OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
Ah, to be clear, I'm using 'sexpest' mainly just to mean 'aggressively promiscuous person'. It doesn't imply non-consent for me. I like it as a gender-neutral alternative to 'slut', I suppose? It also implies actively seeking out or badgering others for sex, and that also sounds like Gaiman. This is enough for me to morally condemn Gaiman.
But this was known already, and I'm not sure what Gaiman's case specifically, or the vagaries of whether he gets cancelled or not, tells us about either the broad issue of sexual ethics, or even that much about the moment. Gaiman is an ageing white man who's also, at best, what we used to call a dirty old man. He seems potentially vulnerable to cancellation, but then, cancellation has never had a 100% hit rate, so it could go either way.
So I think I'm with 4bpp in terms of what we can draw from Gaiman's case, even if I suspect we differ on overall sexual ethics. There's just a limit to how much can be inferred from any one case.
OliveTapenade
8hr ago
Forgive my naivete here, but I'm not really sure what the story here is, beyond "Neil Gaiman is a creepy sexpest."
Well, yes, and I will happily join in with condemning his sordid exploits. Promiscuity is bad and this seems quite a straightforward example. I'm just wondering what particular light is shed by this specific case?
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I think Zelensky is trying to obtain as many effective weapons for Ukraine as possible, and he is behaving to try to maximise that. Would a more grovelling approach achieve more of his aims, or would it just be better for your ego?
The way I see it, he's using all the influence he has to try to get as many weapons as he can, and I struggle to see why he should choose a less effective strategy. If you think Western leaders ought to drag him across the coals a bit more, blame them, not Zelensky himself. Blame the people setting the price, not the one grabbing the bargains while he can.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
The Sikhs are generally quite unhappy towards both Hindus and the concept of India as a nation. I've met diaspora Sikhs in Australia and a complaint that regularly comes up is that at partition, the British gave the Hindus a nation, and they gave the Muslims a nation, but the Sikhs were screwed out of one, and Sikhs view themselves as just as important and respectable as Hindus or Muslims.
As such, Sikh separatism has been ongoing since before independence, and has at times led to insurgent or terrorist movements. The Sikhs have a strong internal feeling that they are not the same as Hindus or Muslims, and the more that Indian nationalism comes to be identified with Hindu nationalism, as it is at the moment, the alienated the Sikhs feel.
I would be entirely unsurprised to find some diaspora Sikh on the internet engaged in vicious anti-Indian ranting.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I remember it was posted here a while back, and I think my response is still what it was back then - that misleading vivedness remains a fallacy. I knew long before this film that it would be possible to find an hour or two of footage of Indians behaving disgustingly. I am pretty sure that's true for every nationality on Earth. So in that sense the film offers no new information at all and I should not update based on it.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Is he not behaving like a beggar? He's spent the last few years asking for, campaigning for, and I would say begging, for aid. He knows that Ukraine's chances in the war depend on Western aid, and he has acted accordingly, investing a huge amount of time and effort in visiting Western countries and making the case for more aid as strongly as he can.
How should he behave? Do you think he should be more self-abasing? Why? Would that help? I suspect most Western countries would rather deliver aid to an ally that seems, though in need of assistance, nonetheless committed to the fight and strong of will.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
It does read rather like a dismayed realisation that the Motte is what the Motte has always, explicitly, advertised itself as being - a discussion and debate club, and explicitly not a place to recruit for any given cause.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Wasn't it always an echo chamber of a small fraction of the public?
OliveTapenade
15d ago
No, that's the etymological origin of 'vulgar'. The meaning of a word is not reducible to its etymology. That's called the etymological fallacy.
Have lower or peasant classes been consistently crude, blunt, or offensive in the way they talk about sex, relatively to middle or upper classes? It would not surprise me - if nothing else I think the lower class, almost definitionally, does not speak in the way the upper class considers polite - but it would be nice to have actual data to go on.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
I suppose there's a case you could make that delicacy around sex is an affectation of the middle (and upper?) class(es?), and the lower classes/peasants/proles have always been quite vulgar? It's certainly the sort of thing that could be true, though I'd like a bit more of a survey before I conclude that it is.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Oh, I'm with you entirely on finding it gross, and I think there has been a pornographic shift in the way we think about sexuality, desire, and human reproduction. There's probably an essay there to write one day, but I might save it up and do it in a top-level comment one day. The death of the concept of normality, or the concept of what is natural?
OliveTapenade
15d ago
I know my preference would be for the Motte to be at least a little more proper than 4chan...
