OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
7mo ago
It's not particularly clear to me what the relevance of any of this is, or why we should care?
The Kurgan hypothesis is pretty well confirmed, as I understand it, so the idea that Proto-Indo-European people spread outwards from the steppe and used violence in the process is hardly new, nor the idea that it's possible to, at least in part, trace descent from them across a wide area. But this is a very niche area of history, of interest to only a small group of specialists.
Moreover, as has been noted below, there doesn't seem to be any particular correlation between degree of PIE descent and what we might call civilisational complexity. Degree of PIE descent doesn't seem to mean anything significant or practical today - it is, at best, a mild curiosity.
I don't deny that history is interesting in its own right. However, it sounds like you're interested in present-day political implications? So to ask you directly - what do you think the significance of this is? So far you've pointed to, well, a bunch of creepy fringe figures on Twitter, but of course what they believe isn't exactly significant.
The glorification of the Indo-Europeans on the right wing also marks a shift from a liberal/conservative "white people didn't do nothing" opposition to progressive racial narratives, to a Nietzschean glorification of a Bronze Age spirit.
I think you are extremely mistaken if you think that 'the right wing' in a broad sense has any idea about Proto-Indo-Europeans, or that it gives a damn one way or another. You link a short clip on Twitter that is totally inexplicable to anyone who isn't already deeply invested in a tiny subculture of conspiracy-minded anti-semites.
I know BAP had a moment, but if you think that there's a wider 'BAP school', so to speak, that's going to become a major, even mainstream influence on the right... well, I think you will be surprised.
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
To be contrarian for a minute:
100% Red and 100% Blue are indeed identical.
60% Blue is good. Everyone is alive. 60% Red is bad - it means that 40% of the population have just died horribly.
That is, the threshold for a good outcome with Blue is 50%. If Blue gets at least 51% everyone is alive and it's great. But the threshold for a non-horrible outcome with Red is much higher. Even 90% Red is still 10% of the population dying. If you gave this poll to America and the result was 90% Red, that would still be easily the worst thing to happen to America in approximately ever. By comparison: WWII killed approximately 17% of Poles, 14% of Soviets, and 8.8% of Germans. It only killed 0.3% of Americans.
How high do you need the Red percentage to be before you shrug and say, "Oh, well, acceptable casualties"? 80% 90%? 95%?
Is it lower if you think that people who pick Blue are obviously idiots and it's their own fault? Don't like it, should've picked Red? In your estimation, is picking the 'wrong' answer in a poll like this enough to condemn someone to death?
The thing is, you only need to get Blue to 50% to save everyone. That seems like a much lower hurdle than getting Red to 100%.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying.
I would be surprised if this is true given the experience of the Christian equivalents.
To be clear, the Christian tradition is similarly clear and firm to the Islamic tradition on many hot-button issues. It isn't particularly the case that, say, Christianity was historically ambiguous about sexual morality in a way that Islam was not. Nonetheless many churches have been hollowed out, and I am unsurprised to see the same process going on in Islam. Catholicism, if anything, is more explicit about many of these laws than Islam, and yet most Catholics defy that.
My guess is that one of the key factors here is that for most people, religious identity is something more like cultural identity or community - for most Catholics, "I'm Catholic" means "I identify as part of the Catholic community" and not "I positively assent to all the doctrinal claims of the Catholic Church". Likewise I suspect for many Muslims, "I'm a Muslim" is a statement about which community group they're part of, rather than what they actually believe. And the beliefs can be substantially revised as long as the sense of group membership remains intact.
Put bluntly - only autistic weirdos care about their religion's actual doctrines and commandments. So it has ever been, and so it will ever be. Even in religions where rule-following is a huge part of daily life, those rules are followed as something more like a cultural habit than anything else.
Pro-gay Christians aren't lying. I think the ones who argue directly that the Bible is neutral or positive about same-sex relationships are saying something obviously false, but I don't think they know that it's false. Lying involves a sort of psychic pain - people don't like do it, and if we have to lie for a very long time, we usually trade that lie for a self-delusion. Delusions are easier and more comfortable to maintain.
The few Haider-style MINOs that exist at the moment, I feel pretty confident, are not making public claims that they privately know to be false. I doubt they are very different to the Christians or Jews who went down the same path before them.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual. People make fun of the Evangelical thing where they insist on saying "same-sex-attracted" instead of "gay", as if it's some shibboleth, but the reason for this is that "gay" carries with it an assumption that it is, and ought to be, part of one's identity, and the Evangelicals are right that it's a big part of the problem.
