Something's off with the chart, isn't it? It looks to me like you have Liberal Jesus in the Degenerate Realist quadrant, and Rove as a Decent Fantasist, along with Putin. At first I thought it was an axis-labeling problem but MLK, Biden, and Trump are all in the right places so I think we just have those three misplaced dots. I admit I'm not sure where Tucker's supposed to be; I don't think I'd put him neutral on the Decency scale but maybe that's just me.
I'm a bit confused why Liberal Jesus is low decency/high reality instead of high decency/low reality? Also not sure how Putin and Rove end up in the high decency side? Sure Rove, Bush, et al, look like towering statesmen compared to the latest cohort but they were and are pretty big scumbags? Is this more about being able to be polite? (Faking like you are nice and caring being an underrated political skill pre-Trump.)
Maybe some more examples for that upper left quadrant would help? SBF might fit, in the non-political realm? Or Bill Clinton?
(On preview, what Osgood said.)
Quibbles: I'd prefer Decency vs Indecency, just because "degenerate" has a lot freight. I think Putin (at least post-2022) is definitely on the fantasist side. I'd put liberal Jesus much closer to the middle of the realism axis. But then liberal Jesus is himself more a spectrum than a point.
The axes look fine to me. horizontal is realism, vertical is decency.
Oh, maybe 4 is right and I did just have axis confusion. On my screen the word Realism appears at the bottom of the Y axis, making me think that's what it's labeling; Decency's on the left of the X axis, suggesting that it's horizontal. But if we go by the way the words are oriented instead of where they're placed, then I think all my objections go away.
You can place the Joker, Luthor, Batman, and Superman on this matrix, so it seems like a genuinely useful new tool for moral evaluation.
What makes Rightwing Jesus a -0.6 on this scale? What are some ways this vision of him are commonly expressed?
Does nobody populate the middle?
I didn't misunderstand the axes but yes the labelling wasn't great, and the "Moral Coordinates" looks like yet another axis label so it took about three glances each time I looked at a point to reestablish what was what.
I kind of love that Karl Rove and Joe Biden are at the top of the realism heap.
Does Liberal Jesus, who is right there at peak goodness (sorry, decency) take no responsibility at all for the whole eternal torture thing? IANAbiblical scholar but that's a New Testament insertion into Christian dogma, right?
4: Thanks, Mossy! That's how I intended it to read, anyway. I'm not a chart guy, so maybe I'm not aware of the labeling conventions.
3: I thought a lot about labels, and understand your point about the freight of "degeneracy." But I think it catches the flavor of what I'm going for. "Indecency" also carries a set of connotations.
I really struggled with "Fantasy," because I was tempted to fall into one of the traps that I'm trying to address. "Bullshit" was my first thought, but that is judgmental in the exact way that I think is erroneous.
For degeneracy vs decency, I would distinguish between private degeneracy and public degeneracy.
True! I bet some D&D player has come up with the formulation: Lawful Evil in the streets, Chaotic Good in the sheets.
10: I think there are some parables that imply eternal suffering, but others that imply oblivion for the unsaved, so it's a bit of a tossup. The NT is never that direct on the subject. It certainly didn't harp on eternal suffering like later millennia did.
10,12: Well, there's Liberal Jesus and Conservative Jesus, both of whom we know a lot about. Then there's Actual Jesus, whose record is murkier.
But yeah, the Lake of Fire and whatnot are basically New Testament innovations.
So for example, Mark 9:43-48 ESV: "And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire."
[Quote about the Big J being the center of life.]
[Urge to shake this hotel lobby's chandeliers shouting Arioch, Arioch, blood and souls for Arioch.]
I like this -- I have formulated a similar theory calling the axis Serious to Silly, but Realism to Fantasy works fine.
Wasn't Karl Rove the one who said we create reality?
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out."
16: Exactly! That's a guy with a deep and subtle understanding of the real world.
I love 15. It is so Unfogged-like. Everyone post their income, SAT scores, and the moral axis systems you have created in your spare time.
Without having thought this through carefully, I think the relevant epistemic quality (at least inasmuch as we're analyzing MAGAs) is less well described as fantasy (evaluation of claims is divorced from reality) than as confirmation bias (evaluation of claims is based on conformity with beliefs already held).
If one dug into it I doubt this would prove a distinction with a difference, but the change of terminolgy feels better to me.
I shared Osgood's misunderstanding of the axis labeling.
Re: Rove, does nobody remember election night 2012 anymore? It was the good-for-a-chuckle SNL sketch that got turned into 2020's stinker of a movie.
