OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Oh, not the Iran war specifically. That does not have and has never had popular support. I meant the American-Israel alliance in general.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
The question of sources of credibility is an interesting one - it hasn't stopped, for instance, Saudi Arabia from cooling its hostility to Israel. But then the Saudis have alternative sources of Islamic legitimacy, from their role as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Governing/protecting the Hejaz provides a kind of de facto legitimacy, whereas the Iranians have to fight a bit harder to establish their credentials, especially since, as Shia, it's harder to be accepted by the Sunni-majority Islamic world.
In the US, I don't like the phrase "entrenched Jewish capture", which I think sounds a bit too conspiratorial or pejorative, even though I think it is true that American support from Israel clearly has a lot to do with the facts that there are a lot of Jews in America, American Jews are a disproportionately successful and well-represented demographic, and Jews have extremely high levels of support for Israel. I don't think this is malevolent or in any way democratic bad faith, particularly because American support for Israel is substantially a result of American Jews successfully convincing other Americans to support Israel. (Notably as of these 2024 polls, Protestant support for Israel, at 66%, is very close to Jewish support for Israel at 73%.) It's not a case of Jews covertly manipulating America into doing something most Americans oppose. They convinced most Americans of something, and then America did it. That is democratic politics working as intended!
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I don't put any faith in Trump to take advantage of good opportunities he has, but in the abstract I would say, at least, that a re-ordering of American alliances in the Middle East seems like a good idea.
Part of what's baffling about the current situation is that, in pure geo-strategic terms, there is no particularly compelling reason for Iran and the United States to hate one another. Neither is there a particularly compelling reason for Israel and Iran to hate one another. Neither is there a very good reason for the United States to be ride-or-die with Israel.
In some ways it's quite sad - historically Persia has been relatively friendly to Jews, at least by the standards of the region. The current hatreds in the region are almost entirely post-WWII. The Americans supported the British with the Mossadegh coup back in the 50s, and then bungled responses to the revolution in 1979, and there's lingering hatred from that even though there isn't a very good reason today why America and Iran can't get along. If the Americans can be good friends with the Saudis, well, the Iranians certainly aren't any worse than the Saudis, morally speaking. At times the Iranians have signalled willingness to cooperate as well - didn't they offer to be supportive with regard to America's invasion of Afghanistan, right up until Bush declared them 'Axis of Evil', unnecessarily making enemies?
As regards Israel, it's partly symbolic - Iran has ambitions of being (and tries to present itself as) the de facto leader of the Islamic world, and because there is incredibly strong grassroots sympathy for Palestine in the Islamic world, presenting themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause is good for that. (Meanwhile potential rivals like the Saudis undermine themselves by slowly normalising relations with Israel.) Obviously the hatred is partly sincere as well, but my point is that the conflict between Iran and Israel is largely not over material interests.
And of course for the last leg, it is pretty unclear what America gets out of its alliance with Israel. The Israelis do not seem like very good allies. I cannot blame Israel for prioritising Israeli interests first, or taking the best deal they can get, but there certainly seems to be room for America to ask for more out of the arrangement, or failing that, to scale back their support for Israel.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
That was my (very rough, uninformed) understanding of the famous Obama Iran deal - good for Iran, good for the United States, bad for Israel. So naturally Israel has leapt at every chance it can get to sabotage it.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
You can still criticise Lowe, surely, for taking actions that make it more likely that people he opposes will be elected and will govern his country. If he thinks Reform would be better in government than Labour, and his actions increase the odds of Labour winning, then isn't he undermining what he himself believes is best for the country out of a personal grudge? It seems reasonable to criticise that.
This is all downstream of Britain having an awful FPTP multi-party electoral system, of course.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
It probably is correct to say, though, that the British upper class considers itself distinct from the rest of the population, which it does not care about the welfare of that much, and that class does not track neatly to race or ethnicity. Rishi Sunak is upper class - he went to Winchester, and has a first from Oxford. He's in the club. The people in the club care about other people in the club, you know, the right sorts of people, made not only by descent but also by education, lifestyle, and even accent.
