OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I find productivity a particularly tricky concept in fields that don't, well, produce things in the traditional sense. For instance, I work in a caring profession. I spend most of my work time talking to people, logging that I talked to people, diagnosing people in need of being talked to, and bringing in outside specialists to talk to people. I don't prescribe any medicines, and I don't build or create anything physical. The outcomes of my work are all psychological - if I'm doing my job right, I make people feel better about their lives.
Is that productive? How would you go about quantitatively measuring my work? The best we can do is send around surveys and ask people how happy they are, and try to get some statistics going, but in my experience the survey process is so messy and full of confounders that I just don't think it tells us much.
Productivity seems like a measure that comes out of physical industries, like agriculture or manufacturing. It is easy to measure productivity when there is some kind of measurable product at the end. Is this farm more productive than that farm? Easy, let's look at how much grain each produces. It gets more complicated around manufacturing - a smaller number of higher quality products versus a larger number of lower quality products - but at least some of the same principles seem to apply.
But there is a lot of work that produces ephemeral things. Lots of work produces experiences. How do you measure, say, the productivity of a chef? At the most basic level, number of people fed, I guess, but in practice what a chef - and a whole restaurant - produces is not a certain number of calories on a plate, but rather a whole dining experience, and that's what people pay for.
Bare productivity seems like a useful metric in some contexts, but I am wary of applying it globally.
I think the real question is more like, "How much do we value this work?" That's inevitably a values-laden question, and cannot be answered outside of particular cultural contexts.
The question around the retirees is more about earning or deserving. Do these people deserve the benefits they are currently receiving? Have they earned them by doing work that other people value or appreciate? But that seems like a subtly different question to productivity, to me.
I'm aware - I do recognise your name from SB. I am also, sadly, familiar with the other people you mentioned as well, though I had better avoid going to any more details.
I'm happy to talk more privately, but as far as it goes for the Motte, I think the upshot is that those boards aren't really good alternatives if what you want is nuanced political conversation on the internet. I am very sympathetic to wanting an alternative to the Motte; SB and its splinters just aren't that alternative.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Well, SV was a Blueskyisation, which is its own form of seven zillion witches. The most progressive posters, mainly those who were fans of a censorious power mod (who in my view did deserve to be fired, but the firing process was arbitrary and incompetent), schismed off to their own website. As SB has coalesced more around progressive norms, that site's comparative advantage has faded and it's now dying. The Sietch was a second schism, that time over another case of staff arbitrariness and incompetence but that time related to the right-wing fringe. SB hasn't become more open to hard-right views, so the Sietchers have not returned.
QQ and DWW are a different situation. QQ was just people angry they couldn't post porn, and DWW was a single charismatic jerk angry about getting into trouble, who went off to start his own forum with blackjack and hookers where all speech would be allowed. DWW as far as I can tell never had much life in it at all. QQ survives just because, well, people like their NSFW quests.
I would not recommend any of them for serious political discussion. The Sietch and SV are small, bitter echo chambers. QQ and DWW don't really have lasting politics discussions at all. And SB is a much larger but equally pointless echo chamber. Outside the occasional insightful poster, I'd say they're all around Reddit tier or lower.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
The Sietch is a bit too spittle-flecked for the tastes of most Mottizens, I think; and too dominated by the same half-dozen or so regulars.
The SB diaspora is a good example of the wider tragedy of the fragmenting internet. What used to be a more close-knit community with a range of opinions has, as it has grown, also narrowed its window for acceptable speech and become something of a shadow of its current self. It's a good example of self-siloing and the seven zillion witches effect.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I think French would take two tacks here. Firstly, he'd argue that you underestimate what is and remains possible for Christians in the United States. It's all very well for you say that viewpoint neutrality is a spook, and only applies in some narrow scenarios, but those narrow scenarios undoubtedly matter. If you're proposing abandoning the kinds of constitutional protections that grant Christians rights to public spaces, it seems reasonable for people like French to point to the cost. Secondly, he'd challenge you as to what your alternative is. Fine, abandon the idea of viewpoint neutrality, and perhaps even the whole idea of classical liberalism. What then? What do you want to build instead?
For what it's worth I think that final crack about "assuming he doesn't know perfectly well" is conspiratorial and beneath you. Nor do I think French is particularly an obstacle to other Christians. French's entire position is for more free expression, more free association, and more free use of public resources, even for people whom he profoundly disagrees with. In what way is he standing in the way of anyone, much less other Christians? French has never to my knowledge said or done anything to limit the expression or mobilisation of people like Ahmari. What are the obstacles? I see French as one American Christian among many, who is trying to hold to a set of principles and navigate a very difficult cultural moment. His existence in no way inhibits others.