19: Didn't I write a whole thing? I had arbitrary Capitalizations and everything.
Does nobody populate the middle?
David Brooks.
1. Alignment charts are hard to apply to gods, or even demigods in pluralistic pantheons or "aspects" of gods like "Liberal Jesus" or "Rightwing Jesus", because they are often at least somewhat beyond good and evil. Even without getting into theodicy it's tough to ascribe human morality to a being like that. Why does it matter if you follow the laws if you've made them and can change them at will? Example one, example two.
2. I feel like the alignment framework in the OP is well thought-out for what it is, but isn't as useful as the standard D&D good/evil vs. law/chaos. "Bullshit" is a judgemental way to describe what this is getting at, but there's nothing wrong with that; "evil" is also judgemental. High-decency vs. low-decency looks a hell of a lot like good vs. evil. I guess it's interesting to have some way to put Trump, Rove, and Biden in three different quadrants (different boxes is easy, but different quadrants is harder), but that's all I can think of.
3. Lots of alignment chart examples here, if anyone else is interested: Mightygodking dot com.
I realize right-wing evangelicals will say, e.g. Jesus would have wanted them to unload their magazine on that home invader, but I'm not sure that translates to a coherent Trump-like Rightwing Jesus as a character. Don't they still talk about the towering morality of Jesus but compartmentalize that with how they feel guided?
I would distinguish between private degeneracy and public degeneracy. Is cheating on your spouse but voting well on important measures a decent person or a degenerate person?
A very apt distinction. Similarly, there is (not quite Public/Private) but a Personal Realism/Political Realism distinction. I am thinking of many engineer/STEM types I know who are grounded in their jobs(as well as how they manage their personal affairs) but just willing to engage in massive flights of fancy about politics and sometimes the world in general.
Right -- the quality that drives me nuts about them is that they don't think politics and government are the sorts of things you need to be realistic about.
oh yes, I know lots of those. And the flip side, the hocus-pocus woo lady with the sage in her private life, who is quite practical about locking down funding for the women's shelter and taking water and blankets to immigrants in detention facilities.
If you are insulated from the consequences and really selfish, you don't.
I think part of it is that in a lot of science and science-adjacent fields it's fine and good to have crazy ideas so long as at the end of the day you check them. It's harder to check them in politics and government because we can't let every person run their own country just to see how it goes, and without those guardrails things get wacky.
In the arts, you can go far with crazy ideas until you can't (like the butthole version of "Cats"). Most Republican officials are now actors or aspiring actors.
26: That's the exact phenomenon that my chart explains. There is no compartmentalization here whatsoever. No paradox. No contradiction.
Rightwing and Leftwing Jesus are both primarily about tailoring beliefs to personal preferences rather than facts. Both Jesuses are grounded in the Bible, which is to say that they are both grounded in myth.*
So if you want to know what Jesus teaches, you find out what His followers want to believe. Turns out the followers of Rightwing Jesus want to believe that sexual assault, theft, lies, lawbreaking, invading the United States Capitol to overturn an election etc., are NOT intrinsically sins or crimes. The deepest roots of RW Christian theology are a variation of Wilhoit's Law: God honors and protects the Chosen, regardless.
People get confused because RW Christians say they believe in (for example) the Ten Commandments. But that's the whole point: They can say that -- or anything else that they want to say -- and they are only required to act on that to the extent they are inclined to do so. Trump gets this.
Even Trump's apparent apostasy on abortion isn't going to cause him a meaningful problem with his evangelical constituency. Everybody knows that, right? We all know it because we know he's a good RW Christian, and the evangelicals correctly understand that they can trust him to lie.
If you try to frame RW Christianity as hypocritical, you're missing the point. Hypocrisy is a core value and of course they are going to say otherwise. The Trump web site is called Truth Social ! How could he be any more Christlike? He is the Truth!
*I really dislike the New Atheists, even though I often sound like one. Among other things, the New Athesists are unable to grasp the issues explained by my Moral Coordinate plane.
"[my job's easy] if I never make up my mind, even in the privacy of the kitchen or the voting booth, that one candidate is better than another, that one side is right and the other wrong" -- journalist Peter Baker, former Oberlin student and pretender to Broder's throne
Oberlin is a very nice campus, with an actual Ben Franklin store across the street.
27-29: Factuality is one tool among many, and often has significant disadvantages. (Moby in 30 gets me.)
If you are committed to Fantasy, maybe you end up declassifying secret documents in your mind or sending your soldiers to Stalingrad. Then maybe you bump up against Reality in an unpleasant way. But you can still accomplish a lot along the way, and deliver a lot of bad outcomes to Realists.
