OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Just use an example coded in the opposite direction. Is MLK Jr. morally better than Donald Trump?
In a world where moral status (or, as you will soon see, we could call it moral stature) is defined by a person's height, what might we expect?
Well one thing is it would be very rude to point out that people have different heights.
In a world where moral status is defined by height, I would certainly not expect it to be rude to point out that people have different heights.
In the world today, it is not rude to point out that people have different moral statures. If I say in public today "some people are morally better than other people", nobody will dispute that at all. As far as the obvious allegory goes, if I say in public today "some people are smarter than other people", nobody disputes that either.
If I lived in a world where height was thought to be either identical with or strongly correlative with moral virtue, if there were actually a guide to individual moral goodness that straightforward, I'd expect people to just say it. That's the hypothetical you've presented.
It seems to me that in the real world, the common, folk understanding is that morality and intelligence are different things, and that people differ on both scales, and that both moral goodness and intelligence are desirable qualities to possess. But I'd argue that pop culture is full of examples of very intelligent people who are evil, which seems to show that people distinguish these two axes. 'Evil genius' is a cliché! Lex Luthor is both extraordinarily intelligent and a complete monster. The likely fact that Lex has a higher IQ than Clark Kent has not made people conclude that Lex is really the good guy. Really, just as much as the evil genius is a cliché, the virtuous simpleton is just as much of a cliché. Over twenty years ago I remember Abigail Nussbaum complaining about this. Intelligence or education (which are admittedly not the same, but often correlated) make somebody effete and morally depraved, absent the simple, common-sense goodness of the less intelligent salt-of-the-earth types who built their world. The quarterback is more idolised than the nerd. Thor is morally better than Loki, his cleverer brother. Conan the barbarian is not an idiot, but he is portrayed as more vital, more morally whole, than all the necromancers and dark wizards he fights. Thulsa Doom would probably beat Conan in an IQ test; but we know who the good guy is.
I think the Freddie deBoer argument, in The Cult of Smart, that there is a strong tendency to moralise intelligence is true in certain quarters, but it's just clearly not the case that we live in a world where moral status is defined by a person's intelligence.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It's true that there's a fair bit of language like that early on in the American Revolution, but I think it would be a mistake to read too much into it? Some early petitions are framed in terms of the colonists' rights as Englishmen, and the Declaration of Independence claims that it is the king who has abolished "the free System of English Laws", but I think much of that makes more sense if read tactically. Certainly the overall course of the Revolution would seem to undermine any claim that the rebels meant to be loyal to English law or tradition, and later on in the Revolution they seem to be very conscious that they are doing something new and without precedent.
In my experience it's quite common for right-leaning Americans to deny any kinship between the American and French Revolutions, perhaps noting Burke's sympathy to the Americans and hostility to the French, but that's always smacked of special pleading, to me. You can find early on in the French Revolution plenty of people considering constitutional monarchy, or some sort of more limited reform, before, like the Americans, they settled for something more transformative. It's true that the American Revolution was relatively 'civil', and the French Revolution more bloody, but I don't think that was a result of differing ideologies. I put that down more to two things. Firstly, the American Revolution was more of a secession than a true revolution - there were existing governing authorities that the rebels took over and largely maintained. It was not only possible but conceivable for the British to let America go, whereas the ancien regime did not have that option in France, and fought tooth and nail. Secondly, the Americans were not immediately tackled by every other European power. They had more breathing room to establish themselves and figure out how this newfangled republic idea was going to work. Nonetheless, both the American and French Revolutions were liberal humanist revolutions, and the number of American Founding Fathers who saw a kinship between their own work and that of the French suggests to me that the comparison is more than coincidental.
Neither of them are totally unprecedented - the English Civil War plays out many of the same issues as the French Revolution, and I'm sure the Americans were aware of it - but they are, I would say, two different instances of the same type. In a sense I think that, in a macrohistorical sense, the American Revolution is most significant as a kind of prototype for, and a contributing cause of, the French Revolution.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Well, bluntly, it is that I don't consider you a remotely objective assessor of any kind of evidence related to Jews or the Holocaust because you, at such tedious and repetitive length, clearly hate Jews.
And I think your continual evasion of that question - the way you duck and weave, unwilling to, even under the shield of an obviously-Nazi-inspired screen name, on an anonymous web forum, where, again, everybody already knows how you feel about Jews - is plainly bad faith. Worse, I think it is cowardly.
