OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Any kind of conservatism? I'm wondering what kinds those are?
From my perspective, it doesn't make sense to describe Trump himself as a conservative of any kind - he's a populist demagogue and I'd say closer to the revolutionary of the spectrum than the conservative end. But of course it's possible for a non-conservative to, however inadvertently, create the space for conservatism to survive.
The question is what that is. What kinds of conservatism are we talking about? The conservatism of the American experiment itself, i.e. a kind of classical liberalism? A sort of cultural or social conservatism embedded in community and religious life that goes back long before the American Revolution? Reaganite fusionism? I think this kind of dialogue often struggles because 'conservative' can mean a lot of different things in the American context, some of which outright contradict each other.
At any rate, I notice you didn't answer my question. If you had a time machine and went back to 1945, what would you advise 'conservatives' (who are they, specifically?) at the time to do? Would you give advice to Thomas Dewey or Robert Taft? Maybe William Jenner? What would it be?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I suppose I count as defending Hanania - I don't particularly like him, but I think hate for him here is absurdly overblown.
I will just straight-up defend Yglesias, though. I don't find him particularly annoying and he strikes me as effectively advocating for his preferred positions in a way that admits of rational argument and counter-argument. Well done him.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
"Don't lose" is not the most clear or transparent piece of advice.
What should conservatives have done starting from 1945?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Okay, I'll give you that one, that was probably the best reply you could have written.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Ironically this is the kind of comment that makes me like Hanania more out of contrariness, because this sort of bile itself is repulsive.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Well, I can definitely understand pursuing a parasocial internet vendetta. I hate-read a few authors and feel my share of schadenfreude when things go badly for them. But for a top-level like this, I'd ideally want the self-awareness to realise that not everybody knows who this person is, and the understanding that their importance may not be immediately obvious.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Could I get a brief explanation of who David Cole is, and why anybody should care?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Lewis actually saw it with Tolkien, who was not a fan either. That article is pretty clickbaity, but even so, I concede that I smile at the thought of Lewis and Tolkien walking into the cinema, watching Snow White, and then complaining to each other all the way back to the pub.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
What might have come of it if the man had been educated - or even brought up in a decent society?
This one?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
There have been people who've taken that line historically. That's the line of the Gospel of Judas, for instance: that Judas was a hero because he caused the Crucifixion, which saved the world.
However, this is obviously heretical, and to my knowledge orthodox Christianity has never had any time for it. The Crucifixion may have been the means by which the world was saved, but it was still nonetheless an evil deed.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Woke right is not a thing: it never was a thing, because actual Nazis, fascists, and white nationalists don't use or accept critical theory. Any resemblance (da joos vs da whitey) is coincidental: the true similarity is that both wokism and fascism are illiberal, but for completely different reasons.
Neil Shenvi has a few examples, surely? He cites Stephen Wolfe recommending using CRT's premises, and taking his opponents' weapons and growing stronger by them, and he explicitly refuses to abjure a critical theory approach. Shenvi also cites Abrahamsen to the effect of there being a 'Gramscian right', and credibly cites people like Sam Francis or John Fonte acknowledging Gramsci's influence on their own work.
That seems like a pretty reasonable prima facie case that at least some far-right or white-nationalist-adjacent people are genuinely influenced by critical theory.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I'm going to start with a petty nitpick:
More precisely, in the Scriptures there are four terms for love: eros (sexual love), storge (parental/familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship), and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause)
Storge (στοργή) does not actually appear in the scriptures. A handful of words derived from it do (there's φιλόστοργος in Romans 12:10 and ἄστοργος in Romans 1:31 and 2 Timothy 3:3), but στοργή itself is not in the Bible.
Now that said...
I don't think much of any kind of Christian-inflected atheism. I understand that a religion can cast a long shadow and retain immense psychological power even among those who reject its core claims. However, what I find in cases like this is a kind of sentimental appropriation of the power of Christian rhetoric even alongside the rejection or outright destruction of Christian faith itself, and I think I would prefer honest enemies to friends like that.
