vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
Yeah, I love Christmas, but even I'm tired of seeing it creep ever earlier in the year, swallowing up other holidays like Thanksgiving. I hate that I've had Thanksgiving dinner immediately followed by my mom and sister taking off for a "Black Friday" sale on Thursday that they went to in order to buy presents for Christmas. Frankly, Halloween seems like it is the only thing stopping Christmas from seeping even earlier into the year.
I did a little digging on NGram, and found some interesting things. First, look at this graph. I for one, have never heard someone wish me a "Prosperous New Year", and yet looking through this has a sudden uptick in popularity during the early 1900's and then seems to drop off entirely.
While "Happy Holidays" certainly becomes popular after WWII, there are pre-WWII instances like this one from 1937 which has a "Happy Holidays and Prosperous New Year." A quite early one is this one from 1921, although this one seems to support a Jewish origin for the term - since Liberman is a common Ashkenazi surname.
However, I have also found entries like this one from a 1904 Christian periodical.
I'm inclined towards a hypothesis that "happy holidays" has been an existent but uncommon greeting since at least 1904, it likely caught on in the Jewish community pre-WWII, and then was popularly adopted from the Jewish community's usage after WWII, based on this investigation. So while a Christian origin for the phrase isn't unlikely, a Jewish origin for its popularization is fairly likely.
Holidays ebb and flow in popularity.
Easter is theoretically the most important Christian holiday, and there have been times when banning Christmas was a popular opinion among certain populations. (Especially some of the Founding Fathers.)
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
Yet now it is "The Holidays".
Don't Christians celebrate New Year's right around Christmas as well? I always assumed "the Holidays" started as a Christian thing and not an inclusive thing.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
There's always going to be people online who care less about principles than scoring a point against the other team. Even so, I think it is a strange way to defend someone, by saying, "You're only pointing out this bad thing they did because it gave you a chance to own a member of the out group." Essentially, it's the same playbook from the other side: the bad things people on your team do don't matter, because they weaken your team's position.
The only time your principles matter is when you're applying them against members of your in group, otherwise it goes without saying that you'll happily see your enemies torn down for their violations.
I think it's okay to say, "I'm not happy with Internet Historian for plagiarizing his Man In Cave video, but this one smoking gun of plagiarism is not enough for me to discount his larger body of original, properly cited work, which I still enjoy and will continue to support."
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
While I don't discount that it wasn't random happenstance that Hbomberguy looked into the particular creators that he did, you're sort of ignoring that the fact that the main target of the video (indeed the person to whom the last 2 hours is entirely devoted to) is James Somerton - a leftist, queer content creator broadly on the same "side" as him.
I don't think you need an excuse to not spend 4 hours of your life watching a drama video (even if it is a thoroughly researched, well-presented drama video.) However, I don't think Hbomberguy's political commitments left him unable to mount his attack. On the contrary, because he's doing a bit of an own goal with the main target of the video, I'm inclined to give greater weight to his claims that James Somerton engaged in plagiarism and therefore wronged the community he belonged to.
Because it's easier to kick a guy when he's down? Enough of Internet Historian's fans are sufficiently distasteful of his plagiarism, and his clumsy attempts to cover it up that they're not willing to go to bat to defend his edgy humor and imputed political stances. That leaves a clear path for those who always hated him to mount their attacks.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
This is how the whole "breadtube" ecosystem works. It's a tool for hurting people as effectively as possible: look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today.
Have to agree with /u/Testing123 here. Hbomberguy's evidence that Man In Cave was plagiarized from a single article was fairly convincing. For what it's worth, I also think Internet Historian and James D. Rolfe came out looking the best of all the plagiarists in that video. For Internet Historian, it seemed to only be a single case of blatant plagiarism, while for Rolfe it seems like he is mostly guilty of selling out (all of the actual plagiarism done without his knowledge by his scriptwriter.) Meanwhile, it looked like iilluminaughtii's entire career was built off of sloppily plagiarizing documentaries, and James Somerton just compiled and read essays from other thinkers in the space, including entire books.
Contra Innuendo Studios On "Didoing"
Today, another video from Innuendo Studios in their "Alt-Right Playbook" series just dropped, and it describes a move in an argument where Person A will propose a small gesture that they assert will make things better for some group, and Person B counters by essentially agreeing that society is unfair around the issue being discussed, but that it is such a minor problem that it is not worth addressing. Innuendo Studios' preferred word for this move by Person B is "Didoing" (after the Dido song Thank You which features the lyrics "[...] it's not so bad"), but he also points out that some people have called this issue "The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness", which I prefer as a name for this, since it doesn't rely on knowledge of a song from 1998 to explain.
