DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
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DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
My ancestors tried to escape organized religion and live a holy life with no private property in a commune on the New World. Their ship, the Mayflower, nearly sank but for a great metal screw, possibly part of a printing press. Half of them died that winter, but they were saved by an Indian who walked into town and asked them for beer. This man negotiated an alliance for agricultural knowledge and trade with the local tribe. Once they got back on their feet, the Pilgrims had a great harvest feast with the Wampanoag before the next winter set in.
Although there was a clash of these civilizations several generations later which set the groundwork for many ethnic conflicts and genocides, what we celebrate is that fragile peace and brief cultural understanding that gave us the harvest we needed to survive.
Whatever your family’s story, I encourage you to celebrate my family’s holiday, giving thanks to your gods and/or economic systems for providing your daily meals and your full bellies through the coming winter. Happy Thanksgiving.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
Yes to the latter.
Reddit’s “There Was An Attempt” subreddit is for failed attempts at doing simple or easy things. This news article was posted there as “To stay alive as a PoS who made millions off the suffering of others.” As of now, approx 8000 upvotes and 1000+ comments, most of them cheering on the assassin.
It’s culture war because the Democrats forced the country’s insurers via the ACA to stop offering all healthcare except “Cadillac plans,” and to cover all pre-existing conditions, and reduced the employer-provided requirement down to 30 hours.
Then they successfully blamed Republicans and the profit motive for increasing the percentage of 29 hr/wk jobs with no healthcare, making all healthcare costs skyrocket, making doctors and nurses quit and new people not want to go into the field, and making Big Pharma rich.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
Terminator: Dark Fate
(Disclaimer: I am ONLY discussing T1, T2, and DF here because it fits this trope.)
Sarah Connor fought Skynet’s Terminators, first for her own survival and then her son’s. She prevented Skynet from coming into being. She became a true action hero in T2, a mama bear, right up there with Rambo and Ripley.
But she tried to kill Miles Dyson so he wouldn’t invent the militaristic Singularity. Miles was Black, and he died helping her kill Skynet. Thus, she isn’t allowed a happy ending.
DF picks up after the Los Angeles adventure in T2. Sarah and John flee the country to the tropics. A Terminator, Arnold model, emerges from the water and slaughters John Connor, successful in his mission at last. She saved the world but lost her only son, her motivation for fighting.
Hollow and defeated, she lives her life as a fugitive from the law until one day she gets a message pinpointing where and when a Terminator will emerge from the future. She shows up, kills it. This keeps happening until she saves the life of a Hispanic girl, the newest target.
It turns out Sarah only killed the first militaristic Singularity, Skynet. They’re going to keep happening as long as humans try to make smart machines. This one will be called “Legion” and has time travel and Terminators too.
On the run, they commiserate about being the targets of Terminators and losing family. Sarah waxes angsty about how meaningless it is that this girl will spend her life just trying to keep her son safe. The androgynous augmented woman warrior from the future tells Sarah that no, this girl is herself the future savior of humanity, the future general who takes down Legion.
Sarah Connor, the white waitress-turned-warrior woman who defeated Skynet in a time war, is devastated. She lost her son after he was no longer vital to humanity, and she’s on the run for crimes she committed to keep him safe.
This Hispanic girl, meanwhile, will someday be hailed as conquering hero. If she doesn’t strangle Legion in its crib, she’ll at least put it down with extreme righteous violence. She’s Sarah and John Connor wrapped up in one person.
The cuckolding of old and wrinkled Los Angelina Sarah Connor is made complete when it turns out the T-800 who killed her son became a really chill dude and has been feeding her the coordinates of Legion’s Terminators all along. The cuckoldry is doubled by Arnold’s doofy ass having become stepfather to a gun-loving Texas family.
Sarah gave it all, every ounce of strength and will and legal recourse, and her son besides, and the week she finds out she’s been the sidekick to her son’s slaughterer is also the week she finds out her son’s place in prophecy has been pre-empted by someone nonwhite, non-American, and non-male.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Probably the single most manipulative person I know has a documented mental disability (low IQ) in addition to her autism (which I share, which is how we met). She tried to manipulate my emotions to get me to be on her assisted decision team, which I know she will hector until they bow to her wishes and let her go to Disney World for a week instead of fixing her roof with the savings.
