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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31005 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Some complaints about Netflix's new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front.

Im Westen nichts Neues is one of my most beloved books, and it had a profound effect on me reading it as a teen. Moreover, the First World War is a period of history that has always fascinated me. Consequently, I have Strong Opinions on Netflix's adaptation. In general, I try to avoid watching adaptations of my favourite books, and I haven't seen either the 1930 film or the 1979 TV series. Yet bored in a hotel room, I decided to watch this one (warning - spoilers ahead).

In short, while the movie was a visual feast and was highly evocative (and Daniel Brühl is a consistently fine actor), it also spectacularly missed the point of the novel. To wit...

(1) The title of the novel literally means "nothing new on the Western front", reflecting a central theme of the novel concerning the ubiquity and mediocrity of human suffering in this period - Paul's death isn't even a footnote in dispatches. By shifting the action of the story to the final day of the conflict, you lose the sense of mediocrity and genericity - the dispatches from November 11 1918 most certainly did NOT read "Im Westen nichts Neues". Consequently, the adaptation misses one of the central themes of the novel.

(2) Additionally, by making the denouement of the movie a senseless attack ordered by a deranged general, the hamartiology of the movie is fundamentally undermined. A big part of the novel is that if there was evil in the trenches, it was deeper, systemic, engrained in our species and society rather than locatable within a particular malevolent actor. But we all know exactly who to blame for the final, utterly pointless assault at the end of the movie - the cartoonishly nationalistic and stupid General Friedrichs.

(3) Arguably the most powerful part of the book - aside from the eternally haunting crater scene (which I'll grant the movie did well) - is when Paul returns home to the village of his birth, and finds himself utterly alienated from his former community. This is something we feel powerfully as a reader, too - after the torrent of horror and futility we've been reading, there is a tonal whiplash returning to a civilian setting that emphasises the naivety and lack of understanding of Paul's former mentors. The idea that warfare fundamentally damages and dislocates combatants from their pre-war communities is one that's now firmly in our cultural DNA thanks to the flood of post-Vietnam movies exploring alienation and PTSD, but Im Westen nichts Neues was one of the earliest works to explore it. Yet this whole scene is utterly absent from this adaptation, again because of the foolish decision to shift the focus to an incredibly compressed time window at the end of the war.

(4) As an amateur military historian, I found lots of things that made me grind my teeth (in contrast to Sam Mendes' relatively punctilious 1917). I won't list them all, you'll be glad to know, but just to highlight one, the movie depicts an array of threats and modern horrors, from planes to tanks to flamethrowers, in an unrealistically condensed and spectacular fashion. This would be understandable if we were being shown an edited "highlights reel" of several months of fighting, but we're expected to think this all happened in a single day! In fact, the majority of deaths in WW1 were due to artillery, not machine guns as the mythology would have it. Moreover, most of these deaths happened not in mass 'over the top' assaults but while soldiers huddled in dugouts. The First World War was largely a miserable boring conflict in which death could come at any time due to a shell landing in the trench next to you.

(5) The decision to explore the armistice negotiations was an interesting one, and Matthias Erzberger is a fascinating figure. But if this was what Director Edward Berger wanted to explore, he should have made a different film. As it was, these scenes were utterly underdeveloped, and we didn't get much insight into why Germany was forced to negotiate, or the various factions involved on the German side. The growing effects of the British blockade, the abdication of the Kaiser, the failure of the U-boat campaign, the horrific losses and disappointment from the 1918 German Spring Offensive, the Russian revolution, fears of the nascent threat of Communism, the collapse of the Danube front - all of these themes are important and interesting if one wants to tell a story about why the war ended. As it was, the Armistice scenes detracted from the film's ability to tell Paul's story at the frontline, while failing to deliver a particularly rich or historically-informed narrative about the politics.

I will resist the opportunity to go on a further rant about public misperceptions of World War 1, but I will say that while I love Blackadder Goes Forth with a passion, it has - in combination with the "lions led by donkeys" trope - helped cement many misunderstandings about the war, especially in the British mindset, and this film perpetuates many of these myths.

For example, the First World War's causes were not some terrible accident or obscure diplomatic nonsense involving an ostrich. It had been brewing for decades as the balance of power in Europe shifted, Germany and Russia sought to flex their muscles, the Ottoman Empire declined, and France sought to undo the losses of the Franco-Prussian War. It very nearly happened several years earlier during the various Morocco crises, for example. All of the players had very good (political) reasons to fight. The involvement of the UK in particular was triggered by the German invasion of Belgium, a neutral country whose defense we were explicitly committed to. The death-toll and misery and human suffering of the war was obviously colossal, and from a moral perspective of course the war was a species-level mistake. But it was a disaster arising from deep systemic factors, and without radically revising the world order as it was in 1914, it's not clear how it could or should have been avoided.

Relatedly, there were no 'easy fixes' for the stalemate of trench warfare. As everyone knows, the balance of military technology at the time made sustained offensives very costly and unlikely to result in breakouts. However, defense was also very costly; in the majority of German offensives, for example, the Allies suffered more casualties as defenders than the Germans did as attackers. Ultimately, when you have large industrialised countries with huge populations that are engaged in what they see as a war for national survival, they will send millions of soldiers to fight and die; these nations can "take a punch", as Dan Carlin memorably put it, and there's no "One Weird Trick To Fix The Trench Warfare Stalemate". When various powers did try alternative approaches - for example, the Gallipoli landings or the Ostend Raids - it generally backfired. While the likes of John French and Douglas Haig were mediocre commanders, even the best and most innovative officers of the war (such as John Monash) sustained eye-watering casualties.

Despite all the above complaints, I do think the film is worth watching; it is a visual feast, as I say, and some scenes are spectacularly well done: the famous crater scene, as well as the 'uniform scenes' added at the start that KulakRevolt discussed here. However, as an adaptation of the book or as a rumination on the nature of evil in warfare, it is distinctly lacking.

I'm in 100%, total agreement with you, as a big fan of the book and someone very interested in the world wars. I've mentioned before here that the depiction of the Germans as over-eager in the final days of the war isn't just a baffling reversal of the book's finish, but also likely to give the average viewer the completely wrong impression about what the German morale and position was like come November 1918.

Over time I've become less and less tolerant for movies that take historical liberties. I don't really care about names or places or specific dates, or getting all the period details of dress and costume and dialogue correct. But the average person should be able to get, emotionally and intellectually, a roughly accurate impression of the era depicted. The average person knows fuck all about history EXCEPT for what they get from pop culture, and so in that respect I do feel that film/tv/video game creatives have some responsibility to get the broad stuff right. In an age of decreased literacy they do shoulder more of the burden (extremely sadly) for explaining history. And I think it's much more important that the larger public have a decent sense of our shared history than most people would reckon.

I will resist the opportunity to go on a further rant about public misperceptions of World War 1, but I will say that while I love Blackadder Goes Forth with a passion, it has - in combination with the "lions led by donkeys" trope - helped cement many misunderstandings about the war, especially in the British mindset, and this film perpetuates many of these myths.

YES. I remember watching a few of the episodes in high school history class and it was one of the first time that I realised how, with just a little bit of obsessiveness about history in my spare time, I already knew more than a lot of well-educated adults.

However, to paraphrase what has been said about Neville Chamberlain, World War I British have about as much chance of being remembered as competent decision-makers in a new and difficult environment as Pontius Pilate has of being remembered as a competent Roman official.

I don't know that much about WWI but I got the sense that it was a very theatrical and "hollywood-ized" depiction of the war. I watched the 1930 years ago in college and I especially remembered the scene where their kindly postman becomes a tyrannical bully once he's in uniform. I was disappointed not to see that in this movie.

The involvement of the UK in particular was triggered by the German invasion of Belgium, a neutral country whose defense we were explicitly committed to.

That is the official reason, because the UK government knew it would be hard to convince the British public that Serbia was worth fighting over, but they were keen to get involved from the very start.

Indeed, Britain's involvement is what really set it off as a "World War", whereas if they had stayed out it would've probably been a larger repeat of something like the Franco Prussian war. I've felt for a while that their decision to join the war was ultimately the most disastrous foreign policy decision the UK ever made.

Does Trump sue just to fundraise?

Throughout the early history of the American legal system, if you wanted to sue anyone in court you had to follow this arcane and inconsistent labyrinth of common law pleading rules. What we today generically call "lawsuits" were pointlessly split up into "actions at law" or "bills in equity" or whatever, all of which had different pedantic rules depending on the jurisdiction you're in (for a long time, federal courts dealing with state law had to apply procedural rules that were in effect at the time the state joined the Union). When the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were first created in 1938, the intent was to get rid of the stodgy traditional requirements in favor of something comparatively more informal. As reflected in Rule 8, all you really need to file a lawsuit is a "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief" in your complaint.

This "permissive" paradigm was put to the test in front of the same guy who was responsible for writing those new rules, Judge Charles E. Clark. The 1944 case Dioguardi v. Durning is a fun read, and involves a handwritten lawsuit filed by a guy with a very questionable grasp on the English language complaining about a customs official seizing "tonic" bottles "of great value" imported from Italy. Clark ruled that "however inartistically they may be stated" the guy was clear enough to meet the new pleading standards. For a more modern example from a much more complicated case, see the complaint that was filed in the Tesla Securities lawsuit (I know nothing about this case, just picked it at random for an example). Despite the complex subject matter and the number of people involved, the complaint is only 58 pages and is structured logically enough to make it relatively easy to follow. It establishes why the court should hear the case, some background facts, and then articulates in clear detail who harmed who and why the court should do something about it.

In contrast, compare the lawsuit that Lance Armstrong filed against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in 2012. The Judge took one look at the PDF, saw that it was 80 pages long, and promptly dismissed it with a "I ain't reading all that" ruling:

Armstrong's complaint is far from short, spanning eighty pages and containing 261 numbered paragraphs, many of which have multiple subparts. Worse, the bulk of these paragraphs contain "allegations" that are wholly irrelevant to Armstrong's claims and which, the Court must presume, were included solely to increase media coverage of this case, and to incite public opinion against Defendants. See, e.g., Compl. [#1] ¶ 10 ("USADA's kangaroo court proceeding would violate due process even if USADA had jurisdiction to pursue its charges against Mr. Armstrong."). Indeed, vast swaths of the complaint could be removed entirely, and most of the remaining paragraphs substantially reduced, without the loss of any legally relevant information. Nor are Armstrong's claims "plain": although his causes of action are, thankfully, clearly enumerated, the excessive preceding rhetoric makes it difficult to relate them to any particular factual support. This Court is not inclined to indulge Armstrong's desire for publicity, self-aggrandizement, or vilification of Defendants, by sifting through eighty mostly unnecessary pages in search of the few kernels of factual material relevant to his claims.

Since lawsuits are already a vehicle to air grievances, it's understandable when clients/lawyers try to sneak in as many parting shots as possible. Lawsuits are endowed with an aura of gravity and seriousness that a bare press release or op-ed outlining the same grievances would lack. Unless things get *too *egregious, there's not a whole lot a judges can do to stop the practice of trying to disguise a press release under a legitimate lawsuit costume.

Back in March of last year, Trump filed a wide-ranging 108-page lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and several dozen other defendants. You can read the entire lawsuit yourself here but the basic allegation is defamation over claims/insinuations that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. The complaint was later "amended" in June to include yet more defendants, and ballooned to 193 pages in the process.

