OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
Sure, it's possible that in a different system the results might have been different - but then you'd be hanging a claim about what the voters want, or what the voters voted for, on a pure hypothetical.
Something I've tried to be very conscious of recently is the way that ideologues construct 'the public' or 'the people' or 'the voters' in ways that agree with them, but in the absence of convincing evidence about what the people actually want or believe. This can be a communist believing that everyone will support the revolution, or a MAGA person believing that Trump in some way represents the popular will, or the way postliberal texts like Regime Change are premised on the assumption that most people on some level support the author's politics.
This is often just not plausible. We have polling on Trump over time as well, including from when he was president. He never broke 50% approval, and right now he clearly does not enjoy anything like majority support.
Like I said, there are issues where I think you can show an elite class stepping in to overrule the democratically-expressed will of the majority. But Trumpism specifically isn't an example of that. Majority popular support is something the man does not have and has never had.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I think 'directionally correct' in this case roughly translates to 'motte and bailey'. Or perhaps it's worse - perhaps it functions just to sanewash Trump.
That is, I can see an argument that systemic media bias, tech oligopoly, deep state institutions, etc., made the overall political landscape so distorted in the popular consciousness as to make a free and fair election impossible. That makes sense, and I have some sympathy for it as a position.
But that's a motte - that's a sanewashed, 'directionally correct' version of what the stolen election claims actually were.
The actually-existing version of StopTheSteal, the one that Trump endorsed, is not that. The Trump position was not "systemically slanted media landscape", but "literally cheating" - ballot dumps, fake voting machines, you name it.
The sanewashed version might be true! There's an argument that goes something like: "Democratic legitimacy is not merely a result of voting, but rather depends on robust norms of civic participation and deliberation, which must be resourced and facilitated by civic institutions. Such institutions include both public and private bodies, including media such as newspapers, television, radio, online social media, internet news and search, and so on. They also include the sources of information for public debate, such as academia, think tanks, or 'experts' broadly construed. In the United States, however, civic institutions are dominated by the left - by a silent, unspoken but nevertheless well-understood consensus - to such an extent that it is genuinely impossible for conservative or right-wing viewpoints to have a fair hearing in the public square. Such viewpoints can only be expressed in cordoned-off areas of conservative media, which by virtue of their isolation are unable to facilitate the kind of robust deliberation that democracy depends upon. Under these conditions - the total domination of the civic sphere by left-biased authorities - the very notion of democracy is degraded, and large sections of the population are effectively frozen out of democratic participation. No election held under circumstances such as these can be considered 'fair'."
I think that argument is probably true! I think it's not the whole story, but as far as it goes, it's true and it points to the crisis of American democracy.
It just doesn't get you to the stolen election claim that was actually made.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It seems to me that it's worth bearing in mind that Trump lost the popular vote both times. 'The populist threat of the voters getting what they vote for' doesn't seem like a good description of Trump, since both times he ran for office the popular majority was against him.
There are cases where I think you can convincingly point to a Blue elite stepping in to overrule the clearly-expressed democratic will of the majority - Proposition 8 is an ageing example but a good one - but Trump, a candidate who has never commanded majority support, seems like a bad example of one.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
Erm, can you clarify how this works?
The US needs Trump to 'expose all the flaws'... how exactly? What specifically does Trump do that another populist Republican couldn't?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That's another sign to me that it's not a particularly earnest gesture of inclusion - they are obviously male and female, with nothing changed but the names. No additional work has been done, so no additional expense has been incurred. From a development perspective, changing the names of the genders is a trivial task, and defaulting to singular they in all dialogue is slightly cheaper and easier than having distinct male and female variations.
The banner is inclusion, arguably, but the actual itself is profoundly lazy, and insofar as what it does is ignore or misgender everybody who identifies as anything other than they/them (which at last count was approximately everyone), it's actually less welcoming and inclusive.
But it's easy, it looks trendy and/or fits the cultural moment, and if it continues, by reducing the diversity and variability of humans - making everyone a bland, standardised they - it suits the interests of systems designers. A perfect symbol for the time, really.
(Yes, they're distinct male and female types now, but they don't need to be. For instance, in Splatoon 3 there are no gendered body types or identifications - everyone is just an androgynous little squid-kid. I guess the justification there would be that the characters are prepubescent and shouldn't have visibly different physical characteristics, but still, that is a long way from the time when the Pokémon manuals explicitly recommended that the children playing choose the character of their own gender.)
