OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
19d ago
My rule of thumb with Wikipedia is:
Anything well-known (in the community of Wikipedia editors) and uncontroversial (in the community of etc.) is likely to be reliable. Look up, say, Maxwell's equations and you will find detailed and reliable information.
Anything well-known and controversial is going to be well-sourced but unreliable, likely in the direction of the preponderance of sources used by Wikipedia, which tend to be heavily biased not only towards left-wing sources, but also towards free sources on the internet. Wikipedia prohibits 'original research' which means that it will tend to uncritically repeat the syntheses found in supposedly reliable sources. So, for instance, Wikipedia's page on the January 6 riots is going to be a very well-sourced summary of the 'orthodox' liberal line.
Anything not well-known, regardless of controversy, is usually going to be the playground of whoever cares enough to write the article, which may be just one or two people. This used to be seen much more widely, but today it's easiest to find this when looking for articles on non-Western history, culture, or art. An article on an obscure non-Western monarch, for instance, may well be written and edited only by a single enthusiast from that monarch's own culture. One example of this at the moment might be the article on King Zhou of Shang, which includes a long excursion, footnoted exclusively to Chinese sources, dedicated to arguing that Zhou is the victim of a historical hit job and was not really that bad. This reads like the work of a single devoted Chinese editor, which remains on Wikipedia mainly because very few editors of English Wikipedia know or care about King Zhou.
In general Wikipedia will give you a summary of the consensus view of Western popular academia (that sounds like a contradiction, but I trust you know what I mean), with a moderate liberal bias. On subjects that are not heavily politicised, this is pretty decent. On subjects that are not subject to significant academic controversy, or which aren't extremely technical, this is also often decent. But on other subjects Wikipedia can range from actively misleading to outright spreading falsehoods.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
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.
OliveTapenade
21d 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
23d 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
23d 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
23d 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
23d 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
24d 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
28d 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
29d 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.
This sounds a lot like what Scott described as 'phatic' speech.
I mentioned recently that I work in a caring profession and spend most of my time talking to people. One of my lessons from that work is that while occasionally you meet someone who wants to have an in-depth, substantive conversation of a particular issue, by far the majority of all social encounters are phatic. The goal of the conversation is not to arrive at insight, but rather to make a person feel heard, appreciated, and validated. Even if I am going to forget everything we talked about by lunchtime - and I confess that I usually am - my purpose in the space is not to learn or assimilate facts, or engage in some kind of analysis, but rather to convey to the person I am caring for, "You are important, and I care about you".
This goes especially for when people want to talk about politics. Smile, nod, show sympathy, but don't get into an argument or even an analysis. Sometimes people will say things I disagree with strongly and I'll just file away that disagreement and ask an open question. If someone rants about this or that politician, there are a lot of ways to politely engage in and redirect that conversation without either lying or making it a contest. Gaza is one that comes up sometimes, and I have gotten pretty good at noncommittal ways to move that one along.
People are usually not trying to share facts, and if you treat every conversation as an exercise in collaborative truth-seeking, you are the creepy weirdo, not them. Sometimes the correct response is to just nod, smile, say "yeah, I know where you're coming from", and then say something else. If someone says to me, "ugh, my job was awful today, I hate capitalism", I don't jump in with facts and arguments about how 'capitalism' however defined is not the reason why work is tedious and boring. I say, "oh gosh, sounds like you had a hard day, can I get you a cup of tea?", and then we move on.
Now you are correct that this kind of conversation is politically productive, and the kinds of complaints you can make are reflective of overall shifts. To use the above example, I pretty much never hear "ugh, I hate capitalism" from older people, but younger generations are much more likely to use that phrase as a generic statement of unhappiness. That does reflect a shift in values and political priorities. This goes for politicians as well - whether, in a particular local context, someone uses "ugh, Trump sucks" or "thanks Obama" or "let's go Brandon" as a casual complaint is genuinely reflective of something, and your phatic response to that serves to normalise that complaint. The same goes for praise as well; I have noncommittally nodded along to a lot of praise of Jacinda Ardern. But I tend to think these conversational changes are downstream of larger changes, and that the direction of the stream cannot be reversed by arguing or quibbling on this casual level. From an activist perspective, the way you should respond to or change the view of the "I hate capitalism" girl is not to argue with her on the spot, but to change the affect she associates with the word or concept of capitalism. You can't change the direction of the ocean currents by pushing the froth on the surface in the opposite direction; and we're mostly talking about conversational froth here.
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