masc in a peacock way

Twenty years ago, a sociologist of science called Harry Collins tried out an experiment. He had been researching the community of physicists who worked on gravity waves for the preceding two decades, trying to get insight into standards of proof and how experimental results were reconciled and interpreted. In furtherance of this project, he had been attending gravity waves conferences, where he was a familiar figure and had lots of friends in the community (because he talked to lots of people, physicists often sought him out to get gossip and news on what other labs were doing and seeing). The experiment was a sort of Turing test – one group of physicists came up with a list of half a dozen questions about gravity waves, and then sent them by email to both Collins and a physicist, with instructions just to answer them from general knowledge rather than looking anything up. A jury of other physicists were then given the job of deciding which set of answers had come from Collins, and which from the physicist. And all but one of the judges identified the sociologist as the physicist. Although extremely funny, this wasn’t actually meant as a practical joke; it was meant to test a serious hypothesis about expertise. Harry Collins theorised that there was a thing called “interactional expertise” (basically the ability to hold a sensible and useful conversation about a subject) which was distinct from “contributory expertise” (he didn’t actually even know enough maths to do gravity wave physics). Deep interaction with a knowledge base and literature could provide one, but it wasn’t the same thing as actually working within the field.

It feels like a uniquely American capitalist take to assume these traditions will make you completely self sufficient. You need a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of knowledge across a lot of subjects, and a lot of luck to provide for everyone's nutritional needs.

So should you even bother trying to be more self sufficient with your food? I argue yes. Foraging and gardening are fun and will teach you so much about many things. They are deeply rewarding activities that can supplement your diet. There are herbs I haven't bought in years because I grow my own. There are dishes I can only make with foraged ingredients because I can't get them in stores.

But the post misses two important things: 1) white supremacist readings are actually based on misreadings and selective readings of the text - it's a story where nobody is monopoly Good, where the great king is shown to be wrong about several things, where fall remains a real possibility for any character - including of course the main character - where evil wins by spreading distrust of foreigners and nationalist pride (not a surprise that its Boromir, the great patriot, who falls, even though he redeems himself before the end) and good triumphs by trusting the foreigner and breaking the laws that have been placed against them (over and over again, whether in Gondor, or Rohan, or Lothlórien, or even in Fangorn, Tolkien hammers this point home). White supremacists can only see the superficial east vs west and fails to read the rest of it. Tolkien himself, if we count his opinions, was famously opposed to anti-Semitism and spent his valedictorian address to Oxford, the one thing that as far as he knew at the time would get the most attention of anything he would ever say, condemning Apartheid, in the mid-fifties.

Also b) most white supremacist identification with Lord of the Rings comes from occultic black metal adjacent worlds, where they mainly identify with Sauron.