WestphalianPeace
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User ID: 184
WestphalianPeace
14d ago
Social Construction radicals have to attribute all thought to social construction. They can't admit to any inbuilt preferences, only social constructs. So when they find someone's who has 'converted' they can't attribute it to helping someone who was already inclined to like X realize who they are. Instead it has to be that they finally broke through their socially constructed preferences into liberated ones.
In my personal experience with these types of people there is a strong case of "my expansive preferences are natural, which is proof that your narrow preferences are socially constructed." Similar to the 'well obviously we'd all fuck dudes if we could, but society would collapse so we need social pressure to keep men straight' phenomena. Just a total inability to model other minds. Very similar to polyamory people. Their end of bell curve genetic inability to feel jealousy is obviously perfectly normal. Your jealousy meanwhile is a patriarchal social construct you can be liberated you from.
For people on the tail end of the bell curve the typical mind fallacy is a hell of a drug.
I do think Tumblr took these people's pre-existing preferences and intensified their conviction of their moral superiority. AO3 is not Pornhub and everyone used to understand why they attracted different sexes. It took tumblr to convince people that the only reason men don't rely on AO3 is because they've been socially constructed not to. For the average person of this 'if we just push body type X enough people will change!' mindset I think it's more likely that they went to tumblr because they had a predisposition to like the art there and then got socially radicalized. Not that they were a straight guy who got converted and now wants to spread the good news.
WestphalianPeace
16d ago
I think we need to make a clear demarcation between race vs ethnicity even if the one often incorporates the other. The old Yamato Nadeshiko trope is a clear example of something that's like 90% behavior, 10% physical attributes.
So personally I think ethnicity groups are constructive/useful. I think a physical attribute description like race is only useful when it correlates with ethnicity with such overlap that it's meaningful information at a glance. People want the ethnicity information so badly that in monoracial societies people often play shibboleth games to figure out what someone's sub-identity is. Naming conventions/accent is a common one. My sister worked in a town that specifically renamed itself so that anyone who pronounced it as it's naturally read would be immediately outed as an outsider. To pronounce it 'correctly' you had to pronounce it incorrectly. Done after the American Civil War to identify Yankees. And I've heard that in Ireland a way to checking if someone is protestant or catholic is ask them what school they went to growing up. No idea if that information is outdated or just rumor though. But it illustrates the point.
On a racial level if a 3rd generation japanese-american visited Japan I think it's perfectly reasonable for the local Japanese to initiate conversation with him in Japanese after a quick glance and then be surprised when he only speaks English. But it would also be reasonable if the native Japanese looked at the 3rd gen, had a second to process all the other information, the manner of dress, hair style, posture, gait, social manners, nearby company, and concluded 'I bet that's an American'
There is also one other issue of identity groups being useful. And that is the tragedy of victimization on the basis of ones attributed race/ethnicity by others. As illustrated in the movie Operation Finale. A young woman is unknowingly courting the son of Adolf Eichmann. When Israeli agents explain to her that she's at risk to she protests that she and her family aren't Jews, her grandfather was Jewish but her father converted and they are good Catholics. To which the agents respond rightfully 'you think that matters to him?'.
I think it's useful, inevitable even, for people to form identity groups based off of mutual aid against threats they each can't avoid by disclaimer.
I hope my writing is precise. This is such an awful topic to discuss because of the constant ambiguous 2 step people perform going back and forth between race, ethnicity, and individual's position in race-ethnic-cloud-space.
WestphalianPeace
1mo ago
I never could get a full grasp of Stellaris. And the new ck3 expansion is just okay. After the End 2 released on steam though. Shame they removed the California rationalists big Yud lore.
Suzerain is unique as a western VN. And it's hard. But pulling off the Great Sordish Recovery is incredibly satisfying.
It's also a great way to understand the struggles of post ww2 Turkiya
WestphalianPeace
1mo ago
Remember the second half of On War when Clausewitz just starts getting really nerdy about old Napoleonic tactics involving skirmishers and such? The Idealism philosophical book isn't useful for the tactical and operational scale. And the tactics he spends the second half on are hilariously out of date.
So I'm less passionate about the idea of the average military personnel pouring over the book than I am about the very idea of establishing On War's prestige in the eyes of the laymen. Sun Tzu has some name recognition and some people have even pretended to read his book. But Clausewitz is pretty much forgotten by the non-engaged public unless you are some kinda warnerd.
