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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   35745 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Quite frankly, it seems to be such low hanging fruit, I'm really surprised I never saw anyone saying this about Trump, Bush, Cheney, Romney or any other undesirable before now.

I'm told by someone in that world that politicians, particularly Republicans, get specific media training on how to avoid making gestures that look like a Nazi salute (or can look like one with a cherry-picked angle). Elon, presumably, didn't.

I remember an e-mail forward, titled 'The unbearable likeness[sic] of being", that had pairs of images of Bush fils and Hitler in similar poses; I haven't been able to find it again, so I couldn't tell you if that gesture was included.

(There was also a similar forward, "The Man/Simian Candidate", which paired pictures of Mr Bush with chimpanzees; one website hosting it, upon receiving Strongly-Worded Letters from people offended on Mr Bush's behalf, posted a statement saying "We apologise for making such a comparison, and hope that the following will be considered sufficient restitution.", followed by a thank-you-for-your-donation letter from the Jane Goodall Institute.)

I remember the website www.bushorchimp.com (no longer up) which did the same thing - I don't know if the same people were responsible for the e-mail memes. The website also had to donate to a chimp conservation charity to placate internet ranters defending the honour of the chimps, but IIRC it was a US one.

Maybe that was what I was thinking of. (It was c. 20 years ago.)

i swear there was even a portmanteau 'chimpler' combining chimp and hitler but I tried to search this in google but couldn't find any references. maybe this was just in my head. the closest i could find was 'chimp bushitler' https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bushitler

Like comparisons with the Antichrist, attempts to frame people as Hitler along with unflattering stances seem to be as old as the subject matter himself.

It is new for the prestige media to engage in this kind of thing though, that's been the domain of kooks for my entire life. Until 2016, when the world stopped making sense.

The Bush-monkey comparisons made the double-standard with Obama even worse.

Oh, so you can compare the President you don't like to a monkey, but when I do it it's racist? Bit of an own-goal there, and one of the first hypocrisies that presaged my departure from the Democrats.

The reasoning on that was that there had been a long history of very racist comparisons between black people and non-human primates.

What I've noticed is a very inconsistent double standard on what the definition of "species" is in biology. Isn't it interesting how all the extinct races (like Homo luzonensis) get classed as proto-human variants while all the ones that survived to modernity are homo sapiens sapiens? This is even the case when the "non-human" great-apes like Homo neanderthalis were much more intelligent/advanced than some of the extant varieties of Homo sapiens. That taboo on calling people monkeys is clearly downstream of public awareness that the "academic" understanding of human taxonomy (and the out-of-Africa theory) are politically motivated and don't stand up to scrutiny.

What is wrong about the academic understanding of human taxonomy? Is there something false within the out-of-Africa theory?

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