The idea that destroying the environment will make the remaining species "better" by making sure that only the "fittest" survive betrays a near-total misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is just the name we give to the fact that organisms (or, more precisely, genes) which survive and reproduce effectively in a given set of conditions become more frequent over time. If you clear-cut the forest, you're not eliminating "weak" species and making room for the "strong" — you're getting rid of species that were well-adapted to the forest and increasing the numbers of whatever organisms can survive in the resulting waste.

Evolution is no threat to religion. Natural selection, explaining and predicting evolution is a threat to religion.

Indeed, one can usefully define any belief system as quasi religious if it finds natural selection threatening. If that belief system piously proclaims its admiration for Darwin while evasively burying his ideas, attributing to him common descent, rather than the explanation of common descent, then that belief system is religious, or serves the same functions and has the same problems as religion.

The trouble is that natural selection implies not the lovely harmonious nature of the environmentalists and Gaea worshipers, but a ruthless and bloody nature, red in tooth and claw, that is apt to be markedly improved by a bit of clear cutting, a few extinctions, and a couple of genocides, and of course converting the swamps into sharply differentiated dry land with few trees, and lakes with decent fishing, by massive bulldozing. And a few more genocides. Recall Darwin's cheerful comments about extinction and genocide. It is all progress. Well, if not all progress, on average it will be progress.

Why would abolition of political parties make politics better? Look at politics before modern democracy and political parties. I personally can't imagine something more mind-killing than court intrigues in, say, 18th century.

I can likewise imagine (and could prefer) a scientific civilization that is freely polyamorous, atheistic, Eugenicist, etc.

But "brutally unegalitarian and aggressive"? Why in the seven hells would I prefer to live in such a horrid place? Historical precedent indicates that the more unegalitarian the society the most horrid it is for the majority of its people. Aggressiveness is even more likely to lead to a horrible society. My limited personal experience confirms (my one-year military service being the the worst sub-society I've been in).

Perhaps when you imagine such a society you imagine yourself being the boot, not the face it crushes forever? To evaluate it properly you need imagine both, giving weight according to the percentage of the crushers vs the crushees.

China should be the best example of what even moderate levels of capitalism can do.

The Communist bloc aren't know for their environmentally-friendly outcomes or even policies.

I'm sorry me message didn't come across clearly. I can see it's not phrased well.

I'm immensely skeptical of the notion that clever people are needed to tell dumb people what to do to achieve what they want; to "harness the capitalist system". Mostly because so-called smart people have multiple other flaws that mainly stem from their not participating in or acknowledging the marketplace.

Many (public/social) intellectuals have such poor understanding of basic issues of economics, psychology and evolution that their prescribed cures worsen the ailment.

Which is why I mentioned Europe, a moribound continent which doesn't seem to understand that it has to produce stuff to consume stuff and which appears to value appearances and 'ethical policies' over facing economic reality.

Save for problems regarding the tragedy of the commons, I see little hope for centralized harnessing by clever people. I see socialism as the economic variant of creationism: the notion that good, complex things cannot arise without central planning.

Caveat lector: I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now.

Actually, there's a difference I didn't think of last night. I believe I'm Jewish and American because people kept telling me I am, and I wasn't immune.

However, there are people who aren't Jewish who feel they are really Jewish, and convert.

That's true, but downvoting without comment is especially harmful to new contributors, who might conclude goodness knows what from it. ("Does Less Wrong hate me? Do they regard all meditation as woo? What's going on?")

EDIT: Oh, apparently this happened while the article was in Main, and in that case I'd have approved of the downvotes even so. I only came across it in Discussion, though.

For pure pragmatic reasons, peaceful methods would be still preferable to violent ones...

Why Terrorism Does Not Work

This is the first article to analyze a large sample of terrorist groups in terms of their policy effectiveness. It includes every foreign terrorist organization (FTO) designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. The key variable for FTO success is a tactical one: target selection. Terrorist groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumber attacks on military targets do not tend to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature. Contrary to the prevailing view that terrorism is an effective means of political coercion, the universe of cases suggests that, first, contemporary terrorist groups rarely achieve their policy objectives and, second, the poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself. The bulk of the article develops a theory for why countries are reluctant to make policy concessions when their civilian populations are the primary target.