The Trump v. Clinton et al lawsuit eventually got dismissed last September. For a full accounting as to why you can read the 65-page opinion but the short summary is the lawsuit was a confusing constellation of disconnected political grievances Trump had smooshed together into a laundry list of allegations that could not conceivably be supported by any existing law. For example, Trump's lawyer Alina Habba alleged malicious prosecution without a prosecution, alleged RICO violations without predicate offenses, alleged obstruction of justice without a judicial proceeding, cited directly to reports that contradicted their claims, and on and on. None of these problems are supposed to be common knowledge, but it is *very *basic stuff any lawyer filing a federal lawsuit should either know or research before they step foot on a rake. But when the defendants in this case pointed out the problems, Habba's response was to just double down instead of correct them. My favorite tidbit was when they justified why one of the 30+ defendants, a New York resident, was being sued in a Florida court (even federal courts need personal jurisdiction established) by claiming that defendant should've known that the false information they were spreading would end up in Florida, and also that they "knew that Florida is a state in the United States which was an important one."

When someone is served with any lawsuit, they have an obligation to respond or risk losing the entire case by default. In very rare circumstances (namely with handwritten complaints from prisoners with nothing better to do), a lawsuit is so patently bogus that a defendant can sit on their laurels doing nothing, confident it will get dismissed without them having to lift a finger. Before Trump's lawsuit was dismissed, a veritable legal machinery from the 30+ individuals/corporations sued whirred into action, ginning up an eye-watering amount of billable hours in the process to investigate and respond to the allegations. The judge in this case was seriously annoyed by all this and on Thursday she imposed sanctions by ordering Habba and Trump to pay everyone's legal bills, totalling almost $938,000. You can read the 46-page opinion here.

I've written before about pretextual excuses, such as when NYC *claimed *their employee vaccine mandate was for public health reasons, but then implemented exceptions that were inconsistent with their lofty claim. I argued it's reasonable to conclude NYC was lying. Similarly, Habba may claim as a lawyer that her lawsuit was to pursue valid legal remedies on behalf of her client, but when her efforts are completely inconsistent with that goal, it's perfectly reasonable to conclude she's lying. If valid legal remedies was the real goal of the suit, even someone like me --- with no experience civil litigation --- can contemplate trivial changes which would have significantly improved its success (most obviously don't wait past the statute of limitations, don't try to sue 31 different entities all at once, don't try to sue in a court that lacks jurisdiction, don't try to sue fictitious entities, etc.). So if that wasn't the real goal, what was?

The judge in this case strongly suspects the real purpose of the (bogus) lawsuit was to use it as a vehicle for fundraising. The vast scope of characters sued matches with this explanation because while a disparate cast of defendants legally frustrated the lawsuit in the courtroom, it does make for a better headline when soliciting donations (Clinton! Adam Schiff! James Comey! Lisa Page! Peter Strzok!). Trump has a pattern of filing frivolous lawsuits (like suing the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation for awarding NYT and WaPo) and then following up with "breaking news alerts" soliciting donations for his Save America PAC, so the timing matches up. The fundraising efforts appear to be working well, with the PAC having about $70 million on hand as of last fall.

The sanction this judge imposed is the highest by far imposed on any of Trump's attorneys. It's possible this is a coincidence, but the day after the sanctions, Trump voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit he filed in Florida (??) against New York's Attorney General. I'm assuming the judge hopes the $1 million penalty will discourage further waste of time for the courts and other potential defendants, but the fundraising mechanism I described feeds itself. The higher the sanction imposed, the more urgent the breaking news alert begging for money will be.

=edited

Seeing ymeskhout and Nybbler duking it out is like seeing mommy and daddy fighting. Stop it, think of the children!

That said, the post was good and informative and Trump should not be above reproach. The attempts to raise the costs for criticising Trump on The Motte reads to me like a cheap attempt to enforce consensus. That is not why we're here.

This is my read of it as well, particularly considering how many are coupling with the thought-terminating cliche phrase "Orange Man Bad". It is highly ironic to me that this phrase, supposed to mock "NPC-like" left-wing behavior, has just become a reflective crutch to be employed by MAGA and MAGA-adjacent folks every time someone criticizes Trump for anything, anywhere, no matter the quality of the criticism.

Trump is the former US president and quite potentially a future US president as well! He should be criticized, and criticized a lot, for his various maneuvers and wheeling and dealing!

Well, I wouldn't use it if the criticism was substantive, but most times it does amount to nothing more than "Orange Man Bad". Trump is supposed to be uniquely awful. Situate him in the context, demonstrate that this is so and that it's not the equivalent of an instance in the past when everyone was shocked and horrified by how uniquely awful and unprecedented such and such was.

We're currently seeing with Biden, for instance, that taking batches of classified documents home with you after leaving office is not a once-off, uniquely Trumpian, case. And indeed Biden did it before Trump, after leaving office as Vice-President for Obama. But somehow this is different. "Oh but Trump opposed and fought, Biden co-operated". Biden had these documents for six years, had no idea he had them, left them lying around in cupboards to be found by people clearing out old offices, and in his garage. Of course he didn't fight, he was all "I have classified documents? Okay, if you say so". Is this supposed to be better?

We're currently seeing with Biden, for instance, that taking batches of classified documents home with you after leaving office is not a once-off, uniquely Trumpian, case. And indeed Biden did it before Trump, after leaving office as Vice-President for Obama. But somehow this is different. "Oh but Trump opposed and fought, Biden co-operated". Biden had these documents for six years, had no idea he had them, left them lying around in cupboards to be found by people clearing out old offices, and in his garage. Of course he didn't fight, he was all "I have classified documents? Okay, if you say so". Is this supposed to be better?

Yes. Being in violation of the rules because of negligence and then cooperating to rectify the mistake is better than openly flaunting the rules, if you believe the rules are just. Which I do in this case, even if its enforcers aren't.

Well, in this case, I find it pretty hard to argue that it's a substantial criticism, in the way that I haven't seen this particular criticism before and it adds to the image of a Trump being a type to ignore the formal rules of the system to pursue personal agendas, surely something one would mostly not want to see in a president. Furthermore, it taught me things about the American legal system I hadn't read about or even considered before. Summarizing this particular post just as "Orange Bad Mad" seems, indeed, nothing more than a reflex, and it's not the first time I've seen this thought-terminating phrase just being used as an automatic dismissive reaction to any and all criticism of Trump.

Yes, yes, heaven forbid that people are informed what the thread is about, so they can scroll by if they're not interested.

Trump is the former US president and quite potentially a future US president as well! He should be criticized, and criticized a lot, for his various maneuvers and wheeling and dealing!

Criticize President Trump? Inconceivable! It has never been done before!*

*) Which is to say: there's nothing wrong with beating a dead horse, but stop acting like criticizing Trump is what people have an issue with.

I haven't seen this particular criticism of Trump before, and I found it interesting to read.

Sure, I'm not saying it shouldn't be posted, just that people miffed because this wasn't what they were signing up for have a right to be miffed.

arguing with Nybbler means you're probably gonna lose

Your post was high quality. One can always disagree on substance, but their criticism of the form doesn't hold water. Partisan complaints based on impossibly high standards shouldn't be rewarded with edits, let alone apologies and bans.

I think any issues it had were solved with changing the headline to:

Does Trump sue just to fundraise?

I actually ignored the post from the start, but I can understand someone being frustrated at essentially being Rick-Rolled into reading another "Orange Man Bad!" post. Likewise the "You're about to be triggered" warning was picking a fight. The post as it is now, is perfect.

I actually ignored the post from the start, but I can understand someone being frustrated at essentially being Rick-Rolled into reading another "Orange Man Bad!" post. Likewise the "You're about to be triggered" warning was picking a fight.

I agree with this criticism, and credit to @aqouta for convincing me of the errors of my ways. I feel silly that I did not consider "open question as headline" as an option before.

Thank you. It's certainly possible that some partisans want to react to arguments they don't like by throwing a tantrum instead of engaging with the argument itself, but given the amount of productive feedback I received in this thread, it's worthwhile to remain receptive to valid criticism and acknowledge it.

Content Warning: This post criticizes Trump

This is obnoxious and unnecessary.

Some people thought that my post was a pretextual excuse where I discuss the US legal system just as a vehicle to criticize Trump. The whole point of the post was to criticize Trump, so I wanted to make that clear to anyone who would read this. How else would you propose I address this concern?

I saw the down thread squabbling and can registering nothing beyond a desire to recoup the precious minutes wasted in reading it. I will be brief for the sake of you and others. Your disagreement would be best resolved by not having happened, the second best solution is to have it be ignored or at least contained to the offending response thread. Editing your post in any way to make this disagreement more visible cannot possibly improve it. If you wish to make someone seem like an unhinged partisan for dismissing valid criticism this is practically the worst way to achieve your goal. You know, I know and everyone reading your post knows that this warning has no purpose other than to sneer.

You make a good point about visibility, and I edited the content warning to a more natural sounding open question. I put [edited] at the bottom. I would have edited more of a note but I'm already at 9991/10000 characters.

Significantly better, thank you.

Adding the other poster's name was gratuitous but I think the content warning was fine as it was. People are mad at you because they don't enjoy reading long posts criticizing Trump and they admit as much. The content warning gives them a chance to minimize it and move on, which is what they should do instead of getting mad and telling you to delete your post.

Partisans here know what they're getting into when they read long form analysis of Trump lawsuits. A content warning is as much of an insult to the reader's intellect as a warning that an aquarium may contain fish. @ymeskhout frequently makes posts of this type that I genuinely find valuable, especially with the aggressively neutral wording emblematic of a good lawyer that lets the facts and framing damn their opposition in a way low effort swipes simply irritate. It's frankly below them.

I don't think partisans do know what to expect.

My own biases are flattered by @ymeshkout's take, but if certain usernames were at the top, I'd go in assuming apologetics. Or at least "Here's why there's a problem Trump wants to combat."

For what it's worth, coming into the version that asks "just to fundraise?" I think it's pretty reasonable. That's a hypothesis, it's made clear from the start, and then the rest defends it. I read it as less stilted than a Content Warning and less of a bait-and-switch than just segueing partway through.

People are mad at you because they don't enjoy reading long posts criticizing Trump and they admit as much.

Some people did have thoughtful feedback downthread which I found persuasive and noted accordingly. For that reason, I'll hold out hope that people are not mad over something as petty and childish as what you're describing.

How else would you propose I address this concern?

Don't use something deliberately provocative like "Content Warning". If the point of your post is to criticise Trump first, and the legal arcanities are second, then state that at the outset: "I want to criticise Trump from the standpoint of the lawsuits he takes".

You're perfectly free to say "Orange Man Bad" but why drag us through a history of "bills in equity" to get there? In fact, I think if you did do a post about the history of lawsuits, it would be more informative, more entertaining, and more acceptable as well as more in keeping with the spirit of this place.

Yes, the spirit of this place is about arguments and disputes, but don't be boring while you do it.

reposting, does this provide any insight as to why I included the history?

I do often wonder if I am overexplaining things. Because of my job, I don't think I am well calibrated on how much non-lawyers need/want something explained. I'm a nerd about minutiae like the history of civil procedure and personally find the subject interesting so when I started writing about a "bad" lawsuit, it seemed relevant to include some background on what makes a "good" lawsuit. The point, one which I probably should've been clearer about, is that we used to have this very formal and stodgy standards for how lawsuits are worded but that changed in favor of something less formal. The intent was to encourage people to speak more plainly, and I showcased the Dioguardi case to highlight how low the bar was. The risk with less formal standards is that people might ramble on, and so I thought it was relevant that courts want you to get to the point when you file a lawsuit.

All those things combined (less formality, preference for short and plain statements) showcase the challenge judges have with strictly policing the gratuitous parting shots lawyers/clients include in their lawsuits. So towards that end I highlighted Armstrong's example as a rare case of a lawsuit being dismissed for being too long, as a way to illustrate the limits of what judges are willing to put up with. The point was to set the stage for how Trump's 193-page lawsuit should be evaluated. I think if I just linked you a 200 page PDF and said "this is bad", few people would understand why.

The 'overexplanation' here was great, and I'd have enjoyed reading another eight paragraphs of it.