According to Innuendo Studios, Person B's hidden premise is that "it is okay for things to be unfair, within a certain tolerance." That "some people do and should take extra precautions just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us."
My own politics lean towards social democracy, and aside from some anti-woke skepticism, I am far from "alt-right." But to the above I have to say, isn't Person B obviously correct?
Innuendo Studios initially frames the discussion around content warnings, so let's start there. I want to set aside, for a moment, the question of whether content warnings are actually successful at addressing some alleged unfairness in society. Let's grant for the sake of argument that they are 100% successful at addressing the issue of people with PTSD or anxiety attacks having their conditions activated as a result of media they are consuming.
That still doesn't answer at what level society should be trying to deal with this issue. As I see it, there are four basic levels a coordination problem can be solved in society:
- The government (AKA the use of organized force)
- Social norms (AKA the use of organized social ostracism)
- Private organizations
- Individual actions
Now I believe the question becomes, assuming that content warnings work, at what level should we try to solve the problem that they solve?
None of these options are without downsides. If we create a new government bureaucracy to do this, how do we stop it from trying to seize new power or misusing the power it was given? If we enshrine a new social norm, are we prepared to accept the ostracism of people from polite society for its violation? If a private organization tries to solve the problem, how can its limited reach be solved so the maximum number of people possible enjoy the benefits of the solution? And doubly so for individual actions.
We already live in a world where there are a ton of voluntary systems for content ratings, from the MPA film rating system to the United States pay television content advisory system to the ESRB. All of these systems are being done by private industry, and don't have the force of law.
We also have successful examples of crowd-sourcing trigger warnings with sites like Does The Dog Die.
I don't think it would be unreasonable for a person to think that this level of dealing with the problem is more or less acceptable. We haven't delivered a perfect solution to all people, but we've achieved reasonably good coverage at a tolerably low cost to society in terms of money and resources invested. Sure, some people might find this incomplete resolution unsatisfying, or on the other side believe that even the level we're currently investing in it is too high.
All discussions are going to end up like this in the end, whether we're talking about whether the government should have programs to pay for eye glasses for people, or whether we're talking about whether we should force private companies to build handicapped spaces in parking lots.
If we have a list of societal interventions we're considering implementing, I think it is obvious that you should do the ones that have the highest impact with the lowest cost of societal resources to implement. It doesn't mean that the problems that you don't focus on aren't problems, but they might be small enough problems that you don't actually need any larger coordination to solve the problem.
I think it would be worth prioritizing relatively cheap interventions like eyeglasses, which can have huge positive impacts on people depending on the level of impairment they started with, over more untractable problems that tend to be the focus of woke bellyaching.
No matter how you try to solve a problem in society, there will always be trade offs. You're always compromising between bigger interventions in Area A and Area B since every resource that matters is finite, and I think most people find it acceptable to leave many small problems unsolved. We're okay with saying, "suck it up, everyone has to deal with some level of unfairness, and the current status quo already solves most of the most important issues you have to deal with." Or alternatively, "The status quo is indeed unacceptable, but we should focus on solving big, important issues X, Y and Z, and we won't be getting to your tiny issues any time soon, if ever."
There has to be a Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, whether you're "alt-right" or not. Most of the argument is about where the line should be drawn.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
To simplify it: A Napoleon movie which isn't done by the French for a French audience is cultural appropriation.
I'm sure you're not being entirely serious, but this is a silly thing to say. When Europe looks like this at the height of your power, I would say you're fair game for almost any European nation to have a take on. That's not to say that I think any one country has the monopoly on truth when it comes to opinions on Napoleon, but just because modern France and the French people are the inheritors of Napoleon's legacy, doesn't mean that they're the only or best ones to tell his story. It doesn't even mean that a French filmmaker would make a "better" or "more accurate" biopic.
Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex.
To use an analogy: Richard Hanania has written about how civil rights law is the origins of what is called "wokeness." I've seen others talk about how American colleges and universities only started valuing "diversity" after the Supreme Court struck down one form of affirmative action, while signposting other forms of affirmative action that would be acceptable.
