re: #161 EPR-radar

I’ve been flabbergasted for years that two people left the Bundy Ranch standoff and shot cops on the Strip…actualizing the rhetoric they’d just been immersed in, and people didn’t line up the details.

It’s all fucking lazy narrative thinking and shitty tropes.

What I find amazing is how often sentimentalism and melodrama inform both reactionary groups and the people that normalize them. The Bundy saga was packaged as pastoralist twaddle, as is the whole “Sagebrush Rebellion,” but it fucking works because it hits cultural notes that people understand (and thus has verisimilitude). With the alt-right, there’s some version of this going down, too.

A big part of fascism elsewhere was the cult of tradition…which had fuck all to do with actual tradition, but was rather humorless pastiche and cliche. But people eat that shit up.