OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that this is a foolish reason to convert from Christianity to Islam.
Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten not created, coeternal with the Father, who died for the forgiveness of sins and will return in glory to bring life to the world?
If the answer is yes, then you stay within Christianity, and no amount of church heresy about sexuality can change that.
Likewise: is Muhammad the final prophet of God, and the Qur'an the true word of God, directly dictated to the prophet by the archangel Gabriel?
If the answer is yes, then you should become a Muslim, no matter how good or bad Christians or Muslims might be on the subject of sexuality.
Christianity and Islam both contain core, substantive claims that go far beyond sexuality. If the churches are all wrong on sexuality, but nonetheless Jesus is Lord, then you stay a Christian and you continue to practice that faith, alone if need be, or even fight to repair the church. If Islam is all wrong on sexuality or anything else, but there is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet, then you should be a Muslim, and make your daily prayers, and stay faithful to what God has said, and if the ummah has gone astray, try to repair it as best you can.
But the core claims matter.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
There's a reason why I advise people to avoid donating money to Wikipedia if at all possible. Wikipedia does not need the money, and at this point reducing the income stream is the only way they might change.
I'm not optimistic that they will, of course, but at the very least we stop rewarding irresponsible behaviour.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Counterpoint:
Consider political fiction. What does it say, for instance, that Americans made The West Wing, and British made House of Cards? When the Americans wanted to tell a drama about government, they made it one in which government is a fundamentally noble affair full of good-hearted altruists genuinely trying to do what's best for the people. When the Briths made one, they portrayed government as something amoral and fundamentally corrupt, something full of treachery and remorseless ambition. Notably when Americans made a drama about corrupt government, it was a remake of the British version! On a lighter note, even when making a comedy, the British made Yes, Prime Minister, a show that, while more gentle, shows politicians ae doddering, selfish, and absurd.
Or even to step away from politics - compare, say, the American The Office to the British version? In my judgement the American version is much more optimistic about the institution of the workplace. The UK version shows a place of quiet desperation - its office is a soul-crushing place, with people trying to find relief amid grinding misery. In the US version, the workplace is ultimately a place where people find meaning and satisfaction and love. There's a positivity that the British version lacks.
Moreover... I don't know, I feel like popular film does this? I can remember watching Independence Day, with the heroic US president character and his big patriotic speech at the end, and my father leaning over to me, putting on his best American accent, and saying, "Makes ya proud to be American, doesn't it?" (We are not.) I feel like it's much more rare for British or Australian media to be so... nakedly jingoistic, so unreservedly positive about government.
OliveTapenade
10mo ago
That had nothing to do with the admins. The short version of that controversy was:
A group of BattleTech fans wrote a Pride Month themed fanzine about LGBT characters in BattleTech. The mod of /r/BattleTech didn't allow links to this fanzine, feeling that it breached the sub's rules against politics. There was a revolt among users, and Catalyst Game Labs, BattleTech's current publisher, said that they disagreed with this decision and supported the fanzine. They made a new 'official' sub, /r/OfficialBattleTech. At this point the mod of /r/BattleTech reversed his decision and posted a grovelling apology, and /r/BattleTech resumed as the central sub.
(Some long-running BattleTech authors also made comments, though they seem frankly bizarre - the Warrior trilogy criticises racism, sort of, it's still a story in which the heroic English/French/German states fight a moustache-twirling Fu Manchu stereotype, but there was one sympathetic Chinese character and there was a whole subplot about how samurai are cool, but that's a different issue to the present drama. 'Woke' is a motte-and-bailey. Amusingly Stackpole himself has also been criticised as a conservative.)
This is a particularly interesting incident, I think, because BattleTech has historically been a pretty right-wing property, fitting squarely into the right-leaning milSF genre. Previous BattleTech-adjacent controversies have often been in this direction - for instance, a few years back there was some drama because MechWarrior Online allowed people to have Confederate flag decals in game, but banned someone for spamming "trans rights" at the start of every game. More infamously, one of BattleTech's flagship authors for a while was Blaine Lee Pardoe, a solid, Trump-voting conservative. It's not worth rehearsing tired personal drama (he claimed someone stalked him), but he was eventually let go and now he writes bizarre alternate history/revenge fic about a Second American Civil War. So this is an interesting example of how what was probably a relatively conservative-leaning game and community has still been really subject to the hegemony of Pride Month.
