WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
It's coherent but you are invoking a moral truth, whereas I am discussing realpolitik
Perhaps you are, but I think talking about "human rights" in terms of realpolitik is a category error. I was originally springing off of 2D3D asking what entitled Palestinians to Israeli food. "Moral rights," I replied. Your jumping to say 'what are these human rights worth, if no state actually enforces them?' is the equivalent of bringing up gun ownership and effective self-defense in the context of a conversation about whether innocent people getting murdered is wrong.
What can that moral correctness without leverage really accomplish in the moment?
Even if it can't sway Israel (let alone Hamas), it can influences the choices of people on the sidelines ie the rest of the world. Whether we're talking about the big picture of "should America support Israel's war effort even though it results in starving children", or the small picture of "should I, personally, donate to that online fundraiser to send help to starving little Abdul".
Do those human rights exist if neither side chooses to enforce them?
Well, if you aren't a nihilist, yes. The morally correct course of action remains the morally correct course of action even if nobody implements it. Under most western ethical philosophy, the right thing is under no cosmic obligation to be easily achievable for people who are also trying to secure geopolitical goals. Sometimes doing the right thing for the needy means you risk your own comfort and safety, and that's just the way it is.
We instinctively understand this where individual life-or-death situations are involved, eg running into a burning building. But somehow when we're talking about whole populations, both sides of the conversation pretend that a case that XYZ is the right thing to do also needs to prove it's the advantageous thing to do. No. It's perfectly coherent to say "The right thing to do is to prevent children from starving. It might in fact result in losing the war, but it's the right thing to do anyway. A victory that can only be won by starving children to death through inaction would be morally bankrupt and is not worth pursuing."
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
If they didn't fight, it would be October 7 constantly.
Well, that's the question. Hamas would certainly attempt October 7 constantly. But "Oct 7 was a fluke caused by an unforced error in the Israeli defense strategy, Hamas did not have the capacity to achieve regular Oct 7-level attacks and Oct 7 itself could easily have failed if Israel had put in a bit more effort" is a reasonable claim.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Why is Palestine entitled to Israeli food?
Well, human rights come to mind. Rather, they're the reason individual Palestinians are entitled to food generally, whatever it takes to get it to them - not Palestine as a political entity, and not Israeli food in particular.
I didn't mean that there was no wokeness in museums, just that the "memorials being forgotten about in renovations" thing doesn't necessarily/inherently seem like an effect of it. As per my anecdote, I've seen the same thing happen for no political reason at all, just because the bureaucrats who oversaw some alteration or other to a building or organization didn't care to preserve them in the switchover. (I do not say this to exonerate them. Frankly, all else being equal, the thoughtless lack of respect appalls me more than any deliberate attempt at damnatio memoriae. Actively wanting to destroy the legacy of your enemies is at least an understandable human emotion.)
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
The problem isn't personally having illegals hit and run you personally on the road (that was several friends of mine), or murder your family (that was my coworker's brother), or take hostages and burn your house down (that was a row of houses or two behind mine)
I think this still counts as things happening to you "personally". A series of mishaps and disasters affected your friends and family and coworkers and neighbors, and this gave you a subjective sense that civilization was falling apart blah blah blah. @cjet79 can correct me if I'm wrong, but I parsed "Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy" as very much including "my friends and relatives and neighbors have rarely if ever suffered life-ruining events of the kind you described as having affected your family, neighbors, etc.".
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Rape is more sensitive, I guess.
Especially with regards to CSA, it definitely leads to a lack of clarity at times. If someone tells me "oh, Alice was abused as a child" it can be pretty tricky to decipher if they're telling me her parents used to beat her, or that she was groomed by a creepy uncle - even when I am actually intended to take the hint by the speaker (as distinct from them deliberately obscuring the facts to protect Alice's privacy).
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I'd argue "passed away" is a more precise term than "died". "Passed away" means died peacefully. If I get a call that tells me my father passed away last night, I instantly parse it as: ah, he died in his sleep, guess age caught up with him at last. If the call instead tells me that my father died last night, I'm as likely to imagine that he had a car accident as anything else.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I get the "marriage equality" thing, but honestly I'm fine with that term too -- if you believe gay marriage is meaningfully different from straight marriage, obviously you think it's unequal, and should be so legally,
Well, one sticking point is that it used to be a major conservative talking point on the topic of gay marriage that the word "marriage" means "a man and a woman getting hitched", exclusively, fundamentally; that so-called "gay marriage" is not marriage at all, and granting queers the use of that word even with a qualifier is already surrendering half the battle. Precisely analogous to the anti-trans contingent's reluctance to use a term like "trans woman".
