OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
29d ago
Sometimes I wish I could vote in American elections, for how much they shape the world, and how significant they are even for us.
I don't wish that for this one.
If I had to, I would feel genuinely awful and miserable voting for either of those candidates. As it is, I'm going to watch from the other side of the ocean and hope that whoever gets elected doesn't screw everything up too much. It's a bad time to be American; it's a bad time to be an American client state.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
The best kind of upvote!
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Anecdotally, in the circles I move in, while concerns about stolen training data and artist livelihoods are real, I think the biggest factor is a combination of the aesthetic (i.e. AI art just looks bad) as well as what I think of as purity concerns. The way people treat AI art reminds me a great deal of Jonathan Haidt's purity foundation - people react to it the way they used to react to GM foods, or just way they reacted to junk, heavily processed foods in general. It's gross. It's icky. There's a kind of taint or poison in it. Real art is made by an artist, and involves creative decisions. Algorithms can't do that. People hate that sense that the image is inauthentic or 'not real', and if the AI art is curated well enough that they don't notice it's AI, then they were fooled, and people hate being fooled. If I say I hate AI art, you show me a picture, I like it, and you reveal afterwards that it was made by an AI, I don't conclude that maybe I'm wrong and AI art is fine. I conclude that you tricked me. You're a liar, and I condemn you.
That may sound uncharitable, though for what it's worth I'm anti-AI-art myself. Part of my concern is indeed aesthetic (the majority of AI art is recognisable as such; maybe high-quality human-curated AI art can escape this, but most of it is samey trash), and part of it is ethical (I admit my skin crawls a bit even to think that my writing might have been included in AI training data), but honestly, a lot of it is instinctual. AI art, like AI writing, is... well, impure. It feels dirty.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
There's no set closing time, even based on state?
Here, for instance, polls always close at 6 PM, in every state. I believe if you are in the line (the website says "still in the polling place", but since the place may be outside or split between several buildings, e.g. at a school, it is usually interpreted to mean anybody who's present and wishes to vote) at 6 PM they will stay open just long enough to empty the line, but no more will be admitted. In my experience (having worked as a polling official), it is extremely rare for that to matter, and usually at 6 PM there is nobody around any more.
Thus my usual experience of voting, when I'm not working at the polls, is to stroll down the road on Saturday and usually I can be in and out in five minutes.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
That makes sense in the US context - I'm Australian, so here voting is always on Saturday and legally compulsory, so if you work on Saturday, it is very likely that your workplace will make arrangements for everybody to go and vote. Or failing that, early voting is relatively easy here. I understand that voting is usually more of a hassle in America?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
The ad is targeted at men who already support Kamala. The goal is to remind them to go out and vote. It's not supposed to win new converts to the cause.
Right. I note that they don't ask the man who he's going to vote for - they ask whether he's going to vote. They ask him if he "has a plan" to vote (which sounds weird to me, because you shouldn't need a plan beyond "rock up to a polling place", but maybe it's playing on ideas about voter suppression?). It's turning out the base, not persuading unsure voters.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Well, taken as a realistic depiction of a speed date, it's ludicrous. Certainly my experience dating has been that you don't talk about politics at all, especially not when first impressions are on the table. Occasionally it is worth soberly reminding ourselves that most people find discussion of politics actively unpleasant, and avoid it wherever possible. There are minorities who are interested in politics, and I'm sure that the sorts of people who make and approve political ads are disproportionately drawn from those minorities, but most people don't like politics, and don't bring it up unless they feel they have to.
Aside from the realism of the scenario itself... I suppose I think there's potentially an interesting strategy here, particularly in light of the increasing gender gap on politics. Women do swing a bit more to the left on average, and men a bit more to the right. But men and women usually want to attract each other. "Come over to my side, it'll make you more attractive to the opposite sex" is a crass but perhaps effective strategy. You can see the echo of this strategy in those "don't be weird" ads, portraying right-wing men as repulsive and unattractive to women. Insofar as being attractive to women is something a lot of men value, is it a useful tactical approach? Perhaps.