It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards. I also find the politics of it bizarre - the Clans appear to be presented positively in it, despite being militarist eugenicist space fascists. So to me the whole thing comes off as something closer to 'rainbow fascism' than anything progressive. This is arguably consistent with the tone - the most recent BattleTech story arc, the IlClan arc, is basically pro-fascist (as in, genuinely in favour of fascism as a political ideology), but somehow they seem to have gotten away with it.
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
AFAICT 'yes' outspent 'no' by orders of magnitude. Another nail in the coffin for those who think that you can just buy any election.
I believe this is true. This is from the end of August, but back then Yes23 had outspent all other groups by far, and they tracked 1009 Yes ads compared to 164 No ads. As of September the Guardian was running pieces about the No campaign spending four times as much on Facebook ads, but this is misleading - Yes spent far more on Google ads, and overall Yes spent far more - they note Yes23 spending 1.1 million, over ten times as much as the No-aligned Fair Australia. In particular as they got closer to the date, Yes spending on Facebook surged and easily outstripped No. AFR also notes Yes receiving over 26 million in donations.
It does rather bother me that in the face of the Yes campaign's considerably superior spending, institutional support, and visibility, that there is scaremongering around No. I remember spooky stories about No campaign consultants, or the terrifying fact that some people working for the No campaign are Christians. I find it rather surreal to attack the No campaign for working with a Christian marketing company, and to imply that there's something wrong working with 'a firm that specialises in fundraising for church groups', when the last I checked the Yes campaign was drowning in church support.
In the letter itself, there's the implication that 'conservative and international interests' are illegitimate. I'll concede the point around international interests (though I will argue that it is hypocritical for the Yes campaign to suggest that international voices should stay out), but surely Australian conservatives have every bit as much right to participate in the debate and to vote as anyone else?
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.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I'm not sure how compelling "game writing is bad if you remove it from the context of the game" is meant to be?
Yes, just reading a text dump of the game isn't very entertaining. But games are games, and the writing in it serves the purposes of the game as an integrated whole. It's like pointing out that just reading a film script is usually worse than reading an equivalent novel. Of course it is! It would be bizarre for it not to be!
Ironically I actually disliked Disco Elysium - I found it clunky and unappealing as a game, and I found its writing a bit too precious; notably I actively disliked the gimmick where your skills talk to you, as if you're a schizophrenic. But I think the point holds. Game writing ought to be evaluated in the context of an entire game, and it is no sign of bad writing that it doesn't stand up if removed from that context.
Let me take a specific example. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is often considered one of the best video games ever made, and I'd argue it has great writing. If you just read its script you might find that surprising, but I think its script contextualises its gameplay really well, and successfully contributes to the overall success of the game. Some of the game's most effective moments work because of the writing - stepping out on to Hyrule Field for the first time is a very memorable moment, and that's achieved due to the graphics, music, etc., but also because the story has contextualised what that means by making you spend the first hour or two of the game in this restricted, dense forest environment while reminding you that Link has never left this area, that nobody ever leaves the forest because they fear they'll die, and that Link is nonetheless adventurous at heart. The huge field rising before you, the horizon, the iconic swell of music is all powerful, and the writing contributes to it. Even if no one element by itself is that amazing.
To me, that's what good game writing looks like.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
...I have no idea what you're talking about.
You don't like left-wing people? You don't like Western non-Muslims who are sympathetic to Muslims?
I feel like you're using a lot of high-flown rhetoric to dodge the risk of actually making arguments - of needing to say that something is true, and then explaining why.
What am I supposed to get out of this beyond, "Muslims are bad, people who like or are even just neutral towards Muslims are inhuman scum, please subscribe to my Substack"? If you have a point, please make it.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
GamerGate is one of those cases, in hindsight, where each side had a public definition of what they thought it was about, and both of them were lying or self-deluding. This is necessarily a simplification, since neither side of GamerGate was univocal - both were unsteady coalitions and contained substantial diversity of motive - but it's one that helps make sense of it to me.
What pro-GG said GamerGate was about was ethics in game journalism. They were concerned about lack of disclosure, conflicts of interest, a journalistic field controlled by the industry it claims to report on, and to an extent (though GG was always a bit cautious and divided in expressing this) by journalists who were not culturally members of or sympathetic to their audiences.
What GamerGate was actually about, to pro-GG, was video games as a cultural scene being taken over and gatekept by cliques of progressive journalists, people alien to and contemptuous of the traditional gamer demographic, but who, by taking over journalistic institutions, arrogate to themselves the power to define who is and is not a 'gamer', and who also seize privileged access to publishers and developers and thus influence the types of games that get made. What it was really about was entryism.
