“Back when we were kids, we all went to church and learned the difference between right and wrong,” (Sheriff Eddie Scott) said. “And we’re not seeing that now.”
Obviously he never learned the difference. Rapey, manipulative, power-hungry dudes rarely do.
Was getting serious a few years ago, it’s past that now. We’re to the point now where we could actually theoretically fall. We’re being generally outmaneuvered, as we’re mostly being modern and democratic, and they perceive themselves as fighting a war.
In a war, you do what you have to do to win, the normal rules no longer apply. Even human rights are irrelevant if your war can remake a world without them.
I see it as the last hurrah of the past. If they don’t stop the world now, fascism might be dead forever in western history. This is the last chance they may ever get to truly create the world that they want to see. Otherwise economic, technological and educational factors will deprive them of even the opportunity eventually.
Make no mistake, the goal for many is some kind of WW3. A significant portion lean towards a doomsday cult. They look to things like global warming and they see the second coming. They are not interested in concerns about disaster whatsoever, if anyone hasn’t noticed yet.
It’s cyclical, so I don’t think this is the last hurrah of fascism.
Additionally, when everyone has a phone in their pocket with access to confirmation bias, it was inevitable that this would be the result. Social media has amplified echo chambers to levels never seen before, and it’s made even worse by the fact that those social media sites use algorithms to keep users engaged as much as possible for increased ad exposure. Unfortunately, those algorithms will show you inflammatory content, as that’s been shown to grab users’ attention the most: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024292118
However, social media may be creating perverse incentives for divisive content because this content is particularly likely to go “viral.” We report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out-group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing, such as emotional language. These findings contribute to scholarly debates about the role of social media in political polarization and can inform solutions for creating healthier social media environments.
We have seen this unfold in virtually real time over the last decade or so. The result is an ever more divided and radicalized society that becomes more and more exploitable by populists.
I find it difficult to look at the breadth of recorded history and see anything cyclical about it. Never saw people flying through the sky in machines until pretty recently, or communicating instantly across the globe.
Regarding social media, yes, that is a major concern. I think we need to wreck the market locks of the major tech giants. Which is why I picked a Fediverse service and not any of the other reddit competitors.
When people say that history is cyclical, they don’t mean that it is literally repeating itself verbatim. They’re referring to human nature/behavior. There’s been numerous cycles in that regard that haven’t varied that drastically. One only needs to even examine the last 150 years and see that we’re once again experiencing a modern version of the Robber Baron Era (in the US at least for this one), the rise of fascism and populism, an increase in xenophobia and demand for isolationism, etc.
Look at human history, on a global scale technological development has been constantly increasing over time. Locally there are plateaus and even valleys like the middle ages but those have always been temporary and afterwards canceled out when development went back to going up again. Overall the technological knowledge of humanity has always been increasing and it seems like a trend that is almost impossible to stop. Example for directional technological progress : pointy stick -> bow & arrow -> sword -> cannon -> rifle -> tank -> nuke -> drones
Social development of societies on the other hand seems to be oscillating between several poles instead of having a general direction. Examples for social oscillations:
authoritarian rule <-> individual freedom
capitalism <-> socialism
aggressive expansionism <-> peaceful cooperation
Germany is a good example for this oscillation process, it went monarchy -> democracy -> fascist authoritarian dictatorship -> democracy -> today the AfD (neo nazi party of Germany) has the best polls ever, so the direction is changing again.
I see what you’re saying, I noticed similar things in my youth. As I studied more though, I realized I was simply cherry-picking, and filling in the gaps with pop culture misconceptions.
The plateaus and valleys you describe, for instance, are some of these misconceptions, stemming from old schools of thought. Modern scholarship points how how progress in many arenas continued through the dark ages and medieval period. You could look at the history of something like military fortifications and see this progress very clearly, in a situation where we have a great many old examples to study.
Regarding this social oscillation you describe, I think it’s fairly cherry picked. With the whole data set, this starts to become more clear. How about the history of Denmark or the UK? How about Chinese or Japanese history? These will all break your hypothesis.
We can talk about these things, it’s completely okay. You did nothing wrong and neither did I, we’re just two people having a conversation. We’re all good here man.
Faschism is to eventually win unless you do something to oppose it. There would always be ones who’d try to recover it for their own benefit. It requires conscious effort, education and empathy to not give in into that set of ideas, like it needs a decision to skip fastfood and go to the gym\walk but for society as a whole. It’s unhealthy and causes cancer, but it always somewhere there.
Security services have been warning us of inhouse terrorism for years. This is what we are seeing now.
The US for one could just stop their war on drugs, which has been ravaging the world for decades, and only has like 1% efficacy, and use that money in programs to prevent this. But unfortunately we no longer live in times where reason rules.
Zero-sum ideologies have taken over. We live in societies where other people’s gain are seen as our loss. And then what we get are huge society splits which will eventually and inevitably be the end of that society as it was.
