OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
Maybe; could be that if you take the average of two biased perspectives you get closer to reflecting the true state of things.
This is correct.
Let's say women in general tend left and men in general tend right. This would give you the situation we see at the moment, where sometimes the left wins and sometimes the right wins, and swing voters matter a great deal in directing which way it goes. This is plausibly superior to "the left always wins" or "the right always wins".
Of course, since we've seen male-only electorates, we have a pretty good idea of what a single-sex electorate would actually do, which is not that so-and-so partisan split always wins. Rather, both major parties will orient around the median voter. In a male-only electorate, the Overton Window of politics is probably further right than it is right now, but government still swings back and forth between the less-right and the more-right parties. Replace 'right' with 'left' and that's likely what you get in an all-female electorate.
It would be the just world fallacy to suggest that the electorate at present has the Overton Window in exactly the right place. It is, however, not obvious that the current state of the electorate is worse than either the right-tilted male electorate or the left-tilted female electorate.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
I'd argue that in terms of pure self-interest, you should vote Blue, because even supposing that the majority of Blue voters are irrational idiots, the deaths of the dumbest 40% or so of society will drag you down. You should expect significant suffering as a result.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
All right, but what you said was:
If you're happy paying them to exist and letting your two kids figure out how to support their three then have fun with that, but that's all you've been doing and all you'll be doing, and I don't consider the whole farce deserving of the respect you apparently feel it's entitled to.
As far as I can tell, you are the one who's happy just paying a population to survive on endless welfare, while I'm the one insisting that this status quo is not acceptable.
You yourself said that you don't have a different option. You're fine with this, then, are you?
I am not fine with this, and I do not think that Aboriginal people are so congenitally incompetent that they cannot find some role, even a very humble role, in a modern economy.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I'm still on Team Blue. This is a coordination problem. You need to get close to 100% of people to pick Red in order for Red to be non-horrifying. Blue only needs 51%. As long as some significant portion of the population are picking Blue, and I don't think it's possible to change that, Blue is the only option that prevents atrocity.
The good endings here, so to speak, are 100% Red, or 50+% Blue. The latter is achievable, and the former is not.
Is this stupid? Yes. If everybody were rational, we could all just pick Red and we'd be fine. But unless you're willing to bite the bullet and say that irrational or foolish or unlucky people should all die, even 80-20 in favour of Red, or 90-10 in favour of Red, is a nation-wrecking calamity.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I agree that doing what we've done for the last few decades is not adequate. It will not work, and the Voice was just a pitiful attempt at doubling down on that.
From my perspective, both the Voice and what you're saying are counsels of despair. You and Megan Davis are both saying the same thing, which is essentially, "Nothing will ever change, welfare forever."
I do not accept that this is good enough. This is not acceptable. Maybe you think Aboriginals are all dumb, fine, whatever. But Aboriginals are not as badly off as the dumb members of other racial groups. I would at least aim for that level!
OliveTapenade
1d ago
The Aboriginal population is growing on paper, but I'm not sure about overall birthrate figures - the increase in people identifying as Aboriginal is partly driven by changing patterns of identification (and the increasing number of mostly-white people claiming indigenous identity) as well as increasing life expectancies. So even if the birthrate stayed completely flat I would expect the number of Aboriginal people on the census to increase.
As far as I can tell the Aboriginal birth rate is pretty flat overall, though higher than that of non-indigenous people. It is not so high that I expect an exploding Aboriginal population in the short to medium term, especiall since, though their birth rate is higher than non-indigenous people, large-scale migration means that the non-indigenous population is still growing much more quickly than the Aboriginal population. This paper is older but takes a longer look and seems to indicate that Aboriginal TFR has been falling, along with everybody else's.
If you would like policy to try to increase the non-indigenous birthrate in Australia, and to encourage family formation and children among Australians in general (perhaps specifically white Australians?), then I have no hesitation in supporting that. I think fertility decline is a serious problem across the entire Western world and I expect it to become one of the foremost global crises over the 21st century. So I am wholly behind pro-natalist policy.
I think my position overall, then, is that there is no particular threat of a rapidly expanding Aboriginal population making demands on the Australian welfare system that bankrupts us, but that I support pro-natalist policy regardless, for other reasons.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I suppose I think the issue you're dodging, then, is that something must be done. Both option one and option two lead to undesirable outcomes - you only have to glance at Alice Springs to see that.
I don't think Aboriginals must be brought to some level of luxury, but even supposing for the sake of argument that Aboriginal people all have a median IQ of 80 or so, I think getting them into the same rough position of IQ 80 non-Aboriginal people would be a step up, both of them and for the rest of Australia. I won't dispute that the last fifty years of Aboriginal policy have failed, but I don't accept that "just live with a horrible problem forever" is a better approach.