In this case, both the perpetrators and the victims are lower class, and therefore unimportant. Class solidarity is much stronger than ethnic solidarity. British uppers do not consider themselves 'one people' with British lowers.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I think the point is that K:D ratio is irrelevant? It's a set of goalposts that gets moved around as needed in order to claim victory. Wars are not sports or video games - you don't win them by racking up points on a board. The important questions here are to do with whether or not the US and Iran have achieved their various war aims.
I am reminded, actually, of past discussions with Americans concerning Afghanistan, and a very strong instinctive refusal to say "we lost". The Taliban won the war in Afghanistan, and the Americans lost, and no number of statistics around casualty ratios can negate that. A war should be measured by how well the participants achieved their goals.
Personally I'm not willing to call Iran yet. I do think that Iran has proven unexpectedly resilient, the US has failed to achieve its goals thus far, and the US is probably going to end up worse off compared to a timeline where it did absolutely nothing, but there is a lot of fog of war and we do not know how theings will end. But thus far I am comfortable saying that this has been bad for the US.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Should we distinguish between medical care, and elder care in general? It's often somewhat blurry, since aged care facilities are at least partially medicalised, but I am thinking about people in their 80s and up who, for example, need assistance showering and toileting, who cannot make their own meals, who need to be accompanied for walks or activities due to high falls risk, who might be on anti-depressants or some other prescription to help cope with cognitive decline and need assistance taking their medication on schedule, and so on.
I would hope we can agree that people in that vulnerable condition should be cared for. Alternatives like "letting them die", or "trusting that families can always take care of them (they can't)", or even something truly drastic and inhumane like "euthanasia for everyone at 75" are going to either produce tremendous innocent suffering, or are radically contrary to most people's moral instincts.
It seems to me that firstly we want some sort of system to provide care for vulnerable elders, secondly we want that system to be well-funded and not an excessive drain on the public purse, and thirdly we want people to work in that system and provide the required care. Of these, the difficult, controversial part is the second one. Maybe tinkering around things like the retirement age is a reasonable step to take; I'm not particularly inclined to argue if you want to bump the retirement age up a year or two. Australia recently bumped it up to 67. There was that recent dispute about this in France.
But I also wanted to say, in response to ThomasDelVasto's comment about "wiping the asses of boomers", that I think that aged care is a necessary and honourable profession.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
I work in elder care myself - can you expand on why you feel negatively about it? I tend to agree that it would be bad for a huge proportion of the population to be involved in it, and that mostly relates to concerns about the birth rate and demographics, but insofar as the elderly population is growing, needing more people to look after them seems inevitable. Lifespans are increasing and medical care is improving, so the number of elderly people is also going to increase.
Unless one wants to bite the bullet and say that increased life expectancies are bad, and it would be better if more people died at 70, there are going to be more elderly people, and through no moral failing of anybody, they will need care. What is your preferred response?
OliveTapenade
14d ago
I'm not sure what point you're making or what this has to do with anything under the sun?
You may well think that the religious right are incorrect, but what you've just said hardly seems to follow from their beliefs. If nothing else, it is demonstrably the case that the religious right do not support endless foreign aid or anti-nationalism. On the contrary, support for high levels of foreign aid or anti-nationalist feeling appear to correlate positively with secularism or irreligion.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
The Didache is from the first century. If there was nothing critical of abortion in early Christianity, that part was added in very early indeed. I think it's just plausible that early Christians considered it too obvious to require mentioning that abortion is a form of murder - you might compare the way that, for instance, early Christian writings on suicide are similar. As far as I can tell it was just considered obvious that suicide falls under the heading of murder.
Regarding life, I grant that there is room to quibble, but insofar as it is scientifically true that conception is the first moment at which a unique, genetically distinct, new organism comes into being, I think it's reasonable for a modern Christian to consider that morally relevant.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
I suspect that in the early Christian imagination, abortion was considered basically a form of infanticide. We know that early Christians were known to do things like rescue exposed infants and raise them, and that seems a similar category. Thus my citation of the Didache above: "you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born".
It is probably worth emphasising that in valuing the lives of children so much, early Christians were themselves being counter-cultural and odd - we've lost this today, but Jesus' comments about children (bring the little children unto me etc.) are shocking in their original context because they were made at a time when children were viewed as significantly more disposable than today.
Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with?
No, but if they believe that the infant in the womb is not a person, such that it can be terminated at any point without guilt, that's something they have in common with leftists, not with conservatives.
(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)
The Didache says, in so many words, "you shall not murder a child by abortion" (Roberts-Donaldson). Is that what you're asking for?
The specific biblical proof-texts include things like Jeremiah 1:5 ("before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you"), but these are more quibble-able, if you're so inclined. Footnote 5 here mentions some of the others.
Augustine, describing sin, writes in On Marriage and Concupiscence, that cruelty and lustfulness, "resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born." This is about a plain a condemnation of abortion as I can imagine.
To personhood specifically, in City of God XXII.12-13, Augustine considers whether aborted infants will be included in the Resurrection, and he considers the question again in Enchiridion 85-6. Here he interestingly admits to ignorance:
And therefore the following question may be very carefully inquired into and discussed by learned men, though I do not know whether it is in man's power to resolve it: At what time the infant begins to live in the womb: whether life exists in a latent form before it manifests itself in the motions of the living being. To deny that the young who are cut out limb by limb from the womb, lest if they were left there dead the mother should die too, have never been alive, seems too audacious. Now, from the time that a man begins to live, from that time it is possible for him to die. And if he die, wheresoever death may overtake him, I cannot discover on what principle he can be denied an interest in the resurrection of the dead.
I take Augustine here as saying, "A late-term infant in the womb is clearly alive, such that killing him or her is murder. I do not know at what moment in the womb the infant begins to live. That question is currently beyond scientific understanding."
Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."
Augustine always frames this in terms of 'life', but the logic seems applicable to personhood, to me? He does not use the exact moral vocabulary that modern thinkers do, but I think the direction of his thought is pretty clear.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
Isn't this just generic "boo outgroup"?
It seems to me that the religious right take a very consistent position on this - it is wrong to kill an innocent person. If the alt-right carve out exceptions, like it's okay to kill pre-natal people, or it's okay to kill people with genetic disorders, or even (implicitly?) it's okay to kill people who are genetically inferior in some other sense, well, they're the ones who would seem to need to justify the inconsistency.
The true religious right, the socially conservative right, has a principle. Do not commit murder. They have stated that principle openly for a long time. For the small, historically new or young group of weirdos constituting the alt-right, or neoreaction, to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.
If anything I think the religious right could more plausibly argue that it's the alt-right, as you describe them, who are pseudo-leftists. If you're going to accuse the religious right of being 'leftists' because they're anti-eugenics, I think they're just as much at liberty to say that you're leftist because you're pro-eugenics, and eugenics was obviously a progressive movement going all the way back to the late 19th century.
OliveTapenade
23d ago
I don't remember Harambe ever being anything other than an annoying internet meme.
Maybe it was different on-the-ground in America, but certainly over here, it was just the dumb internet thing of the hour. It was around briefly, then people got bored and move on. I don't think it had any significance whatsoever.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
It's clearly true that people are more likely to lie in ways that benefit them and less likely to lie in ways that do not benefit them, but even for Crucifixion, the "Criterion of Embarrassment" is based on a lot of assumptions and convenient omissions. It's a rhetorical tactic, not a historical reasoning tool.
For what it's worth, while I agree with you entirely in your dispute with coffee_enjoyer, I would like to nitpick that this isn't true about the criterion of embarrassment.
It's true that the CoE is not treated as absolute. This is why people who deploy it as a gotcha in apologetical contexts are being dishonest. The CoE is probabilistic. In principle, if there's no clear reason to falsify something, it seems more likely to be true, but this is an educated guess based on how well we can model the beliefs and motives of an author. That's a very fallible process, so the CoE is very rarely, in biblical studies, treated as conclusive by itself. It is used alongside half a dozen other criteria to try to build up a picture of what is likely to be true.