I want to chime in to absolutely agree with this, particularly from the perspective of a somewhat conservative Christian, though I'd argue it's an insight that you'll find much more broadly as well. You are not your desires. Put like that, it has a very Buddhist ring to it as well, and I daresay you might find similar ideas in psychotherapy. A desire might be a passing thing, or it might be something that you need to tame and control, or it might be something like a sickness or a pathology. At any rate, it is something that passes through your mind, not your mind itself.
I suppose a gay activist might reply here with the claim that same-sex-attraction isn't a desire as such, but rather it's a permanent disposition. A desire is something in the moment, e.g. "I want to have sex with that hot guy". A permanent disposition over time or even an attribute is different. It's not about specific individual desires, but rather about an overarching framework, the structure in which individual desires rise and pass away.
There's a sense in which that's obviously true, I suppose. By way of comparison, a desire to have a beer could arise in anyone, for all sorts of reasons, but the state of being an alcoholic is more than that. Being an alcoholic is some sort of resilient-across-time tendency which may produce the desire to have a beer on a regular basis, but which is nonetheless more than just the first-order desire.
However, while I accept this precisification as a fair description of the nature of desire, I don't think it changes the central point here - whether we're talking about desires or dispositions, there's still a claim about identity that's being made.
Christians sometimes argue that the core of our identity should be in the confession of the risen Christ - it's being joined to him that forms who we are. They then go on to criticise groups like Spiritual Friendship for getting the order wrong. You aren't a gay person who happens to be a Christian - you're just a Christian, and while you may have some struggles in the flesh (as do we all), those struggles in no way change or reorder your fundamental identity, which is to say, a child of God, a sinner, forgiven, redeemed by Christ's blood. It would be absurd for people to identify as 'gluttonous Christians' or 'proud Christians' or 'Christians tempted to adultery'. The same applies. Christ comes first - he will not accept being made a hobby or an extra.
That might be valid there, but if we want to make a wider critique, we probably need to say something that's understandable even for secular people. I suppose for them what I would say is that identifying with one's desires seems like it carries with it the hidden implication that it's the fulfilment of one's desires that's the key to long-term happiness or to spiritual meaning or whatever else. That, I would argue, is a dangerous mistake. As far as I'm aware, even quite basic pop psychology has retreated from the idea that happiness comes from the fulfilment of desires. Instead, it typically arises as a byproduct of something else - the best advice for how to be happy is generally to focus on doing something else meaningful.
This is by no means saying (from a secular perspective, at least) that one shouldn't be attracted to one's own sex, or that one shouldn't live as the other sex, or generally that one shouldn't be LGBT. LGBT identity may well be compatible with all of this! Just be gay or be trans and then go and live a meaningful, other-oriented life. Rather, it's that one's desires, whether sexual or otherwise, should not be at the heart of your identity. They are not what produce long-term happiness or welfare.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
It has been very striking as well, at least to me, the way that rhetoric has blamed the result specifically on white Australia, and not on multicultural Australia.
There are significantly more Chinese-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. There are more Indian-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. But they apparently don't merit a mention?
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
Yes. I've seen the arguments against Romans 1:26-27 as dispositive, for instance, and they seem profoundly weak to me. It is true that for Paul same-sex relationships are not the fundamental vice, but rather a symptom of the fundamental vice of idolatry - but that hardly seems a defense of those relationships, no more than the same observation is a defense of wickedness, covetousness, gossip, foolishness, or cruelty, all of which are in the same passage. It is true that the phrase Paul uses in those verses, para physin (against nature), is used in other contexts in a positive way (e.g. in Romans 11:24), but this in no way turns the negative reference in 1:26-27 into a positive one. Likewise you sometimes run into the argument that Paul was talking about people acting 'against nature' in the sense of against the way they are created, and he didn't know what sexual orientation is - now that we do know what it is, we understand that for a homosexual person to eschew same-sex relationships would be acting against their own nature. Therefore the Pauline argument should actually be in favour!
And so on. There's a lot of very standard but also very weak argumentation along these lines - here are two examples from the Australian debate a few years ago. I do not think these need to be particularly dignified with a response - in particular I think the second piece's conclusion that we need to be "even more Pauline than Paul" is an excuse for revisionist sophistry, where as long as we can contort a 'big idea' into something that can be awkwardly construed as supporting whatever we want to do today, we're free to ignore all the details of that idea.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that, if one approaches the Christian tradition - including both the Bible and the two thousand years of interpretation and practice on top of that - with anything like a neutral gaze, the disapproval of same-sex relationships is clear and unambiguous.
Nonetheless, people who have been raised in and identify with Christianity nonetheless sometimes want to affirm same-sex relationships. Rather than face the understandable psychic pain of needing to either abandon Christianity, or abandon their convictions about sexuality, they instead go for the oh-so-much-easier approach of convincing themselves that Christianity says what they wish it said.