This is a response to both you and @Southkraut below:
Well, a permanent class of parasites is what we have now. Part of the goal of Closing the Gap is to get Aboriginal people into the kind of economic system that would allow them to be like any other demographic in Australia.
I fully agree that it is a failure if all we do is bring Aboriginals up to the same standard of living as other Australians by throwing money into a sucking pit. The goal of all Closing the Gap schemes has to be getting the Aboriginal population to a point where they are sustainable participants in the Australian economy and even the Australian community.
The metrics by which the Gap is measured include educational and employment outcomes. The thing we are trying to do is get Aboriginal people to have jobs. I oppose just throwing charity or welfare at people forever. But if we can get most Aboriginal people to have tolerably decent jobs that are bringing them 60k AUD a year or whatever (which is well below average but enough to live on), then that is a good thing.
It seems to me that there are basically three paths before us.
Path one: Do absolutely nothing. Don't care, just let Aboriginal people starve or turn to crime or otherwise form a permanent underclass.
Path two: Provide enough welfare or charity to avoid one. Create a permanent welfare class.
Path three: Use a combination of welfare, education, and targeted social interventions to try to shift this group into sustainable participation in the Australian economy.
In the post you responded to I rejected path one. You now accuse me of path two. I agree that path two is bad. I therefore favour path three.
I can't think of any other path, save perhaps a 'path zero' which would be to just kill them all, or deport them all, or otherwise make Aboriginal people not exist in Australia any more. That's obviously not an acceptable path either. So what else is there?
What's your favoured path? What do you think should be done?
OliveTapenade
3d ago
You're the one who brought up genetics.
The case for Closing the Gap is that Aboriginals, whatever else the case may be, are people and therefore should not be suffering avoidable harm. We should try to care for the worst off in our society.
This does not require blank-slatism. This does not require believing any woke nonsense about 'the oldest continuous culture on Earth', or submitting to any of the noble savage garbage that our enlightened academic superiors try to foist on us. This does not require any left-wing commitment.
Aboriginals are human beings and therefore, insofar as are reasonably able (and we are a very wealthy First World country), we should try to avoid them living in poverty, violence, and misery.
I promise I am not a bleeding heart leftie. I voted No to the Voice, and I believe that was right. I believe that my prior commentary on the issue establishes that I am not on the left, and if my views were known publicly, I suspect I would be denounced as a vicious racist. Nor am I supportive of the clearly hucksterish Aboriginal activist industry, which is full of people using Aboriginal suffering as a bad-faith explanation for why they should given more wealth and influence. I do not think that Aboriginals deserve any special or additional consideration relative to any other suffering group.
But Aboriginals are people. They are not orcs. If it is possible to 'close the gap', that is, to bring their life outcomes more-or-less into the range of the entire rest of the Australian population, that would be a good thing.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I think on my ranking of swear words, "bugger off" is harsher than "get stuffed", but less harsh than "piss off". I could say "go bugger yourself" or something to make it more intense, but that still feels fairly 'light' to me.
It's hard to imagine 'bugger' being very offensive, at least to me, because it's such a funny word? Aurally, it sounds a bit silly or amusing. You cannot say 'bugger' with the same harshness or violence as most of the four-letter words.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I think this was my polite upper-middle-class family and upbringing, actually, and I do not regret it.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Well, I don't try to adhere to the positions of every person who has ever called himself Protestant, so pointing out that Protestants disagree doesn't do anything for me. And I don't see how you can get from "Protestants disagree with each other" to "Catholics are right". Size or uniformity are not evidence of correctness, after all, even if we overlook the great many internal disagreements among Catholics. But fundamentally, if Protestant Pastor 1, Protestant Pastor 2, and the pope all disagree, you cannot reason from PP1 and PP2's disagreement to the pope's correctness. The pope is in the same situation as a hypothetical Protestant Pastor 3 - he's just one more pastor with an opinion. What's missing here is the reason why the pope's opinion is more reliable or authoritative. I think we're better off just discussing the positive case for the pope. The fact of disagreement among Protestants proves absolutely nothing.
Disagreement isn't the problem, it's the fact that these people generally all have similar hermenutics and ways of trying to answer the questions, and then all get different answers on matters that impact their salvation.
I don't see how Catholicism offers any solution to this problem. I've studied under Catholic professors, Jesuits and Dominicans. Catholic theologians have very similar hermeneutics and ways of trying to answer theological questions to Protestants. Almost all the baseline work of theology is the same regardless of whether you're in a Catholic or Protestant faculty. The Catholics just have a bunch more different answers, on matters that impact salvation. There is no fundamental difference of kind.
Have you figured out a consistent system that includes everything essential and excludes everything not essential? If so, good for you and I guess you're better off than myself.
