OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
Presumably 'gay' is a useful shorthand that connotes effeminacy, weakness, vanity, and superficiality? Something along those lines?
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
Good luck explaining why 'Aborigine' is now frowned upon, while 'Aboriginal' is fine.
I have heard people explain something about how 'Aborigine' is a noun and 'Aboriginal' is an adjective, and a clipping of 'Aboriginal person' is better because it acknowledges their humanity in a way that 'Aborigine' supposedly does not. Or sometimes you just get vague waffle about how somehow 'Aborigine' has racist connotations from the colonial past that 'Aboriginal' does not. Now as Amnesty's own link some want to move the treadmill again to 'First Nations', a term borrowed from Canada (and not, contra the article, actually supported or used by a large number of Aboriginals).
It's all just... extraordinarily tiresome, petty language policing as if the letter E does some sort of psychic harm that AL does not, all as a substitute for any policy that might actually improve anybody's lives.
If you want to de-stigmatize stupidity, then... good luck with that, I guess.
Wasn't that the argument of The Cult of Smart?
Come to think of it, that's also an argument Lewis satirises in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, isn't it? Norwood's idea of 'parity of esteem' is a kind of move to de-stigmatise stupidity, or at least, de-stigmatise low academic achievement. Lewis' response is, "Intelligence is good, and academic success is good, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. They are not the only goods, and dumb people may be virtuous in other ways, which should be encouraged and praised, but they are nonetheless good in themselves."
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
Jeff Maurer's case for it is that the word at this point is clearly detached from any reference to people with developmental disabilities, in much the same way that 'idiot' once referred to a person with a disability, but has now come to just mean 'stupid person'.
In a sense the euphemism treadmill functions to exculpate words over time. The treadmill means that today nobody uses 'retard' to mean 'person with a mental disability'. The non-pejorative use of it has been crowded out by the pejorative use, so to it all intents and purposes it now has only pejorative meaning. When I say "you're a retard", nobody pictures a person with mental illness. Indeed, if I want to refer to a person with a developmental disability in a polite way today, I would not use the word 'retard' because it has come to be seen as always offensive.
I suppose another comparison might be 'lunatic'. If I say "you're a lunatic" or "you're a loony", nobody sensible believes that I am specifically criticising people with mental illnesses. (I have, admittedly, once been lectured by someone for saying 'lunatic', as it is 'ableist language', but I think that was transparently ridiculous.) The word 'lunatic' now means 'person who is dangerously unhinged' or 'person who behaves in aggressive, unpredictable, and self-destructive ways'.
The case for 'retard' is that there is, in 2026, no risk of confusing it with abuse of actually disabled people, and that it fills a useful lexical gap - it is stronger than 'idiot', 'moron', 'imbecile', or similar, and is immediately understood as a pejorative.
My final thought is that I think the other way the euphemism treadmill fails is that if a quality is genuinely perceived as undesirable, accusations of having that quality are always going to be offensive regardless of language. If I say to someone "you're intellectually disabled!", that still read as an insult, and it's always going to read as an insult no matter what language you use, because it's the actual condition of intellectual disability, not the word, that makes the insult work. You cannot change the actual perception of a minority group just by policing words. To take a different example, you can ban kids from calling each other 'fag', but then they'll just switch to 'homo' or something and it will continue to have exactly the same effect. If you want to eliminate the insulting-accusation-of-homosexuality, you have to eliminate the perception that homosexuality is something shameful. Shifts in genuine perceptions of homosexuality have done far more to eliminate those insults than policing vocabulary.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Well, my model of human behaviour is such that even if people hold their nose to vote for a candidate at first, people tend to then talk themselves into that choice being right. Once you're in a coalition, you tend to rationalise that coalition to yourself and align along all its issues. If you are, for instance, a single-issue voter on abortion, you will nonetheless probably talk yourself into adopting the rest of the Democrat/Republican platforms over time, even if only to minimise cognitive dissonance.
So I would tend to expect a Republican who reluctantly talked himself into voting for Trump in 2016 to have, over the next decade, talked himself into being more generally supportive of Trump.
