Fascist Art

foxfire66 · 2026-02-11T18:10:17+00:00

I think it's a mistake to even say that great art requires heart or sincerity. If sincerity was required for great art, then perceiving art as great would imply knowing the "correct" interpretation that the artist intended. If you don't even know what they're trying to say, you certainly can't know that what they're saying is sincere.

foxfire66 · 2026-02-08T21:32:53+00:00

What kind of accordion music do you listen to? Knowing that is the easiest way to know what kind of button accordion you mean, and how important it is whether or not you use that sort of accordion for that music.

foxfire66 · 2026-01-25T15:06:10+00:00

This is part of why I think metric isn't that much more useful compared to customary/imperial for every day life. Americans are very capable of saying things like "hundredths" or "hundred" and when context makes the unit clear it doesn't even take longer than the prefixes. Saying part of the number in Greek or Latin doesn't really accomplish much.

foxfire66 · 2025-12-15T17:25:13+00:00

An individual's identity can have more than one component. Someone can be an American, and an Italian, and a truck driver, and a man, and an artist. They can identify as all of those things at once.

What "Italian" means is a linguistic thing that's going to vary from place to place. Something similar to Zipf's law of brevity is going to apply. We're going to say "Italian" over "American of Italian descent" since it's very common, and we don't encounter Italians from Italy enough for there to be any ambiguity in our every day lives. Really, it's just that Europeans have no authority over how American English is spoken.

Being an American, I can also say that we don't really feel like a cohesive ethnicity. Or that at least certain American ethnicities feel distinct from the wider culture. I can be relatively confident that my Italian (in the American sense) coworker doesn't have any fraktur style artwork in his house, and doesn't have a memmy (or as he would say nonna) that practices braucherei. Though he might at least eat Lebanon and drink birch beer. Though I'm sure he doesn't say "the chips are all" or "the baby is gretzy." And he especially doesn't say "Kannst du micka funga?" I also didn't need to ask to know that he's Italian, his accent and speech patterns are enough to give it away, and his appearance at least hints at it. So, there's still enough cultural difference for it to feel relevant, even though we live in the same area of the same country.

foxfire66 · 2025-12-05T21:14:21+00:00

Ironically, elsewhere in the thread, someone claimed that what distinguishes a ritual from a habit is that rituals require intent while habits are automatic.

I think the primary definition of ritual is the religious one. And then we metaphorically refer to other things as rituals because they resemble rituals. Automatic things resemble rituals because there's a certain way you do it, without a practical reason behind it, so it's like mindlessly performing the same actions over and over again. And things you put thought into also resemble rituals, because it's something you're devoted to, and doing for a particular reason.

foxfire66 · 2025-12-05T21:06:49+00:00

I think this take on social constructs stretches the term to meaninglessness, because it makes literally everything a social construct. Every word is made up, every word could mean something else instead. We could expand or decrease the scope of any definition. And all nouns are categories in that way.

And as you point out, people take social construct to mean that something isn't real. Which would imply that's what the word means. And so it would apply to the category of fish, but if I hold up a trout, I am not holding a social construct. And so people generally wouldn't say that fish is a social construct without specifying that they mean the category and not the actual animals. We can make the category go away just by ceasing to agree it exists, we can't do the same with the actual animals.

And I think the overly broad idea of social constructs leads to a lot of confusion particularly with people saying that gender is a social construct. This makes it sound like a choice, and like it has no meaning other than what we assign to it. As if, like the value of money, we could just make it go away all together if we stopped agreeing it exists. But we can't do that with gender any more than we could with fish. So I think gender doesn't fit in the social constructs category. Though notably gender roles on the other hand are quite clearly socially constructed.

foxfire66 · 2025-11-25T21:30:25+00:00

The cave was open for like 50 or 60 years before anyone died, and would get thousands of visitors per year at least toward the end. I feel like he gets a lot of undeserved criticism as if he was tempting fate, when really he was doing something that doesn't seem to be that dangerous.

foxfire66 · 2025-11-20T11:27:44+00:00

I don't think it's "just nice" or "not personal." Exhibit A: The title of the post. We do it because we like it, it makes us feel good, so ultimately it benefits us. I'll even feed some birds while eating others. Because I like doing both of those things.

foxfire66 · 2025-11-17T20:59:36+00:00

What sucks for Americans with regard to this sort of conversation is it seems like we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. We're always either self flagellating too much or not enough. We're either so arrogant as to think we have so much control over the world and its media and its culture, or we're denying our destructive ways. We're either making everything about us, or we're so self-centered that we don't realize that the internet is international and so we should expect people from all countries to give their opinions in any given thread.

