OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
27d ago
Well, I mean, it seems to me that we have a situation where the official account (unaided suicide) is mostly plausible, there's a minimum-EDKH that's plausible and would be hidden (aided suicide), and then there's a maximum-EDKH that's implausible and is unlikely to be successfully hidden (murder by a third party).
The case for it aided suicide or murder are that circumstances around unaided suicide seem kind of weird to observers. That's not a whole lot to build a case on.
At any rate, my position is that unaided suicide is most likely, aided suicide is reasonably possible, and murder is sufficiently unlikely that we can rule it out; and that the difference between unaided and aided suicide is unimportant.
When you see someone destroying evidence, you should assume that said evidence was important by default. But if you want a theory, it's that his clients likely included many powerful and influential people, who need to be punished.
I don't actually see anyone destroying evidence, though. What's the evidence that's missing?
OliveTapenade
27d ago
I wonder if I can take this as an opportunity to just start from the top?
I have very little prior investment in Epstein. I had never heard of him before he became famous on the internet - for years literally the only thing I knew about Epstein was that he's the guy who didn't kill himself. "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a meme I saw in a range of places but I didn't know what it meant or its significance. Eventually I did get curious and looked it up, and what I got was basically that Epstein was a rich asshole, that he had social connections to a lot of other rich assholes, that he liked sex with underage girls, and that he was eventually caught, went to prison, and probably killed himself there. There are theories that he didn't kill himself, ranging from those that seem superficially plausible (e.g. a sympathetic guard helped provide tools and opportunity for him to commit suicide) and those that seem a lot more implausible (e.g. a wealthy or influential person organised an assassination to prevent him revealing damaging information), but I did not bother looking into it much more than that. Either suicide and what we might call the motte of EDKH could be true, and either way it's inconsequential. The bailey of a large elite conspiracy to kill Epstein before he can reveal something dramatic sounds so much less likely that it would take significantly more for me to update in that direction.
So the questions I would ask you, as presumably an EDKH-believer, are:
What do you think is likely to have happened?
Why is this important?
As far as I can tell from the outside, the EDKH theory is largely circumstantial - here are a bunch of odd things that happened around Epstein's death, it is implausible that these were all just coincidences, here are some other plausible explanations. There doesn't seem to be any truly solid evidence of foul play; just a lot of things that seem suggestive. Is that much correct?
Right now where I am is more or less, "probably he killed himself, there's an outside chance that some sympathetic guard or other staff member helped him kill himself, anything larger than that gets Basic-Argument-Against-Conspiracy-Theories-ed away, and I don't care very much which of the former two theories is true". So, why should I update in the direction of anything more significant, and more importantly, why does it matter? Why should I care about this?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Muslims circumcise themselves as well. Muslim Palestinians are just as circumcised as Jewish Israelis, so that doesn't function as a tribal distinction any more.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I have to imagine that a lot of the people sincerely responding to the prompt are working boring 9-to-5 jobs that they hate.
Take the very first person. Her answers were "leading discussions on theory", "making clothes from scraps", and "making lattes". These are clearly things this person enjoys: talking about political theory, creatively working with her hands, and serving other people. If I might be allowed to be cringeworthy myself for a second, I get it. All of that sounds pretty good to me too. Granted, if it were me it would probably be theology or religious philosophy rather than Marxist theory, and it's probably painting or being a musician rather than making clothes, but that kind of life sounds pleasant. Most of the sincere responses sound similar: there's intellectual stimulation, self-expression, maybe a bit of physical exertion as a break, a few who enjoy working with children, and so on.
In sum, it sounds a lot like common depictions of the good life. John Adams famously wrote, "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy... in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine." Suppose you were the grandchildren in this narrative. What would you study?
If I have problems with the commune, they're twofold, I guess. The first is on the object level that I think leftism or Marxism or what have you is wrong. The philosophical basis of the commune is bad. But that's fairly superficial, so to turn to the second - it's that the idea of the commune serves as a kind of imaginary justification for bad politics in the here and now. The commune sounds like an S&W-style prefiguratory community. This is the criticism of the guy who said his job would be telling everyone to go home and unionise. The commune may be fun as a brief fantasy, but if it displaces more productive visions of effective political action (and leaving aside the part where I don't want Twitter leftists to engage in effective political action), it may do more harm to the overall movement.
