OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
Now this scenario with the Chinese playing this role is unlikely for two reasons: First, despite their intelligence they completely lack the Jewish talent for creating myth, propaganda, and social narratives... amazingly, people here are citing the worldwide adherence to Abrahamic religion as evidence for the innocuity of Jewish mythmaking, rather than acknowledging that as evidence for the potent psychological influence of their talents. This is without a shadow of a doubt derived from their cognitive profile that goes way beyond IQ alone.
So, firstly, you've omitted the context of that disagreement entirely and in doing so changed its meaning. You quoted part of the Aleinu with the implication that it's a call for outright ethnosupremacism - for the supremacy of the Jewish tribal deity over other deities. Per your own comments, you think that Adonai is just 'a metaphor and synonym for the Jewish people'. I thus understand you to be claiming that the Aleinu is an outright call for Jewish supremacy - for the superiority of the Jewish race over other people.
In that context I think it is extremely relevant that the part of the Aleinu you quoted is not only common knowledge but also uncontroversially accepted by billions of non-Jews. I can only assume that the non-Jews who agree with that statement do not see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. Certainly I don't. If so, then it also seems at least imaginable that Jews themselves don't see it as a call for Jewish supremacy. This seems supported by the fact that if I ask Jews directly, they tell me that it isn't a call for Jewish supremacy.
As such I think your claim about the Aleinu is a tissue of nonsense. I invite you to consider that it actually means what it says it means - that it is a statement about God, rather than one about race.
Moving on...
Why is the global success of Abrahamic religion 'without a shadow of a doubt derived from [the Jews'] cognitive profile'?
For a start, 'the Jews' in a macrohistorical sense aren't a single clear genetic profile. Even if for some reason there was proof that Ashkenazim or something have a unique genetic tendency towards subterfuge and malevolence, it is not clear how this would equip you to productively speculate about the genetic profiles of the 'myth-makers' of Abrahamic religion. Bluntly, we don't know anything about the genetics of Abraham or Moses, if they even existed, or David or Solomon, or Jesus or St. Paul. So you're attributing whatever storytelling genius they might have had to an entirely mysterious genetic factor, which there is no evidence they even possessed.
It is worth bearing in mind that, as far as we can tell, the early narrative tropes of the ancient Hebrews weren't particularly unique. If you read something like the Mesha Stele, it is remarkable how similar it is to biblical narratives. Ancient Hebrew stories are often visibly influenced by contemporary stories - Genesis 1 is informed by Babylonian creation narratives, for instances, and indeed in places the Hebrew Bible seems to get mixed up with Babylonian stories. (e.g. Gen 1 itself reads like a response to or parody of the Babylonian motif of Marduk slaying the sea monster and fashioning creation from her remains, but with the sea monster removed, indicating God's absolute supremacy. However, in other places - Job 26, Psalm 74, Psalm 89, Isaiah 51 - the monster-slaying narrative element has crept back in and God is depicted as having killed a sea monster to create the world. Ancient Hebrew narratives don't look like the uniquely genius products of a malevolent culture of subverters - they look like what was going around at the time.
Maybe some Hebrew thinkers brilliantly remixed it all into the perfect combination to survive and spread. If so, I don't see how that's evidence for the unique storytelling genius of Hebrews - after all, they were probably pretty darn similar, genetically, to all their neighbouring peoples. It seems more likely to me that whichever strand of ancient Near Eastern religious thought came out on top, you could accuse it of being the product of a genetic community with a unique gift for myth-making. But that doesn't make it so. Any number of contingent historical factors apply as well.
Moreover, I think the argument about the Jews as supremely good myth-weavers, creating narratives that powerfully spread on their own, has to reckon with the fact that it is not Judaism as we know it that actually spread to half the world. It seems to me that non-Jews deserve some credit for the spread of Christianity and Islam. If judged purely by personal success (and ruling out the possibility of divine intervention), the decidedly non-Jewish Muhammad seems to have been a far superior maker of myth than any Jewish figure. If we consider Christianity, sure, maybe you can declare that Jesus and Paul have whatever mysterious genetic trait you're ascribing to Jews, but the successful spread of Christianity across Eurasia seems to have had less to do with super-capable Jewish Christians and more to do with a vast array of apostles of many different genetic backgrounds. To take a specific local example, the Christianisation of Britain seems to have had more to do with non-Jewish missionaries like Augustine of Canterbury than it did any Jews.
