thejdizzler
10d ago
I reject this framing completely. Is Macbeth nihilistic? Romeo and Juliet? King Lear? Just because it's a tragedy doesn't mean that the author and the writing don't believe in anything.
thejdizzler
10d ago
This is a really frustrating comment because I don't feel like it engages with what I wrote nor, nor with the comment above, nor even in good faith with the author's work. You are doing the exact same thing that I come down on the Brother's Krynn for: engaging in bombastic, exagerrated critiques of the book that have much more basis in your reactions and emotions to the book rather than what is actually in the text. Now unfortunately I have quite the large rhetorical advantage here because I've read these books many times and love them, and so have many more resources to draw upon to contradict your rather juvenile interpretations of A Feast for Crows in Particular.
Let's start with the first point.
To say that 'war is bad' is a rhetorical tool is comic over-exaggeration. In truth, I believe that his work is not even strong enough to state such a thing definitively. That is the nihilism of which people speak. There is no message. Things happen. There is no meaning in the cruelty and goodness of these characters: it might as well not have been written. Their deeds don't effect the world. At times, they hardly effect themselves.
I'm not sure how you can say this given millions of people have gotten so much out of these books, but I disgress. A Feast for Crows is certainly the easiest of the books to pick a fight with in this regard, but again I think it's pretty easy to prove you wrong. Let's go through the major plot points of AFFC and see if anything "happens"
-
Cersei in King's Landing: Without Tywin/Jaime/Tyrion to keep her in line, Cersei descends further and futher into an egoistic spiral where she becomes increasingly paranoid, easily manipulable (and fatter), and begins to take on all the characteristics of her dead husband who she hated. This culminates in her misplaying her hand and being arrested by the faith militant Themes/messages: corrupting nature of power (even for someone already clearly corrupt), complicated relationship between love and hatred (Cersei sure spends a lot of time thinking about Robert), fear of declining sexual attractiviting when one's power is derived from appearances.
-
Sansa in the Eeyrie: Sansa sinks deeper into her identity as Peter Baelish's stepdaughter. There's some minor politicing in the Vale of Arryn, but I found most of Sansa's sections to be focused on her struggles with her own identity and her own ideals. So much of Sansa's story is about her obsession with some knight or hero coming to save her from the trials and tribulations she's been put through, and this part of her arc is about her slow realization that hero has to be her herself. She has to be the one who plays the game and embody the ideals of her father. How is this not a powerful message.
-
Dorne. Arianne and Ser Arys plan to crown Myrcella Baratheon queen and rebel against the Iron Throne after the death of her uncle. This goes horribly wrong when her father finds out, and Myrcella is maimed, Arys dies and one of her co-conspirators escapes. Her father confesses his own long-planned moves against the Lannsiter regime. Themes/messages: the innocent are always those who suffer most in war, vendetta's never solve anything, thinking carefully about a plan doesn't necessarily make it so it's going to work out. Adam Feldman has some great essays on this plotline at the Mereenese Blot
-
Iron Islands. Balon Greyjoy is dead so there's an election for a new King. Balon's brother Euron wins the election through the promise of even greater booty through the continuation of raiding/reaving, this time in the south. Asha is unable to articulate her reasons for peace, and Victarion is unable to effectively form a coalition with her because of his views on gender/general dimwittedness. There's some more reaving in the Shield Islands off the coast of the Reach where it becomes increasingly clear that Euron merely views the ironborne as a tool for his lovecraftian plans. Themes/messages: The seductive appeal of war, manipulabiliity of democratic institutions, problems with holding to tradition when tradition clearly no longer works.
-
Arya. Arya trainsto become an assasin in Bravos. At the end of the book she has to give up Needle, which is her last real memory of home. Like Sansa this section is very much about identity. Arya has worn so many faces throughout the series and been forced to do some pretty horrible things (remember she's an 8 year old when the series starts). These sections made me think about how we shape and form our own identities: is there some deep core of who we are, or is it more dependent on our environment.
-
Brienne. Brienne wanders the Riverlands looking for Sansa, which we know is a futile quest. That is not to say nothing happens: each chapter is a little adventure in of itself, and serves as a vehicle to explore the questions of knighthood and chivalry. Does Brienne still embody Knightly ideals even though she doesn't have the actual blessing of the institution of knighthood? Even though her quest is pointless? Yes, yes she does. She kills outlaws, she protects the innocent from violence (which I quote from the text above), and she trains a squire in this image. Martin is trying to tell us her that you don't need a grand quest or instititutional approval to be heroic and to live up to your ideals.
