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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24376 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Slam Frank is kind of disappointing

(Spoiler Warning: Full spoilers for Slam Frank.)

Slam Frank is an anti-woke satirical hip hop musical, created by a few Jewish guys, that depicts a play within a play, where a woke theater troupe decides to update the story of Anne Frank for the modern age, and depict her as Anita Franco, a neurodivergent, Afro-Latina, pansexual girl forced to hide in an attic by the Nazis, as she and the other Jews hiding there deal with the most important issues in their lives: patriarchy, coming to terms with their sexuality and gender identities, and being true to her identity as a proud Afro-Latina immigrant.

Now, a disclaimer at the top, I have only listened to the official cast recording ($20 I will never get back), which omits an important song from the last 15 minutes of the musical that serves as its main twist, and I've been forced to cobble my understanding together from various summaries and the lyrics of the omitted song. (Worth pointing out that I have occasionally enjoyed musicals I encountered roughly this same way.)

But overall, I'd say I'm pretty underwhelmed.

To be very fair to it, I actually think a lot of the music is pretty decent and catchy. For a work that is so dripping in irony that many people had trouble figuring out whether it was serious or not, and what the play's message was, they put more effort into the music than you'd expect. I appreciated some of the nods to other musicals like Hamilton here and there, and there were lots of little funny moments throughout. The absurdity of a beat poem about how every woman is a Jew and the patriarchy is their attic, or Peter van Pels singing about coming out of the closet as nonbinary feel like they belong to the long tradition of musicals like Avenue Q or The Book of Mormon which manage to thread the needle of being outrageous and offensive but still enjoyable.

However, I might just be desensitized from having been on the internet for too long, but I just didn't think there was much there there in Slam Frank. While I do kind of respect them for ending the play by having Anne Frank turn her own family in to the Nazis after she learns what the Jews are planning to do to Palestine (only for Adolf Hitler to show up after the execution, revive the family, and come out as a trans woman, before the whole cast sings a song meant to show the parallels between woke left rhetoric and Nazi ideology), I can't help but feel like it is all shock humor with very little else going for it.

I wanted to feel something. I wanted them to do something witty and interesting, and instead it just seems like they had a single idea for a joke and managed to stretch it over the length of an entire musical.

I'm reminded of the empty feelings I was left with listening to Kanye West's Heil Hitler. I was listening to it, waiting for brilliant lyrics or interesting themes or ideas, and instead I just got lazy shock schlock, which doesn't do much for me. I'm not easily outraged by this kind of stuff, and so I'm just left a bit bored, asking, "What else you got?"

I'm happy that the musical exists, but in some ways it feels like a grift designed to sell tickets, even as it is a complete musical play. I thought it was odd that I couldn't find any bootlegs of the whole show, and only short clips of some of the songs online, but I think they made a very deliberate choice not to upload the complete album to Youtube or Spotify, because it would remove a lot of the "mystique" around the show that their viral advertising on Tik Tok and Instagram has created.

Listen man, I'm not trying to be an asshole, but you're presenting a review of a work where you:

  • Did not attend a performance
  • Did not read a score of the song you didn't hear
  • Relied on secondhand retellings of the song you did not hear

From that, you managed spill 655 words worth of ink about it to say it's disappointing. You're making an assumption that the stage performance ads no value over your partial recording, and you're making an assumption that the musical aspects of the final song don't shore up what you perceive to be lyrical shortfalls.

That's like claiming that a steak is bad because it felt gross when you touched it with your fingers. You might be right, but if you are it's probably not because of your methodology.

Since nobody has uploaded slime tutorials/bootlegs, I engaged with the art in the format it was available to me.

I have enjoyed musicals enough via cast recordings that I've wanted to look up bootlegs or find a way to see a live performance or a pro-shot. But Slam Frank wasn't one of them.

If you feel that a more fair review would be something like, "Don't buy the cast recording of Slam Frank, it omits crucial songs from the musical, and it feels like the Kickstarter to get it released and the fact that it costs $20 and isn't up on YouTube or Spotify are cynical ways to turn rage bait for a mediocre work into profit", then I suppose that's fair.

