domain:parrhesia.substack.com
SoonToBeBanned
3hr ago
Thus, Azov aren’t really Nazis, they’re just… LARPing, I guess?
What is "really a Nazi"? The German NSDAP party (1920-1945) has been defunct for generations. It's physically impossible to be a real Nazi then. And yet people keep using that word without irony and demanding to be taken as if they are speaking seriously.
I, personally, continue to be confused and angered by other's dialog around this fetishezed word. How it's used is clearly propaganda and point blank logical fallacy usage. The equivocation fallacy, I believe. X thing holds the mental symbolic resonance of [evil] thing we all hate. People want Y thing to be hated too, so they use the title of X and expect transference of associations, even though Y is objectively different than X in all the ways that made X probable to be associated with the mental color [evil]. Namly Y is not a militarized authoritarian party in the 1940s running Auschwitz and making massacre graves on the Eastern Front. What I don't get is why people, you included, seem to believe their own propaganda. This shit ain't real. "Nazis" are no longer real. Is there confusion on this?
What there is, and has been before, during, and after Germany 1920-1945 is the an ultra "right-wing" mentality and disposition. Some of these people do in fact engage in LARPy antinomian symbology and acts associated with the past NSDAP party (e.g. swastikas, salutes, black sun) - intentionally because they are so taboo most likely, because there's limited good ultra-right art/iconography to draw on, as well as admiration for the high point of the German ultra-right at its apex when it was winning. People love a winner and tend to rally behind one. But the ultra right mentality would exist if God deleted Germany from all time. People are their own thing. Again, is there confusion on this?
TequilaMockingbird
4hr ago
I don't have anything to add, but i enjoyed the read.
gattsuru
4hr ago
Jackson's starting to have her own windmills to tilt at: the anti-Munsingswear solo dissents and concurrences, and while they have obvious political ramifications (tactically mooting a case after receiving a favorable injunction in lower courts is mostly useful for current progressive goals, if only because SCOTUS demonstratably isn't going to wait before slapping down the 5th Circuit), it's at least a meaningful position with not-crazy-partisan political underpinning. She's not a Thomas or Gorsuch on that (yet!), but it took a few years for Thomas, at least, to grow into it.
I don't like the position, and maybe it's not enough to pull her from the 'reliably' partisan, but not an obvious thing either.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4hr ago
Is this fear of Ukranaian Nazis genuine, or just an attempt to sap anti-Russian energy in the West by associating Ukraine with one of the past century's great villains?
Yeah, I'm pretty anti-Western as far as it goes, but this is one of the lamest arguments in circulation. Like, who do you expect to voluntarily show up to face bullets, artillery fire, and drones? It's going to be the same type of guy in practically every country.
crushedoranges
4hr ago
I wrote an entire story based on a (well, not realistic) but more NrX/libertarian viewpoint on superheroes, right here.
https://fiction.live/stories/Molon-Labe/tykhbTXTZhJn3FHQ4/home
anon_
4hr ago
To me, a much more satisfying conflict among good guys would be for good people to fight over complex issues and/or ideological divides, and do so rationally rather than emotionally.
This would be more satisfying, but it would make a totally crappy movie. We don't go to the talkies for reason, we go to have our adrenals stimulated.
SteveKirk
4hr ago
Having so many different writers work on big projects is my least favorite parts of western comics, and that's stiff competition against all the other stuff they do wrong.
I read all the early Judge Dredd comics once, and important details got changed every single episode on the whim of some writer who couldn't even be bothered to coordinate with his coworkers.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
4hr ago
INTJ is just Myers-Briggs for autist, I guess.
But seriously, another INTJ reporting in. If I recall correctly, it’s among the rarer MBTI types. I wonder if you’re right about your assessment of this place as having massive overrepresentation.
Have we ever done surveys or tried to get a handle on the demographics here? Given the amount of wrong think/number of witches, it might be interesting. Or people might not want to participate and we’d see skew as a result.
KMC
4hr ago
I don't think I'll ever forgive him for Bostock, but he's easily the best Justice since Scalia, and as good a replacement as anyone could have hoped for.
However, I 100% agree that Marvel movies are stupidly written and don't make sense. The superheroes are weak in relative terms. A couple of Stryker brigades could demolish Thanos's army. Iron Man is worth maybe five to ten jet fighters. None of them could handle tactical nukes. All superhero movies seem to adore Bronze age tactics: mass charges and 1v1 duels.