All of that to say, is it possible that the "empirical claim" that trans people make are more motivated by "what actually works" legally and culturally in our society? That they're falsifying their preferences, in an attempt to justify the way they want to live their lives to the gatekeepers and the masses?
Obviously, their efforts don't work for you and other trans skeptical posters on this forum, but imagine you found yourself in the following life situation:
You are a man, and you want to be a woman. It doesn't matter if that desire is caused by an intersex brain, or a paraphilia or is a whimsy you picked up as a result of your life experiences. You have this desire, and it is strong enough to make you want to do something about it. Maybe it has become what Scott Alexander calls a trapped prior - a nearly unchangable belief that doesn't respond to new evidence, like a phobia or an OCD obsession. You know that you can't become exactly like a typical woman, but you believe that with hormones, surgery and vocal training you can get close enough for your own purposes, at least physically. Heck, maybe you'll even get lucky and pass so well that for the vast majority of the people you interact with, you will be indistinguishable from a typical woman and you'll be able to live your life.
Either way, you need to convince society that they should allow you to get the hormones and surgeries, and that they should treat you in all ways like a woman, despite whatever doubts members of society might otherwise have about your claim.
I put forward that the "typical trans narrative" is like water filling the shape of the society it is arising from. All of the philosophical and metaphysical arguments are a smoke screen. They don't exist to get cis people closer to the truth of understanding what it is like to be trans - they exist to get enough important gate keepers in society to let the trans person live the life they want to live. Maybe parts of the "typical trans narrative" are close enough to being true for many trans people. Maybe they were gender non-conforming as a kid, or didn't fit in with other kids of their natal sex, or they couldn't cut it as an adult of their natal sex, but it is also the end-point of a long process of memetic evolution, where trans people collectively discovered the set of secret words and shibboleths they had to say to get what they wanted.
I think the modal trans person wants to look like, live as and be treated socially and legally as a member of the opposite sex. Whether that is a result of nature or nurture, or whether we realistically have any way of talking a person out of this once it has become a trapped prior for them, all other aspects of the "typical trans narrative" grow out of this simple truth. Because they want to live as and be treated as the opposite sex in all ways, it behooves them in the current cultural environment to make certain impossible-to-verify empirical claims about their internal experiences, about "feeling like a woman" or "knowing they were a woman."
That's how they get doctors and lawmakers on board with their desires, and after that it is a matter of keeping their heads down (if they pass), or cultivating cultural norms that minimize the friction of the way they're living their lives (if they don't pass.)
Long story short, while I'm sure many trans people actually do believe empirically unverifiable things about themselves, I think that in most cases those things matter much less than the simple pragmatism of saying whatever reduces the friction between them and the things they want out of life.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Modern Greeks are actually descended from ancient Greeks and so you promoted here nationalist propaganda against various ethnic groups.
Fair enough, I stand corrected on this point. It doesn't fundamentally undermine my position that nations are artificial.
So in a very real sense we can see that the the nations you primarilly focused upon which were european nations are fake. Not whether all ethnic groups are fake. But much more so the real issue in regards to influential organizations that pretend indigenous europeans are not indigenous.
I considered including a few paragraphs on things like Hindutva in India, and the erosion of diverse languages and cultural groups in Indonesia, but I didn't think it was necessary.
My basic opinion is that humans are social primates with hardware designed for groups of ~150 individuals. Using this hardware, we've managed to create social technologies that allow for greater numbers to be part of organized wholes: religions, nations, etc. Really, it's remarkable that we've been able to create social technologies that allow millions or billions of humans to work together. Whatever else you might say about the current capitalist world order - its ability to coordinate the actions of billions of humans is truly remarkable.
Nations being a social technology does mean that they're "fake" - we did have to invent them. I don't deny the existence of "clans" or "extended families", but I do think once you've reached a certain size it is only ideology and centralization of power that allows us to conceptualize such things as "Han", "Yamato", "French" or "Mexican."
htps://www.themotte.org/post/667/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/137944?context=8#context
Yourself have said in regards to a mod race swapping from non white to white:
If someone in your orbit decides to add a mod that turns all the characters into BIPOC they/thems, and you became aware of it, would you not immediately jump to a conclusion on why they might have done such a mod? Modifying the media you consume is theoretically morally neutral and apolitical, but once your media habits become public they are subject to public scruitiny.
