OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
8hr ago
What do you think might happen? I doubt they'd get enough Republicans to vote to impeach and remove him from office - not without some significantly greater disaster than this down the line - and he's not going to be 25thed. Nor do I think anyone's going to be able to convince him to resign.
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
I thought we all knew it was going to be a strong night for Democrats, and the only question was how strong?
It seems like it has been a very strong night indeed, which is certainly good news for them, but within my range of expected outcomes.
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
I still find the 'thank you for your attention to this matter' sign-off hilarious.
What does he expect the reader to do? Go and inform people that the drubbing wasn't his fault?
OliveTapenade
9hr ago
I don't know whether you've read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but this is basically where Yudkowsky arrives on the matter.
I have never done more than give it a brief glance. I can't stand Yudkowsky's prose style in general, so even if MoR were telling a story I were interested in, I think that would be an insuperable obstacle to me.
That's the "love" the OP suggests Malfoid (at least potentially) brings to the source material: the love for one's children that is expressed by giving them the best available start, by choosing a high quality reproductive partner. Slytherin need not be bigots to be both proud of what they have (magic is cool!) and anxious to share that inheritance with their own children.
I don't think the Harry Potter comparison adds anything here, though?
The hypothetical you bring up is basically the Gattaca argument - a loving parent should want to give his/her children the best possible shot at life, that should involve the best possible genes, so therefore eugenics.
Harry Potter adds nothing to this because, as it sounds like we agree, magical talent in the Potterverse doesn't seem to work that way. Are pureblood/half-blood families particularly less likely to have wizarding children than pureblood/pureblood families? There's no specific textual evidence suggesting that, as far as I'm aware? Magical ability is a simple switch, and squibs appear to be very rare from two wizarding parents, regardless of whether the wizarding parents are from long-established magical families or not.
I suspect I'm on a different page to many on the Motte here, because I do in fact think it's immoral to abort a child due to Down Syndrome or other recognisable disabilities. If a wizarding couple proposed to identify squibs in utero and pre-emptively terminate them, I would say that couple is behaving grossly immorally. As far as canon Potter goes, I think the general direction of the text would be on my side there. Rowling is a liberal feminist and in favour of abortion rights, but the published text of Harry Potter seems like it would be against any notion that squibs are not worthy of life, and anti-squib sentiment is presented as a bigotry, albeit a common one in the wizarding world. For me I think all we need to recognise is that squibs are, like any muggle, clearly capable of living full, satisfying lives. A parent who would rather terminate a squib/muggle child and replace him/her with another one seems worthy of moral condemnation, at the very least.
You have suggested that the discourse is tainted by the real-world implications that the OP probably intended for at least some readers to draw vis-a-vis race mixing or the like.
Right, here. I think I stand by the idea that while it is possible to have a good conversation about reproductive ethics, it's not possible in this particular context because of the original poster. One could have a reasonable discussion of eugenics, but I think it's fair to say that if someone with a known malicious agenda brings the subject up, and sets the tone accordingly, that would make a reasonable discussion much harder to have.
Death of the Author is a good principle for literary analysis, and I think I invoked it a little myself (that is, Rowling's own views may be different to the views logically implied by texts she authored), but I don't think Death of the Author applies in every discursive context. If a person says something to invite a conversation, but through that person's identity, reputation, known other positions, visible agenda, etc., that conversation would be unlikely to be productive, I think it's fair enough to act accordingly.
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
I suppose the way it's portrayed is that magic appears to run in families, and therefore must have a strong genetic component, but that this is just magic Y/N. Two wizarding parents will reliably produce wizarding children, and every now and then two muggle parents will throw up a wizard child, but there doesn't seem to be a difference between the overall magical potential of purebloods and muggleborn.
It does make me wonder a bit about mixed pairings. The prevalence of half-blood wizards in the series seems to suggest that wizard/muggle pairings frequently (usually?) produce wizards. I can't off the top of my head think of cases of, for example, a wizard/muggle pairing produce some wizard and some muggle children.
We are told that squibs are relatively rare. They may not actually be any more rare than muggle-borns proportionally (after all, vastly more people are born to muggle parents than to wizarding parents), though. I do wonder about the statistics, and how likely wizards/muggles are to be born to mixed marriages... wiki tells me that a muggle born to one muggle parent and one wizarding parent is considered a squib, which suggests to me that wizard/muggle pairings usually produce wizarding children, but I would love better data than that.
This is getting more into worldbuilding and fanon now, but I could see a case that wizards ought to have a strong bias toward endogamy. If two wizards generally produce wizard children, but wizard/muggle pairings only sometimes produce wizard children, and the muggle population is vastly larger than the wizard population, then arguably there's a risk of wizards breeding themselves out of existence through intermarriage. Wizards might be like some minority ethnic or religious communities in prioritising endogamy, to try to preserve their own existence.
