ahobata1
7mo ago
They may not have had much in the way of settled civilization, being nomadic and far away from any enduring population centers, but for that very reason the idea that their only advantages were in... stupidity and an appetite for bloodshed, you're suggesting? should strike you as immediately implausible. Archaeological and linguistic evidence show that they and their close kin were the inventors of the wheel (or at least the first to find a use for it, in the form of wagons which enabled them to colonize previously uninhabited regions of the deep steppe, and chariots which were only later imitated by the big kids on the block) and the first to domesticate the horse -- at first for food, but later turning it into a practical means of transportation by inventing the bridle. They were the richest and most technologically advanced pastoralists the world had seen, while enjoying a higher standard of health and personal freedom than any contemporaneous agricultural civilization. The extant evidence probably underrates their cultural achievements, in that, as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, they were able to force their language and many of their customs even on those host cultures that they were not able to overwhelm numerically/reproductively.
Later inhabitants of the steppe -- the Cimmerians, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Mongols, etc. -- also made a name for themselves by terrorizing the settled peoples of Europe and Asia. The low population density and lack of geographic barriers to movement removed the ordinary mechanisms by which tribal hierarchies are solidified into inward-looking governments, while the people adjacent to the steppe always made for tempting targets. The Indo-Europeans just did it first and best.
You haven't spelled out how exactly Aella's moral reasoning here is more "sophisticated" than that of Joe off the street.
Is it that she is routinely able to conjure up difficult thought experiments where no answer can fail to unnerve those with pedestrian moral intuitions? Admittedly, doing so with the regularity she does might demand very slightly higher than average intelligence, but I would be surprised if the vast majority of her Twitter readership did not clear that bar.
("Bro how do you niggas even think of shit like this" being a counterexample, but something tells me that the author of that comment is not representative of her audience.)
Or is it that her tone is more level than some of her detractors', demonstrating a mind unclouded by petty emotions? Any moral belief has to have an emotional core. Even hard-nosed consequentialists ultimately have to resort to axioms defining what is good and what is bad. Downthread you dismiss "have the child r*ped by a pedo" as a possible alternative, because the child wouldn't enjoy it. But then nothing would stop a more-decoupled-than-thou elite from patting you on the head and chiding you about how naive it is to elevate the wishes/utility of a child (or adult, it doesn't make a difference) to the status of moral principle. (Such an attitude might already have achieved a certain level of prevalence in the (as you see it) incipient British elite that you often stump for, with its spiritual capital in Rotherham.) After all, utilitarianism may be a generalization of a set post-hoc rationalizations that people make when defending moral assertions using common sense, but utilitarianism itself is a tiny, a-priori-arbitrary point in the space of possible consequentalisms.
Aella's polls piss people off because of their gratuitousness. Her goal is not to start a moral debate through participation in which readers will emerge with a more harmonious/well-founded/highly ramified model of ethics etc. etc. etc., let alone leaving them better equipped for moral action. "Nobody said that it was." Well, what is she trying to accomplish then? What can be the purpose of contriving an extremely unlikely scenario that smushes together the concepts "child" and "sex" and inviting people to think through the uncomfortable details? Leaving aside the partial answer of "driving engagement", the other most likely other answer is "pour épater le bourgeois". And decoupling/"sophistication" is not the axis that determines how annoyed readers will be by such antics. "Épater le bourgeois" isn't exactly heady stuff; it's a game people have been forced to play for centuries by now, which has definitely played a role in creating the [REDACTED] state of Western ethics you gesture at downthread. It's like the "penis" game, but for adults, and with a greater possibility of sinister/subversive intent. Even your "nigga" quotation doesn't deny that Aella actually has found a paradox resulting from ordinary moral judgments being brought into conflict with one another. It's just that for most people, going out of one's way to imagine scenarios where one is forced to choose the lesser of two evils involving sex with children is not a normal form of recreation, and it's understandable to be put off by those for whom it is.
If your problem is just that you're disappointed that Westerners' descent into depravity is being checked by a residue of moral common sense because you are rooting for our downfall, you should have been more up front about that in your top-level post. I can't imagine what is supposed to be the difference between the replies you cited disapprovingly and how your ideal traditional Muslim would react to the tweet.
Edit: Except to the extent that sex with children is practiced in the Muslim world/condoned in the Quran.
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