I would note that the CoE is not always used in ways friendly to orthodox Christianity. The CoE has sometimes been used to argue in favour of the historicity of the Crucifixion, but it is always used to defend the likely historicity of, for instance, what seemed to be false or mistaken prophecies on Jesus' part. For example, the Olivet discourse infamously contains the claim that this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened (Mark 13:30). It would be highly embarrassing for Jesus to make an incorrect prophecy, and some scholars would argue that there are places in the Bible where the authors seem to be backing off or making excuses for (e.g. the Lukan Jesus chides others for seeking to know the times, or 2 Peter 3:8). The CoE would be used to argue in favour of the mistakes being real, even though this shows a fallible Jesus and is problematic for believers.
It does get used outside of biblical studies as well. My favourite example is the satanic verses - there seems to be very little reason for early Muslims to make up a story about Muhammad being misled, so is it more plausible that the event is historical? It doesn't seem totally unthinkable to suggest that Muhammad, during his lifetime, experimented a bit with optimising his message, and tested out how different ideas went down. There could be argued to be elements of early Islam that are syncretic with re-contextualised Arabian paganism (most famously the Kaaba), and there are undisputed incidents where Muhammad seems to show sympathy toward a pagan custom - the Nakhla incident, for instance, shows Muhammad apparently wanting to observe a pagan custom not to fight in the holy months, until (supposedly) God corrected him. So it seems plausible that maybe Muhammad might have once briefly experimented with incorporating pagan divinities into Islam as something like angels, then changed his mind, and the story of a Satanic suggestion was invented to cover the gap.
However, that theory is still highly speculative - wiki describes a history of debates on its historicity, some of which challenge the idea that there could be no motive other than truth for Muslims to invent the incident. The CoE is very rarely dispositive by itself!
At any rate. I would defend the CoE as having a place in historical and textual study.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true.
I have heard this a lot, but I would hold, I think, that even though you can find edge case exceptions if you stack the deck a bit, most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style? And that style tends to be both repetitive and cheap? Maybe you can avoid that if you can spend hours slaving away over prompts, but that is quite rare.
At least part of the conversation is about status, right? AI art is perceived as cheap and nasty. Like the microwave, it might be useful, but it's also fundamentally low-class, because using it signifies that you could not afford a real human artist.
You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil.
Obviously 'everyone' is hyperbole and I do not mean every single person, since there are people here who like it. There are a handful of people like Scott Alexander who defend it. Still, as far as I can tell it's genuinely unpopular? Searching for polls, well, I'll spare you all the results from artists themselves or from art galleries (both those groups passionately, overwhelmingly, hate AI art), but as far as I can tell, ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields. This seems consistent with the generally skeptical if not outright negative view of AI most people have (and the Pew poll is just Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings). Here there is apparently widespread opposition to AI music.
In general, I think my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime, and I don't think I can really overstate it. There are very enthusiastic AI boosters on the internet, but as far as I can tell in the real world, people are mostly either ignorant of AI, or they dislike it to various degrees of intensity.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
If I were arguing against myself, actually, I might have used the example of found art, or perhaps animal art, which I think people are often more generous toward?
In this case I think the sense that no skill or taste has been exercised is important. Drawing a picture seems to require some level of effort or skill, which a person has acquired over years of practice. There may be an incoherent feeling that 'resistance' is important to art.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.
Why yes, if you lie to people, you can trick them into thinking that AI art was made by humans, or that human art is made by AI. It's a complicated world and that's possible. But you shouldn't be surprised when people respond to that with extreme hostility.
People are frequently bad at understanding the reasons for their convictions. In this case, the conviction that it's important for art to be made by humans, or that the social context of art matters to how it's received, is being muddled up with the idea of abstract quality.
However, underneath that, I think people do value knowing that such-and-such picture is the result of a real human being exercising skill. Effort and creativity are things that we can and do value. It's acceptable to care about these things in themselves, for their own sake.
On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
That's... not what happened in Australia.
During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on. I think our covid response was over-enthusiastic and proved to be stronger than was necessary, but foreigners have a completely distorted picture of what happened here.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Would you say it happened organically in Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire?