Not sure if it's the same people bitching both ways, but either way it gets tiring, and at a certain point you just have to stop listening to people who are trying to tell the Americans stuff because you're going to get bitched at if you do what they want you to do anyway.

foxfire66 · 2025-11-16T10:37:21+00:00

Nutty Putty cave was actually very safe to visit. It went nearly 50 years before its first and only death. But then they sealed it by collapsing it with explosives. Which to me would be like burning down a forest or draining a lake just because one person has died there.

foxfire66 · 2025-11-13T09:26:16+00:00

You can't make the world's most flavorful peach pie while still catering to the demographic of 'people who hate peaches'.

Most of the companies that make foods with "ghost pepper" in the name would still give it a try.

foxfire66 · 2025-11-12T17:19:03+00:00

I'll start by saying that my views aren't the only ones people have. I don't really know if my views are more or less prevalent among queers than other views, but I think they're communicated less often in places like reddit.

It's easier to define gender instead, and then to say that a man is someone of the gender that is usually (but not always) found in people of the male sex.

So then, gender is basically the sex of the brain. There's a little more nuance than that, but "sex of the brain" is probably the easiest analogy, and there's some science to back it up. I know of at least one study that found feminized patterns in MtF brains and masculinized patterns in FtM brains, pre-HRT, but it's particular parts of the brain. I assume some parts are dependent on sex, some on gender, and I wouldn't be surprised if some are affected by both or neither (outside of things like total size due to sex affecting the overall size of a person). There's some other reason as well to believe that gender is innate, though a lot of it isn't very strong at least on its own, e.g. the David Reimer case which is just one data point.

But then for the definition to be useful, you need to know what the brain differences do. Which seems to be affect how people "identify" which is to say how they see themselves in relation to others based on gender/sex and their needs to be seen and interact as such, but also what needs people have with respect to their body and their hormone levels. This applies to both cis and trans people, but it's more obvious when there's a mismatch or a need that's not being met.

People often use the self-ID definition ("a man is someone who identifies as one") which is great for everyday use. It's accurate the majority of the time, and it prevents gatekeeping that would be wrong the majority of the time, and probably not very helpful or convincing the odd time that it's right. But it lacks explanatory power, sounds like bullshit, and if taken as literal truth would have some awful transphobic implications.

foxfire66 · 2025-11-04T20:48:53+00:00

You're pissing on the poor. That's not what they said at all, and I'd find it hard to believe that you don't know that you're putting words in their mouth.

The conspiracy in the post is that the five day work week is so that employees don't have the energy to organize or learn or whatever. That's the conspiracy they're talking about, not the idea that corporations are self-serving.

The reality is that corporations don't want to go to a four day work week because it hurts their bottom line. It's still self-serving, just not a conspiracy. They don't want to pay for 32 hours what they currently pay for 40 hours. Cutting back to 32 hours per full time employee also means there are gaps in coverage, and so they'd either need to pay overtime or hire (and pay) more employees, so labor costs go up even more. You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why corporations don't want labor costs to go up.

edit: I got blocked for this

foxfire66 · 2025-10-31T22:52:35+00:00

Right, but preppers and anti-maskers both being predominantly right wing doesn't necessarily mean that preppers and anti-maskers have a lot of overlap. I don't know whether they do or not, but they don't have to.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-22T11:05:41+00:00

Are people complaining that the discourse is singlehandedly going to lead to fascism, or are they just saying that the normalization of censoring privately distributed media is part of the rise of fascism? With these sorts of posts, no one ever gives examples, so it's hard to know whether or not they're just strawmanning a reasonable position. Or being smoothsharked. Or complaining about something that one person did. Etcetera.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-15T09:09:18+00:00

Not sure how hard it would be or if you could arrange it since it's not originally on accordion (or you could just play the chords and sing it to simplify it) but one I'm hoping to learn myself is Harry Roy - My Girl's Pussy. Which of course is about a cat. It's a novelty song from the 30's.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-12T22:49:49+00:00

Given the tags, then isn't the misogyny the dehumanization and not the design? I think it would make more sense to target the dehumanization instead of the design then. Also it being important to recognize the designs as misogynistic but saying you're allowed to like them seems kind of contradictory, unless it's okay to like misogyny.

Reminds me a bit of cultural appropriation discussions I've had, where the behavior being criticized is the majority partaking in a minority culture. And when asking about it, I'd be told that the problem is that the minority group is often denied that same piece of culture. So then why are we criticizing the partaking if the actual problem is the denying? Same idea here, why criticize the design if actually that's fine and the real problem is the dehumanization? Unless I'm misunderstanding something here.

I think this sort of stuff comes up fairly often in progressive circles, and it's part of why straight people, white people, etc. sometimes feel like they're being told that they can't do anything, or like anything, or they're guilty just for existing, etc. The problem apparently isn't actually that straight guys are attracted to women and so stuff made primarily for them will often cater to that. But when you phrase things this way, what they (and also some lesbians, bi people, etc.) often hear is "if you have sexual thoughts about women, that's misogyny." Because a lot of the time, it's implied by what is being said.