What anti-GG said GamerGate was about was a harassment campaign. It was about a bunch of reactionary troglodytes who hate women and minorities lashing out to try to punish the diversification of video games, both as products and as an audience.
What GamerGate was actually about, to anti-GG, was a bunch of gross ugly people being gross and ugly in public, and worse, trying to exert control over a cultural or media sphere that anti-GG felt they were rightful custodians of. GamerGate was about a bunch of basement-dwelling virgins acting out their resentful misogyny against people who are leading the rise in diverse games. I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").
In a sense, what GamerGate was about was control of 'gamer' as an identity - about who gets to decide what it means to play video games, what 'gaming' is as a subculture.
Seen in that light, I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists. Asmongold doesn't have a journalism degree, but he has significantly greater access to Blizzard than anyone working for Kotaku.
It's not a total victory and journalism still matters - Jason Schreier, say, still has a lot of influence - but it's not got the stranglehold that I think it was felt to have in 2014.
Whether this is good or bad overall is a separate question - I think personally I prefer the streamer/content-creator-based world to the progressive journalistic clique, but frankly I dislike both of them - but insofar as it was about gaming as a scene, I think pro-GG have probably come out better than anti-GG have. Even if all the official histories favour anti-GG and will probably do so forever.
OliveTapenade
1yr ago
Please note that the Talmud is a record of historical debates, and therefore includes records of many positions which are advanced, considered, and then rejected. In ths case, Sanhedrin 59 is the section concerning Torah study and Gentiles, and the view that Gentiles should not study Torah is contested and rebutted - it goes on to say that "even a gentile who engages in Torah study is considered like a High Priest".
On a purely anecdotal level this has tracked with my experience with Jewish communities and synagogues - I mention the above passage in particular because I once discussed some of these questions (specifically the relation of Gentiles to Torah) with a few rabbis, brought up this dispute in the Talmud, and the response I got was a smiling rabbi saying, "Like you." I ended up attending a Torah study for a while and being part of a beit midrash.
Obviously synagogues vary widely in their level of welcome, but I bring this up just to have a contrary example present as well. There is tremendous internal debate within Judaism - even the link you provided above points to a record of debates about the status of Gentiles, and cites the very Gemara passage I mentioned above.
I think there's a tendency you get in many external critiques of religion that simply read a given sacred text, draw a lot of surface-level assumptions from it, and therefore conclude that either the religion is painfully anti-human and cruel, or that almost all practitioners of the religion are hypocrites. I'd suggest that it's often better to pay more attention to what is actually practiced - not that sacred texts don't matter, but those texts are held as part of interpretive communities. The history of the text's reception and interpretation, and then the way it is applied communally, are inseparable from its meaning.
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
9mo ago
From a perspective outside to both - Australian - my experience of both continents was that the natives were generally very friendly and kind, but both also had a tendency to be intolerably smug in some way.
In America, it took the form of the unthinking, automatic assumption that America is the best place in the world, that everyone else seeks to be like them, and then on some level there was this patronising belief that everyone else should be flattered to be noticed by America. Americans firmly believe that they're the greatest in the world, and they like hearing that repeated by others. Americans also like to deign to offer other countries their recognition and sympathy as if we should feel grateful for it. There's this whole underlying belief that the world revolve around America, and no comprehension that other people may not feel that way.
In Europe, it took the form of an only-partially-buried condescension, and the sort of bitter resentment that understands that they need foreigners, but that they ought to be on top of the relationship. It's often very visible when it comes to language, but even in the UK, every now and then you come across the sense that they are the centre of civilisation and on some level we're still just a bunch of unwashed colonials who've gotten inflated opinions of ourselves. I can remember people on the continent saying 'merci' or 'grazie' with a tone of utter contempt, or I can remember people snottily saying 'in this country...' before explaining something in a way that makes it clear that they consider every other country to be not really civilised.
Americans are smug in the infuriating, un-self-conscious way of people who know they're the superpower. Europeans are smug in the quiet, bitter way of people who know that they ought to be the superpower, but aren't.
They can both be quite ugly.
However, to be clear, none of this invalidates the many wonderful people I met or wonderful experiences I had in both regions, and the majority of memories I have of each continent are very positive and happy.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
By itself, "the right side of history" is clearly fatuous, yes. It assumes firstly what the people of the future will believe, which we obviously cannot know (and is likely to be diverse and contested regardless), and secondly that the beliefs of these hypothetical people of the future will be correct, which obviously may not be the case.
