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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   32844 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Have we discussed the live-action remake of 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs since it came out?

In an effort to drum up business my local theater is running a promotion that includes free movie tickets for spending money at local bars and restaurants. While it's not something I would've spent my own money on, I elected to use one of my free movie vouchers to see the new Snow White because I was curious, and wanted to form my own opinion of it.

I expect most readers of this thread have at least a passing familiarity with the various controversies surrounding this production and more knowledgeable people than I have already done the business and Culture-war narrative side of things to death. So I'm going to focus on the on-screen product.

As a movie Snow White is solidly "Mid". Not good, but not terrible. The writing, acting, and set-peices are all passable. The humor is bland and inoffensive, and the songs are mostly forgettable. Gal Godot may have the dramatic range of an Electric SUV on 5% charge, but "Sultry Femme Fatale" is well within that range, and she seems to be having fun vamping it up (As is often the case the "villain song" is one of the better ones). To Rachel Ziegler's credit she sings well and serves adequately in the role of "pretty princess" / "coquettish ingenue" coming across as substantially less "Girlbossey" than I had expected given her off-screen persona.

The movie wastes no time establishing it's left wing-wing politics. The opening song and dance number is essentially all about how wonderful life is when people give according to their ability and receive according to their need. The word-play between "fair" as in "light-skinned" or "pleasing to the eye" and "fair" as in "fair use" "fair trade" and a "fair contest" is a recurring leitmotif throughout the script and it gets established in this bit.

Because Disney princesses are not allowed to have a mother the good queen falls ill and dies at the end of the song which is when a wild Gal Godot appears. She is a beautiful noblewoman from a far-off land across the sea whose people, covet wealth, power, and beauty above all else, and have magical powers. The King (Snow White's dad) is naturally smitten and immediately marries Gal Godot presumably because she is wealthy, powerful, and looks like Gal Godot.

In her new position as Queen, Snow White's stepmother immediately begins to subtly corrupt the Realm and remake it in her own harder and more covetous image (think Pottersville versus Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life). In case you haven't picked up on it yet, Snow White's canonical origin story in this movie is about a virtuous and happy left-wing government being subverted and taken over from within by an evil Jewish woman through a combination of sex-appeal, blood magic, and propaganda.

We skip forward an indeterminate number of years, Snow White has been kept cloistered in the castle "because it is not safe". The evil queen Gal Godot has been sowing fear about a nebulous threat on the southern border as an excuse to get Snow White's Dad out of the picture and to crack down on dissent. (I wonder what that was intended as an allegory for?) Snow White catches a thief named Johnathan played by Handsome McStrongJaw raiding the Castle's pantry, and he informs her that life outside the castle walls is not all sunshine and adorable woodland creatures. Snow White's response is to inform the Queen. You see, if only the queen knew what was going on she would put a stop to it. Johnathan is arrested and put to death, but Snow White helps him escape the castle because this is a Disney movie and he is the designated love-interest.

Snow White is getting a bit too uppity and too "fair" for her own good so Gal Godot convinces the one black guy in the palace guard to take Snow White out to the woods and kill her by getting all up in the guard's personal space and offering him anything he wants. Black guy takes Snow White out to the woods to kill her, but he gets cold-feet and decides to tell Snow White about the whole murder plot because she was nice to him and asked him how his day was going.

Snow White flees into the enchanted wood where she meets the Seven AI-Generated Dwarves we are all familiar with from the 1937 original. After some hijinks and another musical number the Dwarves inform her that the enchanted wood is also home to Seven Bandits. A troupe of erstwhile actors who are plotting to overthrow Gal Godot and have recently been joined by our "prince of thieves" Johnathan. Snow White sets out to find them and a bunch of stuff happens without any real rhyme or reason. There is singing, there is dancing, there is peril, but none of it really effects the plot or evokes a feeling.

The proverbial "final battle" of the movie is Snow White and the Seven Bandits leading a protest march against Gal Godot that ends with the Townspeople and Palace Guards all drinking a pepsi turning on the queen and reinstating the socialist order from the opening musical number.

In conclusion, for what is otherwise a very bland and boring movie in the watching there seems to be a lot going on. And im curious to hear other people's thoughts on it.

I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...

A comment that I haven't seen brought up much anywhere is that the Snow White remake is a musical. Most Disney movies have lots of songs, but I wouldn't call, say, Aladdin a musical in the way the new Snow White is. It feels like the screen version of decent, not great, stage adaptation of the story.

Also tonally inconsistent, the writers couldn't come to terms with what degree they were playing it straight, comedic, deconstructing, etc. "Princess Problems" reminded me of something like Galavant that was intended as both send-up of tropes and an appreciative homage to the genre, but that tone wasn't consistent. The closing clap and stomp felt out of date but maybe that's my own tiredness with Mumford being in the past.

The queen's death? They just did that in Wish! Enough with the people getting sucked into magic mirrors.

I find it interesting that it took more than 24 hours for @HereAndGone to point out that 1937 movie is in not original but is based on Grimme brothers tale. The Grimme version is, in turn, not original, it is based on German folk tales and similar tales have been circulating in many European nations. It is an example of disneyification of culture, let's borrow something from public domain and make it copyrighted and lobby to make the copyright as restrictive as possible.

Anyway, since it is a folk tale, it is interesting to point out that in this supposedly "patriarchy", the folk recognized the power and agency of women with men having distinctly secondary roles in the story. And also that the folk recognized the bad effect of UV light exposure on skin beauty (let's hope that Snow White ate a lot of fish not to have vitamin D deficiency) with paleness of the skin of Snow White the crucial component of the plot.

I find it interesting that it took more than 24 hours for @HereAndGone to point out that 1937 movie is in not original but is based on Grimme brothers tale.

I don't know about everyone else, but I didn't mention that fact because I thought is was already well-known, and (unlike you) didn't have any arguments that relied on it. I wouldn't read anything more into it.

One thing all the drama teaches me is that a less strict version of the one-drop rule is still very much real in American society.

Rachel Zegler, even though she is probably about 3/4ths European genetically, is viewed as a brown woman both by the left and the right.

Obama, even though he is 1/2 European genetically, is almost universally viewed as a black man both by the left and the right.

It really is sort of strange if you think about it.

To be fair, the fact that Zegler probably identifies as brown and Obama at least publicly tends to identify as black muddies the waters a bit. It's not just how American society defines people, it's also how they define themselves.

And to be extra fair, it's not like Obama ever had a real choice about publicly identifying himself as black. Realistically, given how American society views race, he never would have been able to pass himself off as a white man. 99% of Americans look at him and immediately think "that's a black guy", they don't think "that's a half white, half black guy".

Personally, I see Zegler as essentially racially white European. However, she's obviously not white enough for Snow White. The precise phenotype is important in this case. The apparent attempt to prove that actually the phenotype doesn't matter appears to have backfired on Disney. If Zegler had enough talent and charisma maybe it could of worked out.

Apparently, 19th-century Americans could tell mulattos, quadroons and octoroons apart by sight.

Apparently, 19th-century Americans could tell mulattos, quadroons and octoroons apart by sight.

Some of them thought they could, but the concept of "passing" goes back at least that far, so in fact most of them could not.

Conclusion does not follow from premise here. That's still consistent with most people being able to tell most of the time.

Rachel Zegler, even though she is probably about 3/4ths European genetically, is viewed as a brown woman both by the left and the right.

Isn't this the case for pretty much all Hispanics?

American racial categories have never made much sense to me, but taking 'Hispanic' as roughly coterminous with 'South and Central American', the vast majority of Hispanics are in fact significantly European in descent. I understand most South Americans to be mixtures of European and indigenous American, with the exact proportion changing from place to place and class to class; in general, the higher the social class the more European descent, but there are plenty of exceptions. There are also a lot of South Americans with partial or majority African descent, but the fact that we use terms like 'Afro-Hispanic' or 'black' for them suggests that we consider them slightly differently?

It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.

(Technically you could argue that Brazilians aren't Hispanic at all - sometimes I see 'Hispanic' as synonym for 'Hispanophone', and Brazilians are Lusophone - but American racial categories don't have a separate section for Brazilians. In general I get the sense that in America, Brazilians are lumped in with Hispanics, and Spanish people are not, even though in the literal sense Brazilians are not related to Hispania and the Spanish should be the central example.)

Anyway, Zegler is majority-European-descent, but isn't that quite common among Hispanics? Most Mexicans are mestizos, i.e. of partial but significant European descent, and then roughly a third of Mexicans are just European. I think that even white Mexicans would be considered 'Hispanic' in the United States? Or am I mistaken?

It does confuse me a little - as I understand it, all Brazilians, say, are Hispanic, even though they are ethnically diverse and include white, black, indigenous, and mixed-race people.

"Officially, Brazilians are not considered Hispanic or Latino because the federal government’s definition applies only to those of “Spanish culture or origin.” In most cases, people who report their Hispanic or Latino ethnicity as Brazilian in Census Bureau surveys are later recategorized – or “back coded” – as not Hispanic or Latino. The same is true for people with origins in Belize, the Philippines and Portugal. An error in how the Census Bureau processed data from a 2020 national survey omitted some of this coding and provided a rare window into how Brazilians (and other groups) living in the U.S. view their identity. In 2020, at least 416,000 Brazilians — more than two-thirds of Brazilians in the U.S. — described themselves as Hispanic or Latino on the ACS and were mistakenly counted that way. Only 14,000 Brazilians were counted as Hispanic in 2019, and 16,000 were in 2021. The large number of Brazilians who self-identified as Hispanic or Latino highlights how their view of their own identity does not necessarily align with official government definitions. It also underscores that being Hispanic or Latino means different things to different people."

That's about as organised and consistent as I expect racial identification in the Americas to be!

Many American government forms needlessly ask you for your race. Some have two categories of "white and Hispanic" and "white (not Hispanic)". Other forms have a yes or no Hispanic portion and a separate racial section. That is strictly speaking more correct since Hispanic is not a race. A Mexican whose ancestors immigrated from Japan are Hispanic and Asian.

According to the census bureau, Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, and is orthogonal to race. You can be a white Hispanic, a black Hispanic, Asian Hispanic, etc. So yes, Zegler is a white Hispanic.

But is she a Snow White Hispanic, that is the question?(!)

If they wanted that they would have used Ana-Taylor Joy. She white enough to glow.

