someone who always identified as progressive

says the “far left” is anti-semitic

So they’re a rightist.

Progressive means essentially nothing and if they’re more focused on levying false accusations of hypocrisy toward an amorphous blob version of “the left” than doing something about genocide, well, it’s clear where they stand.

Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification

Such an insult to communism. The end goal of communism is to eliminate class stratification, not to glorify struggle and suffering as inherent good. Those who glorify suffering tend to glorify it precisely because they have no systemic solution for it, so in order to keep people in line, they try to convince them that the suffering is of intrinsic value. Communism recognizes that some suffering is going to happen in the fight for a better world because conditions are not ideal and have to be worked through as a process, but in this sense, suffering is a byproduct of struggle, not something to be sought after. And struggle is a byproduct of working through the dialectical process of internal and external realities, in a similar sense to how breathing keeps you getting oxygen. It happens to be something you have to do to keep going, but it is not there to shape you into some kind of idealized image. The framing of an individualistic idealized form resulting from the proper behavior rituals usually comes from some kind of idealism or religiosity; how one would think it has anything to do with communism, I don’t know.

I suppose it could sometimes appear to liberals that some marxist-leninist types are being less abrasive toward republican administrations, if only because there isn’t the same need to write long essays trying to explain to liberals how the republican admin is bad. Like if they’re looking at it from a very narrow, simplistic interpretation of surface talking and ignoring ideology, I could maybe see where a liberal would arrive at this.

For example, I have probably so far been less viscerally, in detail opposed (in words) to Trump 2 than I was to Biden, but not only are we only a few months in, often it’s like, what is there to say? Liberals already tend to think Trump is Satan/Hitler, but many were or still are in denial about the nature of Biden or Harris and that denial is one place where false comparisons of “slightly vs. very” corrupt can come from. As long as a liberal refuses to admit how similar the two camps are, I suppose it’s going to be hard for them to understand the level of attention some pay to criticizing the democrats.

But also, if they were really paying attention, they’d know that most of what MLs talk about has jack-all to do with the US political party fighting because 1) the US is not the center of the universe, contrary to how it acts and 2) neither of those corporate stooge parties is going to be liberating people any time this century, short of a forceful takeover (one that many liberals would no doubt accuse of being evil tankie behavior because it uses force, while continuing to say that no one is fixing “corruption”).

Sometimes I see stuff in SRS and I’m like, okay, there’s an opportunity to make a point here counter to what the reactionary said. Teachable moment sort of thing, if I’ve got something to say.

But this? This is pure nonsense. The kind of raw, unfiltered nonsense that is genuinely hard to find. It’s not that it’s impressively pure nonsense either. It’s just so far from anything of value or reality, there is nothing to engage with.

“America humiliated” - USians as a colonizing-based “culture” have never experienced humiliation and losing empire status would still not be that, it would just mean having to admit they’re not a superior breed of human.

I feel like humiliation on a cultural scale of a whole people should be a term reserved for colonized, imperialized peoples and the like, who have been subjugated en masse and treated as subhuman for some external force’s benefit.

Not that I expect the DailyMail to use anything resembling nuanced language. But I still want to make the point.

Double-edged sword thing I think. His egotistical way of being is something the system he lives within rewards, but it also rewards it in a fickle way. Many a celebrity has risen to the top of fame only to fall because of something they did/said that was considered wrong/unpopular. Musk’s seems to be a slower fall because he built such a cult of personality around the idea of him being “uniquely” (not) interested in sustainable transportation and going to mars and all that, and also because of his ability to swing around ungodly amounts of capital to keep blundering his way through the system. And he’s just been slowly testing (probably accidentally, not with intention) how far that can get you in the fucked up US system before you hit the ground. Similar with Trump and his cult of personality stuff. I think we’re seeing the limits of it for Musk now that his actions are directly impacting lots of people’s jobs in the US. With Trump, it’s less clear to me because he’s already been widely hated for a while and keeps going.

I’m assuming this wasn’t even an actual military target, since most of the murder the empire and its proxies does is murdering civilians and calling them terrorists after the fact.

Yes! Thank you, I think that is it.

I had to doubletake and check the date of the article just in case, considering it’s April Fools day here. But then, it really isn’t a shock capitalism would lead to someone trying such a thing. I think if it actually happens and happens prolifically, it would lead to a bunch of anti-tech violence from people who thought they could escape such things by going camping or whatever, and steadily become unfathomably angry when they find that’s ruined too - the sort of people who would make naturally good guerilla fighters too, since they’re used to roughing it. If only that’d scare capitalists away from it, but capitalism is not exactly known for being afraid of consequences of actions.

Looks modern, organized, and high-tech to my eyes. But I also live in the US, where it often looks like that image (can’t find it just now) of business sign clutter, haphazardly built up over time. So my standards are like, “Just don’t look like cluttered trash, please god, stop assaulting my brain with ads.”