One side note that I'd meant to put into my last post, and which I am tossing up maybe putting into a top-level post - I think it is very relevant that French is an evangelical Protestant and Ahmari is a Catholic. Evangelicals tend to be much more skeptical of institutions and more in favour of liberalism, in part because of the role of Protestantism in the American founding, and in part because, going back to the modernist controversy, they have experienced betrayal by their own institutions. So they tend to be very skeptical of any argument that we need a strong, paternalistic authority, whether secular or religious, to get us all on the same page. Ahmari is an Iranian (cultural background more comfortable with religious authority wedded to state power) convert to Catholicism (a top-down hierarchical institution that up until the 1960s explicitly held that states ought to follow the direction of the church). If you'll pardon the slur, it does not surprise me that Ahmari is, by disposition, more of a bootlicker than French. Ahmari is coming from traditions that accept the right and even the duty of religious authorities to order society in a top-down way for the common good; French is coming from a tradition that sees that vision as prone to corrupt both true religion and civic society.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
One of French's limitations, in my view, is that he's a lawyer and tends to think in positivist terms. The Ahmari/French dispute was ignited by an argument over drag queen story hour in public libraries, which Ahmari understandably thinks is disgusting and would like to get rid of. French argues that the public accommodations that allow drag queen story hour to happen are the same public accommodations that allow for e.g. prayer groups or Bible study groups to meet in and use public libraries. He mounts a solid case for that, I think, particularly because his own background is legally defending Christian groups using these accommodations. The basis for that defense is viewpoint-neutrality - a library or similar institution cannot deny a group the right to meet there simply because the library doesn't like that group or its message. This kind of neutrality allows Christian groups to use public resources like this.
French fears, to my mind reasonably, that revoking this neutrality and allowing institutions to discriminate against groups whose messages they don't like (such as drag queens) would inevitably result in Christian (or other conservative) groups being denied the use of those spaces as well. If we tear down the wall to attack the drag queens, we will be vulnerable to attack in return, and because many of these institutions are dominated by progressives, we would take more damage.
Thus he recommends supporting viewpoint-neutral public accommodations as strategically wise for conservative Christians.
Then there's also the moral/theological argument that I alluded to, that Christian charity and the Golden Rule should mean that we should extend to our opponents the same accommodations that we would like them to extend to us. French would, I think, see liberalism and Christianity as deeply compatible - perhaps even liberalism as outself an extension of the Christian ethic into secular law.
More pessimistic Christians might reply to French, "Hang on, a few problems here. Firstly, they won't reciprocate if we do this. They will still try to ban us. Why are you saying we should offer succour to an enemy? Secondly, this kind of 'neutrality' is a sham. A few concessions like meeting in libraries does not constitute true neutrality. It's just a cover for more legal attempts to hound Christians out of public spaces entirely; we've seen the progression of hate speech laws, for instance. Thirdly, you focus far too much on what's legally allowed, when law is actually just a frontier of this dispute. The bigger issue is culture - not just what one is legally allowed to say, but about what can say without being culturally ostracised."
I think the third problem is a significant one, and that's why I say that French is a bit too positivist. Legal protections are good and necessary, but what happens underneath the law's umbrella is important as well, and I think that without a more robust cultural shift in the direction of the values French ostensibly espouses - Christian faith and morality, or just conservative values more generally, such as responsibility, duty, initiative, French has written about positive masculinity before, etc. - the law will count for little. So while French's legal efforts have been praiseworthy, to look at those legal victories and conclude that everything is fine is myopic.
I agree with that perspective I just laid out. I think part of the issue is that French does not have a natural home for his values. When he was more straightforwardly affiliated with the right, in the early and mid 2010s, when he was a National Review columnist, you could see more consistency, but he is basically a Romney-ite - small government, individual freedom, personal character and traditional virtue. Since 2015 or so, the wider conservative movement in the US has gradually reconciled itself to Trump and MAGA, and those groups are profoundly opposed to the values that French stands for. Nobody can look at Trump and see someone championing Christian virtues, responsibility, courage, stoicism, self-control, or the like. Thus French praising Erika Kirk while condemning Trump, and writing blisteringly about the moral failures of MAGA. So now he's ended up with the New York Times and a group of liberals, many of whom share his proceduralism and his sunny American patriotism. But liberals are deeply out of step with him on cultural issues, and he can only prosper there by muting his criticisms of left-wing culture. (Which he does, I think to his shame. There is probably also a dispute to have about how much his actual positions have shifted, and they have a little, but not completely. For instance, he's gone from opposing gay marriage to supporting the Respect for Marriage Act, conceding ground that I don't think he would have in 2012.) There just isn't a natural home for him at the moment.
