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Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for February 2019

Gloria Steinem is an Idiot

February 26, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Steinem argued in the 1980s that opposing abortion is actually a secret form of Nazism, and she repeats the argument in an interview below:

Well, the new generation of reader is instructing me by saying that these essays are still relevant …. on a more serious note, to put it mildly, is why Hitler was actually elected, and he was elected and he campaigned against abortion. I mean, that was — he padlocked the family planning clinics. Okay, so that is still relevant in the terms of the right wing. So there were very few things, actually, that I had to take out.

Forget the historical improprieties. The main thing is this: Some people feel that you can argue against literally any idea by citing the Holocaust.

Here’s another example:

In a discussion of the symbols and/or actuality of transcendent being, Rebecca Goldstein says that Jordan Peterson’s use of Christian symbols and William Craig’s belief in a transcendent God make her very nervous because…the Nazis felt transcendent. As she begins to say it, she obviously feels it is nonsense but says it anyway. But the idea is basically that, “You guys are basically Nazis.”

So what’s my point: Godwin’s law is actually an iron clad counterpoint for anything. You’re against abortion: Hitler. You believe in God or symbolism: Hitler. You’re a Zionist: Hitler. You think Islam is wrong: Hitler.

This sourthpark skit is our reality now:

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Filed Under: Rhetoric, Politics

The Digital Tribe

February 23, 2019 by Geoff 2 Comments

No man is an island, even conceptually.

We see ourselves enmeshed in multple layers reality:

  1. Family
  2. City
  3. Nation
  4. Sport teams
  5. Religious groups
  6. The physical world
  7. Etc

There are certainly more elements to this and many of our social selves instantiate precisely to fit into these groups. So we behave differently at work than at home, in a forrest than at church, at a restaurant than at a friend’s house, etc.

Our bodies have an entire reflect system to help us navigate all of these communities. For instance, you may value your job and your family, but you feel more guilty about leaving your family for a slightly bigger paycheck then you feel about doing w/out the money.

Our emotions, far from being mere spontaneous reactions are deeply social and party rational, insofar as they respond to things we deeply value, either innately or through choice. You might call your family, friends, and religious group a tribe.

Your emotions respond to your perception of your tribe’s approval. This helps you survive. The word being valuing your tribe and the opinions of your tribal members is loyalty or even faith. They are the people you trust and entrust yourself to.

Now, in more ancient times, people were necessarily localist, and so outlier tribe members had two options: leave the tribe or find a niche therein. If they could not, too bad. Leaving meant facing hostile groups or the environment without support.

In the age of the Internet, it is far easier to find a tribe if your family is boring, hostile, or uninvolved. This can be good. So much of our culture is complete bullshit these days, that finding a real, local tribe to fit into is almost impossible in some regions. For instance, I live in a city w/no gym and probably a 90% obesity rate. Almost everybody who goes outside wears sweatpants and sports-team shirts. I do not hate these people, I just cannot fit in with them. Thankfully, I live near a large city with more like-minded people. But if I didn’t, the Internet could provide me with access to experts in weight-lifting, forums of weight lifters offering guidance, support, and encouragement, and all of this would be to my choosing. And this happens for people in many domains: gaming, religion, humor, dating, etc.

What’s my point? That the Internet offers replacement tribes and therefore creates a set of emotional commitments. So while people might feel lonely because they have very little close fellowship with like-minded friends, they also find themselves highly influenced by distant individuals with no skin-in-the-game for their well-being. For instance, an individual with gender dysphoria whose behavior might have been taboo 30 years ago, might have been pressured into therapeutic intervention or into having a private life of cross-dressing and public life that looked much different. Now, such an individual can go to Twitter and find what appears to be millions and millions of supportive cheerleaders, feel really good about a permanently life-altering series of surgeries, and have not one conservation with a dissenting voice that is genuinely concerned. This happens with divorces, religious conversions, abortions, and so-on.

Why? Our tribes are digital.

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Filed Under: Economics, Culture

Just Once

February 23, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

More and more articles on the standard Christian websites and highly read blogs have articles that follow this pattern:

  1. I used to believe idea ‘X.’
  2. After agonizing, recognizing how bigoted the church was, and really following the Holy Spirit [God told me!], I realized I was wrong about ‘X.’
  3. Now that I believe ‘Not X,’ many evangelicals seem to disagree with me and it hurts.

Belief ‘X’ is almost always something like traditional Christian sexual ethics, the Biblical restriction on divorce, being pro-life, believing that God is real (not even kidding), or believing the Bible is inspired or even accurate at all.

Just once it would be interesting to see a story pumped that said, “I used to believe the progressive narrative and careful study changed my mind.”