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Firstly, unless you're a complete nihilist, "black lives matter" is a true statement. So's "blue lives matter", and so's "all lives matter". The controversial ideological position behind BLM's name is the claim that white cops don't believe black lives matter and are consequently shooting innocent blacks left and right. Conservatives believe that this is baseless slander, that most cops value human lives as much as anyone without racial discrimination, and that the supposed spree of extrajudicial police killings is an illusion at best, a deliberate lie at worst. Nobody except a few mad edgelords disputes the literal meaning of the words "black lives matter". The implicit BLM claim of "black lives matter, and yet white cops are racist and don't believe that", meanwhile, is so contextual that simply saying the name "Black Lives Matter" does not, in any conceivable way, constitute parroting that claim out loud.
More salient, however, is the fact that while "black lives matter" is technically a "message" with a "direct plain meaning", the same can hardly be said of the words "george floyd". You are not endorsing any particular idea by mouthing or writing those syllables, except that there was a human being by that name involved in the event at issue, a truth-claim which I… hope you would not deny as a matter of objective fact.
That second bit is making it especially hard to take you seriously.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
For what it's worth, speaking as one of the most left-wing people here: I found it very interesting, I believe you wrote it in good faith, and I have a lot of sympathy for you, so I'm glad you did go to the effort of writing it.
(Of course, it doesn't convince me. The impression I get is that the universe has played a cruel trick on you - that you've been tremendously unlucky over an extended period of time, Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers-style, and this has inevitably and understandably skewed your intuitions in a very deep way. If I had a chronic heart condition, and got "treated" by three or four of Scott's anecdotally-psychopathic cardiologists in a row through pure luck of the draw… yeah, I might wind up with a deep-seated intuition that there's got to be something to the inherent rottenness of the profession, no matter how eloquently people tried to talk me out of it. Confirmation bias giving undue salience in my eyes to the ordinary feelings of ordinary cardiologists would do the rest.)
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Reminds me very much of Scott's misophonia essay.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
museums literally being torn up like an SNL sketch of Great Replacement Theory
Most of this sounds wild to me too, but I have no difficulty believing that bit. I don't think it's got much to do with immigration - even a connection to wokeness-writ-large seems strained - but memorials to otherwise-non-historically-relevant individuals being lost to renovations because nobody gave a shit is a story I've heard many times. My old college absolutely broke a sweet old nonagenarian's heart when they reorganized which departments got what buildings, and, in the process, failed to carry over the naming of one of the humanities dept.'s main lecture halls after his long-dead wife, who'd been a lecturer there herself. It wasn't anything to do with her being cancelled, it wasn't anything personal at all. There was just no procedure for carrying the tributes over, and no one cared enough to make one even with the old guy protesting to anyone who'd listen.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
because I thought bloody meat was gross, and consequently I did not enjoy steak any more than I did chicken
Dunno about that "consequently". I prefer my steak well done, and a nice well-done steak is one of my favorite foods.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Shame on the government for allowing a fentanyl crisis to fester and claim lives, you might equally say.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
But you did say his name. You typed "Floyd", right there in your message, clear as a bell. If you had some objection to typing out the full "George Floyd", well, I think that's pretty silly, but no one's asking you to do that; you could just have removed "Fentanyl" and said "Floyd's crime wave".
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
"the convention ought to be broken but only in casting in the correct direction in the progressive stack"
Yes, but I parse this as "the convention ought to be broken. separately, we should introduce a whole new convention about never making casting decisions that reduce the pool of roles available to POC actors". The reason a white actor playing a historically black character would be lambasted is not that it would break the norm of physically-realistic casting; the outrage you would get in such a situation would very much be rooted in "how dare you take this part away from deserving black actors".
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
So there is no distinction between fantasy and a straightforward historical drama for which factual depictions are expected?
