OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2d ago
But we aren’t talking about 12th century warrior aristocrats, we are talking about civilized Europeans from 1600-1860.
I don't see anywhere you specified that? I said '12th century' mainly because '12th' is an inversion of '21st' and I found the aesthetic pleasing. The examples you actually gave at the start of this conversation ranged from the 19th century to the 16th to biblical Israel to the Fourth Crusade, so I took you as making a pan-historical claim, about men in all times save apparently the present.
It seems to me that people in all times and places are socialised, that soldiers specifically are a heavily selected group not representative of all people (both because soldiers are specifically trained for killing and because the most killing-prone people are more likely to become soldiers), and for that matter Western soldiers still happy to do war crimes, so the claim that there's something uniquely softening or, if you'll pardon the casual term, wussifying, about modern socialisation seems to outrun the evidence you've presented.
I say this particularly because the evidence you've presented is... what, that boys like playing action video games? That doesn't seem much different to me to boys liking action movies, or boys running around the playground pointing their fingers at each other and yelling "bang! bang!", which, the last I checked, boys still do.
There's just no substance here. Do modern men have a particularly different attitude to violence than historical men? I'm not convinced they do. If we are in a more peaceful age, you could attribute that to us having more peaceful socialisation, or past peoples having more violent socialisation, but neither thesis is more obviously true than the other, so the claim about innate male nature remains unjustified.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “what is the difference” between those things; I assume you’re asking rhetorically?
What I mean is that there doesn't seem any compelling reason to believe the story you're telling. Obviously both men in the 21st century and men in the 12th century were socialised into particular contexts and for particular behaviours. On what basis do you say that the behaviour of 21st century men does not reflect natural instincts, but the behaviour of 12th century men does? (Especially since the 12th century men we're talking about, warrior aristocrats, were given a martial education from a very early age.)
On video games specifically: I don't have figures specifically separated out by gender, but I don't see anything in the conversation before now that says that under-18s don't count. I'd take "that's including women" as a valid objection specifically for The Sims, but gaming in general is such a massively male-dominated hobby that I doubt it makes much difference for anything else. And I don't know why you think that pre-2000 games somehow don't count. Aren't you making a claim about innate male nature?
I note that you also skipped over the point about even these violent games being extremely sanitised. You cite Fortnite, for instance, and Fortnite is a heavily stylised cartoon game. Fortnite looks like this. It is not even attempting to show realistic violence. Likewise on Steamcharts, you have games like DotA 2 or Apex Legends, which are similarly cartoony. Even the 'realistic' games are heavily sanitised. Here's Counterstrike 2 - while it's higher-fidelity than Fortnite, it is still obviously cutting out most of the gore, grime, and terror of war. I feel the violence on display here ranges from what you'd be happy to show to primary school children to PG 15 or so.
That young boys like to play war isn't really contested - but none of this play-conflict bears much resemblance to real war.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
We might be using different definitions of elites? I'd say that Donald Trump, for instance, is hated by elites, and he's the most powerful man in the country. I think that evangelicals are generally looked on with contempt by the intellectual and cultural elites of the United States.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I'm responding to the idea that "Catholics have basically just won" - no specific comment on Ramaswamy intended.
If Ramaswamy were to convert to Christianity, I agree that he would probably pick Catholicism, because that's a religion more acceptable to elites. Evangelicals are hated by elites, and they generally hate elites in return.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
My point is different: they have been trained out of applying their instincts at a young age. Not quite “wussy”.
What is the difference between "men have a natural in-born tendency to violence, and socialisation is required to make them peaceful" and "men have a natural in-born aversion to violence, and socialisation is required to make them militant"?
All people are socialised, and soldiers or military elites of past ages were socialised into those roles. Today people are often socialised into different roles. Obviously socialisation has a huge impact on adult behaviour.
But you seem to be claiming something more than that people can be socialised for violence (or more specifically, for certain forms of controlled violence) or against violence. I understand you to be making a claim about inherent nature or essence. Does the claim that all men have this inherently violent nature stand up?