But I view those objections as pretty minor. To the first, the problem isn't that they're indulging in a utopian fantasy - it's that their undergirding political ideas are bad. I can just focus on those ideas themselves. And to the second, well, that's just a question of keeping things in proportion. If you fantasise about anything all the time it's disastrous, but I would not ban fantasy.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'll actually give a limited defense of "What's your job on the leftist commune?"
I don't think the people engaging in that thread understand themselves to be sincerely laying out a plan for a total society. On the contrary, the idea that it's a commune probably suggests that it's a small, utopian community within a larger implicitly capitalist society, if anybody is even thinking that far ahead. But I don't think they are, because "what's your job on the leftist commune?" is not a question about politics at all.
What the question is actually asking is, "What would you do if you didn't have to work?", or perhaps "How would you want to spend your life if you didn't have to participate in a capitalist economy?" The details of how the commune works are beside the point. If you didn't have to do anything you don't want to - how then would you want to contribute to society?
It's a utopian fantasy, and I think there's actually a place for utopian fantasy thought experiments. Throw realism out the window for a minute and - what would you like to do? Then once you've reflected on that a bit, take the insights you find from the process and bring them back to the grubby real world of toil and compromise.
The answers people give are cringeworthy, but all fantasies tend to sound cringeworthy when you voice them out loud, and I'd defend this kind of fantasy as a reasonable thing for people of any political orientation to do. Maybe it's a hippie commune. Maybe it's a trad farming community. Maybe it's on a Culture orbital. Maybe it's a royal palace, or maybe it's being an ascended digital being with god-like power. It doesn't matter. But I think that the job on the leftist commune is basically the same thing as, say, Bostrom's Deep Utopia. It's immature but perhaps useful - and if this makes me think more of random Twitter leftists and less of Nick Bostrom, then that's all properly balanced.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
The thing traditionalists don't seem to have a satisfying answer for is "why is gayness uniquely bad"? Why does it uniquely fuel identarianism, if it does? When I consider the question of "if it wasn't this, would it have been something else?", I think back on all the times it has been something else, and note that there's nothing unique/special to non-straightness that lends itself to being used as a weapon in this way.
I'm a little confused here.
Firstly, social conservatives and particularly conservative Christians do have quite detailed answers for why same-sex relations are morally bad. If you aren't satisfied, presumably you either don't find those answers convincing, or you aren't aware of them, but I suppose neither strikes me as a particularly devastating criticism. Let's charitably assume that you are familiar with and unconvinced by, for instance, teleological arguments, or arguments from natural law. It's not clear to me why that in itself should be that concerning, particularly since my suggestion here is not "social conservatives are absolutely correct in everything they have asserted", but rather "social conservative predictions coming true is an opportunity to re-evaluate their earlier claims". Social conservative arguments around sexual morality might be only partially true, or might lead to some pragmatically true conclusion for the wrong reasons; in either case it would still be worthwhile to revisit their arguments and see what might be salvaged.
Secondly, social conservatives do not claim that same-sex relations are uniquely bad, and I don't know where you got that idea. Let's assume a traditionalist Christian approach here. That approach is that same-sex relations are one species within the wider category of sexual sin. The category of sexual immorality or porneia is quite a broad one, and the reasons why same-sex unions are bad (illicit, to be discouraged, sinful, whatever language you like) are substantially the same reasons why many other forms of sexual behaviour are bad (this is where progressives would get very angry at the comparison between homosexuality and various other paraphilias).
So I'm not sure I understand your retort here. Social conservatives have explained why same-sex relations are bad at great length, and they have not argued that same-sex relations are uniquely bad in a way that sets them apart from any other sexual immorality. What's left here? You don't find conservative arguments against same-sex relations convincing? Well, good for you, I suppose.
without ultimately falling back on some variation of "sin"- if they had a better argument, they'd be making it- then I judge they're no different than those who also have the same definition of sin but with the who and whom switched.