Too old now.

True. Maybe in 10 years she can play the Queen.

Ana-Taylor Joy

I like the look of that one. Very unique face.

More of a Sandy Tan Hispanic, if you ask me.

The census bureau categories don't have great overlap with how people behave in real life, though, do they? For instance, the census categories include Middle Easterners as white.

And to be extra fair, it's not like Obama ever had a real choice about publicly identifying himself as black. Realistically, given how American society views race, he never would have been able to pass himself off as a white man. 99% of Americans look at him and immediately think "that's a black guy", they don't think "that's a half white, half black guy".

My vague recollection and also this bit by Trevor Noah is that Obama was referred to more often as mixed-race early in his campaign before he was properly accepted by the wider black community. It was certainly also a conscious decision on his part to lean into it, but not one he made as early as say Kamala Harris, who chose to attend an HBCU (the story told among Asian-Americans being that she was too dumb to get into a better school and realized that she could only achieve success by black standards and not Asian ones).

the story told among Asian-Americans being that she was too dumb to get into a better school and realized that she could only achieve success by black standards and not Asian ones

Can you give examples of Asian-Americans saying this?

Well, me for one, but mostly just anecdotes from my disproportionately male and either apolitical or tech right adjacent Indian-American peers. You can see similar opinions being downvoted in reddit threads like this one.

I checked the downvoted comments, but I couldn't find one saying this.

What they say there and in other threads is that Kamala downplayed her Indian identity, and it's a common attack by her opponents of any background that she's not very smart, but I've only heard the complete thought "she went to Howard and played up her blackness because she was dumb" in person.

There's an issue with HBCUs not getting higher performing black students. Those people go to regular colleges. The ones who can't settle for HBCUs.

There's an issue with HBCUs not getting higher performing black students. Those people go to regular colleges. The ones who can't settle for HBCUs.

This is a logical consequence of competing offers between schools optimizing for academics and schools optimizing for culture, but what evidence is there that it rises to the severity of "an issue?"

what evidence is there that it rises to the severity of "an issue?"

None at all, obviously. Was this a serious request for "evidence" of common speech terms being applicable?

None at all, obviously. Was this a serious request for "evidence" of common speech terms being applicable?

Yes, obviously. There's a difference between "Logically, one would expect this trade-off to exist" and "This trade-off exists, and it has notable consequences."

One thing all the drama teaches me is that a less strict version of the one-drop rule is still very much real in American society.

It's not the "one drop" rule if it isn't strict. That strictness is the defining characteristic of the "one drop" rule. It should not be surprising that percentage ancestry ("blood quantum") matters.

Rachel Zegler, even though she is probably about 3/4ths European genetically, is viewed as a brown woman both by the left and the right.

Mostly because she promotes herself that way. Zegler could have certainly downplayed her Colombian ancestry.

Obama, even though he is 1/2 European genetically, is almost universally viewed as a black man both by the left and the right.

The average African-American is only about 65% sub-Saharan African ancestry, and this figure varies considerably; Obama is not far off at all.

The average African-American is only about 65% sub-Saharan African ancestry

From my understanding it’s actually ~80%, going off this chart. (source)

It's not the "one drop" rule if it isn't strict. That strictness is the defining characteristic of the "one drop" rule.

See also: This Black woman's bone density scan results list her ethnicity as 'white.' Why that's a problem. I looked at the picture at the top of that article and went "...really??"

Mostly because she promotes herself that way. Zegler could have certainly downplayed her Colombian ancestry.

If you want a counter-example, look at Anya Taylor-Joy who despite being a double minority (Ayylmao-Latina) mostly just bills herself as white.

isn't she only latina on paper? Her dad is argentinian, but he's half scottish half english. Her mother is from zambia, but she's half english half spanish. So she's maybe a quarter spanish, the european sort. That's why she doesn't go for latina roles despite speaking spanish and growing up in a spanish country, doesn't want to risk the woke furiosa. Funny to think she's only American because her parents happened to be passing through though. If the birthright citizenship stuff gets undone she'd no longer be a citizen.

If the birthright citizenship stuff gets undone she'd no longer be a citizen.

How? Getting rid of jus soli is next to impossible in USA, and retroactively stripping citizenship is, well, even closer.

My favorite type of American critic: the carpetbagger

On the contrary, the HBD-curious faction of the right has a pretty sophisticated understanding of how to categorize people of various ancestries; many are bringing back old, but at one point widely used, terms like castiza, quadroon, mulatto, etc. Such people would see Zegler not as “brown” in some absolute sense, but rather as simply too brown to play a character named after how pale she’s supposed to be.

We can quibble about how “European” she is — although she apparently describes her paternal ancestry as “Polish”, “Zegler” doesn’t sound like a Polish surname to me, but rather like an Ashkenazi surname — but if she’d self-identified as basically white from an early age, and not made a big deal out of her partial Amerindian/Latino ancestry, I think most people would probably look at her, hear the name “Rachel Zegler” and think, “Yeah, that’s white enough for me.” If I knew nothing about her and you showed me a picture of her, I could imagine being persuaded that she’s Cypriot or Lebanese or something like that, which I would consider at least contingently white.

Obama is a tougher case because, as you note, people with African history have been set apart, legally, culturally, and otherwise, for so long in this country that Americans do still have a pretty keen eye for identifying who’s “black” and who isn’t. Obama’s not light enough to pass for “ethnically ambiguous”, let alone “white”, even though his level of European admixture is probably roughly the same as that of someone like, say, Rashida Jones, who is far more white- or -white-adjacent-passing.

That being said, Obama was not raised as black, did not have any connection or interaction at all with black culture until college (there were few black people in Hawaii, and none at all in Indonesia), and still decided that he was going to lean into his black identity. If he’d never gone to Occidental, never fallen in with black culture, and kept going by “Barry Obama”, I don’t think people would be very hung up on his African ancestry. He’d just be seen as some sort of “mixed” and people wouldn’t dwell on the specifics.

Zegler is a form of the common surname Ziegler, coming from German "Ziegel" (brick) and typically meaning "brickmaker"; it could be Jewish, but such surnames relating to common unskilled jobs were more common among ethnic Germans.

I recognized it as definitely Germanic in origin, but assumed it came to us in this case via Yiddish.

I just think the original story's random and uninteresting.

Queen becomes jealous of princess. Tries to murder her. Fails. Queen tricks princess into eating poison apple. Princess falls into coma. Queen is chased up cliff and then falls to death due to lightning strike (lol). Prince stumbles upon comatose princess and kisses her, awakening her from her coma. The end.

Throw a magic mirror and seven dwarfs in there because why not.

I simply don't care. The general audience probably doesn't either. Not sure why the remake was greenlit.

It is a fairy tale, especially the more sanitised version of the Brothers Grimm version. There are several what I guess we'd call tropes which resonate with people familiar with how such stories go: the Wicked Stepparent, for example (though some stories are also about neglectful or abusive parents - think about Hansel and Gretel and their own parents just abandon them in the woods). Even today, this is a live topic so the idea that the second wife of the king would not have been loving to the stepchild is exactly what everyone would assume.

Then there is the question of beauty, which ties in with both questions of power and maturity. After all, the queen is technically only ruling as regent until Snow White, the legitimate heiress to the throne, comes of age. Snow White becoming old enough to be esteemed beautiful as a sexual rival indicated the end of, or at least a threat to, the queen's power. Having her disappear in the forest on a hunting accident is deniable enough and also allows the story to permit Snow White to survive and grow up. Look at the Princes in the Tower for what happens to inconvenient obstacles in the way of an ambitious claimant to the throne.

Snow White, in the Grimm fairy tale version, grows up with the dwarves until the evil queen manages to catch up with her, and has three attempts at killing her. The dwarves foil the first two, but the third - the poisoned apple - works. The prince finds the crystal coffin in the woods with this beautiful maiden inside and demands to bring it back with him (this is creepier/stalker behaviour unlike the cartoon where they meet when she's alive and develop a first attempt at a relationship, so Zegler got that wrong). It's not true love's kiss that wakes her up, it's when the coffin is jolted and this knocks the poisoned piece of apple out of her throat.

The wedding is planned to go ahead, the evil queen finds out and when she arrives there discovers the bride is Snow White. She tries to kill her again, and the prince punishes her by forcing her to dance in red-hot iron slippers until she is dead. Then the happily ever after happens.

Everyone knows how the story should go: the wicked are punished, the good may suffer but they get their reward in the end. It also brings in the notion of the Golden Age (before the evil queen ruled) and a return to that, with the rightful heiress (Snow White) who knows the lot of the ordinary folk (because she lived in the forest with the dwarves as a humble person) restored to her rightful place (the bride of the prince) and now the rightful rule will be established again and Snow White will be a better queen. EDIT: Though dwarves in folklore are not the cute version of the Disney cartoon, nor are they humans of short stature. They are sort of nature spirits (which is why they live in the forest and work in the mountains in the story), and Snow White becoming aligned with them is one form of magic against the magic of the evil queen. So there is another thread there of the rightful queen (Snow White) taming the spirits of the woods and mountains and bringing them into alliance with the humans in the kingdom so they are less malign and malicious.

So yeah, there's room to update the 1937 cartoon, but changing the prince to a bandit leader misses the point: this is about monarchy, not some kind of "head of state democratically elected by the people". But in the end, it's a fairy tale about a princess and the rewards she gets for being good and suffering at the hands of the wicked, so it doesn't have to be too deep. It's for little girls, who may or may not still want to dress up as princesses and play at that today.

Isn't there also a version where it takes the prince literally raping her to wake her up? Or am I confusing it with Sleeping Beauty?

That one I think is Sleeping Beauty; she gets pregnant with twins and the child (or children) suckling at her finger so the splinter that caused her to fall asleep is sucked out is what rouses her out of the slumber. Rapunzel also gets pregnant by her prince, but that was more consensual. After the witch causes him to fall off the tower into a patch of briars which poke his eyes out, he eventually meets Rapunzel wandering in the wilderness with her twin children and her tears restore his sight.

Folktales were never shy about the grim parts of life. That's why Zegler saying the prince is a creepy stalker might apply to the original stories, but since she's talking about the cartoon where the Disney story made sure to have them meet while Snow White was still alive, that's not applicable.

