OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

It's this piece, titled The Banality of the Banality of Evil. Because on first glance, you're like. Yeah, okay, it's obvious what it's saying. Even nazis, even evil people can appreciate beauty, too. But then you learn its name, and suddenly the interpretation shifts a bit. The idea that evil is banal has in itself become banal. my first response to seeing a nazi on a bench is "oh it's about the banality of evil" and not "jesus christ there's a nazi on the bench."

what I find really interesting is how the way this is drawn (especially considering who drew it) the art style seems extremely deliberate. This type of nostalgic landscape painting is very reminiscent of nazi art and specifically, Hitler's art.

Nazis were extremely judgmental of "entartete Kunst" (degenerate art). Bansky's usual work very well fall into this category! So for him to go for this style of painting in particular is another choice I find very interesting, because I can see some people react to this painting with some variation of "oh, I didn't know he could actually draw! I thought he is a hack but he is a real artist!" - and that is where they would agree with the Nazis.

So in summer of 2024 I was on an Alaskan cruise that ended up also having a gathering of 800+ Christian nationalist qanon people, no hyperbole at all. And it was one of the weirdest weeks of my life.

But one experience from it was this very strange feeling that this painting reminds me of. When you view this painting youre observing the nazi observing the landscape. When I was I'm Alaska looking at melting glaciers and massive untouched mountains and wilderness, I was also looking at nazis looking at it. And it made me wonder how they saw it, where their appreciation for the natural world sits.

I wondered if they knew that the landscape was only there because it was protected from mining and oil refinery. Or how they were taking in the visibly shrinking glacier without reflecting in horror about the effects on climate change. I looked and thought about the people whose land it was well before settlers, I sought out that history on our excursions, I know they didn't. When we all watched whales together I wondered if they cared, or if they were looking at sacrifices they were willing to make.

It was very surreal because I could hear them talk about how beautiful it all was. But I knew we weren't looking at the same thing, not really, and I wondered *what* exactly they saw.

Just like I wonder about what this nazi sees in this landscape, and how that vision aligns with his others for the world. If it's something he feels entitled to, something he sees as a sacrifice, something cold and aesthetic without any wonder or love for the natural world and the people in it.

It didn’t register for me until recently that my experiences of being forced to strip naked multiple times at the mental hospital to be ‘checked’ when I was 14 was sexual assault, because the people who did it were nurses/doctors who clearly didn’t find me sexually attractive but instead used it as a form of humiliation and control towards children they deemed as ‘unruly’ and ‘uncooperative’ (ie. children who asked to be treated like people). I thought only people who fit into this idea of a child attracted pedo could be child sexual abusers, so I thought my experience didn’t count.

my stepfather would openly sexually harass me and my siblings at dinner while also loving the fantasy of killing pedophiles. whether he personally found our abuse sexually gratifying was frankly irrelevant to whether it traumatized us. whether he would be considered a pedophile or not doesn't change that he committed sexual abuse of children

The ‘reflect on why you enjoy giving blowjobs’ post was insane. I miss one day of twitter discourse and suddenly my feed is covered in people joking about reflecting on blowjobs and mindful blowjobs

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.