(One might wonder a bit about the opposite, but I think female attractiveness tends to work differently to male, and certainly is presented or constructed differently socially, so it's not a mirror image. And in general I'd expect to see less of this just because there's less conservative media in general, and significantly less of it aimed at women. Evie is trying her best, but it's a different field, and in general I think women's attractiveness tends to be more self-focused, more you-are-the-belle-of-the-ball, whereas men's attractiveness tends to be more other-focused, look-at-all-the-people-you-can-attract. So strategies have to be different.)
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I suppose I'd distinguish two scenarios there. The first is one where Dutton supports the Voice, but the rest of the party does not necessarily. In this case, much like same-sex marriage, the Voice becomes an effective wedge against the Coalition, splitting the Liberals from the Nationals, and potentially getting Dutton, who became opposition leader on a strong, right-wing image into trouble with his most dedicated supporters. The second is one where we presume that the entire Coalition, or at least the entire elected/institutional Coalition, goes all in to support the Voice.
In the second scenario, the Voice likely succeeds, I think. In the first, though... I don't know. The first is more plausible, but the fragmenting Coalition, while worse off overall, might not provide the push to get the Voice over the line. There is an issue that, no matter how much institutional support the Voice had, and it was indeed drowning in it, it runs counter to the moral instincts of a great many Australians. I tend to agree with Jim Reed - Australians will vote to treat everybody the same, but not to treat everybody differently. The Yes case's biggest hurdle was that it was unavoidably a proposition to enshrine permanent privileges for one group of people on the basis of their ancestry, and even if both major parties had endorsed it, I think there would have been some resistance. It's not inconceivable that Australians vote to structurally favour certain people on the basis of ancestry (the White Australia Policy was genuinely popular in its day), but the more multicultural Australia gets, the less that will seem viable, I hope.
Or, well, it's either "treat everybody the same and ignore race" as the most viable truce, or a competition between every ethnic group imaginable to secure legal privileges for itself, and the latter would be disastrous, and I hope most Australians can see that.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
It's all the one line of questioning - it's all the same dodge, it seems to me. The fifth question being slightly different doesn't erase the context of that answer, and I still object to "but big tech" being used as a motte to defend the bailey of "Trump didn't lose 2020".
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Reposting from the final hours of last week's thread, as requested (and have no fear, it is still 11 PM on the 14th here, so it's still the anniversary!):
Today is the one year anniversary of Australia’s Voice to Parliament referendum. It received a good deal of discussion on the Motte at the time, so I thought it might be worth looking back at what’s happened since then.
As a brief reminder, the referendum was about amending the constitution to require a body called the ‘Voice to Parliament’. The Voice would have been a committee of Aboriginal leaders with the power to advise and make submissions to the elected parliament, but not to do any legislation itself. Despite early signs of support, that support decreased as referendum day approached, and the proposal was soundly defeated, with roughly 60% nationwide voting against it.
On the political side of it: on the federal level, the Labor party seems to have responded to the defeat by determinedly resolving never to speak about it again. The defeat of one of their major election promises reflects badly on them, so it’s understandable that they seem to want to memory-hole it. What’s more, the defeat of the referendum seems to have warned Labor away from either more Aboriginal-related reform, or from any future referenda on other matters. They’ve silently backed away from a commitment to a Makarrata commission, which would have been a government-funded body focused on ‘reconciliation’ and ‘truth-telling’, and they’ve also, in a reshuffle, quietly dropped the post of ‘assistant minister for the republic’, widely seen as a prelude to a referendum on ending the monarchy and becoming a republic. Labor seem to have lost their taste for big symbolic reforms, and are pivoting to the centre.
Meanwhile the Coalition seem to have been happy to accept this – they haven’t continued to make hay over the Voice, even though a failed referendum might seem like a good target to attack Labor on. Possibly they’re just happy to take their win, rather than risk losing sympathy by being perceived as attacking Aboriginal people.