"Don't buy the cast recording of Slam Frank, it omits crucial songs from the musical, and it feels like the Kickstarter to get it released and the fact that it costs $20 and isn't up on YouTube or Spotify are cynical ways to turn rage bait for a mediocre work into profit", then I suppose that's fair

As a fellow musical-enjoyer, this is actually really useful. Thanks.

Anne Frank turn her own family in to the Nazis after she learns what the Jews are planning to do to Palestine (only for Adolf Hitler to show up after the execution, revive the family, and come out as a trans woman

I never gave this thing a second thought after hearing about it, but that's actually pretty funny. Woke Jesus Hitler is very apropos.

Unrelated Anne Frank Complaint

I listen to my local college radio station constantly when in the car. It's one of the few places left in the world where I can genuinely discover new music, without searching in any way. But because it is a public station, they play PSA's constantly, and the worst are the Pass It On people. And the worst ad they've ever created started airing recently:

Anne Frank as role model

Her words weren't written under peaceful shade, but under fear for her life. "Everyone has inside, a piece of good news." For two agonizing years she worried about being caught by the Nazis. "The good news is, you don't know how great you can be." Though her story ended early, her words live on. "I don't think of all the misery, but the beauty that still remains." With her positive outlook, Anne Frank continues to fill us with hope. Hope. Pass It On. This message is a courtesy of The Foundation for a Better Life at Pass It On.com.

This is actually offensively bad. Anne Frank's story shouldn't fill us with hope! How exactly does the story of a young girl who was murdered by an industrial racism machine fill us with hope? That's not the message we're meant to get from that school assignment! The point of assigning The Diary of Anne Frank in school is to place us in a state of empathy with the victims of the Holocaust*, to make us understand that these were real humans just like us being herded into camps. Whatever hope she had was misplaced! Her life ended ignominiously and miserably! To turn her into an inspirational self-help guru is to lessen the impact of the crimes committed against her.

It's offensively preachy and bad.

*FWIW I think we all need to stop empathizing with the victims and start trying to empathize with the perpetrators, and realize that It Could Happen Here

It Couldn’t Happen Here. German society is different from American society and one of the ways in which it is different is that Germans follow authority when it conflicts with their conscience, while Americans are much less willing to do so.

Are we sure that’s still true

American culture is radically different since we’ve imported tens of millions of foreigners into the country with limited assimilation.

We just saw during the pandemic that Americans cower to fear over the smallest of things and will despite the outgroup.

I don't think it was the immigrants who were so afraid of COVID. I was thrown out of a couple of parks during the lockdowns, and while I can't swear the others thrown out were mostly immigrants, they were definitely mostly 'brown'. I think the increase in fear is largely due to the aging of the population. Not sure about respect for authority; that probably has multiple causes including reduction of lead in the air, the unfashionability of cigarettes, and increase in state capacity at all levels. I doubt it has much to do with immigrants; Asians may be more respectful of authority, but we've got a lot more Mexicans, who ain't.

Is it respect for authority or more about conformity?

It's the same picture.

US compliance with Covid mandates was very low by developed world standards, especially compared to Germany.

How is that measured and shouldn’t we measure by state

The reason people like to read The Diary of Anne Frank and find meaning in it is because they empathize with the narrator. And the narrator in this book is likeable in part because of her hope in dark situations, which is a positive example for the reader. There's nothing offensive about that in the least.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a character story set against the background of the Holocaust. It's not a historical treatise. It's not about the Holocaust at all.

And the narrator in this book is likeable in part because of her hope in dark situations, which is a positive example for the reader.

Hope which is completely misplaced. It's a negative example for the reader! "Even when things look dark, have hope, like Anne Frank!" "What happened to her?" A line in a comedy too stupid to be believed, yet here we are.

So if she'd survived then her hope would have been correct? That's post facto reasoning.