Replace the word 'sin' with 'bad', if you prefer. It doesn't make much practical difference. I'm often baffled by the way secular people seem to understand the word 'sin'.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I suppose I should also mention positive predictions that failed to come true as well - I remember plenty of pieces along the lines of "gay marriage will rejuvenate and improve straight marriage", with the idea that extending it would contribute to the wide social valuation of marriage. This will improve reverence for marriage and help everyone.
That... did not happen, and in fact, taking the US as the biggest example, marriage rates have continued to decline, while average age at marriage has continued to increase. The benefit never manifested.
None of this necessarily proves that the conservatives are right, and you can be progressive while just holding that all of this is unrelated and that gay marriage needs no more justification than "it would make some gay people happy so why not?", but I do think that, at the least, it's a good reason to re-evaluate some of those old arguments, and maybe conclude that people against it at the time were not wrong about everything.
I'm a social conservative, and the new orthodox faith of the One, True, Catholic Church of Trans Rights is not convincing me to shift on that. All the former gay rights activism that successfully sold the line "if you're not gay, this will have no effect on your life" to the mainstream and the trans activism that piggy-backed on this ("why are those bigoted conservatives so obsessed with bathrooms? no trans person has ever said anything about bathrooms, it's all them!") couldn't maintain the facade.
One of the things that has struck me about the trans backlash, which I think is real, has been its unwillingness to extend the slightest charity to social conservatives qua social conservatives. To put it bluntly and perhaps uncharitably: if the social conservatives warned you that this would happen, and now this has happened, perhaps you ought to consider whether or not they had a point.
So, for instance, I see worries that opposing such-and-such trans issues might overspill into opposing same-sex marriage. But social conservatives at the time said clearly that one of the issues with same-sex marriage was that it would undermine the gender binary. They were right, on facts. They have in fact, regularly been right on the facts. So now that the thing they warned would happen as a result of gay marriage has happened... shouldn't that make their judgement of gay marriage more credible, not less?
The thing is, the push for gay marriage included a number of predictive arguments that have since proven to be incorrect. "Gay marriage will have no effect on your life" was untrue. "Gay marriage is not a stepping stone to more radical activism" was untrue. "The normalisation of and acceptance of homosexuality will not lead more people to identify as homosexual" (deployed in gotchas like "gay marriage won't make you turn gay, why do you care?") was untrue. I suppose you could quibble causation and correlation, but the course seems pretty intuitive. Yet I still see this quite determined hostility to re-evaluating.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
But what RLHF does is create a meta-level reward landscape. The model learns that generating text which corresponds to verifiable facts gets a positive reward, and generating text that gets corrected by users gets a negative reward. It's not learning the "vector for truth." It's learning a phenomenally complex function that approximates the behavior of "being truthful." It is, in effect, learning a policy of truth-telling because it is rewarded for it.
I'm not sure how this makes sense? The model has no access to verifiable facts - it has no way to determine 'truth'. What it can do is try to generate text that users approve of, and to avoid text that will get corrected. But that's not optimising for truth, whatever that is. That's optimising for getting humans to pat it on the head.
From the LLM's perspective (which is an anthropomorphisation I don't like, but let's use it for convenience), there is no difference between a true statement and a false statement. There are only differences between statements that get rewarded and statements that get corrected.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
To clarify, as far as I can tell the issue is that he refused to delete or censor Facebook posts by other people that were perceived to be transphobic. Hutton himself frames it as a straightforward free speech issue. He has since gone on to denounce the party as authoritarian and enforcing a cult-like orthodoxy.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised by this. That the Greens, the most progressive of Australia's significant political parties, enforce lockstep orthodoxy on trans issues is not a surprise to me. I daresay it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who's been paying much attention to progressive political spaces in Australia or in the wider world. Is it possible that trans issues are a wedge for parts of the left?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
It’s not uncommon for people to say “I’m pro-choice, not pro-abortion.” If you are one of those folks or know someone who is, we know your heart is in the right place. But this framing is hurtful to people who’ve had abortions and those who might need abortions in the future. It implies that abortion isn’t a moral good and that while legal abortions are needed, they are somehow bad.