I'd agree that it felt fairly organic in Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, but those aren't really games about morality. BG is sort of about whether you choose to turn away from or embrace the power of Bhaal, but those games are so sidequest-heavy that you don't spend most of the game thinking about it, and for the most part you just make decisions based on what seems sensible at the time. Baldur's Gate does not even track your moral decisions systematically in any way - the closest it has is reputation, which is clearly more about how you are perceived. NWN does have alignment shift slightly in response in your choices, but in a very granular way (loot a house, +5 to Chaotic, etc.).
However, KotOR and JE both sell themselves as games about morality, and have a big moral choice system that their mechanics are structured around. I thought that both of them do present you with a series of contrived moral dilemmas just so you always have a Light Side/Dark Side or an Open Palm/Closed Fist choice. They were usually cartoonish and silly, but they were unmissable.
Perhaps it felt less jarring then because KotOR is a Star Wars game, and very blatant LS/DS choices are part of that franchise? But Jade Empire starts to give you the idea that OP is not good and CF is not evil, and while that was laughable as implemented in JE itself, it's clearly a prototype for Paragon/Renegade.
I suppose my perception is that BioWare sort of flanderised themselves over time. Baldur's Gate doesn't really have a morality system but it does have themes of the protagonist struggling with his/her evil nature. KotOR and JE externalise it, ME built the whole game around it, and...
So I think Dragon Age is an interesting comparison, because Dragon Age does not have a morality system as such. Dragon Age replaces morality with a more granular system of companion approval. There aren't objectively good or evil choices, just choices that different companions like or don't like. In theory this fits well with the early DA games' attempt to be dark fantasy, emphasising necessary evils, sacrifice, complicity, and murky situations where there are no good options. At times it even works well. Do you execute Loghain or not? There isn't a clear right or wrong answer to that question, but your choice will have consequences either way, especially for your companions.
However, you can tell that Dragon Age is written by people who have the KotOR/JE/ME script still in their heads, and they keep presenting you with contrived dilemmas that feel like they're from earlier games. There aren't little blue or red icons, but obviously sparing the mages is the LS/OP/Paragon/blue option, and the Rite of Annulment is the DS/CF/Renegade/red option. Saving the elves is blue and recruiting the werewolves is red. Destroying the Anvil is blue and making the golems is red. DA's promise of more interesting choices is usually not lived up to. Helping Caridin is the good choice and helping Branka is the evil choice. It's not subtle.
And the same in DA2, and then by Inquisition I think Dragon Age has more-or-less given up on being dark fantasy entirely. It is a pity, because while it was certainly imperfect, I did think Origins was on to something.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I agree about the fantastic aesthetics, and wish we'd seen a Tevinter more inspired by Kirkwall than whatever it was Veilguard was trying to do. The music is solid though I think Inon Zur did better work on Origins, a game I would like to defend at length but won't attempt to do so tonight.
I think my main disagreement with you is about the writing. I agree that it's better than Larian or Obsidian's recent output, like The Outer Worlds, but I feel that's a pretty low bar. I'll agree that it's better than Disco Elysium, but I hated Disco Elysium, so I would consider almost anything better than sitting through another page of Disco Elysium trying to be clever.
It is worse, I think, than Origins, or Obsidian games like Fallout: New Vegas or Knights of the Old Republic II. I think the combination of a dialogue wheel and the three colour-coded personalities for Hawke really hurt the writing. I suppose one of my spicier opinions might be that the Mass Effect dialogue wheel has been a disaster for game writing. The three options are just never enough to express a nuanced opinion on anything, especially because they are always locked to the blue, purple, and red options. No matter what's going on, my options are always limited to a polite yes, an angry yes, and a 'funny' non sequitur.
I'm not sure I agree about mages, and in fact I think the Dragon Age fandom has distorted and flanderised mage issues. Origins presents the issue as genuinely complicated - the templars serve a necessary but unpleasant role, justified by the obvious threat of magical crime, but their ruthlessness makes them hard to like. Greagoir and Irving are colleagues who mostly work together well, but with a subtext of threat - Greagoir knows that Irving and his mages might be possessed or turn into monsters at any point, and Irving knows that Greagoir and his templars are their jailers and legally empowered to kill them, so there can never be complete trust between them. I feel that DA2 was a step back from that in favour of making both sides almost cartoonishly evil. Almost every single mage who slips the Circle becomes a blood mage or abomination, and meanwhile the templars have gone from necessarily ruthless to just plain abusive. Fortunately Inquisition dialled it back and instead showed a world where the breaking of the Circles has left both mages and templars in crisis, to the detriment of each order. It is obvious that mages are people who should not be abused or imprisoned; it is also obvious that either the templars or something like the templars are necessary because of the immense risk posed by magic. Inquisition generally refuses to demonise either group, and I also give it some credit for, in a move that surprised me, the templar sidequest being vastly better than the mage sidequest.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the BioWare fanbase is extremely progressive, identify heavily with mages, and have a flattened, 'All Templars are Bastards' level of understanding of the issues that the games evoke.