But the next time some genuinely asks me "I don't get it. why didn't we just nuke Afghanistan?" I wish I could use an argument from authority using quotes from Clausewitz. Since people think with crude heuristics and assumed knowledge (no condescension. we are all condemned to this) I wish his very basics could be expressed and then get a sage nod of 'well if Clausewitz said so then I guess so" simply because they recognize the name drop. I have managed to actually get normal people to take seriously that war has economic costs by pointing out Sun Tzu.
There's also an effort post somewhere about how obsessions' with winning in the operational sense undermines grasp of the strategic/political reality. You'd think the Nazi's won the war for all the gushing people still have over Rommel and the first year of Barbarossa.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
I quibble but it's a reasonable argument. We've definitely largely forgotten the degree to which defeating the Nazi's was rhetorically presented as Smashing Junker Prussian Militarism and stopping the Germans from reading On War is consistent with that.
All the more absurd that then a few years later the US would be so taken in by the histories of Halder and Melenthin.
Would love to see a list of texts banned by US occupation forces in Japan. My impression is that there was a strange combination of renaissance of writings from the simultaneous abolishing of Japanese censorship while also starting American censorship of militarist/expansionist texts. But I'm far less exposed to the Pacific Theater and could be wildly off base.
WestphalianPeace
4mo ago
There is certainly precedent for it
You know, for an comparatively low population city (compared to london, NYC, LA, Chicago) I feel like Philadelphia gets a disproportionate amount of representation on the motte.
Though I think if you met us in person you'd find we are mostly just normal people. We pay our bills. Make dinner each night. Delight in our hobbies and mostly just get by day by day. Though perhaps i'm only speaking for myself and everyone else you meet will be an unlikely instantiation of the heroic.
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
While in the vernacular it's common to use Agnostic to mean "I don't really know but I think it's possible" and Atheist to mean "I believe there is no God" I think you'll find that when pushed hard to really clarify exactly what Belief and Knowledge are that most of what we think of as knowledge claims are in fact belief claims. I do not "know" that say (purely for example), the Chicago School of Economics is true. But I may perhaps "believe" that it is. Or to be even more pedantic, I may assign a 90% chance in my head that I think it's true, a 5% chance it's flawed but mostly true, and leave the remaining 5%.
I do not "know" that I am not a brain in a vat in a jar experiencing a simulation. But I don't find this particularly likely, and am happy to say that I believe my toothpaste exists and should be applied before bed. Even though if sufficiently pushed I'd be stuck arguing that, yes, it's true. I can't be literally 100% confident about my toothpaste the same way I am that A = A. This 'mere belief' state of affairs has yet to stop me from brushing my teeth before bed.
In that sense the vast majority of Atheists are, more precisely, Agnostic Atheists, and are happy to describe themselves as such. They do not Know, but they lack assertive belief that God exists. Much like how I lack a belief in the efficacy of Mercantilism, even if I can't write a PhD paper explaining why. Atheists may vary in the particulars. One may give God a 10% chance, which isn't enough for him to believe in a positive existence. Another may say God's likelyhood is less than 1%! I have even seen someone describe himself as an Asymptotic Atheist. His credence towards Gods existence approached infinity but never quite touched "cannot possibly exist".
Actual "God does not exist, 100%, stop" Atheists do exist. They'll have uncommon definitional arguments about how all sufficient definitions of God are inherently incoherent or contradictory. But these are rare indeed, and functionally arn't all that different than a mainstream Atheist.
Perhaps you will find your argument for God and change your mind. Perhaps you will look back at this moment as your crisis of faith and in the end it was the testing fire you needed to harden your spirit into a faith a strong as steel.
I can't prevent you from doing that. But what I can say is that even losing all faith that God exists, the world is still beautiful. Painfully, overwhelmingly, & shockingly beautiful. It's the beauty of a cherry blossom caught in the wind between branch and ground. We travel in the now between the Scylla of pre-existence and the Charybdis of our species eventual end. In this precious moment we exist and are lucky enough to be conscious of it. There is no reason for our morals to atrophy or our marvel of the natural world to diminish because what we do now is only heightened in importance by it's transience. There is a joy to be had in the self regard as one made in the image of God. But when that disappears it does not stay a God shaped hole in the heart. Rather, I regard every piece of civilization as a precious jewel against the void from which we came. Humanity as universe's greatest happenstance. We could have stayed as brutes. We could have been born and winked out of existence. Humanity was once reduced to nearly a thousand people!
