OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
We're all pedantic nerds here, come on.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
I don't make a claim about the fall of the Roman Empire.
My take on the full meme - strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men - is mostly just that it's stupid.
That is, taken at face value it is obviously false. Even if you operationalise strong/weak men and good/hard times sufficiently as to apply it to specific historical situations, it fails to bear out predictively. If you try to use it to predict the rise and fall of particular civilisations - say, Chinese or Indian dynasties - it's just not accurate enough.
You can try to nuance the meme enough to make it useful, but it's all epicycles and retroactive interpretation. If an empire fell, per the meme it must have been full of 'weak men', and if one rose or enjoyed good times, it must have been 'strong men', and if you shift around your definitions of strength and weakness enough you can sort of retrofit it into any given situation, but the same definitions usually won't apply to other situations. Alternatively you can retreat into generalities, but these are useless and without insight. It's good when people have a sense of civic duty, or are prepared to endure hardship? It's bad when elites are feckless and irresponsible? That's not particularly insightful.
I do think that decadence is a useful concept and one that we can validly talk about. I also think that it makes sense to talk about common factors that contribute to the downfall of a civilisation, and I think that things like moral or civic character, popular legitimacy or faith in a system/ideal, or irresponsibility or waste on the part of elites, are probably among those factors. I broadly think that asabiyyah is real and important, though I don't endorse Ibn Khaldun's entire theory surrounding it. Anyway, I think it is both meaningful and true to say, for instance, "the United States as of 2026 is decadent".
But I see no need to defend the weak men/hard times meme to establish all that. It's just an oversimplifying, unhelpful internet meme. It's dumb. That's all I really have to say about it.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I didn't read the prior thread, unfortunately, but I'm surprised to see this whole summary without any mention of Douthat's The Decadent Society. Douthat's been the foremost person articulating a criticism of Western or American decadence at the moment, I would have thought, and his definition of decadence is something more like an absence of creative ambition or drive. His short definition is a combination of "economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development".
Thus for him, a decadent society may still be rich, productive, or militarily powerful, but it lacks drive. It lacks a goal or ambition beyond merely continuing on in its current state. In that sense he thinks that a society can be decadent long-term, even on the scale of centuries. With this approach in mind, military weakness can be a sign of decadence, but is not guaranteed to be, and for that matter military strength can be an enabler of decadence. It is possible to be militarily decadent, if one is powerful, devoted to maintaining a strong military and warrior ethos, and yet nonetheless in a kind of cultural stasis.
I find this a more useful, well-rounded concept of decadence than one that just seems like it's based on a vague mental image of wealthy Romans getting drunk and having orgies while the barbarians ravage the frontiers. That may be an uncharitable description, but I think something roughly in that area is what the "weak men make hard times" meme is gesturing at.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It's very contextual, I think? In Australia you would ask "who did you vote for?", but the answer to that question would be "Labor" or "Liberals" or "Greens", not a specific person's name. I think the general understanding is that you vote for a party, not a person. Because it's a party, I also think it tends to be less revealing? One of the differences I notice in American politics is that voters emotionally associate with the person at the top of the ticket more. Voting for Trump has a stronger association with Trump as a personality. Character and personality do matter here, and I think Peter Dutton's bad personal brand and off-putting manner hurt the Coalition at the last election, but they seem to matter less. Americans, if you'll pardon the uncharitable way of putting this, are a bit more personality-cult-ish around their leaders than we are.
This isn't an interrogation so I'm happy to disclose that in my life I've voted for both major parties. In fact I've usually preferenced a minor party first - Australia has compulsory preferential voting, so I always have to list every candidate in order of preference, but in practice usually the only question that matters is whether I put Labor or Liberals higher. The answer to that is that sometimes I've put Labor higher and sometimes I've put the Liberals higher. I am not particularly consistent. I suppose in American terms that would make me an independent or a swing voter? One thing I do like about the American system is that you can split your ticket. If I had been in the US, well, it would probably depend on the state, but I could easily imagine, say, voting Harris for president but voting straight Republican in the legislature, because I think Harris was marginally less unfit for the presidency than Trump, but I oppose much of Harris' policy agenda and would like her to be constrained and ineffective in office. But it sounds like in a case like that the only thing most people would care about is the vote for president.
