OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
This idea is a bit foreign to me, are there people actually arguing that?
Well, someone just upthread for a start.
I don't assert that everybody in every culture throughout all of history has had exactly traditional Christian beliefs on sexual morality. Demonstrably it is not universal human consensus that marriage is an objective reality constituted by the decision of a single man and single woman to form a faithful, sexually exclusive lifelong bond oriented towards the begetting and raising of new life; and I'd argue that there are some ways in which the early Christian understanding of sexual morality was revolutionary.
However, I assert that in broad strokes, it appears to be relatively universal that humans form monogamous male-female pair bonds in order to raise children, and while there are forms of alternative sexual behaviour that we often see in history (polygamy and homosexuality being likely the most common), the universality of the male-female parenting unit, and likewise its universal recognition in social institutions either equivalent or roughly analogous to marriage, is apparent. (It is perhaps also relevant that polygamous relationships typically have been understood as marriage, but same-sex relationships have not; the possibility of children is the most obvious explanation for that difference.) What the consequences of that observation should be for our understanding of sexual morality today is, of course, a controversial question, but I can see no way to evade the observation itself.
That is, for better or for worse, marriage, by which I mean sexually exclusive long-term male-female pair bonds, appears to not just be a quirk of Christian or Abrahamic culture. It's widespread enough that I think it must be understood as either part of human nature itself, or as an inevitable consequence of human biology and evolutionary history in the environmental context of this planet.
I doubt you disagree with me on that, but I might as well state it as clearly as I can in my own terms!
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Well, yes, I agree, but then I'm inclined to natural law arguments in the first place. There is a telos to human sexuality which is discernible from nature and implicitly known to almost every human culture, despite occasional deviation. We can cash that out in either evolutionary or moral terms, but it seems fairly evident to me.
This position is naturally consistent with Christian theology (it is in fact the traditional Christian position), but it would cut against the idea of any kind of 'Christian exceptionalism', where male-female monogamy is a unique Christian innovation, rather than a Christian re-statement of a universal principle. Hence my asking the question - if male-female monogamy is unique to Anglo Christians, why isn't it, well, unique? Why does the same pattern recur globally, even in very isolated cultures and communities?
The alternative - that, ironically enough, the Christians are right and it's a human universal - seems to make more sense to me.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
Well, Trace isn't a Mormon any more, so I hardly see the relevance.
How would you convince Mormons to invite non-Mormons to live alongside them? I'm not sure. 45% of Utah is non-Mormon, so it doesn't appear to be that difficult, and as far as I'm aware Mormon Utahns don't seem to have any great hatred of their non-Mormon neighbours.
Or is it specifically how you convince 'Northern Europeans' (Nordics? Germanics? Aryans?) to live alongside non-Nordics? That again doesn't seem that hard? Minnesota, for instance, was settled as majority Scandinavian and Germanic, I believe, and it now seems pretty welcoming of non-Nordics.
I just don't particularly see the riddle here. Neither Mormons nor Northern-European/Nordic/Germanic/Aryan/Whatever people are in fact inherently predisposed to exclusionary ethnic communities. You may just be typical-mind-ing here. Perhaps you feel a kind of visceral opposition to living in a community that's something less than 99% Nordic, but demonstrably not even most Nordics feel that way, much less most fair-skinned people, and much less people in general.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
To what extent does Ben Shapiro even represent a form of 'Jewish identity politics'? If anything, Shapiro is a Western chauvinist who generally frames his arguments in terms of pan-Western common cultural values, rooted in a Judeo-Christian tradition.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Precisely, and to the extent that they indulged in racialist theories, those theories made some very fine-grained distinctions among different European peoples. The white/northern-European/Aryan version of the thesis has to be filled with epicycles in order to make it match either historical or contemporary experience.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
Let’s assume they aren’t gay furries.
Cheap shot?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
That actually leads to a question that I wish would be asked more often -
Why isn't gay marriage the default?
There's an argument you sometimes hear from Western progressives that goes "there is literally no argument against it" - that is, gay marriage is so much of a no-brainer that failure to affirm it isn't even wrong so much as it is utterly nonsensical. If asked as to why it hasn't already been the case, a common answer is to blame Abrahamic religion and specifically Christianity. (Just above we see a variant of that answer.)
But if so, then why isn't gay marriage the historical default, and exclusive male-female marriage the weird aberration? Why haven't China or India had gay marriage for thousands of years? Why didn't the Persians, or the Mongols, or the Bantu, or the Mississippians? Suppose that poll is accurate - what's going on in Thailand, that not only did it not have gay marriage last year, but it also didn't have it for centuries?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Do have a theory as to why that might be? I'm struck that, even if not quite as strong, norms around marriage as a theoretically faithful, male-female bond do seem to have arisen all around the world.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
We're about Texas sized, I think. The way I think of it is less that we're the size of a state and more that the biggest US states are the size of small countries.