Perhaps there historically has been (although people sure didn't use to shy away from casting John Wayne as Genghis Khan). I am simply saying that the pro-race-blind-casting position is to reject the expectation of realistic depiction; not to surrender historical accuracy itself. The smart pro-race-blind-casting argument isn't "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra is canonically Chinese" but "you should be allowed to make a movie where Cleopatra, a Greek woman in-universe, is played by a Chinese woman". i.e. you should look past the fact the actress in Chinese in the same way you look past the fact that she's speaking modern English instead of subtitled Ancient Greek.
I sympathize with saying that this is a distracting burden to place on the audience. But people keep complaining "but Cleopatra wasn't Chinese. casting a Chinese Cleopatra would be inaccurate", and that is the position I am trying to defeat. "Cleopatra is canonically speaking Ancient Greek, but the audience doesn't understand it and the actress can't pronounce it properly anyway, so we'll depict the dialogue in (non-diegetic) modern English" -> "Cleopatra is canonically Greek, but Chinese actors need jobs and Hollywood doesn't make that many meaty historical dramas about Chinese history, so we'll cast a (non-diegetically) Chinese actress as Cleopatra".
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
You have chosen an especially poor example with Rings off Power, because it belies either an ignorance about the purpose behind Tolkien’s work, or else an intentional disregard for it. Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories are intended as an ersatz mythos for the historical peoples of the British Isles (…) To the extent that this matters to you, it should matter that the actors involved at least plausibly physically resemble somebody belonging to, or descending from, those peoples. It matters that they’re white in a way that it doesn’t matter if the actors in a Star Wars film are white.
No. You are still missing the point I was trying to make. By all means, perhaps it matters that the characters are white. My argument is that (the pro-race-blind-casting position is that) it shouldn't matter if a character who is theoretically white within the story is played by an actor who is visibly black. This is precisely what I meant about Hobbit genetics being neither here nor there to the debate: I am not denying that the Hobbits are meant to be white. I am saying that you can cast a bunch of black actors as white Hobbits.
If a director set out to make a Harriet Tubman biopic and chose to cast Saiorse Ronan in the title role, there is no amount of “she just really crushed the audition, and I’ve always wanted to work with her” that would suffice to excuse what would be (correctly) interpreted at a slap in the face to black Americans. They own Harriet Tubman’s legacy in a way that white people obviously don’t. She means something to them, it’s important for them to see themselves in her, and pretty much everybody understands that.
Well, yeah. Notably, however, this is a very different argument from it being wrong because Saiorse Ronan is physically too different from the historical Tubman and casting her would be unrealistic. The outrage would be rooted in the racial politics of denying a job from some other, black actress who rightfully "deserved" it more than a white actress ever could. If, say, a black actress with dwarfism were to be cast as Harriet Tubman, this would scarcely be more physically accurate than casting Saiorse Ronan, and yet I predict you'd see much fewer complaints.
(Also, in an ideal world, I, for one, believe a director who sincerely wanted to make that movie for the reasons you ascribe to him ought to be able to make it and not be branded a racist for having made it. That's neither here nor there because I'm trying to steelman the pro-race-blind-casting position as it actually exists, not mount my own argument, but I thought it would be worth clarifying so we know where we stand.)
I think you recognize that there is an explicitly redistributive aspect to modern race-swapped casting.
Indeed I do, and I've recognized it explicitly in this thread.
you also have to justify making it work one way only
Well, that's where the usual affirmative-action argument comes in - "black actors deserve as many job opportunities and chances to shine as white actors, and they won't get them unless you go for race-blind casting and compromise on the convention of casting for physical resemblance". Notably, this argument works even without ascribing racist animus to any casting director - it's just an emergent consequence of e.g. most historical dramas being based on western history.
And you can certainly reject that argument if you want, for all sorts of reasons. I don't buy it all the way myself (I personally don't find race-blind casting distracting, and would encourage more productions to use it if it were up to me; but equally, if a director is really committed to a lifelike historical vision, I think that's their prerogative and it doesn't make them a racist, which is a hot take these days). The point I wanted to make is just that "the convention ought to be broken" is the serious pro-race-blind-casting position, which means the endless arguments about the plausibility of black WWII pilots or black Hobbits are a distraction. If they want to be taken seriously - and granted, that is an uphill battle to an unfair degree - retractors need to ask more questions like "Is it detrimental to a film's artistic worth for a white WWII pilot to be portrayed by a black actor?", and to make fewer snide comments about the apparent population genetics of the Ring of Powers Shire being implausible, which is, again, missing the point on a level with complaining that a Muppet doesn't look like a real barnyard animal.
