David J. @TheDavid_Jay

@SaemusRiley My sentiments exactly. I love this app. There are so many values I gain from it.

@SaemusRiley The Romantic Manifesto is one of my favorites of Rand’s non-fiction work and has heavily influenced my own work.

@YandhiAesthetic @sfmcguire79 Thanks. I know that, and it’s why part of my strategy is to post on here. I know it’s popular right now to hate on X as a platform, but honestly I think it’s a tremendous value.

@is_OwenLewis @is_OwenLewis what are your thoughts about how this strategy might apply more broadly, to foreign policy, for instance? I’ve been working on a project (that isn’t ready to discuss publicly yet) but there seems to be some overlap.

@HistoryWJacob I largely agree with you, but I think the term “sacrifice” in your post obfuscates their position. I think many of them would argue that they viewed public office as a *service* towards a higher value—namely the republic—and an example of high civic and individual virtue.

I apologise if I was unclear. I don’t think propaganda implies fascism—I’m using the term descriptively, here, not pejoratively. Propaganda, as I understand it, is simply what we call government speech, particularly when it advances an opinion about facts in reality. It may be true and benign—for instance, if a government publicly recommends an apple a day for health, it has propagandised its position. Almost all governments do this, from liberal social democracies to republics to dictatorships. That does not mean fascists do not make special use of propaganda to push their agenda; they aim to divorce the individual from objective truth so that only the government position remains. That is ultimately a difference of degree, not a difference in the essential distinction between private speech and government speech.

In such a scenario, fascism looks heroic by comparison, because you have humans fighting to the death to protect Earth and the billions of innocent humans that live there on the one hand, and on the other, you have giant space murder hornets who unthinkingly and dispassionately tear people apart.

I think the claim is, if one’s aim is to satirize “fascism” (and that’s even if we grant that film does a good job of depicting fascism), it might not be a great idea to have humanity locked in a war of extermination with an alien hive mind whose individual components are literal non-rational slaughter machines.

@R0SBIF Same is true of Sir Francis Drake, to be fair.

I just wrote about this on another thread, but the TLDR is I think the use of “fascist” in this “controversy” is just mistaken. It seems that many don’t know what’s destinctive about fascism as a political philosophy. So when they use it, it’s just a smear for something in the political realm that they don’t like. For those interested: x.com/thedavid_jay/s…

David J. @TheDavid_Jay

18 hours ago

@M_Bohemond It’s another instance of the habit of treating anything short of twenty-first-century liberal social democracy as fascism. Look at the Federation as the film actually presents it and what appears is, essentially, a modernised classical republican system: full citizenship is

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But is that true? Carmen and Zander are struck by the asteroid precisely because it wasn’t supposed to be there (if I remember correctly she had just re-plotted the course, and they register it as an unexpected object). In the same scene they trace its trajectory back to the Arachnid Quarantine Zone and try (and fail) to warn Earth. The film presents it as a pre-existing threat from the bug zone, not something they deflected.

It’s another instance of the habit of treating anything short of twenty-first-century liberal social democracy as fascism. Look at the Federation as the film actually presents it and what appears is, essentially, a modernised classical republican system: full citizenship is earned through federal service but otherwise available for all, political rights are restricted accordingly, and public life is organised around a conception of civic duty while the private sphere is left alone and protected. Sure the militarism is cartoonish and the homoeroticism is overdone, yet neither supplies the racial hierarchy, the one-party dictatorship, or the revolutionary-nationalist metaphysics that distinguish fascism and Nazism as specific political philosophies. Those terms have been stretched so far that many people can no longer identify the features that made them distinctive and evil. It’s all just “icky martial” vibes at this point.

Very well said. And while I’m not one to normally take a more negative turn, the same holds for a toxic male figure in a boy’s life: he can just as easily learn from that bad example as something to be avoided—a kind of negative yardstick that serves as a constant reminder to be a better man. Obviously a negative example is nowhere near as effective as a positive one. For one thing, it does not teach a boy how to be a good man; it only shows what will happen if he decides to be a bad one. The result is that, without a positive male role model, the boy has to figure it out through trial and error. It is still possible to be a good man despite this tragedy, and it is all the more impressive when that boy actually makes it.

@TheGentsGuild @fearnothing Have you heard of the upcoming models by Scout Motors? They have a similar rugged boxy body styling as the Toyota Land Cruiser above, but they’re also electric! I think they’re pretty cool: scoutmotors.com

@Gentleman_Ways @TheGentsGuild Morning gentlemen, this seems like something you’d appreciate:

Archaeology & Art @archaeologyart

a day ago

Thomas Blackshear - Watchers in the Night (1955)

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@peterrhague This and the mosquito BS a few weeks back has me thinking that today a non-trivial fraction of people are actually pro-human death by insects.

@stephenituruka Not quite: x.com/thedavid_jay/s…

David J. @TheDavid_Jay

a day ago

@CreativeDeduct Close. It is one of the most important individual rights, to be sure, but it is not the only one. One must *first* have a right to one’s life. Life is the fundamental right; from it follows the freedom to act so as to sustain that life, and from that freedom follows the right to

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