I know Neil Gaiman is now Problematic, but he wrote a version of the story where the queen stepmother is the heroine and Snow White the villainess, and it works too; the idea of a girl with skin white as snow and lips red as blood can be creepy and horrific as well as unearthly beauty: Snow, Glass, Apples.

think about Hansel and Gretel and their own parents just abandon them in the woods

Modern retellings make it a wicked step mother who abandons Hansel and Gretel in the woods.

Actually that was a revision by the Grimm brothers. It enhances the story, because children back then (and now) were often put under the care of people who weren't their parents and it is good to learn early that just because someone calls themself your parent doesn't mean they love you like your parents are supposed to.

That is because it doesn't resonate with you. The story does resonate for young, attractive women. Young attractive women face a lot of bitterness and resentment from older, less attractive women. The story is effectively a warning to young women and a lesson for them. If you are being backstabbed by other women, withdraw from social games and wait until you snag a high quality man.

It also teaches be humble, be kind to those around you etc even if you are an attractive women. Don't let that attractiveness turn you into a monster.

To add to this, have some similar stories from other countries:

From Scotland, Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree, in which an oddly-named queen decides to kill her equally oddly-named daughter after a magic fish tells her that her daughter now surpasses her in beauty. Unusually for these sorts of stories, the king/father is not totally useless, and he fakes the daughter's death while also secretly shipping her off to marry a foreign prince. This lie holds for a while, but eventually the queen goes back to the magic fish to verify that she's now the most beautiful woman alive, the fish blabs the truth, and she goes off to the foreign prince's castle with murderous intent, and after a number of shenanigans gets tricked into drinking her own poison.

From Italy, Bella Venezia, in which a female innkeeper constantly asks customers to agree that she's the most beautiful woman in the world, until one day they start saying her daughter is more beautiful, so she locks her daughter away, but she escapes and ends up keeping house for a gang of thieves. All's good until one of the thieves visits the inn and blabs, and then the mom hires a witch to kill the daughter, and things proceed as in Snow White.

From Armenia, Nourie Hadig, in which a rich man's wife regularly asks the moon who's most beautiful, until one day it names her daughter, and she asks her husband to kill her. Less competent than the Scottish king above, the Armenian rich man fakes his daughter's death but abandons her in the forest to fend for herself. Then she wanders into a gender-swapped Sleeping Beauty situation, except she has to cook and clean for the sleeping prince for seven years before he'll wake up, and then when he does some other chick tries to steal credit, but he sees the truth at the last minute and marries the heroine. Meanwhile, the mother had soon learned from the moon that her daughter was alive, and had spent the seven years unsuccessfully hunting for her, but after the marriage the moon starts referring to her as "the princess of (location)", thus giving her away. So then the mother makes an enchanted ring that puts the wearer in a coma, and persuades the daughter to wear it, and this works for a while but eventually someone tries to steal it, she wakes up, and the mother dies of rage-induced apoplexy.

I think you're wrong and that we are precisely in a time where a good mythic story about the unique role, power and duty of women to others and themselves could resonate with a lot of people. I don't think Barbie was just meme fodder.

In my view the remake is empty and boring precisely because it attempts to be subversive instead of trying to properly engage with the themes of the tale.

Making it about power politics instead of the good and evil sides of femininity through some dime store play on the word "fair" is so tiresomely post-modern that I'm falling asleep just thinking about it.

The original movie is also like 50 minutes. Its simple by necessity. The film is iconic and carries the nostalgia factor for a remake because of its excellent animation for the time, and the excellent writing, voicing, and particularly singing/songwriting.

This film's biggest problem is it couldn't pull in any of that. A jealous aging woman is a tale as old as time. You don't need much plot development to get to that point if that is the motivation driving our villain. AND this is a villain-driven movie. She has the agency for most of the movie, and since her motivation is clear, the movie can proceed at pace. And that speedy pace ends with the downfall of a villain. So its simple tight plot wrapped up in singing and animation.

You can do this type of reductionist deconstruction with every story.

As a counter argument: Using the 'correct' view, good stories are about the journey. Not the Shyamalanaman plot twist, clever subversion of tropes or badass value shifts.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by these short term moments, designed to give you an emotional high, and lose focus on what's actually good when you're born into what's effectively a vortex dragging your brain towards this sort of short term stimuli on an ever-accelerating repeat. But we should be able to spot it.

This vortex afflicts both the consumer and creator. As can be seen, for example with projects like Star Trek. One of the big problems with new Star Trek, to kick that dead horse, is the narrow scope of the overarching narrative. It's not about a transcendent view of humanity, that existed in the older versions. It's about... Brexit? Immigration? Racism? It loses sight of what makes the 'journey' of watching Star Trek and being immersed in that universe feel good. None of the bells and whistles of the new era matter since the journey you have to take to enjoy them involves wrapping yourself in some sort of post-progressive pessimism where humanity is still constantly tripping over itself.

By the same token, categorizing fairy tales by their plot elements is just... For a lack of a better term: Not getting it.

You don't really need a plot twist at the end of a story with a simple moral message. And whilst the OG versions of these fairy tales often had a quite a... 'convoluted' message, they lived on to serve a different purpose. In short: These movies should be wrapping the viewer in the warm embrace of a loved one that's just sat down next to them on a sofa with a grandfather clock rhythmically ticking in the background. Ready to soothingly tell them a story from memory. Instead the movie is contextualized in political feces before it's even released.

The dwarves are there to demonstrate that, as a fair maiden, she has the power & duty to civilize the uncultured. She makes them wash their hands.

Based.

Those dirty fuckers.

Thanks for actually addressing the object level contents rather than the 3rd degree "so-and-so got mad because they criticized such-and-such over their comments about why the movie flopped".

I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...

There was always a far dose of noblesse oblige in the woke socialists. "From each according to his ability" is a moral duty rooted in privilege. They both demand awareness of ones station (modern: privilege) and to use it nobly (modern: wokely, towards equity, etc..).

Your review has made me want to watch this now … no really.

Please review more film.

I have noticed that for a site centered on the Culture War, we hardly ever actually discuss cultural works.

I've been following the commentary around this movie in a desultory way for the past couple of years. So far it seems like it's doing very sluggish opening business, and because it's been delayed so long and gone through so much re-writes/add in CGI, the budget has ballooned and Disney is allegedly facing another box office bomb.

I think the main problem was Zegler shooting her mouth off. She's very young and would have been even younger when the movie originally went into production, but trash talking the original cartoon, claiming the central romance is creepy stalker and Snow White Don't Need No Man, and joking about the main male lead being written out and edited out completely, as well as "now 'who is the fairest of them all?' means 'being powerful and ruling fairly and not needing no man'" does not sell the movie to families wanting a traditional Disney movie they can bring their kids to.

Updating something from 1937 isn't impossible or a bad thing, but they should have put a muzzle on Zegler. Add in the delays and the unforced errors about replacing the Seven Dwarves with the Seven Persons Experiencing Unhousedness (who now turn out to be the merry band of thieves in the forest led by the prince who is no longer a prince but a bandit chief this time round) and then having to bring back the dwarves with poor-looking CGI, and you get a mess. EDIT: I also heard that the climactic battle is anti-climactic? Originally it was supposed to be Snow White and Evil Queen going toe-to-toe, but now she just falls off a cliff or something?

To my own eyes, Snow White's costume looked terribly cheap - for a big budget movie, where did the money go? So too late, too pulled about, and it's just a rehash of the cartoon so parents will probably wait for it to turn up on the streaming service instead of spending the money for a cinema trip which is increasingly expensive.

Originally it was supposed to be Snow White and Evil Queen going toe-to-toe, but now she just falls off a cliff or something?

In the 1937 version, it's a bolt of lightning that precipitates her fall off a cliff. So this is pretty standard.

but they should have put a muzzle on Zegler

It's funny how the right played right into this. Hollywood made a dud and when the ship starts to sink the rats turned on each other and found a scapegoat. Her idiotic comments, no matter how daft, were not at fault.

In the 1937 version, it's a bolt of lightning that precipitates her fall off a cliff. So this is pretty standard.

The thing is, that actually has some symbolic meaning beyond the convenience of a clean death. The Queen's schemes of immortal beauty are cut short by a sudden fateful death, there's some depth to it, no pun intended.

But with the way the plot is changed, that doesn't actually make any sense anymore, except as a reference to the original.

Still, in the original tale, the queen dies by being forced by the Prince to dance to death in red hot iron slippers. Which makes a lot more symbolic sense, but I can understand how it's not children's cartoon material.

in the original tale, the queen dies by being forced by the Prince to dance to death in red hot iron slippers. Which makes a lot more symbolic sense, but I can understand how it's not children's cartoon material.

I think it should be, and hold with Tolkien that the problem with modern fairy stories is that they're too sanitized. The danger and horror are part of the point and kids want their horizons expanded that way. They'll find it where they can get it.

Indeed.

It's funny how the right played right into this.

What do you mean? Studios have been blaming istophobic comments from muh toxic fandom, regardless of how people were actually behaving for the better part of the decade now.

Updating something from 1937 isn't impossible or a bad thing, but they should have put a muzzle on Zegler. Add in the delays and the unforced errors about replacing the Seven Dwarves with the Seven Persons Experiencing Unhousedness (who now turn out to be the merry band of thieves in the forest led by the prince who is no longer a prince but a bandit chief this time round) and then having to bring back the dwarves with poor-looking CGI, and you get a mess. EDIT: I also heard that the climactic battle is anti-climactic? Originally it was supposed to be Snow White and Evil Queen going toe-to-toe, but now she just falls off a cliff or something?

Seems like the main problem then was on the production side at Disney and Zegler was mostly just mirroring their energy. The ambivalence-at-best towards the source material seems to come from the top.

I don't think her inability to shut her mouth is good - why would you bring in Palestine on what's an already fraught campaign? - but Disney made multiple inexplicable decisions that not only apparently harmed the movie but ballooned the budget to the point it was far less likely to make its money back even had the changes worked. And now they're leaking that Zegler's big mouth put them in this mess to shift the blame.

Disney has a major problem where it is unwilling or unable to constrain budgets on productions.

I think midlevel execs get an ego boost from writing big cheques. It makes them feel important and powerful.

My theory is that it's fear of commitment. They're delaying every single production decision to the last minute because technology now allows them to and they're afraid that the audience context will change at the last minute and sabotage any choice. And execs are too cowardly to take bets, so everything must be CGI and reshoots galore, which means ballooning budgets.