...wow, that's a new one to me. In my experience prior to now, very few activists would say that abortions are actively good. The line I usually heard was indeed that abortions, while unpleasant or even tragic, are sometimes necessary, and that the best person to decide whether or not one is necessary is the woman considering one. That seemed like a more sensible approach if only because there are a great many people who have moral qualms or concerns around abortion who can be persuaded into accepting it sometimes as a lesser evil, and those are the people that pro-choice and pro-life movements fight to sway to their side.
But I'm probably behind the times here. I haven't been following this area closely over the last few years.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Wanderer got there first, I think.
Lower-case 'black lives matter' is a mother statement. Nobody's going to argue that the lives of black people don't matter except the most egregious and nihilistic of racists. The phrase 'black lives matter' is even entirely consistent with believing that black lives are worth less than white lives - if they matter any amount above zero, the statement is true.
Capital-letter 'Black Lives Matter' refers to a movement that makes specific, potentially false claims around police violence, structural racism, and so on. I fully sympathise with not wanting to endorse those claims, since many of them are false. But I don't see how naming the movement constitutes endorsing it, no more than saying the words 'Human Rights Campaign' implies that I agree with the specific, potentially false claims made by the HRC.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
There's even the movement to stop saying pro-choice (among pro-choicers) and instead say pro-abortion.
Among pro-choicers themselves? I remember in the past once, wanting to avoid biased labels, talking about 'anti-abortion and pro-abortion activists', and the latter angrily telling me that this was incredibly biased of me, and they're not 'pro-abortion', nobody is in favour of abortions as such, but rather they are in favour of a woman's right to choose. I thought that remained the general position, and that outside of a few relatively radical voices, very few people actually try to present themselves as liking abortion as such.
In practice today I mostly just use 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice', and when people quibble those labels ("They're not pro-life! They're just pro-birth! Look, they oppose the welfare state and support capital punishment!" and similar), I tend to assume the quibblers are just trying to pick fights and are not worth engaging with in good faith.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Yep, that's the distinction I was going to make as well.
Organisations and movements have names, and those names are often intended to communicate something flattering about the organisation. Nonetheless using those names is not usually taken as endorsement. I call the Human Rights Campaign the Human Rights Campaign without necessarily agreeing that they do in fact campaign for human rights. I call the Justice Democrats or the Freedom Caucus by their names without thereby conceding that they have anything to do with justice or with freedom.
I understand wanting to be careful about the language you use. There are cases where I would be careful. But this seems excessive to me.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
To be fair most visual adaptations I've seen of LotR go pretty hard on Anglo-Saxon Rohirrim, and all the white horse imagery makes it tempting. Nonetheless I think it would be just as reasonable to present them as something more Scythian, which would fit well if you're inclined to a more Byzantine vision of Gondor - the eastern/southern half of the great empire of antiquity, its western/northern cousin long since fallen, but still holding out and serving as a bulwark against the east. I have seen people draw comparisons between the Black Speech and Turkic languages before. I could also see maybe a comparison between the Rohirrim and the Cumans?
At any rate, the Rohirrim are clearly fair of skin and fair of hair, so that would definitely constrain my casting of them.
I should also say, to be fair, you are correct that one of Tolkien's motives was to create a kind of mythology for England. Here's Letter #131:
Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. (I am speaking, of course, of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, which you read.)
Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.
Of course, such an overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spend itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.
So my nitpick does not pertain to this motive in any way. It's only that I don't think this motive constrained Tolkien to depicting places geographically analogous to England. I suppose this is inevitable; any fair reflection of the historical or mythic consciousness of England qua England must surely also include a sense of Europe, or of the lands to the south that have, for better or worse, shaped England's history and identity.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Imagine if the enemy said "doing the hokey pokey is an endorsement of our cause." Or alternatively "doing the hokey pokey is pledging loyalty our cause." Well I would find it a pretty compelling reason to stop doing the hokey pokey.
Well, sure, but who on earth says that saying the name 'George Floyd' or that saying the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' (in reference to a movement and organisation called Black Lives Matter) constitutes endorsing anything? I don't see the concern here.