The superheroes are weak, which is actually a double penalty because the armies/countries have to be weak for them to matter. So Asgard's army has to be useless outside of flashbacks, and let's not even get started on any battle in Wakanda. And the bad guys basically have to be incompetent hordes literal children can fight.
Say what you want about Snyder but you actually get why people with modern armies would actually keep his superheroes around.
dasfoo
4hr ago
Is this fear of Ukranaian Nazis genuine, or just an attempt to sap anti-Russian energy in the West by associating Ukraine with one of the past century's great villains?
There seems to have been a very convenient transfer of exaggerated fear of Nazis from the progressive left to the far right which took place right around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Historically it echoes how the American Left went from impassioned pacifists in the 1930s to hawkish anti-Nazis coinciding with the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
My far-right friends mocked the "punch a Nazi" drumbeat up until it became a weapon in Putin's rhetoric, so I have trouble accepting it at face value.
But evidently most people don't care about this. So maybe the writers simply are illiterate when it comes to politics and geopolitics, but more likely seems to be that they aren't incentivized to try very hard given the paying audience doesn't appear to mind. The third, slightly tin-foil-hat possibility is that it's a very intentional propaganda--to all the teenagers watching superhero movies, it's better if 117 countries vote for a UN panel to be in charge of real power.
Yes, the audience doesn't care because the audience is no longer just American teenagers, it's people across the world .
There's a reason most of these movies don't even have a pretense of real politics like Civil War . Everyone can sympathize with people fighting nondescript aliens or scifi Nazis. Arabs, Germans, Chinese people all get it with minimal fuss.
Civil War has to be more political, but I hardly doubt it'd play well across the world to have the mostly American protagonists laugh off the UN like they're Dick Cheney. Marvel wants their money too and some people still feel sore about that sort of thing. Might as well let them feel like they participated via the UN. Let's not even get into "complex issues". Just having gay people in Eternals caused a minor controversy.
but then you can't also ask me to emotionally buy into the idea that in such a world, I should genuinely fear the secretive Nazi organizations and ultracorrupt politicians and amoral killer CEOs. I mean, is this a utopia or not?!
There's actually a reading that Nazis are why the world is so centralized, and not for any good reason. In Avengers the "World Council" could somehow order a nuclear strike on New York (they warned you early about the bad geopolitics). In Winter Soldier we found out that the Nazis/Hydra have been actively making the world more chaotic to centralize power in a few powerful organizations like SHIELD they could use to take over the world. In Agents of SHIELD the very person who ordered SHIELD to perform the nuclear strike is...a member of Hydra.
I don't think everything should be meritocratic, though. I wouldn't let some random dude take the place of my cousin in my family, just because he's more competent, and/or more pleasant to be around, for example.
Right, so this is a good point that needs to be addressed. However, I don't think that the cousin being related to you is the key detail here---for example I would say the same about a childhood best friend but not about a hypothetical cousin whom I just met and never knew existed until then.
The principle here is really about close personal relationships, whatever might cause them. These come with an obligation of strong loyalty that overwhelms many abstract notions of fairness. The loyalty should be there when the close personal relationship is there even if there's no hereditary connection and doesn't need to be there if there's a hereditary connection with no close personal relationship.
Yes, this isn't purely meritocratic, but there's no one value that determines what you should do in all situations. We have a pretty good system of rules and expectations around professionalism---like how you should act differently in public-facing roles---that help us balance society's needs for fairness and meritocracy with personal needs for loyalty. It's ok to invite your cousin to a party over the other person, but not to hire them for a job.
somedude
5hr ago
One might watch Civil War and ask why Tony Stark, aka Iron Man is on the side of the government despite being a tech entrepreneur who refused to share his suit tech with the government for years
Because he built an AI that killed people and almost destroyed the world.
and Captain America, an FDR Democrat (aka the closest thing we have had to a dictator since George Washington) is on the side of the libertarians.
Because the government agency he worked for turned out to be a front for a bunch of evildoers.
I've never even seen Civil War but if there's something stupid about it conceptually it's that Cap didn't say "Hey doctor Frankenstein I agree someone should be in charge of making sure you don't blow up the world again but I just club people over the head with a shield so maybe get outta my ass."
