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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.

I mean, I am I completely misreading in Harry Potter the real world implication of the good guy position being that teens need to learn to fight while carrying their deadly weapons (wands) and it's only the bad guys that want to keep them unarmed, weak and vulnerable?

I don't think it can be read into everything, but I think there's definitely instances where the narrative strength of a trope that the author consciously rejects still forces them to argue for a position they abhor. Sometimes, especially when the author has strong cognitive dissonance in their worldview, a story wrestles away control of its own messaging from the author.

Idk what you mean by misreading. It's certainly not JK Rowling's position. I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.

We have guns, we use guns, but for sport and hunting and as objects of beauty. I don't think the narrative you mention would even occur to most people - it's not that the anti-gun side has beaten down the pro-gun side, it's that for all intents and purposes the battle doesn't even exist in people's heads. Nobody would describe themselves as anti-gun either.

I would say the number of Brits who believe that people should be armed so they can fight bad guys and their oppressive government is approximately 0.

I'd say that a clear supermajority of the Finnish people hold this belief, at least - with the caveat that the definition would have the armed people being the Finnish nation as represented by the conscription-based Finnish Armed Forces and the bad guys and their oppressive government being Russia and Putin.

No, these are not the same and in context are close to opposites. Trusting the Finnish Armed Forces would be like trusting the Ministry of Magic.

I know it's not the same thing, I was just playing around with the literal meaning of the words.

It has always struck me that the American belief that the most likely chance to have to face down an oppressive government from the inside is a belief enabled by the fact of belonging to the most powerful country in the world without any conceivable external enemy that could defeat it in warfare; in a small nation with a powerful authoritarian neighbor, the threat matrix and the perceived ways to combat that threat are obviously different.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...

We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Also, the same weapons and the same spirit that effectively precludes totalitarian domination also precludes domination by foreigners. Or in the vernacular, "welcome to the rice fields, motherfucker."

Quote attribution, please

apologies, I thought it was well-known enough to not need the attribution. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago

Appreciate it. Looks like I'm bumping it up my reading list.

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