I can understand not wanting to use certain phrases because they frame an issue in a way you disagree with. For instance, I avoid saying the phrase 'marriage equality' because I think it is a gross mischaracterisation of the issue, and if I used it I think I would be accepting a strawman. Likewise there's a tic among some activists where they refuse to use the phrase 'pro-life' in any circumstances; they instead refer to pro-life activists as 'anti-abortion activists'.
But 'George Floyd' is just a name, and saying it implies nothing about whether one supports or opposes any political issue related to him. Likewise BLM is the name of an organisation. I don't think that saying it in that context constitutes a kind of endorsement.
Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories are intended as an ersatz mythos for the historical peoples of the British Isles; the various peoples and factions of the world are rough stand-ins or symbolic idealizations of the various ethnic groups and their myths which have coalesced into the modern (white) peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. (And, by extension, the Celtic and North Germanic peoples of Continental Europe.) Gondor as a rough analogue for Roman-Celtic Britain, Rohan as the horse-obsessed Anglo-Saxons, Elves as the remnants of the pre-Aryan Neolithic peoples, etc.
This is expressly incorrect.
If you open up your copy of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes in the appendices that the Rohirrim do not resemble the Anglo-Saxons:
This linguistic procedure does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances: a simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and more venerable culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its domain.
He represents the language of Rohan as old English in order to express its linguistic relationship to the common speech spoken by the hobbits, which he represents as modern English, but he says clearly that the folk of Rohan do not especially resemble the ancient English otherwise.
Likewise for Gondor, note Tolkien's Letter #294, where he is responding to and criticising the draft of an interview of him for the Daily Telegraph:
[Journalist:] Middle-earth .... corresponds spiritually to Nordic Europe.
Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories. Geographically Northern is usually better. But examination will show that even this is inapplicable (geographically or spiritually) to 'Middle-earth'. This is an old word, not invented by me, as reference to a dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford will show. It meant the habitable lands of our world, set amid the surrounding Ocean. The action of the story takes place in the North-west of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely 'Nordic' area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.
Auden has asserted that for me 'the North is a sacred direction'. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man's home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not 'sacred', nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a 'Nordic'.
Tolkien analogises the return of the king to Gondor to the re-establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, with its capital in Rome. It seems to me that this would make Gondor or Minas Tirith the proper analogue to Rome itself, or Italy more generally. This seems supported by his intention that Gondor is, in terms of latitude, somewhere roughly between northern Italy and Greece or western Turkey.
I agree that The Rings of Power is garbage and that, in general, actors should be cast who plausibly resemble the characters they are intended to portray, but I want to nitpick that your claim about Tolkien's intentions here is just false.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
...I think that's what the Sunday small-scale question thread is for.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Well, I will grant that on the latter definition, LLMs are 'intelligent'.
I don't think I would grant it on the former definition, because I take building a model of the world to be a claim about conscious experience, which LLMs don't have. LLMs are capable of goal-directed activity, for whatever that may be worth, but I think having a model of the world implies having some kind of mental space or awareness. You mention an entity being 'cognizant' of something, but I would have thought that's the thing obviously missing here. To be cognizant of something is to be aware of it - it's a claim about interiority.
I mention this because I notice in AI discourse a gulf where it seems that, for some people, LLMs are obviously intelligent, and the idea of denying that they are is ridiculous; and that for other people LLMs are obviously not intelligent, and the idea of affirming that they are is ridiculous. I'm in the latter camp personally, and the way I make sense of this is just to guess that people are using the word 'intelligent' in very different ways.
That's where I am as well.
Maybe I'm too cynical here, but to me the WSJ story doesn't seem to add anything that we didn't know before. Trump and Epstein were friends, and Trump says creepy things about young women and sex. We knew that! "Trump engages in sexual misconduct" just isn't a story that I can see going anywhere - Trump supporters have already rationalised that away, and people who would oppose him over it already oppose him.