You might reply that even if the standard-bearers and the myth-tellers weren't Jewish, the fundamentals of the narrative had been worked out by Jews, with whatever this unique gift they apparently have is. But by the same logic I might as well say that the Jews themselves deserve no credit at all for Judaism, because the fundamentals were worked out by the Egyptians or by the Babylonians. Judaism modifies many ideas from other ancient Semitic religions, but then, Christianity and Islam modify many ideas from Judaism. (Although to be fully pedantic I should say that rabbinic Judaism in the modern sense is itself a modification of more ancient ideas - Second Temple Judaism was destroyed in the first century, and both Christianity and the rabbinic tradition from which modern Judaism descends are innovative reactions to that disaster. Both had to significantly reformulate what it meant to worship God.)
I'm not sure how you can get past this - if Jews are uniquely gifted at myth-making and the formation of religious narrative, it seems at least a bit odd that Judaism is the least successful of the major Abrahamic religions. When it comes to formulating a narrative memetically optimised for spreading, the Christians and the Muslims seem to have significantly outdone the Jews.
Why were the Abrahamic religions so successful at spreading?
Well, leaving aside the possibility that God wanted them to, there is indeed the possibility that many of the basic elements of the Abrahamic religions are memetically optimised for spreading. But that possibility does not require the hypothesis of a unique Jewish talent for myth! It does not follow.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I haven't seen the Dune films, but it does sound to me like there are a lot of things missing from them that are extremely important to the text, such as Frank Herbert's weird psychosexual theories, or the entire Arabic/Islamic/Middle Eastern element - I think they steered away from the word jihad? And I remember glancing at the cast list and being shocked by, well, pretty much every casting, as well as the total absence of Middle Eastern actors. It looks to me like every single human ethnicity is in those films except for the ones that are actually appropriate. I don't know how you take a story that's about a Greek family falling in with Arabic tribespeople in order to overthrow a Persian emperor and manage to not cast a single person who looks remotely Greek, Arabic, or Persian.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I would have thought there are at least two prominent anti-semites here? Three if you count Foreverlurker?
The specific issue does make a difference. There are enough of these posts that a casual scroll through the CW round-up on any given day is likely to run into at least one of them, and the regular presence of narratives about how the perfidious Jews are plotting to destroy Western civilisation is something that's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, or contribute to the perception that the Motte is a 'Nazi forum' or somesuch. Heck, the top post in the roundup thread right now is one directly engaging with anti-semitic conspiracy content, and it isn't even by any of the 2/3 regular anti-semites we have.
I can very much understand people not wanting this garbage on their doorstep. If nothing else, it makes it much, much harder to recommend anything here to outsiders.
"Oh, the Motte, that's the site with the Nazis" - that's not a reaction one particularly wants to deal with, is it?
OliveTapenade
5mo 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
4mo ago
Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that? The Trinity is a theological doctrine that doesn't directly contradict any experience of how the world works, and if it sounds strange or unintuitive, frankly it seems even more unintuitive that an infinite, all-powerful deity would have an innermost being exactly like or easily comprehensible to humans.
If I wanted to point to something empirically absurd, I would have thought the obvious candidates are things like transubstantiation or even the virgin birth - something that appears to plainly go against how we think the world works.
(Of course, it is perhaps relevant to say here that transubstantiation or the virgin birth didn't go against how ancient people thought the world worked, so they can't have been demanding believe in an absurdity as proof of loyalty. If they seem absurd now, that is surely more due to a changing weltanschaung around them. I doubt that the church at any point actually demanded belief in something that seems absurd as a loyalty test to weed out dissidents; that sounds to me like a post hoc rationalist attempt to make sense of something that probably just made sense to people at the time on its own terms.)
OliveTapenade
9mo ago
I think there's a difference between an open dialogue and low effort link spam.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I think you're muddling quite a few things here.
For a start, I want to clarify exactly which standards you're using. The global spread and popularity of biblical narratives does indeed seem like evidence that those narratives have some merit. But what I would challenge you on is that there's any particularly unique about those narratives, which implies anything sinister about Jews as people.
