OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
Do the alt-right agree that "pre-natal people" are a thing, to begin with?
No, but if they believe that the infant in the womb is not a person, such that it can be terminated at any point without guilt, that's something they have in common with leftists, not with conservatives.
(Incidentally, I've been wondering, is there a literalist Biblical case in Christianity for the personhood of fetuses, or is this something that has been coloured in retroactively by modern analysis/apologetics "through a Christian lens"?)
The Didache says, in so many words, "you shall not murder a child by abortion" (Roberts-Donaldson). Is that what you're asking for?
The specific biblical proof-texts include things like Jeremiah 1:5 ("before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you"), but these are more quibble-able, if you're so inclined. Footnote 5 here mentions some of the others.
Augustine, describing sin, writes in On Marriage and Concupiscence, that cruelty and lustfulness, "resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born." This is about a plain a condemnation of abortion as I can imagine.
To personhood specifically, in City of God XXII.12-13, Augustine considers whether aborted infants will be included in the Resurrection, and he considers the question again in Enchiridion 85-6. Here he interestingly admits to ignorance:
And therefore the following question may be very carefully inquired into and discussed by learned men, though I do not know whether it is in man's power to resolve it: At what time the infant begins to live in the womb: whether life exists in a latent form before it manifests itself in the motions of the living being. To deny that the young who are cut out limb by limb from the womb, lest if they were left there dead the mother should die too, have never been alive, seems too audacious. Now, from the time that a man begins to live, from that time it is possible for him to die. And if he die, wheresoever death may overtake him, I cannot discover on what principle he can be denied an interest in the resurrection of the dead.
I take Augustine here as saying, "A late-term infant in the womb is clearly alive, such that killing him or her is murder. I do not know at what moment in the womb the infant begins to live. That question is currently beyond scientific understanding."
Today many Christians would presumably add, "Today, we have greater scientific understanding, and therefore do know what Augustine did not, which is that life begins at conception."
Augustine always frames this in terms of 'life', but the logic seems applicable to personhood, to me? He does not use the exact moral vocabulary that modern thinkers do, but I think the direction of his thought is pretty clear.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Isn't this just generic "boo outgroup"?
It seems to me that the religious right take a very consistent position on this - it is wrong to kill an innocent person. If the alt-right carve out exceptions, like it's okay to kill pre-natal people, or it's okay to kill people with genetic disorders, or even (implicitly?) it's okay to kill people who are genetically inferior in some other sense, well, they're the ones who would seem to need to justify the inconsistency.
The true religious right, the socially conservative right, has a principle. Do not commit murder. They have stated that principle openly for a long time. For the small, historically new or young group of weirdos constituting the alt-right, or neoreaction, to accuse the conservative right of 'LARP' or of being 'leftists' is surely absurd.
If anything I think the religious right could more plausibly argue that it's the alt-right, as you describe them, who are pseudo-leftists. If you're going to accuse the religious right of being 'leftists' because they're anti-eugenics, I think they're just as much at liberty to say that you're leftist because you're pro-eugenics, and eugenics was obviously a progressive movement going all the way back to the late 19th century.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I don't remember Harambe ever being anything other than an annoying internet meme.
Maybe it was different on-the-ground in America, but certainly over here, it was just the dumb internet thing of the hour. It was around briefly, then people got bored and move on. I don't think it had any significance whatsoever.
OliveTapenade
21d ago
It's clearly true that people are more likely to lie in ways that benefit them and less likely to lie in ways that do not benefit them, but even for Crucifixion, the "Criterion of Embarrassment" is based on a lot of assumptions and convenient omissions. It's a rhetorical tactic, not a historical reasoning tool.
For what it's worth, while I agree with you entirely in your dispute with coffee_enjoyer, I would like to nitpick that this isn't true about the criterion of embarrassment.
It's true that the CoE is not treated as absolute. This is why people who deploy it as a gotcha in apologetical contexts are being dishonest. The CoE is probabilistic. In principle, if there's no clear reason to falsify something, it seems more likely to be true, but this is an educated guess based on how well we can model the beliefs and motives of an author. That's a very fallible process, so the CoE is very rarely, in biblical studies, treated as conclusive by itself. It is used alongside half a dozen other criteria to try to build up a picture of what is likely to be true.