Hope is valuable in and of itself, because it is the counter to despair. This is something we should absolutely teach our children. What would you have preferred, that the Diary is just pages on pages of dwelling on the possibility of getting caught? Or perhaps rationally calculating and recalculating her chances of execution would be better?

I would prefer that we teach the diary for what it is: a horrifying document showing the awful crimes of war. I mean, actually I think the Diary of Anne Frank is outmoded as a teaching tool and that Holocaust education is a moral failure. But if you're trying to teach a unit on hope, Victor Frankl would be the choice. If you're trying to teach someone the idea that hope is a positive good, you should probably use a teaching tool that shows that hope can pay off.

Honestly I'd prefer if western societies could please kindly stop dragging the dead out of their graves to beat dead horses with them. Anne Frank this, Hitler that, General Lee another thing...they did what they did in ages very different from our own, and we're better off looking to our own affairs rather than to try and make saints or devils out of the unusual people of the past.

While I agree it is somewhat unhelpful to have hagiographies and anti-hagiographies of real, complicated people, I think it is immensely valuable to learn from the past in a variety of ways.

I think it is useful to have moral biographies like Plutarch's Lives of Eminent Greeks and Romans, which are written to show each figure's greatest virtues and greatest vices so that someone can learn and grow from their example.

I think it is useful to engage with parts of the past to get a real sense of the fact that "the past is a foreign country", and to understand the historical forces and major figures who shaped history on down to the modern day.

I think there's a place for discussion of figures like Anne Frank, or Hitler or General Lee within all of that.

they did what they did in ages very different from our own

There are people alive today who met veterans of the Slavers' Revolt.

There are over two hundred thousand people alive today who lived through the Holocaust.

A decade ago, the United States Government was still paying pensions from the Civil War.

The attitudes that lead to the historical horrors are still very much with us.

The past is never dead. It is not even past. --William Faulkner

The attitudes that lead to the historical horrors are still very much with us.

What do you think the attitudes are that lead to these horrors? Do you believe how we currently teach these events inoculates students against these attitudes?

I think those two questions are what make the historiography of human cruelty controversial. Different people can look at the same event, and have completely different opinions on it.

An example of this would be the Holocaust. Just looking at Jews in particular, here were/are four responses/interpretations to it:

  1. This was a failure of insufficient small L liberalism. We must promote liberalism globally to avoid tragedies like this in the future.
  2. Capitalism and imperialism naturally leads to war and genocide. We need global Marxist revolution to prevent this.
  3. Jews need to be armed and have a state of their own, so they are too tough to victimize ever again.
  4. Hitler is a new Nebuchadnezzar, sent by God to punish us for our apostasy.

There are more interpretations, especially once you get interpretations beyond just Jews. If you teach a particular interpretation, it’s quite possible that instead of reducing the chance of a new atrocity, you either do nothing or maybe even increase the chance.

I mean gun to head I’d point to several things:

  1. Scientific hubris abroad in much of Western Europe at the time which assumed that humans in their infinite wisdom had the ability and thus the duty to reshape humanity and human genetics to create better humans.

  2. Nationalistic fervor that resulted from the loss in WWI and the desire to reassert Germany as a major power in Europe.

  3. Reparations demanded added to the global economic crisis of the Great Depression meant that the median population was experiencing hyperinflation and unemployment and so on. This lead to people being willing to look for anything and anyone who had some sort of plan to make things better before bread cost 2 wheelbarrows of marks instead of one.

  4. Jews were pretty easy pickings at the time. Many were immigrants who had fled Eastern Europe during the Russian revolution, they were isolated, they did weird things in their religion. They were already seen as enemies because of blood libels based on Christian beliefs from earlier centuries. They didn’t have a lot of political power. They were “those weirdos over there who dress funny and nod while they pray.” Getting people to not like them isn’t hard.

  5. Moral relativism that meant that people were no longer beholden to ideas of Good and Evil.

Jews were pretty easy pickings at the time

As opposed to at some other point in the previous thousand years?

What do you think the attitudes are that lead to these horrors?

The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.

The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)

The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.