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5hr ago
Not exactly an invitation to “reconciliation”.
It's a point that can actually be argued---if you don't agree maybe you can describe why instead of pulling out about 150 words of debate-team kritik?
On the other hand, this:
However, I would caution that I’m not confident the posts alone will be persuasive to you, since they will not be in combination with the specific and non-transferable life experiences I’ve had which caused me to be more sympathetic to these ideas than I likely would have otherwise.
is not something that can be argued or lead to any kind of reconciliation. I either have the same life experiences as you or there's no way that I'll ever understand why your values are valid?
That would be difficult, simply given the lack of any effective search function in this site’s design. I have been meaning to put together a master spreadsheet of links to some of my more successful/important posts, such that I would be able to supply those links when prompted, but I have not gotten around to doing so
This is a frustratingly long post that somehow manages to dodge every possible chance to give a concrete argument on the actual value issue in favor of making meta points. I guess the most productive thing to do here then is wait until there's an actual substantive point to discuss. I mean, there hasn't been much in 3 years of trying, but maybe something better will come out of this.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
5hr ago
It doesn't look like you've made any posts in the CW thread this week (top level or reply).
You are the forum. Any criticism of the forum is a criticism of yourself. If you don't like what's being posted in the CW thread, make the kinds of posts that you do want to read.
Great.
But not my point. I can filter my dates by going on them, even if the ratio of crazy/not crazy is unfavorable.
I'm asking for a quantification of how many women out there are actually likely to pass the filter.
And, to really drive the point home, are there enough of them for most guys who want marriage and kids to have them, or do we have to acknowledge that the pie is too small for them all to get a slice, and thus we're actually in a state of heavy competition for a limited resource?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
5hr ago
At this point, subversive isn’t even really subversive because it’s almost a trope. If there’s a single set of heroes or archetypes that haven’t been “subverted” by now I’m not really aware. The subversive thing for the modern deconstructed media landscape is actually playing it straight, having a hero who’s actually a decent guy and a villain who’s actually bad and actually doesn’t have a point to make, and a plot that actually makes sense.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
6hr ago
where Tony Stark is guilted into supporting the Sokovia Accords
Also, Tony should have known better than to trust Accord oversight, considering the first thing they tried to do is nuke Metropolis [or wherever that was] to contain the Chitauri invasion. He ended up directly having to clean up that mess.
I get that Tony Stark very quickly became "Bay Area thought as a superhero", but that was not good judgment. Then again, because Tony really doesn't have good judgment, he'd naturally support the Accords, so maybe I'm more annoyed about it than I should be.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
Allowing a group of your citizens to cosplay as Nazis instead of drafting them into regular army units is handing Russia an easy propaganda victory.
But Russia also allows groups of its citizens, like this one, to cosplay as the Nazis. Of course one could argue that kolovrat is something else than a barely-plausible-deniality swastika (after all, it has barely plausible deniality!), but come on now.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
6hr ago
outside of DEI inclusion
This is a huge parenthetical. They're definitely alienating people with the way they're doing this, consciously. And it's not just about the inclusion, it's about the very intense way in which they're doing that inclusion and how communicating the right message flows through everything that gets made.
I think there's a lot of paint-by-numbers going on, but I'd remind you that the most controversial movie of the past decade was almost certainly The Last Jedi, which famously had an auteur who deliberately made unexpected, confusing, and ✨subversive✨ choices that alienated people and damaged the brand. There's a lot of both going on; the only constant is DEI.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
6hr ago
My problem with Civil War was that it wasn't a Captain America movie, it was an Avengers movie. I didn't even feel like Captain America was the main character, he just felt like one out of a cast of characters.
I'm sure this just comes from the comics, every time I speak up about my criticisms of the MCU I get told it's because they adapted something straight from the comics.
One part that I'd add is that we don't really have any such examples of a Gorsuch opinion that's bizarre textual literalism that benefits the right or part of its allegiances.
Maybe he'll prove me wrong -- Williams v. Kincaid in the 4th Circuit is kinda an anti-matter Bostock, where there's absolutely no question that the explicit ADA statute excludes a wide array of sexuality and gender-related stuff, and lower federal courts have decided that Congress must have really 'intended' for this exception to not apply for a wide array of sexuality and gender-related stuff.
Wouldn't put money on it, though.
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