I remain utterly baffled that people can look at the last twenty years of this world, all the bloodshed and bigotry and abuse, and be like "ooh, you know who I really really hate? Atheists. They're so smug in their newspaper op-eds."
I'm worried about vegans. I can't face the future without butter or cheese.
29: what unites the two types is that the woo side makes them both in some sense fragile. The first will do you a genuinely unburstable serverless framework for Kubernetes but is likely to fall for libertarianism or something; the second is at risk of dropping into the wrong facebook group and ending up searching for tunnel kids.
ajay has such a narrow estimation of the human capacity for hate. Sad, really.
unburstable serverless framework for Kubernetes
Incredible that this is the realism thing, not the fantasist thing.
Tell me of this thing you humans call "Hatred of Outgroups."
Jon and K8 plus 8 VPN tunnel kids
Generally,
My ethical development as a young man was shaped largely by Catholicism and Dungeons and Dragons.
D&D comes from Tolkien and Tolkien comes from Catholicism. But I don't really see the evil/lawful axes in Tolkien and IDK Catholicism from peanuts. Is there a lineage or did Gygax just make it up?
"D&D co-creator Gary Gygax credited the inspiration for the alignment system to the fantasy stories of Michael Moorcock and Poul Anderson."
Apparently the very first release only had the Chaotic/Neutral/Lawful axis and the Good/Evil one was added a few years later.
Peanuts is Calvinist. Or at least the morose kinds of Lutherans you see sometimes.
I don't see evil/lawful axes in Tolkien either. I'm re-reading The Silmarillion right now too.
Probing Elric of Melniboné I see he's based in part on Kullervo, from whom we also get Turin Turambar, Tolkien's closest I can think of offhand to chaotic good. And Kullervo is pre-Christian, while MAGAs are post-Christian. FWLTMBW.
I'm at the part where he refused to go back with Beleg Strongbow.
A haughty spirit before so many falls.
Tolkien would not have liked the Good/Evil axis because it's redolent of the Manichaean heresy. It's hammered home again and again that Tolkien's universe isn't the scene of a battle between equally powerful good and evil demiurges. Evil (Melkor/Morgoth, Sauron, Saruman etc) cannot create; all it can do is to twist or mimic what's already created.
The structure of the universe itself gives Good an inherent advantage. Which I think is also the case for the real universe, actually, though not because of the intervention of any particular god.
WFRP had one axis that went Lawful-Good-Neutral-Evil-Chaotic - overdoing Good led to a sort of rigorous stasis, and overdoing Evil led to a complete collapse of all structure, rational thought, and indeed bone structure.
45: Yes, the little brown booklet Men & Magic only had Law, Neutrality and Chaos. Good and Evil didn't come along until Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
47 contains possibly Moby's most baffling statement ever.
The Unfogged Commenter Moral Plane has two axes. One runs from "never comments" at the bottom to "comments constantly" at the top and the other runs from "generally agrees" on the left to "generally argues" on the right.
Lurkers are obviously at the bottom. Bottom left are lurkers who support you in email.
46: Sad and tragic. I don't know that there was ever a solution that both Baku and Stepanakert would have accepted. I mean, I wrote a bunch about N-K back in 1995-96 and even then I called it an intractable problem even though the ceasefire was just a couple of years old at the time.
I think maybe the closest was in 2009 when it looked like Turkey and Armenia might normalize relations. (Of course it might be that I think that just because I was sorta on the scene at the time.) That could have provided the basis for a regional solution: opening the Turkish-Armenia border, N-K allowing return of Azeris to the west and south of what had been the Soviet-era Oblast, Baku recognizing considerable local autonomy in N-K.
But that would have taken a lot of things that just weren't at hand. Above all, I think, it would have required an Azerbaijan that wasn't a personalized dictatorship and that was willing to treat its citizens, especially its Karabakh citizens, with dignity and equality under the law.
I've said many times that the sequel to "Intractable Problems" was always going to be called "Just Add Oil and Money" because it was obvious that as Azerbaijan got richer they were going to be buying military equipment to try to re-take Karabakh. And the population of Azerbaijan is more than three times the population of Armenia, with the gap widening for the whole independence period. The notion that diaspora money and Armenian fighting spirit were going to save Karabakh forever was just delusional. Sure, Azerbaijan is still colossally corrupt, but it's not prostrate in the way it was at the tail end of the USSR.
I don't know that the de facto authorities ever offered anything to Baku except a middle finger. The Armenians won in 1993, but what did they do with their victory? Churchill said suggested magnanimity.