So you are willing to think a sinister motive for race swapping in general when it is from non white to white but not for the opposite.
There is no contradiction between what I said there, and what I am saying now. I was then and am now in favor of people making and using mods for video games of any kind.
My post there was descriptive, not prescriptive. I was saying that media habits that become public are subject to public scrutiny. This is undoubtedly true. I said nothing about myself attributing "sinister motives" to other people either way. People's private "vices" are their own business.
Even if there were unabashedly white supremacist mods being made, they don't seem to have lead to any real world harm, and so I don't see a need to prioritize them as an issue.
It is bothersome that you dodged in your support of race swapping the issue of discrimination, and how race swapping involves a heavy dose of a choice to discriminate against whites for blacks.
Anti-identitarianism can be seen as the genuine and not motte and bailey, only if it promoted to begin with in a manner that disrespects the progressive sacred cows too
I apologize if I've misread you, but I don't think you've understood where I'm coming from. My entry point into this topic is much more tied up in my aesthetic philosophy than any pro- or anti-identitarian sentiment.
I didn't omit discrimination in my argument because it somehow escaped my notice as a possible motivation for race swapping. I omitted it because it is completely immaterial to my reasons for supporting the creation of new artistic expression inspired by what has come before.
I'm fully in favor of roasting progressive sacred cows as well, if that is something someone wants to do. Nothing I said implied I wasn't, and I have consistently maintained that I would be in support of things like white Othello or white John Henry when pressed.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
The problem with race swapping is that people (rightfully) associate it with lazy cash grabs.
I agree, but I think the problem is the lazy cash grab, not the race swapping. All of Disney's live action remakes have been dull and uninspired, and the race swap in The Little Mermaid was hardly its biggest problem. Let's start with the fact that they somehow turned a lean 83 minute movie into a two hour and 15 minute slog!
Obviously, I prefer good storytelling and craft to bad storytelling and craft, when deciding my media diet. I would like to hope the vast majority of people do, though the evidence is strong that the masses prefer "junk food" more than works that are profound, thought-expanding, etc.
It has a culturally genocidal element and is not unrelated to afrocentric ahistorical lies. It is cultural appropriation to the extreme.
I don't buy the concept of cultural appropriation. I've learned too much about things like Greco-Buddhist art and Daoist Christian syncretism to think there's anything wrong with "appropriating" cultures, even in the most sacred of contexts.
There's a difference between treating another culture or group with dignity and respect, and refusing to do anything with that culture's art, fashion or stories. I actually think it's a bit racist to refuse to let cultures mix and mingle as is their natural tendency historically. It would be much easier for humans if everything always stayed separated into Platonic ideals, but the reality is that especially in the Old World everything was very connected and ideas in one part of Europe might find their way to India or Japan given enough time historically.
The ideology of marxist nationalism or liberal nationalism for groups like blacks and other progressive beneficieries of progressive stack is key part of what is happening. And it is about racist devaluation of the history and culture of certain peoples to the benefit of other peoples and also under hateful spite from the perspective of an ideology that sees white ethnic groups as evil. Cultural marxism like original marxism promises utopia once the class enemies/ethnic enemies, oppressors are destroyed. This is part of said mistreatment, humiliation and destruction. Is cruelty and it is immoral and ought to be stopped and punished.
I think you're seriously misreading the situation in a number of ways. You see victory, and call it defeat.
When the Greco-Bactrian kingdom started depicting Buddha in Greek-style statuary, was this a humiliation for the Buddhists or the Greeks? No, of course not. If anything it showed the strength of Greek culture and of Indian Buddhist culture that when these two great cultural groups mixed they produced something new.
Western culture has been so successful that a Puerto Rican man made a musical about one of America's Founding Fathers and it was wildly popular. Was it a humiliation that many of the cast in Hamilton were black or Hispanic? Of course not, this is a sign of American and Western culture's strength, not its weakness.
I believe that people have a right to have their own history, culture, traditions and that being respected.
I'm sorry, but I honestly can't unlearn how artificial nations are. Modern Greeks learn about the Classics, even though a lot of Greeks are descended from the Ottomans and haven't got a bit of Hellenistic blood in them. The majority of French people didn't speak French until surprisingly recently in history. The drindl and lederhosen are the costume of specific regions of modern Germany, and not Germany as a whole.
It's all fake, fake, fake.
