I was always under the impression that you had to be convinced in order to change your mind about something. But if there is anything that I've learned lately, it's that you can be unconsciously duped into having a knee jerk response to something that your conscious mind finds ridiculous. Bear with me.
This may be a kind of corollary of Robert Conquest's second law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. Except in this example, the organization is your mind.
In my particular case, if I were to attempt to watch a movie (which I never do) and were to select one that perhaps I loved as a young person, I would find it disgusting now because of all the proto-woke messaging. Why the godawful hell is a princess without Jedi powers or basic training formidable in blaster combat? How on earth do musicians from entirely unrelated biospheres and evolutionary backgrounds have enough in common to play together in a cantina? Etc.
One of my friends (an individual so anti-woke he's embracing *bad* ideas just to "own the libs") described having a similar reaction during his wedding. In our tradition there is a point in the ceremony where the priest says something to the effect of "Whereas woman has been created as a help mate to man". When that line was said he looked uncomfortable and later stated he had a physical cringe reaction, even though he considers himself very anti-feminist and intellectually agrees with very traditional marriage roles. (In practice, they both work but his wife is very much the breadwinner)
I personally am too young to have seen or cared about this movie when it came out (I would have been around 8) but I’ve definitely felt a similar flinch-double take response. My mom is old and aggressively progressive, but also incapable of political correctness. She will ‘imitate’ people she disagrees with or considers racist or sexist, and in this ‘imitation’ she often uses slurs. She isn’t using them against anyone, she’s accusing people she hates of thinking them and/or trying to get a reaction out the hypothetical people she hates, but it it still makes me twitch. Same with the recent ACX post about hyperstitious slurs where he talks about the word Jap as an example. I had an instinctive cringe, followed by confusion and annoyance about the cringe. No ones even up in arms about anti-Japanese sentiment! The only reason I know about it is history class! But I was taught that slurs are inherently dangerous and bad, and that it’s best to never even say them in reference.
Being a very online Youth deep in the blue Bay Area I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t an act of dangerous malice to say offensive words, even when not directed at anyone. I don’t think I’d find this movie funny, and indeed if someone uses queer as an insult I will probably be wary of them. Despite my dislike of language purity politics, as someone who looks like a pronoun-haver I think I’d be correct to honestly. But as they say, that was then and this is now. And even now I’m not convinced that it would mean they’re a danger to me (despite the best efforts of my social class).
This may be a kind of corollary of Robert Conquest's second law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. Except in this example, the organization is your mind.
In my particular case, if I were to attempt to watch a movie (which I never do) and were to select one that perhaps I loved as a young person, I would find it disgusting now because of all the proto-woke messaging. Why the godawful hell is a princess without Jedi powers or basic training formidable in blaster combat? How on earth do musicians from entirely unrelated biospheres and evolutionary backgrounds have enough in common to play together in a cantina? Etc.
One of my friends (an individual so anti-woke he's embracing *bad* ideas just to "own the libs") described having a similar reaction during his wedding. In our tradition there is a point in the ceremony where the priest says something to the effect of "Whereas woman has been created as a help mate to man". When that line was said he looked uncomfortable and later stated he had a physical cringe reaction, even though he considers himself very anti-feminist and intellectually agrees with very traditional marriage roles. (In practice, they both work but his wife is very much the breadwinner)
I personally am too young to have seen or cared about this movie when it came out (I would have been around 8) but I’ve definitely felt a similar flinch-double take response. My mom is old and aggressively progressive, but also incapable of political correctness. She will ‘imitate’ people she disagrees with or considers racist or sexist, and in this ‘imitation’ she often uses slurs. She isn’t using them against anyone, she’s accusing people she hates of thinking them and/or trying to get a reaction out the hypothetical people she hates, but it it still makes me twitch. Same with the recent ACX post about hyperstitious slurs where he talks about the word Jap as an example. I had an instinctive cringe, followed by confusion and annoyance about the cringe. No ones even up in arms about anti-Japanese sentiment! The only reason I know about it is history class! But I was taught that slurs are inherently dangerous and bad, and that it’s best to never even say them in reference.
Being a very online Youth deep in the blue Bay Area I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t an act of dangerous malice to say offensive words, even when not directed at anyone. I don’t think I’d find this movie funny, and indeed if someone uses queer as an insult I will probably be wary of them. Despite my dislike of language purity politics, as someone who looks like a pronoun-haver I think I’d be correct to honestly. But as they say, that was then and this is now. And even now I’m not convinced that it would mean they’re a danger to me (despite the best efforts of my social class).