She has had her rights thoroughly and fully explained to her throughout her public schooling in Special Education. She insists upon them at every turn when someone says something she doesn’t like. She uses threats of suicide to summon the police Crisis Intervention Team to try to get her caretakers at group homes and even her mother to give her what she wants.
But her deficit is real. Attempts to explain, by people she genuinely trusts, go over her head and you can practically hear them whizzing by. Try to stuff into her head a concept not directly concrete or tied to her health and wellness, and you will find nothing but misery and confusion.
She has been convinced, in those terms, that literally every Republican wants to take away her Social Security and let her starve, and she was genuinely suicidal during Trump’s Presidency, and grateful that someone let her vote. No concept of the deep philosophical reasoning behind the right to vote, just a bunch of motivated reasoning.
I find myself remembering that IQ 100 is an average, and realizing how many more Americans like her I’ve never met because I never go where they are; my ingroup is clever talkers, and she is adjacently a clever-talker by the quirks of autism.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
My own experiences with school bullying (taunting to the point of tears, flinch-teasing, verbal bullying), though never physical, were free of politics. However, though it was the Popular Kids and Sports Kids I expected to tease me (because American entertainment made me expect it), it was actually the everyday kids, and sometimes my fellow nerds. The Cool Gamer and his buddies stole my box of 1.44” floppies twice.
American entertainment also told me to look for outsiders as my natural friend group. What I got was a series of bad friends who were outsiders for a reason: they were toxic. The Island of Misfit Toys is as fictional as Rudolph the Inspiringly Disabled Reindeer.
Conformity to tribal norms is valued across all three tribes; it’s just that uniqueness is a norm of the Grey Tribe: liking geeky and nerdy things, dressing in reference-laden clothing, taking being kept outside the Red Tribe’s inner circle as a badge of honor. As a kid with autism, I also heavily enjoyed Robin Williams’ weirdness, and his death hit me so hard because he was the first person to tell me it was okay, and even good, to be weird. Having attended Weird Al’s Poodle Hat, Running With Scissors, and Straight Outta Lynwood tours in Albuquerque, I felt as accepted as I am at sci-fi conventions and game stores.
As a Grey Tribe Christian from a Red Tribe church, I never consciously sought to feel superior, and when I notice it’s a motive of mine, I deconstruct it to not feel it. What I crave is acceptance of my whole self: my truth-seeking, logic-loving, nerdy self. And I find it at Weird Al concerts. I don’t want to analyze it away.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Or maybe the Civilization/Barbarism moral axis population will be stripped of any penchant for color by the time it picks up arms.
The vast majority of Americans honestly believe they are against racism. The tokenism and Afterschool Specials of the 80’s grew into the acclaimed dramas of the 90’s, and both eras have tremendous nostalgia and cultural cachet for GenX. “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings,” was the motto of Optimus Prime, a marketed moral stance of the Hasbro corporation, but that makes it no less philosophically valid than “I have a dream…” or “love thy enemies like yourself.”
I do not wish to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentations of their transwomen. I wish to see their pride turn bitter in their mouths and their people turn from their wicked ways. I reject being othered into an ethnic identity when my physical and political ancestors spent all their political capital trying to decouple race from politics, only to see it turned on them in the most vicious way. I will not pick up that sword in particular, and neither will the vast majority of Americans, willingly.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
How We Talk Past Each Other: understanding how the war over the future of Dungeons and Dragons is the entirety of the culture war in a nutshell
In a thread on Reddit Motte at least six months ago, I became enlightened to the fundamental difference between drag and crossdressing. The latter is fundamentally serious, a personal choice of expressing something important about one’s inner self. The former is a form of playing, specifically, performing a role meant to be absorbed as part of a fiction. It is part of the larger genre of performance known as clowning, which can be described as colorful character archetypes performing bold actions with obvious consequences for an audience. Clowning also includes professional wrestling, F/SF cosplay, Muppets-style puppetry, and political ads.
