OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
'Vice versa' is not a Caesar quotation.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
That would be the pronunciation in classical Latin, but ecclesiastical Latin would be different. I believe there it would be more like 'vee-chay ver-sa', the way you pronounce ce in Italian.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I read a note a few weeks ago that pointed out that describing something as "late stage" only really makes sense retrospectively, or for a phenomenon which has a predictable end state (e.g. the last few weeks of pregnancy are "late stage pregnancy"). Describing our current economic condition as "late stage capitalism" carries more than a whiff of wishful thinking. Indeed, I predict that capitalism will survive all of the people currently using the phrase.
Perhaps this is unfairly charitable of me, but I prefer to read the phrase as "capitalism of late", that is to say, it means "recent capitalism" rather than "capitalism near the end of its life".
Probably most people who use it are indulging in wishful thinking, and have hopes of some sort of imminent economic reorganisation, not to say revolution, but the word 'late' by itself can be read in a less ridiculous way.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Ah, I have just had people mistake me for Catholic before - my guess is because they're the biggest player in the 'conservative Christian intellectual' space. Mainline Protestants can be intellectual but not conservative. Evangelical Protestants can be conservative but not intellectual. So people tend to assume I'm Catholic, or automatically take Catholicism as the framework for this kind of reflection.
I actually think the rise of Catholicism in this context is overstated and mostly illusionary. In practice American Catholicism is much more like mainline Protestantism, demographically and intellectually.
At any rate, the Catholics would not create a new term - or in a sense, they already have, in the way they talk about sacramental marriage. But theologically, as it were, the Catholic position is that marriage is marriage is marriage, full stop, and there is no reason for the church to change its language just because secular law has gotten things wrong.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I'm not Catholic.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I'm not sure I understand the relevance of the bottom part? I think part of the point of marriage is to guide people towards successful family formation - not just sexual pleasure, not just emotional fulfilment, but forming a genuine family unit, which is among other things capable of bringing forth and nurturing new life, but also supporting the whole rest of the society in which it exists.
It seems to me that any attempt to reduce marriage to the crudely sexual, whether that be people obsessed with gay sex or people who think it's just about guys having sex with women, are missing the point. In that sense the successful push for gay marriage was and is the outgrowth of an error going back decades.
I genuinely don't care, for instance, if a guy does not want to have sex with women. There are long and honourable traditions of both male and female virginity, and there is no shame in either. I'm interested in families, in the relational health of men and women as part of an overall vision of not only the human person but the human community also.
Now the place where the gay marriage advocate will press me is why such a vision must exclude same-sex couples, and my answer to that I think they're putting the cart before the horse. If your position is that same-sex couples ought to be able to participate in the same cultural institution that opposite-sex couples do today, then my position is that they should not do that, because opposite-sex couples shouldn't do that either. What we legally recognise as 'marriage' is not particularly worthy of the name. The problem I have with gay marriage, from a traditional/conservative position, is that it is trying to gain access to what is already a distortion of what marriage is supposed to be, and that the process by which it tries to do this is by doubling down on that distortion. Gay marriage whose core claim is "we live together, we love each other, we have sex, we want to be recognised as the same kind of thing as opposite-sex couples who do all those things" is all well and good but it is only an extension of the fundamental problem.
This is not to say that I think that if we just wound back the Sexual Revolution everything would be great, because it is clearly not that simple, and pre-Sexual-Revolution marriage was obviously also distorted in various ways. In a sense my position is that marriage must be fought for and re-created in every successive generation, from the very roots. Marriage is what you do when you and your partner set out to create something larger than yourself.
The legal regimes we have around marriage are one thing, and they may encourage the growth of real and good marriages, or they may hinder that growth, and the public policy debate is important, but they are not the foundational issue, I think. In a sense I 'support same-sex marriage' in the sense that, given the actual practice of marriage in the modern day, and what couples actually do, incorporating same-sex couples (insofar as their relational structures are imitative of opposite-sex households, which is I think pretty clearly what the big gay marriage push was claiming) into the same legal regime is just good policy. But that policy is froth on top of the ocean.
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:
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.
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