DA2 disappointed me because, well, the actual issue with mages is fairly straightforward. Mages are innocent people who are not responsible for their own powers; it doesn't seem like they deserve to be brutally oppressed. However, intensive training is necessary in order for mages to not be a threat to everyone around them, and magic is incredibly dangerous and a threat to everyone. Even leaving aside the everyday risks of possession, or the maddening influence of blood magic, one can hardly forget that magic were the ones who tainted the Golden City and unleash the Blights. It is very reasonable for the people of this world to want to control and regulate magic. So the question is - how should those concerns be balanced? How can magic be regulated, mages taught to use their powers constructively and punished if they go wrong, without threatening the rest of society? Unfortunately DA2 mostly flattens it to "do you like mages or do you hate mages?", and that's just the wrong question.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Yep...
It sounds interesting when you talk about themes and character, but man, it is a tedious pain in the ass to play through. For everything that works, there's some baffling design decision adjacent to it that lets it all down.
One positive element I forgot to mention earlier was the setting. Kirkwall in premise is a really interesting place. This free city built on top of what used to be a slaving outpost of a cruel empire, the City of Chains where you sail in past statues of broken slaves, is a really evocative setting, and the eventual revelation that this was the site of the Magisters' great sacrifice in order to breach the Fade, thousands of slaves slaughtered on bloody altars in a crime that still echoes through the heavens, just feels natural. Of course it was here. Of course.
And from a game design perspective, the idea of zooming in on a single location and watching it develop over time is a good one. The city of Baldur's Gate was under-used in BG1, but Athkatla was easily the best part of the Baldur's Gate series, and it had similar themes, getting to know this wealthy city built on injustice, with a lively underworld, gang war, ruthless magic police, and so on. DA:O was famously a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and I wouldn't be surprised if Dragon Age 2 started with someone saying, "What if we made an entire game about Athkatla?" It's not identical, and Kirkwall has deeper shadows, putting the themes of slavery and oppression more centre-stage (which is itself compatible with DA:O's dark tone and fascination with corruption and moral compromise), but I can see the evolution.
Every time I talk about DA2 I end up frustrated because I can see the good game you could make out of these parts.
It's just that DA2 itself is not that game. DA2 is broken and annoying to play and un-fun. I am glad that I played it and I will never play it again.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Personally I wouldn't go so far as saying that DA2 is a great game, or even a good game. It might be BioWare's most interesting game, but taken as a whole, I think it has to be judged a failure. It's a mess mechanically, its line-to-line writing is frequently bad, and its setting struggles for coherence. DA2 is not a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.
However, for those willing to sift through it, there is a lot there to like. Act two is easily the best part of it, with the qunari a fantastic depiction of the genuine appeal of fanatical religious asceticism. Sometimes I hear people wonder what drives people to support the Taliban, and the answer I want to give every time is, "play DA2". The Arishok and the qunari are deeply repulsive to liberal values. They preach strict conformity, obedience, and discipline. But they exist in a context where everything else is falling apart. In comparison to Kirkwall, they have solidarity with each other. They do not tear and bite at each other, as everyone else does. Each person works for the good of the whole, and each person is looked after. What hardship exists is shared, and when successes are achieved, they are also shared. The qunari have an aura of righteousness - they sit there above the strife, perhaps the only non-hypocritical faction in the city, issuing judgements of the degeneracy around them. They are an island of order in a sea of chaos and you can understand why people would choose them. You cannot choose them yourself, of course, but the Arishok's respect matters to me, and I care about winning it.