The Holocaust numbers are not actually important here, because you're not a disinterested observer, and they are not motivating for you. If you became convinced that the six million figure is true exactly as popularly reported, I do not think it would change your feelings on Jews one iota. It's just not the operative thing.
Thus to repeat myself:
The more important point is that those details are in themselves a red herring, because it seems to me that, as Amadan says, even though you say that the Holocaust didn't happen, your openly-stated positions on Jewish people imply that it would have been a good thing if it had.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I just said that I was not interested in getting into the weeds of Holocaust denial.
I believe it is telling that you chose to engage exclusively on the point that I said I was not going to nitpick, and chose to ignore the more substantial points regarding your position on Jews.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I made those links to previous conversations because I am content with the arguments made in the past. There were millions of European Jews who vanished during WWII - that part is indisputable. This occurred alongside the conquests of a violently anti-semitic government that openly stated its loathing of Jews - that is also indisputable. It's not exactly hard to connect the dots here, and I'm not going to engage you on nitpicking details.
The more important point is that those details are in themselves a red herring, because it seems to me that, as Amadan says, even though you say that the Holocaust didn't happen, your openly-stated positions on Jewish people imply that it would have been a good thing if it had. And you can just say that! This is the Motte - you won't get banned. It's the way you pivot and dissemble that's so frustrating. You can just say what you believe.
It's this:
But "the Holocaust" - a concerted effort to exterminate Jews - happened, and the strategy of the Holocaust denier is to try to convince people that actually the whole thing was fake because record books at Dachau don't match what someone said in an interview, or what have you. The reality of course is that they know the effort was made to exterminate Jews and they think it was a good thing, but they also know that the public is extremely unsympathetic to this and that Jews benefit from the widespread guilt generated by the Holocaust. So it's a political strategy to try to erode belief that the Holocaust happened, not a historical investigation.
But this forum isn't the public, and there is no need to strategically lie here. Thus my regularly asking you, "Do you hate Jews?" You know the answer to that question, and I know the answer to that question, but you're bizarrely unwilling to say it, even here, on an internet forum for contrarian edgelords, under the cloak of anonymity, even though everybody already knows it. What is this cowardice?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
At which point you run into the question that Amadan and others have asked you in the past - account for all the missing Jews. This discussion has happened before, and the denier position leads to the pretty implausible position that the Nazis hated the Jews, wanted to kill all the Jews, and millions of Jews died, and somehow the Nazis were not involved with the deaths of the Jews. That is facially absurd.
So you quibble documentary evidence in order to distract from and avoid the headline claim - that the Nazi German state killed millions of Jews. I don't particularly care whether or not you can find a memo from Hitler; I care about what happened. And as past discussions have borne out, the evidence that the Nazis killed millions of Jews is pretty darn robust.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Okay, good job, that made me laugh out loud.
That is indeed what Protestants and Catholics are like.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I'm not an expert, but my sense was that there are various forms of low-level discrimination in Israel? It's not particularly bad, especially considering the region, and there's the joke that Arab Christians are 'the Jews of Israel' (i.e. a highly-educated over-achieving minority), but if the question is just "is it worse to be an Israeli Christian than an Israeli Jew?", the answer is yes.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
You are doing, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, the exact thing that Amadan just criticised you for doing.
You just jumped from "was there an organised attempt to kill all the Jews?" to "was there a specific individual document that said to kill all the Jews?", even though that is not the same question at all, and that is exactly what Amadan just said you would do.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I didn't suggest anything negative about you. I asked a very straightforward question, and then attempted to precisify the terms of the disagreement.
It is not a gotcha, a funhouse, or any kind of trick to ask you to clarify exactly what you are debating about. As for the sum of your posting, yes, I am quite familiar with it, but it is useful, when there is an ongoing disagreement, to occasionally try to back up and clarify what the disagreement is about.
In this case, I think that "Does SecureSignals hate Jews?" is a meaningfully different question to "Why does SecureSignals hate Jews?" You don't appear to me to be disputing that you have a very negative assessment of Jews, which would make the dispute about the latter question.
Don't waste time with this flimflam, please. Stating what you actually think is not a high bar, and is in fact required by the Motte's rules.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
So there's not much to say other than you are wrong, my opinion of Jews is downstream from my analysis of these issues, same as Blacks.
Is this an admission that you hate Jews and blacks?