Even then I'm sometimes shocked at the size of some countries. I once roomed with a Czech and was shocked to realise that his entire country was smaller than an Australian state capital.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
Okay, fair. I'll qualify that to elves never voluntarily side with Morgoth or Sauron.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
My short definition is "a posture of extreme or exaggerated deference to identitarian sensibilities, or to the imagined shape thereof".
Wokeness is more of an attitude or posture than it is a list of doctrines that must be accepted. That posture is one of identifying supposedly marginalised or oppressed voices, and then assigning those voices epistemological and ethical priority over other voices. Wokeness is then what happens when you self-present on this basis.
I note explicitly that wokeness does not require actually listening to or acting consistently with the preferences of a supposedly marginalised group. It is the presentation of acting as if one is doing that. The classic example is 'Latinx'. This makes it more clear that wokeness tends to be a manner that privileged or educated people adopt in order to be seen by other privileged people. You don't say 'Latinx' to actually help or engage with Latino people, but rather in order to performatively display your sensitivity to Latinos. Latinos themselves are not the audience, and so their actual feelings can be ignored.
I think this element is helpful with regard to your last question - the difference between social consciousness and wokeness. Social consciousness is actually being aware of the feelings, concerns, and cultural norms of a particular social group. Wokeness is the performance of that awareness for the sake of intra-elite competition. Thus to pick a concrete example, a white person who goes to a majority-black church and understands their local culture, is accepted among them as a friend, etc., is likely socially conscious as to issues in the black church, but may not be woke; meanwhile a white person who goes to an all-white church but has a BLM sticker on their car and tweets about structural racism is likely woke, but probably not that socially conscious.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
Don't people refer to the Secret Service as the SS, at least in contexts where the referent is clear?
OliveTapenade
9d ago
It's not a Roman salute, at any rate - the arm is flat in a true Roman salute.
I buy that he was trying to do a "my heart goes out to you" gesture, if only because I can't believe that even Elon Musk is dumb enough to try to do a Nazi or a Roman salute in public.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I suppose Australia counts as a 'nice state' from this perspective? I certainly like living here, more than I did in parts of the US.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
I had a listen to the interview and didn't find myself feeling particularly illuminated - the interviewer in particular struck me as inadequate for this particular task.
There's a tension between two responsibilities an interviewer has, to be fair to him. On the one hand, an interviewer ought to invite their subject to articulate and reveal their perspective as clearly as possible. On the other hand, an interviewer ought to provoke and hold to account - an interviewer shouldn't be a pushover, but should judiciously apply pressure to draw out the challenges and contradictions of the subject's worldview.
Marchese, here, seemed inadequate to either task. He was unable to meaningfully engage with or critique much of what Yarvin said, and evidently was not familiar with the history Yarvin regularly alluded to, and rather than either get Yarvin to expand on genuinely interesting subjects or challenge Yarvin where his viewpoint is weak, Marchese came off as flailing around for attack lines. Several times, I thought, just as the conversation might be getting interesting, Marchese realised he was on weak ground and tried to pivot to a subject where he thought he could gotcha Yarvin.
It all just came off as very superficial to me. Marchese did not understand Yarvin's ideas very well and struggled to engage with them, especially when his prepared gotchas didn't land.
I'm not particularly on Yarvin's side as an intellectual, and there are plenty of effective ways to criticise him, but Marchese was just, well, bad.
OliveTapenade
11d ago
Yes, I've read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Or do you mean some other text?
OliveTapenade
11d ago
He does. There is a single character, Eöl, who is known as the Dark Elf, and a broader category, the Moriquendi (lit. 'Elves of Darkness' or 'Dark Elves').
In neither case does Tolkien mean anything like Dark Elves or Drow in the modern, D&D-influenced sense. The Moriquendi are merely those elves who never went to Valinor and saw the light of the Two Trees. (Those are the Calaquendi, or Elves of Light.) But there is no implied biological distinction, and certainly no moral distinction. For instance, Legolas is a Moriquendi, despite being probably the most famous example of the later Wood Elf archetype. The vast majority of elves are Moriquendi.
I wouldn't say Tolkien has Dark Elves in the D&D sense of an elven kindred who are evil. Tolkien is generally quite careful to avoid elves like that - there are plenty of morally flawed elves, but elves never side with Morgoth or Sauron, ever.
At any rate, none of this makes Yarvin's fantasy metaphor any less cringeworthy, though I suppose that is an aesthetic judgement, so make of it what you will.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
There's a motte and bailey on the subject - on the one hand it's perfectly true that Jews often do things in the interests of Jews. Everybody occasionally does things in the interests of groups to which they belong, so it's utterly unsurprising that, for instance, Jews tend to be quite pro-Israel, or that Jews are more committed to fighting anti-semitism than non Jews, or that Jews are more invested in Holocause remembrance.
On the other hand, what SS usually argues goes a long way beyond that, to the point of holding that Jews are a uniquely diabolical race of manipulators who infiltrate and control other societies.
The practical upshot, I would argue, is that you should automatically disregard anything that SS says that involves Jews, and because practically everything he posts is about Jews, that means you should ignore most of what he says full stop. I realise that sounds pretty harsh, but he is a very focused poster.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
I've noticed weird changes in the way that it's framed, actually?