I think this is an instructive example not only for Christians thinking about issues to do with sexuality, but for Christians thinking about any moral issues whatsoever - because on every issue, there is a temptation like this, a temptation to disfigure the gospel and make it into whatever is convenient for one's present interests.
At any rate -
As for Christianity, so too for Islam. I don't think the clarity of Islamic teaching on this point will help it any. Christian teaching is just as clear, and yet...
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I guess part of my point is that it seems to be that the traits we assign to each group are heavily influenced by the location wer'e starting from and the particular questions we want answered. The top-level comment here is interested in black-white relations, so the dynamic he zeroes in on is mature/neotenous, with wild/domesticated as a secondary factor. Lu Jiamin is interested in Chinese/European relations, so he focuses on a different dynamic - wild/tame, or steppe/agrarian, or something else entirely. It's also, I think, very noticeable which qualities of different groups he thinks are revealing. Diet appears to be important to Lu, but I don't notice any of the Western HBD types mentioning diet. Presumably diet comes into it because his binary is to do with agrarians (eating grains, weaving clothes from plant fibers, etc.) with nomads, hunters, and pastoralists (eating meat and dairy, wearing clothes made from fur and wool, etc.), but it also seems like for him diet is one facet of a broader lifestyle that also involves political and cultural practices (e.g. women's rights, parliamentary democracy), and for that matter economics. He thinks that a free market and a competition of equals is paradigmatic of the Wolf peoples, whereas Chinese communism, implicitly, is another form of the 'Dragon King' to which the Chinese people bow. The stereotypically Chinese/Dragon way is to have a tremendously powerful central authority that coordinates all economic and social activity, on a strict hierarchical lines, and to which the people meekly submit - the CCP is structurally the same as the emperor.
This seems especially interesting to me because Lu doesn't try to reduce it to a single factor, like genetics or descent. I notice in the top-level comment here (and in the usual comments of our local racialists) a very reductive approach, trying to find the one controlling factor. For Lu, it seems to be a complex - genetics play a role, but so does culture, education, political structure, economic structure, and so on. Thus Lu maintains some hope that it might be possible to teach the Chinese to understand or respect wolves (indeed one of the central themes of the novel is a lament for the dying grassland), to teach them to preserve the grasslands they are destroying, to discover the secret of the West, and form a kind of hybrid. There is a kind of fusion. By the end of the story, the wolf cub that Chen Zhen has raised dies, and they skin the wolf's pelt and tie it to a pole, like a flag:
A fierce northwestern wind sent the cub’s pelt soaring, combing through his battle garb and making him appear to be dressed formally for a banquet in heaven. Pale smoke rising from the yurt’s chimney wafted under the pelt, making it seem as if the cub were riding the clouds, roiling and dancing freely and happily in the misty smoke. At that moment, there was no chain around his neck and no narrow, confining prison under his feet.
Chen’s vacant gaze followed the impish, lifelike figure of the cub’s pelt as it danced in the wind; it was the undying outer shell the cub had left behind, but the beautiful and commanding figure seemed to still contain his free and unyielding spirit. Suddenly, the long, tubular body and bushy tail rolled a few times like a flying dragon, soaring in the swirling snow and drifting clouds. The wind howled and the white hair flew. The cub, like a golden flying dragon, rode the clouds and mist, traveling on snow and wind, soaring happily toward Tengger, to the star Sirius, to the free universe in space, to the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated.
At that instant, Chen Zhen believed he saw his very own wolf totem.
By the end, the wolf has become a dragon, soaring through the air towards heaven, and Chen, one of the dragon people, has found his own wolf's soul.
(And then the grasslands are destroyed, because the Chinese government is terrible, and both the wild wolves of the region and the last nomadic herders die out. Boo!)
So there's something more to it than just under-resourced speculations about population genetics. (Indeed, the genetic part is one of the weakest parts of Wolf Totem, and can feel like a self-hating Chinese person's recapitulation of some kind of Aryan thesis.) There's more than one factor here - there are chances to learn.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
As regards structural changes in how games are made, I wonder if it would be useful to compare similar works written by the same authors?
To take a straightforward example - has Chris Metzen's writing, for instance, gotten better or worse over time? I'd argue that the original Starcraft has a compelling, well-written plot that serves the needs of its gameplay very well, but that Starcraft II is less well-written. This isn't the case for every mission, and of course some blame might attach to other SC2 authors like Brian Kindregan or James Waugh, but given that SC2's epilogue was all Metzen, and it's by far the worst part of that game's story, and of course he was involved in overall story development, it still seems a reasonable comparison.
