Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q34,67/aslan

[motif 1] [field: fiction] Aslan (fictional Christ figure in Chronicles of Narnia series, a series of fantasy books loosely based on the events of, but closely depicting the moral statements of, the Christian bible)

[motif 2] [field: fiction, fictional stories that could hypothetically exist] Aslan meeting fantasy representation of Islam

[proposition 3] [field: Liberal-republicanism] Anti-essentialism is a path to truth
[RD's comments on proposition 3] this is false on its face the more you think about it. simply assuming that a category does not contain the things said to define that category is not guaranteed to be true and materially accurate. like, you don't go to a bakery and expect to find the one of them that stocks frozen turkeys, you don't go to Trotskyists and expect to find the one of them that gets along with Stalinists, and you don't go to Christians and expect to find the one of them that doesn't believe in a god or anything supernatural. at a certain point that turns into "repeating the same hope over and over is insanity". but when you are trying to determine whether a statement about religion is "inherently" offensive there are few other things that even come up aside from this old, false rule. if I write a fic about Aslan clashing with fantasy Islam based on things that have historically happened, with actual research, how do I know whether ordinary people would read it as unfair to "the real" Christianity or Islam to the point the statements it was making came across as false and just label it "ignorant" or "anthropological misinformation"? "read the room" is not an answer. you cannot read the room if you have no room at all and correctly guessing in advance what will be in the room is the only way to have a room. in a way, even when there is a room the room only comes to exist after a period of everyone making correct guesses in the dark of what will unify them into a room instead of scatter them. because people are always expected to know what etiquette is before they even walk into a situation where they can learn what it is, you really cannot understand etiquette from just watching people unless you reconstruct it from absolutely nothing.

[proposition 4] [fields: sociological hypotheses, "meta-Marxism"/"existential materialism"] Challenging religion is equivalent to a blood feud; Challenging religion is equivalent to imperialism at the tribal scale
[RD's comments on proposition 4] religion has gathered up many completely unwritten customs over the centuries and it's been so long that everyone has forgotten why those rules are even there and seems to only recite them. I'm going to propose a hypothesis on one of them: if someone makes a statement about a group of people, it potentially has the function of a declaration of war in which one people is about to try to conquer and rule the other through the justification that that group would otherwise be unaccountable and dangerous. the accusation may or may not be accurate to some degree in context. but if some 90% of people do not fit the accusation, the accusation divides the vulnerable group into an antagonism with itself. this division is an important moment in history that can amount to a revolution or a counterrevolution. if the accusation is "supporting Stalin" the result can be 90% of people leaving the body of people of the Soviet Union and effectively joining (though not literally joining) the body of people of the United States to smash the Soviet Union, or each of the local-states of Germany leaving East Germany and joining the United States to smash East Germany. if the accusation is "the United States owns slaves" the result can be the United States fighting the Civil War and ending slavery. if the accusation is "the United States is sending Israel to crush Palestine", that could hypothetically lead to a division of the United States in which most of the people of the United States take over the United States and end some part of the current regime in order to stop Israel from crushing Palestine.
what have I discovered here? have I discovered that every United States concept of stopping imperialism is actually formulated through the lens of imperialism? probably something like that.

[proposition 5] [fields: sociological hypotheses, "meta-Marxism"/"existential materialism"] Imperialism is partly defined as one group of people attempting to conquer and rule another group of people through putting out moral accusations to shape the group's behavior or the internal antagonisms that actually shape the group's behavior

[question 6] [field: "meta-Marxism"/"existential materialism"] Why does it seem like contradictions inside a group of people are usually imposed from the outside by imperialism?