-
Jaime. Jaime has a lot of parallels to Brienne's story. He spends all of this book mopping up the last bits of Stark resistance in the Riverlands. Knighthood is also central to this arc. Jaime spends most of his life scoffing at the institution because of its apparent contradictions. Yet in this book Jaime realizes that those contradictions mainly involve other's perceptions of you: you always have a choice to do what you personally believe is right and thread the narrow needle of all your conflicting vows.
-
Sam. Sam only has three chapters in this book, so his arc is rather short. Sam and Maester Aemon are sailing to Oldtown but get stuck in Braavos. Maester Aemon ends up dying, and Sam comes into conflict with the other brother of the night's watch who is shirking his vows. Sam finally ends up standing up for himself and his beliefs and ends up finding passage on a ship because of it. In contrast to your point, this is an arc about gaining agency by standing up for one's beliefs, even in the most desperate of times.
I just gave you eight character arcs with various levels of plot and character development. It's okay to not have enjoyed these arcs, to think the book as a whole is too slow, or to think that some of these arcs were poorly done. What is not okay is to claim that it all means nothing, that there's no message here, that the character's lack agency in their own stories. That is just so clearly false. Just because the stakes aren't world shaking, doesn't mean that the character's lives and actions don't have meaning. Brienne might not find Sansa, but she saves Willow and her siblings from being murdered and raped. Jaime might not be able to turn back the clock on the whole of the war of the Five Kings, but he does use diplomacy to prevent a bloody battle over Riverrun.
You and all the other people in this thread need to be better readers. Not only does Martin's work clearly not support a nihilistic world view, but my own essay very clearly argues against that. All you all have to offer in return are word salads about your emotions reading the book, rather than actual textual evidence.
thejdizzler
11d ago
This is exactly related to my overall point. By the later seasons the show has very much returned to this black/white way of seeing characters, but this time woke. Jon couldn't possibly do anything wrong, it's just the evil bigots who hate wildlings trying to sabotage him. While in the books there is an element of bigotry in the mutiny, Bowen Marsh does let the wildlings through the wall. It's Jon doing what the readers want him to do (using the Night's Watch to fight the Bolton's) but breaking promises that causes the mutiny in the end.
thejdizzler
11d ago
Martin is not saying that classical virtues don't exist. He very obviously believes they do exist. He just doesn't think it's as simple as Lord of the Rings makes it out to be. It's hard to walk in the Shadow to Mount Doom, but it's also extremely hard to make a decision between two things you value and love when they are at odds. It's not enough to just do what the church, or Plato, or Aristotle tells you because in the end you will be the one who has to choose.
The first (and second) world wars are great examples of this. People choose governments and institutions that claimed that they stood for these high-minded ideals, which were in reality just neo-feudal skinsuits for individuals/nations that wanted wealth/territory/power. Those ideals were why we could not back down. You get similar, although more personal, conflicts like this in the Middle Ages like the Wars of the Roses, Castillian Civil Wars, Thirty Years War, etc. People are so steeped in ideology, either personal or abstract, that they can't live up to the ideals that they want to. At least that's my reading of Martin.
thejdizzler
11d ago
I'm also enjoying Dorothy Dunnett, and I find that Guy Gavriel Kay scratches a similar itch (he isn't explicitly historical but its extremely clear what his inspiration is, so he constrains the story that way).
I'm not sure Martin's problem is a lack of interest, or frankly even in skill. He's far too much of a perfectionist, and the amount of moving pieces that he has to manage in TWoW is staggering. The reception of the later sessions of the show I think caused some quite extensive rewrites from him, which is why we are seeing such a huge delay. Interesting that Dance is your least favorite book in the series: I just did a reread this summer, and while I found I didn't like Dance as much as I used to (was my favorite book in the series from about 2012-2022), it still held up pretty well thematically.