“Fictional” is irrelevant, because people do fictionally what gives them pleasure. There isn’t a fictional homework simulator, or a fictional laundry simulator. There’s no fictional “comfort dying grandmother” or “be broken up with” simulator as this would be unpleasant. And “sanitized” is not my understanding of male video game culture. When a teenage boy sees that he can shoot his enemy’s head off, or that impaling them leads to his moaning in agony, he finds it awesome. That’s why developers put those features in. Out of all the millions of possibilities to have fun, males consistently choose “pretend to kill my enemies realistically with my friends” simulator, which they do because they like to imagine doing that. They could instead play “paintball simulator” or “airsoft simulator”, if they were averse to violence, but those don’t even sell.
Yes, I think it's absolutely sanitised. When I was in primary school I thought Turok 2 was awesome, and that's a game where you have a gun that fires a drill that homes on to and burrows into an enemy's head and mulches their brain. But this is not a realistic depiction of such a weapon. It is highly sanitised. The enemy wiggles in a funny way and then their head explodes. That's the kind of thing that young boys laugh at and it is very far from realistic death.
And of course there are very popular non-lethal games? Paintball simulators don't sell? The Splatoon series has sold over thirty million copies. It's paintball. It has live concerts in real life. If you look at the most popular video game series, yes, there are some at the top about violence (Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed), but there are also totally abstract games (Tetris), sports games (FIFA, NBA 2K), games about everything under the sun (Mario), games about building and creativity (Minecraft), games about bug-collecting (Pokémon), games about racing (Need for Speed), games about life simulation (The Sims) and so on. Conflict and fighting feature in most games and I think people do find those enjoyable or exciting, but you suggested that realistically killing enemies is overwhelmingly the most popular thing in games. In the top ten best-selling game franchises, I see maybe three that could fit that description (CoD, GTA, and AC).
Male nature and human nature is just more complicated than you're asserting here. I'm not saying that men in their natural state (which probably doesn't exist, unless you want to get really into studies of wild children) are all harmonious peaceful stereotypes. I think that people in general, both male and female, do have some aggressive and competitive instincts. But I think those are just one part of a larger and more complex mix, that we also have cooperative instincts, including those that make us hesitate to inflict violence.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Well, I'd argue that naval officers are firstly already people who've been through military training, and secondly are already selected for martial intent. Pointing out that certain classes of people historically have been willing to use violence doesn't seem like enough, to me, to establish that all or most men throughout history have had high tolerance for lethal violence, and that modern men are uniquely wussy. Is it not just as likely that historical warrior classes were intensely socialised for violence? That seems like, well, an integral part of having a warrior class in the first place.
As regards games, I would tend to agree that men in general (and in fact people in general) have competitive instincts, where they enjoy defeating simulated opponents. I am skeptical that this generalises to real violence, given that simulated violence in video games is firstly fictional and secondly usually extremely sanitised. I think that if I gave the average gamer who enjoys shooting people in Call of Duty a real rifle and invited them to shoot real human beings (and let's say I guaranteed them immunity from reprisal, prosecution, etc.), even human beings belonging to outgroups, that gamer would hesitate.
I'm not moved by high-flown rhetoric about "the instincts God gave them", and I don't need a call to action. I think that kind of preaching is actually against the Motte's rules. Let's try to stay focused.
Hi there. I'm a serious Protestant.
It's worth bearing in mind that in the real world, as opposed to the internet, evangelicals are doing a much better job of holding on to faith than Catholics or Orthodox. News stories about youth conversions to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy are usually looking at a few high-profile outliers rather than the overall demographic trend.
The Catholic Church in the United States, demographically, is buoyed up by large numbers of Hispanic Catholic immigrants, but if you restrict yourself to looking at people born in the US who were raised Catholic, they look very similar to mainline Protestants, i.e. in decline. They have noticeably lower retention than evangelicals. Church attendance is consistently higher among evangelicals than Catholics, as is consistency on moral or social issues. (Go through and compare if you like - 59% of Catholics are pro-choice, 70% support same-sex marriage!) If you compare what Protestants and what Catholics say about why they stay in their church, Protestants are significantly more likely to say that they believe in the religion's teachings and that it gives them spiritual comfort, while Catholics are more likely to say that it's because it's just the religion of their family or community. Note also that 1% of Americans are ex-Protestant Catholics, and 4% of Americans are ex-Catholic Protestants, which seems suggestive.