Yea, the US helped the war on drugs by selling less heroin. Who was guarding and smuggling it out? Poppy fields inreacesd dramatically during the occupation and dropped after. The US is a mayor part of the dugtrade
Just highlighting the difference between the government that protects its people and a government that throws a political circus. And at the same time, I showed where they could get the funding to do so, since lack of funding is made the excuse too often.
The political system is highly intertwined and it’s often just a matter of looking for the strings you’d like to connect. Sure I’m trying to paint a picture here since I don’t believe these people and others deserve to be targets of such pointless crime.
Hard to say since news organizations had to sue this department to get these numbers and pretty much every department is always trying to sweep dirt under the rug like that
According to the FBI, around 51% of murders in 2021 were solved. So this is just a bit lower than the federal numbers. The number doesn’t shock me, I think solving a murder is very hard and technology can only offer so much more info. Proving murder beyond a doubt is also very difficult, like OJ. We all know he killed his ex wife and her boyfriend, but prosecutors couldn’t prove he did it within the court context. An “unsolved” murder that has a solution.
That’s 51% in one year though, in STL if they only did 60% over the 6 year span of 2017 to 2023 then they haven’t hit 51% in any given year, unless they just completely stopped post covid.
I live in stl and can say it feels like they did completely stop post covid but I don’t know for sure, I know they had a “silent protest” for a while while Kim Gardner was in office but that’s over now that she’s resigned as circuit attorney and someone competent took over.
You could make that argument. Florida Republicans are teaching children that the slaves benefited personally because they learned skills they could use.
One thing a modern world needs to come to grips with is that a person can both be extremely talented and have negative qualities. Humans by their very nature have both good and bad traits, thoughts, and opinions. We can’t bury the fact that someone who contributed work that we enjoy had some awful views. But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean when you need to completely wipe his work from the face of the Earth. We have to find a way to show that someone is capable of creating great work and still not be a perfect or necessarily even good person.
I feel like the art is what needs judged here, not the artist. We put all this emphasis on Dahl thought this and Lovecraft said that, and people use that as reason to disregard the entire body of work the person produced. But we lose a lot of work that isn’t really affected by those views and actions because we can’t disconnect it from the person involved in the creation.
What throws a wrench in that is when the person is still alive, and still profiting from those works. Hence why most of your queer/trans friends haven’t bought anything Harry Potter related in a while. Marilyn Manson is my personal example of this. I was a huge fan of his work as a teenager and well into my 20s. When all the stuff about what he did to Evan Rachel Wood came out, I stopped listening to his albums for a long time. I intentionally avoid streaming his tracks because I don’t want to give money to someone I see as abusive toward others, but those albums are still worthy of attention for what they say beyond that subject. Still, it’s hard to hear his voice and not think about what he did.
On the other side of that coin, those managing the estates of these creators that are gone need to be aware of what’s wrong with their charge as much as what’s right. The museum in this piece is doing it right at the end of the day - making the best of a lifetime of antisemitism.
I haven't read a ton of Dahl's work as a adult but I have been going through the Lovecraft collection and the racism is sort of baked into the work. I'm not saying throw it out if anything the only thing positive I can say is Lovecraft work probably wouldn't have worked so well if it wasn't his idiotic racist views since in a way a ton of his work is based on fearing the outsider and basically is racism in a super hyperbolic way. I do however agree mostly with your other point that the big problem is supporting currently alive creators since consumption does sort of benefit them allowing them to push their views in the real world.
The entirety of human civilization is deeply rooted in racism, so yeah, makes sense. What I'd like to know is what's especially bad about cosmic horror specifically as depicted in, say, The Mountains of Madness.
I'm not saying cosmic horror is inherently racist but how HP Lovecraft wrote it was absolutely inspired by his racism. Shadow over Innmouth could be seen as a very heavy handed metaphor for Interracial marriage. Also can't remember the actual name of the short story but HP Lovecraft for some reason found the need to point out a Jewish merchant gave someone a cheap or free Necronomicon, it was really on the god damn nose.
I mean I love the concept of cosmic horror but we would have to be blind not to see how racism especially HP Lovecraft version of it was heavily flavored by his bias and racism.
Ah, yes I can see that for sure. I wondered if you were arguing that the whole genre was racist because it rests on the idea of "fear of the unknown" as some folks seem to be. Lovecraft himself was a shithead, but that's kind of why I enjoy stuff like Lovecraft Country so much.
Lovecraft work probably wouldn’t have worked so well if it wasn’t his idiotic racist views since in a way a ton of his work is based on fearing the outsider and basically is racism in a super hyperbolic way
I never really thought about it that way, but you’ve got a solid point. The people fear the unknown, and the unknown acts in ways that provoke and reinforce that fear, turns it into cosmic horror. If you were to take away the Cosmic part, all that’s left is the fear of the unknown.