However, I would nonetheless suggest that most presidents win office with the votes of people who do not see themselves as 'X voters', or as being part of a tribe or coalition that same way. People who identify as Republicans are likely to vote for Trump, and have done that, and as the Republican party increasingly Trumpifies, talk themselves into liking Trump as well. But Trump didn't win with that group alone. He won with the independent vote - he increased his share of the independent vote from 41% in 2020 to 46% in 2024, and since independents are somewhere in between a quarter (in 2020) and a third of voters (in 2024), that is significant.
My guess would be that independents are much more likely to have grudgingly voted for a least-bad candidate than party members. If they were genuinely enthused for a candidate, they would probably just join the party. My guess would also be that independents are likely to be among the quickest to drop support for a president. Trump's declining approval rating is likely primarily seen among independents and moderates - both firm Democrats and firm Republicans have their minds made up and won't change their perspective.
What this adds up to me is the conclusion that there is a significant chunk of people, disproportionately independent, who voted for Trump unenthusiastically, and have since gone off him.
How many is 'significant'? I don't know. In 2024 Trump won 49.8% of the vote, and at present 39.7% of people, according to Nate Silver's poll, approve of him. There's some noise, since these surveys and polls aren't restricted to voters, but just as an estimate, this would suggest somewhere around 10% of the American population voted for Trump and then changed their mind and now think he's doing a bad job. That would also suggest that around a fifth, 20% or so, of Trump's own voters have since gone off him.
There's obviously a margin of error there (what about people who voted for Harris but have since decided that Trump is doing a good job, and started to approve of him? such people would be very weird but there's probably more than zero), but I think it's a reasonable speculation. Say it's less than this, that's fine. If 15% of people who voted for Trump in 2024 now disapprove of his job performance, I'd still say that's a decent chunk of voters.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
That twenty million 'admission' doesn't sound like a reliable figure, but rather the secretary talking off the top of his head, possibly exaggerating?
I'd certainly expect some more credible evidence for the claim that a quarter of all residents in the United States are illegal immigrants.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
My understanding is that there's a case both ways?
On the one hand, 'white' in US census terms includes groups that are generally not considered white socially, in the US - most notably Middle Easterners are counted as white, and most Americans would not consider an Egyptian Muslim to be white. According to the census categories, an Afghan is white, and I think the popular use of race is different to that.
On the other hand, US racial categories tend to undercount whites otherwise. A person with one white parent and one black parent is counted as black. A person with three white grandparents and one black grandparent is counted as black. It's not literally a one-drop rule, but as a rule of thumb, if there is a mixture of any kind, it defaults to the non-white race.
This is also likely to be exaggerated by changing patterns of racial identification. To put it more simply, fifty years ago, if you could identify as white, you did, because that was more socially prestigious. Today, if you can identify as non-white, you probably identify as non-white, because now that's the most prestigious option. It isn't everywhere, but certainly in elite contexts, if you are otherwise-white-passing but have just enough of a distant family connection to claim to be black or Asian-American or Native American or ambiguously brown some other way, you probably do.
The census has changed as well - this relates to the above, but just by itself, the addition of multi-racial or mixed-race categories (now apparently 10.2% of the population) is going to depress other categories. It is thus possible for the racial categories on the census to change significantly even with the exact same population.
What is the 'real' white proportion of the US population? I don't know. It doesn't really have an objective answer, because the borders of the category 'white' are often shifting, and different people put those lines in different places. If you pressed me I'd guess that, broadly speaking, white people, are somewhere around 60-70% of the US population, and any answer more precise than that is going to require both stipulating a narrower definition of white (and good luck finding one with majority support) and collecting data that nobody has actually collected.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
The fact that the Republican candidate was mostly voted for by Republicans is surely to be expected irrespective of who the candidate is. Republicans vote for Republican candidates. But not all of those were genuinely enthusiastic about Trump, and of course, Trump won on the back of swing voters.
