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Notes -
About ten years ago, a new form of cultural criticism emerged on places as diverse as 4Chan’s /tv/, Twitter and Slate Star Codex’s Culture War Roundup thread.
The general message was always the same. An ostensibly mainstream or even outwardly progressive Hollywood movie was secretly Based™️, sometimes supposedly intentionally on the part of a secretly redpilled director or writer, mostly unintentionally by someone who didn’t realize what the implicit narrative of what they were creating actually was.
I’ve written comments like this, I’ve enjoyed comments like this. But you can’t be too serious about them, and in fact you could write a similar narrative about almost any movie or TV show you can think of.
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'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 think this is a case where there is a lot of mutual incomprehension between Americans and Europeans due to different historical mythologies reflecting different histories.
In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the American Revolution*, liberty is secured by the ability of the nation-in-arms to check the power of the armed forces of the democratic state. In the historical mythology that stems from a rose-tinted view of the French Revolution, liberty is secured by the fact that the nation-in-arms is the armed forces of the democratic state**. Finland (alongside Switzerland) is one of the few European countries where that is still a realistic statement of how the armed forces work. Contra Nybbler downthread, if you accept that worldview then the Finnish government didn't corruptly turn on its own people in order to appease the Soviets - the Finnish government and people surrendered to the Soviets after losing the Continuation War.
* The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop on what we (wrongly) saw as the least important front of a three-continent mostly-naval war against France. This isn't quite true, but it is a lot closer to the truth than "Colonial militias were able to take down the British Empire by virtue of local knowledge and superior woodcraft."
** It wasn't
So, the difference is pretty much down to how much a state is considered to be contiguous/coterminous with its people, rather than being in a separate and implicitly-adversarial relationship?
Somewhat, though not entirely. Even when the French people consider themselves to be in an adversarial relationship with their government (which is most of the time), they expect that the army would ultimately take the side of the people over the government. (Or at least did during the period where France had a large conscript army.)
It is worth noting that at some level the US Red Tribe know that the French model is closer to factually accurate than the Paul Revere one. As soon as you start talking about the practicalities of "what happens if a Blue-controlled Federal government decides it is no longer willing to tolerate armed Reds?" everyone agrees that what would stop them wouldn't be the armed Reds shooting back, it would be the lack of sufficient Blue-aligned goons able and willing to enforce the order against trivial opposition.
"Everyone" does not agree with this; I certainly don't. We've just finished two wars featuring the US military operating against insurgents. One was a pyrrhic victory at best, the other was a flat loss. Both were in countries significantly smaller, significantly poorer, and significantly less well-armed than the US. The assessments that generate the consensus you're referring to are based on the idea of pitched battle between AR15s on one side and Abrams tanks and f35s on the other, but it is ignorance to the point of madness to imagine that this is how the situation would work in practice. This failure to understand the nature of asymmetrical conflict was risible ten years ago, when we only had two decades of examples from our two most recent wars to draw from. Given the developments since, it approaches a very black form of comedy. We're literally watching the formation of deep-seated assassination culture in our society right now. The government can't consistently enforce straw purchase laws when the criminals submit a signed confession to federal law enforcement. And these aren't even the worst problems with such a scenario, or even in the top ten!
Blues and the Blue-adjacent have the insane belief that they could plausibly impose their will on Reds and get it to stick. Reds and the red-adjacent have the insane belief that violent conflict with the blues would be short and sharp, and then life would go back to normal. Both of these beliefs are insanely destructive if acted on. Neither side has anything near a proper understanding of just how fragile our Belle Epoch really is: It will pop like a fucking soap bubble, and it will never, ever come back. Please, I am begging you, update your priors!
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