Southkraut
Rise, ramble, rest, repeat.
All alliterations are accidental.
User ID: 83
While I don't disagree with your conclusion I do doubt that it was really the statue that led you to this. Be honest - you were ready to embrace western chauvinism beforehand, weren't you?
Southkraut
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1yr ago
Thanks for a good post.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
So goes the euphemism treadmill. The undesirable is dressed up in respectable clothing, until the clothing itself takes on the aspect of undesirability and is exchanged for a new one.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.
Wasn't the motte that vaccines are at least not more dangerous than the virus, while the bailey was that getting vaccinated is what good people do? At least that's how the arguments went in my social circles.
If you want to look at the picture purely as an abstract piece of visual art, divorced from its context and implications, then fine, it can get away as being merely not pretty. But visualizing the scene and its constituent elements with some degree of fidelity should present an image that requires some ideological or at least aesthetic buy-in for the viewer not to be repulsed. See some of its elements:
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Cripples
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Fat people
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Squatters
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Graffiti
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Transsexuals
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Piercings
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Tattoos
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Antifa
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Stoners
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BLM
And I don't mean this as a jab against these categories, but I do mean to observe that someone who is not already inured to their sight would almost certainly feel some level of disgust were he to encounter their average representatives. Certainly those who are already on board will imagine more presentable examples instead, or idealized versions, and the poster is almost certainly simply an in-group signal aimed at them in the first place.
To rephrase: All of the elements enumerated above are, if not categorically then at least with most of their real-world examples, fit to cause disgust, and ugliness is merely description of the visual qualities that lead to the more visceral reaction in the viewer.
To be even clearer: Crippled limbs are ugly. Rolls of fat are ugly. Squats are, most of the time, ugly. Graffiti is ugly. Transsexuals are ugly. Piercings are, if not ugly in themselves, viscerally disgusting. Tattooed people are ugly. Antifa tends to be fairly ugly. Stoners often become ugly. BLM activities tend to be ugly. Yeah, there are probably counterexamples, but I'd wager they're rarer than those examples that prove my point. And yes, ugliness is subjective, so I posit some neutral human observer who sees any of these things for the very first time and has never heard of them before.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
IMO it was doomed from the start. Since the mid-20th century practically all institutions are being taken over by big-government leftists, and creating one from scratch that's too big for anyone to take down and too far removed from the people for anyone to keep it in check just meant giving the institution-eating left a giant gift that keeps on giving. An alternate, politically neutral EU was never an option.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
No. I've spent several days in a state of unabating rage about her having strangled everyrhing positive out of our lives. I'm escalating. Today I dumped her, myself and our daughter at her parents' house and we'll live here for the indefinite future. If retvrn to the multigenerational family model doesn't help, then my next step will be to be a very bad parent and ask my daughter to choose either mom or dad.
Does she have any interest in changing?
Only if it happens without any effort on her part, or by her doing more of what she's been doing so far.
Hello The Motte, thanks for hosting my vent.
Southkraut
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1mo ago
That certainly fits my anecdotal experience. First-hand. Lots of it. My wife's an overtherapied wreck who spends every waking hour re-heating her anxieties. Only ever gets worse.
Southkraut
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5mo ago
He killed what was left of the HRE and accelerated Germany's slide into Prussian hegemony, so he's in my bad book.
Amazing General, though. The anti-meritocrats tell me that it's entirely down to luck, but given the long string of battles that he should've lost by the numbers but somehow turned into victories, I strongly suspect that skill has something to do with it.
Southkraut
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6mo ago
IIRC, he believes that his expedition will change him to such a degree that his newly-acquired badassness will shine through without needing explicit introduction.
Southkraut
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10mo ago
Purely off the cuff: One difference I see is that while dementia patients will only get worse and eventually die, children usually get better and have long lives as self-sufficient adults ahead of themselves, which makes it important to cultivate good habits in the children whereas the same seems to have little importance in dementia patients. Controlling children via unfounded fears may lead to bad habits.
Southkraut
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11mo ago
But using the firearm against him when he is several feet away from you, against merely being punched, is not reasonable.
How do you know it's a "mere punch' and not just the first punch of you getting beaten to a cripple or to death? How do you know that this isn't the last opportunity to use your gun before it'll be taken from you and possibly used against you?
Southkraut
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1yr ago
IMO there should be no blocking.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
I mistakenly assumed that everyone around me regularly got flu shots and would be totally ok getting experiencing less than a second of pain to avoid harming my family. And I suppose now that the old folks are already dead from covid I shouldn't have anything to worry about-it's not like they're going to die again. But just like you, I feel like it's the principal of the thing. Choose Team Mankind or Team Virus (or, hell, Team China if you believe in lab leak theory.)
Choose team liberty over team coercion. Choose team bayesian inference over team blind obedience. Choose team calm over team panic. Choose team economy over team lockdown. We can all spin this any way we like.
I think people should have the absolute authority to choose what goes in their arm, but if I see someone with 'death to /u/evinceo's ancestors' tattooed on their forehead, I'm going to treat them with some amount of contempt.
I'm really not sure what you're saying here, except for the surface-level reading which seems both obvious and very unlikely to occur.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
I usually use Youtube via a heavily uBlocked and uMatrixed Firefox, which means no ads.
Whenever my wife asks me to play a song via the Youtube program on my phone, I almost drop the thing in fright - people actually listen to music or watch videos that are preceded by several advertisements, plus interruptions, plus another round of ads in between videos? It's intolerable. I'd rather not.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
In my experience it is our being here and able to talk about controversial topics in depth and usually with someone poining out errors in reasoning or judgement that enables us to not feel trapped in our heads with only TV or social media for input and talking to ourselves as the output.