I would note that the CoE is not always used in ways friendly to orthodox Christianity. The CoE has sometimes been used to argue in favour of the historicity of the Crucifixion, but it is always used to defend the likely historicity of, for instance, what seemed to be false or mistaken prophecies on Jesus' part. For example, the Olivet discourse infamously contains the claim that this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened (Mark 13:30). It would be highly embarrassing for Jesus to make an incorrect prophecy, and some scholars would argue that there are places in the Bible where the authors seem to be backing off or making excuses for (e.g. the Lukan Jesus chides others for seeking to know the times, or 2 Peter 3:8). The CoE would be used to argue in favour of the mistakes being real, even though this shows a fallible Jesus and is problematic for believers.
It does get used outside of biblical studies as well. My favourite example is the satanic verses - there seems to be very little reason for early Muslims to make up a story about Muhammad being misled, so is it more plausible that the event is historical? It doesn't seem totally unthinkable to suggest that Muhammad, during his lifetime, experimented a bit with optimising his message, and tested out how different ideas went down. There could be argued to be elements of early Islam that are syncretic with re-contextualised Arabian paganism (most famously the Kaaba), and there are undisputed incidents where Muhammad seems to show sympathy toward a pagan custom - the Nakhla incident, for instance, shows Muhammad apparently wanting to observe a pagan custom not to fight in the holy months, until (supposedly) God corrected him. So it seems plausible that maybe Muhammad might have once briefly experimented with incorporating pagan divinities into Islam as something like angels, then changed his mind, and the story of a Satanic suggestion was invented to cover the gap.
However, that theory is still highly speculative - wiki describes a history of debates on its historicity, some of which challenge the idea that there could be no motive other than truth for Muslims to invent the incident. The CoE is very rarely dispositive by itself!
At any rate. I would defend the CoE as having a place in historical and textual study.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true.
I have heard this a lot, but I would hold, I think, that even though you can find edge case exceptions if you stack the deck a bit, most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style? And that style tends to be both repetitive and cheap? Maybe you can avoid that if you can spend hours slaving away over prompts, but that is quite rare.
At least part of the conversation is about status, right? AI art is perceived as cheap and nasty. Like the microwave, it might be useful, but it's also fundamentally low-class, because using it signifies that you could not afford a real human artist.
You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil.
Obviously 'everyone' is hyperbole and I do not mean every single person, since there are people here who like it. There are a handful of people like Scott Alexander who defend it. Still, as far as I can tell it's genuinely unpopular? Searching for polls, well, I'll spare you all the results from artists themselves or from art galleries (both those groups passionately, overwhelmingly, hate AI art), but as far as I can tell, ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields. This seems consistent with the generally skeptical if not outright negative view of AI most people have (and the Pew poll is just Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings). Here there is apparently widespread opposition to AI music.
In general, I think my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime, and I don't think I can really overstate it. There are very enthusiastic AI boosters on the internet, but as far as I can tell in the real world, people are mostly either ignorant of AI, or they dislike it to various degrees of intensity.
OliveTapenade
22d ago
If I were arguing against myself, actually, I might have used the example of found art, or perhaps animal art, which I think people are often more generous toward?
In this case I think the sense that no skill or taste has been exercised is important. Drawing a picture seems to require some level of effort or skill, which a person has acquired over years of practice. There may be an incoherent feeling that 'resistance' is important to art.
OliveTapenade
23d ago
Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.
Why yes, if you lie to people, you can trick them into thinking that AI art was made by humans, or that human art is made by AI. It's a complicated world and that's possible. But you shouldn't be surprised when people respond to that with extreme hostility.
People are frequently bad at understanding the reasons for their convictions. In this case, the conviction that it's important for art to be made by humans, or that the social context of art matters to how it's received, is being muddled up with the idea of abstract quality.
However, underneath that, I think people do value knowing that such-and-such picture is the result of a real human being exercising skill. Effort and creativity are things that we can and do value. It's acceptable to care about these things in themselves, for their own sake.
On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
That's... not what happened in Australia.
During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on. I think our covid response was over-enthusiastic and proved to be stronger than was necessary, but foreigners have a completely distorted picture of what happened here.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
Would you say it happened organically in Knights of the Old Republic or Jade Empire?
I'd agree that it felt fairly organic in Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, but those aren't really games about morality. BG is sort of about whether you choose to turn away from or embrace the power of Bhaal, but those games are so sidequest-heavy that you don't spend most of the game thinking about it, and for the most part you just make decisions based on what seems sensible at the time. Baldur's Gate does not even track your moral decisions systematically in any way - the closest it has is reputation, which is clearly more about how you are perceived. NWN does have alignment shift slightly in response in your choices, but in a very granular way (loot a house, +5 to Chaotic, etc.).
