OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
22d ago
I've not got a survey of all Holocaust deniers (or revisionists, if you must) on the internet, but at least in places like the Motte, I do seem to notice a correlation between Holocaust denial and a strong interest in Jews?
This conversation started out concerning SecureSignals, and the common theme in SecureSignals' posting history is not deep and pedantic historical analysis that leads him to question established wisdom on a wide range of issues, wherever he sees anything that seems off-kilter, of which the Holocaust is only a single example. The common theme in SecureSignals' posting is Jews.
He makes a lot of posts about Jews that do not involve the Holocaust. He does not make a lot of posts about historical population movements or statistics that do not involve the Holocaust. The theme is Jews.
So just as an explanation, I feel like "SecureSignals hates Jews" seems to fit the evidence better than "SecureSignals has an extremely high regard for historical rigour". Hell, I'll be gracious here - maybe he doesn't hate Jews. I don't know the inside of his heart. But he seems to really want to talk about Jews, in contexts that seem to me to portray them negatively.
OliveTapenade
23d ago
At least some of it has to be to do with culture, doesn't it?
Comparison: why don't forums like this get tiresome New-Atheist-style religion-bashing any more? It's not because that particular type of obnoxious atheist doesn't exist any more. They're out there, and likely much more widely prevalent than Holocaust deniers. I think it's just culture. If you jump on that soapbox now, you don't get a sympathetic ear, or even that much real controversy. Everyone just rolls their eyes at you and calls you boring. Or why don't we get the opposite - devout fundamentalists here to proselytise? I've been on forums that had intelligent, well-spoken fundamentalists who signed up to do that, and did so articulately even in the face of tremendous criticism, and obviously that demographic is still out there.
If the dominant response to Holocaust denial and anti-semitism here was collective eye-rolling, of the sort that indicated that nobody is interested in hearing about it or even arguing with it, I think it would probably fade. But for better or for worse, people go where they think they might have audiences.
The Motte is currently in that sweet spot where 1) Holocaust denial is allowed, which is what most of the comments so far have been alluding to, and 2) Holocaust denial is listened to. It causes controversy. It appears that there is at least a chance that some posters are convinceable, or at least, are open to engage on the topic. The latter point concerns culture, and can't be reduced to rules or mod strategies.
OliveTapenade
24d ago
Just for the sake of rigour:
What makes anyone think that this is another other than more Chinese robbers? That it isn't just two hours of misleading vividness?
There are one and a half billion Indians. It is the largest country in the world. Do I believe that a dedicated troll could find two hours of footage of Indians being disgusting or immoral? Certainly. I would be shocked if that weren't the case. I am sure you could easily do the same thing for China or the United States or Egypt or any country of reasonable size.
Meanwhile let's make a quick sanity-check. If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much. They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage. This is even more the case if we look at history. Broadly speaking, which country has been more productive, in terms of art, science, religion, philosophy, engineering, or any similar field? If there's a Chinese advantage, it doesn't look immediately overwhelming, to me. India and China look pretty comparable.
Why should we take this seriously? We ought to predict that such a film could be made regardless of whether its general claims about Indians are true or not. Knowing that, the film presents no compelling reason to believe that its general claim is true.
OliveTapenade
26d ago
Frequently I was met with incredulity here when I suggested that there were people (besides professional artists themselves) who cared about whether art was AI-generated or not.
There certainly are, though in my experience a significant part of that is because AI art has a consistent style, and is consistently of lower quality and inspiration. It's possible that this preference might change if AI art becomes as good or worthwhile as human art - but of course it's also possible that people continue to prefer human art in an 'artisanal' way, much as people prefer individual handicrafts to factory-produced goods, even if the latter are arguably higher-quality.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
This is part of the issue. There's an extent to which I'm willing to engage in fruitless internet debate, and yell at brick walls about how perhaps a certain group of people aren't the source of all evil, but only an extent.