Your argument here, as far as I can tell, is not "I don't hate Jews", but "I hate Jews for good reasons".
To wit, let me ask you plainly: how do you feel about Jews?
The last time we discussed this (ironically, discussing whether you flee debates), I put that question to you bluntly, and you vanished and didn't answer.
Would it be fair to characterise the disagreement, as you see it, along these lines? SecureSignals has a strongly negative opinion of Jews and regularly criticises Jews and Judaism. According to Amadan, this is disconnected from any evidential reasoning, but rather SecureSignals has an abiding prejudice against Jews. According to SecureSignals, this negative opinion is justified by the behaviour of the group he dislikes. Is that what you're clashing about?
OliveTapenade
4d ago
My understanding is that Palestinian Christians are so rare as to be irrelevant, save occasionally when used as a propaganda tool, and are generally even worse off than Muslim Palestinians.
By contrast, Arab Christian Israelis are, I believe, the most successful non-Jewish group in Israel? It's not a paradise for them either, but they are doing pretty well by regional standards.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I was thinking particularly of a few people I know in church groups - white people in their 60s who will host viewings of movies about Palestinian issues, or have 'Free Palestine' bumper stickers on their cars, or aggressively recommend books about the issue, and generally seem like they have never gotten past the 90s or early 2000s. I see them get fully behind groups like Kairos Palestine, or boosting people like Munther Isaac.
In my experience these are centre-left voters, think of themselves as multicultural and very sympathetic to Jews and Judaism, and view it as a non-sectarian human rights issue.
I think it is correct that they effectively carry water for real anti-semites (Munther Isaac, for instance, I think is noticeably anti-semitic), but they are largely useful idiots, rather than malicious themselves.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I think you might be focusing a little too much on those on the Motte?
My experience is that there are three to five groups of people who are loudly anti-Israel in Western countries.
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The right-wing anti-semites. This is the most popular group on the Motte, and you describe them pretty accurately. There are plenty of people who hate Jews for reasons that are more-or-less in the ballpark of far-right or neo-Nazi ideas; usually this comes with a racialist theory where Jews are a uniquely malevolent or parasitic group never acting in good faith, who exert disproportionate influence over Western countries. Often this group has a kind of private admiration for Israel, in that the state of Israel behaves towards Jews the way that they would like their country (or countries) to behave towards whites. Outside places like the Motte, and to an extent even here, this group likes to disguise or misrepresent its motives, usually because they realise that their whole platform is very unpopular in the West. Suddenly discovering empathy for poor Palestinians despite otherwise being heedless of Arab lives is an easy tell.
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The left-wing anti-semites. I think you combine these with their right-wing counterparts, but I find it taxonomically useful to distinguish them. These are the ones who go all-in on the idea that Israel isn't really a country and settler-colonial states are inherently illegitimate and chant "from the river to the sea" on campuses. Whether the motive here is technically anti-semitism is debatable, particularly because there is a small but real number of Jews in this group, which the rest like to hold up as symbols, even as they go around loudly demanding that institutions divest themselves from all Jewish groups, or from anything related to Israel, or even just harass ordinary Jews who have failed to clearly denounce Israel. I called these group 'anti-semites' because I think they do associate all Jews (who have not clearly disaffiliated themselves from Israel) with Israel and will attack people just for being publicly Jewish; and because as far as can reasonably be discerned their actual position is that Israel should be destroyed.
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(2a?) Left-wing bleeding hearts who haven't updated their beliefs for decades. I run into a lot of these in real life. It's probably fair to view them as the moderate wing of the anti-Israel left, or perhaps the anti-semites as the extremist wing of the anti-Israel left. But basically take the group I described in 2 but dial it down to people who really care about Palestinian lives, support a two-state solution, would be mortified at any implication that they're hostile to Jews, and generally ignore the existence of their more extreme counterparts.
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The nationalists. This group largely codes right at the moment, but in the past has been more diverse and I think has room for some leftists in it. It's the one that says basically, "Why are we supporting this small, violent country? What's in it for us?" Unlike the first two, I don't think this one is particularly anti-semitic. Undoubtedly it's true that near-unconditional support for Israel has been a pillar of American foreign policy for decades, and it's understandable for parts of the American electorate to ask why, particularly as Israel seems to, whether intentionally or not, keep dragging America into conflicts that it does not seem in America's interests to fight. They stand out among the other groups for being relatively amoral - they do not care who's in the right, they do not care about Palestinian lives or welfare, and they will not litigate the last eighty years of Israel-Palestine conflict with you. They do not care. They will just ask - why are we involved in this mess?
