rallycar-jepsen
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User ID: 694
If someone had asked me before I'd read these posts about what I associated with the political cartoon meme of an octopus or kraken with its tentacles outstretched around some geographic area that represents unchecked, sprawling power and influence, I might've thought about depictions of a Jewish World Order somewhere down the line, sure, but I also strongly associate it with similar depictions of World Communism/Russia, British colonialism, even oil companies and other international business monopolies.
"Octopus political cartoon" as an image search returns a wide variety of illustrations, many much older than WWII, many much more recent that have to do with more recent issues. This article [ https://neverwasmag.com/2017/08/the-octopus-in-political-cartoons/ ] catalogues a few, many of them going back to the late 1800s. A couple are related to negative assertions about Jews or Jewish conspiracies, most aren't. It's just ... been a common visual trope for when you want to portray some entity as sprawling and overreaching for over a century. I think the first one I thought of personally was the Standard Oil cartoon from apparently 1904.
I could see it if the octopus plush was white-and-blue striped and had sprawling tentacles like the political cartoons. I can definitely imagine a theoretical, unambiguously antisemitic octopus plush. It's just interesting to slide all the way from "the sprawling octopus trope has been used in antisemitic propaganda" to "the sprawling octopus trope is antisemitic" and then to "any imagery featuring an octopus may be an antisemitic dogwhistle in the right context."
Personally I expect the views of a lot of people on the far left to have shifted about specifically, narrowly, Palestinian culture and its current capacity for peaceful statehood. I expect it to become somewhat less fashionable on the left to justify brutality by Palestinian militants against Israel and the general sympathy toward it among the Palestinian populace, even for people who consider Israel an obviously bad settler colonialist apartheid state on the wrong side of history.
Do I expect that shift to translate into a proportional priors update on related issues domestically? Not really. I think it's too easy to rationalize away as, no, that's them, that's unique, it's a regrettable but isolated case, the situation over here isn't like the situation over there, and the people we're talking about over here aren't like the people over there.
I'm an American thinking about the response from the American far left about American immigration policy and culture issues, though. The needle movement elsewhere on domestic issues may be more dramatic.
An opportunity to be a datapoint? Let me at it!
Extraversion - 29th p.
Emotional Stability - 81st p.
Agreeableness - 40th p.
Conscientiousness - 18th p.
Intellect/Imagination - 80th p.
It pretty much comports exactly with how I understand myself and so isn't offering me any fresh or striking insights, unfortunately, but what can I really expect from a 50-question personality test?
(I do think 'Openness to Experience' is a better label for their Factor V though - I don't know that I would consider myself in the 80th percentile of 'intellect', or if I were to, it wouldn't be based on anything this test asked me.)
That makes me curious though, has anybody here ever gotten a result from a test like this that's very surprising or counterintuitive, in a way that offered you some grain of insight or cause for reflection?
edit: Oh cool, several responders here did get such a result. Interesting!
I'm sorry in advance that I don't have anything more interesting to respond with here, but I just wanted to say this is a good reply and I'm glad you replied. I actually think most of your intuitions here are basically directionally correct and I share a lot of your frustrations at a lot of the current conventions surrounding gender identity. As you say, much of it is, at best, not useful for human connection, and at worst, detrimental to it. Maybe I'll write more deeply on it here someday.
He/they user here, it just means either pronoun set is fine. "She/they" is just shorthand for "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs", usually in the sense of "She/her/hers or they/them/theirs, dealer's choice."
If they're anything like me, it's probably because they honestly consider themself nonbinary but they aren't visually readable as gender-nonconforming, have a deferential/non-confrontational habit, don't find absolute pronoun correctness a particularly critical part of life, and/or are averse to policing other peoples' language on principle.
That said, there also do exist a (probably small, but memorable) set of people who will see "She/they" in a bio and do their damnedest to rotate between the two mid-sentence like "She felt their day was going exactly as she hoped it would when they walked out of her door" which is absolutely alien to me and I cannot fathom wanting that or wanting to participate in that. I have to wonder whether that's actually what anyone is truly asking for or if it's just misinterpretation all the way down and nobody in-ranks wants to ask or clarify.
Even when people ask for "any pronouns" (which ... I have a personal and probably irrational aversion to) I always assume what they mean is "pick one set, whichever, and then use that one" not "all text and speech referring to me must be indecipherable".
I do think most people who do it just use "She/they" or "He/they" to mean "Use whichever of these causes the least friction for you, neither one bothers me."
It at least definitely never means "She walked they dog in she front yard."
Interesting - YouTube's automatic closed caption translations did a very admirable job handling this video. Some terms and turns of phrase throw it off, but I definitely got the gist of 80%+ of the spoken information content here. More than I expected.
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