Well, no, and I don't think any human is capable of producing such a system. Thomas Aquinas made a heroic effort but failed. It's seashells all the way down. The human mind cannot fully grasp God.
My position is that Catholicism does not provide an escape hatch from this dilemma. It does not offer a complete or consistent system, and the smartest Catholics, certainly including the pope, face exactly the same problems that you and I do.
I'll stick to Catholicism which on its own provides so much spiritual depth and less anxiety about trying to solve for every intellectual problem myself.
For me, part of my conversion experience - my own dark night of the soul - was admitting my own inadequacy. Like I suspect a lot of Motters, I was an intelligent kid who grew up very convinced of my own genius, and running into the wall of my inability to fathom the depths of God, my inability to jam the ocean into the hole on the beach, was my intellectual crisis. Learning to trust and put my faith in a God infinitely beyond myself was essential.
So I agree that it's very important to realise that you cannot solve every intellectual problem yourself, and find a way to accept faith alongside a level of ignorance or uncertainty - to step into the luminous darkness.
I think that we see a very different role for the church, epistemologically, in the growth of faith. It might be worth exploring that further, though I'd suggest that we might want to reframe it in a more constructive way, so that we can learn from each other, rather than engage in a Catholic-Protestant jousting match!
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Going straight to the section on papal infallibility, from page 53 onwards, this seems... straightforwardly false, to me? It's not true that the pope was understood to have universal jurisdiction, and his argument that universal jurisdiction coupled with the infallibility of the church as a whole body implies the infallibility of the pope seems like a non sequitur. To say that God will not allow the church as a whole body to permanently fall into grievous error does not imply that any particular individual in the church, not even the individual ex hypothesi at its head, cannot fall into error. It certainly does not imply that any such head is authorised to unilaterally promulgate new doctrine.
On the contrary, ancient sources that speak highly of the popes often do so on the basis of the pope's defense of doctrines known to be true some other way - this is what Vincent of Lérins argues, for instance. Vincent affirms some kind of infallibility of the church but without affirming a similar status for the pope. Pope Stephen is praised for his adherence to the tradition of the ancients, which is the relevant authority.
Fortescue cites many examples of ancient authors respecting the pope in some way, which is unproblematic as far as it goes, but then makes the unmerited assumption that all of these statements in the aggregate, none of which individually imply papal infallibility, do collectively imply it. Isn't that absurd?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I am wary of reasoning from any individual case to a general principle. I don't think the Council of Rimini qualifies as a true ecumenical council, but I did say myself that I think a legitimate ecumenical council can err, so even were that the case it would not matter. An example of a council erring and a pope being correct does not challenge me whatsoever. I think that both councils and popes are capable of error.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Oh, fair. Sorry for misreading you.
I'm not sure what significance that is? You can declare statements infallible post facto, but the doctrine of papal infallibility is nonetheless an innovation, surely? Or do you disagree with my assertion that Munificentissimus Deus and Ineffabilis Deus are the only two uncontested instances of papal infallibility? (The latter of which also predates Vatican I, actually.)
My understanding was that because there isn't a clear label, theologians can and often do debate whether exactly which statements come under papal infallibility and which do not.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Isn't that just a matter of what's presently controversial?
In contemporary America, you expect everybody to know and accept that murder is bad. It is not controversial. The film In Bruges expects you to understand that murder is bad. It is, in a sense, already priced in. Add in that fictional violence is often treated symbolically, and not as seriously as real violence, and it does not occasion any cognitive dissonance for you to sympathise with the hitman. Child murder is presented as a flaw, and hating child murder does not position you on either side of a contemporary partisan conflict.
On the other hand, saying nasty things about a fat black woman does position you on this or that side of a present divide. Attitudes to fat people or mentally disabled people or whatever do code as left-wing or right-wing or the like.
Compare the way that, for example, in Mass Effect 3 (2012) you can carry out the genocide of entire species, but you cannot disapprove of gay marriage. In Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) you can lobotomise people, control people through their drug addictions, and so on, but you cannot misgender Krem. Capital-E Evil choices are fine, as long as everyone knows they're evil, but being on the wrong side of a subject of present controversy, which codes political, is not fine. The low-stakes issues matter more than the high-stakes ones, not because they're more important, but because they sort people.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I understand this to be a folk etymology.
Similar minced oaths do exist - my mother was very fond of "strewth!" while I was growing up, a mincing of "God's truth!" - but I believe 'bloody' predates any plausible minced origin.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
In my experience it probably depends on the workplace and culture? I'm Australian born and bred and have a white collar full time job here, and I not only never hear, but would never say the C word.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
My impression is that even in the US, 'spunk' to mean 'spirit' or' daring' is in the decline, probably because of the spread of 'spunk' in the obscene sense?