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Most people have a concept of propriety, and most people understand that words have contextual or connotative meanings beyond the literal, physical act which they denote. "Make love", "have sex", and "fuck" all refer to the same action in a broad sense, but they obviously have very different meanings when you come across them in the wild.
Likewise, "I would like to have a child with your daughter", "I would like to breed your daughter", and "I would like to creampie your daughter" may all indicate that the person would like to have vaginal sex with the daughter in a way that's open to the possibility of conception and pregnancy, but obviously the connotations are very different.
Lewis2 is correct here - 'creampie' specifically is pornographic slang. It's contextually inappropriate because it communicates disrespect. Botond173 made an edgy and offensive joke.
Maybe you like edgy jokes, and if so that's fine for you, but pretending that it's not clear why someone might object is silly.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
Are you sure? Jesus constantly recommends moral action, but I'd say that even in the synoptics, there seems to be an awareness that this by itself is insufficient? Take, for instance Matthew 19:16-27 (which is triple tradition, cf. Mark 10:17-31, Luke 17:18-30). It seems as though in those passages Jesus presents an impossibly difficult moral demand, the disciples wonder at how salvation may be possible, and Jesus says that it comes only through the action of God. He then goes on to reassure them that everyone who has followed him will be saved.
I find it hard to fit a passage like that into a model that says that Jesus was preaching salvation through good works. Jesus evidently thinks that good works are good, and that people should do them, but they do not seem to be sufficient for him. Some divine action seems to be necessary to bridge the gap between human moral effort and salvation.
See also passages like Luke 7:36-49, in which Jesus appears to suggest that a sinful woman has been forgiven on the basis of her great faith, rather than because of any meritorious work of righteousness in the world.
This story also seems reminiscent of the Anointing at Bethany (Matthew 26:6-13, Mark 14:3-9), where the disciples protest at an extravagant sign of faith on the basis that the money could have been more efficiently allocated to the poor. Jesus chastises them and seems to approve of the woman's display of faith. (Take that, effective altruists?) Again it seems like for Jesus there is more to righteousness or salvation than the corporal works of mercy.
You may not count the epilogue to Mark as original to the gospel, and you may discount post-Resurrection appearances, but Mark 16:16 is also a statement directly attributed to Jesus saying that those who believe will be saved. You might also consider Matthew 10:8 ("You received without payment; give without payment") as relevant to Jesus' understanding of how divine favour operates?
It's true that in the synoptics Jesus never says in so many words "salvation is by grace", but there is enough, I think, to say that for Jesus salvation is something that involves both a kind of unilateral divine action, reaching out to sinful humankind, and the faithful human response to that action. The language of grace appears elsewhere. But I think it's plausible enough to see that language as an attempt to faithfully articulate a real feature of the teachings and actions of Jesus in his life.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
I'm not sure about Zoroaster, actually, but certainly Kongzi presented himself as merely a humble servant of the ancient ways. Muhammad is a bit more complicated - Muhammad does not present himself as merely reiterating an old law, but rather as the product of a new revelation, given to him in the very moment that he proclaimed it. Joseph Smith is someone I'd put in another category entirely; he was a revivalist or restorationist, proclaiming not a return to living tradition, but rather the need for a radical break with that tradition in favour of conforming to the way of a (mostly imagined) ancient ideal.
Jesus, Kongzi, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith all talk about the past to an extent, but I don't think I'd say they all share an identical playbook. They do all posit some sort of corruption over the years which needs to be corrected, but the ways they conceptualise the past and the corruption in question are not all that similar.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
I'm not asserting that it's easy to know the truth of Christianity. Certainly I'm not saying that it was effortless for me! Nor am I even suggesting that the only or obvious good-faith answer is yes. What I'm asserting is that it is, for better or for worse, the relevant question.
"Does Christianity produce good societies?" may be an interesting question, in an academic sense. But you cannot get from "Christianity produces good societies" to "Christianity is true". B does not follow from A. And since "is Christianity true?" is a question of, I would suggest, ultimate import, what that says to me is that we need a bit more here than a question about memetic adaptability.
Look, people become Christian for all sorts of reasons, including stupid ones, and as Alan Jacobs reminds us, what matters is not where you start, but where you finish. Someone who was only interested in Christianity at first because it seems pro-social, but who, because of this belief, came to church, encountered Christ, had a conversion of the heart, and eventually became a genuine believer has ended up in the right place, despite the poverty of the original motive. Probably most Christians are like this to some extent - they thought cathedrals looked cool, or wanted their parents to be proud of them, or enjoyed singing in a choir, or whatever else might get someone through the church door.
