To_Mandalay
2yr ago
To be fair "far right" and "far left" are relative. Even the Nazis and the fascists with the mass-quality of their movements would have been objectionable to the reactionaries of the French Revolution.
Yeah, ( @The_Nybbler ) this is what I was trying to get at. Probably half at least of the books listed by wikipedia as early YA (including The Bell Jar and of all things) would never be published as YA nowadays if they were published at all. I doubt even The Outsiders would make it. Pony Boy is 14 (strike one) and a boy (strike two) for starters.
Modern YA has become more of a genre than an age category, not in the least because a substantial chunk of its readers are in fact grown women and not teenagers. For a book to be classed and published as YA it is not enough for it to be about teenagers, it has to hit certain themes like you've mentioned, the fight against an oppressive and cruel 'adult' society (whether it be a dystopian sci-fi tyranny or just bull-headed teachers and parents), the narrative must be very introspective and feelings-y, the lead must be between 16 and 18 (15 and 19 are possible but really pushing it) and with very few exceptions female, there must be a love story B-plot, and it doesn't have to be written in first-person present but that's strongly recommended. There's also just a certain sine qua non 'feel' to YA prose that is hard to pin down but that I know when I see. It's not quite that it's usually linguistically simpler though that is part of it. There is a certain immediacy and immaturity (not necessarily in a bad way, though it can be, but just a sense that 'this is a kid talking') that is usually not found in adult novels. But I have read so-marketed adult novels that have made me think 'this feels like YA' and so-marketed YA novels that make me think 'this feels like an adult novel.'
That stuff is what YA as a "genre" and a publishing category has meant since the early 2010s or so. Gary Paulsen's Hatchet may be a young adult novel but it is not a Young Adult™ novel.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Yeah, this is a fandom universal and has been for ages.
The most popular ship in the Star Wars fandom is Kylo Ren/Rey which is probably not surprising, everybody loves a broody bad boy. But by far second most popular is to ship Kylo Ren and Domhall Gleeson’s minor supporting villain Hux. It is many times more popular than say, Finn/Rey or Poe/Rey (that is, the female lead of the sequel trilogy and the male leads) with some 11,000 fics vs 2,000 or so for each of the latter two.
Another piece of fandom lore relates to Supernatural. The show was clearly meant to be a “guys’ show.” If you’re unfamiliar, it follows two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who drive around the country killing monsters/ghosts/demons and sleeping with beautiful women. However the fandom it cultivated turned out to be overwhelmingly female. And for a while anyways, they overwhelmingly shipped the two brothers (‘Wincest’). The writers tried valiantly time and time again to introduce female love interests for the brothers only for each to suffer the vicious wrath of the fandom (sometimes up to harassing the actresses that played them) and be shortly written out one after the other.
I don’t have any hard data (though I feel sure it exists and will see if I can dig it up later) but going off of anecdotal experience I would be utterly shocked if the demographics of f/f fic writers and readers was less than 80% female and even that would be low-balling.
The only type of fanfic where I expect male writers are probably significantly represented is out and out zero-plot smut and even that is probably more like 65/35 female/male than 50/50.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It's interesting that Harry Potter (maybe Hunger Games but definitely not to the same extent) was as far as I know the last book to really have mass, cross-gender appeal among the youth. I think the male-female split on Potter fans was, maybe not fifty fifty, but probably closer to such than any fantasy YA book since. Doubt we'll ever see another such phenomenon.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Maybe TMI, but now you know (of) at least one other guy, being me. I have always found erotica more exciting than pornography (it used to genuinely annoy me as a teenager how hard it was to find porn with actual plot). That makes sense though because I've always considered myself to have a more feminine kind of mind in a lot of ways. I used to write a ton of fanfiction in HS, and as mentioned above a supermajority of fanfic writers are female. I was in a few fandoms where just about every single other fan I interacted with was a girl.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
People wrote books about young people in the 70s, but that's not the same as YA as a publishing category with genre conventions almost as strict as those of say, romance, which is a much more recent thing.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I don't think modern genre conventions really make much sense to apply prior to the mid-twentieth century or so. Calling the Iliad literary fiction would be ridiculous, but it would also be ridiculous to call it fantasy, or military fiction, or thriller, even though it could fairly be said to share elements of all of those genres.
Young Adult in particular is barely a decade old as a real publishing category. Even Harry Potter doesn't really fit into the formula conventions of modern YA (despite the fact that the YA genre was in large part a product of HP).
I have always understood literary fiction as fiction where the beauty and skill of the prose and the thematic exploration are meant to be as big of or bigger draws as plot or characters. You can have literary fiction where not much happens plot-wise, but not really in genre fiction. Lines are blurry of course. And yeah a lot of it is probably just snobbery.
