OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
It would probably be more clear in Latin letters - it reads Kyrie, poieson me organon tes agapes sou.
It means, well, exactly what he said, but you can probably recognise words like organon (instrument, tool) and agape (love). One resonance that you get in Greek that carries over well into English is that organon can mean any kind of tool, for any purpose, but also suggests a musical instrument (and thus is the source of English 'organ'), so it brings to mind playing God's love as if it is music.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
I don't see the connection?
The point I would make - and perhaps I wasn't transparent enough about it? - is that I see no evidence whatsoever that it is 'conventional wisdom' that 'Israel wants to drag the United States into a likely globally-destabilizing conflict on the basis of their insane, racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths'.
I think that SS and his crowd are, to put it bluntly, anti-semites who would oppose anything involving Israel on principle. They just hate Jews. The fact that increasing numbers of Americans are critical of Israeli actions does not indicate that those Americans accept the anti-semitic position. It's entirely possible, even likely, for one to believe that America should not risk getting further involved in conflicts in the Middle East, and that therefore America should either back off from involvement with, or should actively seek to restrain, Israeli aggression, without believing the SS argument about Jews.
Hence my question. I think SS is eliding the difference between declining support for Israel and increasing support for anti-semitism, so to speak. The 'Anti-Semitic Right' school of thought on Israel is both lunatic on its own terms and not accepted by the wider public. I see no strong reason to believe that public criticism of Israeli actions, and specifically criticism of the Iran strikes, indicates growing sympathy for anti-semitism as such.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It's now just accepted conventional wisdom... Everybody knows now.
Define 'conventional wisdom' and 'everybody'.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It seems pretty easy to me to say that the cruelty is bad and then just... leave it there? There's no need to go any further or give it any more thought than that.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm inclined to think of Romans 3 and Romans 12.
3:8:
And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), "Let us do evil so that good may come"? Their condemnation is deserved!
And 12:17-21:
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
I can sense that some criticism of Aella, or this defense of public shaming, is going to come from a perspective informed by Christian morality. So I feel it is worth the reminder that this sort of consequentialism is directly and explicitly condemned.
I disapprove of Aella's behaviour. But the command is clear: do not do evil that good may come, and do not repay evil for evil.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm not sure I have a lot to say here. I disapprove of Aella's life choices. I think she made poor decisions, particularly from a moral perspective. But I also very much disapprove of bullying and online cruelty, and she's no doubt entirely correct that a lot of cowardly troglodytes lashed out at her. I can hold all these positions at the same time. Aella made bad choices, but she should not have been bullied over them. I hope that getting off the internet is good for her.
I don't know, it just seems like a pretty straightforward situation to me. I don't approve of immoral means being used, even in the service of goals I might ultimately agree with. Promiscuity is bad, but internet hate is also bad. They are all bad at once.
For what it's worth I was aware of Aella only secondhand, by way of rationalists occasionally mentioning or citing her. I have no particular strong opinion of her. I think she conducted her sexual life badly, but then I think that about an awful lot of people. I think that about Scott Alexander himself. It's all much the same error. None of it licenses other people to attack them in this disorganised way.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Chesterton was a localist and a distributist - his political views strongly tend towards small government. He criticises both capitalists and socialists for concentrating property in the hands of the few who can then wield arbitrary power over individual citizens. As an ethical matter, I think Chesterton is also conspicuously opposed to bullies. He presents himself as a champion of the ordinary, no-longer-free Englishman who craves a return to ancient liberties.
I would say that MAGA involves a centralisation of power in a single office, or more properly a single man, and that man is grossly intemperate and vengeful. I'd guess that Chesterton would see Trump as akin to one of the more demagogic kings of England, vicious in his lusts, but nonetheless opposed to the suffocating bureaucratic-parliamentary class that the common man sees as a more direct enemy.
In his Short History of England, Chesterton writes that "the case for despotism is democratic". I suspect he would see Trump as a 'democratic despot' along these lines, and Chesterton's observation that "[despotism's] cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak" might enable him to regard some of Trump's excesses with a measure of sympathy, even if the man himself remains a despot. Thus, still in Short History:
This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the virtues of a despot is distance. It is "the little tyrant of the fields" that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire.
Naturally I do not think Chesterton would be at all sympathetic to the American left, especially as that left has become increasingly institutionalised and regulatory. I am sure he would see that as a thicket of weeds choking the natural liberty of the people. That is simple an instance of The Servile State.