The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.

I agree that putting the Volk as the only thing worthy of moral consideration, with all other rights subordinate to it, is a core ideological feature that made Nazism, and fascism in general, so harmful.

At the same time, I think the issue is when you decide a group, or concept, is the only thing that matters morally and no other rights are important rather than whatever group or concept in particular you elevate. The communists killed millions for the revolution and utopia. In pre-modern eras, millions were butchered for king and/or faith. The crime is in discarding individual rights, not in the object you decide is the only important thing in the world.

The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)

Is there a limit to this principle? Can families morally have ingroup preference? What about a community the size of dunbar’s number? Is the limit more about how much preference you can give someone vs the reason for the preference?

While equality of people is a good, it is a good that has to be balanced against the fact that any individual human has people they care about and people they don’t and our social lives, and really civilization as a whole, are built on this distinction.

The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.

I think this is more the crime of the Confederates and isn’t really the core objection to Nazi Germany. I think the principle of equality under the law naturally leads to people saying rich and poor deserve the same rights. All societies have had both positive and negative rights, and you can’t clearly separate the two in practice. Which rights different people have is a constant negotiation. While I think slavery is a clear violation of equality under the law, and the civil war is an example of the problems it caused, I don’t think you can just from the specific case of slavery to a modern rich vs poor issue.

I think the principle of equality under the law naturally leads to people saying rich and poor deserve the same rights.

"the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."

A decade ago, the United States Government was still paying pensions from the Civil War.

Wasn't that a handful of cases of basically benefits fraud? Say someone is born in 1845, they marry at age 90 to a woman age 15 (born in 1920) and then she lives to around 100.

Turns out there's a Wikipedia page for these cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_widows_who_survived_into_the_21st_century

Another way to view this is that we are seven or eight generations removed from the Civil War - that's a lot of time for values to change, especially in an era of extreme technological progress.

All true, and still I see utilizations of overused names like Frank, Hitler and Lee for moral lessons as nothing but tired, tasteless propaganda.

I'll give a fuck about a dead jew's diary from almost 100 years ago when a UK rape gang survivors journal is required reading in public school.

This was a bad comment. HereAndGone2 went a little too far in admonishing you so I've warned them as well.

But this demonstrates my problem with bad posts, is that they often beget other bad posts. You have both been here long enough to know better.

Her. You've warned her. Pet peeve.

Unless their gender is relevant to a modding decision I'm not gonna take notes or remember it. Your pronoun is user.

Technically user is a noun. I'm not trying to be tedious here.

I suppose my peeve is with the default to the plural when his/her or he/him is perfectly clear in cases where one does not recall who someone is (in your sentence: "I've warned him/her as well"), and indeed was a norm until trans-activists (and the likeminded) pushed for the universal use of the plural pronoun, or terms like zim and zey or whatever. (I will admit I do not know to what degree these were seriously offered as "solutions" or by whom.) The argument that him/her used in this way is an awkward construction is not compelling to me for a number of reasons. And I think the still soft voice of the serpent is in such small details that we do not notice until they're second nature, at which point bringing up the issue at all makes one seem like a man shaking his fist at a cloud. Indeed we may already be there (lowers fist.)

That said, of course you can ignore all this. If no one else cares I'm not going to waste your time or mine any further.

If you cannot shake your fist at a cloud on themotte where can one do so?

I read you. I somewhat intentionally became set in my ways on pronouns about a decade ago. I like the 4chan ethos of "everyone is a dude" on the internet. I don't hear your tone of voice, how deeply or softly you might speak, I don't see your chest or shoulders to know how you hold yourself, and I don't see into your eyes or catch your stare. I just read the words you have written. I'm interacting with just a brain and fingers on a keyboard. A set of physical traits shared by both genders, and in doing so failing to define either gender.

Saying you are a pronoun "user" was a bit tongue and cheek. I definitely don't care about English grammar "rules". If Fuck can mean anything, so can other words. A "user" is the mind and words of person interacting with me over the internet. Maybe eliminate "person" from that definition once AIs truly get good enough (another year at this rate?).

