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Funny how in LOTR Sauron is defeated by the Middle Earth equivalent of multiculturalism. The Fellowship is a loving Burger King Kids Club of racial and cultural identity. It's ghot halflings, an elf, a Gondorian, a partial Numeanorian, a loving dwarf. And Gondor has to band together with Rohan to save Minas Tirith.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:01
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While Tolkien has problems I think he basically shares a lot of narrative elements and beats with some of the volkisch poo poo that was rattling around. This is mostly I think because he was a professor of languages with a heavy focus on Northern European mythologies and folktales and such; his work on "Beowulf" was impressive, for instance. I believe one of the reasons he had a massive hate-on for the Nazis (above and beyond the obvious "aha, the return of the Boche") is that they were more or less loving up his field of work. It would be like an archeologist who had focused his career on a city that ISIS is blowing up and/or cutting up for antiquities. Tolkien of course did not like modern industrial civilization much, but he fought in WW1 and lost most of his close friends to the trenches, so he at least had a reason other than "I hate Jews and poors." He was also a titanic papist.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:07
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Robotnik Nudes posted:Funny how in LOTR Sauron is defeated by the Middle Earth equivalent of multiculturalism. The Fellowship is a loving Burger King Kids Club of racial and cultural identity. It's ghot halflings, an elf, a Gondorian, a partial Numeanorian, a loving dwarf. They're of many different races but those races all happen to have white skin and many of their enemies happen to have other shades of skin. Makes you think.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:09
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I could benefit from rereading but I don't specifically recall most of the characters being described as white. I imagine you could probably read all of LOTR and have a black Boromir or Aragorn in your minds we without contradicting the text.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:14
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Numeanoreans were the first humans so actually it would make a fair amount of sense to think of Aragorn as at least partly black.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:19
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Hobbits are supposed to have brown skin compared to men, I thought. Which in the British imagination is probably like a slight tan.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:19
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Robotnik Nudes posted:I could benefit from rereading but I don't specifically recall most of the characters being described as white. I imagine you could probably read all of LOTR and have a black Boromir or Aragorn in your minds we without contradicting the text. The bad guys are specifically described as black (orcs) or dark-skinned (bad humans), though. I think this was meant to distinguish them from the other races. Anyway, one of the other things that you might notice not appearing in LOTR is any description of elf ears. He never once said that his elves had pointy ears.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:23
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As I recall elves were describes as having "leaf shaped ear" so depends on the leaf I guess. I personally choose a weed lead. Also the dark skinned Southern men who had allied with assuring lead to a scene where Sam finds a dead one and has a "oh poo poo they're regular people like me war is hell" moment. Doesn't mean Aragorn was white. He could have been Mediteranian or what have you. Unless there's something in the text that indicates he's Caucasian.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:25
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Robotnik Nudes posted:But speaking of LOTR, I'm curious how many of these clowns were homeschooled because the right wing views, misogyny and supreme over estimation of their intelligence + LOTR obsession just reeks of the vibe a lot of the more insightful, less conventionally brainwashed homeschool lads I grew up with. Yudkowsky was a grade-school dropout, but he did know better than to fall for Rand or neoreaction. I think the others had a fairly conventional educational path. Some even finished college! One Moldbug piece I used to give any respect to was this one, about why academic computer science sucks. It reads like a rant from someone stuck in a particularly awful corner of academia, and whatever else he is, Moldbug is in fact a competent technologist who knows his stuff. I mean, I disagree with the article, and while I myself am a dismal failure at all attempts at academia, I have lots of friends who arent, and it certainly doesn't match their experiences. But I presumed Moldbug was speaking from unfortunate experience here. Here's another, in which he implores you FOR GOD SAKE DON'T DO GRAD SCHOOL. Again, he writes like someone who knows his stuff and is speaking from at least some experience. Then I later found out he'd done ... two semesters at Berkeley before dropping out. Every word he writes about academia from the inside is sourced entirely from his colon. I shoulda gest. (Nydwracu attempted similar, but you see the state of technology is just terrible don't you know so he's retreated to politics and philosophy, because if you're going to write formless tedious rambles at least you should have a degree to make it official.) divabot has a new favorite as of 01:35 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 01:33
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Robotnik Nudes posted:Funny how in LOTR Sauron is defeated by the Middle Earth equivalent of multiculturalism. The Fellowship is a loving Burger King Kids Club of racial and cultural identity. It's ghot halflings, an elf, a Gondorian, a partial Numeanorian, a loving dwarf. I am now reminded of the time our boy Wesley Morganston defended himself against acccusations of white nationalism by saying that he didn't believe white people were all one race that could live peacefully. So he is literally too racist to be a white supremacist.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:33
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Even loving Tolkein himself said he regretted tying up good and evil with skin color. Did your school not teach context and subtext, or are you just really desperate to justify everything you like as having no bad elements in it?
