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my update:
1) I stand by the great majority of what I said about the last one. pioneer imagery is genuinely benign and a poor target for outrage. this, on the other hand, is a wholly reasonable target for outrage.
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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
Since I received multiple good-faith critical DMs about this, it's clear I chose an ineffective way to make what I think is an important point. What do I mean by "you may be the dog" here?
Consider "It's okay to be white," which was coined and popularized by /pol/. What's the x.com/tracewoodgrain…
Show morebut 2)
I was overly dismissive of the idea of conscious "1488" messaging there, and those who pushed back against me were correct. there's very little ambiguity left in this one, and nothing to defend here.
and 3) shoutouts to the most impressive called shot of the bunch
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Valenteen
@_asmodai
Replying to @tracewoodgrains
Lots of people look at the above, and this painting instead.
Would you go to bat for this painting, too?
This is all just kind of outside the scope of the Department of Homeland Security
Do you reckon the D was also capitalized just to throw people off? Not disputing that this was signaling btw, genuinely curious.
someone pointed out that A = 1 and D = 4 (so ADHH=1488)
idk whether they put that much thought into it, but idk that they didn't either
there are plausible worlds where this isn't signaling, they're just nowhere near the most central ones
maybe im dense but why is this one specifically indefensible? is it the combination of "heritage" and "homeland"?
14 words long, HH again with no title-case ambiguity, and the picture very explicitly involves driving the natives out
This painting is a famous positive portrayal of Manifest Destiny
If you can’t defend Manifest Destiny you can’t defend America at all. There is no America without Manifest Destiny
it's a famous positive portrayal of, among other things, explicitly driving out and destroying the American Indians of the time, yes
It is both possible and good to defend America without glorifying the warfare against American Indians
I don’t think celebrating the driving out and death of American Indians is based tbh
there are many things to celebrate in our history but that is not one of them
celebrating the death and driving out of American Indians is not
not a ton. I think this is the correct one to get outraged at and the last one was not. I do think there's enough evidence at this point to take the "winking at 1488" stuff more seriously than I did with the last one, and I was too dismissive about that element, but I stand by
thought people were memeing about 1488
if intentional (10% chance, it seemed they just made a bunch of these with the prerequisite wording included, and it just happened to hover around the word count) it was a good troll
I find it pretty implausible that an extremely online staffer wouldn't be aware of the chatter around the last one, which makes the prospect of intentionality here much more compelling to me than the alternative
verbose willful density and more eyes on the propaganda. it is becoming quite transparent.
I think both applied if you include the context of what ICE is doing this administration
The first one is subtle enough that if you ignore the context it seems benign, but ultimately this is a DHS that is basically making a concentration camp in Florida and rounding up people
I've never paid attention to this painting before, but to me this doesn't look like Indians fleeing America. looks to me like warriors are fleeing, dragging a female slave, mother, and child who aren't fleeing at all. Am I crazy
Is this because of the native Americans being chased away? If I didn't zoom in on the picture I wouldn't have noticed that.
Yeah I thought the other one was mildly suspicious, but a sufficiently superficially positive symbol that the hysteria was inappropriate (and counterproductive...and exactly what the administration wanted). This is...more than mildly suspicious. It's an escalating provocation.
Yeah, you gotta call balls and strikes as you see 'em. Nothing bad about settlers, pioneers, or white families. Nothing inherently violent, much less fascist, about that. This, though - not a fan of invoking strikingly pagan triumphalist imagery to celebrate displacing tribes.
Also a possible explanation for the weird capital D thing here:
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SDL
@SocDoneLeft
Replying to @SocDoneLeft
- capital HH
- post is 14 words long
- odd capital letters: ADHH, or 1488
- post itself is white nationalist propaganda
You need to hate young Republican interns MORE.
This painting was uncontroversially plastered all over National Park Service field museums a generation or two ago.
It doesn't follow that you celebrate negative behavior toward tribes by acknowledging that we had to expand, & they integrated or moved on.
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TracingWoodgrains
@tracewoodgrains
Replying to @TheFatAmerican
it's a famous positive portrayal of, among other things, explicitly driving out and destroying the American Indians of the time, yes
It is both possible and good to defend America without glorifying the warfare against American Indians
Reminiscent of the mural in Parks and Rec that shows the city’s forbearers slaughtering native Americans on the site of Pawnee. That was made up, though.
Thins one what? Manifest destiny was good and America is good, do you want to cry about the Indians?
stop overreacting, this is clearly just an allegory for the westward expansion of the us department of education
I guess I can kind of see how this could be IOTBW-posting, it's mostly in the 'colonialism is good actually' imagery than any 14/HH stuff though IMO. If the latter is bait, isn't it better ignored?
If anything, this is the more respectable of the two paintings. They're both glorifying the same ideology, and this one's at least more candid about what exactly that ideology was.
So like... someone at homeland security is tasked with finding and posting white supremacies dog whistles?
Was puzzled until I zoomed in.
The angel lady is pretty, and she does tend to draw the eye.
But yeah, that's Not Great Bob.
I feel like they saw your post and said to themselves, "Let us clarify..."
it’s like they read your last one and went “they’re falling for it again, up the fascism-o-meter”
Man the past week in politics has hit like a truck.
Felt like things were returning to a sense of normalcy but this, along with the gerrymandering stuff. Minneapolis elections.
This gets said every now and then but we may as well already be in the event horizon.
In a shocking twist nobody could have expected it turns out there is at least one racist in the Trump administration
Not important but this is one of those “smaller than you expexted” paintings if you ever go see it at the Autry Museum in LA.
and now he’s hit the wall, like every time. soon he’ll be running again
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no earthquakely (YC26)
@no_earthquake
Replying to @tracewoodgrains
and he’s running again
it just keeps getting worse the more I see pointed out. The capitalization, the word count. It's surreal, man
The picture itself is good actually but the HH/14 words baiting is just utterly contemptible.
I'm pro-painting (liberal imperialism doesn't upset me), but the context and implications of that fourteen words, two capitalized Hs has me alarmed.
I'm probably what would be defined as a "bad person" but I genuinely can't understand why this image is somehow problematic? Do you really regret using taming the whole continent from coast to coast? All the greatness that humanity would miss out on without us having done that?
Wonder if there's any precedent for FOIA request over personnel responsible for social media/tweets? Might be worthwhile fishing expedition to see the cretin behind that account.
I mean this earnestly: does the clarity of this one change your view on the previous post
Yeah, I love America, but we really don’t need to proudly reclaim all of our racism, slavery, and ethnic cleansing. We don’t need to do that dawg.
Dumbass probably: "what's wrong with wanting to defend the ideals of your ancestors? I see nothing wrong with this"
Our destiny was manifested Trace. What's wrong with that? Think of it as the liberal burden. Lmao
Yall niggas are schizophrenic as fuck lol put the ssri's down
Personally, I suspect the social-media intern(s) at the DHS read all the discussion generated by the previous post, and decided to deliberately troll people by doubling down with this one.