Not our nation of course. Our nation, uniquely among all nations, is autochthonous and authentic. It's totally real and wasn't the result of decades or centuries of nationalist agitation to make us think of it as primordial and true.
Plus, authoritarianism in favor of antinationalism and anti-religion anti-nation, anti-race has already been tried and found to be extremely repressive and destructive.
I think "nationalism" only makes sense if you are a nation. Yes, yes, I pointed out how nations are fake above, but the United States really isn't a nation. I like someone's description of it as a "civic state." Americans trace their origins to a common civic history, not a common birth like Japan or France.
At one point it might have been a proto-nation of primarily anglo origin, but today it is such a mess of ethnicities that I doubt if it can truly make itself a single nation, though the growing circle of those considered "Han" across Chinese history might provide an interesting template going forward. Certainly, "white American" has become somewhat of a group, as well as "black American" and those ties might be enough to call each group a nascent "nation." I just don't know if I buy that as a solid glue to hold together American society though.
Like, is it a humiliation to anglo Americans that many white Americans love institutions created by, of and for anglo Americans? Is it a humiliation that the anglo Founding Fathers can sometimes be depicted by people of obviously non-Anglo (if still white) actors?
Its tactical support of not caring about your culture/race promoted towards the outgroup. This necessitates for those who want to promote the general pro race swapping attitude to oppose the current status quo and the current movements with their motte and baileys, if they really are something different than them.
I don't know - I think Western culture is pretty awesome, but I'm not a chauvinist about it. I also appreciate (in Kipling's sense of the word) many of the non-Western cultures I've been exposed to. None of those cultures are "pure", isolated islands for the most part. Oni from Japan might have some influence from Indian rakshasa, and so on and so on, the lists of cross-cultural pollination are endless.
I'm pro-race swapping because I'm a student of history and the humanities, and those fields show again and again that you just can't keep a "pure" form of a culture around for any length of time. New circumstances always arise. There's always another tribe or nation or people along the horizon, ready to throw your conception of the world into disarray, or who just has a really cool story that you can't wait to put your own spin on.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Except we won't get them, and you know why as well as I do.
As big Hollywood movies, maybe not. But even I am sometimes surprised at what people are able to come up with.
Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson might have been super cringe, but I also think it was 100% sincere and "organic", even by your own standards. Some Gen Z artist saw Hamilton, and liked that depiction of Thomas Jefferson by a black actor in a play enough to take it one level further. That's just how people interact with media in this day and age.
Look at this list of Undertale AU's. All of that seems completely organic to me. Some people just like imagining their favorite video game characters in a cozy coffee shop, or as vampires, or whatever. This is only even scratching the surface - there are Undertale AU's that have their own Undertale AU's that have their own Undertale AU's with videos on Youtube that have thousands of views. It's a wild rabbit hole.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
I actually fully agree with you here. I think it will be interesting to see what happens when Superman becomes public domain in 2034, and the Hobbit in 2043. It is rather unfortunate that copyright terms are so long that very little current pop culture will be available within our own lifetimes, though.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
I think some of the issue is that film as a medium is closer to a raw pretended reality than other storytelling mediums. In an opera, a young man might be portrayed by an adult woman, and in a Shakespearean play a woman might be played by a boy, but in a film we expect that the world being portrayed is fairly close to what is "actually happening" in the story, and when that expectation is challenged it might pull us out of the story.
But there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Musicals are an obvious example, where something completely unrealistic happens all the time. And some forms of Indian cinema might have breaks from reality that would be jarring to Western viewers, but completely natural within that cinema tradition.
That said, it's not hard to imagine an explanation like "fantasy world genetics are different from real world genetics" or something along those lines. That's obviously more of an issue for something like LotR, which is an imagined past for our world, but with enough epicycles you could pre-authorize any changes along these lines.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Exactly! And that's why it's way past time that John Henry be depicted as a trans pan differently abled bi-racial Latinx!
Oh, but John Henry is different? Why?
You seem to assume something I don't agree with. Sure, bring on every variant of John Henry under the sun! Give me a white Black Panther, or an Asian Othello - nothing is forbidden in storytelling. I have experienced multiple versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, and I would imagine if you asked a person 100 years ago about a version where he's a little person, they would have thought it strange, and yet I loved Peter Dinklage's portrayal of the character in the musical.
John Henry is not an exception to what I say. Even sacred figures like Buddha can sometimes wander across cultures and become a Catholic saint.