Likewise, I don't know that either Aliyev would have accepted anything that Stepanakert offered. But I think that even borderization and low-intensity conflict would have been better than what the Armenians are getting now, which is what Michael offered the Senator.
Apparently protestors in Yerevan are trying to push Pashinyan out of office. I can understand their anguish, but Pashinyan realized that N-K was lost in 2020. Now he's trying to save Armenia, because Baku's appetite for territorial conquest is more whetted than sated now. The whole "western Azerbaijan" discourse points to what's next. An attempt by Pashinyan or his replacement to rescue N-K would not only confirm the loss but probably also lead to a loss of a lot of southern Armenia. Which Azerbaijan will probably also try for in the next couple of years.
Thanks for letting me prattle on. Twitter's too volatile for my thoughts on the subject, and nobody else cares.
56: The Silmarillion multiple times but a short and engaging Pratchett not even once?
I'm reminded of this old saying which maybe I made up
"Well, son, there are 2 kinds of people in the world- people that think there are 2 kinds of people in the world, and non-idiots."
58 is very good and jibes with my far less informed view of the situation at the time.
59: It's because I know "Ankh-Morpork" is a pun, but I can't figure out on what.
That's what happens in the fast years of the sun.
55: I believe drawing from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, rather than Elric as I had always assumed.
The is the usual number of hearts per lion.
Yet, a woefully inadequate number of harts.
66: the average number of hearts per lion, of course, is slightly greater than 1.
Mark Twain said that "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." George Orwell discussed "doublethink." You can say that Twain was making a joke, and that Orwell was engaged in a literary speculation, but they were both describing a real thing.
Christian children are taught about faith as an intellectual discipline that is separate from factual observation. When Thomas was informed of the resurrection of Christ, he said, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."
Jesus took him up on that, but offered an important lesson for modern people. "Because you have seen me," Jesus told Thomas, "you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
It's a method of interacting with the world that gets little acknowledgement from people who don't practice it themselves. Anybody, the Bible tells us, can believe things based on evidence. But for the blessed, there is a higher truth.
The role of truth creation, separate from the discernment of facts, is a bedrock value of Christianity. It's not some accident or contradiction.
And it often works! Trump understands this in his bones, and it's at the absolute core of his appeal. It's not a side-issue or a failure of intellect on the part of his followers. It's a choice.
It is of course at this point that someone normally pops up to explain that this is a terribly simplistic and caricatured way of understanding religion, typical of those ghastly atheists who cause so much trouble all the time, and any sophisticated thinker knows that religion makes "truth claims" that are completely different from claims about actual things that are either true or false, and so on and so on.
It's true all the same, though.
If you teach kids to believe stuff that is either untrue or at best unprovable "because I say so";
and you further teach them that even just thinking to themselves that "because I said so" isn't a very good argument makes them a bad person, far less actually saying it out loud;
you're not going to produce a very critical thinker. You're going to produce someone who has been trained to accept bullshit from authority figures.
Chesterton was wrong when he said "people who stop believing in God don't believe in nothing. They believe in everything." Conspiracy theories are more common among religious people, for reasons that are really pretty obvious. Humans don't have a "believe in weird shit" socket in their brains into which you can plug God, Allah, Brahma, the grassy knoll or the lizard people. Some humans just like believing in weird shit, the more the better, even if it contradicts itself. People who believe that the CIA killed Kennedy are also more likely to believe that Kennedy is still alive.
I think it's moved to thinking JFK Jr is alive, not JFK.
Can't speak to Brahma but God = Allah.
It's a common misunderstanding used by Islamophobic bigots. It's worth pushing back on.
What about the Mexicans worshiping "Dios"?
58 and 70 are both nice.
Jack Ruby had a pretty strange story.
Is there an explainer of what's currently going on in the Caucasus? All I'm seeing, including here, is from people for whom this is an update to a story they know.