Your priors are right insofar as fiction sales are dominated by romance (maybe unfair to class it all as porn-adjacent--there's a lot of romance without graphic sex scenes. It's certainly a very formulaic, paint-by-numbers genre tho even by the standards of genre fiction). Second-biggest I believe is mystery/thriller, though female authors predominate there too these days.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Every set of hard numbers I've ever seen suggest the same thing. I chose that article from the 90s to show that it's an old trend.
See numbers here for 2015, on pages 71 - 72.
Also dovetails with my personal experience so I don't really have trouble believing it. If it was a matter of being pushed out by a market that caters to women, there's plenty of older stuff men could read, but while I know girls that like to read older stuff I can't remember the last time I met a guy who reads Hemingway or Bierce for fun. Men IME have different hobbies.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Probably part of it. Romance has always been the biggest seller in mass-market fiction by far, something like 50% of all units sold yearly are romance. I think the trend holds across most genres though.
Women purchase a lot more fiction than men, a trend that goes back at least to the early 90s and precedes the dominance of female authors in the market. The share of female authors in general ticked sharply upwards starting in the 70s but only cracked 50% in the last couple of years. Why this is I'm not sure. When I was in high school a couple of years ago all the girls read for fun but few boys did. Men tend to read non-fiction a lot more than fiction but even there I think women read a bit more.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
In my experience almost all kids who are bullied are bullied over harmless or immutable characteristics like being short, unattractive, shy, or fat. Once it's established that they suck, other even more minute characteristics (clothes they wear, their interests, their family, etc.) which would be totally unremarkable in anyone else are used as pretexts for further bullying. I don't think I've ever seen a case of "constructive" bullying.
Getting picked on all the time didn't make me any more of a well-adjusted person, it just made me angry and withdrawn. What did was when I eventually ended up transferring (for unrelated reasons) to a new school where bullying was practically non-existent, so I was able to reach out and make friends without the constant fear that I would be mocked or physically assaulted.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I am not sure I would call it complete indifference, but isn't it well known enough that there is a marked difference between the empathy we give men vs women?
I don't disagree that if all we know about a person is their sex we might be inclined to start a woman off with more "empathy points" than a man, but the idea that it's a massive yawning gulf to the point that could it could be compared to a "Lovecraftian horror story" strikes me as absurd hyperbole.
What continues to strike me is the significant reduction in friendliness and kindness now extended to me in public spaces. It now feels as though I am on my own: No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.
This is what I wonder about. I suppose I wouldn't know for sure, because I've never been a woman. But...when I'm out and about in public, everyone else always seems pretty friendly. People smile at me, if I make a reasonable request of a total stranger ("can you hand me that," "can I take this chair," "can you break a fifty," etc.) it's usually granted, if I'm carrying stuff and drop some things usually someone will stop to help me pick it up. I guess I'm just not sure what else could really be expected of people you don't know in a public place. What are they doing for women that they aren't doing for me?
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
It's kind of true. "Super good at rhetoric" is relative. Normies get BTFO by guys called Dirlewanger_Respecter on twitter all the time. When you adopt extremist and fringe political positions you have to develop at least some rudimentary rhetorical skills to defend them, which may not be all that much, but are still leagues beyond those of your average person who rarely thinks even that much about their politics.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The biggest difference between men and women is that when you're a man, the absolute indifference of the universe towards you is the norm
This stuck out to me, despite being tangential to the meat of the actual post, because this sentiment is so commonly expressed online and yet it has always felt alien to my personal experience. I have always felt that people care about me. Not most people of course, but I have always had friends and family that care about me and that I can rely on during a tough time. As far as I can tell, most men that I know personally also have friends and family that care about them. When you say "the universe and the people in it are a yawning void of indifference" do you mean that most men don't have such people they can rely on, who 'care' about them? Or do you mean that people at large, that is strangers, don't care about you? That's true, but I don't think the vast majority of women are 'cared about' by random strangers either. What would it even mean for strangers to care about me? If I got shot on the street some passerby would hopefully call the cops for me (then again there was the CashApp guy last week), but I don't think there's a huge sex difference there. I wouldn't really consider that 'caring' about me. If I started crying on a park bench I suspect no one would stop to ask me what was wrong, and maybe they would for a woman (not a sure thing though, I wouldn't stop for a stranger crying in public, regardless of sex). But that's a marginal kind of scenario and I don't think that's what most people are getting at when they say no one cares about you if you're a man.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
one example I've seen used is that many French republicans (for decades past the last French monarch actually was on throne) were suspicious of women's suffrage because they thought women would return a king to the throne.