I don't agree with him on everything and he has limitations as a thinker, but I do feel a level of respect for him, and I think hatred for him is overblown.
Anyway, what does this all mean for conservative Christianity? I think French is right that it's not as bad as it might seem, especially legally, but it's not great either, and evangelicals should be careful not to sleepwalk into destruction. At the same time, French is correct about a crisis of virtue on the part of the church and the corruption of MAGA, even if he does not have a solution to that crisis.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
There's a big gap in the middle of this argument.
For a start, yes, David French is an anti-Trump, anti-MAGA conservative. That much is obvious - he says it plainly himself. He wants the right to go in a direction other than the one in which Trump is leading it.
But you then gloss that as French wanting to go back to an idealised, dead Reaganism. What makes you think that's a fair or charitable description of his position? If you asked French himself, do you think that's the position he would advocate for?
I'm struck that you, like many people, cited Sohrab Ahmari's broadside against David French, without mentioning the debate between them. Ahmari and French sat down together after the publication of that piece and had a discussion, moderated by Ross Douthat, and, well... so, the thing is, French makes Ahmari look like an absolute clown. Ahmari's criticisms of French don't land (his 'David-French-ism' is a confection that has very little to do with what French actually believes), and when Ahmari starts fantasising about making people sweat in front of hearings, French correctly criticises it as empty and performative. French kills it in the debate to the point that, multiple times, Douthat needs to come in to make a defense that Ahmari was apparently unable to make himself. It made it quite hard, actually, for me to take Ahmari seriously after it.
French has a clear vision - Christians can prosper in a viewpoint-neutral public sphere, viewpoint-neutral provisions have both protected and benefitted Christian groups, and removing those provisions would do immense harm. On a moral level, the Golden Rule means that both he individually and Christians in general should fight for the same legal provisions for his opponents that he would want to apply to himself. Theologically, insofar as the gospel is true and inspired by God, it will survive and even prosper in the public sphere. He supports this with a narrative of Christian activism in the last half-century or so that has substantial room for optimism - there have been great awakenings, the abortion rate steadily decreased for decades before Dobbs, and so on. This vision may be wrong or incorrect (in particular I'm not sure the situation for Christianity is as sunny as he thinks), but it's at least relatively robust, and it prescribes some clear courses of action.
Ahmari's vision is... something else. Not that. Ahmari is not ideologically coherent enough to explain his alternative. French was thus regularly able to push him - "what laws would you pass, and how would they be constitutional?" Ahmari thinks that classical liberalism is insufficient but does not have a clear route to an alternative. He thinks that viewpoint-neutrality isn't needed, at least, not in the French way, but flounders at the obvious response that if it were made constitutional for public accommodations to just discriminate against messages or groups they don't like, Christians are going to suffer a lot more than they're going to gain. Maybe Ahmari's ideal is some sort of Catholic integralist regime, but he has no plausible way to get there, and defending the Trump administration seems like a bad way to try to get there given that administration's almost total disinterest in the common good or in morality legislation.
I'm not wholly behind French overall. My broad reading of the situation is that there are, roughly, three conservative Christian strategies for engaging with the culture in the offering here.
The French Option is to accept the terms of classical liberalism, and just do it better than the other side. The laws protect us all equally, so now all we have to do is win the argument. Go out there and share the gospel! Be righteous and charitable to others! We can have an equal playing field, and we can win on that playing field.
The second two options deny that this kind of victory is possible. The Ahmari Option, so to speak, says that the playing field is tilted. The terrain is unfriendly, and the idea that classical liberalism is neutral is a lie. What we need to do is more like Deneen's Regime Change - use our political strength, seize control where we can, and move the state in a more overtly illiberal direction. And the final option is what I'll call the Dreher Option: Ahmari is right that liberalism is inherently biased against Christianity, but he's wrong that there's a political solution to this. French is wrong that we can win on a liberal playing field, and Ahmari is wrong that we can change the playing field ourselves. Instead what we need to do is bunker up, retreat, and survive as long as possible, waiting until the playing field changes - by some other means - before advancing again. This may mean a centuries-long process of fortification.
