Completely offtopic, but that election seems to have had a reasonable result.

@Wyrsa Yes, as long as democracy is still working, I'm happy. They're doing post-mortem analysis now; some analysis makes sense to me. I just worry the supporting democratic and "rule of law" institutions are weakened, or that the American Evangelical churches are being compromised by the dilution of its message with political American Nationalism that has nothing to do with Christianity.

@GratefulDisciple I worry about how much power the far left has when it seems obvious that the majority of Americans disagree with them. (Welcome "back", @GratefulDisciple!)

@Matthew Was I gone that long? Anyway, I'm trying to cut down my SE involvement, although there are plenty of answers and the corresponding research I want to write. About the far left, I wonder how much of the "woke" stuff propelled Trump voters to go to the polls compared to Economy (including inflation, etc.) which many analysts attribute as the highest factor of the discontent with Biden administration.

Another factor (don't know how big it is in the swing states) is the Catholic voters who deem Trump is the lesser evil instead of the other way around, who traditionally have been voting Democrats before they go further left.

@GratefulDisciple Last message, October 23; two weeks! 🙂

@Matthew That's nothing. But it's good to be missed 🙂.

My biggest worry is the overall electorate's 1) being deceived by rhetoric and the side-effect of what I'm sure Trump will be selling as tangible improvement (but hiding the true cost) such as raising tariffs with China or gutting Federal departments (with their properly trained career employees), 2) being more polarized and tribal by sacrificing common ground to favor a "strongman".

Never trust a politician. I believe in a healthy functioning of the Fifth Estate to offer the public fact checks and to demand accountability from politicians. Instead, there is an increasingly blatant "poisoning the well" by the rhetoric of Fake News when the criers are themselves THE violators of the Truth. It saddens and angers me deeply seeing the sacrilege of using the divine word "Truth" in Trump's "truth social".

But we in C.SE is honest enough NOT to claim we know the Truth even though we're doing theology.

@GratefulDisciple Frankly, as much as the consumerist side of me hates the idea, I'm not convinced that tariffs aren't necessary for the country's long term health. It isn't good for us to be so dependent on what is, let's face it, a hostile nation.

IMNSHO, a lot of what's wrong with the US is that we've failed to see the wisdom of Douglas Adams. Ability to get elected, at least the way politics happen today, is about the biggest possible red flag that that person shouldn't be anywhere near power. But because of the way political candidates get dragged through the mud, only someone like Trump is capable of getting elected. At least outside of the far-left "woke" Marxist camp.

@Matthew Sadly I'm not that well versed in economics, so listening to both sides promoting their economic programmes is like a Bible illiterate listening to RC theologian debating a Reformed theologian. My worry is that most of the electorate are in the same boat.

One way is for a trusted Christian economist whose theology I can trust promoting a particular Christian vision for economy for America and its impact on the global scene (because I more or less now know the landscape of possible orthodox Christian theologies & worldview out there).

But better yet: take good historical macroeconomics class and understand the concepts well enough so to be able to detect lies in what the politicians / think tanks are selling.

Gotta go. TTYL.

@GratefulDisciple I don't claim to know the economics. What I do know is the US is essentially at the mercy of China to continue to provide cheap goods. Look at it this way: Trump raising tariffs can't do any worse damage than China can do by doing something similar on their end... and at least tariffs on the US end mean that money is going to the US.

It might help to look at a microcosm. Would you rather be utterly reliant on your uncle, who hates your guts but is selling you food at an unreasonably low price, or would you rather be able to grow (or at least afford) your own food?

@Matthew That uncle that hate your guts happen to control a huge market for the products you're exporting. So that's a huge factor. Then there is also dealing with bringing back key the supply-side dependencies of bringing manufacturing of products back in the USA (which I do support for strategic products, esp. high technology); it can take > 10 years, so temporary tariffs makes sense, esp. for negotiating tactics.

But politicians need to sell the truths and be upfront that temporarily prices are going up and how Biden was actually continuing Trump's tariffs too and managed to influence Korean & Taiwan companies to set up chip Fabs in the USA. I'm also happy that America is a lot less reliant on Middle East oil, for example, so that would be a good model for other industries too. So the metric should be less political and more objective: what's a good long term strategy for the USA.

@GratefulDisciple More truth in politics would be good, yes. Unfortunately I don't foresee it happening.

@Matthew That's what I said earlier: electorate needs to wise up and WANT to find the truths, instead of gullibly eating up politician's rhetoric that becomes more and more like a car salesman, or worse! There's a significant parallel of Trump style rhetoric with charismatic prosperity gospel televangelist preacher who focuses on audience trusting them with prophetic gnostic knowledge combined with eschatological doomsday alternate scenario!

See the transcript of this interview. Lance Wallnau is a false prophet advocating New Apostolic Reformation, which structurally is like the Catholic church, but the theology is so bad spiritually.

Public policies or budget proposal used to be "fact-checked" (for their estimated cost) by the Congressional Budget Office; I rarely heard CBO assessment mentioned these days.

@GratefulDisciple If you have a formula for freeing Big Media (and Academia, for that matter) from the stranglehold of the far left, I'd love to hear it.

@Matthew One big plank is for Christians to care more of objectivity, life of the mind, and participating in the academia rather than retreating to seminaries that are not part of universities! But as you can see in C.SE, instead you see Christians only do propositional mining from reading ONLY the Bible, not theology, not church history, not philosophy, not psychology, etc.

It has to come from the attitude that reason and faith works together AND ALSO that Christians can work together with non-Christians in the academia. That's a big reason why I'm attracted to Catholicism.

@GratefulDisciple I don't see that happening as long as theology and "science" are considered separate disciplines. (Which... don't you advocate for that? 🙂)

@Matthew Didn't I advocate already that they ARE separate disciplines with separate concerns but with theology HIRING and writing the CONTRACT for scientists to do their job within the sphere that theology gives them?

No, they aren't separate (or at least, separable) disciplines. As long as you try to argue that they are, you've ceded "science" to Materialism... and then you wonder why Christianity gets marginalized.

@Matthew Here we go again. We'll talk about this later. Gotta do some work, sorry. Nice to chat with you though, how about we both learn macroeconomics together?