Ironically, this particular movie (on track to be the biggest bomb ever) proves them right, the bad buzz around the dwarves most likely made them go for CGI counterparts, but the political landscape changed so fast and so unpredictably that the entire premise of the movie is a hopelessly outdated tale of girlbossing coming out on the tail end of a Kamalastrophe. Wicked made money, why didn't his work?!

The world is indeed changing too fast for execs to make the right choices. But as anybody with good artistic sense knows this calls not for indecision and fingerpointing, but long term vision and decisive action, the supply of which is nonexistent in Hollywood at the moment.

This will probably continue until we get new new Hollywood figures. The next Lucas might already be around in the shadows.

My theory is that it's fear of commitment. They're delaying every single production decision to the last minute because technology now allows them to and they're afraid that the audience context will change at the last minute and sabotage any choice. And execs are too cowardly to take bets, so everything must be CGI and reshoots galore, which means ballooning budgets.

Part of it clearly seems to have been COVID breaking something because it's been significantly worse since.

But I don't think it's a coincidence that Marvel, which is notorious for fiddling, fired Victoria Alonso as the sacrificial lamb. And one of the complaints about her? She was infamous for pushing animators to their breaking point and making late changes.

Starting on Reddit, followed by a series of stories published across the internet, visual effects artists began to loudly complain about Marvel’s demanding post-production schedules. Complaints ranged from unrelenting overtime to chronic understaffing to the inability to avoid delivering substandard work due to constantly changing deadlines. Some singled out Alonso as a “kingmaker” who would blacklist artists who have “pissed her off in any way.”

One visual effects artist recently told Variety that the biggest issue for them was Marvel’s inability to provide clear guidelines.

“The show I was on really struggled because it was an established character whose powers they were reconceiving for the MCU,” the artist said on the condition of anonymity. Most complaints, they said, came down to one refrain: “Marvel doesn’t figure shit out beforehand.”

They were already notorious for marginalizing directors Maybe COVID revealed to them just how far they could go with it and they hit a Lucas-level of hubris about the tech. After all, who suffers from this indecisiveness except animators who need to work with Disney anyway?

I find this far more sympathetic with Marvel, which had to do something even comics struggled with before doubling its output.

There's little reason for this indecisiveness around Snow White.

Originally it was supposed to be Snow White and Evil Queen going toe-to-toe, but now she just falls off a cliff or something?

I mean, that style of villain death is a Disney classic.

The classic Disney villain death is for the bad guy to fall off a cliff after getting into a final fight with the hero.

It's the best of both worlds; you get to see the hero defeat the villain in a climactic battle, the hero gets to show how good and noble he is by sparing the villain's life, then the villain dies anyway in a way that keeps the hero morally pure.

See Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, etc.

I was wondering if you were going to link to that Kulak piece as I read your comment. I haven’t been able to unsee that trope and ponder its meaning in each case I see it ever since reading it.

This is the first time I've seen it and it is a baffling article.

In particular it seems to build a case entirely from an imagined literary genre? He makes this appeal:

You must actually READ primary texts written before 1900 like the Epics of Homer, the History of Rome, the Sagas of the Vikings, the Romances of the Medieval Knights, the Plays of Elizabethan England, the novels and memoirs of the 18th and 19th century...

But the fact there is that if you do read those texts, they completely undermine his primary case, which is a plea for more retributive violence, even vigilante violence. If you read, say, Le Morte d'Arthur, you will notice regular and conspicuous displays of mercy to defeated enemies, and unnecessary bloodshed is portrayed as a major threat. Arthur and Pellinore become trusted friends and allies, for instance, and the fact that Pellinore killed King Lot, rather than spare him as he ought to, becomes one of the causes of his eventual death. Sir Gareth defeats several knights in a row, all of whom are acting as vicious bandits, and spares them (at a lady's request, no less) and they come to Arthur's court and are forgiven. When characters choose bloodshed, this is usually bad - the tragedy ends with Arthur's determination to kill Mordred, rather than allow him to flee, bringing his own doom upon him.

The trope of defeating someone and then forgiving them and becoming friends is extremely common in pre-modern literature. Half of Robin Hood's merry men are people that Robin defeated, and then extended a hand to in friendship, saying "you are a man after my own heart!"

Heck, this happens biblically: consider David's repeated and conspicuous refusal to harm his enemy Saul, even when Saul is in his power.

What about classical antiquity? Here I'd note something they have in common with the Viking sagas, which is deep concern about the possibility of blood feuds, and the demand that violence ought to be limited and proportional in order to avoid them. Destroying enemies in a temper is bad. The Aeneid ends with the defeated Turnus asking for mercy, or failing that, to have his body returned to his people for burial rites, and Aeneas' furious refusal to do this and act of retribution is presented as a bad thing, or as a moral failing. Likewise the way the Iliad treats Achilles' disrespect of Hector's body. Neither the Aeneid nor the Iliad are pacifist works that believe that violence is always bad, but they are written with an awareness of the dangers of vengeance. The same is true of the sagas.

What's the last one he cites? Elizabethan England? Suffice to say that I do not think the people who wrote this endorsed bloody-minded retribution.

Now, sure, in all of those cases there is a specific local context - David doesn't hurt Saul because he's God's anointed, and so on. All the examples are a bit more complicated. Everything always is.

Likewise there are acts of retribution, and those acts also have context - Odysseus kills all the suitors, not because they're his enemies in some general way, but because they have specifically violated the laws of hospitality, which are sacred, and even then the way Homer describes the slaughter does not seem to be one that we are intended to cheer for. In the Odyssey itself the act is presented as something somewhat transgressive. The slaughter itself is an extended sequence in which the suitors beg for mercy, try to rally a desperate defence, and so on; there is something terrible about it. And then in the poem the families of the suitors demand justice afterwards and Odysseus must reconcile with them, in book 24. Antinous' father gets up and makes a moving speech about his sorrow, and the suitors' families plan to attack. The Odyssey actually ends with Athena intervening and telling Odysseus to stop being violent lest he incur the gods' anger: "men of Ithaca, cease this dreadful war, and settle the matter at once without further bloodshed... Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, stop this warful strife, or Zeus will be angry with you."

Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.

Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.

Kulak has made LARPing a revolutionary his financial income. Back in the Canadian trucker protests he made repeated calls to resistance and violence and called it a moral failing for any man not to risk death or hospitalization for the righteous cause... while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?

Alas, any cause that warrants risking hospitalization to prove virtue is worth leaving a hospital that you might be returned to.

Kulak is a modern day version of the man with their rocking chair by the fire who valorizes the virtue of fighting and glory of dying young to defend hearth and home.

while begging exception since he was already in a hospital for a medical procedure. Gotta look out for you own health first, right?

To be fair he almost lost an arm and it was touch and go re: whether he'd ever get full use of his hand again, or even sensation. I've seen the scars (and the arm while it was healing) and they're wild. Took several surgeries. FWIW he also accomplished this injury while doing something badass, but I've said enough.

"Driving around the country" is just Tuesday man -- he reminds me of myself when I was his age in some ways, but if he wants to be badass he needs to do better than "I crashed my bike" (also "Tuesday" for a lot of guys I used to know) in my books.

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Victory in violence always demands the sacrifice of your body. You might hope to get away without injury, but you never expect it. People of violence understand this and accept it, or lose. So I am going to need more than assurances he did something badass if you want to change my mind that that incident didn't cement his status as a risible caricature.

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Why is that fair to him? He set the standard he judged others by, and he can be judged by it in turn. 'Fair' is not 'nice,' it is impartiality.

Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?

Or did he abstain on grounds of the consequence of bodily harm?

When someone makes moral judgements and accusations of cowardness for others not risking life or limb, the fair response to claims of personal abstainment on grounds of risk of limb if they went forth is not 'oh, you could get hurt? That's understandable.' It is 'so what, coward?'

Particularly since there have many been many other contexts, before and after, for him to have proven his bravery, if he wanted to tie bravery to political defiance and violence.

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TracingWoodgrains once likened him to Nikocado Avocado, a man (or catgirl?) made ever more grotesque by the vehicle that brought money and fame. I cannot unsee it, despite enjoying some of Kulak's earlier writing (like the Alex Jones/WWF piece).

I remember quite enjoying a piece he wrote about Shakespeare. But I suppose the internet does have a tendency to turn people into parodies of themselves. Even people like Trace, bless him, feel like they've become flattened over time - or at least their online personae have.

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  1. Abolish the police

  2. Give everyone a gun and a wink

  3. ???

  4. Justice!

Give war a chance.

Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.

This is basically everything Kulak writes. He makes up a version of what people in the past thought, from the ancient Greeks to the American founding fathers, that bears no resemblance to anything they actually wrote, but in Kulak's version always boils down to "Violence, violence, and more violence."

I'd say he's historically and culturally illiterate, but accuracy isn't the point. It's all a con to convince other people that violence is the answer (to everything).

The dark meaning of mercy for the villain is the same as the dark meaning of opposition to the death penalty. Brutal thugs are not executed, but given long prison terms. Warehoused. Saved for later. This reserve army of brutal thugs is a valuable resource for avant-garde revolutionaries. Think 1917 Russian revolution. Its was a close run thing with a brutal civil war. Typically the avant-garde don't have the numbers. They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it. They need to put boots on the necks of counter-revolutionaries. Since their tests for counter-revolutionariness have too many false negatives, they have to go large and put boots on the necks of the general population. Where do they find the feet to fill the boots? They release brutal thugs from prison to provide the muscle for the NKVD, KGB, Stasi, etc.

It is a very dangerous game. The avant-garde revolutionaries need to retain control of their brutal thugs. The thugs need to be kept divided. If some get ideas above their station, others are sent to kill them. But the Russian revolution and the French revolution both ate themselves. One faction within the revolutionary avant-garde sends their tame thugs to kill a rival faction within the avant-garde. The death toll rises and Stalin or Napoleon comes out on top.

I'm unclear on the causal connections here. Perhaps opposition to the death penalty is all high minded mercy. When the revolution comes, it is an unfortunate accident that the revolutionaries are gifted a reserve army of brutal thugs to help them consolidate their power. Or perhaps there are some strategic thinkers covertly funding the merciful people naturally inclined to oppose the death penalty. The money boosts the opposition to the death penalty, enough for mercy to defeat prudence.