I'm not American, but I work in a religious field and I will say that just anecdotally I have run into a number of ex-Catholic evangelicals, and I would say that for every person raised a Protestant who felt that they were given a shallow spiritual education, and looked longingly at the riches of tradition and liturgy in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (and I count myself as one such person), I have met a person raised a Catholic who found that faith numbing and deadening, but who came alive on discovering evangelical Protestantism, which gave them the tools to cultivate a more passionate, heartfelt relationship with God.
I don't say this as a triumphant evangelical myself. I'm a mainliner, and I will forthrightly confess that the mainline churches are hollowed out, frequently heretical, and dying. I'm part of what I hope will be a small but devout rump of surviving mainline Protestants. My own institutions are largely betraying the faith and receiving in their own congregations the due penalty for their error.
But I would suggest that if you think that Protestantism in the broader sense isn't being taken seriously any more, or that Catholics have just won, or are in a healthier position overall, you may be in a bubble. Evangelical Protestants are probably the healthiest large church tradition in America.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
In a purely descriptive sense, taking all value judgements out of it:
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Is it true that your posting on the Motte focuses almost entirely on Jews?
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Is it true that your attitude towards Jews (both as individuals and as a community) is extremely and consistently negative?
I note that in your post, you responded exclusively to the accusation of obsession, and not at all to the accusation of hostility. I think that's a dodge on your part, so I restate the question.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
What is your explanation for the fact that armies need to teach men to kill, and that most men display considerable resistance to it, and require intensive training? The Grossman argument, in On Killing, is exaggerated, but as far as I'm aware it is nonetheless true that using lethal force - or even just maiming force - on another human being is psychologically difficult for most people, and they have to psych themselves up for it. That's one reason why armies need pre-battle rituals, communal bonding rituals, etc., to prepare soldiers to use lethal force.
It's true that boys and men often enjoy dominance or victory to some extent. For that matter, as far as I can tell women have competitive instincts as well. But it is a big leap from "boys enjoy winning" or "games for boys often involve simulated violence" to "all men yearn to destroy and rape and pillage".
OliveTapenade
5d ago
What, are you claiming victory because I find you annoying? What sort of point is that?
I have made a criticism of your posting habits on the Motte that you have entirely refused to engage with. You could try to defend yourself in two ways. You could either claim that my description of your posting is inaccurate - that you aren't obsessed with Jews, or that you aren't unrelentingly hostile to them. Or you could claim that, granting that my description of your posts is true (if admittedly framed in a way critical of you), the behaviour that I describe is not bad. Maybe you think that everyone should be obsessed with Jews, and that your hostility to them is justified because they are actually that bad.
You've done neither. All you've done is claim that I'm "just offended" or that I'm "upset". That's not an argument. That's childish.
The closest you get to a response is the suggestion that your focus is "an appropriate level of discourse surrounding Jews", so, I take that to be the second way. Do you grant that it's correct that 1) you are extremely focused on Jews and post almost exclusively about them, and 2) your attitude toward Jews, both as individuals and as a community, is extraordinarily hostile? Is your defense that Jews are important enough as to merit this obsessive focus, and that they are bad enough to merit this extraordinary hostility?
OliveTapenade
6d ago
One of my experiences with QCs is that when one of my posts gets one, it usually isn't a post that I thought was insightful. It's often an explanation or a taxonomy of something that seems obvious to me, but which is not obvious to anyone else. If I look at my QCs, they're for things like the internal dynamics of church politics, or for nitpicky details about the Chinese language, or something else in one of my areas of expertise.
It may sound too obvious to be worth saying, but what seems insightful to you as a writer is probably not what seems insightful to readers. A post is more likely to get a QC if the reader feels that they have learned something.