In general what I want to find are thought-provoking, interesting ideas that I couldn't have predicted or would not have otherwise considered, or perspectives from people with life experiences and areas of knowledge far outside my own. But some of the Motte's most popular hobby-horses are the opposite of that - ideas that are predictable, tendentious, and frankly just not very interesting.
It's not about perspectives being right-leaning, necessarily. I hang out and chat in a number of different right-leaning spaces, and they're all very different. The Motte leans more in the nerdy-libertarian-alt-right direction - very few traditional conservatives here, but a lot of people from over-educated progressive backgrounds who are interested in 'heretical' viewpoints, and as such end up constructing big yet idiosyncratic intellectual frameworks for things, and are usually way too online. By contrast, when I hang out with 'normie' conservatives, God-and-guns-and-low-taxes type conservatives, they usually have a wider range of interests, are much less interested in systematising, and have more straightforwardly anti-authoritarian politics. Or for another, when I hang out with religious conservatives, the ones involved with church and activism and doctrine and so on, again the culture is quite different, with its own language and interests. Notably both the normie-conservatives and the religious-right-types would, I think, utterly hate the Motte. I can just seem them in my mind's eye - the former would call the Motte a bunch of pretentious racists with their heads up their own assholes, and the latter would call them un-reconstructed neo-pagan sophists. The right, much like the left, is full of factions and disagreements. The Motte isn't 'right-wing' simpliciter. It leans in the direction of a very particular type of oddball who has been externally characterised as on the right, but is not really at home there.
OliveTapenade
29d ago
I'm not actually familiar with the entire American media landscape, but certainly if you look beyond America, there are plenty of Chinese-owned newspapers, some intended for general consumption and some that specifically appeal to members of the Chinese diaspora. But again, so what? I'm not even sure what you're talking about now. I thought we were talking about The Atlantic, and The Atlantic is not a newspaper. Now, I'm sure you can find in Western media, if you look, articles by ethnically Chinese people that are sympathetic to the PRC, but that's just what we ought to expect.
You return to this "vertically integrated propaganda apparatus". That's a conspiracy. Let me present an alternative hypothesis - you are likely to find Jewish authors independently, without any particular coordination or malice, writing things relevant to them, which, yes, includes concerns about anti-semitism. There doesn't need to be a grand plan or a racial animus to explain the observations that Jews oppose anti-semitism and that Jews tend to be pro-Israel, and that writing by Jews in the media sometimes touches on those themes.
You say that this "presents ethnic advocacy as journalism", but as I said, The Atlantic is not a newspaper. Theo Baker's article is not presented as neutral journalism - The Atlantic doesn't even do that. It's an opinion piece, and its editorial line - anti-semitism is bad, Stanford students are being unfairly hostile to Jewish students, Jewish students are legitimately afraid - is not concealed. Baker's perspective is obvious.
Is this 'advocating for Jewish nationalism'? I mean, it is taking the strong view that being a Zionist or supporting Israel shouldn't be reason to be bullied or harassed. Is that Jewish nationalism? It relates to the Jewish nation, I suppose. Baker makes zero attempt whatsoever to convince people of Zionism, or to argue that people should be supportive of Israel. He actually is moderately sympathetic to concerns about Palestine, and regularly presents his preferred goal as being open and free dialogue, diversity of opinion, and so on. If this is Jewish nationalism, it's a really poor effort. I mean, read the damn thing. This is his position:
And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.
[...]
At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?
When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.
This doesn't read like Jewish or Israeli nationalism. This reads like, "The world is complicated, it's not all black-and-white, so please acknowledge that there's nuance here and don't attack or harass Jewish students." That is a plea for tolerance and understanding.
Now, sure, the article is written to influence public opinion - that is by definition true of all articles. That is the point of any article. There is no visible unique Jewish malice here.