What I read in Zizek's essay is a kind of substitution. He appropriates the language of Christian faith but swaps out its referent, such that the Holy Spirit can become 'an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause'. What is there to say there but that the Holy Spirit is not, in fact, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause, and the substitution can only do violence to the Holy Spirit, which is, after all, not merely a linguistic flourish, but (as Christians believe) the Third Person of the Trinity.
I think this is trading one's birthright for pottage. Maybe the Christian hope is right, maybe it's a delusion, but either way it's not just the hope for a fairer world in the here and now.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
It's more specific than that, surely? "The reason it's instituted" is a term that admits of a lot of interpretation. Why do searches require warrants? To protect people's privacy? To protect people full stop? To reduce the scope of arbitrary government action? To prevent tyranny? Almost any policy can be interpreted to have multiple reasons for its existence, and then each of those reasons can be defined narrowly, or so broadly as to enable almost anything.
I take "don't kill the baby" to be shorthand for "human life overrides all other concerns".
Put like that it's a principle that I see coming up in all sorts of other contexts. You probably heard it when learning to drive, for instance - you may break any road rule if it is necessary to do so to preserve human life. Most organisations have, whether implicit or explicit, an exception like that. Heck, religions have exceptions like that, where both Jewish and Islamic law may be violated if human life is at risk.
That said this doesn't resolve the issue in the scenario, which I interpret as a probabilistic one. It's possible that the man with the basket is just an innocent fisherman. The policeman and lawyer are making a judgement call, and one for which no explicit rule can be laid down. "Always search people who might be guilty" makes a mockery of the law; "never search people who might be guilty" means more drowned babies than we're probably comfortable with. They both need to show a practical wisdom, weighing the trade-off carefully and making a risky decision.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Subsequent writings are merely of the 'adding more epicycles' kind of truthseeking. First it was literally believing that men were created by God ex nihilo.
This is a nitpick, but I feel obligated to note that no, it wasn't. In Genesis 2:7, the first man is formed out of the dust of the ground. The Bible does not say that men were created ex nihilo, but in fact says the explicit opposite. I would gently suggest that if you want to seriously engage with Christian thought on a complex issue, you may wish to start by familiarising yourself with what Christian texts actually say.
Is this a nitpick? Is it not massively germane to your point? No, perhaps not, and if you want to look for all the ways in which Genesis 1-2 are not a scientifically accurate account of abiogenesis, you'll succeed. But then it is hardly the case that Christians, even long before Darwin, have understood it that way. Thinkers as older as Augustine, in 401, have understood that this narrative is not to be understood in that sense. Likewise Calvin, again prior to modern science, frankly writes "that nothing here is treated of but the visible form of the world" and adds "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere". As with astronomy, so with biology.
You may condemn Augustine and Calvin as adding epicycles, but I would say, rather, that the burden of proof lies with your assumption that the only reasonable way to understand Genesis is as a historico-scientific account of the origin of the universe. It seems to me that as Christians have taken other approaches, even many centuries before modern science, it is by no means obvious that that's the natural reading of it. My view, actually, is that the automatic reading of Genesis as scientific is itself a kind of modern debasement, an error characteristic of post-Enlightenment thinkers.
Now to the rest...
I actually don't find the Riddle of Epicurus particularly overwhelming here, not least because the Riddle predates Christianity by many centuries, and in fact the Problem of Evil is itself voiced with great eloquence and force in the Hebrew scriptures themselves. Confronting the earliest Christians with the fact of evil, in the face of God's omnipotence, would not surprise or challenge them in the slightest, and the difficulty that humans have understanding evil was as familiar to them as it is to us.
What I would say is that Christian faith does, in a sense, require the belief that there is some kind of answer to the Problem of Evil, even if we do not know it. And that in itself is not absurd. If we have good reason to believe that God exists and is benevolent, and yet we observe evil, it would seem to follow that there must be some kind of reason for evil. We need not be able to articulate that reason in order to believe that there must be one. The question has an answer, even if we do not know it. Christianity does not declare that there are no mysteries.