After all, you mention other highly successful ancient narratives. I suspect most people on the street who recognise the name 'Thor' do know that he's an ancient Norse god, and Thor is actually a pretty weak example because the surviving corpus of religious Scandinavian literature is so small. But I invite you to consider, say, the enduring recognisability and popularity of Hercules. Consider the enduring narrative power of the Iliad and the Odyssey - even when the entire religious culture those stories were embedded in faded away. People may not specifically worship Zeus any more, but even in the Superman comics you reference, Perry White continues to swear by Zeus! ("By Jove!") This seems like an enduring hold on the imagination by these ancient writers. The power of Greek mythological narratives is such that they've even successfully hopped across cultures - you can find the Greek gods popping up even in Japanese media, for instance.
What I want to suggest is that the existence of an extremely successful narrative or set of images doesn't necessary imply anything nefarious about race. Certainly the success of Greek mythological narrative suggests that at some point in history something creatively fecund was going on in Greece, but leaping from this to the assertion of a unique, genetic Greek talent for myth-making that continues to the modern day and makes Greeks a powerful conspiracy manipulating non-Greeks to their advantage is simply ludicrous. As with Greeks, so too with Jews.
I think you're also tending to single out the involvement of any Jew in any creative endeavour as evidence that the whole thing is somehow Jewish, or part of this cross-historical Jewish myth-making scheme. In practice, however, Jewish influences are often only one of many involved in creating the narratives that you're describing. I was just talking about Greeks, after all, and we have to grant that Judaism in the classical world was extremely Hellenised, and Christianity's early growth involved a lot of fusion of Jewish and Greek ideas. You might say that this shows the power of Jewish narrative to co-opt and absorb Greek thought, but why not the opposite? Why doesn't it show the power of Greek narrative to co-opt and absorb Jewish thought? Why are the Jews, in your telling, always the manipulators and never the manipulated?
Thus with the Superman example. The Christian and for that matter Greek influences on Superman seem pretty clear - Superman has been read as an allegory for Jesus but also as coming from the Greek heroic tradition. There is certainly something very Apollonian about him. Greek or Christian memes flowing through the minds of Jewish people are still Greek or Christian memes. A figure like Superman is pretty clearly an aggregate of diverse influences, some of which are related to the Jewish experience in America, and some of which are not.
If Jewish ideas can flow through non-Jews in a way that, to you, is just Jewish influence (as with Christianity and Islam), it seems like non-Jewish ideas can also flow through Jews in a way that retains their power. If so, perhaps we'd be better off thinking of ideas in less of a race-essentialist way.
In this case, there are some foundational ideas that originate in ancient Israel, yes - monotheism is the big one. Those ideas spread between many different peoples, mixed with different other ideas and contexts, and eventually formed several different religious traditions, including rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At no point in this process do you need a posit a special genetic propensity for myth-making or cultural manipulation on the part of the ancient Israelites.
I'd also suggest that you use the term 'the Jews' in a very vague and general way, such that it's not clear what you refer to or why. For instance:
Abraham and Moses are heroes in the Judaic pantheon, this is like saying "we don't know the genetic profile of Iron Man so we can't say anything about his behavior in that regard", the storytellers are the Jews themselves who keep these myths alive and propagate them among themselves and others with their rituals and behavior.
Who are 'the Jews' in this context?
Read 'Abraham and Moses' as shorthand for 'the people who historically came up with the core ideas and narratives of the Torah'. The point is that we cannot know anything meaningful about the genetics of the community in which the fundamental elements of Abrahamic faith were born.
I note that it is clearly the case that people like Abraham or Moses are revered by people of many different ethnicities. A specifically racialised interpretation seems weak. Muslims say explicitly that Abraham was a Muslim, and reject any significance for race. Christians also say directly that what matters is being a spiritual heir of Abraham, not one by blood (cf. Matthew 3:9, John 8:39, Romans 4:16, Galatians 3:7). Clearly Abraham is a hero and is understood as an ancestor by members of all the Abrahamic faiths - you have to go significantly against how these traditions have understood Abraham to see him as deeply racialised figure.
This even seems consistent with Jewish understandings of Abraham. Converts to Judaism are given the name ben/bat Avraham v'Sarah - son or daughter of Abraham and Sarah. The Jews themselves understand descent from Abraham to be spiritual rather than genetic!
It seems to me that the genetics of Abraham and the other originators of Abrahamic religion are firstly unknown and secondly held to be unimportant by his own heirs, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. So I think you're wrong to racialise this as much as you do.
In order to calibrate our baseline perspectives, would you accept the proposition that HBD provides explanatory power for why Jews tend to be more successful lawyers than non-Jews? I am suggesting that this holds for culture-and-myth-creation, and the cognitive traits that explain this go beyond simply IQ.