Likewise his other franchises - World of Warcraft infamously has a horrible, broken plot, but how does it compare to Metzen's works in the 90s and early 2000s, like Warcraft II or Warcraft III? On the one hand, as much as WC3 is remembered as having a good plot, if you read it with clear eyes it's obvious that its script is extremely rough. (I am generally a big advocate for only judging game stories in the context of gameplay, rather than ripped out and read in isolation, but even just on the line-to-line level, a lot of this dialogue is just bad.) Perhaps you could make a case that Metzen's story writing ability was always relatively mediocre, especially when it comes to naturalistic dialogue (certainly his biggest weakness), and as such the restricted environments of WC2 or SC1 played to his strengths and concealed his weaknesses.
So if we consider a few possibilities, it strikes me as plausible that he hasn't gotten worse, but rather the more high-fidelity environments of modern games have made his shortcomings more evident. There might be something like the shift between theatre and stage - in SC1, for instance, detailed character acting is impossible, so every character speaks in long, hammy monologues, and dramatic speeches and over-the-top voice-acting need to carry most of the personality. Characters cannot emote any other way. Metzen's writing suits this style quite well, or perhaps that style trained him at an early stage to write in this super-broad, hammy way. However, this style is much less well-suited for a game like SC2, which has cutscenes shot much more like an animated TV show.
Anecdotally I feel like I see a similar transition in other game series, even if writers there have changed over time. If I compare the writing in Baldur's Gate II to the writing in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's hard to resist the feeling that there's been a significant step down somewhere. Even going from BG2 to the critically-acclaimed Baldur's Gate III, it's hard to avoid the feeling that setting detail and plausibility, immersion, character depth, appealing dialogue, etc., have all taken a step for the worse. (Admittedly for setting this might be in part because BG2 was directly based on the extremely-high-quality setting material of AD&D2e, which for my money remains the apogee of D&D worldbuilding.)
Or even if we step away from RPGs - you're correct that going from Marathon to Halo Infinity feels like a major decline, but even within the same series, I'd argue that if you play the original Halo: Combat Evolved today, its writing is remarkably snappy and evocative, and compares favourably to its successors. As the series grew more popular, it also grew more bloated? Continuity bloat in long-running series can be a serious issue - this may also be one of Metzen's issues with WoW.
But I'm not sure continuity bloat can cover everything. If you go from the original Fallout (1997) to Fallout 4 (2015), there's a decline that I don't think you can blame entirely on franchise bloat. It might just be a less competent writing team (especially since New Vegas was so high-quality); I'd buy "Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer are just good writers, and most people aren't as good" as an explanation (cf. recent well-written games by them such as Sawyer's Pentiment) in that specific case, but there may be other industry-wide trends as well.
So while part might be just that I remember good writing from the 90s but not the bad, I would also speculate that the changing nature of game writing due to technological shifts are a factor, as is the natural course of franchise decline and continuity bloat. Most long-running series, and this goes for literature, film, television, etc., decline in quality over time, and games are no different.
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
2mo 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."
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'd tend to agree with this.
I have a general theory of conspiracy theories. It does not universally hold (e.g. it does a bad job with Atlantis or UFO conspiracies), but it often seems to work. That theory is that conspiracy theories usually work by bundling something obviously true with something obviously false. Once you muddy the ground between the obviously true and obviously false thing, the conspiracy theory is mostly achieved. All you have to do is convince someone of the obviously true thing in order to sneak in the obviously false part. Better yet, opponents of the conspiracy theory are just as likely to fall for your framing, and tie themselves in knots trying to refute the obviously true part because they think they have to go through it to reach the false part.
Some examples:
Deep state: It is obviously true that government business is often obscure or opaque, and that politicians, lobbyists, etc., influence government business for their own private interests. Likewise it is obviously true that government bureaucracy has its own culture and to an extent its own interests, and those influence decision-making. It is obviously false that there's an organised secretive organisation embedded in the government bureaucracy that's plotting to subvert democracy and implement their own nefarious and evil agenda.
Great Replacement: It is obviously true that the proportion of white people in the populations of various Western countries is decreasing, due to a combination of declining native birthrates and immigration from non-European countries. It is also obviously true that this immigration is supported by various national and international authorities. It is obviously false that there's an organised and secretive internationalist or United Nations or Jewish or Illuminati conspiracy to destroy the white race.
Zionism: It is obviously true that Jews are a relatively well-off group in the United States, that they're thus relatively politically influential, and that Jews tend to strongly support Israel. It is also obviously true that there's an Israel or Zionist lobby that influences the US government in pro-Israel ways. It is obviously false that a hidden and malicious conspiracy of global Jewry is puppeting the United States for its own agenda, which may be found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
And so on. Typically the way the conspiracist frames it is that all you have to do is notice the obviously true thing and this is evidence of the obviously false part - and this is only supported by the way that their opponents tend to downplay or discourage discussion of the obviously true thing, lest it lead to the false thing. At the worst part of the argument, the obviously true thing by itself is treated as a dog-whistle for the obviously false thing and thus forbidden - which only helps the conspiracist overall.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
My guess is that Dutton opposes it, but is trying to figure out a way to publicly oppose it which doesn't incur the wrath of the Liberals' own pro-Voice wing, and which doesn't paint a giant target with 'I AM A RACIST' written on it on his back for Labor and the Greens.
