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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Parsimonious explanation, the first Joker was supposed to be a middle finger, but it was too balanced and hit at the right time and people liked it. So they went back to the drawing board and made a musical.

Reminds me of something i read, i think it was by Ernst Junger, about how it is hard to make a truly honest anti-war film because any honest depiction of war will inevitably include a hint of what men love about it.

Interestingly I’ve heard the same thing from the other direction, that honest portrayals, the best portrayals, are inherently anti-war.

Probably both are true. As Robert E. Lee said, "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it."

I listened to an interview with I think a psychologist a few years back who argued what we diagnose as PTSD in soldiers is often really the loss of the close relationships and the intense bonds that develop. The feeling of having someone’s life in your hands and willingly putting yours in theirs.

Returning to the world involves a grieving process, he argued.

Returning to the world involves a grieving process, he argued.

That's something Bret Deveraux touched upon in his blog. Why didn't premodern soldiers have PTSD? While my take is that premodern warfare was more immediate and cathartic, he thinks it's three things:

  • ubiquity of experience: everyone would've had some experience with war back then, so you wouldn't lament the lost of military camaraderie
  • celebration of warfare: not "you shot ten Iraqis? You did what you had to", but "you speared ten fleeing Persians in the back? Fucking rad"
  • purification rituals: instead of praying to Jesus alone to find inner peace you had a legible ritual: if you walk into this temple as a warrior, make this offering, do this ritual, say these words, then you walk out as a farmer again and your life of warfare is washed clean and wrapped in the same bundle of oiled rags as your arms and armor.

He thinks that while bringing the first two back would be a regression, bringing back the third one might be a sensible option. Maybe he's right? Beatify some American soldier, build a shrine to him in the Black Hills, establish a pilgrimage to the shrine.

see https://acoup.blog/2020/04/24/fireside-friday-april-24-2020/ starting from

was there post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the ancient (or medieval) world? And I’m going to tilt at that particular question here in a fireside in part because the absence of evidence doesn’t quite make for a riveting collections post and arguments from silence must always be cautious.

This maybe isn't too surprising: the process of turning an average joe into a soldier is often a psychologically-grueling process that we don't give much attention to undoing when that person's time as a soldier is done. Soldiers often have trouble readjusting to civilian life, and often find solace in civilian organizations run by fellow veterans.

Parsimonious explanation, the first Joker was supposed to be a middle finger, but it was too balanced and hit at the right time and people liked it. So they went back to the drawing board and made a musical.

That would work except that I don't think it fits the first movie. The villain protagonist received too much empathy and the ending was too triumphant for that.

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