But today an atheist can go to the cathedral in Cologne and tremble at how passionate humanity was even during poorer times. And a believer can know his doctor is an atheist and realize that his doctor regards his life as something that once extinguished is gone forever, and that his doctors will fight like hell to help him get back to good health as a result. And we can all build something together and marvel at this incredible world we all live in.
There is no shortage of arguments intended to pull you back to a faith in a Creater Deity. But if you should wonder once more about the other side then here:
If you want the old argument, then read De Rerum Natura De Rerum Natura. On The Nature of Things. And realize that these notions about the world are by no means new.
If you want the new argument, then read On the Big Picture, by Sean Carrol. And really understand how we got to this point.
Finally, the rationalists are sometimes cringe. But even in their cringe they have a point. You said "I want to convince myself there is a God". I ask you to consider instead, their Litany of Tarski. Contrast your desire to believe in something you find comforting vs whether you can can find real comfort in belief in something you know just isn't so. And consider instead your desire to believe what is true. That:
If the box contains a diamond, I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond; If the box does not contain a diamond, I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Imagine Shinigami Eyes but applied to people who merely engage seriously with an author.
I want to be able to talk with progressive minded people that 2+2=4 without a tag next to my name that's the same as the one next to Walt's and have my thoughts dismissed out of hand.
WestphalianPeace
1mo ago
This is excellent stuff! With this place off reddit, not advertising elsewhere, and slowly developing it's own jargon things like this are great for legibility for newcomers.
"Westphalian....From a series of treaties in 1648. We also have a member with this as part of his username."
Hey that's me! Hi everyone!
It's an honor to be a recognized name enough to make this list. I don't comment that often but I like to think that I have a pretty good AAQC-to-comment-ratio to compensate. Actually AAQC as shorthand should probably also make the list.
A "prominent people" list may also be useful at somepoint. If only to explain why everything is on the main thread and then suddenly this Kulak guy thinks he's important enough to justify his own thread that's just a link to his substack. Which makes sense in context but must seem kinda bizarre from afar.
WestphalianPeace
1mo ago
at risk of a low effort warning for memeing.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
most of what I see on the list is ignorable drek. And most manifesto's make for awful reading. At best useful to seeing the difference between their literal words vs how the media represents them.
That said On War is pretty much essential reading for anyone who wants to understand war beyond a peasants sense of "Who are the Goodies & Who are the Baddies/Why don't we just nuke everyone as a first resort?" The Michael Howard translation is fine.
Democracy The God that Failed has awful prose and relies a lot on buying in to Austrian Economics but is useful as self-refinement for exactly why one ought to support our current end of history style of government. Either walk away from with a real sense of the unavoidable flaws in democracy, convinced that there must be a better way. Or alternatively confront it's arguments and be made tall by fully understanding the steel man motte for democratic governance.
Or if you want something more readable just go with Caplan's little discussed "Myth of the Rational Voter". People always bring up his education book and his open borders book but his 'Democracy barely works in practice and the academic theory for how it works is hilariously unrealistic' just sits there quietly.
WestphalianPeace
3mo ago
My family was employed by the son of a Holocaust victim. Multiple friends of mine have their entire extended family tree snuffed out and all that remains is a small nucleus that moved to America during the golden age of European migration.
So no. While I don't agree with government suppression of such materials I assure you you will find no fertile grounds for conversion here.
WestphalianPeace
5mo ago
The Afghanistan Papers revealed that if the truth is sufficiently awful people will refuse to believe it or discuss it because they are convinced it's more plausible that racially biased people are making unfounded accusations.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1457753480840372231 (US forces unable to stop child rape and because 'it's their culture')
"Homosexuality was taboo among adults but it was not uncommon for afghan men of means to commit a form of sexual abuse known as bacha bazi, or boy play. Afghan military officers, warlords, and other power brokers proclaimed their status by keeping tea boys or other adolescent male servants as sex slaves. US troops referred to the practice as "man-love Thursday" because Afghan pederasts would force boys to dress up or dance on Thursday evenings before the start of the afghan weekend. Although American soldiers were sickened by the abuse, their commanders instructed them to look the other way because they didn't want to alienate allies in the fight against the taliban"
I also recall an old Foreign Affairs article that made an addendum to why it happens on Thursday. Broadly speaking, many Afghans believed that prayer on the Islamic holy day, friday, cleansed them of their sins. So if you rape someone on Thursday, pray on friday, you are then clean and worthy of paradise on saturday. Of course the sin was the homosexuality, not the rape.
