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Notes -
A poster here recommended a book to us all called “Introduction to Christianity”, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (who would go on to become Pope Benedict XVI) a few weeks ago. I recently got a copy of it.
I wanted to share with you all the first few paragraphs from the book, because I found them very interesting:
I’m sure we’ve all felt like that clown at some point or another. Especially with regards to ideas like “just kids on college campuses”.
Here’s a quote, this one from Saint Anthony The Great, one of The Desert Fathers (Early Christian precursors to Christian monks who lived in Egypt in about 300AD).
Anyway I think the relevance to the culture war is obvious here, and could be taken any of many directions. I just read this today and wanted to share. To pull on one culture war thread (perhaps one of the oldest culture war) it is profoundly depressing to me that these parts of our history, especially the history of The Catholic Church, seem to be suppressed or at the very least ignore in modern western society.
Thanks for sharing it – I'd probably never have bothered to check it myself, due to my (low )prior for value for such literature. This is of course ironic.
The generally applicable logic of his parable, I take it, is that the target of one's proselytism can have arbitrarily strong resistance to your message, either because it relies on extra elements absent in the target's knowledge, or because (more problematically) s/he has received inoculation, to the point of becoming cognitively closed to the message, elements required to parse it, or both.
When inoculated, the target's prior for messengers of your kind, or messages of this type, or both, is such that critical bits (in the clown's case, the truth value of fire, perhaps its early signs) will not be inspected with the scrutiny they deserve, and the rest (desperate gestures, repeating the same thing over and over, enumerating reasons not to doubt a clown, prophesying increasingly extreme costs of disbelief) will be shoehorned into a pattern that allows to react as usual – as if it's a clown show.
I believe the Pope was being too charitable to his side, but certainly I know that feel. There's nuance, of course. Believers complain they aren't taken seriously, because atheists are very sure of being above the clown's game. In the case of hot button topics in the realm of purely secular politics, one can encounter the exact opposite. Perhaps the most frustrating pattern, and one that seems monopolized by the Left, is to assume that the opponent is a rhetorical superintelligence. Sometimes it's phrased the way @2rafa does with regard to Holocaust revisionists, with the focus on experience and cherrypicked trivia (to be clear: sometimes this pattern is valid, which gives it plausibility in the general case, and I think it is valid on this issue; although this still wouldn't justify having strong opinions without object-level knowledge).
Sometimes, the alleged rhetorical superiority of a right-winger is explained by him just being unscrupulous plus very skillful. Therefore, him being persuasive and dissecting your every counterpoint is no more evidence for him being correct than a grizzly bear's ability to rip your head off is evidence of bears being morally above humans; no more than the fact of evil AI being good at pleading to let it out of the box is a cause to oblige.
Oh, speaking of Contrapoints. Here's something from December 2019:
It's a closed memetic surface.
Digging through «The Motte postmortem», I've found a good example of its topology on TheSchism:
And of course our dearly departed Impassionata:
Playing with facts is easy mode so it doesn't matter if you get rekt; appeal to authority is hard and disagreeing with it is the sign of madness.
(So I guess that's what Sartre meant about Anti-Semites assuming the privilege to «play with discourse» while the polite folk are restricted to serious facts and are thus at a disadvantage. Can't say I'm convinced, but then again, they're trying to convince «the audience», and if it's inoculated enough, that'll work. By the way. 895158 also has attributed his condemnation of The Motte to activities of yours truly. Sorry guys for ruining your community.)
A well-formed conflict theory absorbs unlimited epistemic and moral double standard, because there's no standard sans power. It develops scholarship on how the other side allegedly does attack of some type A, to delegitimize arguments that can be shoehorned into A, and check A if it actually takes place, and it teaches on how to do A yourself, and it separately teaches the subtle art of denying friendly As. It's pretty much the same thing as normal military theory.
The question is what is left to the losing side, except surrender.
The point, succinctly, was that the taboo on political violence is both immensely valuable and quite delicate, that we will all miss it badly when it's gone, and that imagining that this taboo can be set aside on a limited basis for one side only is one of the stupidest ideas one can possibly hold. I am quite confident in this thesis and in the arguments I made to support it: it is easy to justify retributive violence, but much harder to control who gets to enact their preferred retribution, a problem exacerbated by a general lack of imagination on the forms and nature such retribution can take.
What about that seemed weak to you?
You know, it's not hard to make a link. In particular, I don't think
has aged nearly as poorly as you think it has, even and especially as someone that opposed this philosophy both for BLM-'adjacent' rioters and for 'WACO Avengers'.
At the very least, the math has, if anything, only become far more favorable, especially as judges and prosecutors have come up with excuses for men who literally lit black lives on a pyre for the cause.
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