To build on a reply I left above; Lovecraft’s work isn’t currently (to my knowledge) funding the KKK for example. He’s not diddling kids, or raping actresses; he’s dead. Is his estate racist? Are the royalties from his published works being used to embolden TERFs? Do lovecraft-estate-licensed board games hold anti-abortion rallies?
That’s the difference. When people don’t want to separate the art from the artists is when they’re out here doing actual harm still.
The problem is when you pay for their work and they use their money to exert undue influence for racist, homophonic, or transphobic causes.
I don’t recall the part where I have to spend my money on art that’s good. All this bullshit about “cancel culture” is basically people with gross ideas whining about the free market actually working.
I mostly agree with you, tho the issue I have deals more with the current batch of rapey Hollywood dudes and still being able to enjoy their incredible body of work.
I still can't bring myself to watch anything of Kevin Spacey's even tho some of his roles were astounding.
There is absolutely no reason to play one of the many yellowface episodes of Bugs Bunny on saturday morning cartoons in the 2020s. And there is potentially a lot of value in curating a couple shorts that aren’t racist and packaging those up for kids to watch.
And that is the logic by which a book might be edited to remove/replace some of the rampant racism. The value is not all the many ways Huck Finn found to give himself n-word privileges. The value is in juxtaposing the idea of growing up with understanding that the world around you might not have.
But something like… any of the works of HP Lovecraft? The racism is front and center there. So much of the idea of being “other” has to do with “racial purity” and similar insanity. And the two can’t be decoupled. Which is why it has been so effective as a backdrop for the LGBTQIA+ community (often with perspective shifts). Ignoring the inherent racism of that is just, for lack of a funnier term, whitewashing.
One thing that has stuck with me through life was a high school english course. I forget exactly what we were reading, but it was very much “Huckleberry FInn” levels of rampant racism. And the copy of the book we had specifically had like a ten page foreward about the edits that were made and why they were made. And I’ll always remember Ms Sell in front of the class looking borderline manic as she explained the racism inherent to the work. And that very much helped with my own ability to critically look at a work. Because you can’t NOT consider the inherent bad parts of work and… you often end up with that toothy rictus of a grin as you are trying to acknowledge all the heinous shit and “move past it” without actually moving past it.
I think execution is just wrong. I think many of the people who are executed have done wretched things but surely we don’t have the right to kill them.
Even if our justice system was perfect and only convicted the people who actually did the crime… I would still be against the death penalty. But here in the real world we frequently murder innocent people and we, as a collective, have their blood on our hands.
I barely learned anything about black history in school in the 80s and 90s in Indiana. I don’t even remember Black History Month being acknowledged. Things should have gotten better since then, not worse.
That's why the regressive troglodytes are on a rampage.
They can't stand that people are actually comparing notes on their Christofascist abuse. So they try to block anyone talking about race or anyone who is happy, well adjusted, and queer. It ruins their narrative for their own brainwashed members.
And the notes aren’t just what they do, it’s what works at stopping them. They know better than most how a lot of effective organization in the gay rights movement came from people who had been involved in labor struggles/communist organizing and/or the black civil rights movement.
Nothing scares them more than solidarity and cooperation
I learned more about indigenous people while in elementary school in Indiana and Florida than I did about my own AA ethnicity. Late 90s-early 00s. I remember having to to a group activity (Indiana school) where we all had to pretend we’re living in times before the civil war and basically come up with what decisions we would be making. I told the teacher I wouldn’t be making any decisions because I would have been a slave.
I remember learning about slavery and the Underground Railroad and not much else. Not slave rebellions, not Reconstruction, not lynchings and massacres, nothing about Jim Crow, etc. Maybe vague stuff about MLK and Rosa Parks in high school? Certainly nothing about Tulsa or Osceola.
Growing up in Ohio we learned a ton about slavery because we were one of the biggest “good guy” states in the fight against it. We even had field trips to Underground Railroad Museums.
Which makes the number of confederate flags in the state all the more infuriating
But yeah Nat Turner showed up in like a sentence in the John brown paragraph.
This is an overreaction, but I don't see the point of the book-burning either. I mean, I'm a pagan who converted from Christianity but you don't see me out in public burning the bible.
Which is again, not to say that this riot wasn't an overreaction. You have a bunch of people with this idea that if one thing happens in one country, that country has that thing happening all the time. It wasn't even a Swedish dude, it was an Iraqi dude although god only knows what the media is saying. Still, come on. I know it's a sacred text but Christians are going to do that to any sacred text but their own.
The guy shouldn't have done it, especially since the Muslin world has been shown to be very sensitive on this topic. But I can't help but think that if Americans stormed an embassy every time someone abroad burned the US flag, the UN would have to move.
Just burn a Bible in front of the Swedish embassy and go on with your lives.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, the top Republican on the Judiciary panel, said that if the bill were to ever pass, “the Supreme Court as we know it would be destroyed.”
Wasn’t he the same guy who said that if the GOP nominated Trump, it would destroy the party? He seems to have a fetish for destruction.
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