How 4000 rabid SJWs learned to stop worrying and love Slatestarcodex
Sooo I’ve finally got a proper keyboard to write on and that means the one thing some have been really waiting for (at least I have): an account of how on earth Scott Alexander of all people secretly (and until recently, unknowingly) kind of controls the most radical major faction of finnish feminism.
That One Feminist Community is nowadays nationally notorious; something spoken of indirectly but often, and most of the relevant people immediately recognize which community people are talking about, when they do. It all started a bit more than a couple of years ago; there was this one community of feminists, by white cisgender studies majors, for white cisgender studies majors. An unimpressive garden dying from its own pacifism, it had a pretty major problem with creeps, TERFs, SWERFs, 101ers and other time-wasting people whose entropic pressure eventually degrades any unwalled feminism-related garden into an endless bog of pointless debates on stupid questions. Not good. Not Steel Feminism (I’ll be using that name for mine so I don’t need to get drawn in debates on whether stupid position X is feminism or not, because I can definitely say it’s not Steel Feminism and that’s the only one I’ll bother to defend; straw and weak feminisms are bad and people who do them should feel bad).
I had been arguing with the undesirables a lot when the admins finally realized that they weren’t doing their jobs and asked for assistance. Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for a lot of people whose existence most weren’t even aware of, I was the most credible candidate for the job: an obsessive no-lifer on sick leave who was already doing that exact thing without a badge. My style of arguing was aggressive but it would get the job done. Oh yes, it would get the job done way more than any of them anticipated. (I’ve mellowed a lot since then, due to some interesting status psychology dynamics stuff I’ll explain more in a later post; basically “Niceness, Community and Civilization” isn’t the only stable low-conflict equilibrium in existence, and “An Armed Discourse is a Polite Discourse” is in my experience more suitable for situations with a substantial fraction of lower-quality participants; and reading Living By The Sword pointed out a pretty strong failure mode to me, I updated and decided to do things so that I’d keep a more comfortable distance to that failure mode)
The group’s rules said that offenders are given three warnings before a ban, except in exceptional situations. In other words: “stay as long as you wish, ruining the atmosphere for everyone else, nobody who can do anything about it is going to do anything about it”. And when all one has is emergency powers, everything starts looking like an emergency. I’d deliberately provoke the people I wanted to remove, get them all heated up, and suddenly spin around and appear with my badge and banhammer, ready to kick them out for doing the exact same stuff I was doing five minutes ago. Showy, effective, and absolutely ridiculously unfair. I got close to the edge once, and the other mods were discussing taking away my badge but I called their bluff with the brilliant negotiating strategy of “just ignore the problem until it goes away” and it did; I was indispensable and consequently untouchable, as most of the people I did purge were actual creeps, douches and other universally agreed undesirables. “First they came for the creeps, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a creep…”
…Finally they came for the white feminists, and the white feminists had nobody to speak for them because there was nobody left who was interested in defending those who think the solution to “these women might have their choices in clothing restricted to conform to prevailing norms” is “therefore we need to restrict their choice in clothing to conform to prevailing norms”. The purges gradually expanded to cover everyone who spoke out against steel feminism. Sex work abolitionists, transphobes, racists, conservatives, and all other varieties of less-universally agreed undesirables were removed one after another, policing of people’s actions and words expanded outside the group, jokes about Stasi became a regularity among the mods as the old ones left in disgust and were replaced by new ones who agreed with my vision, and flashy public declarations made it absolutely clear that the new way was not like the old way.
As this reign of terror continued, the community turned into a desolate wasteland of who am I kidding it absolutely ballooned in size despite constantly tightening its admission criteria so that nowadays joining it is almost like a post-ww2 job interview. (that, my friends, is what an underserved market looks like) Over 4000 members, about 250 waiting to get in right now, and if one calculates it as a fraction of the population it’s equivalent to a quarter million americans. Of course, one shouldn’t do it that way, it’s absolutely verboten to do it that way, but if one did do it in the verboten way it’d be a quarter million. Just saying.