Maps:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FUsTai6YoiIs%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=3cc2f3afb1ce37da77f386a1e91cf6645c36ed0d21eea883f77af26ade51d5c8&ipo=images
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fgreekcitytimes.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2022%2F12%2F7-13.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=4f518fdc55ebdfee50f4ed329a5d91ab10f0547699135a03e2935711e33ee5e4&ipo=images
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F8a%2Fef%2F1b%2F8aef1b7e0eec662977d9025fb1866656.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=91fde8623300ab0b843576c9d9a174a52caea9b99c245df46a9cfb27a4570b88&ipo=images
The Soviet Union drew really shitty boundaries between the SSRs, partly out of ignorance and partly as a kind of divide and conquer strategy. In particular, there's an ethnically Armenian area "Nagorno-Karabakh" that was put in Azerbaijan SSR. It's a bit complicated because this area is mountainous and some valleys have Armenian towns and some Azeri towns, and the most heavily Armenian part is surrounded by Azeri areas. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a war and Armenia took over both Nagorno-Karabakh *and also* enough surrounding area to connect it to Armenia. Loads of atrocities were committed on both sides of the war, and all the Azeris who lived in this territory were kicked out. Then Azerbaijan got rich because of oil and bought a bunch of weapons (especially drones), meanwhile Armenia was heavily dependent on help from Russia which disappeared when they invade Ukraine, so Azerbaijan invaded and has now taken over all of Nagorno-Karabakh. It's expected that they'll kick all the Armenians out (hopefully, the other possibility here is killing them). This happened in two stages, there was a war a few years ago where they cut off the main part of Nagorno-Karabakh and retook a bunch of the historically Azeri areas, and then this week they took over the rest. Big question now is whether they're going to stop or whether they'll also invade the internationally recognized core territory of Armenia. Azerbaijan is bigger and richer. Armenia is Christian and has more cultural ties to the west.
Here's another map which I think helps explains why the whole situation is so difficult and complicated, it's like Bosnia where there just aren't reasonable ways to draw boundaries between the different ethnic groups when each valley in a mountainous region belongs to a different group. (I also just really like when maps treat uninhabited areas as uninhabited rather than filling them in based on who lives closest.)
Less timely, but getting at the same thing as 82:
https://acoup.blog/2022/12/09/meet-a-historian-james-baillie-on-digital-humanities-and-the-medieval-caucasus/
Also perhaps relevant is that Azerbaijan is in two disconnected pieces (roughly what's going on here is that the Soviet/Iran border cuts through majority Azeri areas in a weird way), and if they took over a little bit of southern Armenia then they'd be connected. Iran doesn't want this to happen though.
Pwned by 84:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakhchivan_Autonomous_Republic
One of the odd things from Twitter I now have more context for (thanks for the links) is that at the moment, the US is pushing in the same direction as Russia, to help Armenia against aggression from Turkey-backed Azerbaijan
Also in background:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspian_Pipeline_Consortium
https://en.inform.kz/news/turkmenistan-hungary-formulate-gas-deal-azerbaijan-s-role-and-significance_a4103357/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Anatolian_gas_pipeline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Adriatic_Pipeline
And here's an ethnic map of Iran, which explains how Azerbaijan gets its weird exclave and also why Iran is nervous about Azeribaijan expanding. (Also bonus Lur content!)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ethnic_Map_of_Iran.png
86: Are you? Or are you just handwringing like the Europeans? After which you'll accept the Azerbaijani fait accompli, take Armenia out of the Russia column and keep your well-oiled relations with Baku too? (Which, minus point two, is exactly what Russia actually appears to be doing too.)
86 is roughly right, but with two caveats:
1) Russia historically was Armenia's main backers, but they basically dgaf any more because they have bigger fish to fry.
2) The US backs Armenia not for broader geopolitical reasons (Turkey and Israel both back Azerbaijan, so you'd usually expect us on that side), but because the US has a large powerful Armenian diaspora community.
So basically Armenia has been trying to switch from being protected by Russia to being protected by the US and the EU, but although the US is "pro-Armenia" we're not actually doing anything significant here.
Also, France AIUI feels itself to have some kind of special protector relatinship with Armenians, dating from the late 19C-WWI period, drawing in turn on Romantic revivals of crusader Outremer-Armenian relations.
The main thing I knew about France-Armenia relations is the long-running dispute over Armenian Cognac (which is supposedly actually good, though I've never had it).
https://www.rferl.org/a/armenian-brandy-cognac/31314620.html
If Azerbaijan doesn't invade Armenia proper then yes 89 is exactly what's happening. Things might get more complicated if they do invade Armenia proper because that changes who is breaking the "rules" and there's a lot of value in maintaining the norm that you don't get to just invade other countries.
Also, the CSTO mutual defence treaty covers Armenia proper (but not N-K), and Aliyev presumably knows invading Armenia makes Russia lose a great deal more face. Not that Russian intervention is particularly intimidating right now, but Aliyev has to live with the Russians indefinitely.
There were also clashes in the Fergana Valley (another bunch of insane SSR boundary choices) after the invasion of Ukraine, but it looks like those haven't really come back?
90.2: Does the status of Mount Ararat have any salience with US evangelicals?