To my local case, I work in a religious context, so the social questions come up more. Most intitutional pressures are progressive and the church organisation we're associated with has leadership that signals very progressive, but the people who actually go to church, and the people who are likely to choose to work for a Christian organisation, tend more conservative. So there is often a gap between the messaging from above and what people think on the ground. So I interpret a lot of those questions as employees trying to suss out where I fall on the spectrum. Much as in the US, sexual morality is one of the clearest ways to sort tell which side of the aisle one falls on theologically.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It might, but my feeling is that if a conversation has gotten to the point where someone is, in an inquisitorial manner, demanding to know who I voted for, it's already gotten awkward. When they ask "Who did you vote for?", it's already probably beyond salvaging.
I don't make it an absolute rule, though, particularly because what someone means by the question is often highly contextual. Personally I don't think I've ever had anyone ask me "who did you vote for?" (I suspect that question is more powerful in America?), but several times I have had somebody ask me a different kind of political shibboleth question, the most common being, "What do you think of gay marriage?" That's one where sometimes I will hide behind professionalism (I work in a religious field; I say something about how I need to offer care to everyone and it's not about what I think), but sometimes I do answer honestly. Usually in those latter cases it's because the context is working for an organisation that's officially progressive on social issues, but which has a lot of employees with more conservative views, and I can tell that the person is trying to look for sympathy. Often that question means that the person asking opposes it, and is nervously hoping to find an ally, or even just understanding, in me. So in that case I might lean in and say, "Okay, I'll tell you a secret. I voted no to gay marriage."
There are a few other questions like that. In general I think the key is just figuring out why the person is asking you this. If it's coming from a place of empathy or vulnerability, I'm more likely to answer.
But if it's coming from a place of inquisition - if the person is trying to discover whether I'm a wrongthinker - then I think that's not worth answering. Other people are not entitled to know my political views.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
...but the forty thieves were enemies of Ali Baba.
Ali Baba had zero thieves. They tried to kill him.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I usually say something about it being a secret ballot for a reason. When I was a kid I inherited a rule from my father - you never tell anybody who you voted for, under any circumstances, full stop. I don't follow that rule religiously now, but I do still follow it most of the time. So I just say that I never talk about my vote with anyone. It's nothing to do with you - I just never tell anybody.
If someone decides to break off all contact with me because of that answer, well, we were never going to be friends anyway. Net loss of zero to me.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It's a reference to the film Mean Girls. A character is trying to encourage the use of 'fetch' as a slang term, meaning basically 'good' or 'cool'. Eventually another character angrily shuts her down with, "Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen!"
In internet slang today, fetch is basically trying to force a meme artificially, through over-use.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
See my edit above for an apology.
I do agree that drawing ultimate or singular 'lessons of history' is a foolish endeavour. History teaches us a great deal, much relevant to today, but one of the things it teaches us is that events are extraordinarily contingent and you won't find simple, predictable laws.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I can't really think of a more charitable way to interpret this, I'm afraid:
First: why the Cartledge camp? Why so much of the old (if not busted) over the new hotness in Sparta scholarship? Of course part of the reason is that I think the Cartledge camp is right on some points (back that in a minute), but more broadly, in trying to persuade an audience that Sparta is not a society to be glorified or emulated, the Cartledge position is the obviously superior persuasive position.
[...]
And so if the goal is to persuade people of an argument about Sparta – recall that this series was immediately prompted by dueling essays about the value of Sparta as an exemplar for modern politics – the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points. That being my aim, I used it.
(emphasis original)
I take that as an explicit admission that he premised his argument on positions that he himself thinks are in dispute, but which he believes are instrumentally useful for persuasion. He himself says that is prioritising persuasion!
It might be one thing if he had prefaced those earlier Sparta posts with a note that there are several schools of thought, he find several of them plausible, and for the following he's going to proceed on the assumption that the Cartledge school is correct - but he does not do that. It sounds to me like he thinks that such an admission of uncertainty would give the 'Sparta bros' an excuse to dismiss what he says.