It is not just domestic revolutionaries that one has to worry about. When the USSR took over Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, releasing brutal thugs from prison, to provide the muscle for the secret police, was one of the techniques used to impose the new communist governments.

Source on the use of prisoners for such tasks?

The original communist revolutions in Russia and Germany were carried out by mutinying army units, not by condemned criminals.

Repeating myself

They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it.

Think about what happens after the Kronstadt rebellion. The soldiers mutiny, and overthrow the Tsar. The Bolsheviks take power. The infighting starts. Where do they find the men to stab their colleagues in the back on their behalf?

It is not about the overthrow of the old regime, it is about the worst people rising to the top of revolution and needing henchmen to do deeds that are repugnant to the earlier idealistic revolutionaries.

I’m on record as opposing the death penalty not because of any high minded ideals, nor because I want an army of thugs in reserve, but because the government is entirely untrustworthy. I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

In theory, not having the death penalty allows for a future government, or the people themselves, to rectify things in the future in the way that the death penalty doesn’t. If society was less bifurcated in their beliefs, I could see it being more of value (as people could more consistently agree on the targets of violence).

In general, though, I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power - people with a monopoly on violence should be severely limited on what else they can do, lest they use violence to seize all else in life.

I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power

That cuts both ways. Do you limit government power by permitting the government to accumulate a reserve army of brutal thugs, or by preventing this by murdering the nascent reserve army in its crib?

I've mentioned Communist revolutionaries. See https://theworthyhouse.com/2024/11/19/on-the-1956-hungarian-revolution/ for an interesting, horse-shoe twist

The chief instrument of this terror was the secret police—the ÁVO, an acronym for Államvédelmi Osztály, Department of State Protection.

It filled its ranks primarily with two disparate types of people—hardcore Communists, many or mostly Jews resentful towards non-Jewish Hungarians (again of which more later), and former Arrow Cross toughs, usually from the countryside, whose past could be held over them and whose predilections toward violence were of use to the new regime.

But one could read about Oskar Dirlewanger and where he found the men to staff the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade

Coming up to date,

The Wagner Group has been recruiting large numbers of prisoners for Putin's war in Ukraine.

https://www.newsweek.com/inside-wagner-group-criminals-contractors-putins-war-1770392

I must stop writing this comment before I sink too deeply into despair, both about where government power comes from, and the level of counter-ruthlessness needed to oppose it.

The issue is that the government will only perform the death penalty on those that would be the army of their opponents, not their own. A left wing government would give slap on the wrist sentences to those that perform left wing coded violence, while bringing the full force of the law down on those that commit right wing coded violence (and vice versa is true too).

The advantage to “the government can’t kill anyone” is that it removes it’s discretion to do this - there are always ways for a government to avoid prosecuting those in its favour.

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I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

In the United States? What precedent can you point to in the history of this country to justify this fear? The death penalty was widely practiced across the U.S. until well into the second half of the 20th Century, and is still practiced in many states today. As far as I’m aware there are no historical examples, whether at the federal, state, or local level, of it being used to punish pure speech crimes. Several American administrations have been more than willing to imprison political dissidents — the Wilson administration very famously harassed and imprisoned many socialists and anti-war activists, for example — but none (again, as far as I’m aware) has ever suggested executing them.

In fact, looking at the sorts of crimes people have been executed for over the history of this country, it seems like they’re all pretty much exactly the ones you’d expect. There actually does seem to be pretty widespread agreement, at least among those in this country who don’t actively oppose the death penalty, regarding which crimes merit it. This was true in periods wherein Americans were more “bifurcated in their beliefs” than they are now. (i.e. during the Civil War) It seems like paranoia about being executed for tweets is fairly disconnected from any sober analysis of the actual probability of that event coming to pass.

The USG has executed a few people for basically political grounds, granted that they committed actual crimes those crimes would probably not otherwise have resulted in the death penalty.

Mary Surratt seems like the clearest example; I'd guess you could also add the Rosenbergs even if I have no sympathy at all for them.

I meant mean tweets as shorthand for any politically incorrect speech; and I live in Canada, not in the United States.

Remember that Britain (for example) spent state resources prosecuting someone for misgendering their rapist.

It’s actually not that hard to reach a state where the state could justify it. If words are “literally violence,” it is fairly straightforward to make the case that mean words towards a minority group is exactly what Hitler did (even without the literal violence clause, you could claim that the person in question is encouraging violence and erasure, which is literally genocide).

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Zegler isn’t ugly but next to Gadot Zegler looks like a soft 6. Relative casting matters.

In short, the problems from Snow White are:

  1. It tells a story most people won’t like
  2. It doesn’t execute that story very well
  3. Live action remakes are tired by this point.
  4. Bad PR as the lead actress trashed the beloved source material and attacked a decent chunk of the audience.

Zegler isn’t ugly but next to Gadot Zegler looks like a soft 6

Is this the consensus opinion? Like, not just something people repeat online for ideological reasons? (More on Xitter/Insta, not accusing anyone in here necessarily). I prefer Zegler but I'm also ageist and like women with wide eye spacing. Zegler is definitely more attractive to me on a superficial level, like a more exotic Anya Taylor Joy, Gadot is very above average but is older and has a more masculine edge to her. Also their skin tones aren't even that different. Zegler could pass for Mediterranean to me though I'm not an Ethnoguesser pro.

Zegler has a weird chin and sometimes looks, for lack of a better word, a little retarded.

I don't think either of them is especially attractive but can see what people like about both. Gadot was a good pick for the role. Zegler, I don't think so. There were innumerable better options and would it have killed them to use someone with fair skin?

Zegler isn’t ugly but next to Gadot Zegler looks like a soft 6. Relative casting matters.

Given how they apparently changed the way "fairest" meant in this remake, I actually wonder if the relative looks here was the point. Of course, they couldn't hire someone outright ugly as the lead, but making sure that she's significantly and noticeably less attractive than the Evil Queen (very easy to do when you cast Gadot as her) could have been consciously intentional for the purpose of sending little girls the message that good looks are bad, actually. It's interesting, though, that the original film had a pretty overt message about the evilness of vanity, which gets lost when you replace the Evil Queen's obsession about being the fairest-as-in-beautiful to fairest-as-in-just. I don't know how the remake justifies it, but it seems bizarre that a Queen who intentionally sends her King off to die and oppresses her happy subjects would obsess over a magic mirror's judgment of her as being fair-as-in-just. Perhaps there's some way the Queen's perspective is presented in a way to show that she actually genuinely believes that she is a just ruler? Given how much Disney's been into redeeming female villains like Cruella DeVille or Maleficent, this could've been a good opportunity to show her as a misguided soul who was traumatized by a man in her past that led her to an obsession with being a just ruler that nonetheless turned into evil. I haven't heard that from any reviews, though.

It sounds like much of the film was written with conscious messaging in mind, based on the descriptions I read and saw of the plot, which seems to involve pretty unambiguous pro-Communist messaging, and also an addition of a plot point presenting Dopey as someone unfairly bullied for his muteness and who turns out to be able to talk in the end.

Given how they apparently changed the way "fairest" meant in this remake, I actually wonder if the relative looks here was the point. Of course, they couldn't hire someone outright ugly as the lead, but making sure that she's significantly and noticeably less attractive than the Evil Queen (very easy to do when you cast Gadot as her) could have been consciously intentional for the purpose of sending little girls the message that good looks are bad, actually.

I think the message is that good looks are largely uncorrelated from good morals. Which is an overdone message, but probably a good one for the middling.

Heck, half the trad discourse on X is "stop chasing the thots just because they are the hottest chicks in your field of vision and instead seek out a woman of virtue (as defined thus)". Map it that way, and "who is the fairest of them all" could easily come out of the right, which bemoans a leftist culture of shallow beauty over virtue.

It's all so tiresome.

This interpretation makes no sense in the context of the story, though. The evil queen is the second-most “fair” person in the entire kingdom, but decides to murder her innocent stepdaughter out of jealousy, which is pretty obviously not morally virtuous.

You cannot become a morally virtuous person by murdering all the innocent children who are more virtuous than you, except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else, you are “most virtuous” by default (which isn't what happens in the story). However, you can become the most physically attractive woman by murdering all the women who are more attractive than you.

So the story only makes sense if (at least the evil stepmother) thinks of “fair” as meaning “physically attractive”, not “morally virtuous”.

except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else

That just means she needs to be more virtuous than the competition, so if she killed everyone except even worse mass murderers she might be the “fairest” somehow?

Maybe the qualifications for citizenship in this kingdom is to be a genocidal maniac?

so if she killed everyone except even worse mass murderers she might be the “fairest” somehow?

Worst mass murderers range at about 100 victims, and "killing everyone except" would be certainly much larger than any mass murderer

(I'm sure we could stretch the definition of mass murderer to include Pol Pot et al. and bullshit in a country's worth of these by harvesting across different timelines or whatever convenient plot and physics contrivance is needed, but...)

That still could theoretically work. Say every single person granted access to the kingdom must have killed at least 2 people; if the Queen and Snow White were the only two humans who weren't killers, then the Queen could kill Snow White only and still have the lowest body count of the entire kingdom.

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We're putting a lot of weight on the subjective judgements of a magic mirror. Maybe the mirror is as muddled as real people and lacks a satisfying resolution to a "fair" vs "fair" conflict.

Maybe the magic mirror was just gaslighting the queen about her daughter's bangability.

Mirrors are shockingly uneducated in homophones.

I certainly won't write apologia for the half consistent plot line.

I was only pointing out that a given message (whether consistent or otherwise in this particular film) can be right-coded or left-coded.

The original of course didn’t shy away from beauty being good. But to your point vanity was bad. Yes Snow White was fair but also good hearted — she wasn’t consumed by her fairness. She inspired everyone around her to be a better person. She didn’t need to be a girlboss; the original Snow White was the paradigmatic young woman — fair, looking forward to building a family, kind, nurturing, and inspiring others to be better.

The modern iteration is…an activist

The modern iteration is…an activist

So fittingly enough, she was the paradigmatic young woman, in the context of the Modern Audience^(tm).

Yeah true. Problem for them is people just don’t like the paradigmatic young woman of the Modern Audience.

people just don’t like the paradigmatic young woman of the Modern Audience.

On multiple occasions I found myself wondering "who is this trying to appeal to?"

