Def appreciate the thoughtful response. I agree in principle but disagree in premise. Like, I agree that there is a social problem where people are too dismissive of other peoples viewpoints, often going to the extremes of trying to categorize other people’s arguments as fascist, when the person stating them probably isn’t a fascist, they’re just confused.

I think in general, society encourages people to be too abstract in our treatment of other people. We are so quick to shunt somebody in a category, and of course we can cite all these rationalizations and evidence, and the effect is just continued division within the people who pay the price for bad or draconian policies. Everything comes down to personal responsibility, whether you’re for or against a certain view. And thats just not entirely true. There are myriad social causes for individual behavior: poverty, privilege, racism, sexism all have deep institutional causes and effects. In my own experience, I was raised in the country and had many “right wing” views. But my friends, who were more progressive and educated, accepted me, and over time, changed my mind, which opened the door for me to try and learn more and change myself.

So its really important to me when broaching a political subject to be tuned into the people I’m talking to, to take into consideration where they’re coming from, to listen and be flexible.

Fascists (and billionaires) are intentionally pushing a message of “empathy is weakness.” I find the claim that “people are too sensitive” to be the younger sibling of the more explicit claim. To me, empathy is a way of sensing truth in the world. Fascists want us to be less sensitive, so we aren’t sensing what other people are experiencing, because most people if we knew, would feel empathy and want to change things. Ive seen the argument that it is merely arguing against “selective empathy,” which I dont condone in principle, but in practice it usually means having empathy for the stockholders, rather than the people being harmed by political and economic policy that serves the stockholders interests.

I know what you mean, ive found people to take things very personally when I try to address certain issues with them. But returning to Dali, why is he so celebrated? Its fine that people like it, the philosopher Heidegger is still taught in universities and he was a straight up card-carrying Nazi. But Dali was, other than being kind of a slut for attention and self aggrandizement, not considered one of the surrealists in his own time. Yet now he is synonymous with surrealism? His own prestige replaced the entire movement, who included many socialists and antifascists. He was a vocal supporter of the Franco dictatorship, and of Adolph Hitler. Why does his art keep getting promoted as a leader in the surrealist movement? Is it talent, or is it hegemony?

Culture matters, because it affects people on a level that politics and academics can never. The Italian intellectual, Antonio Gramsci, theorized that culture was where most people got their morality. Unfortunately, the people with the power to promote culture, promote the culture that they want.

Given how closely those people cleave to fascism in recent years (if not always) and how monopolized the culture industry has become in the last 30 years, I think it is definitely concerning to see which artists are promoted and which ones are relegated to obscurity. So the question is: is Salvador Dali’s work actually so important on a cultural level, that his personal views, which were rejected in his own time, aught to be acceptable in our own? Without being “too sensitive” I think that culture matters, and who is behind the dissemination of popular culture, and the currents which resist hegemonic culture and what it represents, are all extremely important considerations.

aw someone yucked your yum with factual history.

boo fuckin hoo.

you stanning for JK too?

Instructions unclear, notch stuck in art.