formerly /u/squirrelrampage on Reddit

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  • 93 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • This is probably an unpopular opinion, but here it goes…

    Because the Hero’s Journey is junk science. Joseph Campbell who created the “Hero’s Journey” was an arch-reactionary who had intended to present an alternative to the literature of his day which he disdained. He longed for a return to the “wisdom of the past” and his book “The Hero with a thousand faces” was positioned as presenting this wisdom, arranged around Freudian and Jungian theories, particularly the debunked “collective unconscious”; as well as the ideas of reactionary philosopher Spengler and ethnologist Frobenius (particular Frobenius’ idea of “paideuma”).

    What the book actually is, is a mashup of quotes from various myths and legends, deprived of their cultural context and strung together along the lines of Campbell’s preconceived beliefs. These myths and legends are never considered in their entirety, nor did Campbell dwell on the culture that produced them. From a standpoint of anthropology, it is a profoundly unscientific book and upon publication it was largely dismissed as such by Campbell’s peers.

    In the “American Anthropologist” Stephen Porter Dunn wrote:

    Campbell’s book is in a sense a throwback to an earlier heroic age of anthropology, when the air was dark with flying hypotheses and comparisons rained down like acorns in autumn. Reading it, the case-hardened social scientist derives the same sort of nostalgic, half-shamed pleasure as the ordinary adult would from reading G.A. Henty or Robin Hood to his children. Campbell uses the traditional equipment and methods of a literary critic, for whom comparison and analogy are tantamount to proof and fact. He writes in a curiously archaic style - full of rhetorical questions, exclamations of wonder and delight, and expostulations directed at the reader […]

    Accordingly, The Hero’s Journey always mattered more to literary applications than as a genuine human artefact. Still the importance of the The Hero’s Journey as a storytelling concept only came after the success of “Star Wars”, when Hollywood discovered it as a template for blockbuster movies. Though Hollywood largely discarded most of Campbell (for good reason) in favor of the simplified version as presented by Christopher Vogler (for example: The 12 steps of the Hero’s Journey are Vogler’s version, Campbell used 17) who did not care much about the Hero’s Journey allegedly universal applicableness, than in its usefulness as a tool set.

    Lots of people are still heavily invested in painting the Hero’s Journey as a universally shared principle of storytelling. To those people I recommend Robert Ellwood’s “The Politics of Myth”, which traces the development of Campbell’s thinking and the development of the Hero’s Journey.



  • I hate Elon with every fiber of my body, but: No, this is not going to happen.

    Most people don’t care/don’t know about Elon’s politics. Look at Henry Ford: Most people don’t know he was a fascist either, they just know that he was the guy who made cars and maybe they even know that he had something to do with assembly lines, but that’s about it.

    You can currently observe in real-time how white-washing the reputation of a guy like Ford/Musk works outside of leftist circles. Mainstream media won’t even acknowledge Musk’s nazi salute ever happened, let alone how he instigates racist progroms on exTwitter.

    Still, I agree that leftist spaces should never stop calling him what he is: A fascist.











  • While I recently dug into some Alemannic folklore, I discovered a different spin on the “fairies/spirits drowning people” tale, the Dolden. Essentially these malevolent spirits/ghosts resemble children caught in trees above stretches of water. At night they will call out for help, pretending to be trapped children, but they only wish for the helpful people to approach the tree they sit in and then fall into the water below where they drown. According to the myth, the Dolden were once mortal children who left to drown in a flood and now punish humans.









  • There are some responses already, but I will offer yet a different one: From a technical viewpoint, middle-middle is best. The seat in the middle of the middle row.

    The reason is because movie theatres need to get calibrated: The sound and the picture get adjusted for the best possible viewing/sound experience. This calibration process usually targets the middle of the room, because this ensures that even the edges will at least have a decent sound and a decent picture. Nonetheless the middle-middle position will be where sound and picture are optimal. You sit at the centre of the area targeted by the sound system and where are at an optimal distance from the screen for the sharpest picture.

    Of course, that is theoretical. Specific movie theatres may have a variety of reasons to go for a calibration that favours different spots and whether people want to sit in the middle-middle is a wholly different question.




  • One of the articles you posted contains this bit:

    According to Fuentes, who could not be reached for comment, Kent told him “I love what you’re doing.” Fuentes said he and his organization — as well as his social media following — boosted Kent’s message.
    “We retweeted his stuff, we showed his stuff on Gab, we got his social media up off the ground,” Fuentes said in the three-and-a-half-hour livestream. “That was part of that call.”

    So whether you believe Fuentes or rather Kent’s denial, Fuentes was at one time convinced that they are working together. That’s “ties” to me. YMMV