From Australia I am accustomed to the verb 'bugger' as a pretty light swear. I might say, "oh, bugger me" or "bugger this" in public and it's about the same level as 'crap'. 'Bugger' is not as rude as the F word, for instance, as you can probably tell from the fact that I do not hesitate to write 'bugger' but I do hesitate to write the F word.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
My first thought is 'gangbanger'.
Some time ago I listened to a British podcast where some people were reading YA novels, and in one book the protagonist was attacked by a group of "street-hardened gangbangers" and the entire group was left sniggering for a good few minutes. I know that it means 'thugs' in American English, but the mental image of being jumped by a bunch of gangbangers in the British sense is really quite funny.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
None of those examples look like clear claims to infallibility, to me. They invoke the authority of the see of Rome, but it was hardly in dispute that the papacy claims authority of some kind. Papal infallibility is a much more specific claim about the nature and extent of that authority.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Well, I would say rather that the papacy does not have the authority to demand adherence to a doctrine as a condition of communion with the church. Only the whole church assembled can do that.
I think that in taking this position, and asserting the superiority of an ecumenical council over a pope, or over any section of bishops, I am actually taking a position more consistent with that of the Church Fathers and the early church than the Catholics. I'm sure that our Orthodox posters would take the same position. Technically I would go further than that in that I admit the possibility of a legitimate ecumenical council erring, and thus assert the need for the church to correct itself by way of constant return to scripture, but ecclesia semper reformanda est is, I hope, hardly a controversial principle.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
My experience is that adult converts usually hold themselves to a higher standard than people raised in a tradition, perhaps in part because their place in that tradition feels more provisional? I don't have statistics to hand, but the zeal of the convert is common enough to be cliché, and I would be unsurprised if Catholic converts take doctrine more seriously, or if Jewish converts keep kosher more rigorously than others, or adult converts to Islam are more consistent with prayer.
I even notice this with secular identities to an extent. I never took a citizenship oath or pledge of allegiance of any kind, and I feel a comfortable ownership of my citizenship. If someone asked me to take the Australian citizenship pledge, I would be offended and would tell them to piss off. If I were told that taking the pledge was a condition of my continued citizenship, I would have to do some soul-searching about whether or not I can honestly take it. What does it to mean to "pledge my loyalty to Australia"? What are these "democratic beliefs I share"? Can we spell those out? And yet we ask new citizens to all make this oath.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Yeah. I mean, I could get into a big slap-fight here over the ways "individual conscience" has led to some very strange wanderings* but basically yeah, and that's why papal infallibility: it's not a guarantee that we'll never go wrong or that individual popes will not be terrible, it's the minimum basic 'heresy will not be made official teaching'.
Well, I suppose the obvious Protestant response there is twofold.
Firstly, theoretically, it is not at all clear how the institution of the papacy is meant to guarantee that. Just in functional terms, it does not seem to follow. How does papal infallibility ensure that heresy will never be made teaching? To sustain this claim the Catholics usually need to bring in some bigger claim about divine intervention, whereby God will not allow the occupant of Peter's seat to infallibly teach heresy, but that is using a less plausible claim to support a more plausible one!
Secondly, historically, it is very far from clear that the papacy has done that. For a start, the safeguard you describe has not in fact been used like that - papal infallibility is actually a very recent idea, going back to the late 19th century at the earliest, and there are only two undisputed cases of its use (ironically, both of which I think are probably false). The doctrine has not been used as a safeguard on the essentials of the faith, historically, but rather papal infallibility in actual practice has functioned primarily to advance otherwise-controversial doctrines. If anything I think it is a tool used to justify innovation, rather than a guard on the tradition. Moreover, the Protestant position is that the Catholic Church has taught various errors. We don't need to get into the weeds on the specific ones, but suffice to say if we go back to the Reformation we will find lots of places where Protestants hold that the Catholic Church is substantively wrong on an issue pertaining to faith and morals. Those issues would need to be engaged on the merits.
If I were arguing against myself here the case I would make would be that the overall machinery of the papacy, as it were, is part of a system necessary to preserve fidelity to the gospel, and that it is absurd of me to profess my own fidelity to the gospel while being critical of its vehicle, all the more so because I myself admit an attraction to Catholic worship. The external evidence of this is, well, look around, the Catholic Church remains institutionally willing to defy power and go against political winds, even as every other church bends or breaks. I think that's partly true (certainly the Catholic Church has been more resistant to that pressure that either mainline Protestants or evangelicals, both of which have severe problems with being colonised by a political/ideological tribe), but also partly an instance of presentism, glossing over the long and corrupt history of the papacy and looking only at the present moment.
...sure?
I am fully in favour of sending criminals to jail. That is a different hypothetical, though.
More options
Context Copy link