I note that the insight doesn't even have to come from the contributor. I remember feeling a bit guilty for getting a QC for the Wolf Totem post, and I myself contributed very little there. It was just that I'd read a book that the average Mottizen probably hasn't. But that's enough. As long as what's shared is something that people want to read, or which gives them a view of the universe they didn't have before, that's enough.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
This post is exclusively quibbling a debate from a year ago - I merely gave two example of past debate, one in which I made the final post and one in which you made the final post, and I said explicitly that a conversation doesn't have to go forever.
What I do think is that what crushedoranges said further up in the thread is true. Crushedoranges said:
Your protest rings hollow because you can seemingly not talk about any subject without bringing them up!
I challenge you to go a month - even a week! - without connecting the subject at hand to the perfidy and scheming of the Hebrew race. And this is a challenge that I believe you will fail because my Noticing powers didn't just stop at FBI statistics.
And:
If you feel that you're the prophet in the wilderness in this, then you are obviously not here to debate, but to preach: and are self-evidentially an unserious person. There's really no good reason to seriously consider anything you have to say because you have a monomaniacal zeal on this one topic that you will never give ground on.
Amadan also said:
People have done that. You ghost when you lose the debate, and then come back to repeat the exact same talking points a few weeks later. You've done this often enough that no one who has the wherewithal to debate you is willing to do it again, so you claim victory because no one will debate you and you pretend your arguments haven't been thoroughly dispensed with multiple times, going back years.
I believe these points are substantially true, and the fact that all you attempt to contest is the relatively trivial charge of whether you have "ghosted" a debate seems to me to be just further evidence of your fundamental unseriousness.
My accusation against you is that you are obsessed with Jews and either unable or uninterested in posting on any other topic, that you always take the most hostile interpretation of anything ever done by a Jewish person and generalise about Jewish people on that basis, and that your larger case against Jews or Judaism is a cobbled-together hodgepodge of isolated references, in the manner of a conspiracy theorist, isolated from any good-faith engagement with either Jewish individuals or Jews as a cultural and religious community.
At times people, myself included, have engaged with you and in my opinion at least made a solid case against you, and what you usually do is reply with a few of the same strung-together references and scary implications, then vanish for a week or two, and then return and keep repeating the same points again, unchanged. The natural result is for people like myself to just conclude that there is no point to engaging with you. It is always the same thing, it is always flawed in the same way, and smashing one's head into the brick wall is neither interesting nor enjoyable.
('Scary implications' is how I would sum up the linked discussion about the person in The Atlantic last year - you take the innocuous example of a Jew opposed to anti-semitism and implied from that wild theories about the supposed malice or racial hostility of the Jewish people overall. In this very post you engage in a motte-and-bailey. There's a highly-defensible motte along the lines of "there are lots of Jews in America, Jews are a successful group who are particularly concentrated in media industries, topics of concern to Jews tend to get more coverage", which I myself stated, but you use this to jump to a bailey of "the media is an organ of Jewish ethnonationalist propaganda". That, I think, is dishonest. But this is what you always do. Every possible observation involving Jewish people, to you, must be interpreted in the most negative light possible. Every instance of a Jew caring about other Jews, or even just a Jew who doesn't want to get beaten up for being a Jew, is evidence of their communal malevolence. There does not appear to be anything a Jewish person could do to avoid your hostility. They are pre-convicted.)
Anyway, maybe you want to nitpick only the charge of ghosting. It is true that you have engaged in discussions and left those discussions even while the other person was still making a case, but as I said, I'm not actually going to judge that too harshly. I explained in the above post what I do judgely harshly, and I think it stands.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
You have, for instance, engaged in debate with me and ceased responding.
That in itself is not bad - there are examples of the reverse, where I don't bother responding to a final comment by you. A conversation does not have to go forever.
It is, however, I think absolutely true that 1) you are consistently obsessed with Jews, to a conspiratorial degree, 2) you are unrelentingly hostile to Jews, and no matter how innocuous the behaviour of a Jew, you always attribute the worst possible motives both to the individual Jew and to the wider Jewish people, 3) you do not debate in good faith, but rather flit between unrelated claims in the manner of a conspiracy theory, connecting dots centuries and cultures apart into a theory of Jewish malignancy that you are committed to prior to any examination of evidence, and 4) you are uninterested in learning or any kind of intellectual growth.
