If everyone but you is wrong then you are wrong.

Here's my statement;

If everyone but you is wrong then you are wrong.


With these caveats; 

(and people who somehow don't read or process these but who still insist on leaving a comment, enjoy my utterly silent passive-aggressive rage in response).

If we are talking about an industrial art, something like cinema or mass publishing where it only really works if a very huge number of people are willing to buy it.

More simply, if we are talking about fiction and products of the imagination. (Not, primarily moral or political matters, like if everyone is into rape or slavery except for you then you still get to be right.) and it’s for a mass audience, in that case, if the vast majority of people who are into it are making a category error, that is, they are viewing it in a way you regard as incorrect, then in-effect, you are making the category error.

Because - the only thing that allows this thing to exist is the mass audience that funds and sustains it. And since its not deeply attached to real life, however they see it is a more true expression of how it is than whatever the cultural minority say about it.

So, in those conditions_, if everyone but you is wrong, then you are wrong.

Usually this is an irony thing and usually it’s the smug intellectual bourgeoisie lecturing the great mass of meatheads on how a thing they like is actually an ironic refutation of exactly that thing they like duuuuuh.

I don't think I've ever really bought that argument, for a variety of reasons

One - I'm usually less pissed off or alienated by this thing than other balloon-headed milk-weeping choleric intelligentsia.

Two - I hate irony itself more and more each day.

Three - As a distaff member of the bourgeois-hating bourgeoise, as you are driven by a desperate need to locate yourself as separate from and slightly better than the great mass of ambulant spam cans who drive and fuel our great society, so I, a superior intellectual, am driven by an equally strong need to show myself as seperate from, and slightly better than, You.

So as you are driven by genetically-deep drive to constantly explain their sadly mistaken cultural takes to the lumpen kulturpfutz, so I must equally chide and educate you.

Four - But, even so, if this thing, this movie, this set of toys, this musical thing, is driven almost entirely by people who take the message at something closer to face value than you, if them buying it allows it to exist, and if it’s an imaginary thing which by bullshit postmodern rules only really fully exists when and while being regarded and thought about, which requires a human mind to interpret it, then doesn't them having more minds, and also literally paying for its existence mean their brain-votes outvote your brain-votes?





WHY BRING THIS UP NOW?

I've completely run out of ideas for this blog so looks like we are doing culture war now baby. The years of content are over, Pundit here I come.

And this recent interview on the 40k company podcast has Tim Molloy making the very-often-repeated by anxious lefties argument that Warhammer 40k is not a desired end-state and we shouldn't identify with it like that.

Which annoys me for two reasons I think.

One - I think very few people do actually identify with it like that, at least without realising what they are doing and being able to stop.

Two - If a twelve year old (probably boy) didn't look at a Space Marine and go 'pew pew! Space Marine! Gonna fight the baddies!', then Games Workshop, and all of the jobs of the people in Games Workshop, probably wouldn't exist.

More precisely, some degree of heroic identification with the setting is absolutely necessary to the company’s survival and has been a fully integrated thread in its makeup from day one.

So I got kind of ratty as what I perceive as liberal chiding and left-wing self-flagellation by groups and individuals who's jobs depend on people not really listening to that chiding and moralising, and who are doing almost exactly the same thing just at a slightly different level.

Because absolutely no-one is playing in or imagining the Imperium of Man as North Korea in space, which is what it would be like, because it would be made out of starvation, boredom, ethnic hatred and rape. And I don't remember seeing much of those in any Blanchitsu articles.


"Ahhhh, you, a child, probably bought and painted that Space Marine thinking you were playing with a hero.

Whereas I, an *intellectual*, agonisingly converted my Inquisitor model and speckled them with a heartbreakingly accurate depiction of situation ally correct industrial decay and in-world derived skin problems, in full understanding of the innate tragedy of the setting.

Yes I do indeed go 'pew pew' with my models, and yes I did glob together a bunch of plastic to represent a person who, if they were real, their main job would be torturing and murdering people.

But, when I go 'pew pew', I do it in a morally and politically sophisticated way, you fucking twelve year old casual.

Also, please buy our all-new Boxed-Set I just opened a mortgage on a house."