OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
8hr 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
21hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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".)
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Hunters are a tougher enemy, certainly, but the hunters you fight in Halo are all the standard model. There's no Halo equivalent of, say, the Makron in Quake II, or Mohc in Dark Forces, or the titular character in Kingpin.
Later Halo games have named bosses - Tartarus in Halo 2, Guilty Spark in Halo 3, and so on - but the first one always avoided that. Wiki does not list any bosses for the first game, if that counts for anything.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I suppose the implicit heuristic I'm using is something like "knows how to use a computer". I'm thinking of co-workers who do fine with the systems they've been taught but the moment the computer does something they didn't expect, they call for IT or ask me.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Huh, I really thought that link was going to the Torment Nexus. I have never seen that comic before.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
My experience with normies, mostly co-workers, is that there's mild awareness of AI, but mostly in a "oh no, are management going to make us learn this as well?" kind of way. It sounds like yet another annoying thing that management might require everybody to learn and use, when we'd really all prefer to just get on with our jobs.
Managers themselves are interested in it and moderately enthusiastic - the most recent pitch has been for an AI tool that's supposed to listen to conversations and then accurately transcribe them, thus improving accountability and documentation - but that enthusiasm is not mirrored on the ground at all.
Absolutely nobody knows who Sam Altman is, or what 'AGI' stands for. Nobody.
My impression overall is not that people are dogmatically anti-AI, or have some strong ideological stand against it. It's just another instance of stupid computer bullshit that the bosses are going to try to make us deal with. Nobody likes it, but nobody likes any of the digital systems that get promoted from above. It's just plain old more of the same.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
The Flood are indeed the weakest part of Halo, and it's a shame because what they suggest to me is that Bungie didn't realise what made Halo good. The Covenant are the best part of Halo, because they constitute a small range of interesting enemy units, with good AI, that can be remixed together to create combat challenges. They use basic tactics and feel fun to fight.
Swapping from them to the Flood, which only have three types of unit, all of which do nothing other than run directly at you and attack, is crushingly disappointing. The first mission where you meet them is a great little Aliens spoof, but... ugh, the Library. They get old very quickly.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Man, I did love the stormtrooper rifle in Dark Forces, though I don't know how much of that is because it perfectly captures the feel of the rifle in the films. I can't imagine that hurt, at least.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
I remember one of the things that really struck me about Halo in its day was that it didn't have bosses. It had a small selection of enemies, and it then remixed them over and over in different scenarios, but unlike most earlier shooters, it did not have boss monsters, or specific boss scenarios.
Halo also, to its credit, mostly dispensed with exploration or keycard-hunting as a core mechanic. If I think about classic 90s shooters, the Dooms and Quakes, the combat in them was often repetitive, or just an obstacle while the core gameplay was exploring a maze of near-identical corridors and getting keys for doors. In Halo you always know where you are going (and you usually have an NPC voice, Cortana or Guilty Spark, ready to remind you). The challenge is getting from Point A to Point B in the face of determined opposition.
It's not unique in this - I suppose you're right and Half-Life had an earlier form of this, and then I guess F. E. A. R. did it even better - but it was done quite well for the time. The infamous 'four seconds of fun' idea paid off. If the basics of gunplay against the standard enemies are fun, you can re-use and remix those gameplay elements over and over to create consistently compelling scenarios.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Okay, that's absolutely a fair point. Counter-Strike was the Defense of the Ancients before Defense of the Ancients, and that was incredibly influential in creating PC multiplayer shooters as we know them today.
So, the organic story telling in first person, with the camera NEVER leaving the protagonists head, was arguably something that was specifically native to games and genuinely felt new.
Maybe this is just tedious nitpicking, but... was that actually new? Did it feel new?
I cannot recall ever leaving the protagonist's head in Doom or Wolfenstein 3D or Marathon. I don't seem to recall that happening in Descent much (I guess short cutscenes of your spaceship escaping?), or in System Shock. Quake doesn't take you out of the marine's head, and Dark Forces never breaks up its gameplay. All its in-level storytelling is environmental. I don't think you leave Bond's head much in Goldeneye. Maybe I'm crazy here, but seeing the entire game from the first person perspective seems to me like it was industry standard in 1998. Games after Half-Life seem to have been the same, to me? 1999's Aliens versus Predator does the same thing; it's not until 2001's AVP2 that they introduced story cutscenes. If anything, I feel like it's leaving the player character's head for a cutscene that was the innovation!
Are you counting a text screen introducing the mission before it starts as 'the camera leaving the protagonist's head'? Because thinking back to the time, I don't remember feeling like Half-Life did anything new with the camera, and looking back today... I'm sorry, I just don't see it.