I'm wary of and try to avoid the term 'HBD'. I think there are probably multivariate reasons why Jews are overrepresented in professions like the law.
I do dispute, however, the claim that there is a genetic propensity for myth-making unique to Jews. I don't think it's even correct to say that Jews (as in a historically distinguishable genetic community like the Ashkenazim) do have a special talent for myth-making above other peoples.
Secondly, we should dispense with the absurd claim that the Aleinu is not supremacist, if a group of white people all cited some refrain proclaiming that the master of the universe chose them as his favorite people and made them differently from everyone else, and all else will bow under the yoke of the Creator who made Europeans his chosen people, you would unambiguously call that supremacist.
You're taking a very misleading reading of it. What the Aleinu says is that God has called and made a covenant with the Jewish people, differently to all the other nations of the world.
How would we feel if a bunch of other people said something like that? We don't have to speculate. We know, because they do. Americans say something similar to that all the time - that's American civil religion, the unique and special identity of the United States, chosen by Providence to be a beacon of freedom to the world. Americans make this claim all the time.
Judaism is an ethnically supremacist religion, and I don't mean that as a criticism, it is the entire reason it has survived under hostile conditions for thousands of years. Their god is their race, and their race is their god.
Judaism is an ethnoreligion, certainly - it is a religion associated with a particular people (though as I have indicated Jews understand Jewish peoplehood to not be reducible to race or genetics). That's not the same thing as being a supremacist religion - as you just admit in the next line, Jews speak very clearly about Jews not being superior to other people.
Moreover, you're taking an interpretation of Judaism here that almost no Jew would agree with. The God of the Jews, as Jews understand him, is the most high and the creator of the universe. They understand God to be a real being, and a different being to they themselves. They have this in common with every other Abrahamic religion.
I would encourage you to consider how the people you're talking about understand themselves. If nothing else, I'd like to suggest that Jews themselves might understand what Judaism is better than you do. Listen to them.
OliveTapenade
18d 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
23d ago
Just for the sake of rigour:
What makes anyone think that this is another other than more Chinese robbers? That it isn't just two hours of misleading vividness?
There are one and a half billion Indians. It is the largest country in the world. Do I believe that a dedicated troll could find two hours of footage of Indians being disgusting or immoral? Certainly. I would be shocked if that weren't the case. I am sure you could easily do the same thing for China or the United States or Egypt or any country of reasonable size.
Meanwhile let's make a quick sanity-check. If we believe this premise, the Indians as a whole are incompetent, self-destructive, and generally pathetic, whereas the Han Chinese, with their statistically higher IQs, should be far more successful. Yet if we do a quick comparison of India and China - it doesn't seem like the Chinese are outdoing the Indians by that much. They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage. This is even more the case if we look at history. Broadly speaking, which country has been more productive, in terms of art, science, religion, philosophy, engineering, or any similar field? If there's a Chinese advantage, it doesn't look immediately overwhelming, to me. India and China look pretty comparable.
Why should we take this seriously? We ought to predict that such a film could be made regardless of whether its general claims about Indians are true or not. Knowing that, the film presents no compelling reason to believe that its general claim is true.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
What constructive observation can be taken from this?
You can think of causes as vast abstract ideologies puppeteering around people, if you like. Nobody ever thinks of themselves like this. There might be a constructive comment to make on whether thinking about people as 'memetic agents' or causes as 'memes' or 'prospiracies' is useful, I guess, but you haven't gone in that direction.
(For the record I agree that thinking of people as memetic agents in the service of vast impersonal causes is usually foolish. If you spend too much time thinking about 'multidimensional space ideologies' and not about actual people who believe things for all the ordinary human reasons you believe things, you will end up badly astray.)
Instead you've just said that...
Some positions are right and some positions are wrong.
Okay, sure. That's obvious. Some people are right and some are wrong.
So what? I don't see what the point of posting that is. We can discuss reasons why so-and-so cause might be right or wrong, but you haven't made any comment or argument along those lines. We can also discuss what the proper meta-level policy is towards people who hold 'wrong' positions, but again, you haven't offered any ideas, any reasons, that might be discussable.
What's your point?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".
Sorry to keep spamming replies, but I want to note directly that there at least some leaning on 'racist'.
Meanwhile, the CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, Nerita Waight, said she was "horrified" by the result.