As far as I'm aware pureblood defenders in the setting don't make that argument, though. Salazar Slytherin, for example, seems to have taken the view that only purebloods are worthy of magic. If he were just concerned for maintaining the existence of the wizard population, then adopting muggle-born and convincing them to exclusively marry other wizards would seem like a higher priority than excluding them. The pureblood supremacist view is that purebloods are individually superior, and that, at least, is clearly indicated to be false.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
I think one can distinguish vaguely right-coded from outright culture war? By comparison, consider, say, Korrasami is obviously left-coded, but I don't think it was held up primarily as culture war.
Take this:
Right-wingers didn't jump onto the meme for its 'racism and ethno-nationalism' — the majority of the appeal for them was about romance, love, yearning, gender dynamics, and flag planting. Malfoid as a trend led to lots of people discussing what was lacking in modern-day courtship, or in modern western media.
I don't think that's culture war, as such. That's just a lot of people genuinely enjoying something that speaks to their values. That is itself the good thing that I want to encourage, and which I don't want to be hijacked by opportunists.
I suppose the content-neutral way to express this is that every popular trend like this starts with people who genuinely enjoy it on its own terms, for what it is in itself, and then later there are opportunists who want to convert it into propaganda for some other cause. I have no objection to the former, and indeed I commend the former. The latter are the ones who make me see red.
Adding onto all of this is the use of AI fanart and animations in this trend.
I've thankfully been able to avoid most of that by using more traditional art and fiction aggregators.
There is definitely a culture war story to have around bot-generated content, and I'm pro-Malfoid while still furiously against that garbage, but in this case I think Malfoid is just the occasion, not the cause. Any popular media trend is going to attract bandwagoners, and unfortunately bots have made it easy for people to try to bandwagon with slop. I wish they wouldn't, but the issue is the bots, not the art trend itself.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
I would think the natural comparison for Israel should be the most similar countries available, especially if the factor we're trying to control for is Judaism. What's the most Israel-like country that's not Israel?
My thought would be Saudi Arabia. That's another wealthy Middle Eastern country that serves as a US proxy and ally. Heck, it even, like Israel, contains/controls some of the major holy places of a world religion. How does US spending on Israel compare to US spending on Saudi Arabia?
Googling tells me that the US spends 843 million on aid to Saudi Arabia, which according to this site is... about the same as they spend on Israel. Huh. That works out to a lot less per capita because Saudi Arabia has about three and a half times the population of Israel, but even so, if what the US is doing is buying allies in the Middle East, both the Israelis and the Saudis seem to be worth about the same.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
I think hanikrummihundursvin is describing a real phenomenon - it's just not as broad or universal as he describes.
The far left does use labels for itself. It loves labels. The sort of people who insist very strongly that there's a difference between 'leftists' and 'liberals' and that they are the former, for instance, do care a lot about adopting names like brands, and will then go on to merrily fight about the difference between democratic socialists and social democrats, and then call themselves Marxists, or socialists, or anarcho-syndicalists, or anarcha-feminists, or womynists, or whatever it might be.
There is, however, a broader kind of left-of-centre values nexus that is imbibed invisibly, and is felt rather than named.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
I'll just register my prediction early - nothing is going to happen and nothing will change in the US relationship with Israel. Trump is just blustering on election day.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
That sounds about as likely as Edward Cullen knocking on my sister's door and offering her immortality and sprinkles.
I freely confess that my political programme will not create cute ojou-samas for the masses. That is a limitation that you and I are just going to have to live with.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
This is true, but something that I think fandom has had a very hard time accepting? Textually, it is extremely obvious in the Potter series that there is absolutely zero relationship between blood status and magical ability. Being pureblood, halfblood, or Muggleborn has nothing to do with your magical talent whatsoever, and the believe that it does is indicated to be irrational bigotry. Most of the most powerful wizards in the series are actually not pureblood (both Dumbledore and Voldemort are half-blood, for instance), after all.
Despite an American tendency to interpret it as a metaphor for race, in its original context I think blood status is a metaphor for class. Hogwarts is an exclusive British boarding school - purebloods are aristocratic families who've been going to Harrow Hogwarts for centuries, and muggleborns are lowborn or common people who aced their admissions tests and made it in, and are now rubbing shoulders with people who considered themselves their betters. Hermione, the most prominent Muggle-born character in the books, is a picture of an aspirational lower or middle-class student who has earned her way into an elite school through sheer swottery. Just watch her cringe when asked what her family does!