I am trying my best not to be biased. I admit that I don't like Half-Life and, no insult to you intended, I find the praise profusely heaped upon it somewhat irritating. Of course, whether or not I like Half-Life is a completely different question to whether it was an influential game, and I am probably subconsciously motivated by just not wanting a game that I didn't enjoy to be important.
Even so, it is nonetheless true that even doing my best to set all bias aside, when I think about the shooters that were popular in the years immediately before Half-Life, and I think about the shooters that were popular immediately afterwards, I don't feel a big difference.
I do see a difference between what I think of as the early shooters, through the 90s, and then the post-2000 modern shooters. I can see the difference between, say, Quake II (1997) and Doom III (2004). Something changed in shooters around the turn of the millennium, and the two most famously influential games in that transitional period are Half-Life (1998) and Halo (2001). I suppose I'm just, in the end, not sure that Half-Life was the cause of this transition or of it was one among a number of games experimenting with the genre (because, let's be honest, the shooter genre had gotten pretty stale by 1997), and it was the most famous in hindsight.
Subjectively from my end, the key thing, I guess, is that I remember playing Half-Life in the 90s, getting bored after a level or two, and thinking, "meh, that was whatever". It felt to me at the time as just another one of the interchangeable shooters in a genre that seemed increasingly out of ideas. But then playing Halo in 2001 felt like playing something from the future. It seemed revolutionary to me. Now, maybe that's just because of the X-Box, or because something had changed in me in the years 1998-2001 which made me receive it differently, or some other alchemy of chance and circumstance. But for better or for worse, that is what I remember.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I think Halo has a genuine love for people who, out of a sense of principle, heroically place themselves in the way of danger for the sake of their people. The potential for sympathetic Elites, therefore, was there from the very first game. Elites are pretty obviously to the Covenant what you are to the humans, so even if they are on the opposite side, they are displaying the virtues that this game esteems - courage, discipline, self-sacrifice, honour. Once the lies were exposed, of course they became co-heroes.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
I hear sometimes gamers talking about how Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were these seminal games and huge steps forward for what was possible in shooters, especially in terms of story. I don't know about that. I never finished either game. I remember trying Half-Life in my teens, finding it boring, and quickly giving up.
But Halo...
Halo was magic. I first played it on a friend's X-Box, and it was captivating. My experience of shooters before that were games like Goldeneye 007 on N64, or Wolfenstein 3D and Doom demos that we installed on all the school PCs, or Aliens vs Predator at home. Halo felt like a step into another world. It felt like it wasn't just awkwardly trying to evoke a setting I knew better from elsewhere. Its gunplay flowed smoothly and its enemies felt capable and intelligent. Its world felt real - there were characters, and there was atmosphere. I eventually badgered my parents into getting me an X-Box and I spent a lot of time playing it.
One of Halo's big innovations, which I'm not sure it gets enough credit for, is having a narrator or perspective character giving you voiced feedback during gameplay. Half-Life gets credit for in-engine cutscenes, but firstly those actually predate Half-Life in shooters, and secondly, even in Half-Life, those were moments where you stopped and watched something happening. Moreover, Gordon Freeeman was a silent protagonist, so it felt like just watching a cutscene only you can move the camera around. Whatever.
The Master Chief is also more-or-less a silent protagonist, but it doesn't matter, because the real first-person-narrator of Halo is Cortana, and it feels like Cortana is constantly talking to you, the player. And she talks during normal gameplay. She usually shuts up during gunfights, but before and after the fight begins, she comments on what just happened, on where you're going next, and on what this mysterious space station might be for. Cortana's feedback lets you know how to emotionally react (she goes "ahh!" at scary things, "wow!" at impressive things, "aww..." at sad things), while also keeping you on mission by constantly reminding you where to go next.
Most shooters felt very lonely, prior to Halo. Explore an environment, kill everything. Halo puts a little buddy in your head, and that created a sense of direction, investment, and storytelling through gameplay. Go somewhere, Cortana sees what you see, she helps you interpret it. Nowadays the mission control character or intercom girl is a cliché, but I think it worked really well in Halo. The missions where you don't have any commentator buddy feel silent and threatening because of it; the missions where you don't have Cortana, but have 343 Guilty Spark instead, feel slightly off. They use the dramatic device for all it's worth.
In shooters before Halo, environments felt artificial, and like just stages for killing things that you wandered around. Halo made every place you go feel purposeful. You are raiding this facility to retrieve a map. You are assaulting this alien spaceship to rescue a prisoner. You are exploring this swamp in search of a missing team of marines. You have objectives.