One key factor in this was that the enforcement of the rules was brutal, but pretty fair for what’s essentially an “exit, no voice” community run by the arbitary fiat of the ruling junta of me and my cronies. I made it a priority to be especially relentless in crushing those whose bullshit could superficially appear to be on the “right side” of identitarian tribal politics; one remarkable situation was where one comment suggesting that it’s not that bad for a woman to sexually assault a man led to instant banhammering and a million flies complaining about how the rape apologist in question wasn’t given a second chance. I pointed out that nobody would’ve asked for mercy if the genders had been reversed, and won a fuckload of respect among the consistent and a fuckload of reputation as someone who simply doesn’t give a shit about the popular opinion among the hypocritical. I’m the Vlad Tepes of feminism, what are people going to do about it, other than go somewhere else?
Of course, there was, and still is, a consistent outflux of people; the banned ones, and the ones who didn’t want to wait to get banned. Nowadays there is a regular fire cycle where approximately twice a year somebody notices the strict enforcement of rules, gets upset, gathers a splinter group, and finds out the hard way why our membership criteria are so strict as all the barbarians whom our high walls keep away join the splinter group, ruining it. Alternatively they turn into That One Feminist Community Lite (now with 100% less promethea!) as a result of adopting relatively strict rules themselves.
The tyranny of That One Feminist Community is kept in check by accountability, as ultimately its point is to create value for the target audience. One important way of creating such value is to actively invert the standard hierarchies of who gets heard and who gets taken seriously. We don’t care if we need to silence men to give women space, or white people to make it so that PoC can feel comfortable discussing their experiences with racism in white feminism, or cis people to let trans people genuinely define themselves. Those people have the rest of the world for themselves, and while we don’t want to invert the rest of the world, having That One place where the roles are reversed is important. (A lot of people seem terminally unable to understand the difference of “we think there should be That One space which caters to these specific access needs” and “we want to make the entire world be the same”, which is frustrating to no end. Okay, there are some norms we want to universalize like “no rape apologia, regardless of the genders of the people involved” but that’s not the same thing.)
Now this is where things get interesting. I’ve established myself as a prominent figurehead of an unapologetically radical community with merciless enforcement of norms consistent to a degree relatively unheard-of in most communities. In other words, I’m un-bingocardable because people trust me not to be X even if I say things that superficially sound like X, and I have a reputation for doing such stuff all the time. It’s for the good of the community even if people don’t understand it immediately, but they usually do because they don’t feel the need to reject it immediately on identitarian grounds and I don’t do weak arguments. Weak arguments aren’t steel feminism. I’m the one pointing the conceptual superweapon which means it can’t be pointed at me even if I tell people to point it away from someone. That’s powerful and very important, and this is the point where Scott becomes relevant.
Controlling the memetic environment is one of the most powerful ways of “brainwashing” people. When one gets to decide what’s normal, one gets to decide what people’s brains automatically conform to without the need for conscious attention. This gets used a lot. The things not subject to debate are the most important things, and one of such things is staying true to reality even (especially) if it’s more complex and nuanced than naive theories would suggest. I get away with using “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics 5″ as a source right there in the open, just by doing some rhetorical trickery around it. (”I don’t agree with it 100% but I’m not going to say it’s really wrong in any specific claims it makes”) Hardcore intersectionality allows us to frame pretty much anyone in pain as being oppressed by something and therefore their pain needs to be at the very least not contributed to by us (the reason why feminists care about structural oppression more than they care about other kinds of suffering is the same reason oncologists care about cancer more than cluster headaches, but the basic fundamental is still to reduce pain and injustice in the world), and thus we even defend people like RooshV when they’re attacked in unfair ways. Bad feminists don’t give a shit about the collateral damage they do to non-shitlord basement dwellers when there’s an opportunity to use the low status of basement-dwellerness against a shitlord, but we aren’t that kind of feminists and the prior for such people getting a banhammer in their posterior in Our Community is pretty damn close to 1 if they don’t cut that oppressive crap.