The initial question here was about Trump voters. I think there are at least three different groups under discussion here: 1) everybody who voted for Trump, 2) Republicans, 3) MAGA. There is substantial overlap between those groups, obviously, but as far as I can tell there are plenty of people in one group but not in one or both of the others.
It looks to me like Trump's approval among Republicans was mostly in the 80s while in office, dipped significantly while he was out of office, and is dipping again due to Iran.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
If it helps any, I've worked in aged care, with heavily Asian staff and a lot of white residents, and in my experience the staff have consistently been kind, caring, and have shared the values of those they care for.
Perhaps ironically, what those same staff tell me is that aged care in China is far worse and more neglectful, and that they are very glad to be here caring for a population that include both their own families and Westerners.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Isn't this combining two groups?
Trump does have a base that is rapturously enthusiastic for him - which people often call the MAGA base or MAGA crowd. But this group is not coterminous with those people who voted for Trump. He did not win 2024 with his base alone - and we can see now that even though Trump won the popular vote, his current approval ratings are far lower than that. It seems like there must have been a lot of people who voted for Trump but are not consistently enthusiastic about him.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I think that if you're trying to nitpick whether or not what you did was really adulterous, you're probably already in the red zone.
The underlying principle is that people who either don't keep their own most sacred promises, or who participate in helping others to break their own most sacred promises, should not bear the public trust. This is why e.g. someone who cheats in a same-sex partnership still fails the test, even though technically that's not 'marriage' in the sense that I understand the term.
You might be implying cases like a married couple who, via mutual agreement, sleep with other people? Like an open marriage? That does run afoul of my rule; I see how it's meaningfully different to traditional cheating, but it's still in my view morally disqualifying. This is also how I resolve cases of consensual polyamory - the interaction with my adultery rule is somewhat blurry, but as it is also disqualifying in itself, there is no need to resolve the exact relationship to adultery.
This is all just around the edges, though. Practical cases tend to look more like, for example, Barnaby Joyce.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I suppose I could be accused of dodging the question, so I should try to expand a little.
One of my red lines is that I will not vote for an unrepentant adulterer. Credible repentance and apology is needed before I will even consider it. Technically both Trump and Harris fail that criterion, though in Harris' case it's because, while single, she had an affair with a married-but-separated man. In general I feel that if you cannot keep faith in your personal life, you cannot keep faith in your political life. So even before we get into any other character issues, I could not vote for Trump.
The steelman of the case for Trump, to me, goes something like, "Yes, I know he is of terrible personal character, and that does weigh in my considerations, but a political choice like this has to be a kind of calculation about what's best for the country, and a bad man might nonetheless be the least bad choice for the country. It is a betrayal of the virtue of charity, and your obligations to your fellow citizens, to refuse to vote for a least-bad candidate for character reasons, because if the worse candidate wins, it is your fellow citizens who will suffer a worse result." A Trump voter aiming to persuade me would probably do best by not trying to play down or distract from the awfulness of his character, as revealed by things like these tweets, but rather by trying to direct me to concrete policy results.
For the first Trump term, I think they might have a strong case on consequentialist grounds like that. For the second term, it would be weaker. Would Harris have bungled the Middle East as badly as Trump seems to be? I can't prove a counterfactual, but I'm skeptical.
Still, if we're going to talk consequences, I would argue, I suppose, that the signalling value of a write-in or absent vote is more than zero, and perhaps a statement of lack of faith in the American political system, or of disgust at both candidates, would have about as much value as a single vote ever could.
I never actually faced this calculation, thankfully, but if I had been in the US, I suspect I would have left the vote for president blank or done a write-in, while still voting down-ballot.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I'm Australian. I was spared that choice.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
I am not a Trump supporter, but I suppose I should weigh in with another Christian response -
This is obviously gross, blasphemous, and testament to Trump's narcissism, and in that light I think it tells us nothing we did not already know. We already knew that Trump cares absolutely nothing for God, Jesus, or any sense of human dignity. We already knew that he holds nothing sacred. He has been very clear about that. We also know that he is prone to like or retweet anything that flatters him, no matter how lacking in taste. This is of the same species as that AI-generated video of Trump in a jet dropping excrement on protesters. If it flatters Trump, he likes it, and because he has no sense of decorum about anything, he just shares it.