"In 2023, we had a chance to move forward rather than to stand still," she said.
"Australia voted today and now I clearly know what lies at this country's heart — racism.
"In my view, there is no way this doesn't impact detrimentally on the path to reconciliation and healing."
The big winners of this campaign are racism and misinformation. Before his term expired, the race commissioner Chin Tan called racism a “tentacled monster that feels impossible to slay, and its venomous nature seems to have only mutated in recent times”.
Tan said his greatest fears were realised and the debate was allowed to “degenerate into one about race”.
Many Indigenous people have maintained Australia is a racist country.
This is not to say every person who voted “no” on October 14 is a racist.
Motivations driving individual voting preferences are complicated, contested, perhaps even contradictory. We must be careful to not equate an individual “no” vote as a marker of individual racism. But ignoring patterns of racism and the relentless racist dialogue from some in the “no” campaign is to be wilfully, and knowingly, indifferent.
Racism is a drug, and Australia has an addiction.
Now to be fair, these are only a few voices, and the dominant line from the Yes campaign has been more muted. There are people who have taken other perspectives:
Yes campaigner Marcus Stewart, a Nira illim bulluk man of the Taungurung Nation and elected co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were hurting.
“It’s a tough result, it’s an emotional result,” he said. But he stressed that people who voted No were not racist.
“The Australian people have decided that the 92 words that were put to them wasn’t the best pathway that they saw for us to improve the lives of our people,” Stewart said.
“Australian people are not racist if they voted No. I want to be absolutely, categorically clear.”
Overall, I think now there is going to be a battle to interpret the result, and it no doubt will be ammunition for people who want to argue that Australia is systemically or structurally racist. But at least right now the claim that the defeat is because of racism appears to be more of a minority view.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I disagree that most Christians are 'at least nominal deontologists', if only because I think most Christians do not know the word 'deontology'.
My guess would be that most Christians have a kind of 'folk morality' - they don't have explicit theories of ethics, but rather have an organic, messy series of moral convictions that they have not systematised, but which are heavily influenced by Christianity as they understand it (which depending on their tradition involves things like reading the Bible, what they learned in Sunday School growing up, what their ministers or pastors tell them, what they absorb via osmosis from other Christians, and so on).
Most Christians therefore probably endorse some strict moral rules or duties (e.g. the Ten Commandments), also endorse virtues (e.g. the Fruits of the Spirit, "let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus", etc.), and also are sensitive to consequences (e.g. "by their fruits shall you know them"). Depending on which of these things you emphasise, you can try to spin Christianity as deontological, virtue-ethics-focused, or consequentialist (of which utilitarianism is a subset), but I think any attempt to simplify it down to one of them would be misleading.
It seems more likely to me that there is no general consensus on these kinds of ethical theories among Christians. Rather, Christians as a group probably more-or-less endorse the ideas that they should follow moral rules, that they should strive to become good people, and that they should try to produce good outcomes for the world. And if you try to force them to consider edge cases where some of those principles conflict, as philosophers do in order to refine theories like deontology or consequentialism, I expect most Christians would umm and ahh and not have clear answers.
So with that in mind, what's going on with the, "How can you be good without God?" question?
I suspect it's probably just as simple as the fact that a lot of Christians regularly incorporate God into their moral reasoning. When faced with an ethical question, they ask themselves questions like what would Jesus do, or what does the Bible say about this, or they engage in practices like praying for guidance. If you do that a lot, you're from a community where that is the default form of moral reasoning, and you have very little experience with other people... well, people who don't do it are going to seem weird. Hence the question - how do you do morality, in a practical sense, without this framework? What framework do you use instead?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Where are the skeptics and cynics on that compass?
Where are the people who just don't believe that AI is a big deal, or who think that AI is just a parlour trick of a text generator, and will not fundamentally transform anything? I'm thinking of something like Freddie's position - the idea that AI might be moderately interesting in some niche professions, but generally isn't worth freaking out about, either in a positive or a negative sense.
Are these centrists on your compass?
OliveTapenade
7mo ago
Something that's really stood out to me during this referendum process is, well, just how bad the Yes campaign is at making arguments or trying to convince people. There's a lot of quibbling minor points, or a simple inability to conceive of anyone genuinely disagreeing with them.