I truly do not see you as men and women or boys and girls. It feels silly to me use gender terms in text-only online forums. If we were to meet in person, you'd absolutely have a gender term in my mind the instant I saw you. Highly likely that term would line up with what you were at birth.

Wow you are so edgy and daring ooh I'm scared I'm only a square not a cool teen edgelord rebel like you man it is so frightening to be one of the sheeple and then encounter a liberated freethinker not afraid to tell it like it is and sock it to The Man.

When do you turn fifteen, just as a matter of interest?

I never read Anne Frank's diary, it wasn't required reading when I was in school, and I don't care if you read it or not, but can you please at least pretend to be over the age of majority when leaving a comment? "Fuck that dead jew" is not the amazing defiance you seem to think it is, it's just more online crap that I hoped wouldn't leak in here.

This was too antagonistic.

Yeah, okay. But can we agree that edgelording is not what this place is about?

Agreed, which is why I also gave a warning to WhiningCoil.

Thanks for the gentle chastisement!

Maybe you could write the "Farewell to Manzanar" of UK rape gang survivor stories, and then find a way to make it part of the curriculum.

Honestly though, I find your post here pretty silly. A fundamentally curious person would read both The Diary of Anne Frank and the Turner Diaries, and they'd have already waded through all of the reports around the UK rape gang scandals.

Time is limited of course, and no one will ever have time to read or care about everything, but it would be ridiculous for me to say something like, "I'll give a fuck about Karl Marx's Capital, when Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public school", because it is obvious posturing.

A fundamentally curious person would read both The Diary of Anne Frank and the Turner Diaries, and they'd have already waded through all of the reports around the UK rape gang scandals.

What would you guess the proportion of "fundamentally curious" people is in society at large? My guess is that they're a statistical nullity.

Time is limited of course, and no one will ever have time to read or care about everything, but it would be ridiculous for me to say something like, "I'll give a fuck about Karl Marx's Capital, when Gulag Archipelago is required reading in public school", because it is obvious posturing.

I'll take the other side of that one. Indoctrination is a real thing and works. I observe that the culture around me has few to no antibodies to the hazardous memes of the Left, and something approaching an auto-immune disease against the memes of the Right, hazardous or not. In what sense is it "posturing" to think that perpetuating this mismatch is a bad thing that should be stopped?

What would you guess the proportion of "fundamentally curious" people is in society at large? My guess is that they're a statistical nullity.

I would hope that we hold people here to a higher standard than randoms off the street, otherwise we may as well rename this space to "theBailey".

What would you guess the proportion of "fundamentally curious" people is in society at large? My guess is that they're a statistical nullity.

I think it's largely an ethnic phenomenon related to both hereditary IQ and cultural inclination, and varies widely among demographic segments. As demographics change and culture changes with them, that number is surely shrinking.

I think we all need to stop empathizing with the victims and start trying to empathize with the perpetrators, and realize that It Could Happen Here

If you ask someone what they would have done during 1930s Germany or 1850s South, there's never any willingness to say "I'd probably have done whatever the typical person did." Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time? But that more philosophical objection doesn't seem to be the real driver of the response: it's never "that's incoherent" or "I don't know," but instead "I would have been a partisan guerrilla against the Nazis or helped run the Underground Railroad."

It ends up serving as a narrative building exercise to reinforce your own identity, instead of a way to test your own mental models of how you act and make decisions.

Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time?

The question is incoherent, and it's not just a matter of not being able to deal with hypotheticals. If I woke up tomorrow as I am now but in that time, of course my opinions and attitudes would be dramatically out of lockstep with everyone else around me. But if you're asking what I would be doing had I grown up in that situation, unless you believe in a very strong version of biological determinism mixed with very fast evolution (ie: that the "better, more moral" humans of today are the result of genetic differences that crop up over a couple of centuries or even as little as a couple of decades), then you're asking me to tell you what a person that I am not thinks.