What makes it doubly insane is that Bachi Bazi was a source of illegitimacy among the wider populace. which means destroying it would have an actually removed a source of Taliban legitimacy.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1366444372972081153 (bachi bazi as source for taliban support)
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZD1UIU0AE8WxU?format=jpg&name=large (Afghan governor was a drug dealer and tyrant but his province was actually stable)
When the US was stuck between a hardliner who could keep the peace and total anarchy it was incapable of biting the bullet as a matter of policy. If stuck between a plan that had proven successful but icky or a plan that would be unsuccessful but sounds good it went with the sounds good.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELZE6_TUUAI9rdH?format=jpg&name=large (US aid would filter through contractors over and over again until about 1/20th actually made it to the country)
Literal actual corruption would have been more efficacious then what the US did. The US would spend outrageous amounts of money on domestic actors and not make any use of the purchasing power difference of Afghanistan being dirt poor. Who do we have to thank for this lighting money on fire policy? Thank staunch conservative senator Jessie Helms.
"...because when the soviet union fell apart we had to cut a deal with Jessie Helms to continue our aid programs. The deal with Jessie Helms was that we would spend the money in the United States. We would buy American products, American grain, American consultants, American Security experts, and they would implement our aid programs."
Finally just for a final kicker. Rural Afghanistan could be so isolated that it would literally inbred. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FDr8Z6lVIAMK_O6?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 ("I hate to say it, but there was a lot of inbreeding. The district chief had three thumbs" he said in an Army oral-history interview.)
That's a lot of scattered stuff. So lets return to my central point. When the truth is so awful people will take accurate descriptions of the situation as proof of racist evil rather than of tragic suffering.
It would have been tragic but true to describe Afghanistan as a land of inbred child rapists who believe that Islam means that if you commit a sin on Thursday then on Friday its cleansed away. That stability at the hand of tyrants would have been more valuable for producing peace than Western european style metrics about the percentage of women in parliament. And that literal direct bribery and corruption applied at the point of local discretion by the military would have been order of magnitude more effective than actual policy. And that the cause of restricting the military's discretion and demanding Made in America contractor corrupt fiscal suicide was due to a Conservative Senator.
But could you have said that? Does anyone believe that you could walk around in polite society and talk frankly about such issues and how we are going to approach solving them. Could you ever imagine Obama making destroying culturally acceptable religiously justified child rape as his first priority in an hearts & minds strategy?
Twitter personality InverseFlorida invented the term Sanewashing to describe how people watered down "Abolish the Police" into something sane sounding. That people would get angry at you for saying "Abolish the Police means exactly what it says and the people who first started saying it are very clear about this" because those people had actually come to believe that X actually meant Y. People who sanewash really believe their revised version of a statement to be the real meaning of the original statement.
The Afghanistan papers showed that people will Sanewash away not just Insanity, but also Evil. If forced to confront uncomfortable truths they will not just disbelieve a statement but they will go through a process of putting it through a sanewash sieve. Once they have their watered down pseudotruth they will then use that 'truth' as proof that the actual truth is just a racist overexaggeration.
Now consider how many people are unwilling to believe the accusations that Hamas uses hospitals as munitions bunkers & military HQ's. And you will be unable to unsee the instinct to Sanewash Evil.
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
Have you ever considered reading the War Nerd translation of the Illiad? I confess to not having read the original poetic translation. But I found myself literally spontaneously guffawing and feeling as though relaxed next to a campfire storyteller in his novel format retelling. Sensations that I'm not sure are as easily flow-into-able in the more high brow accurate translations.
That said I'd like to read it in the original someday. Do you stand by the Fagles translation for the average man?
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
I'm perfectly happy to describe 80%+ of the entire population (aka a large majority of women plus a sizeable majority of men) as "most people".
80%+ seems sufficient to be described as 'Most'
I also believe that women and normie men are 'People'.
this is why I distinguished in the beginning about old core playerbase demographics being a distinct population. They were a skewed population, where a minority approach to matters had a majority control over marketshare. Within that small population the majority culture was different.
is it really your contention that the best way to decribe "Most People" is to exclude the near entirety of one sex and the majority of the other sex?
