OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
For what it's worth this observation is actually consistent with my experiences in other countries as well. I love visiting Britain, but you would have to pay me to make me live in London. The smaller and mid-size cities, on the other hand, are lovely.
In general I think I prefer the smaller towns.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Yes, for what it's worth, I've visited America a few times, and my experience has generally been that it's a nice place to visit but I am very glad I don't live there.
I don't want to judge all of America based on the big cities I've been to, because it is very large and diverse, and people have told me that I would find the Midwest or some of the smaller states and towns much more congenial, but you would have to pay me to make me consider living in New York. I find it quietly terrifying that people who live in that bubble have so much global influence.
So, maybe there are parts of America I would love, but for now, I still call Australia home.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
WhiningCoil didn't mention anything about the monarchy, and certainly I feel no shame in the fact that we have a king.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
The mistake of America is believing anyone else could possibly achieve this.
Surely Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., are evidence that other people can and have built comparable countries?
The whole process of "English people sail across the ocean, establish a colony, and build a free and independent nation that provides for the material prosperity of themselves and their descendants" has happened multiple times.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think I'm mostly just annoyed by this sort of thing because the ABC is publicly funded - it's a federal agency and is in theory supposed to be politically neutral. Now, it isn't, and everybody knows it isn't, but even so I think it is unusually brazen of them to publish a piece, not marked as opinion or analysis, that firmly takes the view that the Trump administration is the enemy and opposed to the founding principles of the United States.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Hmm.
It's embarrassing to change one's mind, but I think I am coming around a little on this one. I think I'd like to see how the word 'jurisdiction' is used in other statutes contemporary to the Fourteenth Amendment, to get more of a sense of how it would have been read in the 19th century, but I'll grant that it's not crazy to say that, for example, a tourist currently holidaying in the US is not subject to its jurisdiction in the same sense that a permanent resident is.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I know you mean the American ABC, but I would like to submit this from the Australian ABC as some of the most naked and patronising propaganda I've ever seen.
I think Trump is disastrous, but on the fourth of July you should probably not publish the Declaration of Independence annotated with "by the way, Republicans are evil" after every paragraph.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That's a reasonable reversal. What are some of the things that Trump and his administration have done that I approve of, or that I think went well?
I suppose that's an easy one for me, because I approve of most of the anti-DEI stuff. I think that moving towards more merit-based systems of hiring in the federal bureaucracy was generally good. I believe the administration has taken some action toward funding charter schools, which I approve of. Illegal immigration on the southern border has significantly decreased in Trump's second term, and that's a good thing.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
SSPX is qualitatively different to the Union of Utrecht. The culture and internal structure of the specific breakaway sect matters.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Shouldn't you add more of your own comments, rather than just repost the views of... er... some guy on Twitter/Telegram?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I don't know anything about you as a person, so if you are not one of those people who feels reflexively obligated to defend everything Trump says or does, then I do not pity you or have contempt for you. I think of personal friends who voted for Trump on the view that he was the less bad of the options available to them, and who do not make excuses for his bad qualities.
Where I come in - sympathising with Meskhout - is when dealing with people who seem to be committed to the, for lack of a better term, Trump cult. I suppose a simple test is to ask a question like, "Can you tell me some things Trump has done that you disagree with, or that you think went badly?" Every politically sane person has some disagreements or disappointments even with their own favoured side.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Fair enough. Just take me as making an unrelated comment, I guess.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I do sympathise with our own ymeskhout on Trump and his supporters - okay, I grant that certain claims of malfeasance might be false or overstated, but the instinct to defend him, the requirement to defend everything no matter how corrupt or absurd, is profoundly humiliating.
In what way was the Roman empire a one world government? There existed plenty of peoples outside of the Roman empire, whom Christians went to and converted. St. Thomas famously went east, even (some say) as far as India. In the Bible itself, Philip converts the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8), who is on the way back to his home country. Ethiopia (or Kush, probably) was not in the Roman Empire. Or are we discounting Christians in Persia?
If we take Pentecost as our example, the list of peoples (in Acts 2:9-11) includes many from outside the Roman empire, including Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, and Arabs.
I think that much of the early church existed inside the Roman empire, and did not advocate the overthrow or destruction of the Roman empire, but firstly the Roman empire was not a world government, and secondly Christianity was never coterminous with the Roman empire.
If I were making a case for Christian one world government I might instead frame that in terms of Catholic claims about the papacy's universal jurisdiction. Fortunately I'm not Catholic and I consider those claims to be in error. I think that visible signs of church unity would be good and I'm broadly in favour of ecumenism, but I don't think that requires some sort of global secular government.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
It can be both, of course. Babel is the divine frustration of a human-willed plan, which is therefore experienced as tragic, even if the scattering was intended all along.
One is tempted also to compare it to Pentecost, partly because the gathering of the nations is the obviously necessary corollary to the scattering of the nations, but also because Pentecost shows us the Holy Spirit speaking to all people in their own tongues. The gathering does not remove the diversity of languages, but includes and accommodates it.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
If you let me get on my hobby-horse, I'll argue that the Catholic Church as we understand it today is fundamentally an early modern institution - it's an enlightened absolute monarchy, ruled by a philosopher-prince. Its understanding of itself is shaped much more by secular forces than it would like to admit.