Outside of the bits with the AI-generated Dwarves it doesn't feel like a kids movie, at the same time it doesn't feel like a movie made for adults either. The whole thing has a very YA tumblr fandom "I'm thirteen and think this is deep" vibe to it.

Oh yeah, I discount the "she's brown not white so not Snow White" stuff and she's pretty enough, but agreed: they did have to manoeuvre around "are you kidding me, Magic Mirror, who is the fairest?" to make it work. That then introduces the problem of "she's the Evil Queen, why the hell does she care about who is the 'fairest where that means most just' part or whether that applies to her?" but you can't have a Snow White story without the Magic Mirror, so, eh.

why the hell does she care about who is the 'fairest where that means most just' part or whether that applies to her?" but you can't have a Snow White story without the Magic Mirror, so, eh.

The evil queen literally does a whole song and dance about how you can get away with murder so long as you're rich and hot, but did anyone in the writers room think about how it fit into the rest of the movie? I don't think they did.

It sounds like nobody in the writers' room was thinking about the story as it got pulled here and there by reactions to reactions, hence all the revamping and reshooting and rewriting.

So the movie was not very good, and also not Snow White.

I’m wondering if proof of concept for AI actors was the point, but surely that’s already done?

I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...

Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle- they’re the same thing. They’re both revolutionary ideologies calling for to radically remake society in a short period of time. They merely disagree about who gets cushy sinecures doing stupid bullshit(black lesbians or white men). The DR weirds out classical conservatives once they figure out it’s not a meme. There is a de Maistre shaped hole in the popular consciousness but the slow growth of more functional societies will eat the revolution alive.

I think if the system is fundamentally broken, you need to take radical action to fix it. And I don’t think anyone sane can look at the old status quo and say “it’s fine, actually.” I don’t see the government as functional, doing useful things, or promoting ideas that are helpful to a civilization. And if anything, most of the indicators seemed to be moving very rapidly in the wrong direction. Slowly applying the brakes means we’re still going the wrong direction, but maybe not accerating as quickly. Instead of letting in 10 million illegal immigrants this year, we let in 5 million and pat ourselves on the back despite the fact that we’re still a net positive on illegals immigrants. Maybe we slow inflation of necessary goods from 10% to 5%. Okay, but that’s still much higher than it should be. Our school students struggle internationally, and we are not only not fixing it, but doubling and tripling down on pushing Woke on kids. A lot of this stuff is broken. Making it break more slowly is not fixing it.

At this point so much of our country just doesn’t work for the median American that I think the only answer is the wrest control from tha apperachniks running the government and to bring it to heel. I’d rather end the current departments and reinvent them because it guarantees that something will actually change. The school system will go back to educating kids and away from promoting The Narrative. A welfare system that works for the truly needy without giving money to people who refuse to work. A foreign aid policy tuned to support American interests and allies, rather than simply funding every do-gooder grant project that nets an over educated elite a sinecure for 100K a year.

Top down radical action according to rationalist principles is what got us into this mess. It won’t get us out; the system needs to be remade through functionalist path-building building, not top down design.

The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house.

You specifically can use house building and maintaining tools to dismantle all or part of a house. I've done major home renovation projects. I'm pretty clear on this.

Why not? A hammer has neither morals nor agency.

It is a reference.

Alfred Nobel begs to differ.

As far as I can tell no dynamite was used to bring down his house.

This is inaccurate. We are living in a world of radical change that does require a radical change of elites to stop this radical change that is already happening. Which it self was a radical revolution on past arrangement.

I won't deny that there are some right wingers that are sufficiently edgy boys to have greater similarities, but I would just say that woke with speed limit is on the radical side and is where to put fake conservatism and fake centrism. Conservatism has always been a revolutionary and forceful movement where it made sense from conservatives point of view. Conservatives even in ancient times when those in power did things they disagreed with wanted to reverse course and sought radical change from not conservative ends. Force has always been part and parcel of conservatism. That and actually caring to change things from non conservative ends. You simply aren't a conservative if you want a leftist status quo to remain and oppose changing it, even if you redefine conservatism.

There is no coherent conservatism without principles. If people claiming to be conservatism understands conservatism to be about losing and surrendering to the status quo, then they simply aren't promoting something that could be accurately understood as conservatism. Just a convenient group for the left as a false opposition.

Even to have centrist ends, you still need a radical change from the policies that are followed. For example mass migration as has happened in last decades and has accelerated and is accelerating is in fact a very radical agenda. But the general package of new left liberalism that supposed non leftists have compromised with, is in fact a radical agenda. And in so far, replacing and people and making them a second class citizens, changing names, etc fits foreign occupation, it is actually inherently quite illegitimate agenda.

It has been very presumptuous how figures who have radical agendas like Starmer and people who sufficiently compromise and agree with them in key areas ave been branded as moderates and centrists. https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1jm1atp/white_men_are_going_to_be_treated_a_lot_tougher/

A good analogy might be a communist country that was run by dogmatic radicals who were fanatical and thought changing things was a radical change from what they have done. This process also included fellow travelers throughout the world who opposed anticommunists. Yes it is a radical change but for something more sensible. Just like if you are falling on the cliff it is a big change to try to find something to hold up and far more so extremely radical to defy gravity and fly over the top of the hill again. Although political change isn't as fantastical. In the analogy, it is an attempt for change towards something more sustainable which is life. A more realistic radical change is chemotherapy towards cancer.

I would identify neocon type supposed conservatives who compromise with the multicultural liberal agendas or champion foreign nationalism, especially aligning with zionists and oppose any nationalism for their own people as another shade of the same liberal uni-party that supports radical destructive agendas and opposes any genuine opposition to them.

When in fact there are alternatives that are obviously more moderate on the nationalism question than what they support and certainly there are people even in the dissident right who are closer to them on that. It simply is a false honor to presume that an anti any European nationalist agenda is a moderate agenda. The moderate position on nationalism in general fits much more within the model that has nations support their legitimate rights but also compromise with each others reciprocal rights and there is basically a range of healthy ethnocentrism rather than too little or too much. While the agenda that concern trolls nationalism for whites is simply an extreme agenda that is falsely propagandized as a moderate one.

I also, wouldn't agree that the dominant party line on feminism and all sorts of issues that establishment supposed conservatives have agreed with is necessarily moderate in terms of outcomes. We are living a giant radical experiment in social change that has already resulted in fertility collapse.

Their very stance of being highly intolerant and hostile to people on their right seeking any sufficient change and much more so than those to their equal distance towards the left left, is it self an example of the left wing radicalism of this con inc space, because by it self is a radical way to behave but also because it would necessitate less revolutionary change if the con inc types compromised less with new left liberalism, neocons, and similar groups. Honestly, in countries like Denmark that have a coalition that includes nationalists and follow the kind of policies that are made taboo, I see no reason to consider what they are doing as bad as the woke. The truth is that the con inc space is sufficiently in bed with liberals and they are trying to suppress any right wing alternative to that, including ones that would work better.

Honestly, in countries like Denmark that have a coalition that includes nationalists and follow the kind of policies that are made taboo

That is exactly the problem. There is no love lost between me and the pro-European because think of the poor LGBT under sharia nationalists. In fact they tend to by their presence disarm the organizations which can outgrow the total state enough to eat the revolution alive. Geert Wilders is likely bad for the Calvinists in the long run.

In contrast the much less ethnonationalist GOP protects conservative Christianity nearly as well as the fossil fuel industry. And only subsocieties which continue to function as societies can execute the counter revolution by slow growth. We’re already seeing the beginnings, but it will take generations to get there. It needs non-state institutions to grow, adapt, build a parallel society which rises until the revolutionary institutions running society are eaten- dismantled or subverted. Scaring the hoes with orgiastic rhetoric or top down revolutions is counter productive. Wait until the Hutterite senators pass a repeal of the 19th instead of just openly talking about it.

The turning of the wheel of history is the only solution to the problem of leftism. Franco failed, the Islamic revolution failed, only growth from the middle and bottom can succeed.

Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.

Communists and Neoreactionaries only appear similar to you because they are both roughly equidistant from American GOP-style conservatives along the axes that are most important to you. There are other orthogonal axes along which they are also very far apart from each other, and those axes are equally important, if not necessarily to you personally.

As I told Hlynka frequently, your analysis here is useful to you as a Schmittian friend-enemy identifier, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actually understanding the internal motivations of the people and movements you’re analyzing.

I’m a classical reactionary.

Communists and neoreactionaries are similar because they are similar. They believe in top-down change according to rationalist principles. In a sense, they’re both totalitarian ideologies. The NRX patchwork state is many tiny countries, not many individuals living in different ways in the same country, not many institutions enabling their members to live different lifestyles under one state. There’s no pillarization. There’s no room for the unknowable, for non-state institutions, only for the subsumption of man into the state, as varied as the state may be.

The main difference is who they think should be in charge/receiving sinecures.

I... dont think patchwork is very important to many "dissident rightists", possibly not even Moldbug himself. Its not really related to any of the things you quoted in your first comment, at least.

Was the HRE totalitarian in your view?

No, because totalitarianism is a state with no competing institutions to the government. The HRE was... the opposite of that.

What makes you think Patchwork would be in any way different given it advocates specifically for such competition and reaches for the HRE as a specific target outcome?

Keep in mind, Patchwork Moldbug and Absolutist Yarvin are as different philosophers as Early Marx and Late Marx. Land is still specifically supportive of only the former (the former two probably).

Huh? This does not match my interpretation of anything that figures such as Yarvin have advocated. “Totalitarian” means the populace is fully politicized and expected to interface thoroughly, on both a practical and, more importantly, an *affective level, with the state. Yarvin’s model is a depoliticized populace whose relationship with the state is either that of an employee to his employer, or otherwise that of a consumer to a provider. He doesn’t want the average person to have any reason to form an opinion regarding state policy, nor to have any illusion of political input regarding policy decisions. This might be authoritarian, but I don’t see much resemblance between that and, say, North Korean juche or Third Reich state-worshipping rallies. Perhaps you and I have differing understandings of what totalitarianism implies.

"Authoritarianism is when there are things which you cannot talk about; totalitarianism is when there are things which you cannot be silent on"

Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.

Is it not though?

At least within the context of the United States, Christian (Burkean) Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics was the dominant ideology from the nation's founding through the latter half of the 20th century, and while it may be in decline it's not dead yet.

Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is the ideology that conquered the continent and put men on the moon. It would seem to me that any discussion of "transforming", "reforming", or "restoring" America has to happen within that context.

Care to expand on the different axes?

Sure, some major ones that come to mind are:

1: Which class/stratum of society is the state (or whatever scale of local decision-making body one prefers) designed to serve? Realistically in any polity comprised of human beings, there will be some sort of unequal distribution of talents and proclivities, with most people clustering around some nebulous middle.

The hard right is split between a faction who want to maximize favorable outcomes for the extreme right tail — to make society a playground for the most intelligent/strong/rapacious/ambitious among us to compete for spots at the top, while the feckless and disempowered middle class try to enjoy whatever downstream goods and services are produced by the 1% and the left tail of the distribution simply starve and die off — and a more collectivist right who want to use the state to crush both tails of the distribution — to dispossess the greedy capitalists, and also to smash and persecute the underclass — in order to secure safety and stability for the middle class. Both of these camps have strong purchase in different sectors of the so-called “Dissident Right”. If something unites these two factions, it’s that they both have zero interest in providing any indulgence toward the left end of the distribution; they despise the “undeserving poor”, the mentally infirm, the criminal underclass, etc. The concept of Christian charity is seen as highly suspect, given that it obligates a significant redistribution of resources from the productive classes to the unproductive parasitic elements of society.

On the modern left, meanwhile, the overriding concern is to siphon resources and status (which, given the Critical Theory focus on social status as the ultimate capital good, are in fact inextricably linked) toward the classes who are most deviant from the middle class. The extremely poor, yes, but also minorities of any kind. The middle class is seen as this sort of undifferentiated demiurgic mass of conformism and stasis; the process of the historical dialectic, ultimately, is the slow but steady revelation of contradictions within the unreflective worldview of the bourgeois class, allowing various elements within it to awaken their consciousness.

Factions on the left are split between what, ultimately, one who has discovered their inner spark of awakened consciousness is obligated to do with it. There are factions who wish to maximize individual and personal freedom, up to and including full transhumanism; their hatred of the middle-class is a manifestation of their visceral hatred of feeling that their life and choices have been pre-determined for them. A different faction of the left is far more invested in pure redistribution for its own sake, out of an overriding visceral hatred of inequality of any kind. They despise the idea of any one person/group having more than another person/group, as well as the suffering and feelings of inadequacy experienced by the one who has less. This leveling instinct drives their hatred of the middle class, who, in this telling, didn’t even earn the things they have, but who nonetheless derive personal validation from the fact that they have more than the lowest among us. (“They were born on third base and think they hit a triple.”) This faction is far more comfortable with anarcho-primitivist and third-worldist rhetoric, with the end goal a sort of deindustrialized communitarian hyperlocalism, in which the accumulated slate of financial and social capital formerly hoarded history’s unjust winners has been wiped away, leaving everyone to start from square one. Each faction of the left basically sees the other as useful idiots, to be wielded as a weapon against the mutually-hated middle/bourgeois class and then discarded.

2: What are the primary determinants of an individual’s life outcomes? The mainstream American idea, on both the mainstream/center right and left, is strongly and overwhelmingly oriented toward “personal agency and hard work” as the answer. Conservatives like Hlynka and @TequilaMockingbird seem to really, really hate anything that smacks of “determinism” — the idea that any individual’s life outcomes are largely constrained by factors outside of that individuals control. This leads to a hatred of eugenics, but also of any focus on socially-constructed factors — and the resulting unequal distributions of status and resources — playing a part. The split between the hard right and hard left are between competing models of which deterministic factors to emphasize.

I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes, but I do actually have to try and get some stuff done today. Hopefully this was a useful starting point.

Excellent analysis. However, if I recall correctly, Hlynka never claimed that the far-left or the far-right are exactly the same; Hlynka only claimed that the implementation of their politics ended up being nearly identical. Isn't that claim compatible with your analysis? Both the far-left and the far-right, on a fundamental level, want to re-order society to elevate either the lower, middle or upper class, with moderates being agnostic or wanting to help everybody.

No, his analysis went far beyond that, and he explicitly claimed on countless occasions not only that there is a set of psychological/lifestyle traits uniting both the far-right and the far-left, but also that in very many cases they are literally the same individuals — pointing out that many people he identified as “dissident right” (mercifully, the term “woke right” had not yet gained purchase prior to Hlynka’s perma-ban, or else he’d have embraced its usage with gusto) were, at one point or another in their lives, at least tepidly interested in leftism.

One effect of the fact that he has been banned is that it’s not difficult to sift through the most recent of his comments on his user page, wherein you can find many representative examples of his claims.

I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes

I would enjoy this, when you have time!

Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle

You are not the only one.

If so many people are channeling @HlynkaCG, maybe we should let him back?

I'm doing my part!

I have consistently maintained that banning him was a mistake. Although he might be prideful enough that even if the invitation was extended, he wouldn’t come back.

Maybe he already is back. OP is carrying the mantle of Hlynka with the kind of things he has been arguing. I actually believe that he is Hlynka but I am not 100% certain about it.

I know Hlynka decently well from off-site and would bet heavily that he doesn't post here anymore.

Wait how many motters do you know IRL? Are you running meetups, or did you just know both of them already?

A whole lot and yeah I guess you could say something like that. Not Motte meetups per se but extremely heavy overlap.

I can assure you, we aren’t the same person(you saw us in the same thread at the same time and the mods do enforce sock puppeting) and we don’t actually share an ideology. We have certain cultural similarities which make my organic counterrevolution ideas look more similar to his social contract absolutism than they actually are.

To name a few things- I am perfectly willing to believe that the black-white IQ gap is real(although I doubt the strength of it as an explanatory factor), I hold significantly more socially conservative views on sex and gender, and I’m far more skeptical of state capacity as a solution.

Hoffmeister is correct that I did not suggest that you are Hlynka but that TequilaMockingbird is and therefore there is no great gap. For the record when Hlynka was banned I wasn't there to gloat even though I don't like him nor do I suggest that mods ban or not ban this guy if he is Hlynka.

My mistake- I thought you were referring to this sub thread from my reference to hlynka posting.

I interpreted @Belisarius as accusing @TequilaMockingbird of being the return of Hlynka — a suspicion which I share, although my confidence has been too low for me to publicly level the accusation myself — not that you are. You’re significantly more articulate, and your ideas on a far stronger footing, than most of what Hlynka ever contributed, in my opinion.

I’ll take the complement, although I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way.

Hlynka had a particular posting style, and I simply don’t see it from him.

Random question. I just wrapped up the chapters in Gibbon about Belisarius, so I wanted to ask. Is he your namesake because you imagine yourself the greatest general of a degenerate and declining age, or because your wife is one of the top 10 most flagrant whores of history?

I kid, I kid. But man, what a way to go down in history. Greatest general of an era, and the biggest cuck.

Are you a Whining Coil?

That is pretty a stupid and insulting question but I will answer earnestly against my better judgement.

I picked the figure Belisarius because he was the greatest general in the fight for the restoration of the roman empire, but I certainly don't see myself as a general, or great general. And it was a bit random I chose that name over different ones. Just one of the figures of history I liked. It is good for us to be inspired by history and part of a degenerate and declining age is this hostility to a positive historical heritage. Why should I have to be attacked by you for picking the name of a great general?

Procopius was generally considered unreliable writer who promoted plenty of sleaze which is what is these claims are based on. Even if one was to accept that his wife really was a whore, he is still a positive figure in general.

It is your choice to take this kind of framing on a figure that is certainly much more known for being a great general than his wife's alleged exploits. We have enough problems dealing with much more common collective cuckholdery of our times to worry about the purity of Belisarius wife.

I truly, truly wish you could see from my perspective how hilarious all this is. I mean, I know now that you can't. But I wish you could.

This was not drive by derailing, I've actually had a hard time keeping up this week since I've been building my wife a new chicken coop, and reading Gibbon in the evening to unwind. I literally did just read the chapters about what a (apocryphal?) whore Belisarius' wife was, and thought it'd be a fun conversation starter since you are obviously a fan. I don't literally think you are a cuck.

Also, I mean, I guess it's uncouth to talk about this. But I've been getting all these notifications tonight that I can't see because I have Amadan blocked. I find his argumentation style tailored to try to get me to break the rules and then punish me. I had to check the thread in incognito mode to even see what the hubbub is about. So yeah, no love lost there.

For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to literally imply your wife is a whore. It's like if someone said they were a huge fan of Bill Cosby and you asked "They show.... or the other stuff?" The joke is how obviously it's not the other stuff. Obviously Belisarius is notable in history for being the greatest general of his age, not the biggest cuck.

Don’t brag about blocking people, it’s a shameful thing. Then you can spare us the excruciating story on how you had to remove your own barriers.

Be less antagonistic, and get a sense of humor.

I would expect this quality of moderation from 4chan, not TheMotte.

Of course you know I have had a beef with your partiality and believe that you treat users and tribes you are sympathetic to favourably, but this is an entirely new level of tendentiousness. User A makes an off-topic post trying to relate User B's username to a common slur/fixation, User B responds in a mildly standoffish manner but actually clarifies the origin of the username, and User B - only User B - gets a modhat reprimand? Of course, I fully expect that any objections will be met with the same old "I disagree, and no, I am not going to justify anything" sort of response from you. Is that what it is going to be, or do you have something better to offer?

(I don't even understand what you find so funny. Is it just "haha bro just called him a cuck"?)

The fact that you think I am being favorable to @WhiningCoil, of all people, or his "tribe," is much funnier than anything posted in this thread.

I have occasionally been accused of reading people wrong, and I'll cop to it when it happens. I read @WhiningCoil as injecting a bit of jocularity concerning a historical name he happened to have just been reading about. Not literally accusing @Belisarius of being a cuck with a famously whoreish wife, or being general of an empire in decline. I read it this way because I know @WhiningCoil's posting habits, and I also know @Belisarius's tendency to be aggressive and overly serious with anyone who argues with him about anything.

If the post was just an attack on a user for his username because WC didn't like him and saw an opportunity for a cheap shot, my response would have been different. Instead, I told @Belisarius to cool it because the exchange doesn't warrant this kind of heat and he is prone to escalation.