Meanwhile the No campaign is largely throwing mud at the wall - it knows that it only needs one reason to vote no per person, so it's focusing on throwing lots of ideas out there, suggesting that even one concern is enough reason to not go for the proposal, and consistency be damned. This isn't a great strategy from the perspective of ideological purity, but it is a great strategy from the perspective of actually winning a referendum.
Let me give an example. One of the most common No arguments is simply that the Voice is racist. The Voice is a proposal to give permanent additional democratic representation, in the form of a permanent lobby group attached to parliament, to a single ethnic or racial group. This cuts against Australian values like a fair go, and would 're-racialise' Australian society or the Australian constitution. How does the Yes campaign respond to that concern?
One common response is to point out that the Australian constitution already mentions race, so this can't re-racialise it. This is technically true - parliament only has enumerated powers in Australia, and section 51.xxxvi explicitly allows parliament to make laws on the basis of the race. However, by convention that power is almost never used, and No voters worried about race seem like they would oppose that section anyway. Moreover, the fact that section 51.xxxvi exists is obviously not a carte blanche to pass any racial law whatsoever. If there were a referendum to reintroduce the White Australian Policy and the No campaign claimed it's racist, pointing out that the constitution already mentions race would not be a defense. So too here. The Yes argument is to pedantically nitpick without at any point addressing the No voter's real conviction - that it's wrong to treat people differently on the basis of a response.
Another common response is to claim that the Voice isn't about race by nitpicking the word 'race'. For instance, here's UniMelb arguing that 'The criterion is indigeneity, not race'. Here's RMIT taking the same line. Here's the Human Rights Commission arguing that the Voice debate shouldn't be made about race, and that 'it's about participation, it's about equity, it's about elevating the position of First Nations' people'. But of course all of this is just irrelevant quibbling. Whether you call it 'race' or 'indigeneity' or 'culture' or 'heritage' it is still unambiguously a proposal to establish a permanent advisory body for a particular group of Australians on the basis of that group's ancestry - on the basis of who their parents and grandparents and so on were. It's still dividing Australians and giving greater representation to some Australians on the basis of something they were born with and did not choose, and that's the thing that the No voter is worried about. James Patterson in that third article says it in so many words: "either way what we are doing is putting into our constitution something that treats people differently because of a characteristic over which they have no control".
And so on for other arguments - it feels like this all the way down. The Yes campaign struggles to understand why anyone would vote No, so the Yes campaign just repeats clichés and slogans and tries to ineffectively obfuscate the nature of the proposal. At some point the fact is just that it's a proposal to give special additional representation to people whose ancestors were Aboriginal, and the Australian public don't like that idea.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
Perhaps you're focused on strategy rather than ontology but I'm inclined to think mimesis and esoteric ideas like hyperagents are the critical ideas we need to think about to understand current issues.
I'd agree that mimesis is a useful concept, but I'm not convinced that agency is the right way to frame it. As I use the term, an agent implies things like deliberate or conscious intent. Emergent agency - the 'agency' of an impersonal system - is a metaphor. There are times when I don't mind that metaphor (e.g. "Germany wanted revenge after the Treaty of Versailles" - sure, Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything, but it's an analogy), but I think you have to be very careful of reifying it.
Is it? Theological ignorance is a massive problem in American Protestant churches as well - remember that Ligonier poll? That found 73% of evangelicals affirming the statement "Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God", which is as classically heretical as you can get. 43% of evangelicals affirmed "Jesus was a great teacher but he was not God". 57% of evangelicals agreed with "Everyone sins a little,, but most people are good by nature". 65% of evangelicals affirmed that "Everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God". These are all obvious heresies.
There are even some obvious contradictions: 97% agree that "There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit", and then 60% agree that "The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being". Not only is that false, they just said that the Spirit is a person!
Likewise I am sure that a majority of Catholics deny the Real Presence, or think that the Immaculate Conception is about Jesus, or some other basic misunderstanding of doctrine.
Catechesis is a massive problem in Christian churches in the West right now.
On the Ligonier poll, it is striking that there is a very high degree of conformity on culture war issues (e.g. 92% agree that abortion is a sin), but extreme levels of confusing on even basic questions of doctrine. It suggests to me that churches have become very good at lining people up into political tribes, but are failing at their more basic, essential duty of teaching the gospel.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
(I know you specifically don't need to know this, but for non-Australians reading, I hope this is helpful.)