However, KotOR and JE both sell themselves as games about morality, and have a big moral choice system that their mechanics are structured around. I thought that both of them do present you with a series of contrived moral dilemmas just so you always have a Light Side/Dark Side or an Open Palm/Closed Fist choice. They were usually cartoonish and silly, but they were unmissable.
Perhaps it felt less jarring then because KotOR is a Star Wars game, and very blatant LS/DS choices are part of that franchise? But Jade Empire starts to give you the idea that OP is not good and CF is not evil, and while that was laughable as implemented in JE itself, it's clearly a prototype for Paragon/Renegade.
I suppose my perception is that BioWare sort of flanderised themselves over time. Baldur's Gate doesn't really have a morality system but it does have themes of the protagonist struggling with his/her evil nature. KotOR and JE externalise it, ME built the whole game around it, and...
So I think Dragon Age is an interesting comparison, because Dragon Age does not have a morality system as such. Dragon Age replaces morality with a more granular system of companion approval. There aren't objectively good or evil choices, just choices that different companions like or don't like. In theory this fits well with the early DA games' attempt to be dark fantasy, emphasising necessary evils, sacrifice, complicity, and murky situations where there are no good options. At times it even works well. Do you execute Loghain or not? There isn't a clear right or wrong answer to that question, but your choice will have consequences either way, especially for your companions.
However, you can tell that Dragon Age is written by people who have the KotOR/JE/ME script still in their heads, and they keep presenting you with contrived dilemmas that feel like they're from earlier games. There aren't little blue or red icons, but obviously sparing the mages is the LS/OP/Paragon/blue option, and the Rite of Annulment is the DS/CF/Renegade/red option. Saving the elves is blue and recruiting the werewolves is red. Destroying the Anvil is blue and making the golems is red. DA's promise of more interesting choices is usually not lived up to. Helping Caridin is the good choice and helping Branka is the evil choice. It's not subtle.
And the same in DA2, and then by Inquisition I think Dragon Age has more-or-less given up on being dark fantasy entirely. It is a pity, because while it was certainly imperfect, I did think Origins was on to something.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
I agree about the fantastic aesthetics, and wish we'd seen a Tevinter more inspired by Kirkwall than whatever it was Veilguard was trying to do. The music is solid though I think Inon Zur did better work on Origins, a game I would like to defend at length but won't attempt to do so tonight.
I think my main disagreement with you is about the writing. I agree that it's better than Larian or Obsidian's recent output, like The Outer Worlds, but I feel that's a pretty low bar. I'll agree that it's better than Disco Elysium, but I hated Disco Elysium, so I would consider almost anything better than sitting through another page of Disco Elysium trying to be clever.
It is worse, I think, than Origins, or Obsidian games like Fallout: New Vegas or Knights of the Old Republic II. I think the combination of a dialogue wheel and the three colour-coded personalities for Hawke really hurt the writing. I suppose one of my spicier opinions might be that the Mass Effect dialogue wheel has been a disaster for game writing. The three options are just never enough to express a nuanced opinion on anything, especially because they are always locked to the blue, purple, and red options. No matter what's going on, my options are always limited to a polite yes, an angry yes, and a 'funny' non sequitur.
I'm not sure I agree about mages, and in fact I think the Dragon Age fandom has distorted and flanderised mage issues. Origins presents the issue as genuinely complicated - the templars serve a necessary but unpleasant role, justified by the obvious threat of magical crime, but their ruthlessness makes them hard to like. Greagoir and Irving are colleagues who mostly work together well, but with a subtext of threat - Greagoir knows that Irving and his mages might be possessed or turn into monsters at any point, and Irving knows that Greagoir and his templars are their jailers and legally empowered to kill them, so there can never be complete trust between them. I feel that DA2 was a step back from that in favour of making both sides almost cartoonishly evil. Almost every single mage who slips the Circle becomes a blood mage or abomination, and meanwhile the templars have gone from necessarily ruthless to just plain abusive. Fortunately Inquisition dialled it back and instead showed a world where the breaking of the Circles has left both mages and templars in crisis, to the detriment of each order. It is obvious that mages are people who should not be abused or imprisoned; it is also obvious that either the templars or something like the templars are necessary because of the immense risk posed by magic. Inquisition generally refuses to demonise either group, and I also give it some credit for, in a move that surprised me, the templar sidequest being vastly better than the mage sidequest.
Unfortunately, in my experience, the BioWare fanbase is extremely progressive, identify heavily with mages, and have a flattened, 'All Templars are Bastards' level of understanding of the issues that the games evoke.