Changes need to be organic, not "how many boxes off the DEI bingo card can we tick?".
I'm curious what you think the process is for a change to be "organic".
Do you also think Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer, which recasts the orcs as the good guys, is inorganic?
Do you think the decision of Marvel's writers to take the originally red-haired Thor and turn him into a blonde character is "organic"?
Do you think that the manuscript traditions of the Mahabharata where the lower caste character of Karna is made more powerful is "organic"?
To me, there is no "organic" or "inorganic" retelling of a tale. There is only the storyteller's art, and what you make of the material you are given. If I was retelling the Greek myths, there are parts I would embellish and polish and things I would omit and they all feel perfectly natural situated in the particular time and place I am in. Saying any of the changes I would make are "inorganic" is to assume there's some way I "should" be telling the story, which I reject.
A Defense of Race Swapping in Adaptations
In the 13th or 14th century, an unknown author writing in Middle English decided to adapt the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This retelling cast him as the noble Sir Orfeo, a harper-king of England, chasing his wife, Heurodis, spirited away by the fairy king into the Celtic Otherworld. It's a fascinating adaptation, taking the Thracian demigod's journey to the Greek underworld, and putting it into terms more familiar to English readers of the time. But for me, the most interesting part of this adaptation is at the end. Instead of the tragic ending of the original myth, the story ends with Sir Orfeo and Heurodis happily reclaiming their place on the throne.
I feel like people rarely put the changing of stories in its larger context historically and contemporaneously. Stories are changed all the time, and it rarely goes remarked upon. Modern retellings of the Greek myths for kids often omit some of the more violent or sexual parts of the stories. A recent example of this can be seen in this segment of the video game Immortals Fenyx Rising, where Zeus recounts the birth of Aphrodite. While the original myth, involving the severing of Uranus' genitals, is hinted at in the dialogue, the game manages to make it about a pearl falling from an oyster. These kinds of santized retellings of stories are so widespread that they're barely commented upon by people nowadays, and they have a lineage going back at least to the likes of Thomas Bowlder's 1807 The Family Shakespeare, which included such changes as making Ophelia's suicide in Hamlet into an accidental drowning.
I have a strange relationship to the changing of stories in this way. I can recall being a kindergartner in my Elementary school's library, and finding myself drawn to the nonfiction section where a kid's version of the Greek myths awaited me. Much of my love for mythology grew from that initial exposure, even if I would only encounter the more adult themes of these myths later in life as I read translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I remember being amused while reading chapbooks from the 1600's , when I found a retelling of the story of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, though I also found it a bit odd that a Christian sermon was put into his mouth instead of his original Cynic philosophy.
I have a great respect for stories and the storytelling tradition. Stories help us understand the world and ourselves. They can convey important values, or, when written down, preserve the values of peoples and places far off in time. The people on the pages can become both alien and familiar to us, as we read about what they did and thought about so long ago. I find accounts of cross-cultural encounters like Laura Bohannan's Shakespeare in the Bush incredibly fascinating.
But I think our culture has a strange way of thinking about retellings. Many would consider "Sir Orfeo" in some way to be second rate - a mere retelling, and not a very good one, considering it removes one of the "most important" scenes of the whole myth: where Orpheus turns around, and loses Eurydice to Hades a second time.
But I don't share this view. While the musical Hadestown, another retelling of the same myth, might say:
See, someone's got to tell the tale
Whether or not it turns out well
Maybe it will turn out this time
On the road to Hell
On the railroad line
It's a sad song
[...]
We're gonna sing it anyway
I respect the unknown author of Sir Orfeo for refusing to bow to tradition. This isn't mere novelty for novelty's sake. This is something so very, very human. Seeing a tragedy, and turning it into a happy ending. I love this about us humans. That we see a tale, told for hundreds of years always with the same sad ending, and yet sometimes, we allow ourselves the indulgence of a happy version of the tale. See also Nahum Tate's 1681 retelling of King Lear with a happy ending.
Of course, a great deal of Shakespeare is just retelling stories that would have been well-known to his contemporaries, and of course even the oldest versions of myths we have from the likes of Pseudo-Apollodorus or Ovid or even Homer are not the originals. To me, the fact that we tell the same stories again and again, making changes with each teller is a beautiful thing.