I get the same issue when my wife asks me if I think a guy is attractive or my type. No matter how I answer that no, I'm simply not attracted to men, she'll invariably ask me "okay, but what if you were?". I cannot answer that question; I'm not this hypothetical attracted to men Pigeonburger, any answer is at best a random guess.

I'm in broad directional agreement, but that perspective has its own issues. I could ask you, "what would you do if you saw a child about to get hit by a car tomorrow, and you could save him with little risk to yourself?" Taking that principle to the extreme, it's impossible to say: you are not in that particular situation, and you lack all the context and history of the preceding day that will form the you of tomorrow.

The question is really something like, what do you predict your self model would do? And maybe it's a question of the stability of that model: it's likely stable over the vagaries of a day's events, but not stable to swapping out your entire life experience.

then you're asking me to tell you what a person that I am not thinks.

Yes, this is what empathy is. Understanding the thought processes of other people.

But I tend to take the spirit of these questions as something like "Imagine a person with your rough personality and qualities, and imagine how they might react to these historical factors".

"Look, you like Austrian thinkers, just let me autistically lecture about Ludwig von Mises for a few hours and you'll see that-" BLAM.

But then the question is no longer what do you think you would do if in that position. I do get empathy for those people, I just don't think it can meaninfully framed personally.

If you ask someone what they would have done during 1930s Germany or 1850s South, there's never any willingness to say "I'd probably have done whatever the typical person did." Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time? But that more philosophical objection doesn't seem to be the real driver of the response: it's never "that's incoherent" or "I don't know," but instead "I would have been a partisan guerrilla against the Nazis or helped run the Underground Railroad."

What's galling about this is that, growing up in the 90s, I was one of many children who was explicitly taught that it could happen here due to conformity and herd mentality and such, especially with regards to ideologies or belief systems or just teams that one likes and feels like one belongs in. I recall a film from the 70s or 80s called The Wave that was shown to basically every student in my school as they passed through late grade school, which was a fictionalized account of a high school teacher bootstrapping a fascist-like organization in his school called The Wave merely based on conformity and obedience, with the climax being the twist that he reveals to all the students that he set this up on purpose to demonstrate how a specifically Nazi-like organization (he presented videos of Hitler when he was purportedly revealing to his students the true leader of The Wave) can rise among supposedly free-thinking, well-meaning Americans all trying to do good things for good reasons.

The obvious conclusion from this is that, for any ideological/political/religious/etc. belief system you follow - especially ones that are approved by people you hold in high regard and/or people who can and do reward/punish you - must be held in great suspicion and skepticism for possibly causing you to become a Nazi foot soldier while completely under the belief that you are an anti-Nazi who does Good Things for Good Reasons.

And yet, this teaching doesn't seem to have continued or been common in the decades since, to the extent that the dominant thing being taught is actually just naked tribalism about how Only Bad People would do Bad Things for Bad Reasons, and We are certainly not Bad People, because we believe ourselves to be Good People doing Good Things for Good Reasons.

I touch on this in another comment, but this idea isn't exactly a conservative coup. Blaming bad things on bad people is easy and doesn't say anything about society as a whole. Did slavery exist because of flawed individuals, or because the United States Constitution is a fundamentally flawed document that allowed such an institution to exist in the first place? Does amending the Constitution to prohibit slavery actually solve the problem, or only mask the symptoms of a system based on the kind of power dynamics that allow for that kind of exploitation? Is the past 150 years of postbellum racism and inequality due to our inability to adequately address this basic issue?

Did slavery exist because of flawed individuals, or because the United States Constitution is a fundamentally flawed document that allowed such an institution to exist in the first place?

Neither. It existed because that sort of thing was totally normal across most of human existance and the Europeans hadn't decided to totally ban it for offending them yet. It's still totally normal across much of the globe.

Imagine a someone in a vegan future asking if the Constitution allowed meat-eating because the people who wrote it were just bad?

First, it seems to me that there was little in the way of chattel slavery in England before colonization. There were serfs, sure, but they were generally if barely considered as human beings, being Christian and all. Chattel slavery is a different category from that.