As an interesting historical note, this was also true in Spain in the early part of the 20th century. After the establishment of a Republic the left was deeply split on women's suffrage; some supported it on principle, others opposed it because they feared women would vote as a bloc for the right. Suffrage was in the end extended to women and in the next election in 1933 the right won in a landslide.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
In pictures I see of the third reich, the ones most enthusiastically waving the swatztika flags and doing the Hitler salute at rallies are young women. Is that them being "empathetic"? No, it's social contagion. The media tells them that Nazism is socially desirable and good, and liberalism is unthinkable. And so they wave their flags.
Worth noting that Nazism was disproportionately popular with women before the Nazis came to power (IIRC the most popular single party with women, before it was the case for men or the population as a whole). Least popular was KPD.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
Spain in the early 20th century is very fascinating. Gerald Brennan's The Spanish Labyrinth is old but a good overview of the conditions that ultimately produced the civil war, including the popularity of anarchism in the south. An excerpt:
The character of the rural anarchism that grew up in the south of Spain differed, as one would expect, from that developed in the large cities of the north. 'The idea', as it was called, was carried from village to village by Anarchist 'apostles'. In the farm labourers' gañanias or barracks, in isolated cottages by the light of oil candiles, the apostles spoke on liberty and equality and justice to rapt listeners. Small circles were formed in towns and villages which started night schools where many learned to read, carried on anti-religious propaganda and often practised vegetarianism and teetotalism. Even tobacco and coffee were banned by some and one of these old apostles whom I knew maintained that, when the age of liberty came in, men would live on unfired foods grown by their own hand. But the chief characteristic of Andalusian anarchism was its naive millenarianism. Every new movement or strike was thought to herald the immediate coming of a new age of plenty, when all even the Civil Guard and the land owners would be free and happy. How this would happen no one could say. Beyond the seizure of the land (not even that in someplaces) and the burning of the parish church, there were no positive proposals.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
I suspect that nationalism was more common among workers than anarchy ever was.
Nationalism, at least as anything more developed than "don't like foreigners, simple as" was probably more of a middle class phenomenon in the 19th and early 20th centuries than a working class one. You may be right about anarchism in particular but revolutionary ideas in general maybe not. In Spain I think anarchism probably was more popular with the workers than nationalism.
Anarchism only ever really developed a mass following in two countries: Russia and Spain. There were anarchist movements all across the western world, but they only rarely managed to put down the kinds of roots among the workers that more 'mainstream' socialist parties/movements did. The SPD in Germany, the SFIO in France, Labour in England. Socialism seemed a much more reasonable philosophy to most workers. Even while theoretically advocating a future classless socialist society, socialist politicians and activists also worked within the system to improve conditions here and now. Another thing is that socialism took root among industrial workers while anarchism tended to be more popular among poor peasants. Socialism was, at least ostensibly, a much more 'scientific' philosophy while anarchism was much more romantic and primitive in instinct. Marxist theory and analysis were taken very seriously by many of the most learned, intelligent people of this period, while anarchism never was. It had a rigor that anarchism lacked, which endeared it to intellectuals and the increasingly secularized urban working classes alike. That is probably a big part of the reason anarchism did not endure, besides those enumerated elsewhere in the thread, is that its intellectual foundations were much shakier than those of marxist socialism.
What Spain and Russia had in common were that they were two of Europe's least industrialized, poorest countries. Anarchism proved very popular among uneducated and deeply impoverished landless rural workers who adhered to it basically as if it was a religion. In the south of Spain the tenets of anarchism essentially replaced Catholicism among the braceros (regular church attendance had collapsed to something like 5% of the population in Andalusia in the 30s). They had the idea of "the Revolution" as like the coming of Christ, one singular event after which there would be heaven on earth.
Anarchism was wiped out in Russia by the Bolsheviks. It peaked in Spain in the 1930s at the outbreak of the Civil War. The anarchists blew a lot of their credibility with the base by collaboration with the republican government, and whatever was left was destroyed by the Franco victory.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
There are hundreds and hundreds of surviving documents pertaining to the Reinhardt operation.
There used to be a lot more before it was ordered destroyed, as Globocnik explicitly notes in the final report.
Also:
The entire Action Reinhardt is divided into four spheres: A. The expulsion itself. B. The employment of labour. C. The exploitation of property. D. Seizure of hidden goods and landed property.
So Reinhardt involved much more than the exploitation of property.
If Himmler really did put Globocnik in charge of the extermination of the Jews, how could you possibly ask for a better source than a direct, top-secret final report from the man who did it to the man who ordered it?