So I can see Chesterton having a kind of, if not affection precisely, at least understanding of Trump, as a kind of poetic expression of the American genius. So perhaps Trump is a Nero figure - someone whose own soul is perhaps contemptible, but whose effect, insofar as it weakens America's de facto 'nobility', is good.
I am not sure how far he'd go with that in practical terms, though, because Chesterton's distributism was very much concerned with the real distribution of property, and as much as Trump has symbolically offended an elite class, he has done very little to remedy the actual concentration of property in America.
I offered via Chesterton a kind of qualified defense of despotism, but I am bound also to mention his description of the same in Heretics:
Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. For that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them, but because he does not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV. because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.
(This leads him on to a defense of 'hereditary despotism', i.e. monarchy.)
If we interpret MAGA as a type of Caesarism, which I think is about as reasonable a comparison as is available to us, I think this gives us a look at some of Chesterton's attitudes towards that. The worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice.
If you'll pardon a long quote, one of the next passages of Heretics strikes me as particularly apposite:
Everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally undemocratic quality. In religion and morals we should admit, in the abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as, or perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant. But in practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all. We are always talking about the sin of intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious that the poor have it more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the rich have it more than the poor. We are always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or prophet was something quite different. The mediaeval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated. The old tyrants had enough insolence to despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them. It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that admonished the gentleman. And just as we are undemocratic in faith and morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters, undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, “What laws shall we make?” In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, “What laws can we obey?” A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been. But even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason. But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy—that is, against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws against heresy—that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be likely to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad, they become equally frivolous. The case against the governing class of modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they always omit themselves.
I think you can trace from this the Chestertonian criticism of the academic left and the bureaucratic state, and insofar as MAGA is opposed to that, they and Chesterton have a common enemy.
But Chesterton was never good at biting his tongue and making common cause against a common enemy - to H. G. Wells' great frustration - and I can't see him joining or supporting a movement that, by his own lights, is weak and cowardly.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
They did see that, though? I'm not sure what world you live in if you think Chesterton wasn't living through the decline and destabilisation of the systems that he thought were essential for civilised society. He explicitly thinks English society is increasingly run by a cabal of vicious, anti-human elites and is therefore sinking back into barbarism.
So I am pretty confident that he wouldn't end up like MAGA.
He did get desperate a few times - I believe he once visited Italy and said nice things about Mussolini - but on the whole, I don't see the resemblance.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I question to what extent those people even are thought leaders in the context of MAGA or the modern Republican base. It's hard to see Burke or Chesterton approving of the kind of reckless destabilisation that you get with Trump, no matter how far you stretch the analogy.
To my mind they're just totally different ideologies. There are always some differences between the way a movement's elite conceives of its mission and the way the masses do, but I think this is far enough that it's fair to say there is no meaningful resemblance.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Im sorry, but i dont see how anyone could reasonably engage with the work of current conservative thought leaders like Victor Davis Hansen or Thomas Sowell, past leaders like Limbaugh, Brietbart, and Buckley, or old lions like CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, Douglas, Burke, Smith, Et Al. and come away with the impression they lack "ideology, vision and a moral compass"
Those people do, certainly, but none of those people seem remotely represented by what currently calls itself the conservative movement in the United States. Limbaugh, maybe.
But if I compare MAGA to, well, Lewis, Chesterton, Kipling, Burke, or even old Adam Smith, I doubt you will find much ideological overlap, if any at all.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
That was the joke, surely?
OliveTapenade
13d ago
This also matches, for what it's worth, personal experience of Ethiopian Orthodox churches - humble, friendly, and they take very good care of their places of worship. I have nothing but positive things to say about them, and their attitude towards non-Ethiopian churches, at least in the West, is very gracious.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I beg your pardon? This is just unmerited aggression. I expanded just below, giving some reasons to be skeptical of your conclusion (it is inconsistent with anecdotal experience, and it is inconsistent with what I understand to be a well-replicated observation, that women care less about appearance than men), and then also speculating about some alternative explanations for the limited observation that you made. I consider this a good-faith engagement.
And your response is... to call me an ugly loser?
Looking further down the thread, this seems to be your general response to anybody who expresses skepticism of your claim, no matter how politely or well-reasoned. "You don't understand because you're an ugly beta, not a chad like the guys in this gallery."
