A penitent who is loud

So don’t make me laugh by saying that the Nazis learned how to be bigots from the US. They perfected a science that the European Christian mind had been working on for two goddamn millennia prior

I would like to talk a little bit about the experience of living in the Roman ghetto in Renaissance Europe for you guys. Just to give a sense of why the idea that Nazis learned from the US is so offensive. A thread of uncertain length.

To start, the Roman ghetto was deeply overcrowded swampland.

Or:
bsky.app/profile/sjsh...

when i talk about how free-associating your way from [policy X] to [imagined harm to a marginalized person] being a real problem with real effects beyond social media, it's this kind of shit i am talking about

www.liberalcurrents.com/in-praise-of...

Not much room to gnaw on there for your theorists when the problem is just "hey. a lot of our current elite are assholes, mostly doing bad things because their brains have been melted by avant-garde reactionary philosophers."

Folks keep making structural arguments, & those are worthwhile & intellectually stimulating under normal circumstances, but MANY of our current problems can be addressed by: "don't give evil people vast political or economic power, & if in power, remove them"

It's just that isn't very interesting.

I wonder why you said it shifted your focus, I guess? I'm not accusing you of anything, I'd like to understand.

sure, but I wouldn't exactly call that especially philosophically daring either, or really especially representative of any intellectual religious tradition.

to people in the hard times of the Renaissance, the absence of pain is appeal enough, I guess, but moderns want to fuck & build stuff.

Well, there's a photo I never expected to see in my life. Noam Chomsky palling around with Steve Bannon.

(if anything the biggest tension came when they revealed that most of Heaven is both ignorant of the whole slaughter and basically good, while most sinners ARE just terrible people, just kind of excitingly hedonistically terrible)

Given that the entire central original problem of Hazbin was basically: "oh no the evil genocidal angels are slaughtering the poor downtrodden damned in Hell, we need to 'redeem' them to get them into Heaven so the mean genocidal chud angels don't slaughter them all for their own sadistic glee!"...

Not *entirely* true, he is presented *more* positively in the original film, and in the books he straight up becomes an ally and worker of magic in his own right

But yeah - people are tied to the idea of divinity and heaven as an orderly perpetual stasis, rather than a vibrant and vigorous place of reinvention, creation and engagement.

Yet the depiction of the place is as a puerile, perpetually innocent combination of Hallmark movie, Kindergarten and Disneyland where the ruling angels have evidently *never seriously thought* about questions of good, evil, & redemption beyond accepting the shallow dogma of damnation as permanent.)

(To tie it back to another of my threads, this is part of what REALLY bugs me about Hazbin Hotel's depiction of Heaven. This is the place where every virtuous soul in human history ended up! There should be so many wise rabbis, virtuous philosophers, and gifted theologians there.

Also that! But I do think it's creative laziness that so many writers don't seriously engage with good and virtue as like, a complex multifaceted thing that needs to be negotiated, explored, studied, and reexamined. The assumption is that evil is infinitely philosophically complex but good is simple

But all of this tying back to the idea that of course the Valar have creative opinions about this. Creation isn't a one-and-done, it's a living system they all worked out, are tinkering with and participating in, including all the pleasures and beauties of life! They're not *separate*.

who could have foreseen

Active participation in existence as a topic of *mechanical* debates in craft about how best to achieve what they can with what they have using their skills as well as philosophical ideas with the deceased Eldar weighing in or watching with amusement, because of course this would be a creative beef!

And it wasn't the Valar all speaking with one placid voice about the necessity of things the Children couldn't understand, they immediately start arguing THEMSELVES about it (because this is an old creative dispute among beloved friends) and one goes "Ok, FINE, if we're going to argue this..."

There's also the belief that these things are rather passive.

Like, one of my favorite passages from an old Silmarillion script fic was a bunch of elves and Valar in the Halls of Mandos suddenly breaking into an elaborate *mechanical* debate on the problems of evil and the design of the world.

they kind of famously did it a lot, at scale, even

The internet makes it so anyone can find your art.
That goes for everyone else art.

Well, I'd argue only because people are lazy and don't really want to engage with good and divinity as complicated.

Heaven and goodness as the designated drivers of reality. Something *someone* should be doing, one of the boring squares, but hopefully not YOU, so YOU get to live it up in revelry.

American Diabolism is still “american exceptionalism”.

This is the actual problem we face that a lot of Media and Artistic Discourse wants to avoid.

There are many people, & therefore many creators & many more works than people have time or energy to experience. How therefore do they get THEIR work to the front of an enormously long list?

I'm specifically referring to the Wicked one, who is all about the seduction of evil mediocrity.

eh, the thing is you can very easily do a hot angel that is also awesome and scary, as opposed to being an eldritch cthulu abomination or a hallmark puerile cliche.

I think it's more that the driving temptation of a lot of modern media is a sort of wicked sexy trangression.

Sure, but the Wicked take is rather more specific and hostile.

TBF also it's not like it's wholly mythically unknown.