Look, if all you were saying was, "For so-and-so historical reasons Jewish are disproportionately present in media and journalism" (which is true), and "Jews tend to care about Jewish issues, such as anti-semitism or Israel, more than other people do" (also obviously true), and therefore "media and journalism tend to give greater prominence to anti-semitism or Israel than they would otherwise" (seems a reasonable conclusion), I'd have no issue. I myself regularly complain about the media's monomaniacal focus on Israel - a brief comparison between October 7 and the invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh is instructive, where Western countries were hugely-focused on Gaza while ignoring the other, much more successful genocide occurring on the other side of the Middle East. The obvious reason for that is that lots of Americans care about Israel whereas not very many Americans care about Armenia, and yeah, that probably has to do with the fact that there are lots of American Jews and Jews are a historically successful group in America. They have a louder voice. Meanwhile there aren't that many Armenians in America, and they're a less wealthy group, so even if they wanted to, they would have a hard time telling their story.
But that's not in fact what you're saying. You are saying, as far as I can see, not just that Jews tend to be interested in things that affect Jews, but that Jews are this inherently untrustworthy manipulative group who should be automatically assumed to be lying unless there is strong evidence otherwise, and you specifically attribute this to 'HBD', i.e. some racial difference inherent to Jews.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
You didn't include any of that in your comment, so obviously I didn't respond to it. What I was responding to was the long record you have here of taking any instance of Jews writing anything, whether about Jews or not, and insinuating that it's evidence of some malevolent racial character. I asked whether you jump to the same overblown conclusions regardless of the ethnicity of the author - and in my judgement, you don't. It is a unique fixation on Jews.
I repeat: what we have here is an article by a Jew criticising anti-semitism. I have pointed to articles by Asians criticising anti-Asian feeling, by black people criticising anti-black feeling, and, yes, by white people criticising anti-white feeling. (Even if you don't count Middle Easterners as white, Conor Friedersdorf is undoubtedly white and he was criticising racial rhetoric that attacks or vilifies white people for perfectly innocent behaviour. It counts.) If a behaviour is carried out identically by pretty much every racial group, then it hardly seems to be something unique to Jews.
You might want to argue that specifically white identitarianism is not published, whereas other racial groups can publish identitarian content. This is true to an extent. The Atlantic probably wouldn't publish e.g. outright black nationalism of the same kind as white nationalism, but it does tend to publish explicitly pro-black-identity black authors more than it would white authors. That's a hypocrisy. It's just hard to see what if anything that has to do with Jews.
(As a side note here, I would gently remind you that Theo Baker's article isn't advocating for Jewish nationalism or anything like that either. It is just a straightforward piece against anti-semitism. The thrust of the article is not to advocate for special privileges or carve-outs for Jews - not the way that e.g. black authors openly advocate for reparations and other special privileges - but rather just to say "please stop attacking us". It is purely defensive.)
But this is what you always do - anything a Jew says is evidence of the sinister racial character of Jews, no matter how innocuous the thing, or no matter how much people of other cultures do the exact same thing. You cite "the very long history of Jews presenting their one-sided account of a political conflict as "journalism"" as if it isn't completely normal and expected for anyone's account of a political conflict to favour their own side. Hamza El Boudali's account of the conflict at Stanford is completely one-sided. Political tribalism is a human constant. Jews and Palestinians are no different to, say, pro-life and pro-choice journalists.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
That's a dodge. I didn't ask about that. I asked if you make the assumption about every group.
Let's recap:
There's a story in The Atlantic where a Jewish person discusses anti-semitism. There are obviously lots of stories in The Atlantic where people of other ethnicities talk about prejudice against them: it's easy to find articles criticising anti-black racism, anti-Hispanic feeling, and so on. Here are two pieces by Asian authors criticising anti-Asian feeling, for instance. I assume I don't need to do the same with black authors; we all know The Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates.