All churches exist in history and are shaped by forces beyond themselves, but then, Protestant churches generally make 'lower' claims about themselves. We are the locally and historically contingent expression of the universal church in this particular place and time.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I don't follow? What are my choices meant to be?
I think you can make a Christian argument for the existence of nations and national cultures being a positive good, and in fact I would make an argument like that. I'd say also that there is a universal moral law to which nations no less than individuals must conform, and that this implies particular moral obligations about how nations relate to each other. I think that means I can robustly support the existence of a community of nations. I am not obligated to endorse some sort of one world government, and I am certainly not obligated to endorse open borders.
What does Acts 17:27 have to do with that? That is indeed a justification for why God would set many nations and many peoples upon the Earth - that we would each seek him and reach out for him and perhaps find him. That is good and entirely compatible with the continued existence of nations.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Again, sure. I don't agree with that understanding of Christianity, but I am very conscious of what I might term the 'neo-pagan right' or the 'post-Christian right', and the accompanying wish for a faith more robustly nationalist or even racialist than Christianity.
Christianity is fascinating for... well, a lot of reasons, and obviously the most important one is that it's literally true, but putting that aside and speaking more sociologically, Christianity is simultaneously individualist and universalist. God is the creator of all things and all people and the faith has a universal scope. Nothing is excluded; God is not parochial. At the same time, God is always encountered as an individual, and individual piety, and the unique relationship that God forms with every single person is likewise at the heart of the faith.
Where does that leave intermediate institutions? Elsewhere in the thread we have the start of a discussion about what this means for the church, and there's also a very rich well of Christian reflection on the concept of nations. What are 'the nations' as a theological category? Are they a problem, something merely temporary and to be abolished in the eschaton, and at worst occasions of idolatry? Or are they in some way intended features of God's design, or vectors of blessing?
I am more sympathetic to the latter view, and have talked about this before, but even granting, as I would, that the nations and their various searches for God are intentional features of his design (cf. Acts 17:26), the question of what their precise role in design is remains heavily contested, and that's where I'm going to end up in pretty fierce dispute with the new paganism, as it were.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Sure? I'm not saying that those historically Catholic countries don't have amnesties or allow illegal migrants. I'm saying that they don't do that noticeably more often or more enthusiastically than similar non-Catholic countries.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Wouldn't they still be considered members of their native nations? The question is not whether the Indian in question was literally born inside a reservation, but whether the Indian is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
My understanding is that as early as the 19th century the understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment was that, outside the exceptional case of natives, anybody born on United States soil was a citizen. There was some room to debate it but Wong Kim Ark settled that and has stood as precedent for well over a hundred and twenty years. My sense of most of the pre-WKA disputes is that they are transparently racially motivated, and generally casting about wildly for justification, via a Dred-Scott-like "well, it can't possibly have meant that group as well!" rather than anything plausibly rooted in the text itself.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Cromwellian theocracy is one of the possible political arrangements compatible with Protestantism, I would say. But it is not required by Protestantism either.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
lol. lmao, even. It's a great ideal, but it's very clearly not the reality.
I am shocked, shocked to hear that the United States supreme court has acted lawlessly!
In case the sarcasm was not clear, I wholly agree that the history of the supreme court is full of politically-motivated or agenda-driven rulings that do not conform to the plain original meaning of the text. Barely two hours ago I complained about some of them.
I do not consider lawless past action to license lawless future action. The court has behaved badly in the past. That does not confer a right to behave badly now or in the future.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
"All people to whom United States law applies", basically. In practice it means "not the Reservations, not diplomats". I think the original meaning of the phrase is pretty clear, and interpretation of it to confer birthright citizenship goes back to the 19th century.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities.
This is not a Protestant notion.
Obviously Protestantism acknowledges authorities in some sense - the Bible is clearly authoritative, for instance. You must be taking the view that 'authorities' must mean some sort of human organisation.
But Protestantism clearly allows for the existence of human organisations and governance. Even leaving aside secular governments, which hold authority in their proper (and limited) spheres, every Protestant tradition that I'm aware of has governing authorities in the church. Protestant churches have synods and assemblies and all the tools of government. What Protestants assert is that these authorities, though valid, are necessarily subject to higher authorities, which includes the likes of scripture.
Authorities exist but they are bounded in a way that they are not in Roman Catholicism. The Protestant case would be that the Catholic investiture of absolute interpretive and governing authority in the institutional body of the church is a kind of idolatry.
I'm surprised that people are surprised by this, to be honest?
If I think about 'rationalists', I think about people who are really into 'AI safety', who experiment with and use nootropics, who are keen on inventing and trying new life hacks, who are actively interested in reinventing things like relationship models from the ground up, and who for some reason are associated with California and the Bay Area...
Obviously that's a group that are going to be into woo because, well, they're already into woo. They always have been. They're already cousins of traditional hippies, right? They're pro-tech where the older generation of hippies tended to be anti, but you can see the kinship, surely?
More options
Context Copy link