But what happens once they're in there is what matters, and I'd suggest that what happens inside the church is everything to do with Jesus, God, and the redemption of the sins of the world, and not very much to do with social engineering. If interest in the noble lie gets you through the door, great, but we must not content ourselves with noble lies. It matters whether or not it's true. That is, perhaps, in the end the only thing that matters.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
For what it's worth, speaking from a Christian perspective, I find the entire argument you're responding to... at best irrelevant, and at worst outright contemptible?
Is Christianity pro-social? Is it a useful ideological technology for producing social outcomes? I don't really know. But one thing I do know is that if that's why a person follows Christ, they of all people are most to be pitied. If Christianity produces good social outcomes: great, I will continue to follow Christ. If Christianity produces bad social outcomes: oh well, I will continue to follow Christ. It's just not an important question.
Moreover, I don't think any of us are actually in a sufficiently distant, objective position to dispassionately analyse the most pro-social memes, entirely independent of their truth-values, and then select them. None of us are Platonic philosopher-kings in a position to select the most effective noble lie, and if we try to put ourselves in that position, even if only in our imaginations, we will fail. None of us have that perspective.
I feel a bit like it's that bell curve meme, with the no-wit asking, "Did Jesus really die for our sins?", and the mid-wit rambling about successful memes and civilisational usefulness, and the full-wit again asking, "Did Jesus really die for our sins?"
Believe what's true, and reject what's false. This is sufficient.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
In what way did Paul twist Jesus' words or teachings? What is the actual perversion?
OliveTapenade
20d ago
In his next section of the essay on Dawkins, he reveals another glimpse into the way he thinks of Christianity. Given the question "Do you believe Jesus died for our sins?", he answers "Yes, but you have to begin from the position that Jesus wasn’t just some guy who arbitrarily claimed a particular title. It was as if morality itself became a person. I find the moral innovations of Jesus to be something close to the mechanical equivalent of finding a functioning F-35 jet plane in ancient Egypt. Do you know what people were like before that guy got nailed to a cross? Crack open a history book.". What an astonishing thing to say! "Jesus died for our sins" is "real" because after Jesus died, we literally sinned less! We went from barbaric and cruel to civilized and moral*.
I find this an especially bizarre position to take because, quite apart from the question of whether or not Jesus is actually the messiah, the Son of God, on which everything turns... this doesn't seem particularly true to Jesus' own self-presentation?
If we trust the gospels, Jesus does not present himself as overturning or revolutionising all prior moral thought. On the contrary, when Jesus is challenged on moral questions, he typically returns to what has been written before him, and enjoins loyalty to already-revealed principles. Jesus criticises other people for their inconsistency with past morality (e.g. Mt 15:1-9), and demands others be consistent with it (e.g. Mt 19:16-22, Mt 22:34-40). Jesus consistently presents his moral teaching as a return to the origins (e.g. Mt:19:3-9). (I've only cited Matthew here for convenience, but this passages are attested in the other synoptics as well.)
It seems strange to praise a man for being revolutionary when in his own words he is constantly urging people to return to what is taught in the law and in the tradition. Is Jesus a radical prophet, or a conventional teacher? You can easily find both narratives around him.
It rather reminds me of Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways.
Likewise I often read about Jesus as being this wild moral revolutionary, or Jesus as just a simple re-presenter of what came before (this is particularly common from the de-mythologisers, who Jesus as merely one more eschatological prophet or messiah claimant in the ferment of first century Judea), and it seems strange to me that the same man be both a radical up-ender of tradition, and a staid product of tradition; or that he be both moral visionary issuing teachings that no one had heard before, and also simply reminding people of what they already knew.
Or perhaps the conclusion to draw is that he's actually the loyal one. He's the one in the balance point, at the centre, a slave of neither past nor future.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
To be honest, this is a perspective I have never really understood. It just goes at right-angles to me - I don't understand the moralisation of climate change. Kevin Rudd famously said that climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation, and this lens just doesn't make much sense to me.
From where I'm standing, climate change seems like a pretty straightforward engineering problem. There isn't really a hard normative debate about it - we mostly all agree on what we want in terms of the environment. The issue is just how to achieve it, and that seems like a technical problem par excellence.
We can debate culpability or responsibility all we want, and that's fine, but that's also largely irrelevant to solving the technical issue. We can talk about moral transformation or changing attitudes ("the hard work of changing"), but that is also largely irrelevant to solving the issue. It's a technological problem! The value of changing social or political attitudes is only insofar as they might help us solve the technological problem! That's it!