On the state level, the result has been for Aboriginal issues to fade somewhat from prominence, but there has been little pause or interruption to state-level work on those issues. Despite a few voices suggesting that state processes should be ended or altered, notably in South Australia, not much has happened, and processes like Victorian treaty negotiations have moved ahead without much reflection from the Voice result.
To Aboriginal campaigners themselves…
For the last few days, Megan Davis, one of the major voices behind the Voice, has been saying that she considered abandoning the referendum once polls started to turn against it. Charitably, that might be true – you wouldn’t publicly reveal doubts during the campaign itself, after all. Uncharitably, and I think more plausibly, it’s an attempt to pass the buck, and she means to shift blame to politicians, such as prime minister Anthony Albanese, who was indeed extremely deferential to the wishes of Aboriginal leaders during the Voice referendum. It’s hard not to see this as perhaps a little disingenuous (notably in 2017, Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had knocked back the idea of a Voice referendum on the basis that he didn’t think it would pass, and at the time he was heavily criticised by campaigners; does anyone really think Albanese would have been praised for his leadership if he had said the same thing?), but at any rate, the point is more that it seems like knives are out among Aboriginal leaders for why it failed.
The wider narrative that I’ve seen, particularly among the media, has generally been that the failure was due to misinformation, and due to Peter Dutton and the Coalition opposing the Voice. Some commentators have suggested that it’s just that Australia is irredeemably racist, but that seems like a minority to me. The main, accepted line, it seems to me, is that it failed because the country’s centre-right party opposed it, and because misinformation and lies tainted the process. The result is a doubling-down on the idea of ‘truth-telling’ as a solution, although as noted government specifically does not seem to have much enthusiasm for that right now.
To editorialise a bit, this frustrates me because I think the various port-mortems and reflections have generally failed to reflect upon the actual outcome of the referendum, which is that a significant majority of Australians genuinely don’t want this proposal. ‘Misinformation’ is a handy way of saying ‘the people were wrong without maximally blaming the people, and it feels to me like the solution is to just re-educate the electorate until they vote the correct way in the future. Of course, I wouldn’t expect die-hard Voice campaigners to change their mind on the issue, but practically speaking, the issue isn’t so much that people were misled – it’s that people didn’t like the proposal itself. I confess I also find this particularly frustrating because, it seemed to me, the Yes campaign was just as guilty of misinformation and distortion as the No campaign, and as magic9mushroom documented, many of their claims of ‘misinformation’ were either simply disagreements with statements of opinion, or themselves lies.
The whole referendum and its aftermath have been much like the earlier marriage plebiscite in 2017 in that they’ve really decreased my faith in the possibility of public conversation or deliberation – what ideally should be a good-faith debate over a political proposal usually comes down to just duelling propaganda, false narratives and misleading facts shouted over each other, again and again. The experience of the Voice referendum has definitely hardened my sense of opposition to any kind of formal ‘truth-telling’ process – my feelings on that might roughly be summarised as, “You didn’t tell the truth before, so why would I trust you to start now?”, albeit taking ‘tell the truth’ here as shorthand for a broad set of good epistemic and democratic practices, not merely avoiding technical falsehoods.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Blast, Australia-Monday has led me astray again!
I can repost it tomorrow! Perhaps I should have just waited, but the one year anniversary was too good to miss.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I didn't say anythin about the character of journalists, so I don't see whythat's relevant. I am, however, going to have to accuse you of selective misquotation. The transcript of the interview is here. Here's the whole exchange (journalist in bold, Vance in normal script):
Last few questions. In the debate, you were asked to clarify if you believe Trump lost the 2020 election. Do you believe he lost the 2020 election? I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election, but we’re focused on the future. I think there’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable. And look, Lulu —
Senator, yes or no. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Let me ask you a question. Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysis have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?
Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? I think that’s the question.
Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.
I have asked this question repeatedly. It is something that is very important for the American people to know. There is no proof, legal or otherwise, that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election. But you’re repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying, which is that when our own technology firms engage in industrial-scale censorship — by the way, backed up by the federal government — in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes. I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020. I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw: Well, every court case went this way. I’m talking about something very discrete, a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020. And more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris’s governance, which has screwed this country up in a big way.
Senator, would you have certified the election in 2020? Yes or no? I’ve said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised. I think that when you have technology companies —
The answer is no. When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that, again, independent studies have suggested affect the vote. I think that it’s right to protest against that, to criticize that, and that’s a totally reasonable thing.
So the answer is no.
Vance was asked four times, very explicitly, "did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?", and he evaded answering that question.
Is the statement that Vance actually made reasonable? Yes, I think so, and I've said that repeatedly. The argument that there isn't a fair or level playing field in terms of US elections, and that technology firms engaged in a kind of censorship such that, had it not been present, the results might have been different - that argument is fair enough.
But it is not what Vance was asked about.
It is a dodge, because, as I just said, Vance cannot safely answer that question. Either "yes" or "no" get him into trouble, so he avoids it.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Yes, a referendum has never passed without bipartisan support. In a sense it's correct that Dutton and the Coalition going against the Voice was what doomed it. I'm not sure if the Voice would have succeeded if it had been bipartisan, and if Dutton had supported it he would likely have faced revolt from his own supporters (the Nationals had already opposed it, for a start), not to mention the grassroots, but it would definitely have helped.
So I suppose you can say it was their fault, but of course, their argument would be that they were correct to oppose it, because the Liberal Party has particular values and principles, those values are, well, liberal, and thus opposed to privileging any group or demographic on the basis of race or heritage. If your proposal is contrary to the explicitly-stated values of one of the largest and most long-running political traditions in Australia, you probably shouldn't be surprised when the representatives of that tradition oppose it. You might make a more limited criticism of the Coalition for playing dirty politics (Dutton's obviously-insincere, swiftly-retracted, promise of a second referendum on constitutional recognition stands out as especially two-faced), but I really don't think Labor or the Yes campaign have a leg to stand on in that regard.
'Truth-telling' is a problematic phrase, all the more so, I think, because it rarely comes with clarification of exactly which truths need to be told. Reconciliation Australia describes it as "a range of activities that engage with a fuller account of Australia’s history and its ongoing impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples", which is roughly the same as the UNSW definition here. Here's a story from Deakin that says that 'truth-telling' involves discussion of colonial history, indigenous culture both pre- and post-colonisation, indigenous contributions to Australia as a whole, and a range of activities including festivals, memorials, public art, repatriation of ancestors, return of land, and renaming of locations. This is all starting to sound quite vague.
If the request is for more education and public knowledge about colonisation, well, that seems to be going quite well - I did some of the frontier wars in school in the 90s and early 00s, after all, and radio, TV, popular media, etc., are full of Aboriginal perspectives. There are already several nation-wide celebrations as well, which is relevant if 'truth-telling' includes acknowledgement of positive contributions as well. There's already NAIDOC Week, Reconciliation Week, National Sorry Day, Harmony Day, Australia Day (or Invasion Day or Survival Day if you prefer) is often used to discuss colonial history, and more. So it seems like 'truth-telling' in that general sense is already happening. What specifically is being proposed in addition?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Yes, I think this is a correct take. From Vance's own perspective, he did the right thing - deflect, avoid, pivot. The question he was given cannot be safely answered. He knows his opponents will try to pin him on it (Walz tried at the VP debate as well), and he's clearly got a couple of deflections memorised. The correct move is to try to distract, maybe go on the offensive if possible, and then just get past it and return to stronger terrain for himself.