This reveals that Trump is venal, crass, self-centered, and so on, but again we all knew that. This does not tell me anything new. Maybe that Trump has a kind of contempt for all that I hold sacred, but that too I already knew.
Yes, it is vile, and the more people realise the extent to which Trump is a man wholly lacking in virtue, the better, but for me personally? It moves me not a jot.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
I don't know how much you know about me or even recognise my name, but I think in my case there's a bit more complexity to it than that?
On the one hand, I grew up as a high-achieving upper-middle class posh white boy, so if I think about all my schooling, it came with the implicit message that if I do well, conform, act politely, etc., I will be rewarded. Even religiously, as much as I had the resources to understand that friendship with the world is enmity with God, that we must not conform ourselves to the world, and so on, the emphasis of most of my education was that nonetheless sacred institutions are basically good and trustworthy. (Typically the way it went was that we, institutionally, are not conforming ourselves to the world, by being good activist left-wingers whereas 'the world' is all that nasty stupid stuff the Bush administration is doing.)
On the other hand, those religious resources did exist, and I can also think of plenty of stories, even very lowbrow ones, that I internalised and which were about the failure of authorities to recognise virtue. As Sturm Brightblade teaches us (I was a D&D and Dragonlance fan, alas), the good are not recognised in their own time, and even the order may lose its way. As I grew older I became more aware of the ways in which the wider humanist tradition recognises this fact. I've been fond, on the Motte, of Tanner Greer's essay - "the world we live in is not designed to reward the life most worth living".
I think there has always been a tension here, and as I have grown older, I have shifted more towards the failures of the world. The idea that you can behave well and be rewarded by the respect of others and worldly success seems increasingly farcical to me. Still, overall this is not so much an overturning of my younger self's worldview as, I hope, a refinement of it. There is no perfect authority to pledge myself to. The orders of the world can only, at best, imperfectly reflect the good, and even that is usually too much to ask. The challenge is to seek the good, and to do good, even knowing that the systems we inhabit are irremediably broken.
To stick with the culture war element, this struck me forcibly reading Rod Dreher on Orban's defeat. For all that Dreher was the man who preached the Benedict Option, who warned that secular power was an unworthy lure and that people should not put their faith in princes or in presidents, you can see that at his core he is a man who craves a righteous authority. Once it was the Catholic Church, then that failed him. More recently it's been Orban and conservative nationalism. Now that Orban's failed, he's coming apart again. He cannot reconcile himself to the idea that the authority is broken, that the authority will always be broken, and that the task of the individual is to stand for wholeness regardless.
In short, this:
...if I behaved with honor and integrity I would inevitably come into conflict with the powers that be.
is correct.
If you try to be the one straight thing in a bent world, you will always come into conflict with those who would bend you. The tides of worldly power flow and reverse and anybody who finds themselves always moving with the tide is either an opportunist or a coward. A life of principle always leads one into conflict with power.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Certainly it's possible to morally evaluate Israeli and Iranian attacks - bluntly, if I zoom out and look at them in a bigger context, I find plenty sympathetic in both cases. Israeli fear of attack is an understandable reaction to having been surrounded by states determined to destroy it. Iranian hatred of America, going back decades, is an understandable response to unilateral Western and later American aggression against them. There's a sense in which I think Israel is right to oppose its neighbouring Arab states, much less Iran, and in which I think Iran is right to oppose America.
In this case specifically, I just don't want to waste your or my time scrutinising this or that specific claim about an Israeli action. Take, say, Gaza. If we trust wiki around 73k Palestinians have been killed, of which 80% are civilians, so let's say 58k civilian casualties. Let's also for the sake of argument assume that figure is heavily inflated, so let's cut it in half and suppose there are 29k real casualties. Let's also be maximally generous to Israel and cut it down again, since maybe a lot of that number is Hamas human shields or somesuch. So let's suppose that Israel has killed 15k or so innocent people in Gaza.