(Not that I think that's necessary, because a dedicated 'Sparta bro' is going to ignore him anyway. Devereaux's Sparta series is not a serious attempt to persuade, but rather a performative dunking, done for an audience already inclined to cheer him on. I understand that persuading third parties, rather than your actual interlocutor, is usually the goal of public debate, but surely even that would be enhanced by presenting your case in the most comprehensive and intellectually honest way possible.)
I'm not really sure what you're getting at here, or how serious you are? Aella's post is not really historical research? In a sense, I suppose, reading the works of historians and trying to discern common themes within them is something historians do, but I don't think it's a central example of academic history. It is a good thing for her to do, and I don't look down on it, but it's not something I would have leapt to as a good example of 'real history research'.
EDIT: Oops, sorry, I thought I was replying to QuantumFreakonomics here. I apologise. I agree that the post on the Maronite Chronicle is real historical research.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
One of these things is not like the others - the Spartans were slightly less patriarchal than other Greek city-states, and Devereaux acknowledges this. But yes - the whole point of the Sparta series is to make it clear just how badly Sparta sucked. What else is there to say about Sparta? The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield.
This seems like an odd take to me? We have very few surviving writings from Sparta itself, because the Spartans did not esteem writing, but if we look at classical admirers of Sparta, it is very rarely the case that they admire Spartan merely for being militarily successful. Plato's admiration of Sparta is not for military strength alone. The case for Sparta is merely that they won all the time, particularly because they demonstrably did not, but that Sparta was in some way a uniquely virtuous society.
It should go without saying that we're not talking about a concept of virtue that a modern Westerner would wholeheartedly endorse, or that most people after the Christianisation of Rome would endorse, but it is nonetheless something that Sparta's contemporaries admired. It was the Spartan constitution and set of laws. Lycurgus was not praised for victory alone. It was the discipline of the spartiates themselves. It involved art and poetry - Tyrtaeus was highly lauded! One of our primary sources for Sparta is Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, which is extremely complimentary, and not focused entirely on military conquest. He praises the moderate appetites of the Spartans, their civic duty, their lack of greed or hedonism, their educational system, and so on. Xenophon is the one who tells us that the Spartans, unlike most poleis, lacked the institution of pederasty, and this is presented as a sign of the Spartans' virtue in valuing boys for their moral character, rather than in fleshly terms.
Should we take that all at face value? Probably not. Much of Xenophon's work is likely a veiled criticism of Athens itself, holding up a semi-imagined Spartan history in order to indict his present society. My point is just that it's plainly not true to say that the only thing Sparta was lauded for was its military record.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
The thing about Bret Devereaux, at least for me, is that he has a degree of genuine scholarship, but he's also way too online, too interested in arguing with strawmen or weak men, and willing to compromise his own commitment to truth for the sake of the latter. He does represent some useful insights to the public, but he's also wildly uncharitable to people he doesn't like.
Probably the best example of this is his series on Sparta, which is grossly ignorant of the latest academic writing on Sparta, is aimed primarily at owning 'Sparta bros' on Twitter, and by his own admission advances positions that he thinks are historically weak or less likely in order to more effectively win internet arguments.
Take, for instance, this post, in which he admits that the Hodkinson position is more plausible and better supported by evidence than the Cartledge position, but says that he made his case based on Cartledge position because "the Cartledge position is clearly the more efficacious tool for reaching people who are not already convinced of the authority of modern scholars on these points". When someone admits to making an argument based on a weaker position purely for the sake of winning a debate, I think it is reasonable to conclude that that person is disingenuous.
I expect somebody with a reputation as a scholar to make only arguments that he himself believes to be strong or true. Some simplification for the public can be reasonable, especially when one is trying to educate children or undergraduates, but even so, I expect a scholar to as much as possible prioritise what is true over what can be used to persuade.
The whole thing is absurd at any rate because it is only an exercise in trying to defeat people he doesn't like on Twitter, exemplified by the weak man of Steven Pressfield.
It has always been striking to me that for everything we are told about Spartan values and society, the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States. If there is one thing I wish I had emphasized more in This. Isn’t. Sparta. it would have been to tell the average ‘Sparta bro’ that the Spartans would have held him in contempt.
I'm not sure what I can say here beyond, "Grow up, Bret."
