• BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Apparently criticising Western Exceptionalism = “simping for dictators”

        I’m increasingly convinced that liberals don’t even think words mean anything anymore beyond signalling what team you’re on.

        • MrMakabar@slrpnk.net
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          2 days ago

          When you read the description “dictator from the middle east” and you believe that it is an attack on Asians in general, you do not understand that not everybody from the Middle East is Asian or a dictator.

            • MrMakabar@slrpnk.net
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              2 days ago

              Just look below. Pretty clearly to call the other person a racist.

              The irony obviously being that this is about the interior design of the White House and calling it “designed by a dictator from the middle east” is about as bad of an insult as “designed by a king from europe”. It only really works as a racist statement, when you believe in Western Exceptionalism.

              • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
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                2 days ago

                It only really works as a racist statement, when you believe in Western Exceptionalism.

                This Is some laughable mental gymnastics! I assure you that I don’t believe in Western exceptionalism.

                The reason looking at Trump’s ugly, ego-stroking, interior design choices and saying they “look like a middle eastern dictator designed it” is racist, is because it Orientalizes the middle east, not as a place with diverse peoples, politics, and yes, interior design senses.

                But instead papers over that diversity and paints Trump’s gaudy displays as unbecoming of a western leader, more akin to that of an imagined barbaric Oriental Despotism

                Saying Trump’s design sense is “Like a middle eastern dictator” is very different from saying it’s “like a European king”. The former sits within a of a long history of Oriental racism perpetuated by Europeans, against people’s the Global South.

                Please read Orientalism by Edward Said, I’m begging you people!