This commitment to reality first has also the amusing side effects of making the moderate conservative feminists far more unreasonable in their claims. The people who say stuff like “practically all abusers are male” [motherfucking sic from their website!] are the established and respected state feminists we constantly criticize (as an organization, some of our best friends can be members but the organization itself is corrupt and propped up by some old-ass bourgie capital and democratic inertia instead of good arguments), while the “evil misandrist radical feminazis” believe the reality is far less simplistic and abused men face may kinds of systematic erasure and unique problems that differ from the experiences of abused women. It’s kind of hilarious, and kind of sad, but most importantly it’s kind of extremely useful as steel feminism is deliberately bulletproofed against empirical attacks by appropriating those attacks and incorporating the evidence in itself. My long-term plan is to create a situation where people with reasonable moral axioms and any degree of consistency in their beliefs have no other choice than to join steel feminism, at least in substance if not in style, and then all those people win and the bad SJ gets purged along with everything else that hurts people and all kinds of access needs will be accommodated in their own places.
And that’s how 4000 radicals will be made to believe every sufficiently solid argument that comes out of slatestarcodex, at least eventually, depending on how difficult inserting it as an unchallenged background assumption into the memetic environment will be.
Also did I mention I did this while on sick leave, for social anxiety and depression of all things? Yeah, taking over locally influential political movements is “side hobby”-level stuff for me. Taking over the world is “actual ambition”.
the belief that ‘order = hierarchy’ is one of the most pernicious mythologies. and it is equally pernicious whether it convinces someone that order is bad, or when it convinces them that hierarchy is good.
order is good. hierarchy is bad. they are not linked.
What the fuck is ‘order’
i mean it’s not limited to this but one example for what i’m talking about is “socially agreed on protocol for acceptable behavior”
romantic notions that people can all just do ~whatever they want~ are childish and ultimately rooted in liberalism.
For this reply we’ve secretly swapped tumblr communist leviathan-supersystem with my conservative Mormon divisional Chief. Let’s see if anyone notices.
Your Divisional Chief Is Correct Though
Actually, “doing whatever you want” and “no need for hierarchy uwu” were both kinda steelmanned by Marcuse with his concept of ~surplus repression~.
The way he does it is simple but kinda subtle, and I’m bad at explaining it, he says it, like, more persuasively and less naively - but basically you don’t *actually* want to do that stupid shit
[1]
to the extent that people would need to shun you, call the cops, etc, right?
Self-image, self-interest, seeking immediate peers’ approval, etc - necessary repression in his Freudian-ish terms - would quite suffice for a more laid-back life, like they suffice in making (many) people e.g. wash their hands and flush toilets. But to do shit like Taylorist discipline, you need to beat people down more actively, past acquiescence and into submission - hence the “surplus”.
[1] Not unless you’re destitute, sick, angry, wasted, crazy, etc, which he kinda discounts, because, in his time and place, capitalism seemed to him about to eliminate
glaring scarcity and obvious Dickensian misery. I mean, of course that looks incorrect now - but imo not that awful of him as far as extrapolation goes.
That sounds testable enough. Build a sufficiently low-scarcity intentional community with population and norms initially selected for prosociality, easy access to psych treatment etc. and let people do what they want, and see if it inevitably degenerates into either hierarchy or chaos. My money would be on “it probably could be done as long as authoritarians don’t get to fuck with it”
I think an orderly non-hierarchical community definitely can be done, but it requires the cultivation of specific social forces in order for it to be accomplished. if it was easy, it would happen more often, and less briefly.
i think one of the keys is that there needs to be a vigorous culture of debate, based around trying to refine moral concepts based around increasing everyone’s well-being. in other words, The Discourse needs to be the central pillar of the society.
That’s detail-level stuff on the prosocial norms, then there’s the fact that “sufficiently low scarcity” seems to be right now achievable by what’s maybe the global 1% (in literal terms) (or maybe I’m just a spoiled materialist brat but having so much stuff that fighting over it doesn’t make sense sounds like a good plan for eliminating fighting over stuff), and the fact that authoritarians really love fucking with other people’s experiments.
And that’s why I want less “hashtag some asshole 20xx” or “global revolution once everything is ready and then we’ll be screwed by some novel failure mode we can’t undo” and more “could you just please let these people try this thing out, without turning it into another replication of authoritarians fucking with everything and ruining it”.