I think you have to factor in double standards on the "your fave is problematic" argument, though. There are, I think pretty clearly, major figures in the history of left-wing politics who seem just as cancellable. Marx wrote awful things about Jews. Beauvoir and Sartre were sexual predators. Che Guevara was, well, Che. The left has many heroes whose feet are just as clay as those on the right. So I think at least something about the argument has to do with what we envision the people of the future caring about - Marx is good because his politics were (supposedly) liberatory; Churchill was bad because his politics were about preserving Britain's imperial power. The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.
Thus with examples like Lincoln - yes, there are people who point out that by modern standards Lincoln was terribly racist, but widespread left-wing approval of Lincoln is acceptable because Lincoln can easily be fitted into an overall narrative of progress. Lincoln had his flaws, but he tried to point the motor in the right direction. Churchill doesn't get that sympathy because he was trying to point the motor in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the preservation of the British Empire.
As such I think a driving concept here is that of progress. It's MLK's "moral arc of the universe". The natural course of things is for society, customs, norms etc., to improve, those who hasten that improvement on are goodies, and those who oppose it are baddies.
Now, I think it's only possible to believe in this moral arc if you are extraordinarily selective about the movements and social causes you consider. Everything else must be dismissed as aberrant, a temporary setback, even just a blip, in an overall course of ascent. But it nonetheless seems to be the case that people are that selective. We take the movements of which we retroactively approve and declare them to be history on the march; and we ignore those movements of which we do not approve.
Take an issue where the course of history over the last few decades seems to skew conservative - gun rights in the United States, for instance. Over the last fifty years, gun rights have expanded, as has gun ownership, to my knowledge. Imagine you jumped in and said that this is progress, the moral arc of the universe, and that those who support expanding individual rights to own and use weapons are on the right side of history. How far do you think you'd get?
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.
The thing is, Pope Francis is a quite skilled user of the media - compare "I will not say one word on this", knowing how the media would take that.
The pope is limited in his ability to actually contradict previous teaching. Direct contradiction provokes responses and creates crises. But he can carefully speak in ways that are certain to be misinterpreted, and in doing so communicate a message that he cannot publicly endorse. He can create his own bailey, and trust that others will occupy it for him. As Ross Douthat says, the misleading headlines are the point.
Is that what he is doing? I don't know - I have no evidence of that. But Pope Francis' reform style in general has been about putting out feelers and provoking misinterpretation (e.g. "Who am I to judge?", that Amoris Laetitia footnote, etc.) without committing himself to anything definite, while also, as all popes do, generally promoting ideological allies while marginalising ideological opponents (e.g. Joseph Strickland and Raymond Burke both got hit recently).
Moving the Catholic Church is a very difficult and slow process. I'd guess that Pope Francis definitely wants to move it in the direction of LGBT acceptance, even if for him that might take the form of welcoming people, not issuing any condemnations whatsoever, and effectively neutering the traditional doctrine, even if sacramental marriage remains technically untouched.
OliveTapenade
4mo ago
...it's terrorism for a teacher to scream inappropriately at a student now? Or at least a 'terroristic threat'?
You don't think that's overblown?
Isn't that just garden variety verbal abuse?
OliveTapenade
6mo ago
There is something of a cottage industry here of people arguing about the overlooked complexity of Aboriginal civilisation. Often it's very vague and unquantifiable stuff about having tended the land for millennia. Sometimes it's just noble savage nonsense, like the claim that at least they didn't war with each other (they did) and all respected each other (they didn't) and had gender equality (take a guess).
Sometimes it's a bit more complex. Dark Emu is the most famous text to spring to mind - a fellow argued that Aboriginals had a settled, agricultural civilisation.
As far as I can tell Dark Emu is a simple motte-and-bailey. The easily-defended motte is that Aboriginal people, like pretty much all nomadic hunter-gatherers, recognised good spots, would leave seeds behind them for their return migration, and could make basic fish traps and the like. The implausible bailey is that this constitutes agriculture and the Aboriginals were "ahead of many other parts of the world".
Directing me to this guy has led me to some truly bizarre works about Mormonism and American history. Ballard wrote three books - The Lincoln Hypothesis, The Washington Hypothesis, and The Pilgrim Hypothesis - arguing that Lincoln was inspired and influenced by the Book of Mormon, that Washington was a pious proto-Mormon setting the stage for the restoration of the saints, and that the Pilgrims were prophetically guided to America in order to create Mormonism. It all seems quite bizarre, and if this positive review is to be believed, he supports British Israelism?