What I’ve noticed in these personal narratives, by the way, is how little actual thought goes into the claims being made. For instance, a famous Christian band was also a worship band. When they started questioning the core beliefs of the church they were paid to lead (within the confines of their statement of faith), they were surprised and hurt that their efforts to change all of that were not accepted. What’s the point? These individuals didn’t even consider that their “new insights” into the Bible being false would disqualify them from their job leading people in worshiping the God of the Biblical narrative.

My charitable read on these people is that they’ve confused thinking with feeling guilty about changing their mind. It’s a sort of sunk-cost fallacy on their part. “I cannot abandon this belief because it would feel like too big of a change in my life.”

On the other hand, perhaps the more accurate reading is that as the culture (defined as mass media culture) becomes more and more a progressive monoculture, these people cannot bear to be left behind by it. In other words, the social pressure of the internet, sitcoms, and political leaders of the day is too much. So their emotions lead them to their new insights, but they need a way to try to keep fellowship with their old social group: “Led by the Holy Spirit” or “after studying the Bible.”

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Filed Under: Contemporary Trends, Christianity

The Rabbis and Biblical Interpretation

February 21, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Mike Heiser makes a compelling case against referring to the rabbinical authors uncritically when trying to understand the Bible:

You have to realize appealing to rabbis means nothing. Rabbinic thought and biblical thought (and academic work) are miles apart. Hey Christians enamored with rabbis: The rabbis can’t even get the messiah right (or, to be more charitable, the two powers in heaven doctrine right — that belief they used to have in Judaism until it became uncomfortable due to Christianity). If you’ve ever listened to Ben Shapiro (I’m a fan of the show) you know what I mean. He often does “Bible time” on his podcast. But what you get isn’t exegesis of the text in its ancient context. What you get is rabbinic opinion (with all the contrarian rabbinic opinions shelved to the side). Rabbinic interpretation (think Talmud and Mishnah) contradicts itself over and over again. That’s what those works do — they fling opinions at each other. That Hebrew food fight got codified into the Talmud and Mishnah. And Judaism is fine with that. We shouldn’t be. Most of what you’d find in rabbinic writings bears little to no resemblance of exegetical work in the text understood in light of its original ancient Near Eastern worldview. Not even close. They’re frequently making stuff up (they apply biblical material to situations in which the community found itself in; the work of the rabbis was responsive to community circumstances — it’s very applicational or situational).

I thought I would preserve this valuable paragraph before it got somehow removed from the internet.

But I will add that the Rabbis, while not worth reading at length if you read slowly, is not utterly without merit. For instance, sometimes material in the Talmud makes arguments for an interpretation. Such an interpretation is either right or wrong, in whole or in part. He observes that his anti-rabbinical argument is effective against early Christian writers as well:

This is also why the church fathers aren’t authorities in biblical exegesis, either. They are centuries (even millennia) removed from the biblical period and had no access to things like ancient Near Eastern texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls for help in interpretation. They were brilliant, but far removed from the right contexts and under-sourced.

While I think that early Christian Biblical interpretation, particularly of the New Testament, is more valuable than Heiser does, I do understand his point and it is valuable. The antiquity of an opinion no more makes it right than it’s Hebrew-ness or Greek-ness. To think an opinion’s source guarantees it to be right or wrong (excepting that the opinion come from God) is the genetic fallacy, a short-cut in thinking.

Do read the whole piece.

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Filed Under: Contemporary Trends, Bible, Christianity Tagged With: Church Fathers

Were the Spartans Pederasts?

February 21, 2019 by Geoff 2 Comments

A great deal of “the literature” about ancient Sparta includes the citizens of that great city in the numbers of those ancient Greek perverts who practiced pederasty.

Paul Cartledge is among the many academicians who have accepted this myth:

One particularly striking instance of this displaced or surrogate fathering was the institution of ritualized pederasty. After the age of twelve, every Spartan teenager was expected to receive a young adult warrior as his lover – the technical Spartan term for the active senior partner was ‘inspirer’, while the junior partner was known as the ‘hearer’. The relationship was probably usually sexual, but sex was by no means the only or even always the major object. The pedagogic dimension is nicely brought out in the tale of a Spartan youth who made the mistake of crying out in pain during one of the regular brutally physical contests that punctuated progress through the Agoge.

