I'm on a mailing list for Claudia and got this today. Kind of funny since last week the Democrats tried kicking de la Cruz off of the Georgia ballot.

  • heggs_bayer [none/use name]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I looked up the guy that quote was from, and umm...

    As an admirer of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, he was an outspoken opponent of... representative democracy... which he viewed as a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors

    He seemed to show a genuine enthusiasm for militarism but never in its American form. "War is a good thing," he wrote, "because it is honest; it admits the central fact of human nature... A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid."

    Mencken recommended for publication philosopher and author Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living and called it "a really excellent piece of work". Shortly afterward, Rand addressed him in correspondence as "the greatest representative of a philosophy" to which she wanted to dedicate her life, "individualism" and later listed him as her favorite columnist.

    In addition to his identification of races with castes, Mencken had views about the superior individual within communities. He believed that every community produced a few people of clear superiority. He considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural elitism and natural aristocracy. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's view, were those wrongly oppressed and disdained by their own communities but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement, not by race or birth.

    Bufe [wrote] that some of Mencken's statements were "odious", such as his claim in his 1918 introduction to Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ that "The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world".

    how-compellingsmuglordwall-flipped

    • roux [he/him, they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 months ago

      This user really started quoting a fascist in a dunk sesh with a bunch of commies lol.

      • Nakoichi [they/them]
        ·
        2 months ago

        This has to be the funniest case of a liberal smuglord stumbling in here thinking they are the smartest person in the room about to educate us simple minded commies and getting absolutely shredded in recent memory, very old school r/cth vibes. I love you all

        rat-salute-2

        • roux [he/him, they/them]
          hexagon
          ·
          edit-2
          2 months ago

          I always wanted to start a dunk session. I just never imagined I would do it with a post in the_dunk_tank lol. The post was mostly meant to poke fun at the sign co-opting too. Didn't expect an Australian trying to lib-plain US politics to those of us who are actively getting crushed by the US machine...

          I think this is probably my best post on hexbear now, but also the amount of info that other hexbears just bring with fire in dunk sessions has always impressed me.

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
      ·
      2 months ago

      A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid

      i love this appears to be the harshest criticism he can come up with of peace. "ummm actually being peaceful makes you like an OLD WORKING CLASS WOMAN. owned yet?!??"

      • Speaker [e/em/eir]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        The expression "old maid" is a synonym for "spinster", and suggests an elderly unmarried woman rather than an occupation. So it's more a misogynistic insult than a classist one.