There are also Atlantic stories that are, broadly speaking, anti-woke, or which criticising identitarianism. The Atlantic publishes Thomas Chatterton Williams and John McWhorter, for instance. Here's an article criticising a form of black activism (I can't tell the author's race; would that count as black in the US?). Meanwhile here's an article by a black person talking about anti-black racism. If you're interested in white people specifically, here's Reihan Salam (who according to the US census is a white person) criticising anti-white rhetoric. Here's Conor Friedersdorf (clearly white) criticising hateful anti-white rhetoric.
You have asserted that the existence of an Atlantic article by a Jewish person criticising anti-semitism is evidence of "a quintessentially Jewish behaviour" to "manipulate public opinion". Well, I think it's true enough that Jewish people want for other people to not hate Jews, and that sometimes they write things to that effect. But there is nothing sinister about that, especially since the very same outlet publishes things by other groups asking people not to hate them! Black authors, Hispanic authors, Asian authors, and yes, even white authors also get published saying, "Please do not hate us as a group."
The objection I have is that you take something very obvious and understandable - a member of an ethnic group writing an article criticising hatred towards that same ethnic group - and, in a way that you apparently do not do with any other group, immediately assert some sort of pan-ethnic deceptive nature. Are Jews a race of lying manipulators for this? Well, by the same logic, so are blacks. And Hispanics. And Asians. And whites. Because they all publish pieces in The Atlantic criticising racial animus towards them. Jewish authors are not acting remotely unusually here - they are acting the same way as everybody else.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
DeSantis claims to have a working class background, but as far as I can tell it's largely fictional. His parents were more-or-less working-class, but he went straight from high school to Yale, was briefly a teacher, and then went to Harvard Law School. He then into the US Navy as an officer. DeSantis himself has never had a blue-collar job.
There's a point where "my father once had a job where he worked with his hands" doesn't count for that much.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
It's only Jews that you'd be that paranoid around, to be clear? Or does every group get the same assumption of bad faith?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I think his point, rather, is that insofar as there are tens of millions of Democrats voting, odds are that at least a couple are fanatical and stupid enough to attempt electoral fraud. The exact same thing is true of Republicans - there are so many of them that it would be unbelievable if literally none attempted fraud. The USA is massive and there are lots of dumb people.
Thus, even if you can find "a few nutters" cheating, that is not enough to invalidate an election, or even to conclude any particular malice or dishonesty on the part of their side.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
That's how I tend to feel whenever people make a political argument from... well, biorealism, race realism, HBD, whatever you want to call it. Even if we grant that Group X are on average 10% or 20% dumber than Group Y, it does not follow that Group X will be better off being governed by Group Y. If nothing else, Group Xers probably care about Group X's welfare, whereas Group Yers do not necessarily.
It's an argument I've had before with people from all sides of politics. Communists, woke progressives, postliberals and integralists, cultural conservatives, alt-righters, HBDers, you name it. There comes a moment where it always seems to come down to, "We just need to get a sufficiently enlightened elite to govern the whole, for their own good."
I think of C. S. Lewis' argument for democracy:
I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
This is correct. Supporting Palestine is a separate question to that of one's affection for Palestinian people.
And I would also try to distinguish between support for Palestine as a symbol and support for Palestine in the sense of actually wanting to help Palestinian people in concrete terms. In the Arab world there is very high symbolic support for Palestine, but relatively little practical support for materially aiding them. If you ask the average Egyptian on the street whether the government should do something to help Palestinians, they will probably say yes - but I think the Egyptian people overall are unlikely to put much pressure on the government to that effect, and the government certainly doesn't want to.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
The short version is that a progressive politics, prizing compassion and equality, is compatible with belief in the scientific validity of genes and heredity. It's more-or-less the same position as Scott's Parable of the Talents, or Freddie deBoer's take on education, or anything that you might file under the heading of 'hereditarian left'. Both social interventions and targeted genetic enhancement are good.