Probably some of the other posters are correct and you're simply trolling. Well, I hope you had your fun.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
I'm far from convinced of this - if I think about what women of my acquaintance tell me about male attractiveness, and how it syncs up with my own judgements, it certainly doesn't seem as if I'm blind to what they like.
I actually find your argument here a bit odd because it's a well-replicated finding, surely, that women care less about physical attractiveness than men do. Attitude and bearing are worth a lot more than symmetrical facial features. Women do care about appearance, but as far as I'm aware, less intensely than men do.
In this case specifically I wonder more about the algorithm. I don't know how Tinder works specifically, but I've used other dating apps before and most of them have some kind of recommendation function, where the app will suggest particular people to you. In most apps I've seen you can pay money to the app to get yourself bumped higher up the queue. So for all I know, X random man with some ridiculous number of hits is just some guy who got really lucky on the algorithm - who had the Tinder equivalent of going viral on Twitter. But you shouldn't make sweeping generalisations from a weird outlier. It's like seeing someone win the lottery and assuming that it's due to his in-born talent for personal finance. For all you know it's a combination of random chance and buying a lot of tickets.
As I said, I don't know how Tinder works specifically. I understand that Tinder is a casual hook-up app, and I have no interest in that, so I've never used it. (Though that probably also distorts the results and makes them unrepresentative of most people's romantic preferences and experiences.) I'm speculating wildly here, but I suspect no more wildly than you are.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
There isn't nearly enough context in that gallery to prove your point.
To be honest, what strikes me most is how unattractive the guys in that gallery are. Gosh, doesn't Finn look like a git? A lot of those guys look like total pillocks. I am glad I don't look like any of those guys, and I regularly get complimented on my appearance by women in real life.
What I see here is an extreme generalisation with firstly little evidence that it's true on dating apps, and secondly little reason to believe that even if it's true on dating apps, it generalises to anything in real life.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
Any kind of conservatism? I'm wondering what kinds those are?
From my perspective, it doesn't make sense to describe Trump himself as a conservative of any kind - he's a populist demagogue and I'd say closer to the revolutionary of the spectrum than the conservative end. But of course it's possible for a non-conservative to, however inadvertently, create the space for conservatism to survive.
The question is what that is. What kinds of conservatism are we talking about? The conservatism of the American experiment itself, i.e. a kind of classical liberalism? A sort of cultural or social conservatism embedded in community and religious life that goes back long before the American Revolution? Reaganite fusionism? I think this kind of dialogue often struggles because 'conservative' can mean a lot of different things in the American context, some of which outright contradict each other.
At any rate, I notice you didn't answer my question. If you had a time machine and went back to 1945, what would you advise 'conservatives' (who are they, specifically?) at the time to do? Would you give advice to Thomas Dewey or Robert Taft? Maybe William Jenner? What would it be?
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I suppose I count as defending Hanania - I don't particularly like him, but I think hate for him here is absurdly overblown.
I will just straight-up defend Yglesias, though. I don't find him particularly annoying and he strikes me as effectively advocating for his preferred positions in a way that admits of rational argument and counter-argument. Well done him.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
"Don't lose" is not the most clear or transparent piece of advice.
What should conservatives have done starting from 1945?
OliveTapenade
19d ago
Okay, I'll give you that one, that was probably the best reply you could have written.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
Ironically this is the kind of comment that makes me like Hanania more out of contrariness, because this sort of bile itself is repulsive.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
Well, I can definitely understand pursuing a parasocial internet vendetta. I hate-read a few authors and feel my share of schadenfreude when things go badly for them. But for a top-level like this, I'd ideally want the self-awareness to realise that not everybody knows who this person is, and the understanding that their importance may not be immediately obvious.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
Could I get a brief explanation of who David Cole is, and why anybody should care?
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Lewis actually saw it with Tolkien, who was not a fan either. That article is pretty clickbaity, but even so, I concede that I smile at the thought of Lewis and Tolkien walking into the cinema, watching Snow White, and then complaining to each other all the way back to the pub.
OliveTapenade
23d ago
What might have come of it if the man had been educated - or even brought up in a decent society?
This one?
She objects specifically to bullying and cruelty.
I, from the outside, do not object to people disapproving of her sexual behaviour, nor stating that disapproval. I myself just did both of those. I don't think people should obsess over her, stalk her, regularly post vicious comments about her, and so on. Just disapprove, ignore, and get on with life.
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