The is a blunder here, but the blunder is not Vance's, but Trump's. I'm sure that Vance could take a much stronger line on elections, democracy, and fairness if he weren't handicapped by being Trump's running mate. Unfortunately, he is.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
There’s nothing bonkers about his argument.
There is indeed nothing bonkers about that argument.
That's just not Trump's argument about 2020, and neither is it what Vance was asked about. Vance was doing this - answering a different question, which he could answer credibly.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I was darkly amused to see that moment, because it felt like a perfect example of something I'd just described.
Did technology companies and the overall media landscape skew public conversation and interest in a way that was generally to the benefit of one party, did this affect the election result, and was this bad? I'm inclined to answer yes, yes, and yes. I am in sympathy with Vance's point here.
But his point is also a dodge - he's retreating from a bailey ("Trump didn't lose the 2020 election") to a motte ("the 2020 election wasn't fair"). There's no rule or constitutional principle saying that elections don't count if newspapers are unfair, nor for if websites are unfair. Vance may be correct about tech firms, but that's beside the point.
I recognise that Vance is in an impossible position here - he can't say that Trump didn't lose without undermining all his efforts to appeal to moderates, and he can't say that Trump did lose without incurring his running mate's wrath, so he's got to deflect and distract. From his perspective, that's the correct strategic move. But I still feel rather sad for America that this is the situation they're in.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Today is the one year anniversary of Australia’s Voice to Parliament referendum. It received a good deal of discussion on the Motte at the time, so I thought it might be worth looking back at what’s happened since then.
As a brief reminder, the referendum was about amending the constitution to require a body called the ‘Voice to Parliament’. The Voice would have been a committee of Aboriginal leaders with the power to advise and make submissions to the elected parliament, but not to do any legislation itself. Despite early signs of support, that support decreased as referendum day approached, and the proposal was soundly defeated, with roughly 60% nationwide voting against it.
On the political side of it: on the federal level, the Labor party seems to have responded to the defeat by determinedly resolving never to speak about it again. The defeat of one of their major election promises reflects badly on them, so it’s understandable that they seem to want to memory-hole it. What’s more, the defeat of the referendum seems to have warned Labor away from either more Aboriginal-related reform, or from any future referenda on other matters. They’ve silently backed away from a commitment to a Makarrata commission, which would have been a government-funded body focused on ‘reconciliation’ and ‘truth-telling’, and they’ve also, in a reshuffle, quietly dropped the post of ‘assistant minister for the republic’, widely seen as a prelude to a referendum on ending the monarchy and becoming a republic. Labor seem to have lost their taste for big symbolic reforms, and are pivoting to the centre.
Meanwhile the Coalition seem to have been happy to accept this – they haven’t continued to make hay over the Voice, even though a failed referendum might seem like a good target to attack Labor on. Possibly they’re just happy to take their win, rather than risk losing sympathy by being perceived as attacking Aboriginal people.
On the state level, the result has been for Aboriginal issues to fade somewhat from prominence, but there has been little pause or interruption to state-level work on those issues. Despite a few voices suggesting that state processes should be ended or altered, notably in South Australia, not much has happened, and processes like Victorian treaty negotiations have moved ahead without much reflection from the Voice result.
To Aboriginal campaigners themselves…
For the last few days, Megan Davis, one of the major voices behind the Voice, has been saying that she considered abandoning the referendum once polls started to turn against it. Charitably, that might be true – you wouldn’t publicly reveal doubts during the campaign itself, after all. Uncharitably, and I think more plausibly, it’s an attempt to pass the buck, and she means to shift blame to politicians, such as prime minister Anthony Albanese, who was indeed extremely deferential to the wishes of Aboriginal leaders during the Voice referendum. It’s hard not to see this as perhaps a little disingenuous (notably in 2017, Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had knocked back the idea of a Voice referendum on the basis that he didn’t think it would pass, and at the time he was heavily criticised by campaigners; does anyone really think Albanese would have been praised for his leadership if he had said the same thing?), but at any rate, the point is more that it seems like knives are out among Aboriginal leaders for why it failed.