Like Chesterton's madman (from the introduction only), I think your mind moves in small, self-contained circles:
Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner. Doubtless he could be vanquished in mere reason, and the case against him put logically. But it can be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms. He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.
I hesitated to even make this comment, because I'm one of those who, as Amadan mentioned, has debated you and since concluded that there is no point doing it again.
Please consider what this says about you and your posting habits.
Look, crushedoranges was warned for criticising you. There's a chance I get warned as well, since this post is only discussing a member here who I do not think makes worthwhile contributions to the Motte. Technically it is not against the Motte's rules to obsessively hate Jews. But at the very least, it would be more interesting if you could find at least one other hobby.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
AI improves that. If your drones can't be jammed because they're autonomous and can find targets on their own, that's a critical military advantage. If your radar software gets optimized by some black-box AI to counter whatever arcane modification the enemy made to their jamming software, that's a major military advantage. Optimization of complex systems in unintuitive domains is a strongsuit of AI. See AI-designed computer chips, Google has been doing that for a while. Modern AI systems are also useful for controlling high energy plasma in fusion reactor chambers, predicting the weather (obvious military and economic significance) and countless other complex domains. Cyberwarfare is another obvious domain where AI is relevant: spear-phishing, reconnaissance, actual infiltrations...
Let me ask a practical question. That's a lot of if statements you made there.
Has AI actually done any of those things? The specific examples you give of things that already exist are mostly speculative - all I can find about AI-designed computer chips, for instance, are hype stories in pop science magazines, rather than anything credible, and even they include the note that most of the AI designs did not work.
In general I am skeptical of the argument that goes, "I can tell it's valuable and useful because people are paying billions for it!" In a sense that proves that it's 'valuable', insofar as you can define value in terms of what people are willing to pay for, but none of that proves that it's useful. People are willing to pay vast amounts of money for obviously worthless things on a regular basis - NFTs are one infamous example.
I can concede a handful of highly technical niche applications - protein folding, plasma confinement, etc. - though even there I'm a little cautious. (I don't understand those technical fields, but in fields that I do understand, where AI is being hailed as a major breakthrough, the breakthroughs once analysed turn out to be, at best, heavily overrated.) But the AI-believer position, in cases like this, are that AI is literally going to make labour obsolete, or that AI is going to become superintelligent, achieve god-like power, and either usher us all to utopia or to utter destruction. And that's a position that is so far in excess of any reasonable estimation of what this technology does that I have to raise my eyebrows. Or yell at a blog post on the internet, I suppose.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I think what he's saying is that techno-futurism is not perceived as a religion because techno-futurists do not make metaphysical or fundamental claims.
Personally I think this is mainly a semantic difference. It's not clear to me that there's a difference between "X is not perceived as a religion because X does not do these things typical of religion" and "X is not a religion". Isn't religion defined, at least extensionally, by the things typical of religion?
I don't think the concept of religion helps very much here. Better to just say that AI hype is a form of collective irrationality or delusive behaviour, if that's what he means.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I think this includes a number of questionable assumptions built into the idea of 'human level intelligence'. The models we have now are very good at doing some things that humans struggle with, but are also completely incapable of some things that are trivial for humans. There isn't a unified 'intelligence' where we are at a specific level, and machines are approaching. Rather, human intelligence is a highly-correlated cluster of aptitudes; aptitudes which do not necessarily correlate in machines. It seems at least plausible to me that existing AI models continue to get better at the sorts of things they are currently good at without ever becoming the kind of thing we would recognise as intelligent.