I'm not sure the blue-blooded characters are all one dimensional in ASOIAF. Joffery is probably the least well developed of these I can think of, but he still clearly has reasons for his shitness (absent, whoring father and doting/controlling mother). Even in Harry Potter this isn't true: Draco gets a redemption arc in the last few books.
thejdizzler
11d ago
I think demographic replacement is fundamentally different from the low level of violence that permeated the middle ages at all times. Yes it absolutely sucks to see your culture be flushed down the toilet, but it's absolutely not the same as having your farm burned down, your daughters raped, and winter food stores plundered every 10-20 years.
thejdizzler
11d ago
I think this isn't the main reason. I think unfortunately his ego is very large, and the poor reception of the ending of the show means he has had to rewrite a lot of the books until he believes that they are perfect.
It's not an extreme minority opinion. I see people on the right bashing on GRRM all the time. This guy's post got hundreds of likes. It's a real opinion. You can see many examples of it upthread
thejdizzler
11d ago
Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I totally agree about feudalism. I find it quite amusing how many people on the right stan monarchy when it is quite obvious from the historical record that good rulership, peace, and stability were the exception rather than the rule. While I'm often frustrated with how democracy works in practice, at least we don't have civil wars every twenty years when we change administrations.
thejdizzler
11d ago
Right but neither the red wedding nor twincest actually work out for the perpetrators. The Frey's are being slowly murdered by outlaws in the riverlands. Cersei is on trial by the faith of the seven for fornication, and Jaime currently hates her. Meanwhile Ned's former vassals are marching on Winterfell to save his "daughter" from unwanted marriage and sexual violence.
No disagreement with you there. George's twitter is pretty bad.
thejdizzler
11d ago
This is not a strawman. I'm quotting from an actual article that someone wrote on substack that I linked to it.
thejdizzler
11d ago
Thanks, this does help clarify things, although I wish people would read his books at critique what was actually there, rather than this strawman that they want to exist. That's far too much to expect from people who are hyper-online probably.
In terms of the other authors being far worse than Martin, I can't help but agree. Joe Abercrombie is another example of a contemporary writer who is much more nihilistic than Martin.
In terms of other positive reinterpretations of Tolkein, I've really been enjoying the saga of the borderlands by the Argentinian author Liliana Bodoc. It's also inspired by the Spanish conquest of the New World. I know your woke radar is probably going off by now, but I actually found it to be much more focused on ecology/preservation of nature (which Tolkein would have agreed with) rather than white-bashing.
In Defense of A Song of Ice and Fire and George R. R. Martin
If you think the series is nihilistic, you haven't been paying attention
There are certain takes on literature and culture that make me want to scream and tear my hair out. Harry Potter being decried as a book that encourages satanic witchcraft, when the books are explicitly (and somewhat heavy-handedly by the end) Christian, is one of them. Another is the insistence that post-modernism, fiction like Cloud Atlas or Infinite Jest have nothing to offer us because they don’t follow some Christian or rationalist world view. I’m pretty sure the early Church Fathers read pagan authors and some (like St. Basil) suggested that Christians should actually be well versed in pagan texts like the Odyssey and Aeneid before tackling the Bible. Most rage-inducing of all however is the idea that George R. R. Martin and his magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire, is some kind of nihilistic, grimdark, pornographic deconstruction of all that is right and good in the world.
Now I think that many of those who make this critique haven’t even taken the time to read the books, much less the wealth of secondary analysis sources like [Race for the Iron Throne] (https://racefortheironthrone.wordpress.com) (RIT Steven Attewell), Mereenese Blot, Not a Podcast, or Wars and Politics of Ice that really clarify what the books are trying to say. The show, for all its success in adaptation during the first 2-3 seasons, unfortunately twists the message of the series towards nihilism and sex and violence for mere shock value. However, this is the fault of the show runners, and the requirements of television as a medium (once again Marshall McLuhan’s words ring true) rather than anything Martin wrote).
Rather I think Martin serves as convenient punching bag for people with a particular view about post-modernism (that it has been bad for human culture). He’s an easy target: he’s old, he hasn’t finished his series, and he doesn’t live a particularly healthy lifestyle. Many people have made these critiques, but the most uncharitable (and negligently so) on Substack comes from this post by The Brothers Krynn.
I found this essay repugnant in a number of ways, from its ad hominem attacks on Martin to the obvious fact that the guy clearly hadn’t read the books he was critiquing. However, I’ll do my best to give Krynn the critique that he fails to give Martin.