I managed to convince a bunch of anarcho-communists to not only tolerate but encourage seasteading (with the simple boundaries of banning polluting and slavery) so if those people get their revolution many libertarians and ancaps would get theirs too, how the hell is it so difficult for conservatives and libdems to not be like “We know this is a bad idea even though it hasn’t been tested so we’ll use violence to make sure any attempts to test it will result in a failure thus proving our point, ad baculum don’t fallacy.”
the belief that ‘order = hierarchy’ is one of the most pernicious mythologies. and it is equally pernicious whether it convinces someone that order is bad, or when it convinces them that hierarchy is good.
order is good. hierarchy is bad. they are not linked.
What the fuck is ‘order’
i mean it’s not limited to this but one example for what i’m talking about is “socially agreed on protocol for acceptable behavior”
romantic notions that people can all just do ~whatever they want~ are childish and ultimately rooted in liberalism.
For this reply we’ve secretly swapped tumblr communist leviathan-supersystem with my conservative Mormon divisional Chief. Let’s see if anyone notices.
Your Divisional Chief Is Correct Though
Actually, “doing whatever you want” and “no need for hierarchy uwu” were both kinda steelmanned by Marcuse with his concept of ~surplus repression~.
The way he does it is simple but kinda subtle, and I’m bad at explaining it, he says it, like, more persuasively and less naively - but basically you don’t *actually* want to do that stupid shit
[1]
to the extent that people would need to shun you, call the cops, etc, right?
Self-image, self-interest, seeking immediate peers’ approval, etc - necessary repression in his Freudian-ish terms - would quite suffice for a more laid-back life, like they suffice in making (many) people e.g. wash their hands and flush toilets. But to do shit like Taylorist discipline, you need to beat people down more actively, past acquiescence and into submission - hence the “surplus”.
[1] Not unless you’re destitute, sick, angry, wasted, crazy, etc, which he kinda discounts, because, in his time and place, capitalism seemed to him about to eliminate
glaring scarcity and obvious Dickensian misery. I mean, of course that looks incorrect now - but imo not that awful of him as far as extrapolation goes.
That sounds testable enough. Build a sufficiently low-scarcity intentional community with population and norms initially selected for prosociality, easy access to psych treatment etc. and let people do what they want, and see if it inevitably degenerates into either hierarchy or chaos. My money would be on “it probably could be done as long as authoritarians don’t get to fuck with it”
The finnish welfare state subsidizes prescription medication with a copay cap at around 600€ a year, meaning that my provigil effectively costs 0,03€ a pill at the margin. As a non-responder I only need it for managing jet lag etc. and can’t effectively use the full extent of the prescription myself. Now it looks like someone took advantage of this and pilfered a bunch of my pills.
Anonymous asked: (re that last ask) id assume that the person was using deliberate hyperbole because of perceived blowback. not quite joking but more like exaggerating so as not to actually engage in discussion? ex: if i was talking w a friend who i felt prioritised the environment over what i believed were more important concerns, i might then say something like 'i hate nature. every day i dump a lil more oil in the HOPES that i kill a few more dolphins' (ie i dont really want to talk abt this w you; relax)
Oooh, interesting, so, basically, the intent is to communicate “we don’t share values and I am uncomfortable discussing this so I’m going to opt out by being a caricature of the side you’re arguing against”? Sort of like responding to people who say “you’re going to Hell” with “yes, eating the souls of orphaned children really did a number on my chances of salvation”.
It would make me really stressed to be on the receiving end of this (as compared to just “can we talk about something that isn’t politics and stressful?”) but I guess people sometimes respond to “let’s not talk about politics” with “this isn’t politics, it’s basic human decency!” or “you’re not supposed to be comfortable!” or other things that make it hard to just request a topic change when someone’s discussing something they think has moral importance.
*is guilty*
The specific instance I can recall is someone calling me a racist, where I was like: “Yes, I hate blacks and I detest Jews. In fact, I punch them any time I see them. On an unrelated note, you wouldn’t happen to have any idea why all the mirrors in my house are broken, would you?”