The same split is seen elsewhere in fiction; genre fiction is considered non-literary because it typically involves stereotyped archetypical characters walking a well-trod path in a specific type of world: Hopalong Cassidy, Zorro, Sam Spade, Batman, Spider-Man, Elric of Melniboné, and so on. I used words containing the root “typ” three times in that sentence because typing is the core of genre: any individual is an instance of a type.
By contrast, novels focus on individuals as beings-in-themselves, and might use types as something they struggle against. So do graphic novels, explorations and deconstructions of characters in a more realistic or nuanced way, even if they have types. They are more akin to the arthouse spirit of crossdressing than the clowning spirit of drag: the sitcom without the laugh track, the invisible and silent audience who appreciates instead of enjoys. And these two spirits cannot exist in the same world.
That brings us to D&D. Gizmodo/io9 published an article about taking biodiversity typing out of the stats of D&D playable species.
D&D is an RPG which is built on the clowning spirit of types and power levels, using fantastic biodiversity to tell adventure game stories. It is a core nerd culture property, enjoyed historically by oppressed people with autism to imagine being powerful people who don’t just fit into their milieu but who thrive as adventurers and heroes.
This little corner of the culture war turns RPGs from Fun With Action Figures to Serious Representation.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
#”We’re coming for your children.”
The LGBTQ+ movement kicked out NAMBLA, genuine pederasts, in the 80’s in order to get sodomy laws aimed at consenting adults off the books. The American anti-pedophilia majority took a generation to accept this disavowal at face value.
The Pizzagate section of the Q or QAnon movement revived the bailey that gay people generally want to rape children to cultural relevance, and did so around the time the trans rights movement was pushing acceptance of transition. The motte version is that the gay community reproduces through social memetic contagion since they won’t reproduce sexually. One potent variation is the ironic and practically self-parodying “trans genocide” meme
The drag queen story hour program made the idea scarily realistic even to parents who didn’t subscribe to any of that conspiracy theory nonsense. And now there’s a new twist.
As chronicled by NBC News:
In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”
To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.
But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year.
Griffin said he chanted obscene things in the past, like “Kill, kill, kill, we’re coming to kill the mayor,” and joked about pubic hair and sex toys during marches. People at the Drag March regularly sing “God is a lesbian.”
“It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”
The “coming for your children” chant has been used for years at Pride events, according to longtime march attendees and gay rights activists, who said it’s one of many provocative expressions used to regain control of slurs against LGBTQ people. And in this case, they said, right-wing activists are jumping on a single video to weaponize an out-of-context remark to further stigmatize the queer community.
Conservative politicians and pundits have increasingly referred to advocates for LGBTQ rights as “groomers,” associating people who oppose laws that restrict drag performances or classroom discussions of gender identity with pedophiles. The charge is an echo of a decades-old trope anti-gay activists have used to paint the community as a threat to the country’s youths, an allegation that some advocates say endangers LGBTQ people. And the intense reaction to the video has scared some attendees, who insist the quip has been taken out of context.
“It’s really scary to us,” said Fussy Lo Mein, a drag performer and activist who was at this year’s march and declined to give their real name because of safety concerns. “It doesn’t represent everybody — it represents that individual. I thought it was a dumb idea, and I started chanting on top of it with alternate verses.”
This seems to be equivalent to the Charlottesville “White Rights” event where “Jews will not replace us” was supposedly chanted. The outgroup only hears “WE ARE A THREAT TO EVERYONE YOU LOVE AND EVERYTHING YOU HOLD SACRED,” while the ingroup appreciates the nuance and gets a bit freaked out at the outgroup seeing only the surface level interpretation.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
Babylon Bee headline satirizing the bias: “CNN: ‘Clumsy Trump Hits Head On Bullet’ ”
Videos of the incident and the shooter: https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/229040
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
Are we just whistling in the dark? We’re engaged in a process of refining our own beliefs, separating the gold from the dross, or at least the iron from the stone. We’re sharpening our wits, becoming able to see our own biases and those of our discussion partners. If nothing else, we’re learning to be less foolish ourselves.