(Alternatively, consider the character creation in a game like BattleTech - there are no gender-locked features. It's been a little while since I played, but I believe that instead you just pick body characteristics from a big chart, so beards, breasts, etc., are perfectly interchangeable. Then at the end you pick pronouns from a drop-down menu. What's gone is any sense that these characteristics form two natural clusters. Instead of men and women, what we have are a bunch of isolated, chopped up body parts that can be reassembled in any combination. It's hard not to feel a bit dehumanised.)
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Yes, quite probably. He was certainly a critic of merely cultural Christianity.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I've noticed a trend in character creation along those lines - 'male' and 'female' in character creation are replaced with 'body type 1' and 'body type 2', and then player characters are referred to exclusively as 'they'. World of Warcraft is an example of this. It frankly makes me feel very uncomfortable and aggressively dehumanised.
What I find most frustrating about it is that it seems like the progressive case against doing this should be obvious - removing all gendered words and enforcing a single pronoun on everyone seems like, well, misgendering. If you took seriously the concern that using the wrong gendered language for someone might be cruel or even traumatic, it seems like you should be sensitive to this, and want to provide more options, rather than throwing everyone into a de-gendered basket of 'they'.
I conclude that they do not in fact take seriously that concern, and that it was and is not the actual underlying motive. Or at least, if there's a motive along the lines of "don't be cruel", it is not applied evenly to everyone, and indeed making certain types of people uncomfortable might be good.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
C. S. Lewis quite explicitly believed that his Christianity was not shared by the majority in his society. He is very clear that he believes that Christians are a minority in Britain, even though it was the middle of the 20th century and the number of people writing 'Christian' on the census was an overwhelming majority.
See, for instance. Mere Christianity p. 62, where he writes, "My own view is that the Churches should frankly realise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives." That book was published in 1952, and the passage I quoted was based on a radio talk he gave in the early 1940s. Lewis believed that as of 1952 most British people were not Christian.
For Lewis, being Christian in a meaningful sense is very much not just a matter of identification, nor of lip service. He understood himself to be counter-cultural.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
...does it? Does it really train any kind of 'moral immune system'?
It seems to me that it falls into the same category as, say, Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom, in that obviously the whole appeal of the story is the naked lady, and the moral is tacked on as an afterthought. The villainous elder is a convenient excuse for the artist to say that it's not really pornographic, even though that is obviously the appeal. There were ways depict a naked Susanna in ways that are not sensually or erotically appealing - but that is clearly not what happened in the case of Renaissance art. The beauty of the woman is quite clearly the point.
It's the pre-modern equivalent of, say, all those mid-century films about Nero or Caligulua, which delighted in titillating the viewer with detailed depictions of orgies and sex and murder, and then had the fig leaf of condemnation at the end where the hedonistic emperors are overthrown and virtue triumphs. But we all know what the real appeal is.
I would caution you not to take the fig leaf too seriously. I suggest that the quite-literally-naked eroticism of the Susanna story is central to its artistic appeal. The fact that there's a vague sort of moral cover for it (it's biblical! it condemns the behaviour!) is convenient, but to suggest that the entire theme is a subversion of libido seems quite breathtakingly naive, to me.
I notice also in your post a skepticism of '[leaving] artists to their own devices'. Even setting aside the way you reify 'The Past', I don't see any particular reason to think that commissioners of this art necessarily had high and virtuous motives. That's just a small handful of examples, and are we really so naive as to believe that bishops and nephews of popes in the Middle Ages of Renaissance were free of venal interests? It may be true that some artists are just horny and lack any concern for morality - but the same strikes me as true of nobles and church officials.
To be clear, I am not asserting that every single depiction of Susanna bathing is pornographic. On the contrary, I think that many of those depictions have artistic merit, and are often very well-composed and striking, or sometimes, as you say, subversive in their implications. But I assert that the enduring popularity of Susanna's bath as an artistic theme has something to do with its eroticism, in a way that goes beyond mere subversion.
Or more crassly: rich people from centuries in the past still liked to look at boobs.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
This is the kind of story which humans once had as their foundational tales. Less “crime bad”, more “withhold judgment until wisdom, because corruption worse”. Kids would have learned this story instead of “racism bad”. And for artists, the story of Susanna was one of the most popular scenes in the history of Western art. Think how beneficial that is! You require your artists to draw Susanna, a beautiful semi-nude figure, and then you require him to draw the corrupt licentious high status figures, ready to blackmail her before being executed. It not only creates a good moral tale for children but it ensures that your artists don’t become regressives.