Is that enough to count as 'behaving badly'? Let's compare this to some other conflicts. The Azerbaijanis took Artsakh and killed a few hundred people. The recent South Yemen offensive seems to have also killed something in the range of hundreds. Those are significantly less. Wiki gives post-2024 casualties in Syria as around 10k overall, which is comparable to our minimal guess at Gaza - am I allowed to say that any of these groups are behaving badly? When the Russians fought that insurgency in Chechnya, they killed a few thousand people - can I say that the Russians behaved badly? How many dead civilians are necessary? I think my threshold is set at a pretty reasonable level.
I think that Israel is behaving more-or-less comparably to its neighbours in similar situations. I don't think it's behaving uniquely badly, but I do think it's fair to say that, overall, it is killing enough civilians that the word "bad" is merited.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Insofar as we're still talking culture war, I would argue that part of the experience of growing up in the 2000s in the West has been that of being disenchanted by institutions. The story of the past couple of decades is that of a Western population gradually learning that all the authoritative bodies of our society are at best fallible and at worst corrupted or depraved - state, church, media, academia, all seem to have left their missions behind. That's a fertile environment for stories about people created by or serving corrupt systems who nonetheless have to defy those systems to stand for what's right.
The untrustworthiness of the UNSC and especially ONI is part of that, but you see the same trend more widely. Captain America gets betrayed by America. Heroes must struggle against their own institutions. Not that rebellion was never valorised in the past, obviously, but I remember commenting that even in Star Wars, in the 70s/80s Rebel leadership was portrayed as consistently trustworthy and capable, which would be less likely now. Outside the realm of fiction, the impulse obviously runs through both left-populism and right-populism, through both Occupy and MAGA, and given free rein turns into conspiracy theories like QAnon. That omnipresent feeling that you cannot trust authorities or institutions is a feature of our day.
Halo is quite an early example, but this would be consistent with Nylund/Bungie establishing early on that no large-scale authorities are to be wholly trusted. Halo 2 goes even stronger on the idea with the Arbiter's story - it's as if they're saying that, even if you fight for the bad guys, if you behave in a consistently honourable, truth-seeking way, that will inevitably lead you into conflict with institutions.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Isn't this just dodging the point that I made? I don't want to be sucked into a tedious litigation of this or that example. The central point for me is that, regardless of whatever moral judgement you choose to make overall, Israel has been aggressive, both militarily and diplomatically.
I could pick some examples, but I suspect that is an attempt to lure me into a tedious back-and-forth, and I don't think you can refute a general point by zooming in on whatever the weakest of my three examples is and quibbling a detail until I get tired. I'm guessing that you follow the Gaza conflict and Israel's wars significantly more closely than I do. Suffice to say that I believe there are plenty of examples of Israel behaving brutally, that if I googled 'Israeli atrocities of the 2020s' I would find plenty (indeed I do), that you know this, and that you are prepared to nitpick any example I give until the cows come home. None of it would be germane to the general point.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Certainly, I think, Israel is occupied in a kind of proactive defense.
My sense, at least from a distance, is that Israel's calculation is that the rest of the Middle East being in chaos is good for Israel. I suspect the Israeli position here is just that if a country like Iran is in collapse, that benefits them overall.
I think that from a wholly amoral perspective, Israel is probably right. I'm also conscious than Iran is nine times the size of Israel, and that hurling Iran into chaos in order to establish Israel's security is a terrible bargain from any utilitarian standpoint. There is a somewhat reasonable argument to the effect that Iran's longstanding and open hostility to Israel means that it shouldn't be treated as an innocent bystander here - this is clearly a complicated situation that goes back to at least the 1950s and probably centuries, particularly insofar as Israel is a client state of the United States, and Iran has been in conflict with the West since at least 1979 and probably since 1953.