96: Yes, simmered down. Until the next round.
97: Not really. There are some fringe people into expeditions to Noah's Ark, but Ararat is not mentioned in Revelation and there's no prophesies about it at all anywhere. You probably get some vague sympathy for Armenia on account of them being Christian, but most evangelicals don't really identify strongly with branches of Orthodox christianity anyway.
The actual mountain is in Turkey anyway.
The Armenian Bible is particularly interesting and called the "Queen of the Versions" because it's an especially literal translation, so you can often work out exactly what was in the Greek that they were translating from, as opposed to more fluent translations where you might not be able to reconstruct the original so easily.
||
I believe I mentioned in the last Check-In thread, I was going to do the ColoGuard. Well, I did it today, and I feel like I should have one of those onesies that says "I pooped today!" I feel stupidly proud of accomplishing this somewhat gross task.
|>
You need to get one that specifically mentions pooping in a box.
Unless it's an envelope, which is even more impressive.
I've still got that box staring at me from across the room. I don't know why I still can't bring myself to poop in it.
Would it help if you put a picture of DeSantis on the outside?
Don't be a dick, Moby. Some lab tech has to see that box. Picture on the inside.
You could take it off before you mail it.
I guess my doctors still wants me to get a colonoscopy instead of pooping in a box.
Maybe I should have asked about "ColoGuard" instead of "pooping in a box"? He may have missed the reference and decided not to ask for clarification.
79 and the comments that follow are all very good. It's also relevant that the two Armenian presidents who held office from 1998 to 2018 were both from Karabakh and resisted any change from a maximalist position.
Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, is the one now in a position to go for a maximalist position. It's probably relevant that his father (from whom he inherited the presidency) rose to power in Nakhichevan, the exclave of Azerbaijan mentioned above.
There's one road that connects sparsely settled southern Armenia to the rest of the country, and I don't think it would take much on the part of the Azerbaijanis to cut it. They wouldn't be able to govern southern Armenia, but they wouldn't need to. It would become "disputed territory" and a lawless region. Maybe control over the two roads to Nakhichevan -- one right at the border with Iran, the other through a pass as far north as Lachin, the chokepoint to Karabakh they've just used so effectively -- would suit their purposes.
Iran is, at least to me, the great unknown in all of this. There are more Azeris in Iran than in Azerbaijan. I have no idea if agitation about "West Azerbaijan" will pique Iran's interest enough to aid Armenia. If there's rhetoric about "South Azerbaijan" that's much more likely to draw interest, but I have no idea about how that would work domestically in Iran.
Whatever happens, it'll soon be overwhelmed by climate change migration crises.
Tucker Carlson has a new broadcast gig. He's doing a regular talk show on Rossiya 24.
https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1705157558590169494
Going back to the OP, I think there's a valuable distinction between Good/Evil and Decency/Degeneracy. They're obviously getting at the same basic idea, but I think that, connotatively, G/E are both relatively narrow & limited. There's always nit-picky arguments about whether politician X is evil or merely venal/greedy/amoral, but in all cases you're describing a degenerate. Similarly, "Good" implies some sort of grand moral standing, while decency is easier to grasp and credit.
Mr. Rogers would be at the top of both Good & Decency scales, but I think it's much easier to understand his decency than his goodness. That is, you have to learn about his whole deal to confidently assert that he really was a very Good man, but you only have to watch him for a few minutes to see the Decency (although you might need someone to assure you that he's not faking it at all).
But I wonder where he would stand on the Realism/Fantasy and L/N/C scales. He had a bit of chaos to him, bringing that Senator to tears and making the entire Emmys stop, and while obviously the Land of Make Believe was fantasy, the whole point was to reach children where they really were.
Carlson is doing the full Lord Haw Haw.
Carlson is doing the full Lord Haw Haw.
Not yet he isn't. He hasn't done the end bit.
115.1, 151.2: That articulates my view neatly. Even with Trump -- a profoundly evil man -- I think his defining characteristic is better described as a fundamental lack of decency.
I like apostropher's 24. I, too, am willing to put that worthless prick Brooks more in the middle.
I didn't know quite what to do with Carlson, but I felt compelled to put him on the chart. His defining characteristics are contained in his relationship to Decency and Reality. I guess we need to adopt two charts, per heebie's suggestion, and talk about public and private behavior.
My comment in 18 may have been taken ironically, but I absolutely did not mean it that way. Rove's remarks cited by Barry in 17 are the Rosetta Stone for this whole conversation. Rove here insightfully explains modern politics and a lot of other stuff.