Thank you, I appreciate that. I'm embarrassed to admit that those few paragraphs took literally hours to write, mostly because I kept getting distracted by research rabbit holes. If there's ever a topic you'd be interested to see me cover lmk

Same here. Leave out the Trump stuff, give us the legal "did you know?" No I didn't, tell me more!

I hadn't read the earlier version or the exchanges of opinion. So I came in to the "Does Trump sue just to fundraise?" version.

It seemed to be leading into an interesting wander through the history of American lawsuits and how that developed, but then that was set aside for "Orange Man Bad".

I don't think I'm a Trump partisan, but I don't much appreciate thinking you're offering me a slice of apple tart and then it turns out to be stewed prunes. I like stewed prunes, but if I'm all set up for apple tart, that doesn't please me.

It would have been better to dump the history of lawsuits if you were just going to go "Trump is a big poopy-head for suing Hillary". Then I could have skipped the entire thing.

Conversely, if you had left out the "Trump is a big poopy-head" stuff and told me about Italians and Lance Armstrong, I'd have read and enjoyed this and possibly upvoted.

As it is, the impression I have of this entire exchange is you sneering about "partisans" not appreciating your legal genius, and the people you're arguing with sniping back at you. I. Don't. Care.

I think you're overstating the choice of venue issue. In practice it's pretty flexible.

Look at when SDNY when after Bannon et al. None of the defendants were in its jurisdiction. They couldn't find a victim. The case was similar -- residents of SDNY heard about "build the wall" so they had jurisdiction.

For things like libel you're supposed to be able to sue in your home state. If the defendant is politically connected (eg NYT) it'll often get transferred, but that's more of an exception.

There have been a few explanations floated for how the lawsuits proceeded...

Fundraising was undoubtably a goal.

Stating all of the allegations in one place for the historical record was probably a motivation. Multiple separate lawsuits wouldn't have been able to convey Trump's side clearly.

The choice of lawyers was questionable. Trump has a thing for hiring ex-prosecutors. They don't have the right experience for this sort of litigation. I suspect that they are grifting Trump... filing half-assed lawsuits so they can bill him and say they did something. Ex-prosecutors aren't the sort of people who actually want to present a strong case against powerful federal insiders.

Another probable goal was just to get to some level of discovery. Getting the various defendants to admit to various facts not in dispute would have been good for Trump's record. It would have been something historians would have needed to acknowledge.

A more out there explanation I've heard is that the goal of the lawsuit was to create a single intelligence silo. It provided a justification to read in all of the lawyers on information that's still classified. Multiple lawsuits would have meant that lawyers could only be read in on specific information relevant to that specific case.

Filing before the statute of limitations had expired was impossible in this case. He wouldn't have been able to sue as president. Legally he could, but it wasn't practical to. Plus high level bureaucrats have too many ways to slow things down... information came out as a trickle, then he had to wait for official investigations to wrap up.

I think it would be helpful if you pointed to links or sources for your claims. For example, I don't know where you're basing the claim that personal jurisdiction is flexible. The wikipedia page on the topic should be enough to showcase how complicated the analysis is and cases get bounced all the time for failure to establish personal jurisdiction (which typically happens because the plaintiff either wants to sue in their home turf for convenience or is maybe judge shopping). Similarly how does filing a frivolous lawsuit help the "historical record" versus just writing a book or issuing a press release? Etc

Definitely curious to hear what you think of what folks like Lawfare called the "speaking indictments" of Robert Mueller. They used this term specifically to describe an indictment that is aimed at "telling a broader story" rather than narrowly focusing in on specific crimes. Are you similarly critical of legal actions taken to harm Trump?

Can you point to a link about what you mean about "speaking indictments"? I'm familiar with the term only generally and don't immediately see the relevance.

I have my beliefs but I also like to think I just follow where the evidence takes me. Here's me being critical of the case Liz Cheney was trying to build against Trump regarding his knowledge about the crowd on J6. I'm sure there are other examples.

This link has an example of the phrase:

The document is what prosecutors term a “speaking indictment”; that is, it describes facts about the defendants’ activities beyond what is strictly necessary for the counts it charges. The purpose of a speaking indictment is more than to simply list charges; it is to tell a story...

I don't have much of an opinion of it. What they call speaking indictments looks like it has about the same amount of detail that I see in charging documents I deal with every day in state court. In your link it's clear why the prosecutors assumed a jury trial would never happen, so adding details into an indictment makes sense. Shrug? Sorry, I'm not sure what you're asking.

I'm confused. Do you disagree with their assessment that prosecutors make a distinction along the lines they described? Do you agree that prosecutors make that distinction, but your assessment is that this particular one isn't in that bucket? Or maybe you think that they're right that some prosecutors make that distinction, but you think those prosecutors are just full of bollocks or something?

I don't know enough about federal criminal indictments in general to have an opinion on this. "Speaking indictment" appears to me to be more like a term of art descriptor than an exact distinction.

Would you stipulate that the authors are plugged in with what federal criminal prosecutors think about such indictments in general? Then, under the assumption that they're right enough about the idea that such a thing was what happened here, would you be even remotely as concerned about it?

It's not like anyone objects (or should object) to shots taken at Biden. I'm starting to feel like this place may have a problem.

I've written before about pretextual excuses, such as when NYC *claimed *their employee vaccine mandate was for public health reasons, but then implemented exceptions that were inconsistent with their lofty claim.

Or, for instance, when someone writes a long comment purporting to be about the US legal system, but is really just a vehicle to take a shot at Trump.

  • -27

The post was awesome, informative, and even cited. Why quibble?

Sorry for the misunderstanding, the post was fully intended from the beginning to be about the $1 million sanction Trump and his lawyer received this week. As I started writing it, it made sense to include background info on pleading standards as way to showcase contrasting examples (Armstrong lawsuit vs Tesla lawsuit). Which part do you find pretextual? Would you find it helpful if I included a content warning at the top?

Edit: I apologize if my overly long introduction left you feeling duped about the content of the post. I added a content warning to make it clear what the core subject of the post is. If you have any other suggestions please let me know.

You should get a couple days ban for being so antagonistic. That edit to the original post is a shameful act for someone that's supposed to be a mod.

  • -11

@The_Nybbler believes that my post was pretextual, in other words that I was falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system as a way to conceal my hidden purpose of criticizing Trump. I maintain that my real purpose was always from the beginning to write a post criticizing Trump, but given how long my intro about the US legal system was, I can understand why someone might potentially be mislead. Since I can't add a title to the comment I added a content warning to more explicitly signal what the post was about. What would you alternatively suggest for me to do to address The_Nybbler's concerns?

I'm not saying I agree with Nybbler. Someone behaving poorly does not excuse behaving poorly yourself. That edit's purpose is to be a petty insult, if it wasn't there'd be no reason to mention the person you're insulting. You could have easily just left the name out, but you wanted it to be insulting. I was asked to review the original post before I went into the thread and I thought it needed a warning because of the way it just called out another user seemingly for no reason. But after reading your post in response, the edit of that, and then the edit of the original post. It's just pure insult and pretending to be otherwise. I can understand banter and swipes and barbs to people with whom we disagree. But you go out of your way to humiliate and troll other users and get away with it because they made a mistake and were wrong and you are right. It's an aggressive and uncharitable trend you make a habit of and it disappoints me immensely that you can just get away with it because you do it with a smile and a bunch of links.

That edit's purpose is to be a petty insult, if it wasn't there'd be no reason to mention the person you're insulting. You could have easily just left the name out, but you wanted it to be insulting.

I understand your point about including his name and have edited it out. If you have any suggestions on how I ideally should have responded to The_Nybbler 's claim that my post was a pretext for criticizing Trump I'm all ears. It's weird to be accused of hiding a motivation I'm not hiding, so it seemed logical to respond by double-underlining the core topic of the post with a banner explicitly announcing the topic up top. How else am I supposed to respond to that kind of accusation?

But you go out of your way to humiliate and troll other users and get away with it because they made a mistake and were wrong and you are right. It's an aggressive and uncharitable trend you make a habit of and it disappoints me immensely that you can just get away with it because you do it with a smile and a bunch of links.

I remain open to receiving feedback on what I write and I genuinely don't understand how the first post is an example of trolling. I thought I was transparent when I wrote: "If I'm being fully honest, the scenario I would find the most emotionally satisfying and personally motivated towards pulling off would be where motteposting blunders haplessly into my trap and exposes himself as a complete hypocritical partisan about the standards of credibility he applies. I must admit that I did not get that, and I'll specifically give credit for things he did that were commendable." I'm not sure what is ambiguous about that or what else I'm supposed to say. What do you think is missing?

I similarly don't understand the criticism over the second link. DradisPing refused to admit they made a mistake and as far as I know this remains the case to this day. Do you think it's inappropriate to point out when someone confidently asserts false information and refuses to admit error? Furthermore, I maintain that examining why someone's mistakes happen to fall in the same direction is a topic worth examining. Which part do you disagree with?

Focusing on a single person for no reason to expose them as a bad faith actor is trolling. People are not ants in an antfarm. Not giving a person any time to respond at all before you make a top-level post detailing how wrong they are and pointing them out by name over and over is not the act of a person engaging in a debate. It's rude, tactless and unnecessarily aggressive. But it's clear to me that you are either unable to understand how your actions can affect other people or simply don't care. You wrap it all up in nice-seeming language but it's not. These are things you do to people you see as enemies. We're supposed to be having discussions and arguments with people that we may disagree with but they're still people. You are not treating people who disagree with you as people, you're treating them like they're enemies that need to be dissuaded or dismantled. Charity: from where I'm sitting you give it to no one.

You're losing me on the definition of trolling you're using. I don't see anything wrong with exposing someone's mistake, especially if I am emphatically accommodating rehabilitation ("it's fair to conclude DradisPing was mistaken. If so, I will preemptively praise them for editing their post and admitting their error."). I don't see the problem with this approach because I explicitly invite others to do the same to me. A good example of where I was scrutinized and a situation I wish happened more often is this post by @Fruck where they ask genuinely thoughtful and penetrating questions about why I had the beliefs I had. I walked away grateful for that exchange because it prompted productive introspection on my end.

If someone pointed out a mistake I made and gave me space to either correct it or justify it, I can't think of a reason why I would register that as a hostile act.

@The_Nybbler believes that my post was pretextual, in other words that I was falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system as a way to conceal my hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.

Strangely, @The_Nybbler did not say that you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal citizen as a way to conceal your hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.

We can tell this because on reviewing what @The_Nybbler wrote, which you quoted, which was-

Or, for instance, when someone writes a long comment purporting to be about the US legal system, but is really just a vehicle to take a shot at Trump.

...which does not say you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal system, or that you were doing so as a way to conceal a hidden purpose, or that your purpose of critizing Trump was hidden. In fact, key framing words such as 'falsely' and 'hidden' do not appear, which the key word 'vehicle' as a metaphor in the context of a criticism of pretext is removed, thus creating substantive change of position from what Nybbler wrote and what you claim he said.

This would politely be called strawmanning, except that strawmanning is a device when engaging in an argument with someone, but you aren't engaging with Nybbler, you are deliberately re-characterizing what Nybbler said in conveyence to external audience.

Which would politely be called 'lying about what someone said to someone else.' Which is a reoccuring feature of yours.

I maintain that my real purpose was always from the beginning to write a post criticizing Trump, but given how long my intro about the US legal system was, I can understand why someone might potentially be mislead. Since I can't add a title to the comment I added a content warning to more explicitly signal what the post was about. What would you alternatively suggest for me to do to address The_Nybbler's concerns?

Delete the post, apologize for poor writing quality, and apologize to @The_Nybbler for poor conduct.

Edit: And I see he has edited back out the troll he had edited in, but no apology in the post. Typical and meeting expectations, I suppose.

I don't have a dog in this fight having skipped the main post until i saw the back snd forth. But i interpreted theNybblers response in exactly the same way ymeskhout did.

