OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
My point is different: they have been trained out of applying their instincts at a young age. Not quite “wussy”.
What is the difference between "men have a natural in-born tendency to violence, and socialisation is required to make them peaceful" and "men have a natural in-born aversion to violence, and socialisation is required to make them militant"?
All people are socialised, and soldiers or military elites of past ages were socialised into those roles. Today people are often socialised into different roles. Obviously socialisation has a huge impact on adult behaviour.
But you seem to be claiming something more than that people can be socialised for violence (or more specifically, for certain forms of controlled violence) or against violence. I understand you to be making a claim about inherent nature or essence. Does the claim that all men have this inherently violent nature stand up?
“Fictional” is irrelevant, because people do fictionally what gives them pleasure. There isn’t a fictional homework simulator, or a fictional laundry simulator. There’s no fictional “comfort dying grandmother” or “be broken up with” simulator as this would be unpleasant. And “sanitized” is not my understanding of male video game culture. When a teenage boy sees that he can shoot his enemy’s head off, or that impaling them leads to his moaning in agony, he finds it awesome. That’s why developers put those features in. Out of all the millions of possibilities to have fun, males consistently choose “pretend to kill my enemies realistically with my friends” simulator, which they do because they like to imagine doing that. They could instead play “paintball simulator” or “airsoft simulator”, if they were averse to violence, but those don’t even sell.
Yes, I think it's absolutely sanitised. When I was in primary school I thought Turok 2 was awesome, and that's a game where you have a gun that fires a drill that homes on to and burrows into an enemy's head and mulches their brain. But this is not a realistic depiction of such a weapon. It is highly sanitised. The enemy wiggles in a funny way and then their head explodes. That's the kind of thing that young boys laugh at and it is very far from realistic death.
And of course there are very popular non-lethal games? Paintball simulators don't sell? The Splatoon series has sold over thirty million copies. It's paintball. It has live concerts in real life. If you look at the most popular video game series, yes, there are some at the top about violence (Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed), but there are also totally abstract games (Tetris), sports games (FIFA, NBA 2K), games about everything under the sun (Mario), games about building and creativity (Minecraft), games about bug-collecting (Pokémon), games about racing (Need for Speed), games about life simulation (The Sims) and so on. Conflict and fighting feature in most games and I think people do find those enjoyable or exciting, but you suggested that realistically killing enemies is overwhelmingly the most popular thing in games. In the top ten best-selling game franchises, I see maybe three that could fit that description (CoD, GTA, and AC).
Male nature and human nature is just more complicated than you're asserting here. I'm not saying that men in their natural state (which probably doesn't exist, unless you want to get really into studies of wild children) are all harmonious peaceful stereotypes. I think that people in general, both male and female, do have some aggressive and competitive instincts. But I think those are just one part of a larger and more complex mix, that we also have cooperative instincts, including those that make us hesitate to inflict violence.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
Well, I'd argue that naval officers are firstly already people who've been through military training, and secondly are already selected for martial intent. Pointing out that certain classes of people historically have been willing to use violence doesn't seem like enough, to me, to establish that all or most men throughout history have had high tolerance for lethal violence, and that modern men are uniquely wussy. Is it not just as likely that historical warrior classes were intensely socialised for violence? That seems like, well, an integral part of having a warrior class in the first place.
As regards games, I would tend to agree that men in general (and in fact people in general) have competitive instincts, where they enjoy defeating simulated opponents. I am skeptical that this generalises to real violence, given that simulated violence in video games is firstly fictional and secondly usually extremely sanitised. I think that if I gave the average gamer who enjoys shooting people in Call of Duty a real rifle and invited them to shoot real human beings (and let's say I guaranteed them immunity from reprisal, prosecution, etc.), even human beings belonging to outgroups, that gamer would hesitate.
I'm not moved by high-flown rhetoric about "the instincts God gave them", and I don't need a call to action. I think that kind of preaching is actually against the Motte's rules. Let's try to stay focused.
Hi there. I'm a serious Protestant.
It's worth bearing in mind that in the real world, as opposed to the internet, evangelicals are doing a much better job of holding on to faith than Catholics or Orthodox. News stories about youth conversions to Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy are usually looking at a few high-profile outliers rather than the overall demographic trend.
The Catholic Church in the United States, demographically, is buoyed up by large numbers of Hispanic Catholic immigrants, but if you restrict yourself to looking at people born in the US who were raised Catholic, they look very similar to mainline Protestants, i.e. in decline. They have noticeably lower retention than evangelicals. Church attendance is consistently higher among evangelicals than Catholics, as is consistency on moral or social issues. (Go through and compare if you like - 59% of Catholics are pro-choice, 70% support same-sex marriage!) If you compare what Protestants and what Catholics say about why they stay in their church, Protestants are significantly more likely to say that they believe in the religion's teachings and that it gives them spiritual comfort, while Catholics are more likely to say that it's because it's just the religion of their family or community. Note also that 1% of Americans are ex-Protestant Catholics, and 4% of Americans are ex-Catholic Protestants, which seems suggestive.
