Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
I'll just leave this here because I didn't know, but guessed from context and then googled to verify:
The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1985. The book, set in New England in the near future, posits a Christian fundamentalist theocratic regime in the former United States that arose as a response to a fertility crisis.
Norm macdonald was somewhat inexplicably outraged by this book and Atwood in general, and constantly trashed her and handmaids tale on Twitter.
https://www.thewrap.com/norm-macdonald-handmaids-tale/
I think he turned a little more toward Christianity near the end of his life, so maybe that explains why the book made him upset.
he almost never posted anything very seriously, or really ever presented himself publicly in a completely serious manner, but every time he talked about Atwood or hating a handmaid's tale, which was many times, he sounded dead serious.
at times he was explaining how ridiculous the premise of her book was, before The Supreme Court struck down female bodily autonomy and health care.
I had a personal friend do the exact same thing, explaining to me how he thought sci-fi novels were ridiculous because you can't have oppression in the future since progress is always moving forward.
first, I tried to explain that history does not precede solely in a linear fashion, which he disagreed with.
then The Supreme Court and State governments outlawed medical care for women and I was like "this is kind of what I was talking about".
progress not being guaranteed with time passing.
I've never read the book. But it's wild how devout Christians never see Christian radicalism as the problem. Literally anything can be radicalized.
IHMO, if you just look at it like any other form of Tribalism (i.e. Political, National and even Sports) it absolutelly makes sense that people whose identity is a Religion (or a Political Party, Nation or even Sports club) cannot emotionally accept that those of "their tribe" are bad since one of the core foundations of Tribalism is exactly that "we" are good and it's the "others" that are bad.
The massive and for them extremelly important mental and emotional construct of self-validation and self-aggrandizing such people have based on their identity as member of a tribe (all those "we members-of-tribe are something-good" beliefs) - often at the cost of personal achievement recognition or as compensation for lack of personal achievement - would collapse if they accepted that the basic axiom of "membership of the tribe makes/proves people good/superior" is not true, so at the most basic psychological level they're driven to not question that axiom and to deny anything that might disprove it.
You're right about how they view their "tribe". I think it's interesting how tribalism unfolds though. At times you have ostracization (RINO, sects, gatekeeping). But sometimes it's staunch defense. You could see this in real time after January 6th when people couldn't decide if the insurrectionists were ANTIFA or patriots. It's just interesting when it goes one way or the other. Hell, in 2016 Trump went from the crazy guy in the room to the core of the party.
There's Progress in Technology and Science, but Socially and Psychologically Humans have barelly changed in millenia.
I think people often people confuse Scientific and Technological Progress with general progress, when for Human Society in general it's really more of a case of Same Monkeys, Better Tools.
(All of this IMHO)
He was more conservative than he let on.
https://jacobin.com/2021/10/norm-macdonald-anti-politics-anti-comedy-snl-subversion-stand-up
Notable figures of the online right did the very same thing, some of them claiming Norm Macdonald as one of their own. While they may have overstated their case, it can nonetheless be difficult to square appreciation for Macdonald’s comedy with his ambiguously conservative politics.
In an era when right-wing comedians claim to be “truth tellers” smashing liberal taboos to get laughs, Norm Macdonald considered himself no such thing. “I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art,” he said in 2018. “But I’d always learned that concealing everything was art.” Macdonald didn’t enjoy political comedy and on stage spared his audience his personal opinions on political matters: “Let’s not get into this shit, man,” he told Marc Maron in 2011 when the topic of politics was broached, “I can see people not laughing now.”
Macdonald’s concealment was a smart call by a canny performer, but it was also a deference to his audience and their enjoyment, and perhaps we should see that as a kind of generosity. And without understanding the extent of this self-concealment — something many of the obituaries missed — we don’t fully appreciate Macdonald’s life, art, and politics.
"He was more conservative than he let on."
no he wasn't. or at least there isn't any evidence of that.
he was a private person and was exactly as conservative as he let on publicly.
norm occasionally publicly talked about his politics, and also how he didn't like to talk about politics in general.
that article is about how he was anti-political and didn't like to disclose personal beliefs, not about how he was a secret conservative.
it's a little gossipy, but it's pop-culture spin on a few off-hand public comments over his entire lifetime of public appearances, not private, new information that changes anything already known to the general public.
How does your friend explain the "linearity" of the Dark Ages?
I asked about Egypt specifically and the rise and fall of empires in general, but apparently that was "not the same thing".
civilization advancing, stagnating, and regressing is not the same as civilization advancing, stagnating, and regressing.
his main stumbling block was that there was still birth control that he understood 200 years in the future.
he said there shouldn't be any pills anymore, because there's no way there would still be pills in the future.
I was like well there were pills 200 years ago from today.
but apparently "that's not the same thing".
so similar medical technology existing 200 years apart is not the same as similar medical technology existing 200 years apart.
and I was like maybe they put all their innovation into creating new materials for spaceships and they had a ain't broke don't fix it attitude toward birth control.
He's like yeah, but there's no way that any sort of technology like that could ever really go backwards.
and I had just watched this video about this specific diaphanous fiber weave that was like the most popular and technically advanced weave of all time that only the wealthy Romans wore, and it was due to a specific weaving technology for these super delicate fragile fibers, and that technology was not funded as rome went bankrupt and then was gradually forgotten and lost for centuries as the local weavers died out and didn't pass on their knowledge, so instead of some insane thread count, the leading weaving expert from that region of the world today can still only match like 30% of the thread count with modern technology and techniques.
and he was like "that's not the same thing".
so technology going backwards is not the same as technology going backwards.
how dull and bewildering an exchange that was.
but riveting to read and write about!
Dawg, someone find this man and throw eggs at him.
I saw this post earlier and it's been bothering me. Even if The Handmade's Tale was based on another religion, how would it be relevant?
Christians would feel a tiny bit better that they're not the villains in the movie
It matters if you're incapable of processing abstraction properly.
If you're a mindless tribalist, the "tribe" it's based on is the thing that maters the most, and for some of those their tribe or at least and important part of its identity is a specific religion (often it's even a specific sect within a major religion).
If you actually use your brain for thinking (instead of just as a cranium filling mass that keep it from collapsing into a vacuum) then it is indeed irrelevant the religion The Handmaid's Tale is based on.
Okay, when did mansplaining change from overexplaining something simple because the listener isn't a man to just explaining things in a horrendously incorrect manner?
This isn't mansplaining, this is just being a massive christian dumbass.
I've seen it used that way a lot. Think I saw a guy link a research paper to a woman he was arguing with. Turns out she wrote the damn thing and it did not agree with him like he claimed.
Incredible
