Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I donāt think people get how reactionary the captain vimes books are. look at whatās happening in them. in plain english, you have a cop and his band of good apples + adorably bad apples saving the ass of a dictator again and again, because sometimes you just need a clever steady hand in charge. Pratchett was informed by liberal humanist values, and thereās plenty of great stuff about tolerance in there. but the foundation of any vimes novel is an institutionalist urge to bootlicking. it just has to be the right boot
It sucks to have to decolonise your darlings. It sucks that a lot of our most enjoyable stories are copaganda. Even the most redeemable stories about cops have probably inspired people to become cops.
@sc_griffith
I think Pratchett understood that, despite people romanticizing revolution, revolutions often end up opening the door to something as bad or worse. Especially in a place like Discworld.
@sc_griffith
In Night Watch:
āVimes/Keel tells Ned Coates not to put his trust in revolutions āThey always come around again. Thatās why theyāre called revolutions. People die, and nothing changesā This is a common theme in Pratchett regarding authority figuresā
That said Vimes does participate in a revolution of sorts in that book, as āJohn Keelā, in the past.
yeah thatās the conservative spirit right there
Books would be really boring if the protagonists were all just the author speaking as themself but using various funny voices.
thereās not a lot of ambiguity in what the novels are getting at, so no offense but this line of argument is not worth engaging directly. but I will point out that I didnāt say what pratchettās views were. part of why people donāt look askance at these books is that his other work is at odds with the realpolitik message Iām pointing out. I canāt and I donāt draw conclusions about his ārealā views based on the vimes novels