I'm not American, but I work in a religious field and I will say that just anecdotally I have run into a number of ex-Catholic evangelicals, and I would say that for every person raised a Protestant who felt that they were given a shallow spiritual education, and looked longingly at the riches of tradition and liturgy in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (and I count myself as one such person), I have met a person raised a Catholic who found that faith numbing and deadening, but who came alive on discovering evangelical Protestantism, which gave them the tools to cultivate a more passionate, heartfelt relationship with God.
I don't say this as a triumphant evangelical myself. I'm a mainliner, and I will forthrightly confess that the mainline churches are hollowed out, frequently heretical, and dying. I'm part of what I hope will be a small but devout rump of surviving mainline Protestants. My own institutions are largely betraying the faith and receiving in their own congregations the due penalty for their error.
But I would suggest that if you think that Protestantism in the broader sense isn't being taken seriously any more, or that Catholics have just won, or are in a healthier position overall, you may be in a bubble. Evangelical Protestants are probably the healthiest large church tradition in America.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
In a purely descriptive sense, taking all value judgements out of it:
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Is it true that your posting on the Motte focuses almost entirely on Jews?
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Is it true that your attitude towards Jews (both as individuals and as a community) is extremely and consistently negative?
I note that in your post, you responded exclusively to the accusation of obsession, and not at all to the accusation of hostility. I think that's a dodge on your part, so I restate the question.
OliveTapenade
20hr ago
What is your explanation for the fact that armies need to teach men to kill, and that most men display considerable resistance to it, and require intensive training? The Grossman argument, in On Killing, is exaggerated, but as far as I'm aware it is nonetheless true that using lethal force - or even just maiming force - on another human being is psychologically difficult for most people, and they have to psych themselves up for it. That's one reason why armies need pre-battle rituals, communal bonding rituals, etc., to prepare soldiers to use lethal force.
It's true that boys and men often enjoy dominance or victory to some extent. For that matter, as far as I can tell women have competitive instincts as well. But it is a big leap from "boys enjoy winning" or "games for boys often involve simulated violence" to "all men yearn to destroy and rape and pillage".
OliveTapenade
1d ago
What, are you claiming victory because I find you annoying? What sort of point is that?
I have made a criticism of your posting habits on the Motte that you have entirely refused to engage with. You could try to defend yourself in two ways. You could either claim that my description of your posting is inaccurate - that you aren't obsessed with Jews, or that you aren't unrelentingly hostile to them. Or you could claim that, granting that my description of your posts is true (if admittedly framed in a way critical of you), the behaviour that I describe is not bad. Maybe you think that everyone should be obsessed with Jews, and that your hostility to them is justified because they are actually that bad.
You've done neither. All you've done is claim that I'm "just offended" or that I'm "upset". That's not an argument. That's childish.
The closest you get to a response is the suggestion that your focus is "an appropriate level of discourse surrounding Jews", so, I take that to be the second way. Do you grant that it's correct that 1) you are extremely focused on Jews and post almost exclusively about them, and 2) your attitude toward Jews, both as individuals and as a community, is extraordinarily hostile? Is your defense that Jews are important enough as to merit this obsessive focus, and that they are bad enough to merit this extraordinary hostility?
OliveTapenade
2d ago
One of my experiences with QCs is that when one of my posts gets one, it usually isn't a post that I thought was insightful. It's often an explanation or a taxonomy of something that seems obvious to me, but which is not obvious to anyone else. If I look at my QCs, they're for things like the internal dynamics of church politics, or for nitpicky details about the Chinese language, or something else in one of my areas of expertise.
It may sound too obvious to be worth saying, but what seems insightful to you as a writer is probably not what seems insightful to readers. A post is more likely to get a QC if the reader feels that they have learned something.
I note that the insight doesn't even have to come from the contributor. I remember feeling a bit guilty for getting a QC for the Wolf Totem post, and I myself contributed very little there. It was just that I'd read a book that the average Mottizen probably hasn't. But that's enough. As long as what's shared is something that people want to read, or which gives them a view of the universe they didn't have before, that's enough.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
This post is exclusively quibbling a debate from a year ago - I merely gave two example of past debate, one in which I made the final post and one in which you made the final post, and I said explicitly that a conversation doesn't have to go forever.
What I do think is that what crushedoranges said further up in the thread is true. Crushedoranges said:
Your protest rings hollow because you can seemingly not talk about any subject without bringing them up!