The overton window has become very narrow lately, and I am not at all surprised that many people find themselves unable to go with the program but also unable to find productive ways of communicating their disagreement.
And finally, some people just are like that old lady or that uncle - but if they're within the overton window they can just join a socially acceptable club of crazies. See PETA or the Last Generation for examples. If they aren't, then shouting into traffic or ejaculating into unrelated conversations are possibly the only channels left to them.
Southkraut
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3mo ago
I've found every Discord server I was ever on to be, ultimately, disappointing. The whole format seems to promote shouting over each other, trying to one-up whoever came before, attention whoring and showmanship. It's broadly the opposite of how I like to communicate. That Discord is mostly populated by young leftist Americans doesn't help either.
In other words, I guess I'm too old for Discord.
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy? Was he an expansionist warmonger or a peacemaker driven to conflict by other powers? Was he a brilliant military reformer or mostly an opportunist riding off others' inventions? Did he leave a legacy of economic and political dynamism or barely make a dent? What's your take?
All of it, to some extent? You outlined many major points, and IMO it's futile to try and pronounce a definitive judgement of the man and his deeds when, as you noted, he's so distorted by controversy and propaganda.
From my perspective the French and the British are villains, and us poor South Germans are the eternal victims of those predatory nations. Our countries were conquered by the man himself, replaced with artificial test-tube states, our young men marched off to freeze to death in Russia as third-rate cannon fodder, and then the Germanies were ravaged by the revolutionary sentiments that we can surely somehow blame on Napoleon, until the Brits' Prussian puppets ended up gobbling up all of Germany, and I probably needn't tell you how that ended for us.
That said, Napoleon, egomaniac scoundrel that he may have been, cuts one hell of a figure. You can practically smell the cope and seethe of those who condemn him. The Elon Musk of his time, but with a grandiose deathwish instead of nerdiness. He's too much of a callous, self-serving conqueror to be painted white, but far too brave, skilled and charismatic to be painted black.
Sure, but then we do the same thing to muslims, blacks and latinos, because their societies/cultures too don't live up to or run directly counter to whatever values we presently hold to be very important. Come on, let's go burn the quran, let's ban black cultural icons, let's forbid the use of Spanish! We have a superior society to offer, so down with the barbarian cultures!
I'm being somewhat inflammatory here, sorry. But really, I do think you're taking the easy route by heaping searing condemnation on a culture of the past that cannot fight back, while cultures in the present that should run afoul of the same metrics get much more lenient treatment simply by virtue of being able to resist, or, more cynically, because this isn't about standards but simply about whose holy cows get butchered today. Someone here recently quoted Chesterton on Tradition; I guess my point is similar.
Also, to be fair, I am not American, so feel free to ignore me on this subject.
Southkraut
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6mo ago
Germany:
German media are overwhelmingly one-sided on the Israel-Gaza issue: https://www.themotte.org/post/716/israelgaza-megathread-2/150352?context=8#context
Berlin has seen a series of riots by pro-Palestinian leftists and muslims. Reactions are predictable - indignation about violence, worry about antisemitism, the left ignoring and the right emphasizing the role immigrants play here.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, our head of government (no, Merkel is gone, for real), has done exactly what anyone would predict - toured the middle east in general and Israel especially, gave speeches there as well as at home, and generally took a hard line against Hamas, against antisemitism, in favor of Israel, and against Putin. And, fulfilling expectations, he announced nothing material.
Sahra Wagenknecht, hitherto leading member of the leftist Die Linke party, in the past a self-described stalinist, now an outdated socialist who failed to get with the woke times, aims to found her own party. The woman has a reputation as someone with actual ideals and principles of her own, which allowed her to stand out and earn a modicum of admiration on left and right alike. Her founding her own party is thus likely to draw at least some supporters away from Die Linke as well as from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. The current leadership of Die Linke, a party in steep decline, is outraged, calling this an ego trip. The AfD, flying high in polls, seems largely unbothered. The founding is supposed to take place on next monday.
In other news, the head of the German Union Association, Yasmin Fahimi, called the AfD - a party with strong support among unionized workers - the enemy of the workers, for its racism.
And I just heard on the Radio that two Bavarian companies will soon launch satellite-bearing rockets from a ship in the North Sea.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
A bunch of interesting points, but what's going on with the headline?
The Far Left's White Supremacist, Violent Rape of Language
Are you just fishing for clicks there?
Southkraut
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1yr ago
We recently had a subthread on topics that broke people's brains, or more precisely on topics that were fighting culture war terrain for them: https://www.themotte.org/post/146/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/22723?context=8#context. Several people, myself included, named covid-related issues as the most salient item.
So, yes, the age of covid broke everyone's brains. Mine included. I won't go into it again for now; there's hardly a point in repeating myself. Check the link to read about people being angry.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
I'm quite ready to call out our politicians as spineless grifters, with perhaps a few exceptions, but the idea that they consider themselves vassals of Washington out of a need to avoid racism is, how do you say it, cringe? Low-effort? They, like most progressives, will indeed go far to avoid accusations of racism, but this is one thing where I see no connection.
Southkraut
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1yr ago
My wife and I usually speak in dialect. A few weeks ago I spent a lot of time cloistered away at work and she spent a lot of time trading voice messages with a northern friend of hers. The friend does and my wife used to belong to the cultural left that try to distance themselves as far as they can from dialects, using that distance to signal tribal allegiance. After a while, my wife began speaking to me and our child in high german. I was honestly horrified. Our dialect is dear to me, a large part of my home memeplex, and I felt like an utter stranger when suddenly adressed in that artificial, impersonal and politically loaded high language.
It's back to normal now but aua did that sting. Felt like the clammy fingers of the cathedral sullying a sacred space.
Yea. "Why are you afraid of them?" is a frequently-posed rhetorical question.
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