Unfortunately, most of the game does not reach that height. The mage/templar debate that dominates the third act is only engaged with on a surface level, and the game's final sequence feels unfinished (why do you fight Orsino if you side with the mages? it feels like it was intended that the final boss be either Orsino or Meredith depending on your choice, but instead they just both go insane?), and is too reliant on contrivances like the red lyrium idol.
And again a lot of the writing on a more immediate level is unimpressive. The doormat/jerk/clown dialogue options are unsatisfying, and Friendship/Rivalry, while an interesting idea, did not work in practice at all, never mind leading to inconsistent results by bundling together positions in unintuitive ways. (Suppose you're both anti-slavery and pro-mage - this leads to odd results with Fenris.)
I would not say that DA2 is a good game, but it's a bad game with enough good pieces that I wish it were better.
This is probably a better position to be in than Veilguard, which is bad and boring, but it is still, I think, a significant step down from the much superior Origins.
Sunday is the Lord's Day, because it is the day on which Christ returned from the dead. It is therefore the site of the primary Christian liturgical celebration. It seems as though it started to be honoured in this way very quickly - see Acts 20:7, for instance.
Whether that makes it 'the Sabbath' or not is... kind of semantic? I have seen both "Saturday is the Sabbath, but for us the Lord's Day is the day of rest" and "the Sabbath has been moved to Sunday" as positions held in the wild.
If you ask me, my guess is that the earliest Christians likely observed both the Saturday Sabbath and the Lord's Day, and that over time the Saturday observance fell away. I'd like to think that the modern custom of treating both days of the weekend as days of rest is a good way of returning to that tradition of honouring both, and that we can even nuance them a little, with Saturday for rest and silence and Sunday for gathering and celebration.
As I understand it, in Islam Friday is not called 'the Sabbath' or any similar word. Friday is, however, the day chosen for gathering, preaching, and communal prayer. It's the day for jumu'ah, the weekly sermon at 1 PM Friday, which is the closest Islamic equivalent to the Jewish Sabbath service at sundown Saturday, or the Christian mass or worship service on Sunday morning.
That said, it plays a different role in the life of the community. For instance, mass is considered obligatory for Catholics and they must attend every Sunday (barring reasonable exceptions), but the daily prayers of the hours are not. Praying the liturgy of the hours is commended, but not required (unless you are a monk or priest), and therefore how much of it to do, and when, belongs to the conscience and good judgement of the individual believer. In Islam, it's reversed. The regular daily prayers are obligatory, but attending the jumu'ah is optional, though recommended, and up to the conscience and judgement of the individual.
This tracks with what I experience on the ground. Devout Catholics tend to be conscientious about mass-going, and there are people who attend more frequently, all the way up to daily mass-goers, but the daily prayers are not that well-known, and if you do them you are unusually pious. By contrast, conscientious Muslims usually make all the daily prayers, sometimes add dua at unscheduled times, and then if you go to the sermon every Friday, you are definitely committed. If a Muslim has to drop one thing, they will usually drop the Friday gathering, not the daily prayers.
That said, in practice Muslims are just like Catholics in that it is extremely common for people to regularly miss daily prayer/Sunday mass/whatever while still internally thinking of themselves as 'good Muslims' or 'good Catholics' and feeling no guilt.
Sorry to use Catholics as the Christian example - they are just unusually legible and public in their requirements. I understand Orthodox to be similarly strict to Catholics, but I am less familiar with them, and I think they are in general less likely to write down a single list of obligations enforceable on all people. And of course Protestants are much more likely to reserve all of this to conscience, culture, and practice. Historically what devout Protestants have done de facto is treat Sunday worship and a daily prayer (usually in the evening, prior to going to sleep) as obligatory, but Protestantism in general is much more skeptical of the utility of legislating specific obligations. As a Protestant myself I do practice weekly worship and daily prayer, and I think the decline in these practices among Christians has been tragic, but I do share the tradition's skepticism of trying to establish a one-size-fits-all timetable of prayer and worship. That, it seems to me, should be a matter of Christian liberty. That said, Galatians 5:13 - liberty should not be a justification for laxity.
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