I don't know if that was what he meant, but it is how it read to me.

Same. I felt that Nybbler was being clearly antagonistic and snide, without any sort of provocation.

I thought it was a bit of a joke. The OP started with “standards for clear concise pleading” and then sorta strayed away from that into a discussion about lawfare. Thus, the joke is that OP’s post arguably contradicts the clear concise pleading because the first half is irrelevant to the second half.

I didn't mean it as a joke but admit that I inadvertently got myself owned

Strangely, @The_Nybbler did not say that you were falsely claiming to write a post about the US legal citizen as a way to conceal your hidden purpose of criticizing Trump.

I interpreted his statement to mean that my post was an example of a pretextual excuse, and I don't know how else the statement would make sense given what he was directly responding to ("pretextual excuses, such as when..." flows into "Or, for instance, when someone..."). So if @The_Nybbler wasn't calling my post a pretextual excuse to criticize Trump, something which requires lying, then I will apologize for the misunderstanding. I still would be eager to understand exactly how I managed to misinterpret that sentence.

Delete the post, apologize for poor writing quality, and apologize to @The_Nybbler for poor conduct.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. Which part do you believe constitutes bad writing?

@Dean believes that I may have misinterpreted your post as if you were accusing me of pretending to write about the US legal system just as a vehicle to criticize Trump. Could you confirm that my interpretation was off-base? As I said before, the whole point of the post was to criticize Trump's behavior. Was that not sufficiently sign-posted?

I apologize for the inclusion of your name in my content warning edit. Could you provide me any suggestions on what I could have done differently to address your criticism above?

The post to me read as just a shot at Trump, not so much criticizing him for engaging in lawfare but gloating over him being sanctioned for it. The whole long introduction on the legal system read as an attempt to add verbiage to make the post acceptable as a Motte top-level post. As for what you should have done, either not posted it or gotten to the point more quickly.

I sincerely appreciate you took the time to respond to my question. Which part do you identify as "gloating"?

Distributed throughout the second half. The whole tone of that half strikes me as just gleeful that Trump's people are being sanctioned.

I don't see what you're referring to. Can you point to any sentence and maybe provide an example of how you would rephrase it?

Or for instance, when someone writes a short comment purporting to make a point, but is just trying to dismiss anything that might be critical of Trump.

Secrecy in Voting

Why have it? What's it for? I've told the story of the "Australian ballot" here before:

When Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.

Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the harshest abuses curious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.

Fundamentally, this is a story of coercion. If someone is able to learn how you're going to vote or how you voted, they can apply coercion to get you to change your vote or try to inflict punishments on you after-the-fact in retaliation for voting the "wrong way". Some people are also worried about bribes, but that's a more minor concern in my view. Critically, in order to perform coercion/bribing, they need to be able to discover who you actually vote for, so as to properly verify whether you should be punished or paid for doing the deed "poorly" or "well". Naturally, if someone is going to apply coercion to guide your vote, they're probably willing to apply coercion to get you to provide proof.

There is a reason why people who are working on digital elections really care about a property known as "receipt freeness", that is, that there is no possible way that anyone, even the voter herself, possesses any information whatsoever which could be used as a receipt to prove how a person voted. The ideal would be for the government to be able to publicize an encrypted database which cannot in any way be used to demonstrate how any person voted, but that each individual can take with them a piece of information which can be combined with this database to verify that their vote was correctly counted (yet still not reveal how they voted).

In any event, the linked opinion from Arizona.

The Secrecy Clause states, "All elections by the people shall be by ballot, or by such other method as may be prescribed by law; Provided that secrecy in voting shall be preserved."

...

When the Arizona Constitution was adopted, the definitions of "secrecy" included "the state or quality of being hidden; concealment[.]" Secrecy, New Websterian Dictionary, 735 (1912). "Preserve" definitions included "to keep from injury; defend; uphold; save; keep in a sound state[.]" Preserve, New Websterian Dictionary, 646. Thus, the Secrecy Clause's meaning is clear: when providing for voting by ballot or any other method, the legislature must uphold voters' ability to conceal their choices. The constitution does not mandate any particular method for preserving secrecy in voting.

"voters' ability to conceal their choices". They have shifted from 'inability to reveal' to 'ability to conceal'. Why have it? What's it for?

Arizona's mail-in voting laws preserve secrecy in voting by requiring voters to ensure they fill out their ballot in secret and seal the ballot in an envelope that does not disclose the voters' choices. Section 16-548(A) provides:

The early voter shall make and sign the affidavit and shall then mark his ballot in such a manner that his vote cannot be seen.

...

Plaintiffs contend that because mail-in voters may photograph their ballot and post it on the internet, Arizona laws do not preserve secrecy in voting. Plaintiffs point to § 16-515(G), which states, "Notwithstanding § 16-1018, a person may not take photographs or videos while within the seventy-five foot limit" around polling locations. Section 16-1018 makes it a class two misdemeanor for a person to "[s]how[ ] another voter's ballot to any person after it is prepared for voting in such a manner as to reveal the contents, except to an authorized person lawfully assisting the voter," but "[a] voter who makes available an image of the voter's own ballot by posting on the internet or in some other electronic medium is deemed to have consented to retransmittal of that image and that retransmittal does not constitute a violation of this section."

We do not read § 16-1018(A)(4) as failing to preserve secrecy in mail-in voting. Section 16-1018(A)(4) merely provides a defense to the crime of showing another's ballot to any person after it is prepared. The defense applies when a person shows another voter's ballot if the voter who filled out that ballot posted the image online. And the legislature's decision not to prohibit a mail-in voter from showing her own marked ballot to another, whether in person or online, does not violate the Secrecy Clause because the legislature has commanded mail-in voters to "mark [her] ballot in such a manner that [her] vote cannot be seen."

Ah yes, the legislature has commanded that it not be seen. Except by the entire internet. Or literally anyone else that she chooses to show (or is coerced into showing) it to. I have almost no words except again, "Why have it? What's it for?" The court here seems to embrace a position that is completely ignorant of even the possibility of coercion. Or maybe it's not the purpose of secrecy that they fail to understand; maybe it's the purpose of photography. Photography is meant to allow a thing to be seen by someone at a time/place other than the original moment/location, even if the original object is long gone or destroyed. Taking a photograph of a thing and then showing it to someone else literally has the purpose of making that thing become "seen" by the someone else.

But photography is honestly a silly aside. Does anyone believe that there is a meaningful distinction between a voter showing a coercer/briber their ballot directly versus a photo of their ballot? Play this out in the absurd: A holds B at gunpoint, telling B to vote for candidate C. B marks down the ballot, and begins to reach out to show her work. "NO! Don't show it to me! That would be illegal. Instead, take out your phone; take a picture of it; show me the picture. That's totally legal and totally cool."

Haranguing about photography is clearly beside the point. The point is coercion! Preventing coercion is why we have secrecy in voting! Preventing coercion is what it's for! And one neat trick to 100% prevent it is to make it 100% impossible for anyone else to discover who you voted for - even if you want to show them. As evidenced by the entire body of literature on receipt-freeness, this is a thing that has been abundantly clear to the tech community, and those guys are usually some of the most boneheaded and slowest to understand history/politics.

Maybe one last attempt at words. This feels like watching a real life version of "catastrophic forgetting" in AI. How can people suddenly just have no clue what the whole point of this entire thing was, especially because you were just using it in all this work?

Maybe one last attempt at words. This feels like watching a real life version of "catastrophic forgetting" in AI. How can people suddenly just have no clue what the whole point of this entire thing was, especially because you were just using it in all this work?

An alternative explanation is that you're not being cynical enough. Perhaps this isn't AI catastrophically forgetting; this is AI becoming unfriendly. Arizona legislators want to be able to harm voters who voted the wrong way. They are in the same position as British-Australian governors: already in power, and intending to use the implied threat of punishment, to stay there.

/u/2rafa suggests an easy fix: mail out two ballots, so you can fill out one and take a picture of the other. I'm not sure if this causes problems by double-voting; how much of voting security is the trivial inconvenience of producing a duplicate ballot?

Alternatively you can just go after people posting photos. If you slap fines on the first hundred or thousand, the others should desist.

With 2 ballots I, the coercer simply make you take a picture of both filled out. I suppose making ballots free to print as many as you like and having a secret keyphrase which must be on 'real' ballots cast could help, but if the phrase is compromised, or the fake phrases you put on your coerced ballots don't match up, I will realisze your trick and punish you.

Best solution I can think of is mail a secured tablet to each voter, which is covered in cameras and records the voting session, only allowing those votes not recorded or with witnesses. This can still be bypassed by hidden cameras, as can normal voting, and is expensive.

With how important secret ballots seem to be to government, I'm surprised they aren't used in industry. I believe most if not all shareholder voting is public. I wonder if the secret ballot is more to legitimize elections and make the governed more compliant than it is to ensure a vital process. That would explain the posturing, but lack of real security measures.

I think the real answer is that a few people voluntarily try to relinquish secrecy in order to try and create peer pressure (and that's vile), but there's no serious push to defeat secret voting going on.

Nobody's worried because nobody thinks there's a serious risk.

I can see it. Controlling people's ideas and behavior outside of voting with propaganda and norms already does waaay more than a forceful system focused on elections could ever hope to achieve, and I don't think I've heard of one place which successfully got rid of the secret ballot.

Couldn’t blockchain somehow save voting? Where everyone who wanted to could go online and count the votes and everyone could verify their vote was recorded correctly by having a private key to their specific Vote.

There are clever extremely complicated mathematical schemes involving it that have all the good properties you want. But still remains two big flaws: you have to use a computer to vote (which can be compromised) and you have to trust an algorithm that is formally proven correct to count the votes, but only a handful of people are educated on how to read such proofs.

Ultimately, in person anonymous paper ballot with public counting is the superior system for a Republic as we understand it today.

As a resident crypto fanatic I agree with this analysis. In a better world crypto solves this but we're not there yet.

Crypto doesn't solve the problem with remote voting. If you can vote from home, you can vote in front of your spouse. If you can vote in front of your spouse, then your spouse can coerce you into doing so and control how you vote.

That gets you "nobody can see my vote", but you can still be coerced into showing your vote. There are clever algorithms using homomorphic encryption which allow votes to be tallied without revealing who voted for whom, and let you verify that your vote was counted without revealing what it was. But you still need someone to implement it in a system which selects lowest-bid contracts, and to convince the voting public that your magic math system cannot be cheated.

People need to understand a voting system to believe in it (see: 2020), and so I'd much rather a heavy clampdown on postal voting, and a return to hand-counting everywhere. Other first world nations can do this, so why can't we?

There are clever algorithms using homomorphic encryption which allow votes to be tallied without revealing who voted for whom, and let you verify that your vote was counted without revealing what it was.

As a very simple example of a system I've occasionally pondered -- which I'm not sure I'd describe as "homomorphic encryption" per se, more a zero-knowledge proof of election outcomes. "For each ballot, the voter calls a fair coin toss. If they win, keep the ballot. If they lose, replace it with a randomly selected ballot. Final resulting ballots are public, but the initial coin flip is never recorded." This is overwhelmingly likely to not change the outcome of the election, and any specific ballot can be verified by voters but they will be unable to convince a third party that the recorded vote for Kang was the result of the coin toss and that they intended to vote for Kodos.

convince the voting public that your magic math system cannot be cheated.

Yeah, this is really the hard part. I don't think I'd trust a coin toss even in my presence to decide something so important. I know abstractly that the statistics work out, but it feels viscerally disenfranchising.

I know abstractly that the statistics work out, but it feels viscerally disenfranchising.

It sounds to me like your instincts are picking up the increased potential for someone to sneakily cheat under these systems. As a voter, can you tell that the coin toss you're making is fair without referring to outside expertise? If it takes an expert to make the determination that part of the system is working correctly, it gets much easier to cheat.

