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Notes -
Please ignore the context of this tweet (Elon reXt it, so it is CW fire): https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1879273049075458217
What I instead found curious was the usage of "GM (Global Majority) formerly known as BAME (Black, Asian, Middle East)" which I had never read before. But I am not British. Wiki has a short article about the term, maybe it will be longer in future:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_majority&oldid=1257733067
It seems to still be fringe/local use, but I wonder if it will be the new preferred term. Being part of a minority sounds small/miserable, you are an outsider. But being part of the global majority, now that sounds grand and legitimate, you are the demos.
Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite impression: I rather wonder whether this will be picked up by the far right as a way to legitimize opposition to immigration, in normie eyes: “Real diversity” means preserving the native people and culture of $WHITE_WESTERN_COUNTRY, who are a tiny, beleaguered minority in global terms.
One man’s modus ponens and all that.
You can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools.
I never understood why this aphorism is a thing. It seems wrong both literally (in what setting that is not a video game do tools come with friendly fire proofing?) and as a metaphor (almost every successful revolution co-opts components nurtured by the system it overthrows). Are there reasons to keep it alive beyond some sort of postmodern appeal (it sneaks in the assumption that your opposition are akin to slaveholders, and appears to say authoritatively that you should reject "tools" on association with the enemy rather than on merit)?
Because it rings true. The contents of Lourde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House" are largely postmodern garbage, but the title is clearly getting at something. The methods those in power used to construct the institutions they use to exercise power can only build those institutions. You can't build a hereditary monarchy by voting, and the divine right of kings will never get you a democracy.
...but Germans voted in Hitler, and Juan Carlos I sort of ordained a transition to democracy in Spain after Franco (if you squint). Outside of the low-N domain that is the political system of a country, there are even more examples of a house being dismantled using its master's tools, first and foremost the progressive takeover of positivist academia. What is entryism, even, if not an attempt to seize the Master's tools to have a go at the house?
(On the meta level, as a right-winger who is adopting this catchphrase, are you not also aiming to use the postmodernist Master's tool against his house - directly, and one step up the meta ladder in that you are in fact even copying the strategy of claiming that "the master's tools will never..." while aiming to employ the master's tools to that end yourself?)
Did they? My understanding was that the Nazis got much less than a majority, but the votes led to a plurality Nazi bloc in the legislature, and in the hopes of throwing them a bone in order to control them and assuage street violence, the President offered the chancellorship to Hitler as part of a theoretical pseudo-coalition. Then Hitler used the chancellorship to orchestrate extraconstitutional "emergency" power-grabs after the Reichstag fire, enabled through threats of violence to Reichstag members.
This would of course not be the last time someone thought "let's just give Adolf what he wants to satisfy him." But I would not describe what happened as "the German people decisively voted that they wanted the Nazis to have full control over society and Hitler to be a dictator." It's much more like a large group of Germans, some out of passionate love for Nazism and some out of desperation amid economic crisis, voted for the Nazi party, and then they used the first tiny, slight grip on power to establish a dictatorship through violence.
I thought the story was that the broad establishment coalition(conservative dominated but included everyone except Nazis and actual communists) needed either Nazi or commie votes to form a government, and picked Hitler over Stalin.
Either way, it remains true that Hitler did not win a democratic mandate.
"Proportional Representation: Literally Hitler"!
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