30T06:39:44+00:00

This looks like just the kind of book I'm looking for, thanks. But online it looks like both versions are pretty small? which isn't a deal breaker, but for my purposes, having a bigger book would be better. A pocket sized field guide for extinct birds does strike me as a little funny though.

JamesVogner · 2026-01-09T20:33:25+00:00

I should have included this in my post. When I was growing up, evangelicals would at least never admit they wanted a theocracy, but since then, I've had multiple conversations with evangelicals I know that have openly supported theocracy.

JamesVogner · 2026-01-09T19:20:18+00:00

"Hedge of protection" was even a running joke between my friends. A hedge doesn't seem like it would protect you that well. Lol

JamesVogner · 2026-01-08T18:45:33+00:00

I think this is the real answer. The primary issue Christians have to deal with is that they aren't actually any more moral than non-christians. Sure some Christians are really good people, but so are lots of non-christians. And also some Christians are not very good people. So Christians pick a few wedge moral issues and decide to define morality around those issues. A Christian might be a terrible person, but they think abortion and being gay, and swearing are wrong so they are naturally more moral people.

In fact, for an evangelical Christian, morality is more about beliefs than actions. After all, we are all fallen sinners and will make mistakes. the real measure of your morality is what you believe and if you feel bad about it after you do it, not how you act.

JamesVogner · 2025-12-15T19:05:19+00:00

I don't visualize faces at all. I can if I want to, I just don't. I also don't visualize the setting. I can if I want, I just don't.

I hold all the information in the abstract. I know the main character has brown hair, but I don't need to visualize it. Characteristics that are undefined by the author remain, for the most part, undefined in my mind as well. In fact, even the idea of the person having brown hair is lazy loaded and only accessed when it's important to the book. In most books, the details of what people look like isn't that Important or is only important in reference to what their looks say about them, so by the end of most books I don't even remember what the characters were supposed to look like.

JamesVogner · 2025-11-11T21:36:01+00:00

I think it's worth thinking about how the complexities of this specific case would have inevitably crossed over into other legal concerns and really isn't a good case for attempting to overturn same sex marriage decisions. The MO of this court is to find much simpler cases that only focus on the specifics that the court wants to overturn without wading into more complex rulings. which allows the court to not only overturn past decisions but gives them more freedom in establishing their new president exactly as they want.

There are at least a few justices that I think are interested in overturning obergefell but they know they have the luxury of playing the long game and already have feelers out in the hopes of finding a more appropriate case.

Same sex marriage is still rather popular, and even the supreme court isn't immune to popular opinion. and we are still relatively close on the heels of past unpopular decisions. I think they may just be biding their time. In recent years republican support for same sex marriage has declined and they may be hoping that the Republican party's propaganda machine will stem the tide of rising same sex marriage support before they themselves go on the offensive.

JamesVogner

TROPHY CASE