If I were bribed or coerced into voting a certain way and my proof was a photograph posted electronically I could just use photoshop to fake my vote.

In balance this really isn't a legitimate concern. We aren't frisking in-person voters for contraband cameras either.

Laws and judges have to take practically and other rights and priciples into account. Technology has thrown some wrenches into the machinery. Dogmatically adhering to a priciple (vote secrecy to curtail bribery or coercion) over a more important principle (voter enfranchisement) with no evidence that bribery or coercion is even occuring and in contempt of the clear, pricipled intention of our democratically elected legislatures, paints those proponents as unpricipled and intellectually dishonest.

But photoshop makes the arguement moot on its own. Technology simultaneously created and solved a hypothedical problem.

I think this falls under the category of, "No law is ever going to be 100% successful. We don't hold any other law that you like to this standard, so we shouldn't hold this law to that standard, either." Take your example:

We aren't frisking in-person voters for contraband cameras either.

Correct. We've figured that this is a pretty significant imposition on one's person, one that can be exploited by bad actors to suppress votes (similar to poll tests). However, what you miss is that the law actually does make it illegal to take a picture of your in-person ballot. We still make it illegal! We still will prosecute people if they get caught doing it! That we don't apply 100% of the world's resources to rooting out 100% of all possible cases would be a silly standard by which to judge this law. (Thus, as you say, "Laws and judges have to take practically and other rights and priciples into account.") Hell, our extremely strict laws against murder don't eliminate 100% of murder. We don't say, "Well, unless we prohibit any individual from ever possessing any object that could be used to aid in murder and impose a panopticon surveillance state, we'll never get rid of the theoretical possibility of murder happening... Therefore, we shouldn't bother prohibiting murder at all." That would be ridiculously silly, and it's silly here, too.

We have basic rules in place that nearly perfectly work, except for the barest of theoretical edge cases. So, when you say that technology has thrown some wrenches into the machinery, I agree. It has really made non-in-person voting far more susceptible to coercion than it was before. Photoshop has not solved the problem, for our technology can just as easily take video which is not nearly as amenable to manipulation (though I highly doubt that a significant portion of folks who would be targets of coercive efforts would likely be skilled enough in even Photoshop to matter).

Furthermore, there is no evidence that allowing easy means by which to curtail secrecy actually causes even the minutest amount of voter disenfranchisement.

In the end, I think reasonable people can disagree on where the balance of interests lay. The primary thrust of my post is that folks seem to have completely forgotten the barest purpose of secrecy in voting. From your comment, I think you understand this purpose.

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:

Anyone who tries today to talk about the question of Christian faith in the presence of people who are not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought (whether by vocation or by convention) soon comes to sense the alien -and alienating- nature of such an enterprise. He will probably soon have the feeling that his position is only too well summed up in Kierkegaard's famous story of the clown and the burning village, an allegory taken up again recently by Harvey Cox in his book The Secular City. According to this story, a traveling circus in Denmark caught fire. The manager thereupon sent the clown, who was already dressed and made up for the performance, into the neighboring village to fetch help, especially as there was a danger that the fire would spread across the fields of dry stubble and engulf the village itself. The clown hurried into the village and requested the inhabitants to come as quickly as possible to the blazing circus and help to put the fire out. But the villagers took the clown's shouts simply for an excellent piece of advertising, meant to attract as many people as possible to the performance; they applauded the clown and laughed till they cried.

The clown felt more like weeping than laughing; he tried in vain to get people to be serious, to make it clear to them that this was no stunt, that he was not pretending but was in bitter earnest, that there really was a fire. His supplications only increased the laughter; people thought he was playing his part splendidly--until finally the fire did engulf the village; it was too late for help, and both circus and village were burned to the ground.

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).

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

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.

Those quotes say nothing more than “I’m right but people won’t listen to me.” Just because something is dressed up as “The Parable of the X and the Y” or is quoting someone from 2000 years ago doesn’t really make it fundamentally different from just leaving it at “I’m right you’re wrong”

Ratzinger is not attempting to persuade atheists here. This is a passage about how a theologian might feel conveying truth in “religious language” to atheists unfamiliar with how religious language works. It’s saying a lot, and should not be seen as an attempt to persuade atheists.

Cox cites this story as an analogy of the theologian’s position today and sees the theologian as the clown who cannot make people really listen to his message. In his medieval, or at any rate old-fashioned, clown’s costume he is simply not taken seriously. Whatever he says, he is ticketed and classified, so to speak, by his role. Whatever he does in his attempts to demonstrate the seriousness of the position, people always know in advance that he is in fact just — a clown. They are already familiar with what he is talking about and know that he is just giving a performance which has little or nothing to do with reality. So they can listen to him quite happily without having to worry too seriously about what he is saying. This picture indubitably contains an element of truth in it; it reflects the oppressive reality in which theology and theological discussion are imprisoned today and their frustrating inability to break through accepted patterns of thought and speech and make people recognize the subject-matter of theology as a serious aspect of human life.

Importantly, he notes the “classifying away” of religion as a category distinct from everyday life, and how this leads to the public seeing religious rituals as something performative and distinct from everyday moral and psychological concerns.

You are right about the second quote but wrong about the first one. Back then (Introduction to Christianity was published in 68) Ratzinger was a reformer: he associated with the nouvelle theologie and was one of the reformist peritus of Vatican II.

What he's saying here is that the catholic church should abandon neo-scholastic theology and all the other weird medieval trappings it accumulated throughout the century and both go back to the basics as well as reconstruct on modern philosophical foundations, because if it didn't do that it would never be appealing to modern intellectuals. This stuff was borderline heretical (probably still is, who can say) and allegedly he was even investigated by the holy office in the 50s (although I've never been able to locate a reputable source for this claim, nor any details about the investigation).

Eventually he became far more conservative, his former associate Kung went off the reservation (arianist, denied papal infallibility, promoted euthanasia) and started hating him. Later on he also became cardinal prefect of doctrina fidei (formerly holy office, formerly inqusition) where, thanks to his conservative positions, he was (informally) known as the german shepherd. Fun fact, he held this post for longer than almost anyone else, you have to go back to the 1700s to find someone that was prefect for longer.

His general ideas about theology and intellectuals didn't fundamentally change, even after he became pope (although they became more moderate): he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think. If anything Bergoglio's approach, to appeal to... "common people" has worked better, even in europe.

Take this with a grain of salt, I'm an atheist and I think it's all nonsense.

Francis’s approach isn’t working better, though. He hasn’t brought the masses back to church.

I mean to be fair that’s a hard problem to solve. But it does appear that Benedict XVI did notably better at appealing to people who are already practicing catholics, based purely on seminary enrollments(which are a reasonable proxy for engagement among young practicing Catholics). That was Benedict’s entire goal; the main thrust was to revitalize practicing catholics that were seen as lukewarm.

It’s not 100% clear what the main thrust of pope Francis’s pontificate is. But measured by what Benedict XVI was attempting to do, it’s been a dismal failure. He also hasn’t brought lots of people into practicing Catholicism that weren’t previously, which was the other obvious goal.

Thanks, I am also an atheist, but I found this a really useful bit of information.

My inclination is to think that he is right that the Catholic Church could win over some intellectuals if it wasn't so neo-scholastic. For example, I know one prominent philosopher who converted to Catholicism, and neo-scholasticism was the biggest single stumbling block. And they're Aristotelian about many things! If it's a problem for an Aristotelian, it's going to be even more of a problem for philosophers who are receptive to some sort of religious belief but who generally have deflationary or otherwise non-scholastic views on many metaphysical issues.

A neo-scholastic might argue that being a neo-scholastic makes it easier to e.g. be convinced by Aquinas's arguments and that these are the quickest way to Christianity for a smart person, but that's making the Perfect into the enemy of the Good. As I recall, my friend was mostly convinced by (a) a best explanation argument for God as the Creator, (b) a best explanation argument for Jesus as divine, and (c) a benevolent God as the best explanation of why there are moral truths. Then he reasoned to Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as the best unifying theory of (a) to (c), and converted, having been an atheist and before that a Protestant.

I think the problem with abandoning neo-scholasticism is that aquinas is a doctor of the church and moving away from it was condemned as heretical by aeterni patris. Also scholastic concepts are used to explain both the trinity as well as transubstantiation. They might be stuck with it.

My inclination is to think that he is right that the Catholic Church could win over some intellectuals if it wasn't so neo-scholastic. For example, I know one prominent philosopher who converted to Catholicism, and neo-scholasticism was the biggest single stumbling block.

Meanwhile, for comparison, 35,000 people convert to Pentecostal Christianity every day.

Yes, this branch of Christianity with zero intellectual appeal is "the fastest growing movement in the history of religion", it grew, in little more than one century, from one small decrepit warehouse to about 1/4 of all Christians worldwide.

Maybe less intellectualizing and more speaking in tongues is the way to success?

There are lots of better ways to succeed if by succeed you just mean grow. But if by succeed you mean really satisfy man’s need to understand the world, his place in it, and his purpose and destiny, putting a primacy on the search for the truth is the only way to do it. If that means getting fewer converts than you could by being a less substantive philosophy, so be it.

(I mean, that’s the enterprise we are trying to be in. You (the reader) may or may not think we do that particularly well, but that’s the point of all of this, not just converting people to…something or other.)

I didn't mean to suggest that that should be the Catholic Church's focus!

In answer to your question, unironically "yes". If the CC had gone down the Malachi Martin route when the Exorcist was still in theatres and played up exorcisms, who knows how many they would have won over?

As it happens, I know a very Social Gospel-style Protestant minister. The one time they ever were invited into the nastiest ghetto in their local area by a family was to perform an exorcism in a "haunted" apartment. The minister didn't explicitly admit "We don't do exorcisms in my denomination," but instead provided a blessing for the apartment, which made the family extremely happy and apparently was enough to banish the ghosts.

The minister also told me that this was the first (but not last) time that they entered an apartment with no furniture - the family was penniless due to drug abuse, and they'd sold (or never bought) all the furniture. They just had sleeping bags, old matresses, and dirty pillows. It genuinely had a "haunted" feel...

he still thought that the catholic church should appeal to intellectuals and that this would help bring back the european masses to church (see Fides et ratio and his regensburg lecture). I think he was wrong on two levels: first he completely failed to attract intellectual, second the masses don't actually give a shit about what intellectuals think.

Well, I don't think it was a kind of...business strategic decision optimizing for growth. I'm sure he hoped he would influence people to come back to the pews, but I think he thought and wrote this way because he believed that man is meant to search for the truth and must attempt to articulate to himself real, satisfying answers to his deepest questions. This is probably part of why he struggled with the job, because he was always more inclined toward theology than administration.

I'd also say that the crafting of an intellectual edifice is a lifetime of work that can only be judged from a generational, rather than immediate, perspective. When Socrates died it probably looked like he was a failure (from an external perspective - of course he succeeded in living how he thought was right), but his way of thinking about man and the soul (via its modulation in Plato and Aristotle and combination with Christian ideas) ended up ruling the Western world for a long time.

As a Catholic I hope that the slow decline of the west we are witnessing will lead to curiosity and interest in the questions that Ratzinger considered central to man's life and destiny but that modern society tends to obscure or deny. I hope it will also lead to fruitful engagement with the lifetime of work that he produced in attempting to answer those questions for himself. But even if it doesn't have any outsized downstream impact, it was worth doing anyway.

I think it points to a fundamental difference in how I see social issues and how people on the left see them. When discussing moral issues with left leaning people, they often focus on the individual and the utilitarian perspective of the individual in the situation. For example, a horny person meets someone at a bar and can choose between sex or sexual frustration. Forcing people to choose monogamy is therefore evil since it is the less beneficial outcome.