My overall opinion, if I zoom out, is that 1) Israel is behaving ruthlessly and inhumanely, yet also for logical strategic objectives, 2) Iran is vengeful but also very much understandable in its opposition to the West, 3) the United States is behaving like an incompetent thug, and 4) we (that is, Australia) ought to have nothing to do with any of this, since none of this is on us, and yet we are paying the cost anyway. I have sympathy for both Israel and Iran, both of which I think are behaving inhumanely and yet also sensibly, in the context of a terrible strategic situation; frustration for the US, which seems to mostly be making an awful situation worse; and even more frustration for ourselves, who have to put up with all of this.
I mean neither to excuse nor to justify Israel. I think that over the last five years Israel has behaved very badly, and yet in a way that is, sadly, par for the course for the region. Iran has hardly behaved any better, and yet, par for the course. I am disappointed but unsurprised.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I haven't been following a blow-by-blow of Gaza, so I'm going to decline to research that specifically. As far as I'm aware the IDF have blown up hospitals (and you added in the 'not being used against Israel' condition yourself), but if you want to litigate that one, I'll concede.
I do think that FirmWeird is correct in his larger claim. What I said myself was that he's correct on the issue, and that Israel is a very aggressive nation. I will thus refrain from quibbling details and defend that claim specifically. FirmWeird said that Israel "is currently invading Lebanon" and "launched the first strike on Iran".
Do you want citations for the fact that Israel is currently invading Lebanon, or that it launched the first strike on Iran? Do I even need to go any further than Wikipedia for those?
Please note that I have not made any claim about moral justification here. You can believe that Israel invading Lebanon and bombing Iran were good and necessary moves in order to ensure Israel's security in the face of unjustified aggression. I'm not making a value judgement. What I'm saying is that Israel is behaving in a militarily aggressive way, and that this aggression is necessary context for evaluating Iran's behaviour as well. You can think Israel are the good guys, you can think Iran are the good guys, I don't care. What I think is that any reasonable assessment of the conflict between Iran and Israel needs to bear in mind aggressive activity by each party.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
I tend to use archive.is, and if that's down, archive.org will do some. This is pretty basic and doesn't handle all sites, but it gets most of the bigger ones.
If anyone has a way to sneak past Substack, that's one I'd love to have.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
For what it's worth, your post was clearly not a Gish gallop and the accusation seems in bad faith to me, but I'd also recommend a better reaction than this sneering.
That said, on the specific issue, I think you're correct - any criticism of Iran for being aggressive needs to have the context that Israel is also a very aggressive nation.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
Why would that happen to Hungary? Hungary isn't an attractive target country for migrants. They typically want to pass through Hungary to richer countries on the other side.
OliveTapenade
8d ago
My recollection is that most of the Halo novels are what Warhammer fans refer to as 'bolter porn'. I remember liking The Fall of Reach, which was a perfectly adequate and entertaining page-turner, but then looking at The Flood, Contact Harvest, Ghosts of Onyx, and so on, the quality decreased quickly. Greg Bear's Forerunner trilogy is by reputation decent, but it also has pretty much nothing to do with Halo.
I think it would be fair to say that the Halo series is about gameplay, first and foremost, and its extended 'lore' is pretty forgettable. I know they try to do something interesting with the UNSC being evil, but as far as the games are concerned (or at least the original trilogy), "humans good, aliens bad" is all you need to know.
(The UNSC does have to be pretty sketchy if they were the kind of people who kidnapped children in order to make brainwashed surgically-enhanced super-soldiers to put down a colonial rebellion, even prior to contact with the Covenant. In the original game manual, it is not clear whether SPARTAN-IIs predate contact with the Covenant or not, and you can read them as being a desperation project in the face of repeated defeats at alien hands. But the novels put paid to that. I bring this up because the top-level post praises Halo's moral clarity and lack of ambiguity, but in terms of the EU, it didn't even make it through a single novel - technically released prior to the original game! - before telling us "actually the human government is evil too".)
In this sense, I think it would be characteristically masculine behaviour that's considered unpleasant, bad, or socially maladaptive?
I feel like the obvious examples are things like heavy drinking, brawling, gambling, and the like? All the 'male' vices.
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