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Aug 11, 2015 01:34
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divabot posted:(Nydwracu attempted similar, but you see the state of technology is just terrible don't you know so he's retreated to politics and philosophy, because if you're going to write formless tedious rambles at least you should have a degree to make it official.) Lol, didn't he get kicked out of college for being too racist? It was a college that kept in a student that made bomb threats too.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:37
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I am now reminded of the time our boy Wesley Morganston defended himself against acccusations of white nationalism by saying that he didn't believe white people were all one race that could live peacefully. Maybe he argued with our favourite Slavic untermensch that week and projected his annoyance on that particular segment of whitedom.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:37
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Unless they're mentioned as white in the text there's no reason a black kid reading it can't picture his heroes as black.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:37
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It's funny because yeah white people aren't a "race" so much as anything is, and we're bound together by the stringent scientific concept of "I don't know. Do they look white?"
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Aug 11, 2015 01:39
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They can, but as Hunger Games showed us even mentioning the character's skin color directly doesn't stop that kind of thing. Tolkien specifically divided the races into good light skin races and bad dark skin races. Him not mentioning the specific skin color of every character doesn't mean there wasn't a clear implication that the Fellowship were all light-skinned.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:42
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Lol, didn't he get kicked out of college for being too racist? That story needs to be verified actually. This tweet says he did in fact graduate. AND OF COURSE HIS LAST WORDS IN CLASS WERE "MENCIUS MOLDBUG". So maybe he really is academically qualified to be a freelance blogger! He's unlocked his Twitter again! https://twitter.com/nydwracu Read and "enjoy".
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Aug 11, 2015 01:44
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If it's not in the text. Death of the author u fukr Aragorn was a descendent of the first men, aka Africans.
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Aug 11, 2015 01:45
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They're white because Europeans are white and it's based in European folklore. The end.
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Aug 11, 2015 02:00
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Sham bam bamina! posted:They're white because Europeans are white and it's based in European folklore. Everyone in Eurpoe is white and has always been white forever the end. oh wait...
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Aug 11, 2015 02:07
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Dwarves were Semitic.
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Aug 11, 2015 02:11
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divabot posted:That story needs to be verified actually. This tweet says he did in fact graduate. AND OF COURSE HIS LAST WORDS IN CLASS WERE "MENCIUS MOLDBUG". Next you're going to tell me he didn't tragically die by falling out of the Dark Enlightenment blimp.
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Aug 11, 2015 02:15
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Robotnik Nudes posted:Aragorn was a descendent of the first men, aka Africans.
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Aug 11, 2015 02:52
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Robotnik Nudes posted:Everyone in Eurpoe is white and has always been white forever the end. I'm pretty sure Tolkien's folkish Catholic fairy tale universe is 100% incompatible with evolution, let alone the cutting edge of scientific data about the evolution of white skin.
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Aug 11, 2015 02:57
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Woolie Wool posted:I'm pretty sure Tolkien's folkish Catholic fairy tale universe is 100% incompatible with evolution, let alone the cutting edge of scientific data about the evolution of white skin. The catholic Church accepts evolution. Also Hobbits mostly evolved into Big Folks via interbreeding 9aka evolution) Stop trying to whitewash middle earth.
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Aug 11, 2015 03:07
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You obviously have not even read the books, as the Silmarillion has a literal loving creation story in it where God and the angels sing the world into existence and elves and men wake up fully formed at their divinely appointed times. E: Most of the Silmarillion was written before World War II, while the Catholic Church did not tolerate evolution until 1950 and did not officially accept it until 1996. Woolie Wool has a new favorite as of 03:17 on Aug 11, 2015 |
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Aug 11, 2015 03:14
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Woolie Wool posted:You obviously have not even read the books, as the Silmarillion has a literal loving creation story in it where God and the angels sing the world into existence and elves and men wake up fully formed at their divinely appointed times. Catholics dont have to take the Bible literally. Why should Elves have to take the Simarillion similarly? See, when Eru's song is actually a metaphor....
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Aug 11, 2015 03:17
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I'm clowning around, but it does occur to me, that's part of the fun of tolkien. His works are meta-fictionally fictional. LOTR is just a Hobbit's account of the War, with some editing by other hobbits. Within Tolkien's world the works we read about are inherently biased and contain some fabrications, misrememberings or other inacuracies because they're the opinionated view of some po'dunk halflings stoned on pipeweed. Likewise the Simarillion is basically The Old Testament of Middle Earth, a text that mixes religion and history, and therefore it's contents shouldn't be treated as necessarily literal.
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Aug 11, 2015 03:25
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pray, sing me the song of your kindergarten literature readings of 60 year-old material
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Aug 11, 2015 03:51
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coyo7e posted:pray, sing me the song of your kindergarten literature readings of 60 year-old material gently caress u.Someone tried to make an arghument for Simarillion literalism and that's a heresy you loving apostate.
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Aug 11, 2015 03:53
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White nationalists embrace Viking religion with Woden and poo poo. Why wouldn't they do the same with Tolkien, aside from few of them being literate enough to read at the necessary 8th-grade level?