I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs
According to investigations, Planned Parenthood does indeed harvest and donate fetal tissue/parts/organs, and is often compensated for their effort. The right was aghast when this hit the news cycle, and called for investigations. The left pointed out that it’s perfectly legal and above-board, and that Planned Parenthood isn’t being paid above market rates. The right has basically said, “And that’s a problem! It should be illegal,” but has no power to make it illegal.
She wasn’t using our words, but she was aware of a real occurence.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
Don’t forget, the primary decrying was of unwed teenage mothers, “girls who got knocked up” with no intention of “tying the knot”. Teenagers (read: high school minors) shouldn’t be having sex, goes the thinking, but if they do, it should be after a youthful marriage on their honeymoon, or for the conservative liberals of the time, at least in the context of a serious relationship, not just a casual form of recreation.
In pro-life communities, then to abort the proof of extramarital sex would compound the sin with a worse one; have the grandparents raise it as a miracle baby in their old age if the father won’t do the responsible thing. This was an era when divorce was still seen as an epidemic rather than the norm it has become, and a child’s birthday less than nine months from their parents’ wedding was still scandalous. Nowadays, with sex and marriage almost entirely decoupled (pardon the pun), it’s hard to remember the sociopolitical nuances from when they were intimately intwined.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6mo ago
The Time Wars Have Begun.
President-Elect Trump has put his weight behind ending Daylight Saving Time. Pretty much everyone likes the idea, but immediately the perma-DST vs. Noon-Is-Noon factions drew up battle lines.
I’m not here to litigate that battle, it’s tiresome; all the points have been made elsewhere and basically come down to if 9-5 or 8-4 (solar time) is what our civilization should stick with, and what we should call them, for the sake of the children and for having some evening daylight after work.
Instead I propose that schools and businesses start using “sundial time”.
They’d open at, for example, one hour after dawn and be open 8 or 9 hours. Retail stores, bars, and other businesses that rely on evening business could base their workday around sunset, closing at (let’s say) three or five hours after sundown.
Their door signs could be IOT smart displays, automatically coordinating with a virtual sundial based on their GPS coordinates, with translation into noon-based time. Smartphones could show these times pretty easily, via a settings switch.
We even have the Latin abbreviations AL (ante lucem), PL (post lucem), AV (ante vesperum), and PV (post vesperum) ready to go.
The major plus would be health, as instead of one hour jumps in spring and fall causing heart attacks, times would adjust only minutes each day, steadily.
Would you be opposed to this in your city/town, and would you be more or less opposed if your political rivals suggested this? Do you have any priors re which political tribes would hold which opinions?
Are you PDST or NIN and a night owl or early bird, and do you think that influenced your other answers and arguments? (For transparency, I’m a Noon-Is-Nooner night owl.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
The White House has already walked back the President’s statement. (Pause here to reflect on the zen of that.)
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
I’ve noted before the similarity of America’s adversarial justice system to the scientific process: a theory must be proposed, all evidence (experimental, forensic, eyewitness) must be logged, all reasonable alternative explanations must be falsified, and only then do we consider it proved, and thus, known.
But there’s a well-known way around the scientific method.
A focus on novel, confirmatory, and statistically significant results leads to substantial bias in the scientific literature. One type of bias, known as “p-hacking,” occurs when researchers collect or select data or statistical analyses until nonsignificant results become significant.
The judge told the jury to break into groups of four, and that each group only had to find one of the three modifiers to be true — and they didn’t have to be the same modifier. Judge Merchan has p-hacked misdemeanors into a felony!
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
I wonder how much of this dynamic is the systemic fault of counseling being female-coded: highly subjective, no rules allowed for assigning blame except the “yes, dear” dynamic, no logical framework undergirding the conversations, etc.
Once I discovered a mental health paradigm which worked due to being the opposite of the above, I dove in with both feet and have never regretted it.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
Sound of Freedom beat the final Indiana Jones movie at the box office, albeit through a ticket multipurchase scheme, and the idea that Hollywood might lose its power is unthinkable to them. The "need" is to regain control of a public narrative of mainstream moral superiority over Christians, and nothing hurts Christians in the news like the "hypocrisy" of a single Christian falling like Samson to a woman's wiles.
