http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2lqwd7
This is a hoot! My Little Pony slams cultural Marxism!
From Brandon Morse at The Federalist:
Go here to read the rest. I thought the article was probably over the top until I viewed the episodes. This is the most conservative message in a cartoon since Scrooge McDuck used to lecture on the benefits of capitalism!
I have to say, I really like My Little Pony. I have three girls, and so it’s a regular fixture around here. The show is well written, intelligent, and funny even for adults. I haven’t seen this episode yet, but it’s a rainy spring break day here so we’ll have to watch. I wouldn’t call the show political in any way. The central message is that different personality types can get along. Many episodes focus on disagreements between characters that are solved by communication and understanding. An important lesson for grade school girls who can get very cliquish. The “Over a Barrel” episode does go against some liberal pieties about Native Americans. A conflict between a native tribe of buffalo and a group of settler ponies is solved not by the settlers moving off their stolen land, but by a compromise where everyone learns to live together and share. The buffalo even benefit from the advanced agriculture of the ponies. http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Over_a_Barrel
http://mynationalistpony.tumblr.com
Haven’t seen this one yet– hoping it’s as good as the hype from all the folks who aren’t already fans suggests it is. 😀
Of course, you’d think “false equality is evil” would be an easy sell, it’s been a theme since I was little…but it takes good story telling to get the idea of being morally equal without being literally identical across, without doing the “being different just to be different, even if it means denying who you are!” thing.
The Cutie Marks thing is a rather good metaphor, really…especially if you watch enough to meet the Cutie Mark Crusaders, who are trying to figure out what makes them special. And fail a lot at finding it, possibly because they’re searching for “special” or “different” instead of “true.”
If Stalin really showed “a young leader how to keep his people under thumb by cutting taller stalks down to the same height as the others” he was probably a reader of Herodotus, where the same story is told of Thrasybulus the tyrant of Miletus and the ally of Periander of Corinth, to whom he sent the advice (Histories 5:92 et seq) Perhaps, Stalin took it from Aristotle, who mentions it in the Politics (1284a).
Livy tells the same story of Tarquin the Proud (1:54). In Livy’s account, the plants were poppies, whose heads Tarquin switched ff with his cane; hence “tall poppy syndrome” is a common expression in Britain to describe the politics of envy.
Machiavelli does not mention it; perhaps, the erudite Florentine thought it too hackneyed to bear repetition. In a similar vein, however, Pope Leo X complained of the invidious task of making appointments: “Every time I do so,” he lamented, “I create nine malcontents and an ingrate.”
From what I’ve read of Machiavelli, he’d consider cutting down those who are good at stuff quite wasteful. You want to come down like a ton of bricks on those who cross you in important things, but actually encourage excellence in all else. He even said something to the effect that you can tell how smart a ruler is by who’s around him. Someone that makes sure nobody is better than he is in any way, as compared to someone who’s surrounded by people who are massively better at what their job is….
Here we go, also this:
“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”
Good article!
Don, are you going to be a “Bro-ny”?
Never!