The wider narrative that I’ve seen, particularly among the media, has generally been that the failure was due to misinformation, and due to Peter Dutton and the Coalition opposing the Voice. Some commentators have suggested that it’s just that Australia is irredeemably racist, but that seems like a minority to me. The main, accepted line, it seems to me, is that it failed because the country’s centre-right party opposed it, and because misinformation and lies tainted the process. The result is a doubling-down on the idea of ‘truth-telling’ as a solution, although as noted government specifically does not seem to have much enthusiasm for that right now.
To editorialise a bit, this frustrates me because I think the various port-mortems and reflections have generally failed to reflect upon the actual outcome of the referendum, which is that a significant majority of Australians genuinely don’t want this proposal. ‘Misinformation’ is a handy way of saying ‘the people were wrong without maximally blaming the people, and it feels to me like the solution is to just re-educate the electorate until they vote the correct way in the future. Of course, I wouldn’t expect die-hard Voice campaigners to change their mind on the issue, but practically speaking, the issue isn’t so much that people were misled – it’s that people didn’t like the proposal itself. I confess I also find this particularly frustrating because, it seemed to me, the Yes campaign was just as guilty of misinformation and distortion as the No campaign, and as magic9mushroom documented, many of their claims of ‘misinformation’ were either simply disagreements with statements of opinion, or themselves lies.
The whole referendum and its aftermath have been much like the earlier marriage plebiscite in 2017 in that they’ve really decreased my faith in the possibility of public conversation or deliberation – what ideally should be a good-faith debate over a political proposal usually comes down to just duelling propaganda, false narratives and misleading facts shouted over each other, again and again. The experience of the Voice referendum has definitely hardened my sense of opposition to any kind of formal ‘truth-telling’ process – my feelings on that might roughly be summarised as, “You didn’t tell the truth before, so why would I trust you to start now?”, albeit taking ‘tell the truth’ here as shorthand for a broad set of good epistemic and democratic practices, not merely avoiding technical falsehoods.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
This seems like some sort of reverse-motte-and-Bailey on your part. Some crazies yell extreme theories, therefore the moderate theories are not worth considering?
On the contrary, I just said:
We also sometimes see the argument that the institutional landscape, particularly re: media, academia and 'experts', civil servants and bureaucrats, etc., is so thoroughly slanted as to systematically misrepresent the positions of right-wing or Republican figures. No election held on such biased terrain can be considered fair. The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas.
I said myself that I agree with the mottes! I just sometimes feel like the mottes, and my agreement therewith, are used to try to justify baileys that I find much more doubtful.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
If those other issues were dealt I would bet enormous sums of money that support for stolen election claims would deflate slowly like a balloon over the course of several years.
I agree entirely.
Unfortunately I think the terrain at the moment is such that, because any questions about those issues are right/Trump-coded, those on the left will reflexively oppose any of those reforms, because any movement towards the right is seen as presumptively Trumpist, and you can't negotiate with insurrectionists, and so on. Extreme polarisation has made it harder to solve the causes of polarisation.
And all this does is push people further to the extremes and strengthen the con men.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
The problem I've always had here, particularly looking down at some of the below comments, is the way that there seem to be several concentric circles of mottes on this question, none of which actually correspond to what Trump or some of his partisans claimed.
Thus, for instance, sometimes there's an argument that US election security could be significantly improved. I wholly agree with this. There are many ways that US elections could be made more secure, transparent, and responsible.
We also sometimes see the argument that the institutional landscape, particularly re: media, academia and 'experts', civil servants and bureaucrats, etc., is so thoroughly slanted as to systematically misrepresent the positions of right-wing or Republican figures. No election held on such biased terrain can be considered fair. The entire institutional ecosystem is soft-rigged against the GOP, regardless of whether there was any direct voter fraud. This is an argument that I have a lot of time for - if one faction has a huge advantage in political communication, and its credibility is laundered by all the major epistemic institutions of its society, then it's hardly a free and fair contest of ideas.