I don't really care too much about the individual enjoyment of the night, but look at the effects of family structure in society. Getting a well functioning family structure is an incomprehensibly complex problem and a balancing act which goes beyond human comprehension. Going from one man, one women to casual sex is fun can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. People today have less sex than ever, fewer children than they desire, and we have incels and feminists who both have legitimate grievances in a dysfunctional dating market. Tampering with an entire ecosystem can have disastrous effects. If there is something we should have learned in the past centuries it is that experts who want to redesign a city, reorganize agriculture, introduce a new species that eats pests etc is that these projects tend to end in catastrophes. Disrupting a delicate balance is dangerous, and science doesn't really provide answers for it. Science experiments run for short period of time with a limited sample size and measure few variables. Traditions last millennia and have sample sizes in the billion. Following tradition is less likely to end up in a situation in which a brilliant scientist concludes DDT is safe, or in which an urban planner wrecks a city because the best science in traffic planning said urban freeways are beneficial.

Chesterton was correct in realizing that traditions were solutions to problems solved for so long that people have forgotten what the problem was.

When trying to stop people who want to engage in a behaviour that creates a small but immediate utility, it is hard to use arguments based on unintended long term societal consequences. It was easy to look like a clown when claiming that giving antibiotics to farm animals is dangerous when it clearly reduces sickness and increases yields, now we have an antibiotic resistance crisis.

Traditional religion are methods of handling large complex systems condensed in mythological format. Historically, this format has worked well. Today appealing to bible texts or the man in the sky doesn't work, yet the evidence for the unintended consequences of short term utilitarianism often appears long after the debate has ended.

I don't think appeals to the individual vs appeals to society are necessarily a left-wing right-wing split.

E.g, The American Right largely opposed covid restrictions on individual grounds; "I shouldn't have to wear a mask", "I shouldn't have to get the vaccine, I'm young", etc. Whilst the American left doubled down on appealing to collective/net good. You were supposed to wear a mask for others because they don't protect you anyways, children were to take the vaccine for their grandparents, etc.

A better albeit more cynical model is... Everyone engages in motivated reasoning. What you want is predetermined, you will argue for the individual/collective or the deontology/utility or the long-term/short-term depending on which framing supports what you ultimately want.

I think the strength of the Blue/Red tribe framing is that it's implicit that policy positions are by and large aesthetic choices. To a young urban person who hangs out with other young urban persons who find hookups at bars, it's deeply "uncool" to suggest anything about hookups otherwise. Suggesting otherwise is what old people who live in the countryside do. And those countryside people are seriously so uncool, they don't even watch French movies or eat at Ethiopian restaurants.

A better albeit more cynical model is... Everyone engages in motivated reasoning.

I think 'holistic' is a better term than cynical. People tend to pick arguments that support their public beliefs but also tend to extrapolate their current perspective to all scenarios. A cynical claim would be hypocrisy between public beliefs and personal habits.

The main problem is that people exist in a superstate in which we are both members of a community and individuals. Sometimes we think as individuals and sometimes we think as members of a community depending on the scenario.

It’s thrive/survive, not individualism/collectivism. You’ll note that when the left goes into survive mode- like with Covid- they go hard. Conversely when the right goes into thrive mode- like with Covid- they behave totally different from how they normally do.

I don't think appeals to the individual vs appeals to society are necessarily a left-wing right-wing split.

Johnathan Chait argues that the left-right split contains such contradictions because both sides are interested in being moral about different things.

It's values all the way down. Values shape what we want, what we need. They shape what we're willing to accept, and what we're willing to do about the unacceptable. The normie thesis everything runs on is that our system should be able to handle values conflict of any possible scale, because it assumes the possible differences aren't actually all that large, that everyone really wants the same things at the end of the day.

Sure, we could look at the Great Leap Forward, cite Chesterton, and conclude that abandoning tradition is dangerous. But the Green Revolution also involved abandoning many traditional agricultural methods, and:

Studies show that the Green Revolution contributed to widespread reduction of poverty, averted hunger for millions, raised incomes, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, reduced land use for agriculture, and contributed to declines in infant mortality.

This is just one of many cases where radical change produced outcomes that are almost universally regarded as beneficial. We have also, for instance, reduced deaths from infectious disease by more than 90%. One doesn't have to look at too many graphs like this or this to understand why "change," as an idea, has so much political clout at the present moment.

There's always a tendency among activists to suggest things are terrible and improvement is only possible through whatever radical program they're pushing right now. In that context, it doesn't do to admit how much better things have gotten without that program.

But more broadly, had change reliably lead to ruin over the last few centuries, surviving cultures would have strong norms against permitting it. Instead we have exactly the opposite — cultures that permitted change reliably outcompeted those that didn't, so successful cultures are primed to accept it.

How does making humans more likely to survive and granting them more resources, reduce GHG emissions?

More importantly, the beneficaries of Green Revolution, "Global South" now use their superior numbers, enabled, by GR to demand more power, as that Modi speech that was the subject of a recent top level post shows. So this shows that only The Thrird World gained, any possible benefits for the First aren't demonstrated by your comment.

The comment to which I was responding seemed to be about how open human societies in general should be to allowing change. This first world vs. third world angle wasn't present. The societies that adopted these new agricultural techniques benefited substantially from doing so. It would have been a serious mistake for them to reason that abandoning their traditional methods could have unanticipated negative consequences and so they shouldn't do this.

Anyway, the first world obviously adopted the same techniques earlier, also abandoning traditional agricultural methods. To a large extent these advances are the reason there is a first world, a set of large, rich nations where most of the population is not engaged in agricultural production.

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:

First stop – an interview where Wynn explains her tactics:

...to see her smiling and nodding at Richard Spencer I kind of went crazy on Twitter, saying, What are you doing? This is unconscionable to give him this kind of platform ... In general, I do think having a debate is good. But when you have very disingenuous opponents and when they are rhetorically skilled, to show up to that debate is potentially to lose a debate to a Nazi, which is very bad, so it’s something I’m afraid of....

«If Cockbane debated Fritz nothing productive would happen but at least she wouldn't be bullied. She'd interrupt, accuse, get real ugly. ... So if there's a "lesson" I guess it's that we have to work on not being Saul. Maybe that means walking out of rooms like that. Or maybe it means developing anti-Fritz rhetorical strategies. But I honestly don't yet know what those are. I can't say I've ever seen someone in debate with a Pepe-grinning fascist come out on top. But if it could be done it'd be worth doing.»

.. Second, you'll never pin them down on the issues, but you can try to get them off their game... If they make a mistake point it out don't let it go. Derail the conversation and keep them on the defensive. Finally, interrupt and filibuster. Whenever they pause, interject. Talk as much as possible. The less they say, the less effective they are.

It's a closed memetic surface.

Digging through «The Motte postmortem», I've found a good example of its topology on TheSchism:

... Among leftists, there are many patterns of behavior that have been observed repeatedly in alt-right spaces - mostly used because they, on some level, work. Things like controlling the conversation or never playing defense. When lefty folks tend to see something that they pattern-match onto that, alarm bells start ringing.

One such commonly-noted pattern is this: "never, ever, ever let a claim go unchallenged, no matter how trivial or generally agreed upon".

[...] Hey, maybe you don't know why people would see this as kinda suspicious. Well, here's the thing: this is exactly the pitch that cryptofascists make. It should be discussed. Debated. There's no harm in hearing an argument out, right? Never mind that, for the most part, these are ideas that were consigned to the dustbin of history quite rightfully for being badly wrong and extremely dangerous. Never mind that "debate" is a format that favors flair over fact much of the time.

I am not interested in racist arguments for the same reason I am not interested in patent submissions for perpetual motion machines or the weekly Flat Earth Society newsletter - there's nothing there. It's always been a long list of horrific made-up justifications for cruelty and exploitation, and it's always been downright awful science. [...] Look, pal, there may be a gray area on "is X racist", but when someone disingenuously argues that statistics showing the average IQ of an entire country as 70 or lower, we're several miles on the wrong side of that line.

And of course our dearly departed Impassionata:

You haven't seen me wrangle with fact-based argument because fact-based argument only works when people actually want to hear what you have to say. HBD fuckers only wanted to spread HBD because the argument is the point.

Playing with facts is easy mode: it's high school essays and if you write a good fact-based essay you get a good grade and people like you and you are Obviously GoodRight.

[...] TheMotte is truly an evaporative cooling rocket that has placed it in true lunacy: a bunch of people have convinced themselves that what they say is discourse when in fact it is outright madness.

I mean look at what this Ilforte has to say.

Can you see the ridiculous self delusion!? 'It's not our fault if a great historian decides we aren't worth the time! It's _his_fault!'

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.

Trying to shoehorn some justification of the Oklahoma City bombing into the mix was pretty weak by @FCfromSSC (I wonder what he'd make of it now).

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?

plus a notable uptick in violent crime nationwide in the following two years, but we didn’t know that in May 2020

It was extremely predictable. We had been educated with the Ferguson Effect just five years earlier.

I just thought it was a cowardly response to relatively subdued ethnic unrest to claim that it retroactively made you reconsider your opposition to terrorism of the most brutal kind (which involved the slaughter, even if you cast a wide net around disliking progressive bureaucrats or whatever, of many innocent people).

In the first place, while neither is admirable, it should be recognized that hatred is not fear. Neither justice nor revenge derive their appeal from terror of the wrongdoer.

In the second place, you don't appear to have actually absorbed the context, details, nature or conclusion of the argument in question.

  • It was a response to endemic arguments justifying rioting, despite multiple innocent fatalities and untold economic and social damage, both in the Motte and in society at large.

  • It carefully copied the exact form of the arguments it opposed, and showed that by the standards of the prevailing mob, the bombing was more acceptable than the riots. The bombing avenged worse killings by the authorities on a proportionally-smaller number of victims, did less economic damage, actually made an effort to target the entity responsible for the initial killings rather than attacking random innocents, thereby inflicted a smaller proportion of collateral damage, was carried out after many more attempts to secure justice had been exhausted rather than being carried out despite justice being actively executed, and was capable of actually being punished by the state in turn, thus limiting the incentive for runaway escalation.

  • Nonetheless, it concluded that such justifying arguments were a very, very bad idea, because the taboo on lawless violence is very valuable.

...Unfortunately, none of these points seem to have actually registered with you, a result regrettably common among Blues. You skip straight to "these aren't comparable", claiming an arbitrary category difference and simply ignoring all arguments to the contrary, and then act surprised and offended that others would deign to disagree. By no means do I claim that the above argument is actually decisive, but I think it's reasonable, here at least, to expect people to recognize that an argument is being made and to at least acknowledge its general contours.

I agree that breaking the taboo on political violence is grim, but I also think that millions of people rioting in a way that caused relatively few immediate casualties (plus a notable uptick in violent crime nationwide in the following two years, but we didn’t know that in May 2020) isn’t the same tier of political violence as two guys killing 200 (or whatever it was) civilians in a terror attack.

Quoting myself, from the thread in question:

By contrast, the media are encouraging rioting that kills a lot of people, and ruins communities so thoroughly that a great many more will die from second-order effects.

Elsewhere in the thread:

Minneapolis is fucked. The blacks who live there are going to have measurably worse lives a year, two years, five years from now. And when the stats come out showing employment and income are down, murder's up, crime's up, the same people who cheered the rioting and arson are going to turn around and blame America's culture of white supremacy, and some smug fuck is going to be writing an article in the New York Times about how it's all the fault of Trump's racist rhetoric, and they will be laying the foundations for the next riot. Real people have actually died from the decisions made by blue tribe, for no benefit at all, and it seems like that's just business as usual.