I read Dutton's requests for clarification as being basically attempts to get Labor to put up a specific proposal that he can then oppose - much like the republic referendum, the Liberal strategy will be to sidestep the question of whether a republic/Voice is a good idea or not in principle while arguing that this republic/Voice is a bad idea. Labor are making what is probably the correct strategic move in reply by refusing to give any such details - they're trying to force him into either admitting that he supports the idea in principle, in which case he has to join the Yes campaign, or that he opposes it in principle, in which case he has the aforementioned target on his back.
It does show how far the terrain has shifted, though. Go back twenty years or so and John Howard bluntly opposed treaty, Voice, etc., on the plain small-l liberal grounds that the Commonwealth does not recognise or privilege any race or ethnicity, and further the Commonwealth cannot make a treaty with its own citizens. That Dutton doesn't feel able to make a similar argument now suggests that he thinks his position is quite fragile. Some of that might be specific to him - Dutton is a former policeman who was formerly in charge of border control, so he has a reputation as representing the tougher, more hard-right wing of the Liberal party; it makes sense that he feels particularly vulnerable to accusations of extremism - but I suspect that is not all of it by a long shot.
On the ideological background of it all - what frustrates me most is how underspecified all the public activism or debate in this area is. It seems to be something that runs on buzzwords. The biggest example for me is sovereignty. The word 'sovereign' pops up again and again like a tic, and it is extremely unclear what it's supposed to mean. It's clearly not sovereignty in the Western, Westphalian sense - Aboriginal people are demonstrably not sovereign in that sense. It's 'a spiritual notion', apparently, but what that means is never specified - a sense of being-on-the-land? Um, okay? What is that? It 'co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown'? Can someone spell out the political implications of that? If you try to look up any explanation, what you find is frankly a lot of waffle that no one seems to take at face value - the quoted elder there says "we are not subject to the Australian or British law but still maintain our own sovereignty", but good luck arguing in the public sphere that the law doesn't apply to Aboriginals!
And so on with so many of the other claims that seem to come up and time again. Another common one is that Aboriginals are the world's 'oldest continuous culture', another claim whose meaning is never specified and doesn't seem to bear up to scrutiny. So on and so forth. It's hard to escape feeling that, ultimately, there is no there there. Overall it seems that there is a desire among the Australian public to be nice to Aboriginal people, basically, but no consensus about what that means, so what ends up happening is that empty platitudes are voiced and no one thinks further about them. Certainly no one does anything.
Anyway, predictions...
Personally, I predict (but with low confidence) that the referendum will pass, and then conditional on the referendum passing, I predict that the Voice will have no real power. For all the symbolism, I don't believe parliament will do anything that would involve giving up any real power, so I think the Voice will have only the power to advise; and its constitution will be contingent on legislation, giving parliament the power to alter its make-up or defang it at whim. I predict the Voice will provide a bunch of well-paid committee jobs to indigenous activists in Canberra, and not make any difference as regards remote indigenous communities in poverty.
I would not be surprised if activists already expect the Voice to be ineffectual. The moment it's created, I predict the entire sector will turn to pushing for Treaty instead. Just as after the National Apology, energy shifted to advocating for constitutional recognition, and just as Malcolm Turnbull seemed about to achieve that, the Uluru Statement came out advocating for Voice instead, I predict that whether the Voice passes or not, in the next few years the whole sector is going to pivot to Treaty.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
This is something that's always struck me about calls for reform. Consider something like Quranism, the idea that Muslims should reject the sunnah and hadith, and this long tradition of interpretation and jurisprudence, and return to the purity of the Qur'an. As you can see, the wiki article on it is written mostly from a Western perspective and is very sympathetic to the idea, seeing it as more open and tolerant than the alternative.
It's just - did we forget the Protestant Reformation entirely?
Throwing out all tradition and interpretation and bypassing all the mediating institutions of a tradition is something that was attempted in Europe. The result was well over a century of bloody, fratricidal war and a multitude of new sects, many of which were more fanatical and violent than the order they originally criticised. Throwing out interpretation in favour of acting according to the original, pure divine revelation is a recipe for fanaticism, not tolerance!
(For what it's worth I say this as a Protestant; I don't mean that the Reformation was 'wrong', whatever specific claim you might attach to that. But the Reformation certainly had a price.)
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
Or to take a more relevant comparison - does Roy Moore discredit all conservative politics?
If no, how can Sarah Nyberg discredit all progressive or LGBT politics?