For example: Rove understands that despite the fact that neither thing is real, as a practical matter more people voted for Bush than Gore in Florida, and Iraq had WMD.
118: Ooh, a useful addition: there's a certain strain of basically realistic liberal who nonetheless holds to fantastical notions about winning through technicalities rather than power. So, unlike most Republicans, they knew there were no WMDs, but unlike Rove, they didn't know it wouldn't matter (until it did, anyway).
Question: if WMD had been found*, but everything else went the way it did, would it have mattered to the war's legitimacy (however you prefer to define it)? My gut says that the public wouldn't have cared, but there'd be a lot more establishment/journalistic defenders of the war.
*set aside exactly what that would mean; let's just say somewhere between a couple old drums of nerve gas and a dozen Scuds with dirty bombs on top. Enough to vindicate the claims, not enough to actually make opponents say "holy shit, I'm glad we/they invaded".
NMM to the commander in chief of the Black Sea Fleet, and a large chunk of his HQ building.
119: I think it would have made a difference if the entire justification for the war had turned out to be factual, rather than being completely wrong.
119: Beyond the non-existence of WMD, the whole thing was a scam anyway. Putting chemical weapons in the same class as nukes is frivolous analysis. It is misdirection.
My intuition on 18.2 is that even the establishment would only have been briefly impressed with the discovery of a cache of sarin gas or whatever because they never cared much about the issue in the first place. There was a bit of carping but no howls of outrage when nothing turned up -- no effectual allegation that GWB led the country into a war of aggression based on false pretenses.
Judith Miller might have kept her job, though.
From an Iranian perspective, the Iraq war was an astounding success. They'll always have to be backing their clients against various other factions inside the country, but their current influence is greater -- in my very quite uninformed view -- that ever in the last few centuries. Who rules Iraq is always going to be an issue of principal strategic importance to Iran. Even if it might not be correct to say Iran has a veto, my perception is that they have more power there than the US or UK have pretty much anywhere that is de jure independent.
It may be that this has been thoroughly analyzed, but the extent to which the various US intelligence failures can be attributed either directly or indirectly to Iranian operatives hasn't pierced my bubble. Are were they just opportunists, barely able to believe that we would actually do this thing?
Remember how the war was supposed to show Iran who was boss?
122.2 I think the outage was dimmed because (a) everyone understood after the Blix team went everywhere intelligence told them to go, that the whole things was a fiction -- we invaded so Saddam wouldn't get to laugh at us as we backed down,* and (b) interest in the rationale for the beginning was completely overtaken in just a few months by interest in the rationale and process for reaching an end. It true that 6 months in, anyone could say that whatever got us there, it's not going to get us out. That's a completely different question.
*And they thought it just might work. Showing Iran who was boss, even if we didn't get exactly the Iraq we'd hoped for.
I'm reminded of Margaret Atwood's 'men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them.'
the whole thing was a scam anyway
See, I'd argue that the reason this is now conventional wisdom is that not even a trace of WMD was found. Had they found colorable WMD, then I think the CW ends up "righteous war, badly executed." You'll recall for awhile they tried that line. But by 2007 the clear majority of Dems rejected that for "all a scam", and by 2015 most Rs had as well. And IMO the key for getting there was having the one potentially legit casus belli get confirmed as utter horseshit.
I should be clear, btw, that I was completely convinced by Blix--this isn't about me thinking it was an actually open question pre-invasion. But I can imagine a world in which Saddam had a modest stash of something scary more than I can any of the other lies (eg "welcomed as liberators") ending up true.
113: Makes sense, right? Republican anti-communism never so much anti-communist as pro-white power. *Right out of California* etc.
*Which I should probably read?
126: I never quite understood why that was supposed to be so clever. The gender-related homicide rate for women is so low that it makes no practical sense to be afraid of it. (And of course it's generally about one fifth of the rate for men.) You might as well be afraid of being killed by al-Qaeda or kidnapped by human traffickers. It's very bad when that happens to anyone and we expect the government to do things to prevent it happening, but being constantly afraid of it happening *to you* is not a rational way to lead your life. Being laughed at, on the other hand, isn't very serious unless you're of the school of thought that classes it as emotional abuse, but it happens all the time.
||
A misprint on p. 86 kills off Cornforth rather than Cornford.|>
130: The point is that women have to adjust their behavior to avoid being killed (or assaulted). Counting actual murders is beside the point.
2nd 132. Or at least feel the need to adjust, or consider adjusting, their behavior.
We have enough unsecured guns that women can also be killed by their pre-school children.