If you ask me all those options are flawed. French's strategy is based on an optimism that doesn't seem particularly justified by the evidence - if the French Option would work, why hasn't it already worked? Churches are declining and culturally progressive messages and policies have been consistently winning for most of a century. Ahmari's strategy is wishful thinking; there is no constituency for the massive, structural changes they want, and the best they can do is fantasise that MAGA might turn to aristopopulists like them, which of course it will not. And Dreher's strategy is more likely to, as Dreher himself has conceded at times, degenerate into little purity cults, at war with themselves. He is unlikely to build fertile gardens, but rather graveyards.
There isn't really an easy answer for what theologically conservative Christians ought to do in the US today. There is no straightforward, obvious path to redeeming the culture, and I do not think it will happen in the immediate future. But of these commenters, French is the one who has won the most respect from me, if only because he seems perhaps the most genuinely principled of the lot. I don't think the French strategy can lead to an overall 'victory', in the sense of re-Christianising the United States, but of these three I think it is the most likely to produce and sustain Christian communities within the United States. And that matters.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
What I am disputing is that 'HBD' is as unambiguously or obviously settled as evolution.
I think that 'HBD' covers a range of different positions, is subject to numerous motte-and-baileys, and that attempting to present it as obviously proven true such that disagreement with it is prima facie evidence of irrationality or folly is itself disingenuous.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I mean, "it was tedious because we're right and other people didn't concede to our glorious correctness" is...
Well, that's a take, all right.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I do remember when it was both everywhere and tedious.
The Motte goes through waves - for a while it was HBD/racism, for a while it was Holocaust denial, every now and then some people are determined to force their pet issue and it's everywhere. I won't say it's not a problem, or that it isn't a reason to avoid this place sometimes, but it does come and go.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Well, if we go up-thread, I have been reading this whole conversation as being about whether it makes sense to describe feminism as downstream of Marxism, a species of Marxism, cultural Marxism, etc.
In that context I made the point that feminism is a much broader stream than Marxism, and much less ideologically coherent - Marxism has a clear central thinker, Marx, canonical texts, and so on, while those are more up-for-grabs in feminism. I then noticed that the most prominent or influential feminist texts of the 20th century that I can think of don't seem particularly Marxist.
ThisIsSin replied by saying "Feminism is redistributionist at its core, though", which I took in context as disagreeing with me. I don't think ThisIsSin was saying "feminism, like all political and social movements, is redistributionist" - I think he was saying, "actually, Olive, I think this is a significant similarity between feminism and Marxism".
In that context I think it was reasonable to ask what kind of redistribution he was talking about, and then to suggest that redistribution alone is not enough to constitute a significant similarity to Marxism.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
That sounds like, well, everything. Those are exactly the same things that, for instance, conservatives seek to obtain. Does that make conservatism a form of Marxism?
There is a sense in which feminism, among other priorities, seeks to redistribute various goods in society towards women, on the premise that the current distribution favours men in a way that is both unequal and unjust. But to say that that shows some connection to Marxism obviously proves too much. Any movement advocating any action whatsoever is going to demand some kind of redistribution, because action is inherently redistributive - action requires resources, and resources need to be distributed from somewhere.
So I don't think I understand ThisIsSin's point. Feminists advocate certain things, yes, and doing those things would involve some level of redistribution. But that is true of every movement. Pointing this out establishes absolutely nothing about feminism, either as a neutral claim about ideological lineage, or about its desirability or undesirability.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
What is feminism redistributing? Reproduction? Family? Male attention? Social status?
OliveTapenade
14d ago
I think you're assuming a more stable ideology behind some key feminist terms than actually exist. I don't think, for instance, that using the terms 'patriarchy', 'sexism', or 'misogyny' necessarily implies that the user subscribes to a particular "highly coherent ideological structure". The latter two, in fact, are regularly used by non-feminists. 'Sexism' and 'misogyny' have clearly understood general meanings (discrimination based on sex and hatred of women) and are obviously compatible with a wide range of feminist beliefs, including those more or less influenced by Marxist thought. 'Patriarchy' is a bit more specific but I think that among feminists it does admit of different interpretations - 'patriarchy' is a word for a general social bias in favour of men, and anything past that is the subject of debate internal to feminism. This is why the word 'patriarchy' itself is contested and opposed by some feminists; 'kyriarchy' is an alternative that some prefer.