And so I wander back to the topic of race swapping in adaptations. Why is it that when I hear about a 13th century Middle English author changing Orpheus from a Thracian to an Englishman, I feel nothing but delight? Why is it that when I hear about the Turkish trickster Nasreddin Hodja being depicted like this in far flung China it fills me with a strange awe at the unity of the human spirit?
I'm even a fan of changes made to a story for political reasons. I find beauty in Virgil's Aeneid, even if Virgil took some liberties with the existing Greek myths to find a place for Rome, and his opinions on Augustus in the book. Roman propaganda can be beautiful, in the hands of a skilled storyteller.
In the face of stories that have taken every possible form in thousands or hundreds of years of existence, there's something to me a little silly about insisting that Superman's Jimmy Olsen must always be a light-skinned redhead, or that Aragorn was, and can only ever be a white man. The story of Superman is only 85 years old. The story of Aragorn is less than 70 years old. If these characters endure, if your children's children are still telling their tales 1000 years from now, they will take many forms once they are as old as Orpheus is. Once these characters have passed through the hands of a thousand generations of storytellers and interpreters, who can say whether they will be the same. In fact, I daresay they will not be the same. If we could live to see these future takes on Superman and Aragorn, they might seem very strange to us indeed.
Even if I agreed that the decision of large corporations to raceswap well known characters was only made for cynical reasons, isn't that too human? A story that can only have one shape is a dead thing. Books preserve the words of a story, but until they are in the minds of readers, until they are imbued with meaning and given a new, alien shape, one which the author could scarcely have imagined, they are just a graveyard of ink and dead trees.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Freedom of movement refers to Palestinians within Gaza not being allowed to get to the West Bank (and vice verse), and within the West Bank being forced to go through Israeli military check points. That also is how the curfew is imposed, mostly within the West Bank since 2005.
Even so, just the blockade and the fact that Israel can cut off electricity and water are enough to call the de facto "sovereignty" of Gaza into question.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Gaza has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since 2007, Israel imposes curfews on Palestinians, Palestinians don't have freedom of movement, and Israel apparently has the power to turn off their electricity and water at will. How can Gaza be said to have sovereignty?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I've seen a few people wonder why some people support Palestine in this conflict. While videos like this one (which predates the current conflict) are undoubtedly propaganda, they do offer a window into the worldview of a person who supports Palestine.
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support. I condemn the killing of civilians by Hamas last weekend, but then I see United Nations OCHA data like this, where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period), mostly from air-launched explosions. I see people talking about supporting "the Jewish state’s justified but often brutal response", which so far includes blowing up a Palestinian house full of civilians with no warning, killing those inside, blowing up marketplaces and mosques, and attacking the Jabalia refugee camp.
Wikipedia claims that 40% of male Palestinians have spent some time in an Israeli prison. I hear about Israel demolishing 55,000 Palestinian structures as of 2022. I remember that Gaza had been blockaded by Egypt and Israel since 2005, despite Israel supposedly backing out of Gaza.
Even if every example of Israelis killing Palestinian civilians was collateral damage or accident, even if we assume that the cameras showing Israeli brutality always start rolling at the perfect moment to make it look like unnecessary brutality on their part, it's obvious to me that Palestine won't be able to grow under its current conditions of occupation. If the United States supports Israel, then Israel will prevail and Palestine will lose little by little every year. It will be a slow motion catastrophe, and there is nothing Palestine can do about it.
Is national, regional and global stability worth anything to the Palestinian people under such conditions? No wonder people are posting music videos in this thread of Palestinians with pipe dreams of Russia becoming a global super power again, and supporting Palestine to spite the United States. They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy. Even if history remembers you as a monster, they will remember you.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
All a statute of limitations does, conceptually, is move step 1 up to some more recent date, though. If we say that any claims older than, say, 100 years will not be recognized, then the new "foundation" of the current system of property ownership is just 100 years in the past. I think a statute of limitations can certainly be a procedurally just rule for a society to adopt, but that doesn't mean the outcomes that it produces will be substantially just.
Also, it's awfully convenient for a group in power to say, "Hey, we've gotta let bygones be bygones, alright? You wouldn't want endless vendettas and re-litigation of this whole thing every generation, would you? Good, good, I'm glad you're seeing reason, now go back to your hovel and eat your gruel."
Joe Studwell's How Asia Works makes a case that land reform (AKA "stealing" land from some people and giving it to others) was an important part of the transition to being a middle income country for many Asian countries. And we even have examples of land reform under the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, so the issue of land concentrating into a few hands and leading to issues in society is a well-trodden one. To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?