It felt like an animated world I was actually inhabiting. I give it tremendous credit and think it was a huge, paradigm-shifting step forward for shooters.
And yes, its story, though very basic (and I recommend ignoring people who tell you all about the Halo EU and the Forerunners; it's all so much garbage), was good and effectively appealed to what every teen boy wants to be. Halo is a story about being a soldier-explorer. It is about being this powerful masculine figure, on the front line or even behind enemy lines, resourcefully overcoming obstacles, and standing in between danger and the people you care about. And it does it with total, unapologetic sincerity. Halo does have some comedy in it (oh, grunts, you silly little buggers), but that comedy never comes at the expense of the protagonist. Halo believes in the Master Chief, which is to say, Halo believes in you.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I certainly don't think it's an absence of imagination on my part - I was an atheist as a younger man, after all. I don't mean to generalise that all atheists feel the same, nor was I suggesting that atheists have no intellectual knowledge of Christianity.
Nonetheless I do think it's fair to say that ideological or religious alignment/difference with a text affects the way one receives it, and therefore that atheists and Christians will respond to authors like Lewis or Tolkien differently. In the same way I'm conscious that my own reaction to Pratchett is different and conditioned by my own background. I am speculating a bit about atheist responses to him, with what I hope is empathy born of my own experience of atheism, but nonetheless I am in a different position now. To the extent that I appreciate Pratchett today (and I'm not actually a huge fan), there is a level of imagination involved, putting myself in the position of someone for whom the world seems very different to the way it seems to me. The same thing, mutatis mutandis, for ex-Christian appreciators of the Christian authors.
There's probably another effortpost to be written one day about the atheist appreciators of Tolkien specifically. That is for another day, though.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
One of the things I think Pratchett has in common with the earlier Christian fantasists is a genuine affection for the parochial, and a corresponding opposition to the impersonal, enlightened, or rationalist.
I mentioned Death. The Auditors might be more efficient, but Death is a small farmer. We want to be collected by the sympathetic local. "What can the harvest hope for, if not the care of the reaper man?"
But we see the same pattern over and over. The Unseen University faculty are a bunch of self-important short-sighted buffoons, but Pratchett has a real affection for them, and their dumb feuds. You can imagine a story about an enlightened, politically engaged busybody coming in, determined to mobilise the university for the cause of social justice, or even just making the wizards do their damn jobs, and you know that Pratchett would be one hundred percent on the side of the wizards. The witches likewise. Pratchett likes the local. In the post below this I cite Carpe Jugulum and the pay-off to that story was that the locals like the 'traditional' vampire lord, the one who kidnaps the bosomy young maiden and always gets staked by the strapping young hero, whereas the modernist who wants to rationalise vampiric predation is the villain. In Ankh-Morpork, all Pratchett's sympathies are with the beat cops, not grand visionaries.
That's something he has in common with the earlier writers. Tolkien loves the Shire, and hates Saruman's mind of metal and wheels. Lewis praises tradition - the bit in Prince Caspian where the children are liberated from the Telmarine schools is a moment of pure, unbridled joy. Chesterton's hatred for regimentation hardly needs to be recapitulated. Pratchett lacks their religious conviction, but something of a stubborn English spirit persists in him, as it did in his literary forebears.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Certainly for me, as a Christian, one of the things that made Pratchett not-intolerable was his sense of genuine sympathy for those who want to make sense of the world and do right. If you sincerely and humanely asks those questions, Pratchett is on your side.
'I feel I should thank you,' said Oats, when they reached the spiral staircase.
'For helping you across the mountains, you mean?'
'The world is... different.' Oats's gaze went out across the haze, and the forests, and the purple mountains. 'Everywhere I look I see something holy.'
For the first time since he'd met her he saw Granny Weatherwax smile properly. Normally her mouth went up at the corners just before something unpleasant was going to happen to someone who deserved it, but this time she appeared to be pleased with what she'd heard.
'That's a start, then,' she said.
Pratchett himself is not a believer, but his worldview allows for believers who are genuinely good people, whom he regards as friends and allies.
I'll take this as an opportunity for a longer effort post, so pardon me if I go a bit beyond the brief.
I think Terry Pratchett is the atheist version of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien.
Lewis and Tolkien are authors that young, nerdy, or fantasy-inclined Christians, especially those from an English cultural background, read while growing up. They often make a very strong impression on us. I know that I was moved and a lot of my worldview, as an adult, was shaped by these two seminal authors.