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Aug 11, 2015 04:00
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Goddammit if we accept that it's possible to pretend like the characters are darker than parchment paper, will you accept that, given the time period, cultural milieu, and writings of the author, he probably meant for them to be White? This was an annoyingly disingenuous argument when I last saw it on tumblr and it hasn't gotten less so, especially since it distracts from making fun of racist manchildren.
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Aug 11, 2015 04:27
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Puppy Time posted:Goddammit if we accept that it's possible to pretend like the characters are darker than parchment paper, will you accept that, given the time period, cultural milieu, and writings of the author, he probably meant for them to be White?  Here's some content from over in the HPMOR thread: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai quote:I physically recoiled during the introductory session when Kerry Vaughan, one of the event's organizers, declared, "I really do believe that effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need." In the annals of sentences that could only be said with a straight face by white men, that one might take the cake.
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Aug 11, 2015 04:33
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Puppy Time posted:Goddammit if we accept that it's possible to pretend like the characters are darker than parchment paper, will you accept that, given the time period, cultural milieu, and writings of the author, he probably meant for them to be White? A reader cna interpret things how they like based on what's presented in the text. Knowing about tolkien as a perosn is interesting, and in a way Tolkien is almost immune to Death of the Author type arguments because amongst his fanbase every loving note he ever wrote down is considered canon, butto a 12 year old black kid reading LOTR for the first time there's nothing there to keep them from projecting their identity onto the heroes in order to feel a deeper connection to an involvment in the story. tolkien was a pretty progressive cat for his time and wanted to do more to George Lucas some of the accidental racism out of his works near the end. I doubt he'd have argued that there's anything intrinsically WHITE about his heroes. Eurpoean maybe, but there are and always have been plenty of Non-Whites in Europe and European history, and as a classicist he;d have known that. I eman I am clowning to a degree, Aragorn was probably white in tolkien's imagination of him as he wrote, but they are mythic works about heroes in part designed along lines of Catholic theology to inspire an aspiration to the virtues posessed by those characters, and if, when you read them you imagine that Aragorn is black you aren't contradicting the text. (as far as I recall) On the other hand, insisting they HAVE to be white is playing into the hands of people who'd like to use them to promote racist views of History that tolkien himself would oppose.
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Aug 11, 2015 04:33
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shut up you incredible baby
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Aug 11, 2015 04:37
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Robotnik Nudes posted:If it's not in the text. Death of the Author is horseshit anyways. Stories are a conversation between the author and the audience. Before modern copyright, the audience's voice often had equal weight. Hence the entirety of the Midrash, a collection of stories all commenting on, expanding on, or reacting to the many stories making up the Torah as well as other stories within the Midrash. Collectively, it forms a vast conversation spanning centuries, where audience and author blend into each other. "Death of the author" takes as a given the modern artificial divide between audience and author, and and erroneously concludes that the author doesn't matter. It ignores the fact that thanks to modern copyright, the audience is no longer the author's equal. The author is now the loudest voice, and sometimes the only voice, in the conversation, and they have unmatched power to shape the conversation revolving around their stories. Citing death of the author does jack poo poo to change the imbalance in this conversation, and merely pretends there is no problem. Tl;dr "Death of the author" is horseshit because copyright gives the author immense power to shape all discussion of their works. Post-modernism does not solve this. Fake edit for content:  Clever of Clarkhat, really. Asserting that blacks have no agency lets him ignore the fact that they suffer the most under the government's hand (something that he cannot abide as a white rich anarcho-capitalist, lest he be forced to acknowledge that they're the ones actually working to change things while he does jack poo poo to fight the Cathedral he supposedly hates so much).
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Aug 11, 2015 04:39
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Curvature of Earth posted:
So I guess Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman didn't contribute poo poo, then?
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Aug 11, 2015 04:41
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divabot posted:One Moldbug piece I used to give any respect to was this one, about why academic computer science sucks. It reads like a rant from someone stuck in a particularly awful corner of academia, and whatever else he is, Moldbug is in fact a competent technologist who knows his stuff. Nah. As in all else, he is a motherfucking attention seeking loon who's trying way too hard to be clever. https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/behn.hoon Loon, hoon, kyoooooooooon
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Aug 11, 2015 06:03
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BobHoward posted:Nah. As in all else, he is a motherfucking attention seeking loon who's trying way too hard to be clever. Would you be willing to explain what that is to us non-programmers?
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Aug 11, 2015 06:17
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Curvature of Earth posted:Would you be willing to explain what that is to us non-programmers? Basically Moldbug and his ilk have some sort of fetish for making really user-unfriendly programming language that has really unintuitive syntax. Pretty much they create intentionally hard to read code so they can smug about how much smarter they are than everyone else even though one of the highest goals of good programming is to be as clear and easily readable as possible. Basically they want computer science to be like the Bible during the Middle Ages. IE only intelligible to a select group of privileged white nerds who know not the touch of woman. Moldbug wants to be the Athiest equivalent of the Pope with programming as his holy text.
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Aug 11, 2015 07:04
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