If there's a significant problem of a paedophilia/LGBT overlap, or the LGBT rights or more generally progressive movement committing to defend paedophiles, I think you need more than a single anecdote, especially one as small-time as this. Okay, Nyberg is a terrible person, and okay, defending her at all was a terrible decision born out of pure partisan allegiance. All conceded. But what does that prove?
I'd like to see a better case for this claimed overlap.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I wonder if it's partly because something like Eurovision requires a level of whimsy or self-deprecation that Americans can't manage?
I have a lot of fondness for Americans, but they do undoubtedly take themselves very seriously - perhaps too seriously for something like Eurovision. If I imagine an American Eurovision, America can do the excess and the glamour and the high-budget-yet-low-taste glitter of it all, but there has to be this subtle element of self-mockery in it, of realising that the whole thing is silly and yet embracing it anyway.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I believe there's a G. K. Chesterton passage somewhere about age and fatigue in a society. A society created last week might have very high average age, and be senescent and likely to die soon; a society created a thousand years ago might be full of vigorous members of a young age, and set for the future. I wonder if something similar might apply - the more a people's storytelling is obsessed with the young, the new, the innovation, the deconstructive, the more that's a sign of the people's age and stagnation. Meanwhile retelling the old classics is not a sign of decrepitude, but rather one of vigour.
If nothing else, what types of stories do you tell to children? It's the old classics and the tried-and-true. Daring deconstructions are stories for old, cynical people. The young and vital like to hear the same old thing.
That said, I think there are some older stories out there if you look for them, though sometimes you might have to look to non-Western developers. I've heard good things (and am slowly making my way through) Unicorn Overlord - it seems refreshingly straight-down-the-line, and is gorgeous to boot.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
One of the problems is that terms like this often succumb to a kind of definition creep. Any postulated definition for 'HBD' shifts as the term is used.
'HBD' stands for 'human biodiversity'. The minimalist definition of it is something like what you said - being aware that there is genetic differentiation among modern human populations. That minimal definition is obvious, uncontroversial among all but the most radical blank-slatists, and also useless for most practical purposes. More importantly, it's not the way the term is used in practice. The category 'people who agree that there is genetic differentiation between human populations' is so vast and expansive as to massively outrun the term itself. When people talk about "being aware of HBD" or the like, they appear to mean something beyond just the motte of the term.
I would take a middling definition of HBD to be something more like, "1) there is genetic differentiation among modern human populations, 2) that differentiation more-or-less, if imperfectly, maps on to popular understandings of race, and 3) this has consequences for public policy". It seems to me that anyone who denies any of those three points is not really an HBDer beyond the most minimal sense of the term. There's room for debate about exactly what the differentiation is, how significant it is, what sorts of policy conclusions should follow, and so on, but the basic point is that race, in a genetic sense, both exists and is important.
And then past there I think there's a maximalist definition that accepts everything in the middling definition, but runs with specific implications for policy - this is the sort that just openly says that black people are genetically less capable and there's a dysgenic issue and so on.
The problem is that anyone criticising HBD (or more pertinently, HBDers-as-a-community) has a very strong incentive to portray the whole group as following the maximalist definition, and anyone defending HBD/HBDers-as-a-community has a strong incentive to portray HBD as only the minimalist definition. Probably most people who identify as HBDers are somewhere in the middle. Minimalists are unlikely to use the term even if they agree with the minimalist definition, because using it lumps them in with the others (including the maximalists, who most minimalists surely recoil from), and then of course even true maximalists have an incentive to water their views down and present themselves as moderates.
Anyway, realistically I just don't think it's a useful term. 'HBD' is too broad to be useful. I think it would be more practical if maximalists and the top end of moderates just ditched the euphemism and called themselves racialists or something - that's a more accurate label for what they are. Maybe they could use 'race realists'? That's a term that's gone around the block a bit. But as it is I feel like 'HBD' is a silly euphemism that people use mostly in order to avoid saying the word 'race'. Even though that is clearly what it's about.
OliveTapenade
8mo ago
The Catholic Church teaches the existence of demons, of course. This includes the note that all demons were themselves created good, but by their own action became evil, and that it is outside the limits of doctrine to determine the number of demons or their power.
The relation of demons to so-called pagan gods is unclear. The idea that gods or spirits are all just demons (or potentially angels or other incorporeal beings created by God which may remain good, and if so are presumably greatly grieved by the folly of men worshipping them) is batted around sometimes.
There's that intriguing passage in Galatians 4 (see 4:3 and 4:9) where Paul describes the believers as having been previously enslaved by the 'elemental spirits of the universe' - the stoicheion tou kosmou - before being liberated by Christ. What are these? Demons? Spirits? Pagan gods? In Spe Salvi Benedict XVI spoke of them as if they're synonymous with 'the laws of matter and evolution', perhaps seeing them as a personification of physical law, or of what an atheistic cosmos would be like, but that seems a little tenuous for the original first century context.