I like to sincerely appropriate the accusation. One of my favourite moments was when a Frustrating Hippie complained about how the CEO of Nestle is evil for suggesting that water should not be free and an unlimited human right, I argued back that the only problem in his proposal of “manage water as a business, sell for highest bidder, generate profit for Nestle” was the “Nestle” which should’ve been “an equal dividend for everyone who lives in the area” instead. He proceeded to accuse me of being an evil corporate capitalist (because apparently socializing natural resources only counts as Proper Left if it’s done in a catastrophically sub-optimal way which eschews the best known technology for allocating them) and asked me whether I wanted people to pay for the air they breathe, too.
I was immensely delighted at this because he was running straight into a trap of “Actually yes” without even realizing it. I just changed “aquifer” to “atmosphere” and “drought” to “global warning” and made the exact same argument as before. Yes, people would technically pay for the air they breathe, but in practice it would be a rounding error only even measurable with cryptocurrencies compared to the industrial users who had been exploiting the free human right to breathing air to the full extent of their ability to consume it (so many orders of magnitude higher than that of the poor people these kinds of hippies claim to care about that it isn’t even funny) and would now pay for it instead, consequently also solving extreme poverty and instituting a global UBI as a goddamn side effect, compensating the people worst harmed by global warming with the money of the people causing it etc. and yes technically people would pay for the air they breathe and this thing you thought was just an obviously evil and ridiculous strawman would be way better than what we have now and what do you have to say about that, huh?
I could hear his brain crashing from hundreds of km away. Troll was highly amused while Optimization feels the need to point out that to this day it hasn’t encountered a more theoretically elegant way of solving numerous global problems at once than Frustrating Hippie’s “evil strawman only baby-eating capitalist devils would support”.
I’m so efficient I get jet lag pre-emptively. It’s morning in Arlanda, waiting for a six-hour transfer for my flight to Oakland, but my body thinks it’s past midnight and we should sleep.
So I’ve been noticing that lately we’re making fun of adults who live in their parents’ basements again…
Guess where I live! My parents’ basement! I’m mentally ill and autistic and not capable of living independently. I can’t go grocery shopping alone, I can’t drive, I can’t make transfers on public transportation, and if I’m left alone I forget to do things like eat, drink, shower, take my meds, and do laundry. Even if I were capable of independent living, I don’t make enough on disability to afford an apartment.
If y’all are actually committed to intersectionality, you’d best find a better insult for misogynists than living in their parents’ basement, because honestly I already get down on myself for feeling useless enough without this stuff.
Also this is totally ok for abled people to reblog and signal boost if you don’t mind? :) Thanks!
Optimization is the engineer, and almost perfectly fits the popular caricature of economists, except that Optimization also knows the value of everything and not just the price as well. Or at least Optimization is the only one with an actual explicit numeric guess. With error bars. Whenever Optimization speaks, math is at least strongly implied. With verbal italics. Its strong personality usually de facto runs the council but it almost always consults everyone else, because not doing so would be a shamefully sub-optimal way of neglecting useful sources of information.
Gregariousness tends to prefer talking to people. Sometimes to the extent of transforming that “to” to something more resebling an “over”. Gregariousness is Optimization’s valued ally in what they call “The Comparative Advantage Coalition”.
Troll is all about The Aesthetic. The Aesthetic usually involves doing the least likely thing which synergizes surprisingly often with Optimization’s goals which also include doing some things that have a low prior, and Gregariousness sometimes bands together with Troll to make other people do the least likely thing as well, because that is even more The Aesthetic.
Slytherin wears a fake goatee, which looks ridiculous on someone who always gets read as a woman. When this is pointed out to it, Slytherin just smiles mysteriously. Slytherin smiles mysteriously at everything else too, because doing something differently would leak information on Slytherin’s inside workings. Nobody ever admits to taking Slytherin’s advice, unless “admit to being advised by Slytherin” is a part of said advice, as it sometimes is. Troll finds it hilarious.