Paul Cartledge, Sparta: An Epic History

But where are the sources for this? Well, I found two ancient sources that mention adult to child relationships in Sparta:

I think I ought to say something also about intimacy with boys, since this matter also has a bearing on education. In other Greek states, for instance among the Boeotians, man and boy live together, like married people; elsewhere, among the Eleians, for example, consent is won by means of favours. Some, on the other hand, entirely forbid suitors to talk with boys.
The customs instituted by Lycurgus were opposed to all of these. If someone, being himself an honest man, admired a boy’s soul and tried to make of him an ideal friend without reproach and to associate with him, he approved, and believed in the excellence of this kind of training. But if it was clear that the attraction lay in the boy’s outward beauty, he banned the connexion as an abomination; and thus he caused lovers to abstain from boys no less than parents abstain from sexual intercourse with their children and brothers and sisters with each other.
I am not surprised, however, that people refuse to believe this. For in many states the laws are not opposed to the indulgence of these appetites. I have now dealt with the Spartan system of education, and that of the other Greek states. Which system turns out men more obedient, more respectful, and more strictly temperate, anyone who chooses may once more judge for himself.

Xenophon, The Polity of Sparta 2:12-14

So, while Xenophon speaks of ideal friendship, here, it can in no way mean anything sexual. This, by the way, is a major theme in the Memorabilia of Socrates. Now, one could make the case that Xenophon is not the greatest of historians, but the source we have is the source we have. And he claims that among the Spartans, ideal friendship was encouraged among old men and their wards, but that pederasty was an abomination. There is a ring of plausibility to this because Xenophon notes that the Spartan laws were unique among the Greek states, and this is a theme in other writers as well.

The other key source is quite late, but it may nevertheless be valuable. From the Historical Miscellany of Claudius Aelian:

Of the Lacedemonian Ephori I could relate many excellent things said and done; at present I shall only tell you this: If amongst them any man preferred in Friendship a rich man before another that was poor and virtuous, they fined him, punishing his avarice with loss of money. If any other that were a virtuous person professed particular friendship to none, they fined him also, because being virtuous he would not make choice of a friend ; whereas he might render him he loved like himself, and perhaps divers ; for affection of friends conduces much to the advance virtue in those whom they love, if they be temperate and virtuous. There was also this Law among the Lacedemonians; If any young man transgressed, they pardoned him, imputing it to want of years and experience ; yet punished his friend, as conscious and overseer of his actions.

Book III, X

The passage above, while almost certainly too late (third century) to be considered a key piece of evidence about Spartan friendship, is used as a moralizing tail about the nature of friendship. Now, Claudius leaned Stoic in his outlook, and the Stoics, at least as far back as Musonius Rufus thought homosexuality was against nature. What this means is that he was almost certainly not writing with a nodding approval toward pederasty here. He was, rather, using the culture of friendship in a unique and powerful city as an example for his curious readers. Scholars, for reasons I dare not speculate upon, take the passage above to be evidence of Spartan friendship being pederastic. The evidence is entirely against such a perspective.

Historian Helena Schrader does a good job further ripping the Myth of Spartan Pederasty to shreds from a similar but distinct angle:

In conclusion, contemporary sources suggest that Sparta was not a particularly homoerotic society, and certainly there was no institutionalized pederasty or homosexual behavior prior to the mid-5th century BC. On the contrary, in Sparta women’s sexuality was not only recognized but respected and to a degree encouraged.  Spartan artifacts furthermore suggest that Sparta was indeed more prudish than other Greek societies.  The evidence suggests that sex in Sparta was a private matter, sought inside marriage, rather than public entertainment pursued at symposia and on the streets as in Athens. The Spartan ideal of sex was an activity between equals, not an act of domination by an adult male upon a child, a slave, or an illiterate and powerless wife. 

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Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged With: Sparta

The Parody of Modern Conservative Ideology

February 20, 2019 by Geoff Leave a Comment

Conservatives rarely conserve anything. This is well known.

What they like to do is make conservative cases for making society worse. For instance:

henever you find an article that begins with the title, “The Conservative Case” for or against something, lock your door, check your wallet, and grab your gun. You know what’s coming is an unadulterated sell-out of everything “conservatism” purports to hold dear.

The words directly following the ellipses usually denote some obviously non-conservative thing, like “a $5 trillion budget” or “transgender bathrooms” or “4-foot-11, 80-pound female Navy SEALS.” Do any liberals ever write “a liberal case” for something obviously conservative, such as the traditional two-parent family or constitutional originalism?

No, this self-sabotaging practice is unique to the American Right, which perhaps helps explain why it’s in such disarray.

Publius Decius Mus

Here are some examples:


Now, an even better one:


What does this mean? It means that the same neo-cons (I’m not including Trump, who likely doesn’t care about homosexual marriage one way or another) who opposed gay marriage in the United States just a few years ago, used their influence in American foreign policy formulation to use gay-rights in Iran and elsewhere as a pretext for more infinite foreign wars. The conservative case for sending your sons to die for the right to engage in a practice condemned by conservatives in a country hostile to your way a life. The conservative case for more government spending to support rights abroad we oppose in our land. The conservative case for making your grandchildren live in a world unrecognizable to you. The conservative case for being a loser.

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Filed Under: Culture, Philosophy, Politics

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