I realise that's not directly relevant to the culture war angle of this film, and he and his charity can have done wonderful things even if he's a fruit loop in terms of historical and theological knowledge, but... wow, this is a reminder to me of how strange the Mormon world can get.
Addendum: I was able to find a copy of the book. Yep, there's very straightforward British Israelism here, complete with nonsense about Saxons meaning 'Saac's sons'.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems?
It's always been explicitly part of the Motte's mission, as I understand it, to not do this.
If you want to solve problems, do not come to the Motte. It's right there in the top-level introduction: do not use the thread to wage the culture, and argue to understand, not to win.
"Doing good" is an activist concern. If you want to be an activist, go somewhere else. There are plenty of web forums and communities out there with the goal of mobilising activity and changing the world. The Motte, as I understand it, is not among them.
OliveTapenade
2mo ago
If we're going to have this whole discussion about regulation, it is perhaps worth noting that for many, this would have been understood to be a contradiction or at least a betrayal - the affair at best is an undermining or a betrayal of the marriage, or at worst, is a sign that he isn't validly married at all.
(Traditionally, valid marriage requires intent - to marry someone, both you and they must agree to marry each other, freely, with full knowledge of what marriage is. Given that Scott and presumably his partner did not intend sexual fidelity to one another when they said their vows, their vows are deficient - they were not made with correct understanding of what marriage is, nor with the intent to constitute a marriage properly understood. Ergo he is not married as such. This is still the formal position of e.g. the Catholic Church.)
At any rate, yes, I think it is probably true to say that Scott's situation is highly atypical, and not a good one to generalise from. Does he feel subjectively happy? No idea. But the rules that govern his relationships are weird, and would not work for all or most.
I feel like this whole Bay Area rationalist scene is a group that - and I don't mean this pejoratively, though I realise it may sound like this - would benefit from acknowledging their own freakiness. They are a small, highly-selected group of weirdos. They are bizarre. They should not generalise from themselves to humanity. This is the case for most small highly-selected groups, and it is always worth remembering. Most people are not like you.
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
4mo ago
That brings us back to Hanukkah, which again, is not an important Jewish holiday. This would be like if Christians in Israel started demanding if a minor random Christian holiday near Passover be given equal standing to their most important holiday. Obviously this is absurd on its face and would never be taken seriously.
The single most important Christian holy day is near Passover.
It's a bit amusing to me that you story you tell about Hanukkah not being that important actually also applies to Christmas, to an extent? Christmas is important, but it isn't and has never been the most important Christian holy day, which is definitely Easter. I'd argue that Christmas is probably around equal to Pentecost in terms of importance?
But the summit of the Christian year is the Easter triduum - nothing surmounts the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
Oh, certainly the last decade or so has been a defeat for social conservatism in video games. Actual conservatives have been consistly losing. Even in games or franchises that in my experience are particularly beloved by conservatives we can see this - BattleTech, for instance, has no gender selection for PCs, but merely lets you select 'pronouns', which can be mixed-and-matched with any body shape or facial features without limitation.
But I think it would be a bad misreading of GamerGate to see it as a social conservative response? GamerGate was never conservative.
Thus to take the case of Hogwarts Legacy - that game's success strikes me as much more compatible with the narrative that pro-GG won? The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy isn't "Hurrah for trans representation!" The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy is "boycott this transphobic filth". (Indeed that review is a perfect example of everything that drove GamerGate up the wall - a 'review' that barely touches on the game itself, which is mostly an autobiographical ramble, and which doesn't even seem to care about the question of whether the game is fun to play. At the time I remember pro-GGers citing this review as an example of what they were angry about - a review that seems more interested in passing moral judgement on a sin, in this case sexism or objectification, that it does in considering whether or not a game is fun or well-made.)
Pro-GG never cared about gay or trans characters in video games. Pro-GG was team "shut up and play video games", and was opposed to any sort of moralising. GamerGate was not anti-woke in the sense of "don't have LGBT characters in games". GamerGate was anti-woke in the sense of "stop lecturing me you puritanical douchebag".
OliveTapenade
7mo ago
It's not particularly clear to me what the relevance of any of this is, or why we should care?
The Kurgan hypothesis is pretty well confirmed, as I understand it, so the idea that Proto-Indo-European people spread outwards from the steppe and used violence in the process is hardly new, nor the idea that it's possible to, at least in part, trace descent from them across a wide area. But this is a very niche area of history, of interest to only a small group of specialists.