Krynn has three main points to make in this essay, which mainly revolve around critiquing a tweet that Martin made about hobbit sex, but he expands to the whole of the guy’s corpus.
-
"The sole thing that inspires and motivates Game of Thrones is sex. Martin admits that it is what he views a most transcendent.”
-
“His series is mediocre at best. It is not true Fantasy. It does not uphold the traditional values one should aspire to, it is not blessed with the Spirit of Truth that Fantasy embodies”
-
“with regards to the ‘religious structure’ as all religious characters are insane, and the Church is mocked and shown to be little more than a political organization, and one that we don’t know the rituals, ceremonies, and the ideals of.”
I would respond to these arguments as such:
1.Martin is a Romantic and places a primal role on Romantic love (which involves sex) as a human motivation. This does not just mean sex but also protecting your family and community of love (which all too abstract in Tolkien’s Gondor, although not as much in the shire). Martin is also careful to point out how various sexual and romantic fixations can ruin people, families, and entire nations.
-
There is plenty of truth in A Song of Ice and Fire. However, it is a (post-modern) novel that is by its nature deconstructive of traditional values. This deconstruction allows honest reflection on many traditional systems of values and myths that empirically don’t work (despite the lamentations of the trad caths and their ilk), and the reconstruction of a more truthful set of personal values.
-
Every single major religion in A Song of Ice and Fire is shown to have some kind of actual supernatural power. While many religious characters are rather likable (Davos Seaworthy, Catalyn Stark), you also have your fair share of insane theocrats (Damphair), and people who cynically use the church as a political tool (Cersei). It’s not true that we don’t see religious ceremonies at all: the drowned God, the Seven, the old Gods, and the Faith of the Seven all have various weddings, funerals, baptisms, and worship services on camera. These churches are shown to be political institutions (if you don’t think the Catholic church was or has always been an extremely political institution you need to crack open both a newspaper or history book), but not mere tools of power (their functioning is heavily swayed by true believers and the supernatural).
Sex and Love
I’ll start off with a little bit about the personal philosophy of George R. R. Martin, which should help clarify his position on the sex vs. love question. Martin was born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey in a working class family. Martin was raised Catholic, grew up reading comic books and adventure stories before beginning his writing career at Northwestern. Here he also was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. It’s also obvious from Martin’s early stories in Dreamsongs, that the guy is a Romantic (with a capital R), and extremely interested in beauty, gnostic individualism, and subjectivity. So we have an anti-war, Romantic, who still believes in many of the traditional virtues of Catholicism without believing in the faith himself. Given these things, the message of A Song of Ice and Fire starts to become a lot more clear.
So sex and love. Tolkien obviously thought love was important too, but he doesn’t take a Romantic view of it. Love for Tolkien is very abstract: for ideals (the shire), for peoples (the Men of the West), or for the idea of a person (which is what Arwen basically is). For Martin, whose is a Romantic, love is very specific:
Needle was Robb and Bran and Rickon, her mother and her father, even Sansa. Needle was Winterfell’s grey walls, and the laughter of its people. Needle was the summer snows, Old Nan’s stories, the heart tree with its red leaves and scary face, the warm earthy smell of the glass gardens, the sound of the north wind rattling the shutters of her room. Needle was Jon Snow’s smile. He used to mess my hair and call me “little sister,” she remembered, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes.- Arya, AFFC
Love for Martin is built on personal relationships, and to describe the personal you have to describe specific intimate moments, some of which are sexual in nature.
Now, as many trad people like to point out, sex is powerful, and when that power is not used in the proper context, it can have terrible consequences. Martin knows and understands this, and contrasts sexual dynamics in two different families: the Starks (healthy), and the Lannister’s (fucked up). Ned has a healthy sexual relationship with his wife, and the resulting children love each other, and their father. This dynamic is also reflected in the political realities of the North, in which vassals are willing to die to save “Ned’s little girl”. Contrast this to the Lannister’s, who all have various sexual traumas inherited from their patriarch Tywin, and fail to meet the personal and political challenges presented to them as a result.
Of course the Brothers Krynn Disagrees:
"Because of this Ned Stark is very much a buffoon, and the likes of the incompetent sex-addled, drunkard Lannisters must triumph."