It has been a while since I've read John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, but I've been ruminating on his conception of property in that book. He says:
Though the earth, and all inferiour creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.
Basically, whenever you mix your labor with something out of nature, it becomes yours.
This conception was highly influential on the Founding Fathers of the United States, and it is easy to see the advantages of such a conception of private property for a brand new country. Sweeping aside the thorny issue of native Americans, if you have a vast wilderness of unclaimed territory, the idea of allowing citizens to go out, form a homestead somewhere and to recognize their claim on the land feels very intuitive and "fair."
Unfortunately, such an idealized conception of property ownership didn't actually exist in practice. Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow explores some of the things that happened in Appalachia over the history of the United States. Just within this microcosm, we see the way things often played out in practice, and it was far from the Lockean ideal.
It was not unusual for some rich landowner to lay claim to a bunch of land he had never even seen or set foot upon, and then to just sit on the claim without ever doing anything with it. Then squatters would move in, and make homes and farms on the land, before being discovered and kicked out.
It seems to me, if we take John Locke's account of property as our model, the squatters had a better moral claim to owning that land than the de jure owners in many cases. And yet again and again, we see governments recognizing the claims of absentee landlords over those of the people who had worked and improved the lands with their own two hands.
In many ways, property and its justification are core to establishing that society is "fair." So it is troubling to note a discrepancy this big between theory and practice so early in the country's history, at the very foundation of property ownership claims, poisoning everything downstream from them.
I think a toy example will help illustrate why this is such a big deal for the modern United States:
Imagine there's an island that has 10 heterosexual couples on it. This island is abundant in natural resources, and it has the following features:
- If 20 people work the land, it can produce a luxurious lifestyle for all 20 people.
- If 14 people work the land, it can produce a good (but not great) lifestyle for all 20 people.
- If four people work together, it is possible to trap two people in a 10 foot by 10 foot area of the island effectively forever.
Now, as we come into the island, 9 of the couples have come together and formed a gang. They claim that because their gang was the first to walk the circumference of the island, they have the best claim to owning the island and they will enforce their property claim against the 10th couple. They do not want the last couple collecting resources on the part of the island that had informally been "theirs" up until a few days ago, in which they had spent years building shelters and tools to improve their hunting and gathering.
The gang is going to imprison the couple in a 10'x10' part of the island unless they agree to recognize their ownership claim. Furthermore, while they're prepared to enjoy a merely good lifestyle for the rest of their lives, they tell the unfortunate couple that after they agree to the gang's ownership claim the gang would be willing to rent "their" part of the island back to them, as long as that couple gives them all a tribute that will take them down to a meager lifestyle, and take the gang up to a decadent lifestyle.
Left with no other choice, the unfortunate couple agrees to recognize the gang's ownership claim, and starts paying tribute.
Is the society on the island described above fair or just? I think most people's intuitions would be that it is not.
Now, imagine that several generations have passed. The islanders have expanded out onto several other islands, but the extra resources from the first island have resulted in a very uneven society. The descendants of the original gang own everything, and the descendants of the original unfortunate couple have never owned anything. They rent wherever they go, despite barely enjoying the fruits of their labor.
Did the passage of time, and inheritance of property down through the generations somehow make the society more fair and just? Would the descendants of the original unfortunate couple be wrong to want to overthrow their society and redistribute the land and other resources of society more fairly and justly?
As I see it, there are three distinct phases when it comes to thinking about property rights:
- The initial distribution of property at the establishment of a country.
- The inheritance of property up towards the present.
- The free exchange of property among people of the present generation.
It seems to me like a lot of people are happy to start at step 3 and call it a day when it comes to how they conceptualize property, and its just distribution through society. A worker who is forced to sell their labor in order to make money to purchase the necessities of life is not being exploited no matter how little they're getting paid, and no matter what happened in steps 1 and 2 to get them to the place where they needed to sell their labor in the first place.
For people who defend the current conception of property in the industrialized world, and who think that we should accept the idea of starting at step 3 and not worrying about 1 and 2, what is the justification?
I'm curious about where you draw the boundaries around "fascist." Are there any circumstances you would consider it acceptable to restrict freedom of movement of individuals or groups?
Would any of the following be acceptable circumstances to restrict freedoms, while qualifying as non-fascist:
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