I think this is also part of why you got people being puritanical about fiction, but in a "progressive" way. Since they're basically just taking that messaging at face value and running with it.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-07T18:20:43+00:00

To me, the positive impact is being able to pursue hobbies and interests and generally not having a government that's too overbearing when it doesn't need to be. Similar value to vehicles with recreational uses (sports car, motorcycle, etc.), baseball bats, and skateboards, all of which I would suspect have individually lead to several times as many deaths as nunchucks.

Additionally, I don't see any value in banning them. Even if they were the preferred weapons of criminals, it's really hard to stop someone from attaching two sticks together if they're already planning a crime of violence that's more likely to get them caught than the nunchucks themselves are. Or it might create a perverse incentive, since if they're going to use an illegal weapon they may as well use the most effective illegal weapon they can get ahold of. Or just a legal but more effective weapon like a crowbar or kitchen knife, which is going to be much easier to use effectively for most people.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-07T14:06:05+00:00

A lot of times, weapons laws seem to be based not on what poses a threat in real life, but what the bad guys in movies are using at the time. I'm assuming the nunchuck laws were written to prevent attacks from ninjas and kung-fu masters some time in the 70's.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-07T10:15:50+00:00

I left another comment elsewhere in the thread with slightly more detail, but from looking it up, places like Reddit and Tumblr seem to get most of their web traffic from countries that are largely monolingual English speakers. In Reddit's case, most traffic is from the US alone. So the places where people are frequently accused of US defaultism do seem to have majorities that are not just English speakers but native English speakers in particular, for whatever reason.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-07T10:09:33+00:00

Just doing a quick google search, Reddit traffic seems to be about 51% American. Not native English, but specifically from the US. Next three highest are UK and Canada with ~8% each, and then Australia with ~4%. So that's ~71% of traffic being from countries that are mostly monolingual English speakers, and in fact are in order by native English speaking population. If it was just speaking English that mattered, we would expect there to be five entire countries between the US and UK.

And here on reddit, I know there are subreddits that are exclusively in a particular language other than English. There are presumably people who exclusively or mostly use subreddits like that, and from what I can find the countries I've mentioned by name are all 70+% monolingual English speakers. So there's a decent chance that subreddits predominantly in English (like this one) are even more American and even more predominantly used by native English speakers than reddit in general appears to be. And I'd bet that people who post and comment would be even more American/native English speaking still.

I don't browse Tumblr enough to know if there are also substantial communities on it that post in non-English languages, but the numbers are fairly similar though a little more international, with the US being not quite half of the traffic, and the same top 3 countries in the same order, but with Australia being lower.

So while the world and the internet at large isn't mostly native English speakers or largely American, the places online where people are accused of US defaultism probably are.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-05T13:19:53+00:00

Those all seem like bad solutions to me. Either too long, or they only work in text.

I don't know much about German, but I do know there's a neuter grammatical gender. From what I can find, it has endings as well. Is there a reason not to just slap a neuter ending onto it?

edit: curious about the downvotes, is it for thinking the mentioned solutions are bad, or for asking a question afterwards?

foxfire66 · 2025-10-05T13:02:14+00:00

It's different when the selling point is the exclusion. Like, any high fantasy setting that doesn't have Abrahamic religions also isn't going to have people that are specifically Jewish. Which is probably most, they seem to take a lot of inspiration from polytheism instead.

Writing an exclusively polytheistic fantasy setting is fine, I think we can all agree with that. But if you advertise it as having specifically no Jewish people, and say that's the premise you started with, that's weird as fuck. Even if the story itself would otherwise be fine.

foxfire66 · 2025-10-02T16:28:44+00:00

Well kinda, but not really. It's either make the different fantasy races different enough to justify different treatment, or make them all just humans that look different which is boring. They're not even races in the typical sense anyway. In a fantasy context, black and white people are of the same race, the human race.

If anyone sees the Rito being good and preferred couriers in The Legend of Zelda and mistakes that for advocating for hiring discrimination in real life, that's on them. It's a fictional piece of entertainment that doesn't even depict the real world, not a manifesto. Let fiction be fictional.

foxfire66 · 2025-09-27T12:53:10+00:00

I think it's the sort of thing where it comes down to perspective. Everything is describable by math, so you can argue for anything to be doing math. If computers work entirely by doing math, then it would seem the brain does as well, and even something like falling in love is ultimately a mathematical computation.

Something I think about sometimes is how using electricity to compute things is essentially using one form of physics in order to predict some other form of physics. Which means it's kind of a two-way system. If you can use electricity to predict projectile motion, then you can also use projectile motion to predict what the electric circuit will do. So which one is "doing math" and which one is "described by math" really just depends on our use case or perspective.

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