However, these were not the actual arguments made by Trump and allies, nor were they the arguments voiced on January 6. Those arguments were much more clearly motivated and false. I'm thinking of arguments like 2000 Mules. It may be true that US elections aren't run well, and that the media landscape is biased to an extent that calls into question democratic legitimacy, but neither of those make D'Souza's specific claims true, or even plausible. Likewise with other claims.
Often I run into defenses like "take Trump seriously but not literally", or "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers", and to an extent I think the points those defenses are making are valid - Trump's communicative style relies heavily on deliberate exaggeration, but the audience is 'in' on that exaggeration to an extent; and there are more subtle and effective ways to lie that don't involve stating identifiable untruths.
But at some point, I think, that eventually turns into "I believe Trump's lies communicate a larger truth" and from there into "what Trump says is false, but I support him because I associate those falsehoods with something else that might be true" and from there to "I ignore what Trump actually says and substitute something else, and I support that something else". At some point you're just too far away from the candidate himself or his campaign.
In hindsight, one of the things that struck me as odd and continues to strike me as odd about Tuvel's paper was the way that defenders sought to minimise the significance of the paper itself. I remember some of its defenders saying things like "this isn't very significant, it's trying to nitpick a slight clarification about the way we use language, this is what philosophers do all the time", and so on.
It seemed strange to me that philosophers would be so critical of the significance of their own profession. What Tuvel does in the paper is argue for an equivalence between transgenderism and transracialism. That would seem to leave two options, if we wish to be intellectually consistent. Either 1) we ought to treat transgenderism and transracialism equivalently (whether affirming both or denying both), or 2) we assert that Tuvel's argument is wrong somewhere (and implicitly ought to show where it goes wrong). Those are your options, if you take philosophy remotely seriously. Either Tuvel is right, in which case we should treat the two situations the same, or she's wrong, in which case it's incumbent on the objector to show where she's wrong.
Either way, that isn't a minor clarification of a point of language - it's an argument that leads to either radically revising what we think it means to be of a particular race, or else rejecting transgender identities along with transracial identities. If that argument is correct, it's a big deal. It's not a silly linguistic game.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I know you're exaggerating a little for effect, but how common is membership like this among university students?
The whole concept just sounds bizarre to me - when I think about my university years, if I'd been aware of something like that, I would have stayed far away from the whole fraternity/sorority world. They sound awful. Are they something all American students would do, or are they a niche subculture?
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
I’m sure most people here are familiar with the concept of Rushing and Pledging a fraternity or sorority,
Is it possible to have a quick reminder?
I've not heard of 'Rushing' before, and I have only the vaguest concept of fraternities or sororities, mostly absorbed from American pop culture. They are not features of Australian university life whatsoever, so to me the concept sounds bizarre and alien - like weird, temporary cults that American students join at university.
OliveTapenade
1mo ago
Very interesting framing! The question that most strongly appears to me, though, is this one:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
This sounds to me like positing a kind of agency or purpose to history - a sense that it's almost like there's a design, or something that's meant to happen now.
That sense would imply some kind of agent to have that purpose, a designer or meaner who lies behind this. To UFO cultists (pardon the pejorative language), that agent might be some enlightened alien race, or spiritual being or group thereof that are only observed through these esoteric occurrences. Someone more focused on AI might posit some way that a future agent can reach back in time to influence its own creation (perhaps something like Dan Simmons' Ultimate Intelligence?), or to create the condition of its own possibility. Or adherents of traditional religions might easily slot their own divinities in there.
Do you have any sense of such a purpose, or implied agency?
Transpacificist, in my case. I'm writing from Australia.
We do have some options in the relationship with America, but the most America-critical voices in our domestic politics tend to be pro-China, and whatever bad things I may say about America, I much prefer the United States as an ally to China.
More options
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