At any rate, there are a range of plausible Christian views on demons or spirits. One traditional position, of course, has been that idols aren't real and don't do anything - that's in 1 Corinthians with food sacrificed to idols, that's the whole point of Bel and the Dragon, that's in Isaiah (41:29, 42:17, etc.). But of course the fact that an idol is just mute wood or metal does not rule out the possibility of other incorporeal beings, like demons.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
It's also hard to imagine that if the gay marriage plebiscite had failed, there would be a exhibition celebrating this as a triumph of Australian democracy like there currently is one celebrating its success (ironic given that many pro-gay marriage advocates initially opposed the plebiscite before they got the results).
This seems particularly baffling, because even today you still find quarters that feel the plebiscite was a mistake, that it was harmful to marginalised people, or that it was in some way inappropriate to have a vote on a 'rights matter'. We had that argument back in 2016, and now it's being made again for the 2023 indigenous voice referendum. See, for instance:
The real damage inflicted by any opposition to the Voice will be in the potential discourse it brings about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The country has already seen the damage a partisan battle can do to marginalised groups, most recently on the same-sex marriage plebiscite.
I confess I find this a very troubling and anti-democratic attitude - if rights are so important that it's wrong to hold a public debate or vote about them, then rights can only be identified and implemented by some other body, smaller than the public as a whole, and that way lies oligarchy.
The government is currently trying to change the way referendums work, incidentally. Specifically, in the past , the government would fund a public debate on the issue, which requires funding both sides. The logic is fairly straightforward - for any issue consequential enough as to require a referendum, there must be a robust public debate, which requires an informed populace aware of the best arguments for each side. If one side is vastly wealthier than the other, this might be difficult. So the government funds a debate, as it did last time. The current government wants to change this.
I don't think it's hard to guess what their motive might be here - they don't want to spend any money on or give any publicity to the "no" side of the debate. The Albanese government is not interested in treating the indigenous voice referendum as a serious debate between two sides, both of which are reasonable and whose best points should be heard, so that the Australian people make an informed choice. One imagines that if they did give money to the "no" side as well, they would be raked over the coals for funding a racist position. One also imagines they know that the "yes" side is much richer and has far more media reach than the "no" side.
This just strikes me as another example of an increasing lack of patience with or interest in the public voice, or in democratic processes overall. If an issue is important, if it is good, if it is about human rights, then why would you ever subject it to anything as capricious as democracy?
In practice, the dominant line is that you don't need to prove Aboriginality, and that it's deeply racist to start quizzing people about their ancestors. Past that, there is a three-part test - 1) be of Aboriginal descent, 2) identify as Aboriginal, 3) be accepted as Aboriginal by your community. But all three criteria there are extremely questionable and sometimes tautological.
We often hear a comparison with New Zealand, but a key difference is that the Maoris in New Zealand have their own de facto government and leadership structure. At the time the British arrived in New Zealand, there was a reasonable degree of social organisation among Maoris. They weren't all united, but there were leaders who could be negotiated with, and who for their part recognised the need to come together and organise a leader who could negotiate on their behalf with the British crown. Moreover, today there are Maori authorities who are able to self-police. This is important because there are specific political rights attached to being Maori. I understand that Native American tribes are similar in the US - they have their own recognised governing authorities and they can be very strict about who counts as a tribal member, including policing false claims.
There is no recognised pan-Aboriginal authority in Australia, and 'traditional leaders' is an extremely woolly category. At the time of colonisation, there were no Aboriginal nations, but rather there were hundreds upon hundreds of extremely fragmented language and tribal groups, with minimal political organisation. It is not like the Maori or the Iroquois. So Aboriginal leadership needs to be confected.
Part of the issue is that, well, to over-generalise for a moment, you have two broad camps of Aboriginal people in Australia. The first is in remote communities, especially in the NT or in bits of rural Queensland or WA. These people are usually of almost exclusively Aboriginal descent, they're politically voiceless, and they often suffer crushing poverty and have other terrible outcomes. The second, however, are in the major cities. This group is almost entirely mixed-race, often with less indigenous background than European, and their life outcomes tend to be comparable to that of the general Australian population. Many just pass as Anglo, often because that is in fact the majority of their ancestry. This person, say, looks indistinguishable from any other Anglo woman. (The Palawa are an interesting example because they're an ethnic group that exist exclusively as mixed-race. There are zero fully Palawa people left.) Not all are like that, but you can still see an obvious gap between people like this (very striking if you compare her to her mother) or this and, say, these people or this.
