OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Oh, not the Iran war specifically. That does not have and has never had popular support. I meant the American-Israel alliance in general.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
The question of sources of credibility is an interesting one - it hasn't stopped, for instance, Saudi Arabia from cooling its hostility to Israel. But then the Saudis have alternative sources of Islamic legitimacy, from their role as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Governing/protecting the Hejaz provides a kind of de facto legitimacy, whereas the Iranians have to fight a bit harder to establish their credentials, especially since, as Shia, it's harder to be accepted by the Sunni-majority Islamic world.
In the US, I don't like the phrase "entrenched Jewish capture", which I think sounds a bit too conspiratorial or pejorative, even though I think it is true that American support from Israel clearly has a lot to do with the facts that there are a lot of Jews in America, American Jews are a disproportionately successful and well-represented demographic, and Jews have extremely high levels of support for Israel. I don't think this is malevolent or in any way democratic bad faith, particularly because American support for Israel is substantially a result of American Jews successfully convincing other Americans to support Israel. (Notably as of these 2024 polls, Protestant support for Israel, at 66%, is very close to Jewish support for Israel at 73%.) It's not a case of Jews covertly manipulating America into doing something most Americans oppose. They convinced most Americans of something, and then America did it. That is democratic politics working as intended!
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I don't put any faith in Trump to take advantage of good opportunities he has, but in the abstract I would say, at least, that a re-ordering of American alliances in the Middle East seems like a good idea.
Part of what's baffling about the current situation is that, in pure geo-strategic terms, there is no particularly compelling reason for Iran and the United States to hate one another. Neither is there a particularly compelling reason for Israel and Iran to hate one another. Neither is there a very good reason for the United States to be ride-or-die with Israel.
In some ways it's quite sad - historically Persia has been relatively friendly to Jews, at least by the standards of the region. The current hatreds in the region are almost entirely post-WWII. The Americans supported the British with the Mossadegh coup back in the 50s, and then bungled responses to the revolution in 1979, and there's lingering hatred from that even though there isn't a very good reason today why America and Iran can't get along. If the Americans can be good friends with the Saudis, well, the Iranians certainly aren't any worse than the Saudis, morally speaking. At times the Iranians have signalled willingness to cooperate as well - didn't they offer to be supportive with regard to America's invasion of Afghanistan, right up until Bush declared them 'Axis of Evil', unnecessarily making enemies?
As regards Israel, it's partly symbolic - Iran has ambitions of being (and tries to present itself as) the de facto leader of the Islamic world, and because there is incredibly strong grassroots sympathy for Palestine in the Islamic world, presenting themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause is good for that. (Meanwhile potential rivals like the Saudis undermine themselves by slowly normalising relations with Israel.) Obviously the hatred is partly sincere as well, but my point is that the conflict between Iran and Israel is largely not over material interests.
And of course for the last leg, it is pretty unclear what America gets out of its alliance with Israel. The Israelis do not seem like very good allies. I cannot blame Israel for prioritising Israeli interests first, or taking the best deal they can get, but there certainly seems to be room for America to ask for more out of the arrangement, or failing that, to scale back their support for Israel.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That was my (very rough, uninformed) understanding of the famous Obama Iran deal - good for Iran, good for the United States, bad for Israel. So naturally Israel has leapt at every chance it can get to sabotage it.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
You can still criticise Lowe, surely, for taking actions that make it more likely that people he opposes will be elected and will govern his country. If he thinks Reform would be better in government than Labour, and his actions increase the odds of Labour winning, then isn't he undermining what he himself believes is best for the country out of a personal grudge? It seems reasonable to criticise that.
This is all downstream of Britain having an awful FPTP multi-party electoral system, of course.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
It probably is correct to say, though, that the British upper class considers itself distinct from the rest of the population, which it does not care about the welfare of that much, and that class does not track neatly to race or ethnicity. Rishi Sunak is upper class - he went to Winchester, and has a first from Oxford. He's in the club. The people in the club care about other people in the club, you know, the right sorts of people, made not only by descent but also by education, lifestyle, and even accent.
In this case, both the perpetrators and the victims are lower class, and therefore unimportant. Class solidarity is much stronger than ethnic solidarity. British uppers do not consider themselves 'one people' with British lowers.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I think the point is that K:D ratio is irrelevant? It's a set of goalposts that gets moved around as needed in order to claim victory. Wars are not sports or video games - you don't win them by racking up points on a board. The important questions here are to do with whether or not the US and Iran have achieved their various war aims.
I am reminded, actually, of past discussions with Americans concerning Afghanistan, and a very strong instinctive refusal to say "we lost". The Taliban won the war in Afghanistan, and the Americans lost, and no number of statistics around casualty ratios can negate that. A war should be measured by how well the participants achieved their goals.
Personally I'm not willing to call Iran yet. I do think that Iran has proven unexpectedly resilient, the US has failed to achieve its goals thus far, and the US is probably going to end up worse off compared to a timeline where it did absolutely nothing, but there is a lot of fog of war and we do not know how theings will end. But thus far I am comfortable saying that this has been bad for the US.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
Should we distinguish between medical care, and elder care in general? It's often somewhat blurry, since aged care facilities are at least partially medicalised, but I am thinking about people in their 80s and up who, for example, need assistance showering and toileting, who cannot make their own meals, who need to be accompanied for walks or activities due to high falls risk, who might be on anti-depressants or some other prescription to help cope with cognitive decline and need assistance taking their medication on schedule, and so on.