The other thing is that most nations did not set out to become a nation which did things better than existing nations did, the US is the exception here. "Slavery was normal" works equally well as an excuse for Leopold II as it works for the US. Most apologists of the US argue (often convincingly) that the system (freedom, democracy, rights) is what set the US apart from contemporaries. "Hey, we were no worse than Leo II" is not a great way to plead exceptionalism.

First, it seems to me that there was little in the way of chattel slavery in England before colonization.

Slavery was extremely common in Europe before the medieval era, when it was phased out for serfdom. Just like it was common across Asia, Africa, and the Americas up until modern times.

"Hey, we were no worse than Leo II" is not a great way to plead exceptionalism.

Why mention Leo instead of, say, The Woman King?

But the point is entirely backwards. "Hey, you did this thing everyone else did too until you decided it offended you, and then stopped at great cost and tried to make everyone else stop too" is a terrible argument that the US is exceptionally bad. The only people who can plausibly claim to have done better are the very European nations that started the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the first place and sold the peak.

Meanwhile, the early US was itself being actively raided by slavers. Find me a single Turk willing to grovel like an American progressive for the way they enslaved my Italian and American ancestors - consider it table stakes for me to care about accusations regarding American slavery. Turkey didn't abolish slavery until 1924. I recommend perusing that whole article, actually. It's great for getting an overview of the extent of the issue, and who exactly ever cared.

Not a conservative or a Founding Father/Constitution fetishist. And, no, any individual deciding to be moral and heroic doesn't change much: there's always some rate of that, and every system that establishes itself has learned to divert, marginalize, or harness that rate.

But the goal should be to interject yourself at critical points, and nudge the system toward dynamics that are are likely to lead to value-aligned outcomes. By itself, that's a very hard problem and hard to do well, but not understanding why a regular person might be a Nazi or support the institution of slavery makes that even harder, not easier.

I think there is a good story to be told about the decade leading up to the Nazis gaining power. The communist and fascist paramilitary groups fighting it out makes for decent and very topical drama. Maybe throw in a romance, make it The West Side story but with Red Front Fighters' League and Brownshirts. I'm not a filmmaker by any means but I think there are a lot of depths to delve in this setting which has been largely ignored.

So... Babylon Berlin, basically?

Spicy romance where the mousy, shy German girl has to pick between the communist street fighter and the fascist street fighter who are both inexplicably obsessed with her.

Exactly what spin to place to bait women into supporting one side or the other is left as an exercise for the reader.

"We had to change some of the details to avoid invoking harmful stereotypes, so now the Jew is a werewolf and the Nazi is a vampire"

Wolfenstein 3 plot confirmed

Epilogue: 15 years later she falls for an American soldier occupying West Germany.

Ao3 Fanfic: she is ravished by a Red Army soldier who is also a literal bear

Wojtek served in the Western Polish forces, not the Red Army. Although that's probably not as good a story.

@Iconochasm

You see how everyone reacted to The Zone of Interest trying to portray the Holocaust as actual murder. No one liked it. Murder is pretty disrespectful and dehumanizing to the victim, no matter how gingerly it’s portrayed. And all murders are at bottom the same, which offends people, because they don’t like that this particular murder reminded them other murders that they like better. It reminds me of a quote from Raymond Chandler:

“If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; otherwise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it.”

So must be the same with Holocaust narratives.

I'm not sure what you're saying here at all.

Nobody wants an un-sentimental look at the Holocaust because it would be ugly and horrible and difficult to score political points off of. It’s the same dynamic for war movies, right down to the ill-recieved A24 release.

*FWIW I think we all need to stop empathizing with the victims and start trying to empathize with the perpetrators, and realize that It Could Happen Here

That's a tall order. A lot of people seem functionally incapable of empathy - and there's a whole topic of partisan Discourse going on about it, and on the difference between empathy and sympathy.