That a very large number of extra murders would be committed per year for the indefinite future was obvious to myself and many others from the moment the scale of the riots and the permissive response of the authorities became evident, and that fact had considerable impact on the arguments we made at the time. In any case, I continue to disagree that the two are a different "tier of political violence". The riots were vastly destructive, and almost certainly resulted in more direct fatalities than the bombing during their active duration; the numbers I recall were 30 killed by the rioting itself, and an unknown but very large number killed in areas the riots forced the police to completely abandon. The exploding murder rate was immediately evident, not some surprise discovered years later.

In any case, "They're totally different" isn't a terribly persuasive answer to an inventory of similarities, but the larger point was that opening the door to such calculation was and remains a very, very bad idea.

It would have been nice to see that argument fail at least a little less completely, but life contains many sorrows.

You know, it's not hard to make a link. In particular, I don't think

Once upon a time, cops killed two Red Tribe in one incident, and then seventy-six more in a second incident, culminating an extensive history of unfair treatment, killings and persecution. A few Red Tribe responded by killing 168 people. I used to think that was a fundamentally monstrous response, but now I'm reconsidering. In lives lost, that's two and a third of theirs for one of ours, a third of the rate that's now been excused by blue tribe. In dollar terms, the two aren't even comparable. It's not as though my tribe is short on grievances. Why are we playing by the rules no one actually believes in any more?

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.

... Among leftists, there are many patterns of behavior that have been observed repeatedly in alt-right spaces - mostly used because they, on some level, work. Things like controlling the conversation or never playing defense. When lefty folks tend to see something that they pattern-match onto that, alarm bells start ringing.

Has anyone actually seen any examples of what is being talked about? I keep hearing about fascist infiltration or alt-right infiltration into spaces, including themotte, but no one seems to actually be showing examples. I doubt I'll get too many example here, but someone must surely have been shown or heard about these infiltrations.

The closest I think I've heard is the story of mlpol, a 4chan board that combined MLP and /pol into one, which may have converted some MLP fans into /pol-style bigots.

As an original /co/mlp poster, trust me, they were already there before that April Fools prank.

That right? So, what, they just kept their /pol posting to a minimum until the prank?

Since everyone is anonymous by default on 4chan and sticks to only the topics of the board they’re on, there’s no way to tell who’s “from” /pol/ or not, though the site has always been joking-not-joking edgy. I don’t know if the Aryenne The Nazi Pony threads started before or after April Fools, but an ironic “unicorns are the master race” attitude emerged by the fourth episode of season 1.

Suffice it to say there emerged two cultures, the pony fans (“ponyfags”) with a machismo “Friendship is magic, bitches!” attitude, and the stereotype of the sissy bronies with a “love and tolerate” attitude - a phrase never uttered on the show. I got a sense the the brony side that stayed on 4chan (instead of migrating to ponychan and other sites) was ironic for a couple of years, but grew genuine after that.

Sure. Were you around the last time our Jolly Benefactor made a play? He would drop a top-level monologue in the CW thread, then either ignore responses or performatively call them out as close-minded. A lot of people made cogent, careful arguments, but he never, ever, gave any ground. Repeat until the latest alt drew a ban.

For a more explicitly right-wing approach, I remember a post about British debt to India. See my responses for why I think it was poorly executed. The OP dropped this steaming turd of an article, loaded with anti-“woke” boo lights, copied the full text into a comment, then wandered off. Perhaps he was just shilling a blog? Or perhaps an account named after a notorious British-on-Indian massacre had ulterior motives?

Coming to this site, there’s definitely a couple users who just showed up to complain about Jews rather than actually engage. It’s pretty hard to get a ban for that, so the mod log may or may not help. But I think it’s a matter of “knowing it when you see it.”

Sure. Were you around the last time our Jolly Benefactor made a play?

Not sure who you're referring to, sorry.

For a more explicitly right-wing approach, I remember a post about British debt to India.

Ah, I remember that post. I hadn't really thought of it that way, but you're right, there's something very culture-warry at the least when you do that sort of thing, though I wonder if that poster was British - it seems like they'd be more likely to defend colonization compared to American fascists or alt-righters. But I could be wrong about that.

Coming to this site, there’s definitely a couple users who just showed up to complain about Jews rather than actually engage.

Yeah, that's fair. But now I find myself wondering if this has happened in more progressive spaces that were open to debate. The accusation by people like the guy who made the Alt-Right Playbook seems to be that you'll have some space that has a mix of conservatives and liberals, then you get these "debaters" who are just trying to sow doubt and convert people by just arguing. That dude gave an example of someone in a fandom being a Nazi, but it feels like there's some specific example being given.

I'm not certain if I would say that about the SSC CW thread, it attracted people who were largely against social progressivism and was thus hostile to their views.

JB is referring to "Julius B ranson," or any of several other usernames for a guy with really, really strong feelings about child, uh, liberation. He showed up a few times and consistently proved unwilling to actually engage on a civil level with any of his many detractors. This included:

  • The aforementioned walls of text

  • "Just Asking Questions"

  • Sockpuppet accounts

  • Singleminded focus

  • A preference for Gish galloping

  • So, so much playing the victim

  • Blaming anyone who pointed out the above tactics for being irrational

  • Shilling how much cooler and freer his own site, Dark Rationality, was

  • Flouncing and/or suicide-by-mod

I can't overstate how much drivel this guy generated without ever so much as acknowledging counterarguments. He just baited Hlynka or Deiseach into getting annoyed so he could cry foul. Also, he thought he was a lot smarter/sneakier than he actually was.

Anyway...

But now I find myself wondering if this has happened in more progressive spaces that were open to debate.

I would guess the answer is yes, since I think countersignaling is appealing to a certain kind of user. In progressive spaces, that naturally suggests right-wing takes delivered with some subtlety. I ended up with a lot more to say about the subject here.

JB is referring to "Julius B ranson," or any of several other usernames for a guy with really, really strong feelings about child, uh, liberation. He showed up a few times and consistently proved unwilling to actually engage on a civil level with any of his many detractors.

Ah, that guy. Yeah, he never came across as that convincing overall and seemed to raise the ire of just about everyone he interacted with. Like, he would get downvoted a lot, especially on the DarkRationality account because he was arrogant as hell.

They're not sending their best, it seems.

Not sure who you're referring to, sorry.

{most famous Roman emperor} + {British transportation/record store billionaire}.

If you have a thousand years of history behind you, there are going to be people on your side who say clever things.

These quotes are saying very cleverly "people just won't listen to the truth". And since they're not arguments, they're just people being clever, anyone who wants to say "people who don't think like me won't listen to the truth" can use them against anyone they want. I suspect that in context, I'd vehemently disagree with how these very clever statements are actually applied.

If you have a thousand years of history behind you,...

I'm thinking that there is a problem right there. Jesus is supposed to come back. As the Nicene Creed puts it "and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead;". But it has been a long time, two thousand years. I don't think any-one expected having to wait that long.

Christianity got a big boost in its early days from the sense of urgency. Nobody knows when the second coming will happen. Don't dilly-dally about converting to Christianity, you might leave it too late! But there is a price to pay. It gives Christianity a soft expiry date. As the century tick by, it gets awkward.

Continuing to talk about the second coming sounds odd. People keep looking forward to it; and keep getting disappointed. When will they learn that it isn't going to happen?

But quietly dropping it also comes across as odd. It was a big deal. And the faith is a one-off, final revelation; you cannot drop bits that age badly.

Perhaps the problem is me. I am "not thoroughly at home with ecclesiastical language and thought". But Ratzinger sees it as a "clown costume" kind of problem, rather than an "its been too long" kind of problem. That is missing the time dimension; the problem is getting worse as the years tick by, in a way the "clown costume" problems don't.

I was raised Christian and I recall discussing the second coming with my mom sometime when I was younger. For context, I had already declared myself christian and had gone through rituals. I said that obviously I would die before any second coming. And she said "not to be so sure." At the time I didn't know the word "Bayesian" or anything like that, of course, so I didn't really press the issue.

In retrospect, what she said seems even more ridiculous to me now if I try to look at it from a lense of truth or reality. My guess is the reaction is more about applause lights vs boo lights?

The quote that the pope used from Kierkegaard is from Either/or and is actually about that entire premise. That there exists a metaphysical space beyond the comprehension of human beings that is completely out of the bounds of empirical rationality, and can also never be accepted through rational explanations. One that is ultimately the most important decision of ones life and which there is no real evidence in either direction. In many ways your comment is exactly the type of person he explains is laughing at him.

Are you familiar with a good explainer on this particular part of Kierkegaard's thought? I admit I'm always confused when this comes up. If you can't accept this concept via rational explanations, how do you even know it's the most important decision in your life? In the story from OP, the fire does eventually kill the townspeople, so in the end there actually is empirical feedback for them laughing instead of believing. Does Kierkegaard suppose similar consequences for those don't make this leap of faith?

I'll admit it's a pretty obtuse subject. It's one of those things that's difficult to understand if not coming from particular assumptions, and is built upon theologians like Augustine. Essentially he argues that one cannot really understand true metaphysics unless graced with divine spirit, and that is done seemingly arbitrarily and only after continuous searching, and maybe even never at all. If one is to get into Kierkegaard I would recommend Either/or and Sickness unto death for a good entry point. I would also recommend Michael Segrue's lecture's on him as a good introduction to his general demeanor. He's like a religious counterpart to Nietzsche.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SMJc9UMzFSE

They didn't exactly learn from it if they died. However, I think that it is a bit silly to challenge a metaphor in detail. A metaphor clarifies something by finding something sufficiently similar, but that can be understood more easily, yet it is not equal. Challenging it for not being equal inherently rejects metaphors as a valid tool of discourse.

In many ways your comment is exactly the type of person he explains is laughing at him.

Which is poisoning the well.

The claim is that there’s a defective pattern of reasoning. How is it poisoning the well to say that a certain way of reacting to the claim is itself an instance of that pattern? That’s a substantive question, not a fallacious inference.

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”

John 15:18-19

The Christian faith has been couched in persecution since its earliest days. I don’t Pope Benedict’s reiteration of that sentiment particularly surprising.

seem to be suppressed

Ah, there’s your problem. What makes you think that Catholic history is “suppressed?” Perhaps it has something to do with those ephemeral “kids on college campuses” who are allegedly watching your circus burn?

Speak plainly. If you see immorality or distasteful behavior, point to specific examples instead of asserting that “we’ve all felt like that clown.”

The first analogy doesn't really work, the fire is entirely separate from the clown's job or attire. Whereas to a modern atheist, the christian faith (among others) is the circus, and there's no fire. Or, if the fire is some modern moral failing, any theological arguments on preventing it are like the clown, instead of breaking character and pleading for help, hoping that if he's just funny enough the people will do what he says. Whether or not you also dress up in millennia of navel gazing is secondary to that base disagreement.

I took the analogy to be an attempt to explain the experience of a Christian trying to argue for their beliefs with people who are not experts in the things you learn to be a priest, monk, nun etc.

I get that. I'm saying that the analogy doesn't work because their beliefs and theology are directly linked, unlike the fire and the circus in the analogy. Not relating to the specific theological trappings isn't the fundamental cause of not being taken seriously by nonbelievers. They might be if the analogy is to converting non-catholic christians (back) to catholicism, though.

A Catholic is warning you that the society is collapsing. You don’t take them seriously or listen to any of their reasoning because you see them as a clown and ignore anything beyond the clown.

A mottizan is warning you that you this stuff is not going to remain as just a few kooky kids on college campuses. You ignore the them because you see them as a clown, and ignore the substance of what they are saying because you don’t see anything behind the clown.

I don't see how this follows. I'm a mottizan - why do I think the mottizan is a clown unless he is making bad arguments and saying stuff that isn't true?

Similarly, there are plenty of Catholics who I take quite seriously. The ones I don't take seriously are the ones who are acting like clowns.

I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. I mean a mottizan may have the experience of the clown when talking to non mottizans. I didn’t mean you literally. (I’m away from my computer so typing on my phone. Sorry about that).

Ah, I see.