Ned makes mistakes throughout the narrative, but very much dies because he needs to for narrative reasons, not because of any fundamental trait the he has. Ned is honestly a very conflicted guy: a lot of his inner monologue is PTSD from the last war, and his inner concerns have little to do with sex, instead dealing with the conflict between trying to protect his family, or doing what he thinks is morally right and honorable. The Lannisters' are no less complicated, and the idea that they do triumph is laughable: very quickly after their "victory", House Lannister is in shambles. In fact you can argue that sex is central to their downfall. The incest between Cersei and Jaime is one of the direct causes of the war that is central to the first three novels. Tywin and Tyrion clearly also have their own sexually-linked problems, and Tywin's sexual treatment of Tyrion's first wife DIRECTLY LEADS to his death and the downfall of his house/legacy. George clearly does not think "sexy Lannister's good", and if you think so, you can't read. When Tywin dies, the regime he built quickly falls apart, as it's constructed on a level of fear, violence, and cunning that his children can't maintain. He also, as many people in the novel point out, dies stinking of his own shit.
Ned's legacy on the other hand is such that his vassals will march to battle in the middle of a snowstorm to save his daughter from a marriage with a monster. All his children remember him fondly and try to live up to the ideals he taught them, as fate slowly brings the whole family back together. Who really is the buffoon there?
I want to live forever in a land where summer lasts a thousand years. I want a castle in the clouds where I can look down over the world. I want to be six-and-twenty again. When I was six-and-twenty I could fight all day and fuck all night. What men want does not matter. Winter is almost upon us, boy. And winter is death. I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned's little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue.-The King’s Prize, ADWD
Fantasy and Truth
The next banger from the Brothers Krynn:
The reason for this is that Martin is incapable of writing tales of honor, of chivalry, of faith, of goodness because let us be honest… he has precious little of it in him. He has no belief in it. He has only scorn for it, as is evident in all his tales.
This is just completely untrue as to be approaching the level of libel. The three prequel novellas, combined in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, are pretty much only about what chivalry looks like, and there are plenty of characters, ranging from Jaime Lannister to Brienne of Tarth who are supremely concerned with their own code of conduct. I mean how can you not read the following passage and not come away thinking that Martin has some idea about what faith, goodness, and courage actually are?
Willow stepped out into the rain, a crossbow in her hands. The girl was shouting at the riders, but a clap of thunder rolled across the yard, drowning out her words. As it faded, Brienne heard the man in the Hound's helm say, "Loose a quarrel at me and I'll shove that crossbow up your cunt and fuck you with it. Then I'll pop your fucking eyes out and make you eat them." The fury in the man's voice drove Willow back a step, trembling. Seven, Brienne thought again, despairing. She had no chance against seven, she knew. No chance, and no choice. She stepped out into the rain, Oathkeeper in hand. "Leave her be. If you want to rape someone, try me." - AFFC
George R. R. Martin is a Romantic who does believe in the ideals that you claim he scorns. But the world is complicated, and being a good person is not as simple as merely upholding those values because in the real world, those things are often in conflict with each other, and the institutions that claim to stand for those values are easily corrupted. We see this in the novels through the lens of the institution of knighthood, which confers honors onto to criminals like Gregor Clegane because of their noble status and physical stature, but fails to grant the same honor to people who actually follow the code due to their gender (Brienne) or social status (Dunk). It’s not that Martin wants us to believe that these ideals are a lie, but rather to critically recognize that institutions and symbols that represent said ideals are not 1:1 substitutes for them.
Tolkien recognized this too to some extent, especially in the Akallabêth in the Silmarillion: the kingship of Numenor as an office did not protect the kings from corruption by Sauron, and it did not protect their descendants in Gondor and Arnor from decadence. Yet because of the mythic quality of Tolkein’s story we do tend to get an exaggerated sense of trust of people and institutions as a collective rather than the personalities of the individuals that make up these groups. The Elves are all wise. The Rohirrim are all brave. The men of Gondor are all good. Of course there are some subversions of these expectations, most notably in the introduction of Aragorn (all that is gold does not glitter), but the pattern holds.
The other point that Martin wants to make is that it’s not always that simple to do the right thing. In Lord of the Rings, doing good may be hard, but it is always simple. There is never a question of whether the ring should be destroyed or Sauron resisted: the main questions revolved around the “how” of these things and the development of moral character to not breakdown when the going gets tough.