The second, urban group, however, has a much stronger political voice and is significantly more outspoken. People in the second group are sometimes very good at leveraging the first group's very real issues into activism for Aboriginal people in general, and because they're the better-educated, more politically-engaged group, they tend to capture the lion's share of benefits for Aboriginal people.
But this leads to claims like e.g. "two people born in the same hospital on the same day, one is ATSI and the other isn't, and the ATSI person has ten years less life expectancy" - statistics that only work by virtue of grouping people with average life expectancy in a category with people with terrible life expectancy. There's a two-step like this that can be done whenever necessary, because the category 'Aboriginal people' is too broad in practice to usefully group people.
I would not be surprised if there's a similar gap like this in the US, with a distinction you can draw between Native Americans on reservations and Native Americans who are more integrated with the rest of society?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Yes, prior to Vatican II and especially prior to 1900 or so, the traditional Catholic position was basically that the state should formally endorse the Catholic Church, obey directives from the Vatican, and tolerate other religious positions either provisionally or not at all. Integralism is, broadly speaking, the traditional Roman position. If you ever get interested in the last two centuries of Spanish, French, or Italian history you will notice this causing a great deal of trouble. It's also responsible for a lot of traditional American (and Anglo in generally) anti-Catholicism. Taken seriously, it is the position that leads to drama like this.
However, Catholics, partly because of how extreme this position seems today, have largely been running away from it in the West, or have been looking for ways to reconcile Catholicism with American liberal values. Some have been more or less successful with this.
But anyway, if you dig into the European history a bit, 'discriminated against' is underselling it. This is/was a position that causes civil wars.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
"Never waste a crisis."
The solution to a crisis is always that thing you wanted to do anyway for unrelated reasons. That much just seems like human nature.
OliveTapenade
1mo 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
4mo ago
I claim no particular expertise in the minutiae of what Richard Spencer or whoever said or theorised in the late 2010s - this is just going to be a comment from the outside.
As it seemed to me over the last few years, 'the alt-right' never really existed at all. There may have originally been a small minority of nutjobs who claimed the term (re: Spencer), but if so they were very few and for all practical purposes insignificant. Rather, what 'alt-right' came to mean was an amorphous, never properly-defined category term similar to 'far-right' or 'right-wing extremist'.
What the term meant was 'right-wing but beyond the pale' - it became a term for people who are unacceptably right-wing. It means right-wing-but-kooky, or right-wing-but-not-respectable. As such it never had clear referents, but always mutated in the moment to mean politicians or thinkers on the right that the speaker happens to believe are crazy or extreme. Thus for example, here in Australia, I remember hearing American commentators suddenly saying that Clive Palmer is alt-right (he's certainly a rich clown; does that make you alt-right?), or that Pauline Hanson is alt-right (she's an insurgent anti-immigrant politician; does that make you alt-right? does it make a difference that she's been doing it since the 1990s, with minimal change?), and it was very clear that 'alt-right' is not an organic category. It just means being on the right, but without notional legitimacy.
Is there a word for how political labels tend to expand over time? Definition inflation? I feel 'alt-right' is an example of that. Perhaps once it just meant whatever it was that Richard Spencer was on about, but that group was small and irrelevant and no good as a bogeyman. So it expands to mean something like 'whatever it is that Donald Trump is on about' or 'anti-establishment right' and it comes to mean almost nothing.
It just doesn't seem like a term with much practical use any more, if it ever had any.
Oh, certainly the last decade or so has been a defeat for social conservatism in video games. Actual conservatives have been consistly losing. Even in games or franchises that in my experience are particularly beloved by conservatives we can see this - BattleTech, for instance, has no gender selection for PCs, but merely lets you select 'pronouns', which can be mixed-and-matched with any body shape or facial features without limitation.
But I think it would be a bad misreading of GamerGate to see it as a social conservative response? GamerGate was never conservative.
Thus to take the case of Hogwarts Legacy - that game's success strikes me as much more compatible with the narrative that pro-GG won? The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy isn't "Hurrah for trans representation!" The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy is "boycott this transphobic filth". (Indeed that review is a perfect example of everything that drove GamerGate up the wall - a 'review' that barely touches on the game itself, which is mostly an autobiographical ramble, and which doesn't even seem to care about the question of whether the game is fun to play. At the time I remember pro-GGers citing this review as an example of what they were angry about - a review that seems more interested in passing moral judgement on a sin, in this case sexism or objectification, that it does in considering whether or not a game is fun or well-made.)
Pro-GG never cared about gay or trans characters in video games. Pro-GG was team "shut up and play video games", and was opposed to any sort of moralising. GamerGate was not anti-woke in the sense of "don't have LGBT characters in games". GamerGate was anti-woke in the sense of "stop lecturing me you puritanical douchebag".
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