WestphalianPeace
7mo ago
Has anyone here ever ran a Petrov Day celebration before?
I've no connection with the actual rat community, but I found the idea to be interesting. Held my first one last year (a small edit of the Jim Babcock version). It had rough patches but overall felt like there was a kernel of something there and I'd like to smooth it into something more satisfying. I'm curious if anyone else has ran one before and, if so, did you edit the program at all?
Also if anyone is in the Greater Philadelphia area and would be interested experiencing a cringe yet sincere rationalist ceremony I'd be happy to have guests.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I don't mean this to challenge. merely to ask. do you remember that exact newspaper? I'd love to have that saved for posterity when arguing about this in person in the future.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
People of all races reduce people of other races to flat cheap characters in romance novels or pornography, and imagine dating that flat character when you ask them about interracial dating.
I think its worth making explicit that Asian women are also the thinnest grouping in 'racial group broadly defined'.
Asian women are vastly less obese than the non-asian population of the United States.
There is this idea that white people (and weebs in particular) think of Asian women as this old practically Victorian Era submissive 3 steps behind the husband trope but I contend that that's not the primary appeal of Asian women to White guys.
In an American context Asian women are far more likely to be
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Japanese, Korean, or Chinese descendent
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roughly speaking are thinner than white women by 30 pounds, hispanics by 40 pounds, and black women by 50 pounds
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more likely to be intelligent as well as college educated
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less likely to come from a family that's undergoing social breakdown from fentanyl/drugs.
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match speech patterns/accent to the local White population if they grew up in a predominately White area instead of adopting a distinct dialect of opposition.
If the Hispanic population in the US was small, distinct, and had the same level of thinness and educational attainment I maintain that Hispanic girls would have a similar highly desired status as Asian women today. Imagine a situation where the US was 4% Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan with the same traits as expressed above. I guarantee if you talked to a random white guy he'd go 'oh yeah. hispanics are cute. I love hispanic girls'. But hes just using physical features as shorthand in order to estimate an what is overwhelmingly an expression of body type & compatibility. It's not a desire to obtain a lifestyle of tropes from old media and/or pornography about what "foreign women" are like.
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I've been meaning to read On the Nature of Things for awhile now. Having read it would you stick by the prose translation or advise looking for something else?
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
I've always found the existence of the Mu'tazila tragic and fascinating, but I never knew their influence on Maimonides and Christianity. Can you direct me to where I can learn more?
WestphalianPeace
1yr ago
The forgetting about the Comey letter and the anthony weiner peripheral scandal is really quite incredible. There can be a great deal of discussion about why Trump or Clinton got the first 98% of their vote totals. But it's worth remembering just how weird and unlikely it was that specific scandals happened at exactly the worst possible time for Clinton.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/
In a way this is normal. People find it easy to remember grand sweeping narratives and easy to forget week by week minutia. For a lot of people Trump wasn't just supposed to lose, he was supposed to experience a hilariously crushing loss. So for many people, especially people who didn't pay attention during the race because they thought it was a preordained outcome, it's engaging to discuss how Trump (an unthinkable outsider) got so close to/exceeded Clinton (the Heir Apparent) in the first place.
You will be judged by normal people not on your accurate assessment of the truth of the matter, and appropriate weighting of the variables therein, but rather in how well your own opinion aligns with the worldview of the person you are talking with. Or, if you disagree with their worldview, how defensible your worldview is within their worldview. But bringing up how the Comey letter constitutes that random always possible weather event that could swing the election one way or another will win you points with neither side.
WestphalianPeace
15d ago
Ahh I'm sorry if I gave that impression that I find these things equivalent. I was trying to use extreme examples to illustrate a point that the same trait that exists in the extreme also cascades down into the merely uncommon. I don't think most of these people are Bloated corpse tier, though those absolutely do exist. It's more a natural consequence of my point about propensity to intensity and yes/no being separate traits.
I think of it as a bunch of brackets. First there is the building that 70% of people prefer A to B. Then there are the aesthetic tastes of those who find themselves in the 20%. Those in the 10% minority opinion etc etc.
So for example I mostly find Stevens Universe to be ugly, but I get why it works and am willing to put up with it. Most people probably find it neutral. There is a certain person who adores its style and hates on actual beautiful things. I'd put them in the 30% bracket.