Anyway, that said, I think there was a fandom tendency to assume that pureblood status means something practical, and I don't think it was just far-right people. Back in the 2000s there was a noticeable trend of stories where Hermione discovers she's secretly pureblood, for instance. My guess would be that because Potter is already a series where firstly magic runs in families, and secondly people discover that they were secretly special and important all along, it's pretty intuitive to apply that same system within wizards themselves. The start of the very first book, after all, is Harry discovering that he's really a foundling prince, a special person revered in this secret world because of who his parents were. If you want to use that trope again, and the character is already a wizard, well, she-was-a-pureblood-all-along is the easiest way to do it.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
I don't think that there's anything neo-Nazi about J. K. Rowling or about Malfoid. I think both of them are quite innocent of that. I was making meta-commentary on the state of the Motte.
OliveTapenade
16hr ago
What does it even mean for Malfoid to be 'real'?
Presumably it would be the same thing it would be for classic-flavour Drarry to be real, or Dramione, or for Bowsette to be real, or for any of its obvious precursors, but... what would that be? Malfoid is a topic for fan fiction and fan art. In what way could it be real that it's not already?
You'd have better luck making anime real.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Obligatory Sarah Haider reference, I suppose? What Islam as a tradition and a body of doctrine teaches is less important than what specific Muslim-identifying people hold to be important - and in a case like Abdul El-Sayed, it's pretty clear that opposition to Israel is central to his worldview and his political advocacy whereas opposition to gender ideology is pretty clearly not.
The fact that Islam as a body of doctrine takes no special position on the existence of a state of Israel (that is, from an orthodox Islamic perspective, there is nothing special or interesting about Judaism qua Judaism, nor Israel qua Israel), and takes a much stronger position on gender, is not consequential. 'Islam', in El-Sayed's case, is an ethnic and a cultural background that informs his identity, rather than a set of propositions to be affirmed or rejected.
I'm a bit ambivalent here. On the one hand, as a fellow moderate, I agree that there is some merit in the idea of siding with whoever's currently out of power in the hopes of dragging the polity back toward the centre...
But on the other, I'm not sure it's as linear as that. I think it's possible for far-left to flip to far-right, and vice versa, without ever passing through the sane middle, and that it's therefore better for the cause of moderation to stand up for moderation regardless, even if that means criticising the extremists who are currently out of power. If Team Open Borders is in power, then I'm not actually convinced that siding with Team Let's Eat Immigrants is a route back to sanity. I suspect it is better to continue to disavow Team Eat Immigrants while still fighting against Team Open Borders.
Prioritisation is important, you're right, and I'm potentially vulnerable to being suckered by whichever lunatics are currently in power, but at the same time, you might be vulnerable to being suckered by whichever lunatics aren't currently in power.
At any rate, in this particular context I am anonymously whining on the internet. I feel more license, on the Motte, to just say what I genuinely feel without consideration for how it might affect the wider political landscape.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
That's probablt a fair point to make, but it is highly contingent on the present terrain, that is to say, the left dominates the culture industries, and the right doesn't. I don't view the right as morally superior to the left when it comes to opportunistically parasitising media like this, because the right's abstinence is not coming from any kind of virtue. It's just coming from a lack of power.
The active ingredients here are not 'left' and 'right'. The active ingredient is power, and nothing else.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm sympathetic to Jonah Goldberg's argument in this podcast, that is, that El-Sayed wants the Democrats to be a straightforward anti-Israel party.
I don't think El-Sayed supports the full Muslim Brotherhood agenda. The social democrat positions that he holds are honest. He is not, I think, secretly an MB supporter in the sense of everything they stand for. But he is, I think, basically a middle-class western Muslim who attributes a disproportionate level of importance of Israel, and it has become organising for his thoughts in a way that it is not for other people.
(This is primarily a response to the top-level comment - I'm including some comments by naraburns just to try to be complete, and to riff on thoughts that occurred to me.)
I am disappointed that "let me assume a headcanon about a piece of fiction-> rhetorical exhortations -> therefore I present conclusions supposedly about the OG work but actually more about arguments I smuggle in as assumptions" a makes an AAQC. What is the quality, as I am not seeing it?
In this case I just dismissed the whole thing as SecureSignals doing his usual neo-Nazi schtick, and to the extent that Mottizens upvoted and/or nominated it as a positive contribution, I put that down mainly to the Motte having an unusually high quotient of neo-Nazis.
There might be an interesting discussion to have somewhere about heredity and children and loyalty and tradition, and I'd be on board for that, but in this case the whole discourse is so tainted as to make it not worth engaging in.
Downvote and move on. That's my advice.
You don't have to think that's interesting to think about, but if you can't even see why others might find it interesting to think about, you might consider the possibility that you have a serious blind spot (or extremely trapped priors) here.