Thus, say, Peter van Inwagen's response to the Problem of Evil is what he calls a 'defense' rather than an 'theodicy'. He writes:
The construction of a theodicy is not demanded of a philosopher or theologian who is concerned with apologetic problems. If apologists for theism or for some theistic religion think they know what the real truth about the existence of evil is, they may of course appeal to this supposed truth in their attempts to expose what they regard as the weaknesses of the argument from evil. But apologists need not believe that they know, or that any human being knows, the real truth about God and evil. The apologist is, after all, in a position analogous to that of a counsel for the defense who is trying to create “reasonable doubt” as regards the defendant's guilt in the minds of jurors. (The apologist is trying to create reasonable doubt about whether the argument from evil is sound.) And lawyers can raise reasonable doubts by presenting to juries stories that entail their clients' innocence and account for the prosecution's evidence without maintaining, without claiming themselves to believe, that those stories are true.
Typically, apologists dealing with the argument from evil present what are called “defenses”. A defense is not necessarily different from a theodicy in content. Indeed, a defense and a theodicy may well be verbally identical. Each is, formally speaking, a story according to which both God and evil exist. The difference between a defense and a theodicy lies not in their content but in their purposes. A theodicy is a story that is told as the real truth of the matter; a defense is a story that, according to the teller, may or may not be true, but which, the teller maintains, has some desirable feature that does not entail truth—perhaps (depending on the context) logical consistency or epistemic possibility (truth-for-all-anyone-knows).
This much, I think, may be required of the Christian - not that they prove that this-or-that theodicy is true, but merely to prove that it is conceivably possible that evil may, for now, exist in a universe created and governed by a benevolent God. The bar required is reasonable doubt.
It seems to me that my justifications for understanding God to exist are sufficiently strong, and the possible explanations for evil's existence sufficiently many, that Epicurus' Riddle does not snuff out my bright candle.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Wait, I've not heard this one - does ChatGPT garbage use dashes the way I just did?
Are LLMs using my own writing style?
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.
Surely this has been a powerful theme in science fiction for well over half a century?
Science fiction authors, or at least classic science fiction authors, have been asking "What if AI are bad?" for a very long time, and while I could easily make a list of classic SF stories with pro-AI or pro-robot messages, the list with anti-AI or anti-robot messages is very long too.
As such I would intuitively expect SF fans to be more likely to have strong feelings in both directions, both strongly pro and strongly anti.
(Disclaimer: I do feel some hesitation in describing WorldCon attendees and the current crop of Hugo voters as 'SF fans'.)
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I think the key here is to trust tradition, which means some establishments but not others. Dumbledore is the central authority figure in the book and he is to be trusted implicitly. Where establishments are to be defied, it's because those establishments are modernising, bumbling bureaucrats. Dumbledore and Umbridge are both figures of institutional authority, but only Dumbledore is a figure of tradition. Umbridge is a come-lately, an interloper appointed by an authority that is both ignorant and interfering with something beyond its proper scope.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Harry does in fact use two of them, right? In Deathly Hallows he uses both Imperius and Cruciatus. The only one he doesn't use is the Killing Curse, and even that seems a bit hollow considering that the conclusion of the novel hinges on him using magic to kill the villain.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I think Harry Potter is an interesting example of the author not understanding her own text.
Or, well, it's an extraordinarily interesting text because of how widely and inconsistently it has been interpreted.
Structurally, as it were, the bones of Harry Potter are conservative or Tory. This is probably inherited a lot from the boarding school novel that it imitates, but it can't all be accounted for that way. Regardless of the origin, Potter is a series about legitimate institutional authority, tradition, family, and virtue. The demagogic populist Voldemort and the inept bureaucracy of the Ministry must both fold before these things. Harry is exuberant to the point of disobedience sometimes, but that is the necessary energy of a young man who is being trained into a stalwart defender of the moral order. Note the exaltation of marriage and family as well - Harry's significance comes from his parents, while Voldemort is from an orphanage after being abandoned by his mother.
J. K. Rowling, however, is a liberal feminist and a Labour woman, and when asked she interprets her own work along other lines - tolerance, feminism, anti-racism, a plea for equality, and so on. There are elements of the text you can read like this (anti-muggle-blood prejudice is certainly mocked), but on the whole this has never come off as terribly convincing. Hermione's experiments with civil rights activism, for instance, are generally played for laughs, and no character really takes a serious interest in large-scale change.