The real bullshit is something like the London blitz containing black characters.
I find this perspective a bit baffling. Have people forgotten how the artifice of fiction works? The idea that what we see on-screen has to represent the literal truth of the fictional universe, hidden-cameras style, in every detail, is a very modern idea and a pretty dumb one. It's how you get people making convoluted theories about code-names and plastic surgery to explain how James Bond turns into a different guy in-between movies. It's just a recast, bro. The 'real' James Bond looks neither exactly like Sean Connery nor exactly like George Lazenby. They're actors. Stand-ins. Race-blind casting in historical dramas works in the same way. A black actor is playing a character who, "in-universe", the audience is expected to understand wasn't actually black.
If you find this sort of thing immersion-breaking, fair enough. I certainly understand the appeal of television which leans really hard into hyper-researched realism; Rings of Power must particularly rankle because the Jackson films were built on this sort of thing. But complaining that black RAF pilots are "historically inaccurate" makes about as much sense as complaining that if Kermit is supposed to be a frog, he shouldn't look like he's made out of felt.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
Oh, there's potential, but it's not going to scratch that whodunnit itch. It's something else.
Look. The rate of adoptees who go on to ruin their parents' lives and their own is high. It's much higher than polite society acknowledges, or many prospective adopters realize. Granted. But it's nowhere near 100%. For a considerable number of children, it's exactly the life-improving, beneficial change that adopters want to give, and it works out good-to-great. Many more sit in the middle, with adoption neither a massive mistake, nor a miraculous cure-all - those kids might never make anything much of themselves, but at least they got a happier childhood in the bargain, and the parents have nothing to regret even if they might, perhaps, have hoped for grander outcomes.
So yeah, the firefighter analogy still seems apt to me. If there's someone stuck on the top floor of a burning building, and I decide to go in there - I know there's a good chance, a really good chance, that we'll both die today and I'll have thrown my own life away "for nothing". But I'm going in anyway, because I also know there's a solid chance I'll save their life. Ideally I'll get them out without injury to either of us; more likely, they'll sustain some severe burns before I can get to them… but hey, it would still beat letting them die. Taking that gamble is what we call "being a hero". In the movies the life-or-death gamble always pays off. And that's a nice story. But celebrating and encouraging heroic behavior in the real world involves acknowledging that sometimes the dice are against you and you sacrifice yourself "for nothing", and that's just the way of it, and it doesn't make it worthless to try.
I don't see how you can possibly argue against this unless 1) you preposterously believe that an overwhelming majority of adoptions wind up net-negative for all involved, 2) you think even adoptions that don't blow up the parents' lives have a negligible positive impact on the children, or 3) you think improving the children's lives has no positive value and base the EV of adoption purely on the potential harm to the parents. 1) would be incredibly dumb and 3) would be skin-crawlingly evil. If it's 2), I'd like to see some solid evidence, because it'd be a pretty counterintuitive claim, what with the foster care system's track record being a massive horror story of its own.
Well, about donations, a deontologist might very well say "the correct choice for me today is to donate to the starving kids; if Hamas steal some of my donations tomorrow, that is their own evil act, exercising their own free will, they could have chosen to do otherwise and I do not bear the blame if they choose evil, however likely that is". So might a utilitarian who thinks about the very big picture, and thinks maintaining a global norm of "if any children are starving anywhere on the planet, the developed world will intervene; we Do Not Do famine anymore, we have outgrown it as a species, end-of-story" has better outcomes in the very long run than examining each particular famine and determining if there could be unintended harms from intervention - just as most utilitarians agree that in practice you have a moral duty to abide by any law of the land banning murder, instead of calculating the moral cost-benefits of killing someone for the greater good all by your lonesome, because the outcomes from everybody taking it upon themselves to decide who lives and who dies are inevitably a blood-soaked hellscape.
(Similarly, America might choose to stay out of the war for virtue-ethics reasons - "it sullies the soul to ally oneself with a side that would starve children to achieve their ends, even if the other guys are also horrible barbarians" - or maintaining-global-norms reasons - "banning war crimes in a genuinely effective way that disincentivizes committing them can only be achieved if we hold to precommitments about withholding aid to people who commit them, even if those people were historically our friends and we don't want the people they're currently fighting to win".)
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