I imagine this is a case of someone starting out with the intent to diss DPRK architecture and looking for reasons to do so.

Cult leader language. “The [scapegoat] is out to get me personally and is evil.”

Are they even reasoning at that point or just coming up with a shoddy excuse to snort lines of fascism? Like I haven’t even watched the movie and it seems very likely from a cursory look at it that the point of the “enemy” being non-human is that fascism and similar dehumanizes/others its victims. So since you’re getting the fascist’s point of view, the enemy is presented as something that a human would consider disgusting. And there are real and literal examples of this kind of thing in practice, like the Nazis comparing Jewish people to rats.

“Sources: I just get these fascist ‘vibes’ when I look at them, ya know.”

“W-what do you mean, western man?”

“Oh, you know. Those vibes.”

“Are… are you racist?”

“What? No, no, no. It’s just, the CIA says they’re doing bad stuff, so they must be.”

“And the CIA is not racist?”

“What? Hah. CIA? Racist? Pffft. Not those guys. Nah. They would never do anything racist.”

“And what are your sources for that?”

“Well I just get this feeling when looking at em.”

“A… white feeling?”

" 😠 I hope they take away your rights, commie."

Good point, makes sense.

Agreed, well said.

Yeah I think there was a brief window during the period where arcades were fading into obscurity and computer games were picking up where things were looking alright, probably because the internet had not been ironed out all that well yet so it was genuinely difficult to implement exploitative practices at that stage. And if you were watching games in that period and didn’t understand capitalism, you might have assumed they’d continue to look alright and that the field would blossom into a unique artistic form.

But capitalism was there, the internet got streamlined, games got turned increasingly digital (phasing out of disks) and with it, it became easier and easier for publishers to exercise direct control over everything and turn it into a predatory nightmare. I want to say the infrastructure to start doing so was in place for a while, but they had to do some of it slow-burn to ease existing game audiences into it. Cause they didn’t go straight from “$60 game and that’s it, end of story” to “pay $10 for an in-game emote.” They went from the first part to DLC, then DLC to some forms of “microtransactions” (which I think were actually more micro then, now they’re more like macro sometimes), then microtransactions to lootboxes. I don’t remember the exact order with other elements like season passes and special editions mixed in with everything else, but basically, there was a progression to it.

But in terms of “games as art”, I think that is something computer games were struggling with even before all the lootbox type stuff. There was stuff like Ian Bogost’s Cow Clicker game, a kind of satirical commentary on Facebook games of the time. And there was some other indie stuff trying to go in the “art” direction (some of it I learned about years ago, so I don’t remember names). But have people ever accepted/considered video games to be an artform? That I’m not sure about. They had a big stigma before the monetization got so bad and by the time they became more mainstream, they were at the peak of some of their worst elements for the computerized medium.

So yeah, it may be safe to say they’ve yet to have had a chance to exist outside of the intense capitalist form. I am curious how game development has gone in China as a whole. If they’ve managed to go more in the artistic direction or if the moneymaking aspect has an overpowering effect there too.

I’m sure it’s an avenue the capitalist west tries to pacify people through, but so are sports, film, music, etc., for that matter. If anything, video games may be one of the weaker means of that in the west because the industry is so overtaken by the worst tendencies of late stage capitalism that it can be radicalizing just to be a video game enthusiast. Not that one will necessary find their way to marxist-leninist theory because of being a disgruntled “gamer”, but it can sure speed up their dislike of capitalism. I’m pretty sure it did speed it up in my case - just wasn’t the only reason by far.

And a good example of it in media form, albeit a rare one, is the Jimquisition youtube channel. Steadily evolved from a channel critical of the video games industry’s practices to a channel saying fuck it and just openly calling out capitalism as the problem.

Basically what the other poster said, if that clears it up. And the reason I said it’s a little more complicated than “victim” and “offender” is because it’s not like Russia is a bastion of socialism motivated by a need to cleanse the world of fascists. They are anti-imperialist in practice because of their positioning in opposition to the western empire, but are also under the yoke of a post-soviet capitalist system, and their opposition to Ukraine being a NATO outpost doesn’t need to be anything more than self-defense against imperial encroachment.

It’s also more complicated from the fact that Ukraine is both a kind of “offender” at the behest of western imperialism and their most reactionary elements, and also a victim of that same imperialism taking control of it to use it as a proxy against Russia and conscripting its people into a meat grinder. The west is the one who has facilitated the creation of this situation and sabotaged peace deals along the way.

They really spent three paragraphs saying “no u”.

Which I guess makes sense because that is the essence of a lot of western and colonial propaganda, and is similar to what an abuser does on an individual level. The old DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Granted, in this situation, it’s a little more complicated than “victim and offender”, but that is what it’s being distilled down to here, with reality being flipped to present Ukraine as victim and Russia as offender.

Exactly. I don’t mean it as an excuse for people who think or do horrible things, but more that when we better understand where things come from, then we can better counter them.