DA2 disappointed me because, well, the actual issue with mages is fairly straightforward. Mages are innocent people who are not responsible for their own powers; it doesn't seem like they deserve to be brutally oppressed. However, intensive training is necessary in order for mages to not be a threat to everyone around them, and magic is incredibly dangerous and a threat to everyone. Even leaving aside the everyday risks of possession, or the maddening influence of blood magic, one can hardly forget that magic were the ones who tainted the Golden City and unleash the Blights. It is very reasonable for the people of this world to want to control and regulate magic. So the question is - how should those concerns be balanced? How can magic be regulated, mages taught to use their powers constructively and punished if they go wrong, without threatening the rest of society? Unfortunately DA2 mostly flattens it to "do you like mages or do you hate mages?", and that's just the wrong question.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
Yep...
It sounds interesting when you talk about themes and character, but man, it is a tedious pain in the ass to play through. For everything that works, there's some baffling design decision adjacent to it that lets it all down.
One positive element I forgot to mention earlier was the setting. Kirkwall in premise is a really interesting place. This free city built on top of what used to be a slaving outpost of a cruel empire, the City of Chains where you sail in past statues of broken slaves, is a really evocative setting, and the eventual revelation that this was the site of the Magisters' great sacrifice in order to breach the Fade, thousands of slaves slaughtered on bloody altars in a crime that still echoes through the heavens, just feels natural. Of course it was here. Of course.
And from a game design perspective, the idea of zooming in on a single location and watching it develop over time is a good one. The city of Baldur's Gate was under-used in BG1, but Athkatla was easily the best part of the Baldur's Gate series, and it had similar themes, getting to know this wealthy city built on injustice, with a lively underworld, gang war, ruthless magic police, and so on. DA:O was famously a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and I wouldn't be surprised if Dragon Age 2 started with someone saying, "What if we made an entire game about Athkatla?" It's not identical, and Kirkwall has deeper shadows, putting the themes of slavery and oppression more centre-stage (which is itself compatible with DA:O's dark tone and fascination with corruption and moral compromise), but I can see the evolution.
Every time I talk about DA2 I end up frustrated because I can see the good game you could make out of these parts.
It's just that DA2 itself is not that game. DA2 is broken and annoying to play and un-fun. I am glad that I played it and I will never play it again.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
Personally I wouldn't go so far as saying that DA2 is a great game, or even a good game. It might be BioWare's most interesting game, but taken as a whole, I think it has to be judged a failure. It's a mess mechanically, its line-to-line writing is frequently bad, and its setting struggles for coherence. DA2 is not a game I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.
However, for those willing to sift through it, there is a lot there to like. Act two is easily the best part of it, with the qunari a fantastic depiction of the genuine appeal of fanatical religious asceticism. Sometimes I hear people wonder what drives people to support the Taliban, and the answer I want to give every time is, "play DA2". The Arishok and the qunari are deeply repulsive to liberal values. They preach strict conformity, obedience, and discipline. But they exist in a context where everything else is falling apart. In comparison to Kirkwall, they have solidarity with each other. They do not tear and bite at each other, as everyone else does. Each person works for the good of the whole, and each person is looked after. What hardship exists is shared, and when successes are achieved, they are also shared. The qunari have an aura of righteousness - they sit there above the strife, perhaps the only non-hypocritical faction in the city, issuing judgements of the degeneracy around them. They are an island of order in a sea of chaos and you can understand why people would choose them. You cannot choose them yourself, of course, but the Arishok's respect matters to me, and I care about winning it.
Unfortunately, most of the game does not reach that height. The mage/templar debate that dominates the third act is only engaged with on a surface level, and the game's final sequence feels unfinished (why do you fight Orsino if you side with the mages? it feels like it was intended that the final boss be either Orsino or Meredith depending on your choice, but instead they just both go insane?), and is too reliant on contrivances like the red lyrium idol.
And again a lot of the writing on a more immediate level is unimpressive. The doormat/jerk/clown dialogue options are unsatisfying, and Friendship/Rivalry, while an interesting idea, did not work in practice at all, never mind leading to inconsistent results by bundling together positions in unintuitive ways. (Suppose you're both anti-slavery and pro-mage - this leads to odd results with Fenris.)
I would not say that DA2 is a good game, but it's a bad game with enough good pieces that I wish it were better.
This is probably a better position to be in than Veilguard, which is bad and boring, but it is still, I think, a significant step down from the much superior Origins.
My preferred example of this is Dragon Age 2, which deserves a longer post than I can make right now, but which I much prefer to read as a tragedy, and therefore is accentuated and heightened by 'bad' decisions.