I'll add that the how-to-vote cards do have a practical function. Firstly, Australia's voting system is relatively complex compared to countries like the US, so having a little more advice on how to correctly fill out a ballot seems reasonable. Secondly, we have preferential voting, and one of the purposes of how-to-vote cards is to explain how the party would like you to vote.
Let me give a specific example - here's a Labor how-to-vote card for the 2015 Canning by-election. For a vote in Australia to be valid, it has to number every box in order. If you just write a '1' in the box of your favourite candidate, your vote will not count. However, there are twelve candidates in Canning! Twelve! Is the average voter really going to research every one of them and rank them in order? The how-to-vote card tells you how the Labor Party would like you to rank all the candidates. If you already know you want to vote for Labor, why not follow their advice?
Canning is an extreme case - there usually aren't twelve candidates. But anecdotally, I find that in my electorate it is usually somewhere between five and seven, and that's still a lot. Thus every party gives out cards like this.
The better cards, in my opinion, also give a little bit of information on the candidate's or party's platform, but that's up to the party. Still, they do have a useful role in educating and streamlining the voting process.
That said one worthwhile sidenote is that because a lot of voters just follow the order that their preferred party says, the people who decide the orders on the how-to-vote cards can have a lot of influence - this is where so-called preference deals can have a big influence. Often the parties will negotiate with other behind the scenes a bit for their preferences, and it can have a significant impact.
Obviously none of this matters for a referendum, because there aren't any parties and a referendum is a straight Yes/No question, but it is an interesting quirk of the way the Australian electoral system works.
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
9mo ago
There's a genuinely difficult problem here when it comes to creating an open discussion forum. If everything is allowed, at least some percentage of that everything will be vile. Many people don't want to be in a space where vile discussion occurs, and therefore will avoid it.
If there's a position that, by virtue of being included, will automatically lead to other positions self-excluding, then including that position may actually reduce the range of potential discussions. How to handle positions like that?
I can already hear the complaint - isn't this just giving a veto to the censorious and intolerant? And certainly it doesn't seem like a good thing to optimise for just having as many people as possible. The goal of the Motte isn't to get as many people as possible, so it definitely makes sense to just go ahead and let 'normies' feel uncomfortable if that's the price of attracting intelligent people with controversial ideas. However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas. So there should be a line, it seems to me?
The line shouldn't be placed at zero, where everything that offends anyone in the majority is banned. But neither should it be at one hundred, where literally everything is permitted including the guy who just likes to scream 'DIE N---ER DIE'. Where should the line be? If we want to curate a healthy, vibrant garden of ideas - where are the borders?
I know this will be interpreted as a call to censor. That's honestly not where I'm trying to go. My preference is to try to maximise the interchange of interesting ideas. It's just that how to do that isn't an easy question. It isn't resolved by just picking an an absolute principle like 'everyone is welcome full stop' and standing on that.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
I would say it's possible to talk about degrees? I think this conversation is happening now because we're talking about rather more than a 'whiff' of wrongthink.
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
11mo ago
It doesn't seem like you need to be racist in any sense to find it odd that they chose a non-Christian to read Christian scripture on this occasion. The blatant racism of the person objecting to gospel music only delegitimises any other concerns he might name.
So in that spirit: the presence of Sunak at the coronation isn't inappropriate, nor is it inappropriate for him to take part in some capacity. Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu leaders appeared later in the ceremony to present items to the king. Being a Hindu doesn't disqualify Sunak from taking part in the coronation.
But you'd think that the reading of scripture specifically is something that ought to be done by a Christian, or at least by a person who believes it.
OliveTapenade
17d ago
I have not played any of them, actually. To be honest I haven't played BG3 either, so I'm relying on osmosis here, but certainly the impression I have received has not been flattering, in terms of worldbuilding.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
Well, it was an exciting night.
It was a very solid result. Antony Green called it at 7:24 PM AEST, only 84 minutes after polls closed in the eastern states. Polls were still open in WA at the time the result was known. I'd say this is about the best result No could have hoped for - they crested 60% nationally, and achieved a full, six-state sweep. That's about the same margin of victory that same-sex marriage had back in 2017, except this was more difficult. SSM was a plebiscite (i.e. optional voting), not compulsory voting like this referendum, and SSM was overwhelmingly supported by media, government, academia, and so on. For No to achieve the same margin of victory with the entire population, and going against the will of the elite blob, is very impressive.