Moreover, as has been noted below, there doesn't seem to be any particular correlation between degree of PIE descent and what we might call civilisational complexity. Degree of PIE descent doesn't seem to mean anything significant or practical today - it is, at best, a mild curiosity.
I don't deny that history is interesting in its own right. However, it sounds like you're interested in present-day political implications? So to ask you directly - what do you think the significance of this is? So far you've pointed to, well, a bunch of creepy fringe figures on Twitter, but of course what they believe isn't exactly significant.
The glorification of the Indo-Europeans on the right wing also marks a shift from a liberal/conservative "white people didn't do nothing" opposition to progressive racial narratives, to a Nietzschean glorification of a Bronze Age spirit.
I think you are extremely mistaken if you think that 'the right wing' in a broad sense has any idea about Proto-Indo-Europeans, or that it gives a damn one way or another. You link a short clip on Twitter that is totally inexplicable to anyone who isn't already deeply invested in a tiny subculture of conspiracy-minded anti-semites.
I know BAP had a moment, but if you think that there's a wider 'BAP school', so to speak, that's going to become a major, even mainstream influence on the right... well, I think you will be surprised.
I don't remember when I first started to suffer Gell-Mann amnesia with regard to Wikipedia. It must have been some years ago, but at some point I remember reading articles, even articles that Wikipedia itself touts as 'Good Articles', on subjects I have real expertise on and being shocked by just how much they distort and misrepresent.
In some cases there might be an excuse. Wikipedia itself reminds us that Wikipedia is not a guide to what is true. Wikipedia is a guide to what Reliable Sources say. Thus on any matter on which Reliable Sources are unreliable, Wikipedia is likely to be unreliable. Add in that Wikipedia's collective judgement as to which sources are Reliable and which are not can be badly skewed, and there are indeed Wikipedia articles that, while consistent with wiki policy, are collections of half-truths.
I still use Wikipedia a lot because it's convenient, but as a first heuristic, I find it's worth first asking whether there's any present controversy over a particular subject that's likely to be reflected in the sources that Wikipedia uses. If I have a question that has a clear, well-known answer about which there is no controversy, then I expect Wikipedia to be quite reliable. If I want to look up, say, some detail of mineralogy, I expect Wikipedia will be pretty good - as far as I'm aware there is no culture war around mineralogy. The page on, say, quartz looks quite solid. However, any matter of interpretation or controversy is likely to be much more tendentious. To take an example here, if I search for gender ideology on wiki I'll get redirected to a page that is substantially just a furious argument as to why it's wrong and doesn't exist. This is not particularly helpful to anyone who is sincerely curious as to what gender ideology is and whether or not it's true.
Another heuristic I tend to use is just looking at the sources themselves - Wikipedia uses Reliable Sources but often goes for low-hanging fruit in terms of what's accessible, rather than making good-faith surveys of information. This is most obvious when dealing with anything outside of the West (if you have any expertise in, say, pre-modern Chinese history or Indian history, Wikipedia is truly dire on those subjects), but also when dealing with any issue outside of the cultural understanding of most Wikipedia editors. I have been dismayed to read wiki articles on a religious topic (my academic specialty) and find footnotes pointing to Vice articles, or to sociological articles on some unrelated matter that merely mention the topic in passing. But unfortunately there isn't always a 'cheat' like this - sometimes there's no one thing to point to, but I read an article and it's simply... bad. It relies heavily on a small handful of unrepresentative sources, it takes highly tendentious claims at face value, and it's parochial to the point of being deeply misleading.
To take one example - if you read the wiki article on Quranism, you will probably get the impression that this is a real, semi-organised movement in Islamic countries with a healthy degree of support. None of this is true. 'Quranism' in practice is a pejorative term - people are accused of being Quranists, and almost never identify with it. Disputes over hadith and sunnah are very common in the Islamic world, and it's always easy to accuse a rival who has a different view of correct hadith of not believing in the hadith at all. What few people there are who do fit the label tend to be a tiny fringe with no real support. There is no real 'movement' or 'doctrine'. Indeed, Quranism is to a large extent a Western confection, an imaginary movement for a better, reformed Islam more amenable to Western values.
That's just one that I picked because it seems relatively obvious. If you read, say, the articles on different theories of the Atonement in Christianity, there is similarly a lot of very misleading information, but it's harder to explain if you're not already familiar with the terrain.
And that's where the Gell-Mann amnesia comes in - I can only assume that it's also misleading on matters that I'm not familiar with, but I can't tell. But perhaps even potentially distorted information is better than no information, at least if I try to exercise skepticism?
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