Now on one level that doesn't matter - I'm just suggesting that AI might keep improving without ever becoming AGI. But AI doesn't need to become AGI to cause technological unemployment, or to give some nation or other a major military advantage, or whatever else it is we're worried about. But I'd still like to know what the mechanism we're predicting for that unemployment, or military advantage, or whatever else might be, because it is not immediately obvious how a language model produces any of those things.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
To be honest the existence and shape of much of this discourse continues to baffle me. There's a discourse around AI causing unemployment, even though AI thus far has not caused any unemployment, and there isn't an obvious mechanism for it doing so. Isn't the evidence so far that incorporating AI into a workplace increases workload, rather than decreases it? It's always possible that this changes, but I'd at least like to see the argument that it will, rather than it just being assumed.
The pattern seems to play out time and time again - Scott's last post about China made me want to scream something. Where is the reason to think that AI is so militarily and economically significant at all? What if this is all nonsense? Isn't this all based on a vision of AI technology that has no justification in reality?
Maybe there's an AI 101 argument out there somewhere that everybody else has read and which passed me by entirely, but right now I continue to be incredibly confused by this discourse. We made systems that can generate text and images, but which are consistently pretty crap at both. Given time I can imagine them becoming somewhat less crap, but where do they pivot or transform into the sorts of devices that could cause massive technological unemployment, or change a war between great powers?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Declaring Maimonides the only Jewish authority who counts is no less arbitrary than the rest of this cherry-picking. Maimonides is a very influential figure historically, yes, but this is the rough equivalent of pointing out that Thomas Aquinas is a Doctor of the Church and therefore declaring that the only thing you need to read to understand Catholicism is the Summa Theologiae. Much of what Maimonides taught was disputed even in his own time - for instance, his thirteen principles were immediately contested by other rabbis and do not enjoy consensus support today.
Moreover, to what extent are Maimonides' teachings even active, living forces in the lives of contemporary Jews? Even a very strict Orthodox Jew does not apply everything ever penned by Maimonides, no less than the most devout tradcath applies everything in Aquinas. Insofar as you are trying to make generalisations about Orthodox Jews today, I think it is necessary to look at what Orthodox Jews actually believe, and how Orthodox Jews actually behave.
Looking at actual behaviour is where I come to when it comes to study. Do Orthodox Jews actually try to prevent non-Jews from studying the Talmud? Really? That does not seem to actually be the case in practice, and I think it is telling that your case otherwise is conspiratorial - you assert that Orthodox Jews are just lying to people all the time. What's more likely? That the entire tradition is engaged in a universal deceit that you've seen through just by reading a book that your own argument would imply should be concealed from you? Or that you're talking nonsense?
Last of all, I am deeply skeptical of you drawing a distinction that excludes Conservative and Reform Jews here, for two reasons. Firstly, in my experience Conservative and to an extent Reform Jews absolutely study Torah, Talmud, and the entirety of their tradition. Secondly, I think that in actual practice yourself and the Motte's other anti-semites (pardon my language, but I do believe it's accurate) do not restrict your criticism of Jews to Orthodox Jews. I think Orthodox Jews are the motte, and you're probably going to go back to the bailey of opposing all Jews.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I can find you more quotes from the Talmud regarding the ban on showing mercy to idol-worshippers (a category in which they universally and firmly place Trinitarian Christians).
The category of shituf in Jewish thought is more complex and contested than that.
That said, I think Amadan has the correct approach here. Let me ask a question, though I'm really just echoing him. Why should I believe that your cherry-picking of nasty-sounding passages from the Talmud is somehow more constitutive of modern Judaism, more accurate as a description of what actually-existing Jews are like, than what I learn from actually talking to Jews? Why is your interpretation of Jewish tradition more trustworthy than that of the rabbis that I have spoken to and who have explained their point of view to me?
I'm both a Christian and a veteran of the New Atheist flame wars of the 2000s, so I am extremely familiar with the genre of hostile outsiders cherry-picking nasty quotes and then condescending to explain my own tradition to me. This inclines me to sympathy when Jews (or for that matter Muslims, who are also frequently exposed to this) face malicious outsiders chucking a bunch of quotes at them, and wearily explain that, no, those quotes are not an accurate or proportional representation of either their faith or their way of life, and that if I'd like to know more about what they really do, I am welcome to come to synagogue or Torah study or other social events and learn more.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Yes, absolutely. There's definitely an interpretation you can take of the Reformers as people trying to rationalise and straighten out the immense, frequently convoluted, tangle of late medieval Christianity. You can't read Calvin or Luther for long without noticing the systematising urge that drives them.