I'd like to suggest, though, that the No campaign not take too much credit for it. There are now Yes leaders specifically blaming the No campaign for the result - Marcia Langton is predictably blaming disinformation - but I'm not sure that's accurate. Even leaving aside that, as you correctly note, the refrain of "misinformation!" was itself sufficiently questionable, some might even say dishonest, as to qualify as misinformation, we have to reckon with the relative lack of power and reach of the No campaign.
Anecdotally - I'm from a Victorian electorate that went No with around a 53-47 margin. Yet the No campaign had almost no public presence here. Yes yard signs were relatively common. I visited two different polling booths on the day, and both had Yes signage and highly engaged Yes campaigners handing out flyers, but no No campaigners. Businesses put up large Yes signs in their windows and by their doors, but there was no equivalent for No. The Voice campaigns, on both institutional and grassroots levels, may be examples of Hanania's theory about cardinal preferences. For better or for worse, the Yes campaign seemed more organised and had a louder voice.
To step beyond the anecdotal for a second, just glancing at the endorsements is striking - Yes had so many more endorsements, including five out of six state premiers, a huge number of professional associations, pretty much every sporting club, all the big banks, almost every religious institution and charity, even the grocery stores. Financially, in terms of ad spend, Yes spent far more money than No did. Given the relative weakness of the No campaign compared to Yes, if the conclusion is indeed that Yes failed to get their message across in the face of opposition, then Yes must have been punching considerably under their weight.
Money aside, the No campaign does strike me as having been more effective than Yes, though. They were running a 'fear and uncertainty' strategy, but that was probably the right call for them. People vote No for a huge number of different reasons, and No doesn't need a one-size-fits-all argument. In general, however, they found a few central arguments (the Voice will divide Australians on the basis of race; the Voice is a vehicle for radical activists; the Voice is expensive and wasteful; the Voice is legally risky) and pushed them clearly enough. The No cause, if not the campaign, also did a good job presenting Aboriginal people themselves as harbouring legitimate differences of view about this. Remember that most Australians do not see or interact with Aboriginal people on a regular basis, so probably most people's image of Aboriginals is coming from media representation. The fact that this referendum made us all familiar with prominent Aboriginals in every camp - Conservative Nos like Jacinta Price or Warren Mundine, Progressive Nos like Lidia Thorpe or Michael Mansell, and Yeses like Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson, or Thomas Mayo - effectively disarmed the Yes campaign line that "this is what Aboriginal people asked for". (Even on polling day I saw Yes placards touting the claim that 80% of Aboriginal people support Yes - a figure that was known to be false at the time.)
The Yes campaign, on the other hand, badly struggled to make its case. I feel that one of its major issues was the inability to imagine the mindset of someone who disagrees or has doubts, and they often resorted to clichés. "If you listen to people you get better outcomes" is so generic as to be uncontroversial, but it doesn't speak to why a constitutionally-enshrined Voice is necessary for that. In other cases I felt they never quite reached the point - they argued that it should be constitutionally-enshrined so that governments can't get rid of it, but given that bodies like ATSIC were abolished with bipartisan support, it seems as though there might have been popular support for abolishing past bodies that failed. It's not clear why we should want to give up the power to abolish a body if it isn't working.
In other places I feel they fell for the fact-checker's fallacy - that if you can quibble the factual accuracy of a statement, that's somehow going to win an argument. I've talked about the way the argument went around race before - if you're responding to someone worried that it's wrong to divide Australians on the basis of something they can't control, like their race or their ancestral background, nitpicking "indigeneity is different to race" or "the word 'race' is already in the constitution" is going to be ineffective.
But overall I feel their biggest failure was, in a sense, typical-minding the entire country. It's understandable that Yes supporters have positive affect around the idea of Yes, but obviously other people don't, so appeals to moral righteousness or attempts to guilt-trip people aren't going to be effective. Take statements like this - McManus and Albanese ask for Australians to be 'decent', to 'show what a wonderful country this is', to 'show kindness', to show 'generosity of spirit', and so on. But anybody who believes that voting Yes is the decent, kind, or generous thing to do is already a Yes voter! You have to win over people who don't believe that! Anecdotally I had Yes-supporting friends telling me things like, "Ask yourself the old question, what would Jesus do?", apparently seeing it as obvious that that leads to a Yes vote. But it doesn't.
This is a refrain I make a lot of the time, but things are not obvious. I think the Yes campaign thought that Yes was obvious. But it wasn't.
On a somewhat meta point, this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it? I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.
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