I don't see here a coherent ideology 'isomorphic to Capitalism in Marxist ideology'. To Marxists, capitalism means a form of political and social economy organised around the interests of owners of capital. To feminists, patriarchy means the idea that society favours men over women. These seem meaningfully different, and if the Marxist understanding of capitalism is more more specific than the feminist understanding of patriarchy, that's because Marxism is a much more narrow tradition with a single ideological forefather and body of canonical work, whereas feminism has neither. There is no feminist Marx; there is no feminist equivalent to Capital.
Thus you take Bell Hooks as one representative example. I'm a bit surprised because my first thoughts as to some of the most influential authors and texts shaping modern feminism were Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. I submit that de Beauvoir and Greer are more important and influential feminist thinkers than Hooks, at least. Are these particularly Marxist texts, in your view? Do they describe a Marxist or quasi-Marxist philosophy? There's obviously some Marxist intellectual influence there (de Beauvoir was quite familiar with Marx), but there is as much by way of resistance as there is by way of agreement - de Beauvoir disagrees with some of Marx's central claims!
At any rate, yes, there are certainly Marxist feminists, and there are feminist Marxists. But I don't think that shows that feminism is descended from Marxism, a form of Marxism, isomorphic to Marxism, or anything like that. It is equally true, for instance, that there are both Christian Marxists and Marxist Christians (I find this baffling, but it nonetheless appears to be the case), and yet nobody tries to tell me that Marxism and Christianity must be closely related in this way.
(Well, I suppose maybe Nietzscheans. Slave morality and equality and so on. Or Randians/Objectivists, for whom both Marxism and Christianity are forms of altruism. Nobody who I think is worth taking remotely seriously tries to group together Christianity and Marxism.)
OliveTapenade
14d ago
My understanding, roughly, is that classical Marxism, to the extent that it acknowledges patriarchy as a concept at all, holds that patriarchy and gender-based oppression are downstream of economic class. The father and husband holds power in a way derivative of his position in the economic system. As such any attempt to solve the patriarchy problem or liberate women that does not engage with capitalism is doomed to fail. The liberation of women is, insofar as it goes, a good thing, and a component of the overall class struggle, but it is subordinate to that struggle and must not be separated out from it.
Today I don't think there is an ideologically coherent 'mainline Feminism'. I think that feminism today is an extraordinarily contested label that is riven by internal strife, and as such it is very hard to generalise about a doctrinaire feminist position on anything. There are some obvious fault lines (pro-porn vs anti-porn, pro-trans vs anti-trans, pro-choice vs pro-life, and in general radical/separatist vs accomodationalist/assimilationist), but they are often mixed up and not immensely predictive of any individual's position. If I were to generalise, I would say that what makes a person or position 'feminist' today is 1) it is primarily interested in the position of women in society, and 2) it holds that women, as group or class, are in some way disadvantaged, and some sort of collective action is necessary to ameliorate those disadvantages.
Within that broad heading, there are both Marxist and non-Marxist feminists, and the line can be blurry. Moreover, because Marx is such a massively influential figure in the history of sociology, philosophy, etc., if you search for traces of Marxism in almost any school of social analysis, you're going to find some. I think it's fair to say that it is reasonably common to find bits or pieces from the wider Marxist tradition in most feminist schools of thought today - but which pieces, and how consequential they are, will vary widely.
I would not generalise that modern, mainline feminists consider their critique to be a refinement of Marxism. I think that most academic feminists, if questioned, will grant that there is some Marxist influence on their thought - but that most will not see that thought as decisive, and most do not think of themselves as working in a Marxist school, or as part of the Marxist tradition. I'd guess that just as classical Marxists think of the class structure of society and the economic mode of production as the umbrella issues, and everything else as derivative, academic feminists today tend to take gender as the umbrella issue, and see economics as downstream of that. For them Marx is an important historical figure working in a related field, whose insights are sometimes but not universally applicable to their own analyses.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Isn't this a motte and bailey?
The motte is Marxists caring about culture, which obviously they have done throughout history. The Soviet Union is just one famous example.
The bailey is the much less defensible claim that "wokism is the bastard child of communism" - this kind of 'cultural Marxism' is a much larger, more complicated narrative about how intersectionality, modern progressive thought, etc., derive from a complex chain of descent from Marxism.
The bailey may be true - you'd have to defend it - but you don't get it free with the motte.
(And it's a genetic fallacy anyway, but that's a whole separate issue. Suffice to say that I think wokism is wrong, but it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of this or that historical antecedent.)
OliveTapenade
15d ago
For what it's worth, I can't imagine the idea of watching a film on a phone or even on a computer monitor. It's practically the only thing I use my television for these days, but I still insist on watching films on a television.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I'm thinking particularly of politics.