Many people seem to interpret a call to empathy as something like "Imagine if your brain as-is right now were transmigrated into another person's body, how would you feel?" They can't even wrap their heads around the notion that they're supposed to be imagining that they had learned an alternative fact pattern, much less held to a different epistimology and metaphysics.

Of course it can't happen here; everyone knows the Nazis are the bad guys! Everyone who can imagine otherwise is a demon in a skinsuit, which means they aren't people and should probably be stripped of rights and isolated away from everyone else, perhaps in some sort of walled camps.

You're right, but probably not for the reasons you think. Nazi empathy was popular among the Jewish emigre academics of the postwar era, and empathy took on particular prominence as things like the Banality of Evil and the Milgram experiments entered the public consciousness. The problem was that Germany couldn't be written off as a political, economic, and social backwater where Hitler was a thug exerting his will over an ignorant and unorganized population. That the German public went along with the horrors of the Third Reich was proof to them that Western Enlightenment epistemology was fundamentally flawed and in need of replacement. The Marxism that they offered as an alternative, however, was verboten during the Cold War, and this interpretation would only take hold among committed leftists.

For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.

For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications.

I do not believe it was an issue of "convenience" so much as a shining example of the moral framework of secular progressivism failing in exactly the manner that classical conservatives from De'Maistre through Kipling had been predicting it would fail.

That is to say that is to say that it is always easier to destroy than to build, and that it is always easier to be cruel or indifferent than it is to care. One of the core conceits of western conservatism is that people will naturally gravitate towards "the easy path", and that it takes conscious effort to avoid it. See also @burkeboi's reply below.

To me the banality of evil and "Nazi empathy" of Jewish academics and Wilsonian progressives in the immediate post-war period reads as an attempt to salvage what they could from the ashes rather concede that their critics had been proven right about where their ideology was likely to lead.

I think @Iconochasm was correct: most people do seem to consider "empathy" as "feeling really hard about someone or something" without any shift to their information state. No theory of mind is exercised in the process, and so it usually ends up being an onanistic "see how hard I feel? I'm not callous (like those on the other side)".

I don't think your observations are wrong, it's just that they're orthogonal to the point being made.

"feeling really hard about someone or something"

The other point is that this is sympathy. I can be very sympathetic to your plight while not understanding a damn thing about why you do the things you do.

They were in my view, about half right. Enlightenment thinking does have flaws, especially in moral reasoning. It’s almost impossible to find any evil that one cannot find some justification for if given just the right set of circumstances. I can justify the murder of millions if my reason is “good enough”. The relativism and utilitarian principles given by the enlightenment put everything, up to and including genocide, on the table. Marxism doesn’t work any better as it is a product of the enlightenment. It’s not really an alternative source of moral inspiration, it’s just a different flavor. What is needed in my view is an outside, definitive and authoritative source of the ideal of Good, and a framework that imagines that the most important thing is to live by the ideals of The Good and thus you cannot change the ideals just because you have a good excuse.

I can justify the murder of millions if my reason is “good enough”.

Can't you always do that anyway? Aside from hypothetical "no-killing-ever-ever" systems, the ones that really exist and are widely adopted always have killing exceptions, and they all revert to some kind of consequentialist decision process in sufficiently unusual circumstances (what is most virtuous? what violates the rules the least?).

I don't know, seems to me that all the talk about ethics is just wankery, that in the end it has to all be broadly isomorph.

For conservatives, the argument that they were all just evil was convenient and would prove to have wider applications. The idea of being empathetic to the circumstances of a criminal's upbringing would become a punchline.

I don’t really recall that being the dominant conservative viewpoint, at least where I grew up. Explaining Nazism isn’t really that big an issue for classical conservatism: humans are prone to cruelty, and civilization barely holds those impulses in check until it doesn’t. While the specifics differ, Germans went Nazi for the same reasons Russians went Stalinist for the same reason Comanches smashed babies against rocks: humans are inclined to cruelty, and organize in ways to facilitate organized cruelty.

The bigger argument is if conservatism, or any particular ideology, has a good track record of restraining those impulses. That’s a far bigger and honestly unresolved argument.

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