Even so, I tend to think that in any group of humans of significant size, there are going to be people of a more rationalising, systematising bent, and there are going to be people of a more mystical bent, and as such any mature religious tradition is going to have ways to accommodate both types of people. (And for that matter further types - there are people whose spirituality is almost entirely based in practical work, for instance, or those for whom everything is about community membership.) Since the 16th century, both Catholicism and Protestantism have undoubtedly become mature religious traditions unto themselves, and therefore both have found ways, on their own terms, to accommodate both the rationalists and the mystics.
I think taking Snoke as the 'main bad guy' of TFA isn't really treating that movie fairly. You can see what TFA is doing in outline - Snoke is Palpatine, Ren is Vader, Hux is Tarkin - and even within that outline, Snoke is barely in the film. Ren and Hux are the primary villains of TFA, and they remain the primary villains in TLJ.
On the EU - yes, I think the lower barrier to entry made a big difference. Novels and comics are much easier and cheaper to produce than films or television series, which allowed for a lot more of the experimentation we're talking about. There were limits to what could be done with major film characters, but the specific example you give doesn't seem like a great one, to me? Luke was paired up with a bunch of different characters, and eventually I think the fan and writer consensus settled on Mara as the best one, and they went with that. Mara wasn't the result of a higher authority pushing an agenda. (As far as I'm aware, not only did Zahn not originally intend her as a love interest, it was actually Kevin J. Anderson who encouraged that idea to Zahn, which is an impressive degree of cooperation considering that it was also Anderson who'd also developed Callista more, after her introduction by Barbara Hambly.) By contrast, the Jaina ship war was settled by higher authority - KJA had probably pushed her more toward Zekk, but Troy Denning liked Jag Fel more, so she ended up with Jag. So that seems like a case where the core, film character went through a more organic, evolutionary development, while the EU-original character struggled with top-down interference.
One option might have been, as you say, to try and mine what worked best in the EU and turn that into films. I'm not sure how well that would have worked. It has generally worked for superheroes, but superheroes are already a mess of different continuities, and films have been considered their own separate continuities from core Marvel or DC canon since the 70s. More usually, reboots premised on simplifying and retelling the best stories from a convoluted and mature continuity fail.
I think I'd distinguish between a hypothetical ST-as-EU-reboot, that is, the ST as a kind of 'Star Wars Ultimates', which I think would probably have failed, and the true MCU or superhero film strategy. The latter is what I think Ross Douthat recommends here - "treat Darth Vader like Batman". There are many Batman films, but for the most part they don't even try to be in continuity with each other. They're all just different takes on the one central idea. Would that have worked? Maybe. But it's a different strategy because it doesn't involve trying to tie it all into one integrated universe.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
You wouldn't count Le Guin's work as being among golden age classics? Or by the golden age, are you restricting yourself to the 50s and early 60s? Again I'm just a bit curious what you'd think of specifically.
I'm not really convinced by the AI example - I think the LLM essay you link on Twitter doesn't really read like an SSC article. And I'm more inclined to take Paul Schrader's comment as an indictment of film executives than a defense of LLMs. Obviously you and I are going to have a hard time arguing literary taste with each other, but I would say, at least, that my experience with LLM writing (and I have spent some time prompting it, writing, roleplaying, etc.) has been that it is only capable of a very superficial, formulaic level of production.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Yes, which is why I said elsewhere that Kathleen Kennedy is ultimately at fault for letting Johnson do this shit. Abrams shouldn't have been allowed to make ANH 2.0. But, once that's done, Johnson shouldn't have been allowed to fuck it up even more.
Sure, I'll absolutely agree that the core problem is the overall management of the franchise and lack of vision.
