3 Topics Over Dinner - Dinner Discussion Group

3 Topics Over Dinner -- NYC -- 3TopicsOverDinner

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Organizer: Bill Chapman

Sunday, June 7th, at 6:00 pm
Bayon Cambodian Restaurant, 408 E 64th St, by the corner of 1st Ave, Manhattan, Menu
Tickets to the Event: here. (Fee refunded in cash when you show up on time).

3 Topics Over Dinner is a dinner discussion group that meets on weekends. Links to articles or videos on the internet about 3 Topics, usually unrelated to one another, are posted on the event listing. Attendees read the articles (and other sources if they so wish) or watch the videos to be discussed over dinner. The idea is to be similar to a book club, only with far less reading. The idea is that this required reading / video viewing will be less than 3 hours.

We go to a different nationality restaurant every month, and always restaurants that will do separate checks for a large group, so everyone can pay with their own credit card and we don't have to figure out how to split the check. The restaurants are chosen to be quiet and nice, but not extremely exorbitant. A link to the menu of the restaurant, with prices listed, will always be provided on the announcement.

The restaurants chosen will always be in Manhattan, 77th St or further south.

RSVP's will be limited to have about 8 people at dinner, small enough that everyone can hear one another and we can conduct a single conversation.

The group has been going roughly once a month since 2008. It was formed on meetup.com and has shifted to Eventbrite.

A $5.00 deposit is required to RSVP. This deposit is refunded in cash ten minutes after the event starts. No-shows and latecomers forfeit their deposit.

We desperately need to get away from our screens and talk with each other in person.

"When people actually meet and get to know each other ... what Lincoln called those ‘better angels’ come out. People start recognizing themselves in each other and they start trusting each other, and that’s not just the basis for democracy, but that’s the basis for our long-term salvation." -- Barack Obama
Past Events

Sunday, June 7th Topics: Insanity on the Political Right, Populism & Demagoguery, Cousin Marriage

Influencers on the Political Right Have Been Going Seriously Insane


Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election was really a case of democracy working as designed:

  • Prosperity was not increasing for whites in red states who didn't go to college, in fact many of them were economically trapped in dying towns that had been devastated by globalism.
  • The universities had come to prioritize a new ideology to the point of abandoning the search for truth. This ideology --"wokeness", "social justice", or "DEI", sought to somehow rearrange relations between human demographics, and its goals certainly didn't include anybody actually getting along better, or eventually converging on a state of color blindness.  In fact, the main motivation seemed to be retaliation for centuries-old wrongs, and the vilification of anyone who is successful as some kind of "exploiter".  People heard a steady stream of ever and ever-sillier nonsense mixed with contempt and hostility coming from the highly educated.
  • The arrival of many millions of illegal immigrants, willing to work harder for worse pay and conditions than American-born laborers, led to many people desperate for the government to get serious about enforcing the border, which the Democrats absolutely refused to consider.

In the wake of Trump's 2016 victory, the Democratic Party totally failed to face up to these realities, insisting that their loss had been due to manipulation by "bad actors" on the Internet, particularly social media.  This led to several years of aggressive "content moderation" (otherwise known as "censorship") of social media, which, unfortunately, wound up suppressing many truths.

Eventually, the censorship went away in a context where the less-educated people have lost all faith in "experts" and more-educated people, leading a free-for-all of lies, conspiracy theories, and the blind leading the blind.

Demagoguery and Civilizational Decline



We've known how to recognize demagogues since Roman times, and the signs are pretty obvious.

Trump rules the Republican Party with an iron fist, and he's driving it into the ground.

Marriage Between Cousins
Should be Banned

Liberals like to tell a narrative of world history where the ascendance of the West is simply described as being solely due to criminal acts by the West against everybody else, but this is not accurate.  The West had a number of cultural advantages over other societies, and if we are unable to stop immigrating millions of people from highly dysfunctional cultures, we should preserve these advantages, and it is reasonable for us to demand, with full force of the law, that the immigrants assimilate from their more harmful practices.

One of these advantages was that, many centuries ago, the Catholic Church banned marriage between cousins.  This had two advantages:

  • a reduction in birth defects
  • far more significantly, if all of one's grandparents are from the same family, one develops a fierce, overwhelming "clan-loyalty" that completely drowns out obligations to the broader society, or to any sort of ethical principles.

Many societies have cousin marriage, and they wind up being very clan-oriented, described as "low-trust" societies because unrelated strangers can't trust one another.  Criminal acts are socially acceptable, so long as they benefit one's clan.

Somalia collapsed into a failed state in 1991, largely due to warfare between rival clans.  Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali described in her autobiography how, as soon as she was old enough, her family taught her to recite her paternal bloodline going back many generations.  Many times in her book she makes clear that a lot of life in Somalia revolved around clan membership.  At one point, a mugger had his knife to her throat, and she immediately started reciting her paternal bloodline.  The mugger understood what she was doing, and let her continue.  Eventually she reached an ancestor the two of them had in common, at which point the mugger withdrew his knife and went away without taking anything.