In A Song of Ice and Fire, doing good is not so simple. I think one of the best examples of this is Jon's story in the latest entry in the series. Jon is the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, whose job it is to protect the world from supernatural evil. And he does this job very well in very difficult circumstances. However, in a nearby theatre of the plot (the North), there is a civil war going on between the forces of King Stannis Baratheon, and the Boltons, the later of whom killed all of Jon’s biological family (the Starks). It is very natural, and also certainly noble, for Jon to try and undermine the Boltons. They are evil characters who have done much harm in the story and deserve to be destroyed. But by acting on this noble impulse, Jon critically undermines his other duty of protecting the realm from literal ice zombies that want to kill all humans. And thus the folly of trying to follow all his noble impulses: which eventually gets him killed in a mutiny. For more info on this check out the essays on Jon over at the Mereenese Blot.
There are countless similar conundrums throughout all the storylines of all the novels. Martin is ultimately interested in exploring the ways our noble impulses come into contradiction with each other, and how simplistic morality stories can often get in the way of making good decisions. Life is not a song, sweetling.
Religion
This one is hard one to discuss because I think unfortunately many in the same space as the Brothers Krynn (and in my own parish) are in deep denial about the political nature that the church has now, and since the days of Saint Paul, has always had. Popes led armies into battle, helped to redraw the political maps of Europe, and had orgies in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Protestantism was just as much of a political movement as it was a genuine reaction to the spiritual excesses of the medieval church hierarchy. The Taiping Rebellion, still the bloodiest per capita war in Chinese history was spearheaded by a man who claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ. And we don’t even need to start talking about the tight link between the political and the spiritual in Islam. Frankly, it is insane to not regard all organized religion as fundamentally political as well as spiritual.
Tolkien doesn’t even address this questions at all: most of the characters in the book are vaguely gnostic, despite the fact that we know the Eru Llúvatar (God) is real and acts in the world. I understand why he did this: he was writing a mythology for his own people. There was no need to complicate things with having the people in the myth have their own faiths.
Martin crafts a much more complex tapestry of faiths and belief systems in his world. There are at least four different faiths in the main continent of Westeros: the Faith of the Seven, the Drowned God, the Old Gods, and the Lord of Light, all of which have their own religious structures and various degrees of supernatural intervention. You have very religious characters, who clearly believe in their faith: Davos, Sansa, and Brienne are constantly making references to different members of the Seven, cynical atheists like Tyrion, and opportunists like Cersei or Stannis that use the faith as a political, or in the case of Stannis, supernatural tool.
We also get a fairly rich sense of what these faiths value. The followers of the Lord of Light are supremely concerned with coming Eschaton: a showdown between themselves and the great evil that lurks beyond the Wall. The Faith of the Seven is concerned with knightly values, while the old Gods are more concerned with traditional values that revolve around nature, the land, and the personal embodiment of justice.
And religious actions do have consequences. Cersei defiles the Great Sept of Baelor when her son orders Ned’s execution on its steps. This wins her no points with the Faith and leads directly to her downfall in the fourth book. Similarly, Stannis’ embrace of the foreign faith of the Lord of Light also makes it difficult to win over northern lords when his priests demand that their heart trees be burned. Beliefs do matter in this world, but so do politics.
Conclusion
Martin's fundamental critique of Tolkien is that the world isn't as simple as a struggle between good and evil. Yes there are elements of that, but often times it is our noble desires IN CONFLICT with each other that causes the real problems. From a Romantic (and gnostic) perspective each individual has to examine the contents of their own soul to make their own (subjective) decision. Of course there are general patterns to what is true and good and beautiful, Martin (and I) certainly think so, but the devil is in the details. And that is for each one of us to figure out: no one is coming to save you.
And that is why it is important to read these books, and everything else much more carefully than the Brothers Krynn. Even if you disagree fundamentally with what is being said, it does you no favors to claim that your enemies “have a black soul. have a wicked heart, and [don’t] believe in goodness. "[That they don’t] believe in righteousness," when that is so clearly not true. All that does is make you new enemies (me), and brings us further away from understanding the good, the true, and the beautiful.
thejdizzler
11d ago
How does one increase readership on a blog? I've been blogging for about 4 years now, and my readerbase has grown from just my two roommates to around ~100 random people on the internet. I'm not necessarily interested in making $$ (although I wouldn't say no) but I would like to get more engagement on my posts.