That's the Culture Total War mentality: destroy all monuments and great works the other side might conceivably claim as theirs, and salt the earth, from football and beer all the way down to knitting forums.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
And this kind of comment is why Trump solidifies the underdog vote.
Life is complex in the postwar era, and there are all sorts of hazards for American people who yearn to live by instinct. The voters you describe were educated in public schools, trade schools, and on scholarship at public universities, the very education infrastructure the elites put into place and then eschew.
The men and women you spit on barely have enough time in their day to make a living in a small business in a strip mall and spend an hour or two in the gym every day working off the calories from hyper-stimulus food. Then on top of that, they have to face their children being taught that their parents are carriers of the whiteness virus, the privilege virus, the capitalism virus, and the straight-and-cis virus.
And to blame people from broken families for buying into the fantasy of the billionaire’s supermodel wife is the topping on the scoffing cake.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
And gas stoves are a great Schelling fencepost, because taking away gas burners from the kitchen naturally suggests removing all the gas from home: gas room heating, gas water heater, and home gas electricity generators for rural or distant/fancy suburban areas.
Just like guns provide security, gas provides power. Having people who can control their own room heat, water heat, food cooking, and even flow of electricity, instead of relying on state-regulated power, is a nightmare for an authoritarian state. The centralization of power is a real project for the Cathedral, and we know it, and holding onto our freedoms by our bare fingernails can include such ridiculous-seeming projects like keeping our gas stoves.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
I don’t see why a verbal referral, possibly made sarcastically to a “squeaky wheel”, would have been recorded.
This is one of the reasons American conservatives don’t trust a large, central, bureaucratic government: “The part of the government which oversees the government states they couldn’t find anything in the files of the part of the government which works with citizens who served the government in fighting another government to indicate there was a referral to the part of the government which kills its own citizens to prevent them using excess government resources which could be used for more productive citizens.”
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
I avoided seeing Disney’s Moana in theaters because all the marketing was “wow brown gurl much diversity so hype”
When I finally did watch it, I enjoyed it. The glam crab was the only near-woke thing, and that segment was clearly over-the-top and based on the voice actor, and thus fun. The rest was a real treat, and The Rock’s “You’re Welcome” is one of the greatest Disney songs of all time.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
I imagine power outages in some parts of the country will be more frequent over the next decade.
Specifically because of switching everything to electric while shifting the grid to less constant / reliable sources of electricity. If every state had a fission plant feeding its major cities, I wouldn’t see as much of a problem with de-gassification, especially here in the Southwest US, but fossil is still the best way to heat cold climate regions.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
11mo ago
No direct culture war implications, at least not directly left/right. However, this was easily predictable by readers of Michael Crichton or Ayn Rand, both names in the “up/down” culture war (to coin a phrase).
Crichton’s most famous work, Jurassic Park, was largely about chaos theory. When working with a complex system, that is to say one driven by logic and rules, an outlier can bring down a house of cards through emergent effects. John Hammond not paying for a team of programmers led to dinos eating people. Today’s a mundane version of that.
Rand had a lot to say about innovative producers versus free riders, and apropos to today, about smart people who can create or repair machines versus everyday people who can just use their interfaces until something goes wrong. When it does, the cynical cry of, “Who is John Galt?” escapes their lips.
In the classic book “Atlas Shrugged”, the phrase Who is John Galt is a cry of despair and hopelessness. It describes a situation wherein the pistons are removed from an engine making that whole metal mass of a car useless.
The pistons form a small part of a vehicle’s mass, but provide the entire reason for a (petrol) car’s existence. Similarly most great organisations and societies are moved by a small group of people — the innovators. When those are removed, the entire thing falls apart. And the engine is usually among the last parts of the car to give up. And when the engine gives up, usually you don’t find a replacement — you just sell the vehicle to scrap. When the small minority of truly creative, entrepreneurial, risk-taking people are removed from a society, the society completely falls apart.