I'm a bit skeptical of the conclusion for overall Chestertonian and/or James-C.-Scott-ian reasons, but I doubt many Motte posters will find much to disagree with. It feels rather Singerian to me, in a sense?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Witness that Malaysia is for example much more anti-Zionist than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, even though Israel and Palestine are on the other side of the world and are inhabited by people ethnically and culturally very distinct from Southeast Asia(ns). But if you speak to Muslim Malays, they see it as their big and noble duty to the Muslim world to be anti-Israel, serving in this sense a function like a crusade.
It would not surprise me if proximity makes a huge difference here.
It's not exactly true that all Muslims coo over Arab culture and Arab states - ask some Iranians how they feel about Arabs one day - but at any rate, it also strikes me as noticeably the case that neighbouring Arab states are quite cool on the Palestinians. They tend to hate Israel (though are periodically willing to do deals with it for advantage), and in that regard are happy to use the Palestinians as a club against Israel, but they don't seem to care about the Palestinians as such. If you look at Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese policy towards the Palestinians, sure, none of them like Israel, but none of them like the Palestinians very much either, and they tend to be extremely opposed to letting Palestinians in to their countries or giving them aid. This is not helped by the fact that when they have let Palestinians in it has gone very badly - people still remember Black September.
If you're Malaysian, you are never going to have to deal with Palestinians yourself. Pragmatism doesn't come into it, since neither Israel nor Palestine matter much or you in material terms. So you're free to adopt this worldview where Palestinians are a nation of martyrs for Islam and Israelis are merely monsters. You can support Palestine-as-symbol in isolation from any real people.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
And he's playing a character named Leto Atreides, which is practically the equivalent of tattooing "I AM GREEK" on his forehead.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I haven't seen the Dune films, but it does sound to me like there are a lot of things missing from them that are extremely important to the text, such as Frank Herbert's weird psychosexual theories, or the entire Arabic/Islamic/Middle Eastern element - I think they steered away from the word jihad? And I remember glancing at the cast list and being shocked by, well, pretty much every casting, as well as the total absence of Middle Eastern actors. It looks to me like every single human ethnicity is in those films except for the ones that are actually appropriate. I don't know how you take a story that's about a Greek family falling in with Arabic tribespeople in order to overthrow a Persian emperor and manage to not cast a single person who looks remotely Greek, Arabic, or Persian.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
It is fascinating and dare I say even hilarious and satisfying to read a man discovering that the whole culture he made up, projected on to people, and invested in was in fact made up.
Why no, it turns out that most white people are not wannabe-Nietzschean-hustlers, and instead just want to find a nice partner, a nice job, and settle down to a quiet life and find meaning in family and friendship. The horror!
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Don't you need to distinguish pornography here from any work that is about sex?
Simply containing a depiction of sex, or more than that, being about sex, relationships, desire, and identity is not sufficient to make something porn. Porn is not about investigating those things - indeed, a work that sincerely investigates or explores those issues in a meaningful way is practically by definition not porn.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I think there's no actual way to know what Sweet Baby Inc influenced in these games unless you work for SBI, the company, or there are leaks. Before SBI was put on as a face to the concept, though, the "woke" direction of the industry had been criticized for a long time, so the issue was never SBI specifically or even companies like SBI, but rather that devs actually seemed to want their narratives to receive influence from the type of ideology espoused by people working at or defending SBI.
Realistically, yes, SBI is only a symbol here. There's no way of knowing what SBI is actually responsible for, or if it was bad.
But sometimes the symbol is enough. The point is "wokeness in games is bad", and SBI consult on games and are (or at least the SBI employees who post on Twitter are) woke, so they stand for the whole fuzzy concept. If there's any kind of strategy here, I doubt the aim is to specifically end SBI influence on games, but rather to send a general message that the audience disapproves of wokeness. The goa may not be for SBI to change, but for the next developer to think to themselves quietly, "Hm, my audience doesn't like woke stuff, I guess I won't include that."