My blog is mainly focused on two topics: language learning and literature reviews (that usually take some kind of culture war angle). Link is here if any are interested.
thejdizzler
6mo ago
My source for this is "What God Hath Wrought", the 1815-1848 volume of the Oxford History of the US. My understanding of the argument is that Southern soils in the Eastern part of the country had begun to be exhausted by the early ~1820s due to poor farming practices. This made it difficult to grow Tobacco or Cotton profitably because the land just didn't have enough nutrients in it any more for those crops. Other crops like wheat or peanuts that were less intensive or even restorative, were better harvested using animal or partially mechanized labor. There's a reason the north didn't have slaves on its wheat farms, although I can't pretend to know exactly why.
In terms of the Knights of the Golden circle, I think it's left out of history books because of the general discomfort that Americans have historically had with imperialism. This was a country founded explicitly on anti-imperialist principles of popular sovereignty and democracy. Plans to conquer Central America and the Carribean generally don't align with that image. Of course, in practice, the US has and continues to be an imperialist power, so I do wonder, like you, if this exclusion from our education system of these uncomfortable facts is actually a good thing.
thejdizzler
6mo ago
In a world where Douglas gets the United Democratic ticket, you have a more conciliatory South, which potentially helps flip OH or IN. But perhaps you're right: the North seemed pretty done with compromise too.
thejdizzler
6mo ago
You're telling me man. This forum is proof of what Nietzche posited that all logic is just a cope for our already inbuilt preferences. People don't have a logical reason to dismiss veganism or animal intelligence, they just like meat, and so their arguments follow that. Rationalism is a sham.
As far as I understand it Lincoln wanted to ban the spread of slavery to the territories. From the Republican platform of the Chicago convention of 1860, clause 8:
That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no "person should be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.
So no, Lincoln didn't want to ban slavery, but he wanted to prevent its spread into territories that had not yet been granted statehood.
This is in contrast to the Southern Democratic Party that wanted slaveholders to be allowed to bring their property (i.e. slaves) into all the territories, effectively making slavery legal everywhere that was not already a state. Now, once these territories were granted statehood, the new states could ban slavery as before. From the Southern Democratic platform of 1860, clause 1:
That the Government of a Territory organized by an act of Congress, is provisional and temporary; and during its existence, all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory, without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Congressional or Territorial legislation.
This clause was completely unacceptable to the North for obvious reasons, on top of recent rollbacks of previous compromises (the Kansas/Nebraska Act undid much of the Missouri compromise), hence the party split and Lincoln's victory in the election.
thejdizzler
6mo ago
Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?
Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.
I'm not sure I buy the slave revolt argument fully. The south was continually expanding its slave population to work new plantations. You see an exponential (in the mathematical sense) of the enslaved population from ~700,000 in 1790 to 4 million in 1860. Now during that time the number and size of slave states also increased substantially, but if you look at this map, the percentage of enslaved peoples in Eastern counties doesn't seem to really decrease with Western expansion. Looks to me like the economics of the plantation were more important than the fear of slave revolt.
However, I do see your argument that this was a powerfully motivating political force behind Southern Extremism. Funnily enough, the Republican Party also didn't really want black people to stick around in the union: Lincoln was a strong proponent of colonization and repatriation of African-Americans to Liberia.
thejdizzler
6mo ago
Right thanks for the clarification on Douglas. I think what I was trying to show with that line was how unreasonable the southern position on the slavery in the territories question was. Lincoln's position was to ban it entirely, and Douglas wanted to keep the post-Kansas/Nebraska Act status quo (territories could decide on the slavery question by popular sovereignty). You could imagine a third position between Lincoln and Douglas that reverted to the Missouri Compromise. But no, the slaveholding politicians in the south had to have slavery in ALL the territories, regardless of the desires of the population. I can see how this was intolerable to even the non-abolitionists in the north, and it almost seems to me that the South knew so too (and thus was trying to start a war that they should have known they would have lost).