How about hearing it from the mouth of the man who ordered it himself?
to me, that speaks volumes that one side is pointing to things like "what do you mean this people"
There is also the unexplained demographic collapse of eastern European Jewry, the staffing of the Reinhard camps with former T4 euthanasia men, thousands of eyewitnesses both hostile and otherwise, and massive quantities of human remains in the ground at Belzec. But the German secret police chief admitting on tape that he undertook to "wipe a people off the face of the earth" is pretty good too.
To_Mandalay
2yr ago
The lack of any mention of extermination in that top-secret report has been attributed to the enormous secrecy of the operation by the mainstream...
Considering the vast bulk of the documentation relating to Reinhard was ordered "destroyed as soon as possible."
You are saying that in a semi-public recorded speech, Himmler himself openly acknowledged a policy of extermination of all Jewish people in October 1943
I wouldn't call it "semi-public." He's speaking to "this circle" and says multiple times that what he is saying here must "never be spoken of in public." Which makes no sense on the theory that resettlement does, in fact mean 'resettlement' because that was in fact spoken of in public.
Earlier same year Robert Ley got a little carried away in a public speech and shouted that Germany "would not rest until the last Jew in Europe is annihilated and dead" (bis die letzte Jude in Europa vernichtet und gestorben ist).
The more reasonable interpretation is that in both passages he is referring to reprisals, which was topical due to recent events in Warsaw.
It's not reasonable to interpret Himmler as speaking about partisan reprisals in Warsaw in a passage where he mentions literally none of these things.
It is radically different.
The wives and children of commissars are being killed not simply as reprisals, but because they are "subhumans." i.e Jews and Slavs.
If there were no extermination policy, Himmler would not have been concerned with saying a phrase here or there that would be pounced on by people like you decades
It's not "a phrase here and there" it's several paragraphs of a speech.
but the fact is if a speaker says "enough about X" then it's far more likely that X is going to be revisited later in the speech
No, when someone says "enough about X" that usually means they're done talking about X. That is quite literally what "enough about X" means. Especially when they move on to talk about a bunch of other unrelated stuff and give no indication they've returned to the topic X. In fact Himmler notes at each point in the speech when he changes topic, and here he says he is going to begin talking about the solution to the Jewish question, nothing so specific as partisans. If he wanted to talk about partisan reprisals, he would have talked about them in the section of the speech specifically dedicated to partisan warfare.
But you are saying he is using a euphemism earlier in that very speech when he describes the migration East of the Jews.
Possibly but not necessarily. Some Jews were in fact sent east to work. Others from the Reich sent east and then shot in the Baltics and Belarus. Not very many, but some.
This is exactly what I mean, you pounce on words like "these people",
He doesn't say "these people." That would be quite different. That would probably be "diese Leute" or "diese Menschen." He says "this people." "Dieses Volk." The word should of course be interpreted in context, so see that Himmler uses the word 'Volk' about two-dozen times in this speech, and every time to refer to an ethnicity or a nation. It would be quite strange and unnatural if he made an exception in this sentence, despite no contextual indication that this is the case. In fact the opposite is true, and the obvious natural referent of 'Volk' in this sentence is the Jews, since the Jews are mentioned very many times in the immediate preceding and succeeding paragraphs, unlike partisans. There is no ambiguity.
For example, in that passage, which you acknowledge was not a euphemism, on partisans and commissars he uses "subhumans". So the identification of "subhumans" with "this people" isn't nearly as unlikely as you are trying to let on.
Yes, they are subhumans who are partisans and commissars. They are not subhuman by virtue of being partisans and commissars. Obviously not because their wives and children are also subhumans, and yet their wives and children obviously aren't partisans and commissars.
dramatically different meanings
Not dramatically different. Very similar. October speech talks about the Jews as a whole, December specifically refers to 'commissars and partisans.' Then again, the Nazis viewed 'partisan' and 'Jew' as more or less interchangeable.
Debatable whether the CEDA could be referred to as an "establishment" party because Gil Robles was very open about his intentions to set up a 'corporatist' dictatorship if he ever actually managed to get into power, which was why Alcalá Zamora (no leftist) refused to give him the prime ministership even when the right won the elections pretty decisively in 1933. The PSOE was almost a mirror image, insofar as it was increasingly radical and people like Largo Caballero were increasingly open about their intentions to use the Republic as a stepping stone to socialism.
The problem with Spain was that there was no real 'establishment.' There were only a very small number of people committed to the liberal-democratic process and they could only hold the center for so long.
An openly anti-democratic militarist movement with the goal of setting up an authoritarian, confessional Catholic state? Is that not far-right?
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