Who is the 'you' in this paragraph?
Isn't the popularity of Susanna bathing, as a subject of art, significantly attributable to artists themselves wanting to produce it? And isn't that desire also largely explicable by the fact that it's a very sexy scene? I'm not sure we need a big explanation for why painters were very enthusiastic about painting an attractive woman in the nude. It seems a popular theme in general.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
The extent to which Catholicism requires agreeing with the pope is regularly contested along partisan lines.
Usually one side argues, "The pope is the vicar of Christ and visible leader of the church, from whom we learn and to whom we have an obligation to listen, and his words should be taken to heart by all Catholics", and the other side argues, "The pope is a human being and capable of error in ordinary circumstances, and there have been shockingly bad popes in the past. Respect for the papal office does not entail unthinking obedience to every off-the-cuff statement a pope makes, and good Catholics can and should, in obedience to sacred tradition, disagree with him where necessary".
And the two sides switch depending on whether or not they like the current pope or not. There is very little consistency.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
You'll have to forgive me if there's something a little counter-intuitive in the idea that the best way to decrease the number of rants about the Jews is to have more rants about the Jews.
And the general theory here doesn't seem to hold? If your assertion is that a perspective's popularity on the Motte correlates with that perspective's unpopularity in real life, well, there are far too many counter-examples of that. It's true, anti-semitism is extremely unpopular in real life. Here are some things that are also extremely unpopular in real life: cannibalism, ISIS, police abolition, Satanism, paedophilia. Yet nobody argues for these positions on the Motte.
It's not a simple correlation, where the less popular an idea is, the more likely that idea's adherents are to come here and post long essays about it.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
When was the last time a billionaire white nationalist or Nazi was punched? The infamous 'Nazi punch' was one guy and it set off a whole debate on the left about whether it was acceptable. Meanwhile of course Jews get attacked sometimes - the ADL (I know you may not trust them, but I doubt they're all completely fictional) cites 161 violent assaults in 2023.
But I guess beyond this I'm not particularly sure why you're focusing on white nationalism? Yes, white nationalism is an extremely hated and ostracised position in the US. I agree that white nationalism is more hated as a position than Zionism is. What is that meant to show? The fact that there exists an ideology more hated than Zionism does not mean that Zionism isn't hated.
Is your point just that you'd like for white nationalism to be at least as acceptable to argue for in public as Zionism?
In that case - great, good for you, but I hardly see how that reflects badly on Zionists. You can just advocate for white nationalism. No need to bring Zionism in at all.
(Unless the implication is that the reason white nationalism is widely hated is the Jewish conspiracy to destroy white culture and so on, but at that point we're just right back into the tiresome nonsense that I was sick of seeing in the first place.)
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Yes, I think this is true. 'Catholic' can continue to function as an identity even in the near-total absence of believe. 'Jew' and 'Muslim' both do the same thing to an extent as well, where they come to denote an ethnic or cultural background or upbringing. Protestantism largely does not do this. If you stop believing, you are no longer a Protestant or even a Christian.
Thus anecdotally I do often run into Catholics whose response to anything about doctrine or practice is roughly, "Oh, no one pays attention to that, don't worry." Catholicism can be grounded in something other than genuine, sincere belief. Protestantism cannot be.
(As a Protestant I'm inclined to see this as good, or at least, as not wholly bad. But that's a value judgement that could certainly be argued.)
I wonder how the supreme court looks if you track it, not by formally stated religious identity, but by actual practice? If we trust NCR, Roberts, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and certainly Barrett all seem to be practicing Catholics. Kagan is Jewish but it doesn't sound like like she's practicing? Gorsuch attends an Episcopalian church, and Jackson is very reticent on the subject, so I don't think I can tell how pious she is. At a glance it sounds like maybe a bit over half of the supreme court is meaningfully religious, in terms of personal practice?