I would hope we can agree that people in that vulnerable condition should be cared for. Alternatives like "letting them die", or "trusting that families can always take care of them (they can't)", or even something truly drastic and inhumane like "euthanasia for everyone at 75" are going to either produce tremendous innocent suffering, or are radically contrary to most people's moral instincts.
It seems to me that firstly we want some sort of system to provide care for vulnerable elders, secondly we want that system to be well-funded and not an excessive drain on the public purse, and thirdly we want people to work in that system and provide the required care. Of these, the difficult, controversial part is the second one. Maybe tinkering around things like the retirement age is a reasonable step to take; I'm not particularly inclined to argue if you want to bump the retirement age up a year or two. Australia recently bumped it up to 67. There was that recent dispute about this in France.
But I also wanted to say, in response to ThomasDelVasto's comment about "wiping the asses of boomers", that I think that aged care is a necessary and honourable profession.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I work in elder care myself - can you expand on why you feel negatively about it? I tend to agree that it would be bad for a huge proportion of the population to be involved in it, and that mostly relates to concerns about the birth rate and demographics, but insofar as the elderly population is growing, needing more people to look after them seems inevitable. Lifespans are increasing and medical care is improving, so the number of elderly people is also going to increase.
Unless one wants to bite the bullet and say that increased life expectancies are bad, and it would be better if more people died at 70, there are going to be more elderly people, and through no moral failing of anybody, they will need care. What is your preferred response?
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I'm not sure what point you're making or what this has to do with anything under the sun?
You may well think that the religious right are incorrect, but what you've just said hardly seems to follow from their beliefs. If nothing else, it is demonstrably the case that the religious right do not support endless foreign aid or anti-nationalism. On the contrary, support for high levels of foreign aid or anti-nationalist feeling appear to correlate positively with secularism or irreligion.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
The Didache is from the first century. If there was nothing critical of abortion in early Christianity, that part was added in very early indeed. I think it's just plausible that early Christians considered it too obvious to require mentioning that abortion is a form of murder - you might compare the way that, for instance, early Christian writings on suicide are similar. As far as I can tell it was just considered obvious that suicide falls under the heading of murder.
Regarding life, I grant that there is room to quibble, but insofar as it is scientifically true that conception is the first moment at which a unique, genetically distinct, new organism comes into being, I think it's reasonable for a modern Christian to consider that morally relevant.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
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.
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
14d 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
21d 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.
Sunday is the Lord's Day, because it is the day on which Christ returned from the dead. It is therefore the site of the primary Christian liturgical celebration. It seems as though it started to be honoured in this way very quickly - see Acts 20:7, for instance.
Whether that makes it 'the Sabbath' or not is... kind of semantic? I have seen both "Saturday is the Sabbath, but for us the Lord's Day is the day of rest" and "the Sabbath has been moved to Sunday" as positions held in the wild.
If you ask me, my guess is that the earliest Christians likely observed both the Saturday Sabbath and the Lord's Day, and that over time the Saturday observance fell away. I'd like to think that the modern custom of treating both days of the weekend as days of rest is a good way of returning to that tradition of honouring both, and that we can even nuance them a little, with Saturday for rest and silence and Sunday for gathering and celebration.
As I understand it, in Islam Friday is not called 'the Sabbath' or any similar word. Friday is, however, the day chosen for gathering, preaching, and communal prayer. It's the day for jumu'ah, the weekly sermon at 1 PM Friday, which is the closest Islamic equivalent to the Jewish Sabbath service at sundown Saturday, or the Christian mass or worship service on Sunday morning.
That said, it plays a different role in the life of the community. For instance, mass is considered obligatory for Catholics and they must attend every Sunday (barring reasonable exceptions), but the daily prayers of the hours are not. Praying the liturgy of the hours is commended, but not required (unless you are a monk or priest), and therefore how much of it to do, and when, belongs to the conscience and good judgement of the individual believer. In Islam, it's reversed. The regular daily prayers are obligatory, but attending the jumu'ah is optional, though recommended, and up to the conscience and judgement of the individual.
This tracks with what I experience on the ground. Devout Catholics tend to be conscientious about mass-going, and there are people who attend more frequently, all the way up to daily mass-goers, but the daily prayers are not that well-known, and if you do them you are unusually pious. By contrast, conscientious Muslims usually make all the daily prayers, sometimes add dua at unscheduled times, and then if you go to the sermon every Friday, you are definitely committed. If a Muslim has to drop one thing, they will usually drop the Friday gathering, not the daily prayers.
That said, in practice Muslims are just like Catholics in that it is extremely common for people to regularly miss daily prayer/Sunday mass/whatever while still internally thinking of themselves as 'good Muslims' or 'good Catholics' and feeling no guilt.
Sorry to use Catholics as the Christian example - they are just unusually legible and public in their requirements. I understand Orthodox to be similarly strict to Catholics, but I am less familiar with them, and I think they are in general less likely to write down a single list of obligations enforceable on all people. And of course Protestants are much more likely to reserve all of this to conscience, culture, and practice. Historically what devout Protestants have done de facto is treat Sunday worship and a daily prayer (usually in the evening, prior to going to sleep) as obligatory, but Protestantism in general is much more skeptical of the utility of legislating specific obligations. As a Protestant myself I do practice weekly worship and daily prayer, and I think the decline in these practices among Christians has been tragic, but I do share the tradition's skepticism of trying to establish a one-size-fits-all timetable of prayer and worship. That, it seems to me, should be a matter of Christian liberty. That said, Galatians 5:13 - liberty should not be a justification for laxity.
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