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Migrants. This group is fairly obvious. Some are Palestinians themselves, many are Muslims, many are from countries like Syria, Lebanon, or Egypt, and therefore have very explicable reasons for hating Israel. There's a very common belief in the Islamic world that Palestine is a 'nation of martyrs', and though this sometimes annoys other Muslims who feel that their persecution is downplayed or ignored (Kashmiri, Chechens, Rohingya, Uighurs, etc.), but nonetheless it is pretty universally accepted. I posted about one of these in Australia last year. This group is often significant among their own communities but are trapped in those bubbles and often ignored in the wider discourse, though sometimes one makes it into politics and becomes more widely known.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
The Israelis at present seem to have proven dramatically more militarily competent than the Iranians, though. What reason is there to think that the Israelis envy Iranian military skill? Or for that matter Iranian civilisation in general, for which I do not consider military competence a general proxy for anyway.
(I grant that military competence and civilisational worthiness, however defined, probably correlate positively. However, I would be willing to point to plenty examples of enviable civilisations that underperformed militarily - my respect for China as one of the world's great civilisations persists despite the Century of Humiliation.)
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Wait, since when were you a Christian? This is new.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
That is not an answer to the question he asked.
There might be many things to envy about Persian civilisation, which certainly has a storied and impressive history, but Hezbollah's resilience seems more like a strategic observation. You posited that Israelis are envious of Persian or Iranian civilisation.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
'Fortnight' is a normal, everyday word in Australia. In America I was shocked that people responded as if it was quaint. I hear it's in A Game of Thrones, so to some people it sounds archaic or medieval?
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I'd say there is a meaningful difference between two quarter-pound patties and one half-pound patty.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I still do a double-take everyone time Americans say 'biweekly'.
Biweekly means twice a week, you silly people! We have a perfectly good word, fortnightly, that means 'every two weeks'.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
My impression of Rogan has always been a variant of that old joke about D&D: "twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours".
Every time Rogan has ever been recommended to me, my impression has been that it's 15-20 minutes of interesting conversation spread throughout hours of dull, meandering small-talk. I do not think that Rogan respects my time as a potential listener, and so I do not give it to him.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
Dutton was certainly kneecapped, like most right-wing leaders in 2025, by the extreme unpopularity of Trump, but I would emphasise also that Dutton's personal brand was always awful. He just puts people off, and while some of that is not his fault (it's unfair to point out the alopecia, but I think it was a factor), some of it was to do with the way he'd spent a long time building a reputation as this hardline police officer.
Albanese is quite good at projecting an image of himself as a boring moderate, and this is a time for boring moderates. Trump created a vision of chaos overseas, while Albanese looks like stability. As a rule, when Albanese tries to gesture towards big, large-scale or symbolic reforms he fails (most famously with the Voice), but I think he has learned from that. He beat Scott Morrison with a small target strategy, and even with Dutton, it was mostly a matter of projecting competence, not walking into any landmines, and trusting that the political winds were blowing his way. Albanese is not an ambitious politician by any means, and is obviously a party man at his core, but that was what the Australian people wanted. No chaos, please, no big reforms, just keep working on trying to fix cost-of-living.
The Coalition is absolutely in crisis at the moment. Both partners are having troubles with leadership, they've threatened splitting up twice and got back together at the last minute, and as you say, One Nation are crushing them. As of last month, on their signature issue, immigration, One Nation poll better than both major parties combined:
A recent Redbridge survey in the Australian Financial Review found 34 per cent of voters preferred One Nation's approach to migration over other parties. The poll found 17 per cent of voters preferred the Coalition's migration policies and just 16 per cent liked Labor's approach.
Does this mean the One Nation will replace the Coalition as the Opposition in Australian politics? I doubt that myself. Much of the reported polling surge for One Nation is disaffected Coalition voters. I expect the Coalition to eventually pivot in enough of an anti-immigration direction to win most of that back. But it will probably be a long and difficult path back to power for them, because the older, Howard-style Liberal fusion is not going to work any more.
OliveTapenade
20d ago
'Vice versa' is not a Caesar quotation.
You haven't seen the "atheists are smarter than religious people" version? This sort of thing?
That was a staple of the old religion arguments on the internet.
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