For an example... I remember being very struck by this listening to a podcast with Sophie Lewis, a family abolition advocate. Unfortunately the one I'm thinking of as since been taken down, but this kind of conversation. Other examples of the podcast I was originally thinking of have the same kind of high-strung, nervous energy that I was trying to describe. Another way of putting it might be just the way that Robin DiAngelo talks.
Perhaps a linguist would be able to explain this better than I can, but there's a feeling I get somewhere beneath the surface where, say, Steve Turley comes off as wanting to yell. He has the energy or vibe, I suppose, that I associate with having clenched teeth, or wanting to punch someone. I get the opposite feeling from people like Lewis or DiAngelo - not actually crying or having an anxiety attack, no more than Turley is actually laying about himself with a golf club, but a sort of... 10% or 15% concentration of the same ingredient that would, at 100%, lead to those more spectacular breakdowns.
I do think it's gendered - I don't get, for instance, any of the nervous energy I'm talking about from Ezra Klein. He comes off to me as professional and articulate, and I think in general men don't project anxiety as much as women (and when they do, they come off as effeminate and weak and that makes it very hard for them to build a brand). But I think it's fair to say that women are more prominent in the left-wing sphere, and right-wing culture warrior women do more to imitate the angry affect anyway.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
Not a right-winger either, but I have noticed a number of subtle speech habits or audio cues between each wing?
You're right that the generic right-wing affect is a kind of aggression or rage. It's not that they're all shouting all the time, because they're not, but they often speak as if they're about to. They tend to have some visible signs of masculinity or working-class LARP (the baseball caps, the beards, etc.) and their visual style is deliberately un-classy (that guy's video is plastered with garish ads, which for some reason I see a lot among right-wing commentators, but lefties seem to avoid).
By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.
In both cases this is a generalisation and you can find counter-examples on both the right and the left all day.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
This has been relevant to me in professional contexts - I don't want to get into specifics, but I have seen laws drafted on 'conversion therapy' that, if taken literally, would make it illegal for a pastor to pray with someone.
It's not that rare a situation that a religious person feels same-sex attraction, wants to resist that attraction and not act on it, and requests help and comfort from one of their spiritual authorities, or even just from brothers or sisters in the faith. Yet I have seen proposed laws that would criminalise that.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
I wonder, looking at some of the comments up-thread, if it's somthing peculiar to Americans? Do the rest of us treat it like fun make-believe to share with the kids, and for some reason it's just Americans in particular who take it extremely literally and obsess about genuinely convincing children with the most convincing illusion possible?
Or is it, for lack of a better way of putting it, about certain personality types, perhaps very detail-oriented or autistic ones? Maybe if you can't read social cues very well, are very literal-minded, and very trusting by nature, you take what's supposed to be make-believe, genuinely believe it, and then feel surprised and betrayed when you realise your mistake? It's possible that people like that are just overrepresented here and on rationalist-adjacent blogs.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
...okay, fair, that made me laugh.
Again, I don't think it's quite the same - the motte-and-bailey is a tactical move you make in an individual argument, whereas this is more like concept creep - but it is close enough that you got me.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
For what it's worth I put that one in because I have heard others talking about it. Personally I cannot remember ever believing that Santa was real, but neither can I remember ever being edgy about it. I can't remember anyone else ever believing that Santa was real either. My recollection of being that age is that of course we all knew it was a game of pretend, and of course we all played along with it for fun.
I may have been very atypical, I don't know. I have never thought about what to tell children about it myself. We'd probably just play the game, but I don't think I'd go to any real effort to hide the truth if a kid was curious.
OliveTapenade
19d ago
Got to admit, of all the examples, that is not one I expected to occasion any controversy.
I was also somewhat tempted by "circumcision is child abuse" or "circumcision is surgical mutilation", though I think that's just the noncentral fallacy, rather than concepts being opportunistically expanded and diluted. It's also a proxy with a larger and more comprehensive argument behind it - that in general we seem to have a rule against unnecessary, permanent surgical procedures being done on children without their consent, or when they are unable to consent, and circumcision does not qualify as an exception to that rule.
It has to ground out in something more than just pay, though, doesn't it? The idea that anything is productive if people are willing to pay for it would seem to make the idea of an unproductive or wasteful job impossible. But in practice we seem to understand that there are jobs that draw a paycheck without providing any real benefit.
I'd like to believe there's a difference between jobs like mine, which do produce benefits even if those benefits are not easily measured, and jobs that simply don't produce benefits at all.
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