The woke are fetishists, first and foremost. They worship idols, yes, but more importantly they have a worldview completely suffused with idolatry. They privilege the symbolic over the real at every turn. For the woke, there is no reality whose horror cannot be redeemed… /1
@politicalmath@gfodor All fine arguments. I'd add as a concrete counter-example to "Everyone Dies" the continuing existence of millions of (in evolutionary terms) highly successful species whose lives we may not envy but which, despite being less intelligent than humans, go on flourishing in their way
@thestustustudio I really like this: "...the more dysgenic the better, I think..." Now that's how you bite a bullet. And with the "Reward Them" above her sidekick's guillotine tattoo, it yields a ironic-melancholy poetic effect.
@ZaidJilani "...Republicans would go extinct" is a dumb conclusion. It's 2008 era Democrat think tank smoke. "Demographics blah blah Republicans extinct." No. Mamdani boosting youth turnout, however significant, doesn't dissolve the natural dynamics of politics (much less big city politics).
@bernardtjoy@damintoell@MichaelMjfm Late to the game as usual, and I don't disagree with the premise. However, some exceptions to the rule off the top of my head: Harmony Korine, Ari Aster, S. Craig Zahler...
@olivertraldi Cut-rate Obama delivered with negative charisma from the guy everyone says has mastered the political media arts. He's stiff as an animatronic bear, and the newly-naturalized framing him look like figures on loan from a wax museum. Still, D+ for "soft hands of a precious few."
@jmrphy I'd argue in any case that a productive understanding of what it means to be human can't really forgo some exposure to the history of human civilization up till now, which requires at least a minimal familiarity with the so-called Classics—the Greeks, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc.
@jmrphy What it does provide is access to tradition, to the articulation of fundamental human questions, and to different ways of solving/contending with them. Don't think that has any political valence necessarily (though the right might tend to fetishize tradition more than the left).
@Lotus_Echo@MoriKamaelSpeer@Paul_Heron_ What does school integration have to do with it? Blacks were 10% of US population in the 1950's and essentially 0% of blacks were foreigners. The failure of Reconstruction was precisely a failure of assimilation (maybe inevitable after chattel slavery) cf. oppressive host culture
@Lotus_Echo@MoriKamaelSpeer@Paul_Heron_ No you don't. You wouldn't be able to pick me out of a lineup of barbarians and autochthons. And too late anyone lol, both for you and your genes. The Romans that raped your ancestors (and my ancestors) are also your ancestors.
@MoriKamaelSpeer@Paul_Heron_ I mean a lot of UK- and US-ians are pathologically self-hating but the assimilation needle is way closer to "comes back" here in the West (broadly) than it ever was to even being a real possibility anywhere in say Asia or Africa (some exceptions for former colonies, go figure)