I challenge you to go a month - even a week! - without connecting the subject at hand to the perfidy and scheming of the Hebrew race. And this is a challenge that I believe you will fail because my Noticing powers didn't just stop at FBI statistics.
And:
If you feel that you're the prophet in the wilderness in this, then you are obviously not here to debate, but to preach: and are self-evidentially an unserious person. There's really no good reason to seriously consider anything you have to say because you have a monomaniacal zeal on this one topic that you will never give ground on.
Amadan also said:
People have done that. You ghost when you lose the debate, and then come back to repeat the exact same talking points a few weeks later. You've done this often enough that no one who has the wherewithal to debate you is willing to do it again, so you claim victory because no one will debate you and you pretend your arguments haven't been thoroughly dispensed with multiple times, going back years.
I believe these points are substantially true, and the fact that all you attempt to contest is the relatively trivial charge of whether you have "ghosted" a debate seems to me to be just further evidence of your fundamental unseriousness.
My accusation against you is that you are obsessed with Jews and either unable or uninterested in posting on any other topic, that you always take the most hostile interpretation of anything ever done by a Jewish person and generalise about Jewish people on that basis, and that your larger case against Jews or Judaism is a cobbled-together hodgepodge of isolated references, in the manner of a conspiracy theorist, isolated from any good-faith engagement with either Jewish individuals or Jews as a cultural and religious community.
At times people, myself included, have engaged with you and in my opinion at least made a solid case against you, and what you usually do is reply with a few of the same strung-together references and scary implications, then vanish for a week or two, and then return and keep repeating the same points again, unchanged. The natural result is for people like myself to just conclude that there is no point to engaging with you. It is always the same thing, it is always flawed in the same way, and smashing one's head into the brick wall is neither interesting nor enjoyable.
('Scary implications' is how I would sum up the linked discussion about the person in The Atlantic last year - you take the innocuous example of a Jew opposed to anti-semitism and implied from that wild theories about the supposed malice or racial hostility of the Jewish people overall. In this very post you engage in a motte-and-bailey. There's a highly-defensible motte along the lines of "there are lots of Jews in America, Jews are a successful group who are particularly concentrated in media industries, topics of concern to Jews tend to get more coverage", which I myself stated, but you use this to jump to a bailey of "the media is an organ of Jewish ethnonationalist propaganda". That, I think, is dishonest. But this is what you always do. Every possible observation involving Jewish people, to you, must be interpreted in the most negative light possible. Every instance of a Jew caring about other Jews, or even just a Jew who doesn't want to get beaten up for being a Jew, is evidence of their communal malevolence. There does not appear to be anything a Jewish person could do to avoid your hostility. They are pre-convicted.)
Anyway, maybe you want to nitpick only the charge of ghosting. It is true that you have engaged in discussions and left those discussions even while the other person was still making a case, but as I said, I'm not actually going to judge that too harshly. I explained in the above post what I do judgely harshly, and I think it stands.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
You have, for instance, engaged in debate with me and ceased responding.
That in itself is not bad - there are examples of the reverse, where I don't bother responding to a final comment by you. A conversation does not have to go forever.
It is, however, I think absolutely true that 1) you are consistently obsessed with Jews, to a conspiratorial degree, 2) you are unrelentingly hostile to Jews, and no matter how innocuous the behaviour of a Jew, you always attribute the worst possible motives both to the individual Jew and to the wider Jewish people, 3) you do not debate in good faith, but rather flit between unrelated claims in the manner of a conspiracy theory, connecting dots centuries and cultures apart into a theory of Jewish malignancy that you are committed to prior to any examination of evidence, and 4) you are uninterested in learning or any kind of intellectual growth.
Like Chesterton's madman (from the introduction only), I think your mind moves in small, self-contained circles:
Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner. Doubtless he could be vanquished in mere reason, and the case against him put logically. But it can be put much more precisely in more general and even aesthetic terms. He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.
I hesitated to even make this comment, because I'm one of those who, as Amadan mentioned, has debated you and since concluded that there is no point doing it again.
Please consider what this says about you and your posting habits.
Look, crushedoranges was warned for criticising you. There's a chance I get warned as well, since this post is only discussing a member here who I do not think makes worthwhile contributions to the Motte. Technically it is not against the Motte's rules to obsessively hate Jews. But at the very least, it would be more interesting if you could find at least one other hobby.
I'm responding to the idea that "Catholics have basically just won" - no specific comment on Ramaswamy intended.
If Ramaswamy were to convert to Christianity, I agree that he would probably pick Catholicism, because that's a religion more acceptable to elites. Evangelicals are hated by elites, and they generally hate elites in return.
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