• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 29th, 2020

help-circle
  • I recommend doing the opposite. Read good texts and widely so that you can recognize the flaws in others’ rationales and school them when they try to pretend thst the Lexicon of one capitalist weirdo is somehow respectable. Some of this is philosophy but I would say that history and media criticism are even more important. Many arguments about “human nature” or how things should be vs. how they are are clouded by false histories and being unable to recognize manipulative thought processes.

    Reading, say, Mein Kampf to learn about “the enemy” is of little value. “The enemy” didn’t become who they are because Hitler wrote a convincing book and you won’t argue them out of a position because you call them out when they quote it incorrectly or something. To understand Nazis you have to place them in their historical and political context. Who funded them? What was their class composition? Who opposed them and how? What were they a reaction to? And in modern times, who do they now appeal to? Are the mainstream cultural elements that overlap witg Naziism? Not just Trumpers, but mainstream liberals and “apoliticals”?

    I would recommend starting with authors like David Graeber, Michael Parenti, Mike Davis, Michael Zinn, or Malcolm Harris for easier political-historical reads. To dive deeper you can read the texts they reference. And FAIR.org and the Citations Needes podcast for media criticism.




  • Iirc it would be more accurate to say the crowd apprehended Jackson. He nearly beat the guy to death with his cane and the crowd had to stop him.

    Nope. Jackson was old and feeble and required someone to walk him to and from the funeral. The crowd, including Davey Crockett, restrained the assassin, who was found not guilty because he had incredible delusions. Jackson himself, old and confused, immediately claimed it was the political opposition come to get him and waved his walking stick around trying to hit the already-subdued man.

    Jackson was a cruel racist settler colonist who only punched down. He was not personally particularly physically threatening and most of his “deeds” were done after age 45. The idea that Jackson was at all physically imposing is just Americans making things up because they have no respectable history. And those myths became rumors and common knowledge and then get repeated with veneration - e.g. I would suspect your knowledge of the cheese wheel comes, in some way or another, from a West Wing episode.