I'm not exactly sure what 130 is failing to understand, and myself, I clearly don't understand what the "gender-related homicide rate" is. Are you pointing out that men kill men more than they kill women? Certainly that doesn't address Atwood, who is talking about something different.
If 132 doesn't explain the issue, I think you want to look at what is being compared to what. If you need to reduce it to some kind of statistical measure, compare the threat of violence to men from women vs. the threat of violence to women from men. But Atwood is wittier and less tiresome than that.
I'm still having too much trouble finishing The Blind Assassin.
On topic because Lawful Evil: What's the scam where they say they moved the satellite and need to adjust your TV? The guy asked if my TV was on and then told me to tell him the brand name on the back of the remote.
132: I mean, so does everyone. The risk of violent assault (possibly by means of a rapidly moving set of goalposts!) is a universal experience.
Atwood's a crap writer generally but that one piece of her fortune cookie wisdom getting so much currency always baffled me. I suppose it sounds meaningful if you don't think too hard about it.
I happen to think she is a delightful writer. And it's a line about the asymmetry of people's deepest fears, not a claim about when statistical heuristics go wrong.
Let's go back to the time that I trolled Ajay by saying something like investment bankers are just bored and greedy.
Risk is not equal. I've never felt afraid of a date or a woman in a social setting. I suspect I've never been at serious risk of assault in my adult life, but I suppose I don't really know. Certainly never been at risk for making fun of someone stronger than me.
There was a guy in high school that I was friendly with, but not friends with. A girl I knew went out on a date with him and a few days she later told me they guy was dangerous. I didn't think it good to ask for details, but I kept it in mind. Years later, he killed a guy and went to prison (for hiding the corpse of the guy he killed, not murder). I always took the lesson to be that women have to pay attention to their own safety more than I do, so they are better at figuring out the danger. It's possible the lesson is just that was was clueless at 17.
|| it's time for one of my periodic reports on the chicken curry at the Hospital Natilo Goes to When He Has A Heart Attack. Curry was very good this time, nice substantial pieces of chicken.
Prognosis is good as long as I give up all my bad habits. If I don't -- Row 7, plot 13.
|∆
Oh my goodness. I'm glad the prognosis is good and I hope your recovery is as comfortable as possible.
Good to hear from you. Glad to hear about the chicken and hope you can keep good habits.
Glad you're recovering, Natilo. Plot 13 sounds unlucky to me.
143: wishing you a quick recovery, Natilo!
138 reminded me of two anecdotes. The first one is that until I was in my 30s, I thought the expression "have your cake and eat it too" made no sense, and everybody else was an idiot for not realizing this. Then I realized that I had simply misunderstood it, and although the order of it is kind of confusing, it makes perfect sense, and, possibly,I was the idiot.
148: I can't put an age on the realization, but yeah, I also remember hearing that for a long time and thinking it was weird before I understood it. And now that you have explained it, I realize that the order is confusing.
So what is the second anecdote?
It's a metaphor about having your anecdote and eating it too.
Oh jesus, Natty. I'd prefer you do the version that gives you a nice long life full of commenting here.
148.2 Thank you so much! I thought no one would ever ask!
A friend in high school had an assignment to write an essay discussing a famous quotation. I think the teacher gave a list of possible quotations and my friend chose the Somerset Maugham quotation, "The tragedy of love is indifference." My friend eviscerated it! He used the dictionary definitions of "tragedy" and "love" and "indifference" to prove the quotation was sheer nonsense. He smugly concluded that this showed that people don't think at all about these quotations at all and just take them on faith. I told him I thought he had missed the point, but he wasn't interested. He got an A for the paper.
152: The homicide rate for indifferent lovers is so low that it makes no practical sense to call it a tragedy.
148: I don't think you're an idiot. I'm not sure if there's a slightly archaic usage of "have" there or if "have some cake" as in "eat some cake" is a slightly more modern usage or if the idea of keeping a cake to look at is just completely alien to my cake-gobbling brain, but I had the same confusion for several decades at least.
155: you don't know me very well! It's really the thinking I knew better than everyone else that seems idiotic in retrospect to me.
My current understanding of the expression is that you have a slice of cake, and you could either eat it now or save it to have later for dessert, but you're insisting that you want to eat it now and still have it for dessert.
It only applies to whole cakes. If you slice it, you can eat one slice and have the rest.
"What's for dessert?" you ask. "We're having cake," says I. "Actually, I already had mine; you can have yours now or after dinner."
It's more complicated with divided ownership.
"Or at least you could have had, if I hadn't eaten yours already."
