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Fantasy Books Are Right-Wing Propaganda (Financial Times, Martin Sandbu)www.ft.com/content/492ba355-e428-4b32-b1d3-1a6a81d9b6d3
1707 sats \ 7 comments \ @denlillaapan 5h BooksAndArticles
First they came for the gym bros (#982981), but I wasn't a gym bro. (lol, not true.)
Then they came for the fantasy literature...
Reading the greats, the ones with clear moral virtue and ethics weaved through a complex, storyline unsuited for those with 5-second attention span... is now right-wing nationalist talk? I hate the mainstream media, its asinine woketard ideas, its reactionary everything-that-isn't-high-brow-leftism-is-racist shit. Abolish; abolish all of them.
My god.

"a fascination with fantasy literature unites European nationalist conservatives, Trump tech bros, and the Maga movement. Is this a coincidence? Or does something about fantasy fit the rightwing mind unusually well?"

it is easy to see how medieval social hierarchy and essentialist racial categorisation, both common to fantasy worlds, could appeal to reactionary world views.
eh, lol? Sure, that's why we read them. Jezus fuck
: ‘pure’ people struggling for values they appreciated but that were undervalued by others around them”
Now, that's more appropriate.
and now we're talking (but that's not a dig at fantasy, but at the lunacy of the left):
Fantasy represents less a return to a premodern idyll, then, than a fulfilment of the freedom the Enlightenment promised but social complexity took away. This is harder for the left to buy into, for social structure is what the left is all about.
P.S.: this is fake news: I'm no longer a fantasy-reading dork, but I'm def a gym bro... @realBitcoinDog attests to it!
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33 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 3h
This bullshit and variants pop up all the time. Folks on the right love some fantasy lit, but so do folks on the left, and it's dumb when folks focus on it from their own perspective ("Tolkien's creating my sort of world") or the way it's done here, looking at the "other side."
Like, how could they write this article which talks about Thiel's Tolkien love with Panintir but somehow not talk about Musk and his obsession with super-socialist (but fantastic author) SF author Iain M. Banks? Musk names all his ridiculous space drones after those books.
(Yes, SF and fantasy are different, but it seems like a very deliberate hyperfocus here.)
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan OP 2h
Yup, says more about author than topic
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33 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 4h
That aligns nicely with populism. It supports the idea that troubles in people's lives are caused by malign forces and that certain special individuals can take those enemies on and win.
Unlike Marxism?
From a wider lens. When is it that "trouble in peoples lives" are not because of "malign forces"? Its something like a tautology. (If your house is destroyed by a hurricane isn't that also a 'malign force')
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19 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan OP 2h
Totally -.-
sociatally structurally bad forces, eh
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59 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 5h
I mean, these books were pretty much universally beloved. I don't think the right all of a sudden found an appreciation for fantasy---that appreciation was always there. I think the left just became a bunch of people whose primary mission is to elevate their own virtue to the point that nothing good can be said about anything.
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan OP 2h
True. Dat.
I sent this to a left-wing friend who went, "well the palantirs are used by pretty bad people, so at least that checks out"
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17 sats \ 0 replies \ @bitcoingraffiti 4h
FT is left wing propaganda.
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