Sometimes atheists read and appreciate them as well, and with all appropriate grace and charity, while I'm glad that others read them too, I don't think they make as much sense for atheists. The Christianity is too foundational - too much of Lewis and Tolkien's writing is impregnated with faith - for them to make sense otherwise.
Pratchett, however, was an atheist, and I think his work is, just as much as Lewis' is with Christianity and Tolkien's is with Catholicism, impregnated with atheism and skepticism. Pratchett is in his own way a very cynical author. Yes, there are gods in Discworld, but they are not particularly worth worshipping, and the religion he is most sympathetic to, the Omnians, are portrayed as nice but nonetheless engaging in a kind of sympathetic self-delusion.
Pratchett's real heroes are existentialists, like Sam Vimes, or Granny Weatherwax, or Death. Death admits openly: "There is no justice. There's just me." Vimes is a man who is fully aware that the society he lives in is corrupt, unjust, and miserable, and yet, grumbling all the while, refuses to submit to nihilism, and makes the world a bit better. Weatherwax is a woman who dismisses religion and faith with, "I've already got a hot water bottle", and yet nonetheless spends her life trying, in her own irascible way, to make the world a little better for the people who live in it.
Often I find, when I read a lot by an author, that author has a kind of general tone or mood. Lewis has an erudite yet common-sensical decency to him. Tolkien is wistful, and lost in memory. Chesterton is delighted by paradox. Adams is wrily amused at the absurdity of the world. The mood I get from Pratchett is, surprisingly for a comedian, anger. Pratchett writes with this white-hot anger at injustice, at unfairness, at a world where stupid bullies tread all over ordinary people just trying to enjoy the good things this world offers. More than that, I think Pratchett has a kind of moral outrage at God. God refuses to even do us the decency of existing so that he can be properly accused of neglect!
Lewis or Tolkien look at the world and they see something there, a divine wellspring to creation, a loving creator who fashioned us, in whom we live and love and have our being, and to whom we will return. Pratchett looks at the world and sees none of that. It's not there. The world may be full of powerful beings separate from us, but they don't really care, and they can't give meaning to life. So what do you do?
I think Pratchett's Discworld books are, in their core, about how to be moral in a godless, meaningless universe.
Yes, he writes comedy. That's the other big difference between him and Lewis/Tolkien. The Christian authors are funny sometimes, but they're saying something sincerely. Pratchett is trying to make you laugh, but he's always, I think, got this really sharp bite aimed at all the absurdities and injustices of the world. Pratchett thus has sympathy for the idealists - consider Sergeant Carrot, or the good Omnians like Brutha or Mightily Oats - but ultimately he's closer to Vimes or Weatherwax or Susan Sto Helit. The world is frequently garbage and disappointing. There is no avoiding that. But this is the one you've got and it's up to you to do your best anyway.
There is no justice other than what we make happen ourselves. So we had best get to work.
Put charitably, this is what I think the "atom of justice" speech is trying to say. Justice isn't a metaphysical constant; it's not out there, it's not written into the fabric of the universe, and there isn't a god coming to make it happen for us. We have to do it ourselves. If stories about gods or spirits or hogfathers have any virtue, it's that they train us to believe the impossible, to go on seeking justice, despite the emptiness of the universe we're in.
Suppose you were a young, teenage atheist, and a fantasy fan. You like people like Lewis or Tolkien, or even their lesser imitators like Robert Jordan, or Weis and Hickman. However, you cannot share their faith, or make that connection. What can you do? Pratchett comes along and writes equally entertaining stories, in an equally expansive mythos, that addresses this question for you. Here's what you do if you share these values, but can't believe in their metaphysical commitments. You acknowledge this godless universe and then set out to make justice happen anyway. More than even that, Pratchett's theory of "the little lies" actually helps contextualise the Christian authors - perhaps Narnia or Middle-earth are lies, but they are lies that help prepare you to believe, and fight for, the big ones.
(Compare Lewis' Puddleglum: "...I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.")
So, all that said, why do I hate the "atom of justice" speech?
Well, mainly just for the reason I said. I think it doesn't work because it's a straw-man. Nobody believes that justice comes in atoms, or mercy in molecules. Things that aren't elemental particles are not lies, or any less worthy of being valued or loved. Death's rebuttal of people who believe in justice does not land, and because I know Pratchett was a brilliant author and extremely capable fantasist, I believe that Pratchett could have come up with a metaphor that worked. It is not beyond his imagination to make the same point in a more artful way. After all, most of his other books make the same point, often more successfully.
Maybe I am just an intolerable pedant. But I hope it comes through that I'm saying this from a place of appreciation for Pratchett.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
The Avignon papacy was from the 14th century. That's all it means.
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.
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