I think DA2 is a tragedy even if you play it 'optimally', for the best outcomes. Even in the best possible version, DA2 is a story about Hawke, the protagonist, seeking his/her fortune in a new city, rising from a penniless refugee to the height of political power, and none of it being worth a damn. No matter how good your decisions, or how diligent you are about sidequests and doing all the content, the city of Kirkwall is doomed to descend into anarchy and civil war. It does not matter how good your judgement is, or how canny a political operator, or even how skilled you are with a sword. The forces of social division and entropy tearing this city apart were set long before you ever arrived. Moreover, no matter your choices, you are going to lose friends and loved ones. This city will chew up and destroy everyone you ever cared for.
In some ways I see the game summarised well in the character of Gamlen. Gamlen is the player character's uncle, someone you were hoping to make contact with and ask for help in your desperate flight at the start of the game. Instead you discover that he is a washed-up drunk and a gambler, who has lost the family's wealth and even sold their estate to cover his debts. It is easy to feel contempt for him as you set about rebuilding the fortune and reclaiming your estate.
Even so, by the conclusion of DA2, well, at least one of your siblings has been killed by monsters, the other has either been killed by monsters or has been lost to you by joining/being-conscripted-into an isolated organisation of fanatics, your dead father's legacy is in disgrace, your mother has been murdered by a serial killer, and your friends have mostly fallen apart as well. By the end of the game I wanted to head down to Lowtown and say to Gamlen, "...I get it now. Pass me a bottle."
If you try your hardest to make optimal choices you can take the edge off the tragedy a little, but to me that always feels like missing the point of the game. Both your siblings should die. Merrill should end up killing her entire clan. Isabela should end up fleeing the city, feeling guilty and abandoned, while the qunari burn the city searching for a book that isn't even there. Anders should die on a bloody block, killed by someone he thought was a friend. This is miserable, but the game is about misery.
DA2 is a game about losing what you love, about betrayal, and entropy, and being the last one standing, hands covered in blood, amid the burning wreckage of everything you were trying to defend. The more strongly that theme comes through, the better and more affecting the game is, and that means that I think the 'good' choices, which let you salvage small bits of success from amid the wreckage, make the game weaker as a whole. DA2 is, unavoidably, a game where you the player lose. Kirkwall defeats you. The game is better if it leans into that.
Another point of comparison might be Rannoch in ME3, which I notice you didn't mention. I think the Rannoch section works vastly better if, in the end, only one race can survive. I have my objections to the actual writing of the Rannoch segment, which is mostly bad, but I like the final choice. The quarians will survive or the geth will survive. Choose. It is a genuinely difficult and even heartbreaking choice. Unfortunately, BioWare are cowards and give you an option to just save everyone, which I think is frankly pretty pathetic.
To an extent I have the same objection to Tuchanka. Both Tuchanka and Rannoch have more-or-less the same premise. You have two very sympathetic characters, Wrex/Mordin and Tali/Legion, both of whom are fan favourites, both of whom the player has probably come to really care about in previous games, and who are on opposite sides of a contentious, morally complicated issue. Wrex wants to cure the genophage; Mordin wants to preserve it. Tali wants the quarians to survive and prosper; Legion wants the geth to survive and prosper. They cannot both get what they want. The case for each side has been made to you at length by a sympathetic, emotionally compelling character. Now choose.
Unfortunately in both cases ME3 wimps out. For Tuchanka it just has Mordin change his mind and become anti-genophage despite that being the opposite of his position in ME2; and for Rannoch it just lets you convince the geth and the quarians to put a history of genocide behind them and make up. You can argue Mordin changing his mind is justified if you pushed him in that direction in ME2, but he changes his mind even if in ME2 you encouraged him to believe that what he did was right and justified. It reminds me of how Garrus in ME2 is always a rogue who's quit C-Sec to become a vigilante, even though his entire character arc in ME1 was about choosing whether to go rogue or play it straight and stay in C-Sec, and both options were supported there. There are a lot of places where BioWare handles player choice very well, but that just makes these failures all the more jarring, especially when they go against the ME series' promise to give you genuinely hard choices. What is the point of promising hard decisions if the games are always going to back out and give you a third option? The golden routes are BioWare losing their nerve and failing their own games.
I suspect that in the early Christian imagination, abortion was considered basically a form of infanticide. We know that early Christians were known to do things like rescue exposed infants and raise them, and that seems a similar category. Thus my citation of the Didache above: "you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born".
It is probably worth emphasising that in valuing the lives of children so much, early Christians were themselves being counter-cultural and odd - we've lost this today, but Jesus' comments about children (bring the little children unto me etc.) are shocking in their original context because they were made at a time when children were viewed as significantly more disposable than today.
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