Because every UN is apparently contractually obligated to have its own North Korea, Anxiety is too a recurring member of the Council. Nobody knows who allowed Anxiety in, because it usually just wastes everyone else’s time. There are two things Anxiety wants: to do that thing with Ritalin and Valium, or to curl into a ball. This is inconvenient as the rest of the Council wants to do something useful instead. Gregariousness hates Anxiety with a rage that could fuel a thousand suns, according to Optimization’s calculations, but harnessing that power has so far been deemed “unlikely to work in its initially suggested inplementation”.
Nerd is an occasional member, whose presence is most conspicuously marked by Optimization’s absence which has led everyone else to suspect that Nerd is just Optimization taking a day off.
Cat is a mysterious one. It’s only ever been present when Anxiety is absent and it votes in favour of relaxing alone which makes Gregariousness intensely suspicious of it. The only thing known of its origins is that before its appearance Optimization received a call from Slytherin and then called a manufacturer of cat ears and prosthetic tails for cognitive constructs.
The One That Watches The Watchers is the senior member in position and respect, if not in age. It seldom intervenes directly, mostly just mumbling ominous things about “corrupted hardware” and making snarky comments at the others about how some things would be quite unbelievably convenient indeed, but whenever it votes it has absolute veto powers. It’s biased against biases and arrests thought-arresting cliches on sight but somehow this isn’t hypocritical, and others wonder why exactly it treats motivation as such a bad thing, but it wields some unknown power over all the other cognitive constructs. When questioned about the nature of this power, it simply says “I have an outside view from the level above you”. The day it appeared, it immediately proceeded to install extremely conspicuous cameras and pictures of eyes absolutely everywhere except Slytherin’s room which only has extremely inconspicuous cameras.
This bunch is tasked with implementing the Utility Function. For some reason, claiming to actually know what the Utility Function is is absolutely forbidden and The One That Watches The Watchers has promised to utterly destroy anyone who does it (and immediately told Slytherin that no, it can’t get rid of Anxiety by manipulating it to do so), so everyone is just taking their best guesses at what it might really be. Optimization’s guesses involve calculations and the others wonder why this isn’t forbidden; they suspect that The One That Watches The Watchers doesn’t err on the side of barring Optimization from doing so because it brings its own error bars which sometimes require many more sheets of paper than the numbers themselves.
Gregariousness and Optimization had long been tired of Anxiety’s single-issue filibustering, always ending its speeches with “also, we should do that thing with Valium and Ritalin” which The One Which Watches the Watchers usually summarily vetoes resulting in Anxiety throwing a tantrum and putting in endless motions for replacing the goal “become a startup billionaire and meet all the cool people” with “curl up into a ball” even though everyone else thinks it’s a blatant violation of the Utility Function and wondering how the hell such a traitor managed to get into the Council.
Last night Slytherin noticed that Anxiety had fallen asleep and proposed a cunning plan to do the intrapersonal equivalent of launching a nuclear first strike. Troll, who usually just lets others decide the big stuff in exchange for amusing concessions such as spending some time convincing communists that the atmosphere should be privatized or using “cortigiana onesta” when describing one’s profession (which lasted for all of a couple of weeks until Optimization got it overridden with “entrepreneur”), found it hilarious. The One Which Watches the Watchers didn’t veto the plan, so Gregariousness was authorized to send introductions to “all the interesting people” immediately.
Optimization expressed worries about the effects of the plan as writing rushed things might seem like the wrong kind of weird but it recognized that the expected value of rushing was nonetheless massively higher as nobody knew how long this remarkable window of opportunity would be, and The One Which Watches the Watchers got unusually interventionistic, noting that debating such things too much could get dangerously close to waking Anxiety up and ruining everything.
There’s only one thing Anxiety dislikes more than getting things done, and that one is losing face. When it woke up and realized what had happened and that there was no way of backing down and that everything it had worked on for years had been chipped away at until it finally crumbled in a massive tour de force as everyone else had painted it into a corner where it could only choose between different betrayals of its principles, it proceeded to curl up into a ball while whimpering “unfair, unfair”, which Troll found utterly hilarious.
Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month
The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.
That’s excellence.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