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Yes, that's where you'll find the majority of culture war Catholicism. What is the Catholic Church? Is it what Catholics actually do or believe? Is it the doctrine of the church? What is the doctrine of the church, and who defines it, and that way lies a whole debate around tradition, magisterium, the papacy, and more.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
Yes, prior to Vatican II and especially prior to 1900 or so, the traditional Catholic position was basically that the state should formally endorse the Catholic Church, obey directives from the Vatican, and tolerate other religious positions either provisionally or not at all. Integralism is, broadly speaking, the traditional Roman position. If you ever get interested in the last two centuries of Spanish, French, or Italian history you will notice this causing a great deal of trouble. It's also responsible for a lot of traditional American (and Anglo in generally) anti-Catholicism. Taken seriously, it is the position that leads to drama like this.
However, Catholics, partly because of how extreme this position seems today, have largely been running away from it in the West, or have been looking for ways to reconcile Catholicism with American liberal values. Some have been more or less successful with this.
But anyway, if you dig into the European history a bit, 'discriminated against' is underselling it. This is/was a position that causes civil wars.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
What surprised me most in the reaction was this amusing line:
Butker’s statement explicitly argues that there’s a correct way to be Catholic, even though in reality, most Catholics are supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Well... yes.
Yes, there's a correct way to be Catholic. It involves believing and acting in accordance with Catholic teaching, which is very clear on some of those subjects.
How is that controversial?
OliveTapenade
13d ago
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what? There's plenty of room for Zionism to be unpopular and provocative and something that might make Jews afraid without it being exactly as bad as the worst thing in modern politics.
The fact that Zionism is not yet as universally loathed as Nazism (though, again, there are certainly crowds people who think it ought to be) doesn't seem to prove anything, to me. Unless you're asserting that it should be?
You're also equivocating a bit between 'Jews' and 'Zionists', so I suppose I'll ask directly. Do you think that Jews should get punched just for being Jews? Or Zionists just for being Zionists?
(And to pre-empt any attempt to turn it around, no, white nationalists or neo-Nazis should not be punched either.)
It seems to me that by any reasonable standard Zionism is quite widely and publicly hated. I mean, anecdotally I know Jews who have been taking self-defence classes and buying more home security and avoiding wearing any outward signs of Jewishness in public because they're afraid of being harassed or possibly attacked. Some of those fears are exaggerated, in my view, but they're not totally unjustified.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
There are, to be fair, plenty of contexts today where you would be afraid to publicly admit to being a Zionist, even by just a minimal definition of it (i.e. thinking it's good that Israel exists and wanting it to continue existing free of attack).
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I usually try to avoid blocking - in particular, in a case like this, the result would be that the front page would consistently have these large, highly-active threads, with dozens of responses to something I can't see. Realistically I suspect I'd just want to read the blocked content anyway, just to see what's going on!
OliveTapenade
13d ago
That generally makes sense as an explanation - I would take it as related to the collapse of mainline Protestantism, and more generally the end of the WASP class. Historically the supreme court is almost entirely what we would call 'mainline Protestant', but in the last few decades mainline Protestantism has firstly almost entirely collapsed and secondly gone quite liberal in terms of politics. Religious conservatives, bar a small handful of impressively stubborn confessional types, are almost entirely either evangelicals or Catholics. Evangelical Christianity in the US began as a movement against an intellectual establishment that they perceived as having succumbed to heresy. There may be many good things about evangelicalism, but it has inherited a certain anti-intellectual streak, and it has never managed to reconcile with cultural elites. It was and remains low-class.
So as you say, that leaves Catholics. The Republicans have made heavy use of them.
OliveTapenade
13d ago
I agree there's an important distinction to make there. Noticing and talking about Jewish overrepresentation is certainly not hateful or problematic in itself. It's an interesting observation, and one that may have positive and negative effects, for both Jew and non-Jew alike. I believe there are actually some meditations on the theme by Jews themselves.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
I'm not particularly inclined to argue voting machines. As it happens I actually agree that voting machines and electronic votes in general are a terrible idea, and I feel glad that my country exclusively deals in paper ballots.
But I'm not sure how that specifically addresses the issue? Again, the StopTheSteal argument was premised on a number of specific claims of fraud. Moving from those claims to a generic argument that voting machines are a sub-optimal way to run an election - well, sure, I agree, I'll let you have that motte, but boy, that is a large and expansive bailey you've just vacated.
You can argue that no election conducted with voting machines should be considered legitimate. Sure - like I said, I don't like voting machines at all. But if so, then that also goes for 2016, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996... in fact, over a century of American elections would have to be thrown out. (Half that if you restrict to computerised voting, but still, a long time.) That is not, however, the argument that StopTheSteal made.
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