It makes me feel like a lunatic - or else, everybody else is.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Entirely possible! People often have different instincts around it as well - people have told me that I sometimes come off as a bit Stepford, even though I don't intentionally try for anything like that, and I find it a little creepy when other people do it. The point where politeness or outward kindness becomes creepy may differ from person to person, or according to cultural context.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Sikhism is an interesting one to me - I wasn't terribly familiar with it until the first time I visited a gurdwara and heard a lot from a Sikh community in themselves. I already had some academic and practical knowledge of both Hinduism and Islam for context, and as they explained their history, doctrines, and practices to me it felt blazingly obvious what Sikhism is.
That is, and with apologies to any Sikhs here, to me Sikhism reads as what you get out of a Hindu reform movement in a place where there is a lot of Islam already in the water supply. There's a lot of it that feels midway between Hinduism and Islam, or as a kind of hybrid. If you come from a Hindu background (as Guru Nanak did), become convinced of the oneness of God in a way that goes a little beyond the soft-monotheism of a lot of Hindu theology, and are surrounded by Islamic influences but are not interested in just becoming Muslim yourself... well, it's fairly intuitive where that ends up.
Anyway, I don't think I would be convinced that Abrahamic monotheism ultimately originates in Zoroastrianism? I think there are Zoroastrian influences in the mix in places (the magoi Matthew references, famously, but also the Zoroastrian influences are especially visible on Islam), but the genealogy is too hard to trace through ancient Judah, I think. I find it more plausible that monotheism independently evolved in several different places historically - after all, if you glance at anything from Hinduism to European paganism to even Chinese traditional religion, I'd argue there are a number of proto-monotheistic trends that often seem to appear. Most of them didn't get to full monotheism the way that Zoroastrianism and Abrahamic religion did, but Brahman or Heaven or the Stoic vision of God or what have you are enough to make it plausible to me that concepts of a unitary divine can just evolve independently.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
To be fair, the sorts of people who make this evolutionary argument will typically point out that the Old Testament is not written down in the order in which it was composed (for instance, Genesis 2 is usually thought to be significantly older than Genesis 1), so we have to do a bit more work to determine which texts came first chronologically, and then discern the evolution that way.
They're no doubt correct to an extent here, but the risk is that the way we identify a text's origin comes to be a self-fulfilling prophecy - we might create a narrative for ourselves of development from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, and on that basis alone assign more henotheistic-sounding texts to earlier strata. So some degree of skepticism is warranted, and classic forms of the documentary hypothesis have come under plenty of fire.
Incidentally:
Interestingly (and to Goodguy's question below) my understanding is that some early Christian apologists centered some of their pitch around the idea that the old oracles had begun to die after the advent of Christ, which suggests that they thought a persuasive argument to pagans or post-pagans was "the old gods are out, the One True God has defeated them."
There are some interesting examples of this! Here's one from the epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians:
How, then, was He manifested to the world? A star shone forth in heaven above all the other stars, the light of which was inexpressible, while its novelty struck men with astonishment. And all the rest of the stars, with the sun and moon, formed a chorus to this star, and its light was exceedingly great above them all. And there was agitation felt as to whence this new spectacle came, so unlike to everything else [in the heavens]. Hence every kind of magic was destroyed, and every bond of wickedness disappeared; ignorance was removed, and the old kingdom abolished, God Himself being manifested in human form for the renewal of eternal life.
The star of Bethlehem agitated the heavens, and destroyed the power of magic. So the people who might once have been in slavery to spirits, demons, or sorcerers have now been set free, and are ready to hear the gospel.
Merry Christmas!
(cf. also New Testament contempt for sorcerers, such as Simon Magus in Acts 8, or the fortune-telling girl in Acts 16:16-19. There may be a sense that the magic is 'real' - the girl's 'spirit of divination' enables her to immediately and correctly realises that Paul and Silas are apostles of God - but even so, it's bad, and Paul and Silas exorcise her and free her, much to the consternation of the girl's owners, who were making money from her power.)
OliveTapenade
22d ago
Certainly I'm inclined to give a fair amount of weight to the "being right" hypothesis. Eschewing the spirit of impartiality for a moment, it is at least partly because monotheism is true, Jesus is Lord, and many (one may even hope most) early Christians behaved as if this were true.
That last part is especially important. All sorts of things are true but don't spread; all sorts of things are false but do spread. The conviction and behaviour of the witnesses matters.
I think the distinction that comes most naturally to mind for me is that a sexpest is someone who aggressively pesters others for sex, and a slut is a person who rapidly or unhesitatingly gives in to such pestering. They're complementary, I suppose?
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