#Renegade Cut

[renegadecut]

Child's Play Totally Normal Halloween Special | Renegade Cut

CW: jumpscares and light effects

[icarus-suraki]

Tis the season

Home Alone (which is a great movie, don't @ me) is a movie about family, Christmas, and the insulated world of white, upper middle-class suburbia and the socially conservative revenge fantasy of trespassers getting legally shot to death with no consequences due to the incredible reach of Castle Doctrine.

[pumpacti0n]

"The performative roles that are enforced onto us reproduce harmful social relations, instilling onto us a preset of prejudiciary behaviors and ideals about what a man and woman is and how they're "supposed to be" in a "good society".

Instead of seeing personhood first, we are instilled with a gendered framework of treating the other person as the prescribed characteristic of what femininity and masculinity is supposed to be, and whether they perform to this prescription or not.

However, humanity itself is more complex than this reductive vision of putting some in to "Block A" or "Block B". Instead, a spectrum of interconnected complexity and performances that cannot be neatly contained into pink and blue boxes.

Hell, even sex itself is bimodal, which explains the existence of intersex people. A post-gender society can only exist when the institutions and systemic consequences of patriarchy have long died.

In the meantime, we can only work towards advancing and progressing notions about gender, and working to dismantle the hierarchies that the binary puts onto us, perhaps reaching a point where we no longer need the gender categorization to meaningfully ourselves in our own unique way."

"Anarcho-Transhumanism" - Post-Comprehension

[futurebird]

Do any of ya'll know the nice man who makes "Renegade Cut" ? It's a leftist youTube channel that's pretty good on some topics, but he seems totally unaware that mastodon even exists (or that tumblr has been as big of a part of this shift as anyplace else) -- even though, he does a lot of videos about politics and social media.

I think we should launch a charm offensive at the guy.

I'm very tired of hearing "reporting" about social media that mentions bluesky and threads but not any of the other options especially from so-called "leftists"

Honey what is you doin'?

[leo-fie]

What makes a leftist?

There's a whole lot of leftists on the interwebs today, mostly Americans, and every once in a while we find out that a particular person (this week it was Ana Kasparian) is not actually a leftist at all and completely fine with parroting far right talking points.

And we notice that although they seem to have been an advocate for social justice and marginalized groups, they have mainly been reacting to whatever bullshit the right is pulling. Understandable,but not conducive to actually pass out the politics of someone. Being against the genocide of trans people in the US doesn't make one a lefitst, it just makes you a decent person.

Which begs the question: What makes a leftist?

For me it's anti-capitalism. It is also anti-fascism, but even liberals can be anti-fascists.

But anti-capitalism IMO is a stance you cannot go back on. Once you understand how capitalism works, once you grasp the underlying exploitation and the fundamentially incompatable interests of working class and owning class, you cannot go back. You cannot wake up one day thinking: You know what? The means of productions don't belong into the hand of the workers.

That is the fundamental difference between a liberal and a leftist. Liberals still uphold capitalism. They can be the nicest people and super involved with progressive causes, but at best they are ignorant and believe the lie that capitalism is just how things are.

It can be difficult to parse however if a certain person is an anticapitalist or not. Again, you don't need to be a leftist to be against the growing fascism in Europe and North America, against ecological destruction, against trans genocide, against police brutality, etc. That just makes you an empathetic person.

It is also normal to be confused as colloquially terms like left, socialism, anarchy, communism are used wildly outside their actual meaning. Not to mention the buzzwordsalad spewed by the right. Consequently being a leftist also means you have read up at least a little on theory and understand that for example Scandinavia isn't socialist at all since the workers don't own the means of production. That politicians like Bernie Sanders are just nicer liberals, social democrats in his case, believing in a mixed economy. That there are no viable leftist political parties anywhere in Europe or North America, no matter what they call themselves.

Being a leftist can mean that you fall into one of the many schools of thought between Marxism, socialism, communism, anarchism, syndicalism, or their various combinations or none of them. But it means you are an anti-capitalist and understand capitalism as the underlying source of all intersectional ills that plague humankind today. From racism, climate catastrophe, income inequality, nazis to war and Elon Musk. It's all connected. It's systemic.

Further reading/watching:

Hadas Thier - A people's guide to capitalism (great starter)

Marx / Engels - The manifesto of the communist party

Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine

Everything by Angela Davis, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Mark Fisher, Pyotr Kropotkin, Antonio Gramsci

Thought Slime

Renegade Cut

Second Thought

More Perfect Union

Unlearning Economics

Carlos Maza

The Leftist Cooks

Then & Now

NonCompete

[zenosanalytic]

Watching This Video from Renegade Cut, and there's a certain extent to which I feel "neoliberalism" and "classical liberalism" are primarily propaganda terms.

Like: all those words mean in practical terms is "Conservative". "Classical liberal" subtly implies that markets, property, and hierarchy(disguised as "competition") -NOT egalitarianism, human rights, and rule of law- are the oldest and most fundamental aspects of liberalism, and Neoliberalism presents itself as a "New" form of liberalism... where markets, property, and hierarchy-under-the-mask-of-"competition" are given primacy over egalitarianism, human rights, and the rule of law. Conservatism, meanwhile, is a political movement which broke away from liberalism during the French Revolution because... they saw it as an example of how egalitarianism and democracy could threaten property, hierarchy, and markets, and they didn't like that. Like: when someone calls themselves a "classical liberal", what they typically mean is that they'd rather see a corporation make 1% extra profit than see the shared humanity of those it employs respected by the State, and that's just a statement of conservative principles.

Anyway just something I started thinking watching this essay that I wanted to share. This essay does a great job of expressing how ~Competition~ acted as a stalking-horse for private-tyranny via labor-abuse and monopoly in 1990s United States political discourse.

[strejdaking]

Seems relevant.

[marvinthemillennialmouse]

If you're not familiar with this channel, please check it out. He does good work.

This video is in a playlist I use when I need something soothing and comforting to listen to.

[hellhoundmaggie]

Don't play Hogwarts Legacy -- play *these* games instead! | Renegade Cut

[godloveyell]

When it comes to shoplifting in general, the answer to “Did you see anything?” should always be “No, you didn’t.” Even if they’re shoplifting nonessential items, not food or medicine, you don’t know their story; there could be stuff going on that you don’t know about, not just entitlement. Besides no matter how much corporations fearmonger, the cost they have to deal with when it comes to shoplifting is a pittance, barely a drop in the bucket when it comes to their profits.

There are already plenty of cops in the world without amateurs stepping in to do their jobs for them. Just keep your mouth shut.

Same goes for diapers. I didn't see a thing

[pumpacti0n]

"The reality of torture and other war crimes presents a moral challenge to all young men and women considering a career in military service.

...

War crimes in Iraq are not mere aberrations. They emanate from official policies regarding the aims and conduct of the occupation. It is official policy, for example, to use cluster bombs in populated areas. Soldiers and Marines merely carry out the policy. It was official policy, under Operation Iron Hammer, to put barbed wire around villages, to bulldoze crops, to bomb homes, and to hold families in jail until they released insurgent information."

10 Excellent Reasons Not to Join the Military - Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg | [source]

[inevitablesurrender]

Please watch Arcade Urban Legends from Renegade Cut. The script and the delivery are so fucking pitch perfect that I'm once again questioning my decision to stay as far away from game journalism as I can get.

[icarus-suraki]

Renegade Cut: "Home Alone Is a White Suburban Revenge Fantasy."

Time to post this one again! On "castle doctrine" and white suburbia as seen through Home Alone (which is a great movie, don't @ me).