Unless there is genuinely rock-solid proof of child sex abuse - and I would be shocked if there is - then this just doesn't change anything. Trump is a pervert in the way we already knew he was a pervert. The needle does not move.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
What is your understanding of 'intelligence'?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
The classic example of people saying nice things about Nazi Germany is the autobahn, right? I think historians still feel free to compliment that.
I suppose I think the consensus around Nazi Germany has moved in the direction that they did make some right calls and pick some low-hanging fruit, but also that a lot of their strengths were either inherited (e.g. the military system) or illusory and exaggerated (e.g. taking credit for the German economic revival). Nazism as a system wasn't uniquely brilliant.
The way TOS frames it is as something like a deal with the devil. You get efficiency, power, a rapid rise to power, social solidarity, etc., and all you have to do is be evil. That's not what was going on with Hitler's Germany.
Yes, the guy who founded the Nazi planet in that episode explicitly believed that Nazi Germany was an extremely well-organised society. He says that it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew". He thought that he could save this society by giving it a social model that had all the benefits of Nazi organisation and cohension while stripping out the evil goals.
This is not, I believe, a historiography that any competent modern historian would agree with. The Third Reich was quite inefficient in many ways, and frequently made poor decisions. Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
I would normally say that it's possible John Gill is just meant to be wrong, IC, and his belief about the efficiencies of Nazism are wrong, but the episode does seem to take his side. The problem with Ekos is not that Nazism is ineffective; it's that Nazism is evil. Gill's failure was thinking he could remove the evil, not in thinking that Nazism is effective. Spock himself agrees with Gill's first judgement:
KIRK: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?
GILL: Planet fragmented. Divided. Took lesson from Earth history.
KIRK: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.
GILL: Most efficient state Earth ever knew.
SPOCK: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.
KIRK: But it was brutal, perverted, had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?
SPOCK: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.
And it delivers the moral pretty blatantly at the end:
SPOCK: Captain, I never will understand humans. How could a man as brilliant, a mind as logical as John Gill's, have made such a fatal error?
KIRK: He drew the wrong conclusion from history. The problem with the Nazis wasn't simply that their leaders were evil, psychotic men. They were, but the main problem, I think, was the leader principle.
MCCOY: What he's saying, Spock, is that a man who holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can't resist the urge to play God.
SPOCK: Thank you, Doctor. I was able to gather the meaning.
MCCOY: It also proves another Earth saying. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Darn clever, these Earthmen, wouldn't you say?
SPOCK: Yes. Earthmen like Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lee Kuan. Your whole Earth history is made up of men seeking absolute power.
MCCOY: Spock, you obviously don't understand.
SPOCK: Obviously, Doctor, you fail to accept.
KIRK: Gentlemen. Gentlemen, we've just been through one civil war. Let's not start another.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
This is a secular space, so I try to reserve my belief in divine intervention to the side. ;)
More seriously, I know you were joking, but I think that in Christianity it's a grave mistake to assume that divine favour clearly correlates or anti-correlates with worldly power or success. God tests and tries his people, and uses them in unexpected ways. Sometimes the church may be powerful and accepted in society; sometimes it may be reviled and persecuted. We shouldn't read too much into either situation.
I don't actually think assassination is plausible. At the very least it is less plausible than one of the other explanations - it requires a lot more moving parts, especially since no particular candidates for either ordering or carrying out the assassination seem to have been identified, or had any evidence pointing towards them.
Nor do I think it's ridiculous to say that, in the presence of multiple plausible scenarios, we should assign higher weight to the official story, if only because it is generally more likely for any given official statement to be true than false. I am not naively claiming that governments never lie about things. I'm saying that things the government says are true are usually either true, or in spitting distance of the truth. They are often massaged a bit, but outright lies are unusual. If nothing else, the government saying that something is true is not evidence that it isn't true. The government may not be always right or always truthful, but its hit rate is better than that of speculating internet randos.
The entire case for EDKH is based on the idea that the official explanation is unsatisfactory. But so far I don't really see a convincing reason to think that the official explanation is that unsatisfactory. The official explanation is pretty plausible. I don't assign 100% probability to it - as I said, I could imagine a minimum-plausible-EDKH being true - but nothing stands out that makes it clearly false. There's no smoking gun that makes me reject it.
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