I would be very wary of using Wikipedia as a source for theology, and especially for the intersection of theology with politics. Wikipedia follows the reliable sources, and the reliable sources tend to be secular mainstream media filtered through an overwhelmingly secular user base, which is to say not very reliable at all. While writing my last message I found myself looking at the wiki page on millennialism, realised that the entire thing was unsalvageable nonsense, and concluded it would take too long to dismantle and therefore I just wan't going to mention millennialism or postmillennialism at all. This is unfortunately an all-too-common experience with Wikipedia and the subject of religion.
So that said...
It is basic Christian orthodoxy that Christ is lord of the whole of life - not just Sunday, not just the sabbath, not just whenever we're feeling pious, not just some imagined secular sphere. If one is a Christian, one is a Christian all the time. So I do not particularly associate that part with Christian nationalism - indeed, I think a general American Christian response to Christian nationalism worries has been to point out that they have always been Christian in the public sphere before, that Christianity has always shaped their values and political commitments, and that the unreasonable push is actually that would demand people cordon off part of their life and identity from their public commitments.
Similarly you mention that politics are inevitable for Christians and Christians must engage in them, must even fight - this too strikes me as, well, normal and the way it has always been for Christians. So that does not strike me as a Christian nationalist distinctive.
As for parallel societies... I have to admit I'm blanking here, because I'm not aware of where self-described Christian nationalists are doing anything like that. Dreher's Benedict Option flips between being a truism and being a headlong flight for the hills depending on what's more convenient for Dreher as an internet warrior in any given moment (and he will call you names if you disagree), but the Benedict Option at least commends a type of parallel society. Sometimes the postliberals give the impression of wanting to set up a parallel society, at least when they're not fantasising about a Hungarian-style top-down programme of public reorganisation, but they haven't done anything to meaningfully create one (except insofar as they exist within the Catholic media and cultural sphere, which does have a kind of internal society, albeit one rapidly fraying). Where do you see them building such societies?
More generally...
I understand Christian nationalism to be an argument about how to be Christian in the public sphere, not whether or not to do so. If they have made you more conscious of ways to be meaningfully Christian in public, and to build Christian community within a larger polity, then that is a good thing, but I would caution against signing on with 'Christian nationalism' as a project.
This is one conservative Christian comment on Christian nationalism that strikes me as useful - it recognises that the term is sufficiently indistinct as to be confusing, and it then more clearly lays out what is poisonous in terms of nationalism, but also what is required of Christians in terms of political and social engagement.
EDIT: Oops, posted too soon. To comment on specific policies, I'm not sure how much good symbolic recognition necessarily does for the church. The US constitution does not mention God at all, whereas the Australian constitution (my own) indicates in its first sentence that Australia forms a commonwealth "humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God", and every sitting of parliament begins with a public reading of the Lord's Prayer. Yet it is not clear that these symbolic acts have made Australia a more meaningfully or piously Christian society than America - if anything we may well be less so. So I would be wary of pinning too much hope on top-down state actions. If as Adams said the constitution is only adequate for "a moral and religious people", the only way to nourish it is to ensure that the people themselves are indeed moral and religious, from the bottom up. Symbolic statements strike me as, well, just slapping a sticker with 'moral and religious' written on it on top of something that isn't.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Well, Heidi Przybyla's definition was absurd on the face of it. She was the one who defined Christian nationalism as based in the common belief that rights come from God rather than the state, but that belief is more-or-less universal within historical Christianity, and to the extent that Christians doubt it today, they do so in ignorance of their own tradition. It is also, incidentally, a view that would be easily affirmed by a majority of religious Jews and Muslims - it is not even a Christian distinctive, much less a Christian nationalist distinctive!
Aniol's argument does not particularly touch on me - it reads more to me like he has an axe to grind around the baptism of children, which is certainly his right, but it has nothing much to do with Christian nationalism. It is, perhaps, an easy rhetorical line to try to dis-associate Christian nationalism from Baptists, but I don't particularly care about Baptist insecurities. He is wrong on the issue of infant baptism; nothing proceeds from that for me. So I find most of his essay irrelevant. But let's pass over Aniol, and focus on his summary of Doug Wilson's argument...