Consider this story from 2017. (This is 'black' in the sense of Aboriginal, which has never made sense to me, since that is a completely different ethnic, racial, and cultural group to black Africans.) Along similar lines, here's more on this so-called 'blerd' movement.
This is strange partly because it erases a history - as you say, there have always been black nerds, who seem to have mixed with other nerds in very normal and boring ways. Instead the idea of being a nerd who is also black is being shifted or ignored by identity entrepreneurs who see opportunity in claiming the label for themselves.
OliveTapenade
14d ago
Well, just on its own merits it's hopelessly arbitrary, right? 'Global majority' just means 'non-X'. Non-whites are a global majority compared to whites, yes, but then... so what? Non-blacks are also a global majority compared to blacks. No racial or cultural group constitutes a majority by itself.
(Unless you count 'Asians' as a single group. If you count South, Southeast, and East Asians as the same group, combined they do form a majority. However, I'd argue that any scheme that says that Indians and Chinese are the same race is badly flawed.)
I'd say they should just say 'non-white', 'non-European', or 'non-native-British', but perhaps that makes it too clear what the intent is.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
If you're asking me, my guess is that:
- Not every celebrity is like this, but a significant proportion are, and that proportion is much too large for anybody to feel comfortable. You should not feel confident that your favourite celebrity is an exception.
- This is true of both male and female celebrities. In general you should assign a high probability to the thesis that any given celebrity is an awful person in private. That said, I theorise that sexual misconduct specifically, at least in the sexpest sense, skews heavily male among celebrities, just as it does in wider society.
- This is in part due to selection effects. Celebrities aren't a random selection of the populace, but rather are skewed heavily towards certain personality types and ambitions. I confidently theorise that celebrities, on average, rate higher on Dark Triad personality traits than the general populace.
- That said it is also due to the corruption of power; or as you put it, because everyone has a lot of darkness in their hearts, and we are restrained by social pressure and lack of opportunity as much as by morality. We should not be confident that we would act better.
From here on I'm going to get more religious, so you may wish to disregard the following if you have a more secular mindset:
The conclusion I draw from these observations, personally, is to be very aware of the depth and temptation of human sin, to show mercy even to those who seem like great sinners to me, and to be aware of and do my best to fight against my own inclination to sin. I very much hope that I'm not as bad as some of those public figures I'm aware of, but it would be foolish of me to be confident in that, so this is another reminder for me to repent and seek a conversion of the heart.
As mentioned, I think disordered sexual behaviour is a more common manifestation of the inner sinful nature among men. I don't think it's entirely absent among women, but I think it's probably more common for women to engage in different types of sin. Both sexes, however, stand very much condemned by their own inward natures and desires. So I don't see any final moral advantage, as it were, for women over men, nor for men over women.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
I think the distinction that comes most naturally to mind for me is that a sexpest is someone who aggressively pesters others for sex, and a slut is a person who rapidly or unhesitatingly gives in to such pestering. They're complementary, I suppose?
OliveTapenade
16d ago
Ah, to be clear, I'm using 'sexpest' mainly just to mean 'aggressively promiscuous person'. It doesn't imply non-consent for me. I like it as a gender-neutral alternative to 'slut', I suppose? It also implies actively seeking out or badgering others for sex, and that also sounds like Gaiman. This is enough for me to morally condemn Gaiman.
But this was known already, and I'm not sure what Gaiman's case specifically, or the vagaries of whether he gets cancelled or not, tells us about either the broad issue of sexual ethics, or even that much about the moment. Gaiman is an ageing white man who's also, at best, what we used to call a dirty old man. He seems potentially vulnerable to cancellation, but then, cancellation has never had a 100% hit rate, so it could go either way.
So I think I'm with 4bpp in terms of what we can draw from Gaiman's case, even if I suspect we differ on overall sexual ethics. There's just a limit to how much can be inferred from any one case.
OliveTapenade
16d ago
Forgive my naivete here, but I'm not really sure what the story here is, beyond "Neil Gaiman is a creepy sexpest."
Well, yes, and I will happily join in with condemning his sordid exploits. Promiscuity is bad and this seems quite a straightforward example. I'm just wondering what particular light is shed by this specific case?
Those are statements of dogma, not reasoned arguments. What reason do you have to think that it's genuinely inconceivable that a majority-Mormon population would ever welcome more than 1% of a non-Mormon population? That Swedes would never welcome more than 1% non-Nordic immigrants? On what basis do you think that? There's at least directional evidence at the moment suggesting that both Mormons and Swedes are happy living in societies that are less than 99% homogenous.
You've also avoided clarifying exactly what you're talking about - I understood you to be making a racial argument here. Presumably Norwegian immigrants to Sweden are fine. German? Slavic? Italian? I am guessing that by 'immigrants' you mean 'non-northern-European immigrants'? Likewise are you assuming that 'Mormons', contextually, means fair-skinned Mormons?
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