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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4044 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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sneering at democrats and academics is not [the accepted norm here].

Er. What? One of the highest voted comments ever on this site is this one, which is basically "look at the ridiculous thing this progressive academic did", let's all sneer at the people who enable such nonsense. The key point, though, was that the sneering was at a specific bad action by a member of that group.

If you had found a killjoy childless academic condemning the Czech and Polish appropriation of American redneck culture, and the condemnation was related to them being a childless killjoy, I think that would have made the comment a lot less jarring. As it was, I felt like I was looking at a comment that said "I don't like childless academics, and also look at this amazing video".

ETA: also TW's comment was in the CW thread

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do take issue with that article being labeled as sneering. I presented an ongoing story while taking pains to avoid unnecessary potshots at the guy at the center of it. His behavior was bad in a way enabled by current culture, but by no means a pathology unique to progressive culture.

I emphasize this because I think it's worth distinguishing between sneering (overt mockery of opponents) and other sorts of criticism or negative coverage.

That's fair. That "sneering vs criticism" distinction was what I was trying to gesture at, but my wording could have been better.

If you had found a killjoy childless academic condemning the Czech and Polish appropriation of American redneck culture, I think that would have made the comment a lot less jarring. As it was, I felt like I was looking at a comment that said "I don't like childless academics, and also look at this amazing video".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_tramping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_tramping_music

This "appropriation" of American culture (more precisely image of American culture from cowboy novels and movies) is more than 100 years old (yes, for real) and is integral part of Czech culture by now.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramping

In the Czech Republic, the first tramps were senior scouts who did not like certain rules of this organization - they paid more attention to taking care of nature. This took place during the First World War , when the name tramps did not yet function, they were called wild scouts.

Tramps gradually discovered still wild areas, such as the southern area of Prague (mainly in the basin of the Vltava and Sazawa rivers ), later the Berounka basin and forests near the Brda River. Later, tramps could be found in every corner of former Czechoslovakia. However, it was in the basin of the Vltava and Sasau that the first settlements were established, modeled on those organized when settling the West .

The tramps showed special respect for nature, their camps left no trace of human interference in the landscape.

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramping

The oldest known Czech settlement was founded around 1918 on the Vltava in a place called Svatojánské currents , today flooded by the waters of the Štěchovice dam reservoir . An initially nameless group of former Prague scouts renamed the place where they went on weekends to "Roaring Camp" after the short story by Bret Hart . Later (according to the settlement chronicle in 1919) the tramp settlement " Ztracená naděje " or "Ztracenka" was founded here - on the forest land of the Strahov Premonstratensians. [1] The settlers chose the name of the settlement after the silent movie cowboy The Valey of Lost Hope (1915, Valley of Lost Hope). The settlers also included the Tramp lyricist and composer Jarka Mottl .

The first tramps were usually people from poorer social strata, or the unemployed for whom this way of life was socially acceptable. Later, when the movement became popular in the wider strata of Czech society, young people from the middle classes, fashionably even from the upper social classes, the so-called Astrakhans, joined the tramps.

City trippers with cars and fancy equipment were derisively called " thugs " or "greasers" - sometimes leaving behind greasy papers and other messes. In contrast, true trampers had respect for nature, there was no trace of their camping, they cleaned up after themselves.

All regimes in history hated this movement - pre war Czechoslovakia as obscene and communist, Nazis as American and Jewish, Communists as American and capitalist. If "childless liberal academics" object to it, they are not alone.

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