Well, Wilson wants some kind of public or legal acknowledgement of the truth of Christianity, via established churches. This seems odd to me as a definition of Christian nationalism. Aniol quotes him mentioning “a network of nations bound together by a formal, public, civic acknowledgment of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and the fundamental truth of the Apostles’ Creed”, and... well, that's kind of it. I think the question I have here is whether this already exists. Does the United Kingdom for a starting point qualify as having made such a formal, civic acknowledgement? It has an established church, that church's ceremonies and rites are part of state affairs, and the sovereign was crowned in an explicitly Christian ceremony in which he vowed to defend and maintain the church. And then for a network of churches - well, the Porvoo Communion exists, and Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland all have established churches as well. If Wilson defines Christian nationalism in those terms, it would seem that Christian nationalism already exists and has done so uncontroversially for a long time.
Yet if I look at the arguments of self-identified Christian nationalists, particularly Americans like Stephen Wolfe, I don't think I see them saying that they want the US to be more like the UK or Denmark. As such, I take 'Christian nationalism' in practice to mean something more than that minimal definition.
At any rate, I asked you the question first. You said that you're getting more sympathetic to 'Christian nationalism'. What do you mean by that? Are you getting more sympathetic to the view that rights come from God? (In which case I would happily agree that rights do come from God, but would dispute that this has anything whatsoever to do with 'Christian nationalism'.) Are you getting more sympathetic to the idea that it would be good for there to be an established church? (That also doesn't seem to be the same thing as 'Christian nationalism', but nevermind.) What is it that you find compelling?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
How are you defining 'Christian nationalism'? There are many ways in which a Christian could or indeed should assert that Christianity should be part of public life, or should inform the principles on which a nation is built, not all of which are typically categorised as 'Christian nationalism'. When you say that you're getting more sympathetic to Christian nationalism, what practical policies or reforms do you have in mind?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'm not sure how compelling "game writing is bad if you remove it from the context of the game" is meant to be?
Yes, just reading a text dump of the game isn't very entertaining. But games are games, and the writing in it serves the purposes of the game as an integrated whole. It's like pointing out that just reading a film script is usually worse than reading an equivalent novel. Of course it is! It would be bizarre for it not to be!
Ironically I actually disliked Disco Elysium - I found it clunky and unappealing as a game, and I found its writing a bit too precious; notably I actively disliked the gimmick where your skills talk to you, as if you're a schizophrenic. But I think the point holds. Game writing ought to be evaluated in the context of an entire game, and it is no sign of bad writing that it doesn't stand up if removed from that context.
Let me take a specific example. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is often considered one of the best video games ever made, and I'd argue it has great writing. If you just read its script you might find that surprising, but I think its script contextualises its gameplay really well, and successfully contributes to the overall success of the game. Some of the game's most effective moments work because of the writing - stepping out on to Hyrule Field for the first time is a very memorable moment, and that's achieved due to the graphics, music, etc., but also because the story has contextualised what that means by making you spend the first hour or two of the game in this restricted, dense forest environment while reminding you that Link has never left this area, that nobody ever leaves the forest because they fear they'll die, and that Link is nonetheless adventurous at heart. The huge field rising before you, the horizon, the iconic swell of music is all powerful, and the writing contributes to it. Even if no one element by itself is that amazing.
To me, that's what good game writing looks like.
I am conscious of the fact, actually, that I probably engage in too much meta-posting. I fear that's a consequence of spending most of my time reading the Motte, rather than writing new posts, which I usually only do when I feel like I have particular knowledge to contribute. I think my biggest contributions were on the Australian Voice to Parliament, which was an issue where I thought I had a lot to add. That's not always the case.
But I am probably guilty of being one of those posters who does spend more time talking about what I want to see in terms of curation than I do actually providing what I want to see. I should make an effort to work on improving the ratio, I guess.
More options
Context Copy link