The problem is that, using Sparta as an example, Devereaux is ignorant of the most recent scholarship, and misrepresents by omission the scholarship that he is aware of, in order to own a small, ignorant, and possibly imaginary audience.
This is not a serious thinker.
And if he's like that on classical Greece, which I've bothered to look into, why would I trust him on anything else?
He does sometimes convey useful insights in his other series, but in general I would caution people to always look up and independently research anything Devereaux tells you. He's clearly intelligent and well-read, but he is not a trustworthy source. He has a tendency to lump together periods centuries apart, for all that he criticises 'Sparta bros' he is something of a 'classical Rome bro' himself, he has a tendency to unhelpful political asides, and he tends to always be maximally uncharitable to people with whom he disagrees. I do not recommend ACOUP, if you want to learn about military history or the classical world.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Are these the equivalent of excitedly telling someone about your level 14 elf ranger? There are whole categories of activity that can feel deeply compelling while you're doing them, but are impossible to interestingly convey to others.
Though I have to confess that I myself don't find talking to an LLM compelling, even solo. It never feels insightful. It feels like endless regurgitated oatmeal, to me. Still, maybe some people enjoy that?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
What confuses me is just how this hooks anybody. I can barely stand to read it for more than a paragraph or two. Setting aside all other disagreements about AI, it's horrible just on the aesthetic level. These machines simply cannot write.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That still fits my experience with them - I have spent some time mucking about with them, and every time I ask an LLM about something I know, it will frequently be confidently, even hilariously wrong. It is not aware of any difference between truth and falsehood and will freely mix them together. I want to avoid some kind of AI Gell-Mann Amnesia. When I ask it questions I know the answer to, it consistently prioritises producing something that looks like a confident, helpful, well-written answer, in total agnosticism as to whether or not that answer is true. It surely does the same thing with questions I don't know the answer to. The only sensible course of action is to assign zero credence to anything an LLM says. What it says might be true. Or it might not be. The LLM's word is worth nothing.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Asking a bot would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
For several reasons.
For what it's worth, working in a non-technical, non-coding-related field, my experience has been that some higher-ups are interested in the idea of AI and occasionally push a half-baked idea, which lower-level employees dutifully try for about two hours, conclude that it's useless, and then keep on doing things the old-fashioned way. I have yet to find any actual use-case for AI and continue to see it as a solution in search of a problem.
Maybe it's useful in some very specific, very narrow fields. Maybe coding is one of them. I'm not a coder so I don't know. But what my professional experience thus far tells me is that LLMs are good for producing large amounts of grammatically correct but turgid and unreadable bilge, and pretty much nothing else. If what you want is to mass-produce mediocre writing, well, that's what AI can do for you. If you want pretty much anything else, you're out of luck.
In a sense I think it's the ultimate 'wordcel' technology. It does symbol manipulation. It's good at translating one language into another, and apparently that it includes translating natural language instructions into computer code. But I remain skeptical as to its utility for much beyond that. It might be nice one day for someone to sit down and run through an explanation of how the heck this is supposed to get from language production and manipulation to, well, anything else.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
If you'll pardon some paranoia on my part... the post you link, attributed to Matt Shumer, really reads like AI slop to me. It does not read to me like a human wrote that. Given that the post is about Shumer outsourcing his work to bots, is it plausible that he also outsourced his post to a bot? Or that he had a bot edit and 'improve' his writing? Or that a bot wrote it and he edited it? Or, perhaps most frighteningly of all, that he's just worked with bots for so long that this is how he has learned to write, and now he imitates them?
Whatever the case, I just don't trust anything written in that mode. Did he write it? Is there any original human thought in it? I don't know. Under these circumstances, I am disinclined to trust.
He does say that he used AI to write it, which I guess proves my instincts right. The post is indeed awful writing, and if that's the standard of the AI that he thinks is going to replace all our work... well, even if he's right, it will be a tremendous disaster for written expression if nothing else.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Certainly, and the base rate being what it is, the odds that any given trans-identifying person is violent are so low that you should not assume the worst. In general you should try to treat people as individuals.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I'm skeptical of drawing strong causal conclusions around mass shootings if only because the number of mass shootings is so low. If we just look at Wikipedia's list, in the 1990s there are seven after Port Arthur, and twelve before. Counting Port Arthur itself, that's twenty, for a total of two per year. I think that's too low to draw any sensible inferences. If we go past that, Wikipedia lists fourteen shootings in all of the 1980s, versus six in the 2000s, and ten in the 2010s.