Is that a sufficient answer for you? Because that's as much as I feel like justifying myself to you, because yes, per that post you linked to, I think you're a bad faith objector whose objections are purely tribal, and I will continue to dismiss your demands that every time two people have an exchange, I carefully admonish everyone involved and make sure I am evenly distributing my admonishments along tribal lines.

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You can't just ask if someone imagines himself a great general or is a cuck with a whore wife and then say just joking. You might find it funny if you dislike the target, but you are only showing a lack of impartiality.

WhiningCoil was being antagonistic and I assumed I offended him when I suspecting Hlynka was the OP and I replied with relative restraint all things considered. Or offended him by arguing against the people I argue, and by my type of argument. Hence "Great General". Saying that it is stupid and insulting to ask if someone imagines himself a great general or a massive cuck is not a particularly antagonistic response to an actually antagonistic post.

Knowing you, and your own sense of humor, I know that you would have responded harsher manner and likely at least threatened a mod action if you have been the target of this kind of "joke", adapted to your circumstances.

If someone wants to be funny about historical figures in a manner that is insulting he can easily do so without making it personal about the user but instead make it about the figure.

You can't just ask if someone imagines himself a great general or is a cuck with a whore wife and then say just joking.

Well, yes, actually you can, and if you had even the tiniest sense of humor, you'd know it. Just like when people ask if my username means I am a great fool.

WhiningCoil was being antagonistic and I assumed I offended him when I suspecting Hlynka was the OP

If there is one thing I am nearly 100% certain of, it is that @WhiningCoil is not @HlynkaCG. Hlynka is very recognizeable and shitty at disguising himself (he's tried a few times), and @WhiningCoil has a long history here and on reddit going back multiple usernames.

Knowing you, and your own sense of humor,

You're mistaken. I have no sense of humor, but that's in the job description.

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FYI my respect for towards you didn't move when Coil made the crack but dropped when you proved unable to roll with the punch. Self-seriousness will make you a target.

I think you are taking someone obliquely implying you picked your namesake for his cuckoldry entirely too seriously. This is an internet forum for witches, not the UFC ringside. Profuse defense of masculine honor looks out of place here, IMVHO.

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How is he gone? I missed all of that and I definitely would have campaigned on his behalf if I was here. I miss him so much.

Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.

Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ. A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee", and the fact that his ban was announced as a top level post without citing any specific rule-breaking comments would seem to suggest that whatever happened to justify his ban happened out of the public eye. Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?

Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism", so it was decided that he would go away to reduce the potential of theMotte.org getting caught up in Trump-related drama.

Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ.

You do not know what you're talking about.

TheMotte is rationalist-adjacent because of our origins, but we (and especially the mod team) are not enforcing some kind of "rationalist consensus" on anything, least of all race and IQ. Hylnka was very open about his disdain for HBD and HBD posters. Most of the mods are also critical of it and HBD obsessives to varying degrees. What consensus were we trying to enforce?

A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee"

Hlynka said a lot of stuff that was rank bullshit.

and the fact that his ban was announced as a top level post without citing any specific rule-breaking comments would seem to suggest that whatever happened to justify his ban happened out of the public eye.

This was officially the post that finally earned him a permaban, but it was really an accumulation of posting over months and months, during which we repeatedly asked him to stop doing that (I mean, we literally told him "Please stop doing this or eventually we will have to permaban you and we really don't want to do that"!)

Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?

No. He did argue with us in DMs, but it was not much different from what he was saying in public: that we should be quicker to ban people and we should especially ban the people he didn't like, and police the place up more. Meanwhile he'd continue aggressively attacking the people we weren't banning.

Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism"

That's, uh, quite a theory all right. I know of no such discussions among the mods, and if Hylnka has become a public figure under another name I am unaware of it. And of all the regular or former motteposters who might draw the Eye of Sauron on us, Hlynka wouldn't be in my top 10.

God damn those are great threads, I am sad I missed them. Thanks for the write up, it does look like breaking with the hbd consensus was instrumental in his ban - not as a reason, but it's still part of the why.

Although there is variation in the opinions of individual mods, my impression of them as a group is that they certainly have no interest in enforcing an “HBD consensus” (in either direction).

Tequila didn't say the mods enforced the hbd consensus he said unofficially hlynka got banned for breaking with the hbd consensus. Despite his contrariness he was still a member of this community and despite his cynicism it seems he couldn't tolerate the community converging on something he found so immoral. It was the reason he decided it wasn't worth playing by the rules to whatever extent he had been before.

My opinion (which I think I shared at the time) was that he got banned for a combination of "breaking with the HBD consensus" in the form of wrangling with many/most of the actual neo-Nazis around here, and being a bit of a cantankerous fuck who posts a lot -- which (the latter) provided lots of opportunity for said Nazis to report him for technically correct but minor rule violations which would have otherwise flown under the radar.

The reports-volume-based moderation strategy is fundamentally flawed when it comes to high-volume cantankerous posters, and I say this as somebody who was banned more than once by Hlynka for cantankerous wrangling, and kind of pissed off about it in the moment.

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Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.

This is in fact what he got banned for. He was an extremely valued commenter, but he eventually decided that he was no longer willing to abide by the rules here, and over the course of a number of repeated and very obvious rule violations presented the mods with a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation. They chose the rules.

@HlynkaCG remains my all-time favorite commenter here, and my interactions with him were, by far, the most constructive and formative of all those I've had here. I maintain to this day that his notable positions and arguments were simply correct. I myself have experienced fundamental conflict between the opinions I wish to express and the rules of this forum, and there was a stretch of time where I fully expected to receive a permaban, not because the mods were unfair in some way, but because I straightforwardly perceived my own intentions as fundamentally contrary to the forum's mission. It's something I and others have written about before: it's entirely possible for good, thoughtful, well-intentioned people to find themselves incapable of further participation here, because what this place requires, often enough, isn't goodness or thoughtfulness or fine intentions, but a peculiar sort of ice-cold abstraction.

To my knowledge, the behind-the-scenes mod drama consisted of mods arguing with him in private that he had to either stop breaking the rules or be banned, and the top-level ban announcement was to increase visibility for the people who had been arguing that him not being banned proved that the rules were fake.

a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation

A third option is to enforce the rules, but not via permabans.

Permabans should be reserved for the most egregious trolls, spambots, or accounts that are otherwise doing harm to the forum in some way. The way I see it, there’s almost never a reason to permaban a good faith poster (which Hlynka obviously was). I would set the maximum suspension length somewhere in the range of 6-12 months.

Yeah, I'd be happy to see him return.

Yeah, I'll +1 on this. Permabans seem unnecessary, and even stranger in light of the old "a permaban is no more than 1 year long, ackshully" rule, that we used to have, but dispensed with for some reason.

I liked Hlynka but my biggest issue with him was when people would respond to him with specific arguments and he would completely ignore them and/or refuse to address them

Yeah, he'd had some pretty bad threads before he was banned.

Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ. A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee"

Yeah, because all the moderators are massive HBDers, to the point they won't tolerate dissent. I like a good conspiracy theory, but come up with one that makes some sense.

Also, why don't you link the post that actually got him banned?

why don't you link the post that actually got him banned?

Because that comment never came up in the discussion.

Yeah, because all the moderators are massive HBDers,

Members of the mod team did endorse the harassment of him for his views on IQ as "providing a valuable public service".

Ymeshkout hasn't been an active moderator for as long as I can remember, not even in the private mod discord. He had nothing to do with Hlynka's ban.

I was surprised ymeshkout is even a mod. You can see how active he was after the move offsite here. And the post you linked to (without context, for some reason) is in response of a mod who declared said activity to be harrasment in the first place!

Because that comment never came up in the discussion.

Neither did the ones you linked to, that's not an excuse.

Sorry, i thought i had provided the full link.

I definitely would have campaigned on his behalf if I was here

I'm not sure if there was much to campaign for. As much as I wish he was still around, he basically pulled a suicide by cop.

We miss him too. But he left us little choice.

Fair, and I shouldn't have assumed otherwise and said for/to. I don't know if I could have convinced him to change tack but I'd have liked a chance to try.

Man, every single mod (and a few non-mods) tried to convince him to change tack. We tried to reason with him in public, we tried to talk him down in private. His permaban was not some sudden thing we did without warning, and I'm genuinely surprised that you missed all of this while it was going down, because we were pleading with him for months to please stop deliberately posting things he knew would earn him a timeout or we'd have to make it permanent, while half the forum was saying "Noooo, you can't ban Hlynka!" and the other half was saying "Just fucking ban him already!"

I promise you I don't doubt that you all tried to change his mind as hard as you could, I just think personally trying to convince him would have been a great conversation (for me, probably no one else). I missed it because it happened during my sabbatical, which is what I am choosing to call my six month flounce these days.

I remember towards the end both a) defending large parts of his thesis and b) pleading with him to just engage with people better.

The problem is he just can’t be trusted not to let his temperament get the better of him. Even an act of magnanimity (and there were many) and a final warning (and there were many) are not enough.

Truly, there is a Hlynka-shaped hole in the Motte's discourse.

That doesn't mean a ban should be reversed just for that, and I'm fairly sure he'd respect that reasoning, but it is amusing.

On the other hand the last thing we need is a story in the Atlantic about Trump officials leaking classified war-plans on theMotte.

I'm going to second @Amadan and ask: what? Hlynka was a Trump official?

It has been theorized that JD Vance or somone else highly placed within the Trump campaign was a Mottizen or SSCer due to how seeming references to the community like "Shiri's Scissor", "this is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence", and "youre still crying wolf" kept making thier way into official statements and twitter posts.

Shakesneer and Hlynka were considered to be the prime suspects.

Yeah, obviously Vance has read SSC and Moldbug. Are there any references that are Motte-specific, though? Or indications that any of them are active members of the Ratsphere rather than lurkers?

where the references were published?

Interesting if true -- do you have any Vance-links on these?

Not to hand, sorry.

More comments

I'd also be interested. What I've seen people of saying things like this in the past, it's seemed like people notice Vance's overlap with their community, but don't really understand him, and so misinterpret him and what he's doing.

Well, Hlynka was a self-admitted Warhammer 40k player. The Trump-as-God-Emperor meme was directly from 40k-aware communities. Furthermore, iirc Hlynka was an orks player, which is to say low-class social barbarian faction.

Ergo...

[/sarcasm]

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