But I'm not sure that following up a stale retread of ANH with a stale retread of ESB is that much of a betrayal, really? That sounds more like he understood the brief. To the extent that he tried to do anything even a bit more interesting than just making the OT again (and again I think the extent to which TLJ is subversive or radical is wildly over-stated), I'm more inclined to give him credit for at least trying something. Sure, it didn't really succeed, but I give a film-maker more credit for trying to do something, even if they fail, than I do one for just painting by numbers. If nothing else, a TLJ that just painted by numbers would have done nothing to arrest the decline.
Quarrels between authors are, as you say, not unknown from the EU. EU author-feuding or attempts to undermine or pull back on each other were common - Traviss and the Mando hissy fit, Troy Denning misunderstanding or trying to retcon NJO, Timothy Zahn sniping at Dark Empire in Hand of Thrawn, KJA writing Callista and the various Luke shipping wars, you name it. I feel a bit ambivalent about all that in hindsight. It was undoubtedly bad from the perspective of maintaining a uniform level of quality, but it also meant that the EU, lacking a single dominating authorial voice, became a case of survival of the fittest. The Luke shipping wars were not resolved by some voice from above coordinating all the others - instead a number of different authors wrote love interests for Luke and eventually the one that achieved the most buy-in from the fans was eventually given the nod. (Ironically, the only one that wasn't originally written as a love interest.) Callista and Gaeriel and all the others have just been dismissed with "yeah, the early EU was weird". The Mandalorian stuff is a huge mess and there are multiple contradictory ideas of who the Mandalorians are as a people - Traviss and Filoni are probably the biggest influences, but let's not underestimate the TotJ comics, the KotOR portrayals, even Republic Commando - and generally the ideas that resonated were taken up by subsequent authors, and the rest abandoned. The EU was a big pool where different authors sank or swam, and because Lucasfilm back in the day were quite generous with the license, a lot of people tried different ideas. And now in hindsight, well, ask any EU fan and they will give you a curated list of the good bits, and those are the parts that live on.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Well, the first response that went through my head was something like, "well, if you're content with AI slop for entertainment, you do you, but that's cold comfort to those of us who expect more than that". That's probably too mean and contemptuous a thought, though, so let me back up and try again.
I've yet to see anything to convince me that AI can write a half-decent film script. Even if, for the sake of argument, it can do better than the worst human writers, I'm trying not to be content with the bottom of the barrel, or even the middle of the barrel. George Lucas definitely has limitations as a writer and director, though I think some of them are overstated. He struggles with some types of dialogue more than others; and at any rate, I think much of that is compensated for by his immense skill as a visual director. Lucas can compose a scene or a shot incredibly well, far better than most of his contemporaries. For films like Star Wars, which are substantially about immersion, awe, and atmosphere, I can't underrate that.
I'm a bit curious what you mean by 'some proper SF'? What sort of SF do you think AI would make possible? What are you hoping for?
I mean, if your point were just that boys like competitive games, then sure, that's obviously true. I also think that girls like competitive games, though I think that boys and girls play different types of games because they tend to complete in different arenas. For boys it's usually some variant on defeating someone else, overcoming someone else, achieving a concrete goal faster or more efficient than them, and so on; for girls it's usually more about achieving attention. It's what I call the masculine and feminine modes.
Where I disagree with you proximately is with the claim that all men, innately, have a strong predisposition to violence, and that it is exclusively modern, Western, implicitly white society that socialises that out of people. I don't think you've provided significant evidence of that, and as far as I'm aware there's evidence suggesting that ancient people as well required ritual and training to psych themselves up to acts of violence. This is true on the personal level (as discussed regarding retributive violence) as well as on the communal level (every fighting organisation or warband in history has those combat rituals). You make some evolutionary claims, but books like Man the Hunted make a reasonably convincing case, to my mind, that humans like many animals evolved with a greater emphasis on avoiding costly conflict than engaging in it.
Where I disagree with you in a more ultimate sense is with the idea that any of this has anything to do with Somalis running day care scams. It may well be that successfully running a scam feels good. Certainly I think white people of my acquaintance feel good when we manage to get more money from the government than we ought to have. But the claim that Somalis are somehow much more keen on this kind of scam whereas white Americans have domesticated themselves and become wimps far outruns any kind of evidence or even plausible speculation on your part.
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