Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q68,98

Main entry

6898. Q6898/Q68,98Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer (song) [1]

Motifs in song

618. Q618/Q618all the compañeros laughed / todos sus compañeros se reían / Todos sus compañeros se reían sin parar; Y nuestro buen amigo no paraba de llorar ->
     so today while looking up versions of "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer" I found out that the Spanish language has one of those nondescript 'teammates' or 'one of our group' words. seeing this word compañeros after already having loosely connected the idea of Trotsky in exile to Rudolph for reasons, that word became incredibly funny to me. because I may not know a lot of Spanish but among the things I know from listening to a couple of Trotskyist talks in Spanish with captions is that the IMT referred to "comrades" as compañeros. all the comrades turned on him. the revolution betrayed.
6892. Q6892/Q68,92Rudolph was useful -> plot motif in Christmas movies or similar fictional works when a character supposedly finds acceptance for being different but it falls flat.
      "Rudolph was useful" is a local joke in the United States about misunderstandings that happened somewhere between Japanese speakers attempting to translate the Rudolph song and Japanese-language students trying to make sense of the translation. the bigger part of the misunderstanding probably occurred the second time around, as "役に立つ" can be a perfectly positive and complimentary thing to say in the moment, similar to "a towel comes in handy wherever you go", and not very similar to the flat and uncaring connotation of "was useful".
6892. Q6892/Q68,92your nose will come in handy (sense) / おまえの鼻が役に立つのさ / 暗い夜道は　ぴかぴかの　おまえの鼻が　役に立つのさ　[2]

Related

6900. Q6900/Q6900Rankin-Bass reindeer -> you know it: the baby "reindeer" that is so overly stylized it looks like a white-tailed deer.
      to be fair: this is closer to being accurate to European reindeer than North American ones. but the people who made the movies were not from Europe...
6891. Q6891/Q68,91Diversity should be accepted because it's useful / Being different is okay only when you're useful / Red (Angry Birds) is useful to society because he's different in the perfect way -> the proposition people pick out and regard with much confusion when they're actually looking at the Wackytown fallacy. this is more a subjective thing than an error because you probably find this proposition some places too.
6890. Q6890/Q68,90Many attempts equal success / Wackytown fallacy (children's stories) / whoops there goes another rubbertree plant (song lyric, High Hopes ) ->
      the more general version of the Wackytown fallacy as it actually appears in kids' movies, rather than as it appears among the directors and writers who create them. "Rudolph was useful" is the Wackytown fallacy applied to specific individuals in a "biographical" way. this is the more general notion of it applying widely across a fictional society or multiple works of fiction.
      this feels so omnipresent in Liberal capitalist and Existentialist-Structuralist philosophy that it almost needs to be turned into a proverb, it needs a nice little phrase that's as repeatable as a Chinese 4-character idiom or something. I looked up a couple. I haven't found a totally satisfactory one but I'll think of something eventually.
6890. Q6890/Q68,90Many attempts equal success / Wackytown fallacy (children's stories) / whoops there goes another rubbertree plant (song lyric, High Hopes ) / 狡兔三窟 (jiǎo tù sān kū, A cunning rabbit has three burrows) [3] / 半途而废 (bàn tú ér fèi, Giving up halfway) [4] / 水滴石穿 (shuǐ dī shí chuān, Dripping water wears through stone) [5] -> "水滴石穿" seems more applicable to quantity transforming into quality actually. some books, in this very Aristotelian tone, use it in the context of tiny wounds to an empire being an offense to justice [6]
6889. Trying hard enough enough times always makes money / Individuals having skills or good ideas always leads to making money with enough time and attempts / Wackytown fallacy (specifically in reference to jobs or investments and money) -> the more people are born and compete for jobs as more unique products exist the less true this gets. MDem entry 4.4/2050 baxter
6888. Columbus Industries conjecture / Spain and Columbus can conquer any nation or land if they spend enough money and try enough times / if Spain and Columbus were a startup, their success is proportional to how much money or how great of assets they start with and how many things they try -> Wackytown fallacy + possible mathematical equation = Columbus Industries conjecture. the sinister framing of this is on purpose. all too many people regard businesses as inherently good as long as they don't contain "bad people", and simply ask, well how do I succeed? and here's your answer. you can succeed at anything if you burn enough money, time, linked social graphs of people, useful political connections, goodwill, and collateral damage. all you have to do is have enough money or people to try the thing enough times.
      what really gets me about Existentialism is this. for normal people it's overwhelmingly intuitive to believe that Nothing should be done unless everybody considers it wonderful. they even apply this to science, arguing to varying degrees of success that animal testing is unnecessary, or more dubiously that there are some things it is inherently unethical to probe and understand with science because science is a tool of domination, and liberation can only be unscientific. but like, once everyone has been arguing this all the time. then Artists show up and are like I surely deserve to succeed just because I'm an Artist, what are ends and means, surely any means can justify my wonderful ends. welcome to Columbus Industries. if you would only burn enough money you can make the world do whatever you want it to.
6899. Uniting against the Wackytown fallacy is progress / It is progressive to unite people against the Wackytown fallacy (Liberal-republican framing) / It is the correct direction of history to unite people against the Wackytown fallacy (meta-Marxist framing) -> this is one of the very few things where I genuinely feel like Communists and anarchists can safely come together behind it even if they have totally different justifications for why it's bad. it's just so obvious this thing is bad that there's nearly no way anarchists can complicate it and screw things up.
618. Q618/Q618Adversity yields to growth (arts) / Adversity is a time for growth (arts) / (9k) -> ... a lot of literature deals with the difference between emerging from pain safely and being destroyed by pain. this is the point of concepts like "eucatastrophe" and the 'unwanted institution' of modernist art, versus postmodernist art.
618. Q618/Q618Any fictional narrative (literature; art) that insists on a happy ending is partially didactic (meta-Marxist literary analysis) / (9k)

Ideologies or fields

618. Q618/Q618Fy (pronounced Fantasy) / Christmas songs