John Galt is a symbol of that risk taking, entrepreneurial guy. And when he gives up, the despair sets in. “Who is John Galt” is a cry from the masses who are confused about what is happening and who are despairing to get back the people in charge [the people who can take charge of reality through reason and bend it to their will].
And the truly creative, entrepreneurial guy need not be a rich industrialist. He can be a worker. He can be an artist. He can be a banker. He can be a professor. It is not about their wealth, but about how much they move the status quo.
The American IT industry was hit hard by COVID. Businessmen, C-suite execs, saw their people remoting in from home and trying not to return to the office. These execs, many of them free riders, realized they could halve their costs by hiring remote MSPs from out of country for IT and relying on Crowdstrike to be their security bottom line. A flood of IT layoffs happened this past year, deflating IT wages and making entry level jobs scarce.
Then today, only people with the admin password or a modicum of critical thought could restore the most well-protected systems. Today, companies across the globe learned who their John Galts were, their Eddie Willers, their Dagny Taggarts.
Although, as to the left/right culture war, imagine if this or worse had happened on Election Day and all the votes had to be hand-counted.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
1yr ago
So then any DC prosecutor with a taste for power can try making his bones by filing grand jury indictments against the President. Even if they’re frivolous charges, the President’s staff and lawyers would have to respond, comply with subpoenas, etc. And considering the District of Columbia has such a liberal body politic, Republicans would stand no chance if the case proceeds to a jury trial.
The constant filing of trivial and/or frivolous ethics complaints is what drove Sarah Palin out of the Governor’s office in Alaska. The cost in time and money were a form of legalized harassment, a sort of Denial of Service attack on her ability to govern. Avoiding the same thing happening to the President should be a priority, given that his duties include things like wars, treaties, and emergencies in and outside the country.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2yr ago
On the /r/FanTheories subreddit, a descendant of King James II of Scotland posted his theory that Captain Hook was always intended by J.M. Barrie to be recognizable as that king's bastard son, who went missing in Paris at the age of ten.
Captain Hook is James Beauclerk, the illegitimate son of King Charles II of England and his mistress, the low-born actress and courtesan Nell Gwyn. Evidence for this includes:
- Captain Hook is the spitting image of King Charles II of England - with dark or black curly hair and "Stewart/Stuart resemblance", with the only difference being Hook's blue eyes.
- Hook sharing personality traits, mannerisms, and physical features with both King Charles II and Nell Gwyn, balancing aristocratic dress and mannerisms with "slightly disgusting" ones.
- "Captain Hook" is implied to be a fake name and invented identity to conceal Hook's true identity. J.M. Barrie states in Peter Pan & Wendy: "'Hook' was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would, even at this date, set the country [of England] in a blaze." This is especially true if Captain Hook was none other than the King Charles II's long-lost son, Lord James Beauclerk.
- The mysterious "death" and disappearance of the Rt. Hon. James Beauclerk, or "Lord James Beauclerk". Nell Gwyn gave birth to her second child by the King, christened James - after King Charles II's younger brother, Prince James, Duke of York - on 25 December 1671 - or Christmas Day. Sent to school in Paris to receive an education fit for a prince when he was just 6, James Beauclerk supposedly died there in 1681 under mysterious circumstances. What James' life was like in Paris and the cause of his death are both unknown, one of the few clues being that he died "of a sore leg", which a great-nephew speculated could mean anything from "an accident to poison". This was published in the book The House of Nell Gwyn (1974). However, it is possible that James Beauclerk did not die, as reported - but rather, disappeared, or was whisked away in secrecy back to England due to fears over kidnapping and assassination attempts. His body was never returned; to this day, it is a mystery as to what, exactly, happened to James Beauclerk.
This contradicts the 2005 children's novel Capt. Hook: The Adventures of a Notorious Youth, an antihero-turns-villain origin story by J.V. Hart, screenwriter of Spielberg's Hook starring Robin Williams. In this novel, young James, alias King Jas., attends Eton and has an odd blood disorder, among other differences from this real-life theory.
The predictions I made:
Thanks for reminding me that the blackpill mentality is extremely online and conspiracy-focused; mea culpa.
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