14-20-6-10 is overall a decline, but one that I find perfectly plausible in terms of the overall decline deaths by firearms (both homicides and suicides) over the period. Overall I tend to agree with RAND's conclusion - the evidence that the NFA reduced firearm deaths is weak at best.
For what it's worth I don't think NFA-style reforms in the US would accomplish very much, and I'd tend to support Australia moderately loosening up our firearms laws. I don't feel very strongly about firearms and I'd be happy to trade it away as part of a compromise on some other issue, but I think we could safely do it, and in principle I'm in favour of people being able to own things that they want, unless there is some pressing reason why they shouldn't. I'm more exercised about speech, personally, where I do think our record is unimpressive, and I look at the American First Amendment with mild envy.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
Yes, I tend to think it's a combination of 1) shooters being almost entirely male, and thus more likely to be trans women than cis women or trans men, and 2) both shooters and trans people having strong positive correlations with mental illness.
You can debate the reasons for trans correlation with mental illness, say that it's all because of bigotry against gender-non-conforming people if you like, but the observation itself seems to remain true. Shooters tend to be biologically male people with some sort of mental disorder, and trans women are biologically male people who frequently have some sort of (other than being trans) mental disorder.
It isn't an epidemic or anything. But if trans women are slightly more likely, statistically, to be shooters than other demographics, it wouldn't surprise me.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
As an Australian (I cringed writing that phrase, but I suppose it's necessary), I am consistently annoyed both by local firearms discourse and by the way foreigners try to weaponise it. The 1996 buyback as far as I can tell made little difference - firearm deaths were a straight line trending downwards prior to Port Arthur, and continued their descent afterwards, with no visible change. There's just no particularly strong evidence that the policy change did anything.
I've come to interpret most tightening of laws after a tragedy as being symbolic. The buyback after Port Arthur probably didn't have much effect, but it was expressive. The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously." The reforms currently being proposed after Bondi are the same. Both additional firearm restrictions and additional speech restrictions have the same effect: they are very unlikely to actually reduce gun violence or anti-semitic feeling, but they signal, "We, the government, care about this, and are taking action."
The only people who lose out of these trade-offs are, well, the public. People whose rights to own what they want or speak what they want are shaved back another millimetre.
What is the classical sense?
I suppose my feeling is that all political labels are inevitably somewhat vague, and refer to clusters of people who associate together for particular causes, and therefore whose borders tend to be blurry and mutable. This means that definitions tend to be provisional and mutable. I can point to, say, Kirk's ten principles and say "a conservative is someone who agrees with most of these" - maybe to preserve a little wiggle room, you need to hold at least seven out of ten to formally count as 'a conservative'? But it's always going to be a bit wobbly.
I think you also need to clearly distinguish between American and other conservatives here. In the United States, conservatism generally means some sort of adherence to the principles of the founding, or the American Revolution, and because the American foundation is paradigmatically liberal, that means that American conservatism is a form of liberalism. This is not necessarily the case in other countries.
For me, I find it most useful to define conservatism in terms of an overall disposition or posture. In general, I think, that somebody whose overall politics are marked by a sense of deference to tradition or obligation to the past, and a preference for organically evolved systems over top-down plans, and who is moderately opposed to change (that is, small incremental changes, or changes to respond to specific identifiable problems, may be good; large-scale reforms are usually bad), would qualify as a conservative in the broad sense.
But this does mean that, for instance, there are people whose names loom large in the right-wing political canon that I would not consider conservative. Re-litigating Trump is boring, so let me take another example - I don't think Ronald Reagan was a conservative. I don't think Margaret Thatcher was a conservative. They were both, in a sense, progressive leaders, in that what they had was an organised theory for how society ought to work that they tried to impose via top-down reform, and for which they claimed a popular mandate. That is how progressivism works. Reagan and Thatcher both clearly belonged to the right-wing coalition in their countries, but it seems odd, to me, to call them 'conservatives'.
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