Then there is Ozy who appears to be the 5% bracket. Everything evolution selected for us to find beautiful/important, symmetry indicating health, indication of running water, open plains allowing for awareness of both predators and resources, kin to treasure and protect, Ozy's mind finds completely unstimulating.
Then there are the people who shudder with delight at the idea of fucking amidst flies over a bloated corpse. Sub 1% bracket.
Dunno if that changes your take on my take but I hope that clarifies my own intuitions on the topic.
From Bauhaus: A Graphic Novel, pg 50-54
"I saw them all, their faces as they crossed the threshold, their hands gilding over the textiles searching for the weave, their eyes reflected in the chrome plating as they let their certainties fall away....their certainties about what a house is, or an object...what a human being is, when there is no gender. In the 'Triadic Ballet' I want to show people move in space. The geometric forms represent the rationality that humanizes and merely stages physicality....and I wondered if, when they left the last room and went back out into the world, they would be able to look at it with the same revolution in their eyes.
The exhibition didn't convince the Landtag, which decided to shut me down: too expensive they said...but I was uncomfortable politically: the right-wing parties won the elections and we were bizarre and revolutionary creatures with socialist leanings. The masters' contracts were not renewed, and the Weimar experience ended on the first of April 1925. I was only six years old! Isn't it the same for everyone? You can still become anything but they tell you you're wrong....that you need to color within the lines, that geometry offers only a limited series of shapes, that words are to be written on the lines of a page. The control exerted by the outside world forces you to define your identity, while all you want is to experience yourself in the world. Your freedom is frightening for them.
This a very common sentiment in extremist left circles. Anarchists in particular. Shifting aesthetics first in order to subvert the current social order and show people that another world is possible. It's not intended to be demoralization, no one actually sits down and goes bwahaha now I will make the world ugly to demoralize my enemies. It's exaltation. Revolution. Religious ferver. It's the sincere conviction that they are breaking people out of Plato's cave and liberating them.
Destroy 2000 Years of Culture is a prayer, not a conspiracy.
I want to be clear though. This doesn't mean the average person making this kind of art is thinking in these terms. That's an entirely separate issue. It's more like how the average conservative might say 'washington is holding back Americans with too much red tape' and then when you keep digging at where that phrase came from you eventually find a Mises Libertarian arguing with a Ancap. Or how a normal left leaning person might say "Healthcare is a human right. We have to help everyone" and then when you keep digging at their phrase you find a Kropotkin-poster arguing with a Noam Chomsky fan about whether the point is to liberate humanity from all Social Exploitation or if it's about liberation from all Material Inequality which Generates Social Exploitation. The tails tug at the core.
I'd recommend Ross Douthat's book "To Change the Church" to get a good sense of that. Either in text or audiobook. It's really quit the engaging read, even for a non-Catholic or even non-believer.
Rather than an outright schism a soft coup looks more like manipulating public opinion through journalists ignorance, manipulating bureaucracies hiring (your ideological allies) & firing (or doing the catholic equivalent of "promoting" someone to Siberia), using ambiguous statements that motte (castle) in the text but bailey (field) in public understanding until the lay public is so unaware your old bailey (field) wins the battle for assumed public opinion. Use edge cases to create extreme exceptions to a long standing principle, then expand that principle to other comparable but less serious edge cases. Then after enough time has passed don't talk about the long standing principle at all and instead explain that it would just be hypocritical to allow exceptions for these extreme edge cases but not to those more common cases.
As an example of how long standing doctrine can become completely irrelevant to the common believer until that new generation forms the next generation of deciding authorities, see American Catholic Opinion on Birth Control. A mere 8% of American Catholics believe birth control is morally wrong. If you point this out to those other 92% of Catholics they won't explain in detail why they humbly disagree with the Church. They'll claim there is no disagreement! The most common reaction will instead be an aghast disgust over your bigotry in claiming something so ridiculous as that the Catholic Church opposes contraception. And the coup is complete.
Nearly half of Catholics don't even know Catholicisms distinction regarding the Eucharist. Athanasios may stand like a rock against the world. But the average member is not Athanasios.
To pull off a coup as Pope you have to make it look like you never pulled off a coup. Everything has to be continuity. But with the right voters added here, the right ambiguous statements added there, you can pull off a coup. You can alter unchanging Dogma because you convinced regular people that you never actually altered anything. It was always there the whole time.
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