Not relating to the specific theological trappings isn't the fundamental cause of not being taken seriously by nonbelievers.

Not sure what you mean by "fundamental cause". I suspect that being very familiar with theology etc. is helpful for conversion in some cases (avoiding some misunderstandings of transubstantiation) and unhelpful in other cases (the Trinity is one of those doctrines where lay misunderstandings like "Ok, Jesus is God's son, so they're two completely different people, and also God can manifest as a spirit" are a lot more plausible for most people than the sophisticated attempts to make sense of it).

deleted

https://www.themotte.org/post/253/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/48121?context=8#context

I’m on mobile, but can try to explain what I mean.

I have a lot of lefty new age, yoga instructing, Bali visiting, “I’m spiritual but not religious” saying, “Buddhism is more of a philosophy” claiming friends.

These people are hungry for something. The age and mysticism of stuff like their misunderstanding of eastern philosophy, is attractive to them because it seems to carry so much weight.

Meanwhile in almost every single town or neighborhood in America, there is a Catholic Church. The church has 2000 years of philosophy to pull on, as well as the most moving art that humanity has ever produced. People associate “meditation” with eastern philosophy, not knowing that their is an equally old tradition of meditation and mindfulness happening in that goofy building with the cross in it.

Not only is the spirituality, the history, the art, the philosophy, etc all there, but all of that philosophy and tradition is what we used to build the modern world. That Church is welcoming people to come into it ever day, or at least every Sunday, and people just…don’t. They don’t even bother to look.

I’m irritated that we have allowed Catholicism to become primarily associated with goofy people in hats, abusive priests, and ugly boring buildings. Im basically just retreading the frustration people have with Vatican 2.

The second thing is that my heart breaks for Protestants. The people attending these awful mega churches and weird youth group pastor things are being deprived of something I think is truly beautiful, and they’re essentially being taken advantage of by people who have a 500 year old hatred of the church. I think Protestants are more than happy to simply lie about Catholicism to maintain this grudge.

The second thing is that my heart breaks for Protestants. The people attending these awful mega churches and weird youth group pastor things are being deprived of something I think is truly beautiful, and they’re essentially being taken advantage of by people who have a 500 year old hatred of the church. I think Protestants are more than happy to simply lie about Catholicism to maintain this grudge.

I have to say that my least favourite thing about the religious is the capacity of some to be so incredibly condescending and to not even have the common decency to be aware of how insulting they're being.

I am not religious, but I do come from what was historically a very protestant culture (with its own national bent on how a religion "should" be, as is typical) and to me I must say that I see very little difference between the american corporate protestants and the catholics. Both are overly obsessed with elaborate ceremony, pomp and spectacle, with the greatest difference between the two being that one is simply crass and the other is vulgarly ostentatious. I could also say that both are essentially scams designed to extract money and influence from large bodies of people eager to find meaning and a greater understanding of what it's all about.

I generally do not voice these opinions unprompted in the same way that I am not given to walking up to people in the street and slapping them in the face without provocation. I assume that most people have reasons for making the decisions they do and are operating off of different information than I am.

The people attending these awful mega churches and weird youth group pastor things

Are probably attending for the same reasons you would attend whatever weird things catholics do, because they're presumably getting something out of it.

I think Protestants are more than happy to simply lie about Catholicism to maintain this grudge.

This sentence alone is so incredibly arrogant that it makes my head hurt just processing it. The idea that protestants must collectively deceive each other about how totally awesome and right catholicism is just because they're bitter about.... something? I have to say that in my experience, there is no collective grudge among protestants against catholics, if anything it is entirely the other way around. I've lived in countries with large protestant communities my whole life, never spent any serious amount of time in catholic countries or communities and the only place I've ever heard anyone talk about the split between catholics and protestants was from catholics. Hell, I've heard significantly more about protestants from catholics than I have from protestants.

I have to say that in my experience, there is no collective grudge among protestants against catholics, if anything it is entirely the other way around. I've lived in countries with large protestant communities my whole life

Not that there is any significant collective grudge in any case, but if you had lived in a Catholic majority country you would have met protestants with quite an obsession against the Catholic Church. So it's probably the resentment of being the minority in both cases.

The second thing is that my heart breaks for Protestants. The people attending these awful mega churches and weird youth group pastor things are being deprived of something I think is truly beautiful, and they’re essentially being taken advantage of by people who have a 500 year old hatred of the church. I think Protestants are more than happy to simply lie about Catholicism to maintain this grudge.

Ahh, it's like being back home in Northern Ireland. Shall we skip the bombings and knee-cappings and just point out that Protestants might say something like:

The people attending these awful ostentatious churches and weird blood drinking things are being deprived of something I think is truly beautiful, and they’re essentially being taken advantage of by people who have a 500 year old hatred of the uncorrupted church. I think Catholics are more than happy to simply lie about Protestantism to maintain this grudge.

And we say the left has it bad with internal purity spirals!

"Purity spiral" means taking more and more extreme positions. I don't see how you can accuse the Catholic church of doing so, unless you are atracking them from the right.

The Protestant church formed (arguably) due to issues with indulgences and the like. It split from the Catholic church. Then they split into multiple different sects.

They are the result of a purity spiral within Catholicism. Martin Luther could not tolerate what he saw to be as the perversion of the Church.

A purity spiral is where intolerance and zealousess grow until elements of the group turn on each other. The various splits within Christianity are nearly the Ur-example i would say.

Our local Orthodox church has, for some time, seen a number of fervent converts (mostly, not entirely, young women) from New Age and "Eastern" (Buddhist etc.) traditions. Some of my friends have dealt with them quite a bit and, even though those friends are quite a bit more conservative than me, are finding their catechumen's fervor a bit offputting. I've heard that there have been such recent movements otherwhere (not only to Orthodox churches), either, though probably not in demographically measurable amounts.

When I saw this, I was finally driven to create an account.

In response to 1 of 3

As a Protestant myself, it is certainly true that many Protestants don't think about church history, but I think it is quite the exaggeration to characterize all Protestants as "deeply ignorant," and I imagine you would object if I characterized you that way. But I recognize that this was in response to claims that Protestants are lying, though, so I'll take that as much less polemic and more charitable than I would otherwise be inclined.

Regarding faith and works, the reasoning behind the concern here is the belief that God's standards in his law are high, requiring that we follow it, not just some good enough intent. There's no "good enough" amount of works aside from actually following the whole law (and numerous scripture passages can back this up). And so, we can't be saved by being good enough by our own works, even post-conversion. That isn't to say that our works should be ignored or thought irrelevant, indeed, they ought to accompany faith, and will do so. We should do them! But they are not the thing—rather, that is Christ's works—upon which our acceptance before God rests.

I think the claim about the 100 AD church is inaccurate. Yes, things probably are not identical to modern Protestantism—the scriptures wouldn't be able to be in everybody's pockets, for one rather obvious thing—but neither would they be identical to modern Roman Catholicism. There's good reason to think, for instance, that bishops (and hence popes, as well) weren't a thing distinct from presbyters/elders (whence the word priest comes) at that point. That is not the only addition over the years, but I think that that is one that strikes fairly near the heart of the claims of papal authority and ancientness, and being the church that's like the early church. I do not think this is some odd claim; if you read the reformers, they frequently cite the church fathers as in agreement with them, though by no means was every father in agreement in every instance.

I'd be interested in whatever primary texts you find especially compelling.

In response to 2 of 3

Regarding the bible, I don't think that that's accurate. The Council of Rome was no ecumenical council. It was a regional council, and so would presumably not be part of the extraordinary magisterium, or so I understand. To get there, you would either need to wait nearly a thousand years until the Council of Florence, or maybe you could make an argument that some of the later councils (like the Second Council of Nicea, in the ninth century), would, in its accepting other non-ecumenical councils, meant to include this one in such a way that it includes the scriptural list. (There are also difficulties concerning whether the books of Esdras are referring to the same ones as in the Tridentine canon). You claimed that they compiled scripture, which, thankfully, does not go so far as claiming that they made scripture scripture, as there is some pretty clear biblical evidence that parts of the New Testament were referred to as scriptures in the works of Paul and Peter.

I cannot readily assault arguments for the beauty of or your liking the various things that you have talked about, unlike if you were arguing for the truth of them. But as something of an iconoclast, I'd just want to point out that God hasn't commanded us to make such things, indeed, if anything, he has repeatedly commanded the opposite, so let us not be wiser than God, but hold fast to what he has said to do, and rejoice in the beauty contained in the word and sacrament.

What is your objection to the protestant teaching of justification?

I agree with the third section.

Separate thoughts

I think, in some circles, Protestantism gets something of a bad rap. Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism often attract people, due to their seeming pretty and feeling old, while Protestantism has to subsist on the teachings of the scriptures. In secular circles, I think that might be true to an even greater extent, because they often will still see those features—prettiness and oldness—as appealing to some extent, and in their eyes, even if they seem antiquated, something we've grown out of, there's still something to them. They might still like the vibes. But Protestantism, where there is much less of that, there are still the (seemingly) distasteful parts—Christianity's teachings on sex, among other things, and still all those teachings that the Christians have to believe, commitments demanded, and so on, but less ritual and experiences and feelings. Protestantism doesn't have to deal with the (unfair) pedophilia reputation, though.

But the majority of you on themotte, I believe, are atheists, so I'm sure you all would have a better account of your perceptions of Christianity than I am able to give.

To be sure, many Protestants are not like this. But such language and such logic permeates the Protestant approach towards Catholicism.

Eh. It's still common in certain evangelical branches, but the Jack Chick brand of Protestantism is not really mainstream anymore.

In that sense I do not begrudge the Protestants their complaints at all. Had you posted something along the lines of SSCReader's reply originally, praising Protestantism over Catholicism,

Just to point out I am an atheist, I was more amused by the (from my point of view) lack of introspection to consider how they might criticize the Catholic church, given they were founded specifically because it was felt the Catholic Church was betraying the values of Christianity (from their point of view of course).

My own response as an atheist would be something like:

  1. Protestants are I think correct to say that the Catholic Church as is and as it was would likely be condemned by Jesus as portrayed in the bible. It seems way too interested in its own survival, power and wealth than the humble values Jesus espoused. The Pope of Christ's church should not be living in a palace (though Protestant sects are also often living in glass houses in this respect).

  2. Protestants are I think incorrect to say that belief is the only gateway to God, a plain reading of what Jesus says would I think endorse the idea that good works have to be at least part of your journey to Christ.

  3. Some sects of Protestantism founded in large part because of the financial corruption of the Catholic church reinvented said corruption (Mega-churches and the like) pretty quickly.

  4. You're (edit - as in Catholicism and Protestantism) both (from my point of view) basically arguing which version of a fairy tale is more accurate when even if the fairy tale itself should be believed, the answer appears to be, both are wrong and that Christ espouses a much more personal, humble and pure version of Christianity than either Catholicism or mainline Protestantism actually perform in practice. Maybe the Quakers are close?

  5. But also the fairy tale is not true, so the best option is simply take the moral lessons said tale can impart without actually believing in witches in gingerbread houses or talking wolves or magic mirrors.

  6. But also people are really bad at being able to do that, so it's probably fine to leave them to believe whatever supernatural bits they want since it does seem to help them live their lives whether Catholic or Protestant, simply reeling them in when they try to drag people into wars or whatever (which is to be clear in no way limited to religion, ideologies also should be reeled in at similar points, supernatural or not).

Since Vatican II, the Church has been actively refusing to provide what those people (and many more) seek, and instead has been busy trying to appear "modern" and failing at it. No doubt most people seeking to get in touch with the transcendental don't even consider going to a church. Particularly in the US, where the building itself looks nothing like a church.

Wait, who recommended the book? How'd I miss this?

Hi, it's me!

Heh, you know when I read the OP I figured it must've been you who recommended the book. Now I'm also curious who it was.


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