Anyway, thanks for the book rec and clarification. I'm working my way through Bruce Catton's History of the Civil War right now too.
thejdizzler
6mo ago
Why Slaveholding interests did indeed cause the the Civil War
When America was founded, slavery was on the way out: turns out it wasn’t that profitable of a system for tobacco farming, and sugar couldn’t be grown in the continental US. Many northern states abolished slavery and then the south followed suit. If there was a time for the peaceful national abolition of slavery it was then. Most Southerners even saw slavery as a regrettable institution that would be phased out (Jefferson most famously).
Then Eli Whitney invented the Cotton Gin, and suddenly mass cotton agriculture became a profitable option for slave agriculture. With the old southwest open for settlement in the first decades of the 19th century, those territories filled with cotton slave plantations. Because of soil exhaustion, the states of the old south (Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland) were not as suitable for cultivation of cotton, and so profited mainly from the selling of their excess slave population to plantations in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missippi and Florida (later Missouri and Texas). In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).
Now of course this was not a sustainable system because a). there is only so much land that is suitable for cotton farming and b). plantations directly competed with free settlers for land (which explains some of the rivalry between the north and the south better than fringe abolitionism). This also doesn’t fit with the argument that if we had merely waited slavery would have fixed itself more peacefully. A large portion of the southern political class was heavily invested in the continued expansion of slavery (so they could make money selling slaves). This was one cause of the Mexican-American war (to acquire more land for growing cotton), and also resulted in schemes like that of the Knights of the Golden Circle’s plan to capture Central America and the Caribbean to make more slave states, and William Walker’s Filibuster War in Nicaragua. The compromise of 1820, the compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act all continued to give more power to slaveholding interests. You wouldn’t have needed to be an abolitionist to be resentful towards what seemed like the disproportionate power and influence of slaveholding interests in the elections leading up to the Civil War.
Then there’s the actual election of 1860. First of all, I want to note that Lincoln was not elected on a platform of sudden abolition, nor did he actually move to abolish slavery during the Civil War until 1863. All Lincoln promised to do was to prevent the expansion of the institution into new territories (few of which were suitable for plantation agriculture anyway).
Secondly, slave holding interests arguably lost that election because of running John Breckenridge as a third party candidate instead of backing Stephen Douglas. Southern Democrats refused to endorse Douglas at the party convention in Charleston because Douglas was not willing to endorse the maximalist position of allowing slaveholders to bring their slaves into any new territory (potentially against the wishes of the population). This was just a bridge too far for Northern voters after the Kansas Nebraska act opened territory that was supposed to be closed to slavery by the compromise of 1820 to slaveholders, and the Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern States to enforce the institution within their own borders where the population was opposed to it.
Both Douglas’s and Lincoln’s positions seem like reasonable ways of gradually phasing out slavery to me (especially Douglas, who didn’t tend to touch the right for new states to choose to allow slavery AT ALL). Instead the South chose secession and war. It also seems to me that the political impasse that led to the war was less caused by abolitionism, but rather the political extremism of the Southern Planters class.
I’d urge those who disagree to put yourself in the shoes of a northern farmer in the late 1850s/1860s. Wouldn’t you have been frustrated by the stranglehold that slaveholding interests seemed to have on the national government, preventing the opening of new lands in the West for settlement by your sons? Encouraging economic policies that were good for cotton plantations but not for your wheat crop? A vote for Lincoln was less of a vote for abolitionism, and more of a “fuck you” to the insidious and outsized influence of slaveholders on federal economic policies.
thejdizzler
1yr ago
Is not wanting to murder what I think are sentient creatures not a reason? Is going without animal flesh such a sacrifice that you really think I'm miserable?
thejdizzler
1yr ago
2.4 g/kg (over 1 g/lb) is total overkill. No study has ever shown a benefit of increasing consumption over 1.6-1.8 g/kg (Source: https://mennohenselmans.com/the-myth-of-1glb-optimal-protein-intake-for-bodybuilders/).
thejdizzler
1yr ago
You can also drink Kombucha, eat vegan yogurt, or take a supplement and not think about vitamin B deficiencies ever. It's really not that hard.
Lots of people in this thread who don't give a shit about animals apparently.
I agree whole-heartedly. I'm not sure what insurance actually adds to the system given that the government is already subsidizing the kinds of people that really need insurance and the fact that insurance companies are incredibly reluctant to actually shell out the cash that they agreed to.
More options
Context Copy link