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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35368 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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nomenklatura

Can someone explain why I have seen this word maybe 10 times in the past week but never before in my life? Did some prominent person or blogger use it recently?

It's been extremely common in political speak since the Cold War.

You might have drifted into a new circle? It and the New Class concept have been popular in the dissident right for a long time (was it Sam Francis who introduced it from the New Left clique?)

I've been totally offline for a few weeks now, so it's probably not a current trend.

These days many people use it as a synonym for PMC, sadly.

Just Bader Meinhoff.

I keep conflating "Baader-Meinhoff" with "Dunning-Kruger." I suppose the composite that results is "you think this is just the frequency illusion, but you're mistaken."

Yeah, or maybe synchronicity in the Jungian "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved", with the 'something other' being memetic. People who are all thinking about the same topic are likely to be in a similar headspace. You want to decry nepotism, and you think some recent instance feels particularly soviet, and what was that cool word they had for them? Nomenklatura.

This is how memes are started though, and nomenklatura definitely fits the bill, so it is possible everyone saying it picked it up from the same source. They don't even have to do it consciously - if it fits well your brain might do it anyway.

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