Finally there's the progressive fan read of it. Though the books are arguably pretty conservative, like Kirk/Spock, Harry Potter slash was massively influential and I don't think you can write a history of fandom in the 20th century while omitting it. That goes hand in hand with the interpretation of Hogwarts as something like a giant closet, and eventually the whole Resistance-coded reading of Potter that we've all seen widely mocked. Despite my tone here, I don't actually want to treat this reading with contempt. What a book becomes 'in the wild' can vary considerably from what the text actually says on the surface, and from what the author thinks it's about, and the huge explosion of creativity and fan interest in this version of Potter suggests that, however unintentional, there have been resonances here.
(I theorise that it's to do with the academic setting - the classic boarding school novel is set in a world where secondary and higher education are genuinely Tory, but the world of the 21st century, especially in America, is one where higher education has become a progressive bastion, so now the idea of the authority of the school and the values it seeks to impart to those in its care reads as progressive.)
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I don't think that's what people who make that argument believe - Tolkien's convictions are too transparent and visible for that. I think it's more Death-of-the-Author, that regardless of what Tolkien personally believed, the text can (and implicitly should) be 'queered'.
I've encountered this method in, for instance, academic biblical criticism, where the exegete says quite openly that what they are doing is 'breaking open' or 'queering' the text to find a meaning that was certainly not intended by the human author, but is powerful and liberatory in its own way, and so on.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
You don't even have to go the Mormons - I believe some people have linked that prophecy to the idea of the Wandering Jew.
That said, as a Christian I don't think your interpretation of that claim is constraining. This is one way to read that verse but it is not clear to me that it necessarily excludes all others.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
Christianity isn't so much about 'things being true' but getting into a mindset where 'it doesn't matter if it's true or not, I believe it'
I think you would find this claim very hard to square with even simply the Bible itself, much less the subsequent writings or even behaviour of Christians.
Christianity might be false - we may be, in Paul's words, of all people most to be pitied - but it is absolutely making truth claims, and those truth claims matter. They matter to Christians. The theology that you blithely dismiss can only exist because Christians care about this.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
I'm not sure how the procedure for electing a pope bears on the truth of Christianity as such? Even leaving aside that Christianity could be completely true even at the same time that Catholicism is not (or rather, particular Catholic doctrines could be false and Catholic institutional practice ramshackle and poorly-grounded), I'm not at all clear on why you would an apostolic constitution of 1996 must be eternal and unchangeable even vis-a-vis Catholicism. The process by which the church elects a pope belongs to the freedom of the church - Catholics do not believe that it has been handed down by God. They believe that God allows them, as an institution, to decide the next pope.
OliveTapenade
3mo ago
My experience was probably atypical, because I went to a boys' school. It had a parallel institution, a girls' school, and the idea was that they would occasionally crossover for social events. The girls' school was both much older and much larger, so it had a significantly larger student base.
I remember at social events and dances, what usually happened was that the boys were maybe 20-25% of the room, and they would all bunker up defensively in a corner, unsure of the female strangers who made up the rest of the room, and likewise the girls would eye all the boys nervously. There was a large gap between them and neither side crossed it.
This was before smartphones so I don't think you can blame it on that. This is all millennials. It's just that when your social scene is extremely segregated by gender, you're naturally going to cluster with your friends whom you trust, and nobody wants to draw attention to himself or herself by being the first one to try to cross the gulf.
(There was, for what it's worth, zero mention of homosexuality on either side - neither ironic nor serious. I attribute this mostly to them being conservative religious private schools. I don't think I fully understood the concept of homosexuality until after I had graduated. In many ways I wish for that innocence back.)
There isn't nearly enough context in that gallery to prove your point.
To be honest, what strikes me most is how unattractive the guys in that gallery are. Gosh, doesn't Finn look like a git? A lot of those guys look like total pillocks. I am glad I don't look like any of those guys, and I regularly get complimented on my appearance by women in real life.
What I see here is an extreme generalisation with firstly little evidence that it's true on dating apps, and secondly little reason to believe that even if it's true on dating apps, it generalises to anything in real life.
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