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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32905 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Then I come here for a dose of sanity, and I have to dig DEEP into the replies before I find anyone positing the plainly obvious: that if you say your political opponents are child rapist election stealing perverts, some section of the population will actually believe the literal words you are saying and "take action".

This is pretty much the reason I think we should not tell noble lies. Our golems will ultimately always eat us. You get it with the weird Q groups producing lunatics like the one who attacked the Pelosis and you get it with the ACAB types eventually inspiring the burning down of police stations and wanton rioting. But even you are taking the wrong tact here I think by referencing the groomer word games, which while I agree are tiresome, are not what has caused the Pelosi hammer incident. That was caused by a pervasive conspiracy theory called Q which I doubt anyone here seriously endorses as it's as plainly ridiculous now as it was when it started on 8chan. I don't know what the right can do about these people anymore than I know what the left can do about people who say "no, we were not playing word games, end the police".

I think the whole "groomer" thing is in response to "you can freely call me a Nazi, a fascist, a murderer, all this sort of thing, now how do you like it when you're called horrible names? Oh you're not a paedophile in reality? Well I'm not a Nazi, but that didn't stop you guys".

Not to be constantly carping about Rings of Power, but stuff like this :

Amazon claims there’s been a coordinated effort to attack the show for daring to diversify Tolkien with strong female characters and people of color. “The hardest part was for people on the cast who have had things related to them privately that are just harmful,” Sanders says.

...But it’s also possible Rings‘ percentage of agenda-based reviews might be much higher than for Dragon. Tolkien’s world has a long, unfortunate history of attracting fascist-adjacent admirers, something that surely would have repulsed the fantasy world’s anti-totalitarian author, whose Rings trilogy was inspired by the horrors of World War I. Italy’s newly elected far-right nationalist leader, Giorgia Meloni, for example, has been an outspoken Tolkien fan, unhelpfully.

and this:

As Tolkien researcher Craig Franson explains, far-right political actors are whipping up the controversy, weaponising it to help get fascist talking points into the mainstream. Franson shows that the right-wing “outrage machine” stirred up “a massive hate mob” through mainstream right-wing press.

Fans who feel they are defending Tolkien’s legacy are being used as pawns to serve dangerous anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian agenda and siding, whether they mean to or not, with racist extremists.

Tolkien made statements against Nazis and also apartheid, but this is not the same as being anti-racist or pro-equality. His condemnation of Hitler, he wrote in the same letter, was for

ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to preserve in its true light.

The comment shows that he believed that some people were essentially different to and better than others. This notion is foundational to racism.

See? If you don't like what the show has done to canon, then if you're not a fascist yourself, you're at least fascist- and white supremacist-adjacent.

Ok, groomer.

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