The Motte unfortunately has a population - I really hope a small one - of unironic pagan neo-Nazis/white-supremacists. Every now and then they get upvotes. Again, the best I can suggest is downvote and move on. This:
With specific regard to this post, it got plenty of nominations but also I did think it made an interesting point. Real people make real decisions every day concerning whether they should or should not pass along their genes, for example because they carry a serious genetic malady.
Okay, that's maybe an interesting discussion. Cursed Child does raise lots of interesting issues around Draco, Astoria, reproduction, and so on. But I think you do have to make some critical judgements about where it's possible to have that discussion in an interesting way in a given context, and... it's not here. I'm sorry, but it's not here.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It was good fun, but to be honest my main takeaway from it is that I hate culture warriors.
Malfoid is a cute premise and led to lots of adorable creativity, and within approximately five seconds discussion around it was hijacked by 1) right-wing morons who think that it's somehow evidence that the masses yearn for their retarded combination of racism and ethno-nationalism, and 2) left-wing morons who think that the whole thing is evidence of incel misogyny and radicalisation.
It really makes me want to strangle both camps.
Can you not just... let nice things be nice?
Let people have good things. For once. You parasitic idiots.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Arguably this is unfair of me, but consider:
When I originally asked readers about this possibility, they raised a lot of valid concerns: some of them were confused by Substack’s commenting system, others annoyed by its pop-up reminders to subscribe, others were concerned about being stuck outside a paywall. I’ve talked to Substack about this, and they’ve made some really impressive promises to address these things – they’re going to code a maximally-SSC-like commenting experience, they’re going to let me opt out of the subscription reminders, I won’t have to “paywall” anything besides some Hidden Open Threads. This isn’t the time for me to go over the dozens of examples of concerns I had that Substack went above and beyond to address, but assume I had most of the same ones you did and put a lot of work into addressing them.
Have we all just forgotten the fact that this was a complete lie?
This was just a blatant lie, and ACT does not look like SSC, or have an SSC-like comment experience, or anything like that. Substack promised that ACT could be just like SSC, and it is just not.
I believe you when you say that you could vibecode a better experience than Substack, and I cannot think of a more piercing criticism of them. If you can vibecode a better version of something, that something was never worthwhile in the first place.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
It's always a bit of a mix, I think. There were some good discussions last week, but also, I'd say, plenty of the usual.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
On the other hand, this may be part of a strategy to connect with the lower classes 'we love the poorly educated'.
I doubt any genuinely poorly-educated working-class person even knows the word 'goy', much less the language of the meme-ified online far-right.
That doesn't mean it's not a strategy to connect with the lower classes - just that, if it is one, it's an incompetent one.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I thought that ad was just too on-the-nose, unsubtle, and poorly-acted to be convincing, but otherwise just unremarkable and mediocre, until I got to the intended stinger at the end.
Obviously an ad about Israel or foreign policy in general can't be accused of anti-semitism, but the spooky picture of a bunch of Jews while calling them 'They/Them' feels either pretty close to that line or outright over it.
Anyway, I think it probably won't matter. My prediction for Michigan is that El-Sayed wins while substantially underperforming the median Democrat, and everybody will freak out as if this is meaningful, or proves that left-wingers or DSA types can win anywhere, or as if the situation is anything other than the Democrats nominating a weak candidate who still managed to blunder into victory in a heavily D-favoured election.
My problem with it is that the UX fucking sucks. They're now the Anglosphere's premier place for long-form political commentary by writers outside of traditional media. It would be nice if they unfucked the UX.
This is my problem with Substack. The paywalls are annoying but perhaps inevitable. A wholly avoidable problem, however, is the terrible UI.
Their product is words on a page.
How hard is it to put readable words on a page? Wordpress had this solved decades ago. If you go from the original SSC to ACT, the first thing you will notice is that SSC is infinitely better. It is more comfortable to read. It loads more quickly and is lower bandwidth. It fits the entire archive on a single page which can be easily searched or skimmed, rather than the useless mess that is Substack's 'archive' page. Half the time when I open a Substack page on my phone, it locks or crashes.
All you have to do, Substack, is render text. That's it. Maybe a picture or two, come on. How are you failing at this? Is Substack just part of the grand software slowdown? Why?
And this isn't even mentioning the part where you cannot read a Substack article without them harassing you about registering or giving them your e-mail. Actually, Substack, no. I hate reading articles in my e-mail. I would like to just read it on a web page, and incidentally, I hate the idea of giving you analytics or other data. Just let me read the dang text.
If Substack provided a better service than the free blogging services that had preceded it, I might see a case for it, but from the user perspective, Substack is a straight downgrade from what we had before. Maybe from the writer perspective Substack makes it easier to monetise, but as a user, I don't see that. As a user, all I see is that reading online writing is now more annoying than it used to be.
Enough to impeach him? What's the process there?
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