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Notes -
If you've browsed alternative politics communities for any period of time, you've noticed that people on supposedly opposite sides tend to use each other's language and terminology "ironically". (IE, "Moid"/"Foid", "Incel", "Chud", "Libtard", "Dudes rock") Likewise, people tend to enjoy the same entertainment media: Strategy games, dialogue heavy RPGs, The Cyberpunk genre and it's associated political themes. Why do supposedly "leftist" subreddits (stupidpol, Redscarepod) get flooded with rightoids when there's a banwave?
I have a theory that many people are actually sort of a meta-fan of the politics fandom. When you're into weird, obscure political philosophers like Julius Evola or Ted Kaczynski or Max Stirner or whoever, you're not actually "more right" or "more left", you're into alternative politics itself.
If you believe that the US government is controlled by a select group of international enthonationalists, it's not that hard to generalize that belief to a class-struggle framework. Likewise, if you believe in class-struggle, it's not crazy to notice that certain upper classes, particularly in Washington DC, have over-representation from certain groups and strong in-group political loyalty to those groups.
Anyone else notice a similar effect? I'm still trying to develop my thesis.
Counterpoint: Political groups have had no issue taking the supposed insults from their opposition and turning it into a badge of pride, regardless of the format.
'Yankee Doodle' was supposed to be an insult. For a more recent occurrence, 'Keep your Rifle By Your Side' was supposed to be atleast slightly satire, until people listened to it, went 'Holy shit, this song slaps' and started using it unironically.
It's a phenomena that's not really new by any stretch.
In 1948 the father of the British NHS, Labour Minister and paragon of virtue (/s) Aneurin Bevan made a speech denouncing Tories as “lower than vermin”.
Thus, the founding of the Vermin Club.
My favourite example of a British Tory doing this is Norman Tebbit, who was a key early ally of Margaret Thatcher and who would go on to be the main minister responsible for implementing her anti-union policies. Tebbit consistently maintained that the closed shop was a form of fascism, because it required workers to join a union they didn't want to in order to keep their jobs. In 1978, this eventually provoked Michael Foot (who was one of the leaders of the far-left faction within the then-ruling Labour party) to call him a "semi house-trained polecat".
Tebbit's wife was disabled by an IRA bomb in 1984, and he retired from front-line politics in order to care for her. As was then usual for senior politicians who retire while still young enough to contribute, he was made a Lord. This entitled him to a coat of arms - which led to the burning question of what does a heraldic polecat look like? Eventually the College of Arms decided that heraldic polecats were semi-mythical creatures similar to heraldic tygers, and could fly. So Lord Tebbit's shield is held up by winged polecats.
That's great.
Do you have a picture? Wikipedia only shows this. I'm not really up to date on my heraldry, but it doesn't seem to match their own description. And Google just provides news articles about the guy. He's been busy.
The description ("blazon" in heraldry-speak) includes "supporters" - i.e. animals that hold up the shield similar to the lion and unicorn on the royal arms. Not sure why they are not in the picture on wikipedia. I tried to find a picture of the shield with supporters, but my google-fu only found the wikipedia version.
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Reminds me of the "beaver" on the coat of arms of Irkutsk.
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(Does anyone know how to inline links?)
It's markdown.
tl;dr use:
[text](http://link)Cool, thanks :)
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