#starting to feel like a lot of 'leftists' on here really are just secret alt righters. cant wait till they drive away all the actual decent

[snekdood]

the thing about this whole situation is- it really opened my eyes up. I already thought it was shitty enough when no one believed me about my own trauma, but I dismissed it with "ah well, they weren't there so Ig I can't blame them" but. there's plenty of fuckin evidence these rapes happened, and it's still not enough for the shitty types of "leftist" out there, or they try to act like its justified. it's really put things in perspective for me in regards to my own situation- I could have straight up video footage of my abusive ex sexually assaulting me and ya'll would find a way to disbelieve it or pretend its justified, and for that alone I'm revoking your leftist card and your ability to keep pretending you care about victims.

[evilelitest2]

"because a lot of folks on this site for example are buying into conservative mindsets even as they battle conservatives" Can you elaborate on this a bit more? It is interesting.

Ok so you know how in the build up to the American Civil War a lot of white Northerners were fiercely opposed to slavery but were still extremely racist in terms of their world view, they basically were right for the wrong reasons.  A lot of leftists here seem to doing the same thing, they oppose conservatism but don’t actually doubt many of the core principles of conservatism.  This is especially obvious when looking at tactics or methods 

1) Accepting Right wing Framing of Issues.  @randomshoes actually made this observation to me, but I’m going to steal it for this post here

Basically when the Right frames an issue, its often this massively simplistic binary narrative like “Capitalism good, Communism bad” or “The West is totally a real thing and it is good and anything on western is bad” or “Christianity=good, nonchristain=bad”  And so many leftists, rather than challenging the binary just accept it but invert it.  So I see people being like “Lets downplay the crimes of Joseph Stalin” rather than “actually making it capitalism vs. communism is a massively simplistic way of viewing extremely complicated political movements that emerged over centuries”.  Or people going on to these extremely nasty anti Christian movements rather than just accepting 

The most extreme version of this is that I sometimes see leftists support literal conservatives because they happen to be opposed to Westernization, like I see leftists justifying ISIS or even Japanese Ultra Nationalist.  

2) The desire for everything bad to be traced back to a single unified source.  If you ever have the misfortune to watch Right wing News like I do, their world view is one where everything they don’t like from socialism to Islamic fundamentalism to Crime to Hollywood to racial minorities  are all one mass that they just call “enemies” ussually led by George Soros or some other antisemitic stereotype.  Because a core part of rightist thought process is an embrace of intellectual simplicity and rejection of complexity.  They like nice simple narratives with clear bad guys and good guys and where they don’t have to imagine things in a more nuanced or complicated manner.   

So it is super infuriating when the left buys into it

Both me and @randomshoes have met leftist who honest to god believe that there is some council of rich white men who are sitting around table being like “ok so the 15th meeting of the Oppressors meeting has met, what are some new ways we can make the world shittier for black people?”  There is no secret cabal of oppressors out there, there are systems, that is why its called “systemic oppression”.  There are people who want to spread or take advantage of that oppression (see entries, Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, the Entire Republican Party) but the systems go beyond just the right.  For that matter, they go beyond capitalism itself in many ways. 

To use one concrete example, so many people at my college were 100% convinced that capitalism invented patriarchy and racism which like....no, capitalism doesn’t exist until the 17th century (ish) while racism goes back to like...all of recorded history.  Even if we specifically mean “racism based on skin color” well that was invented by the Spanish in their conquest of the Americas and Spain was very much not a capitalist power.  Meanwhile patriarchy like...have you studied the ancient greeks.

I could go on through literally dozens of examples of this, but the left can be just as guilty as “all of my problems can be traced to one issue” as the right, though unlike the right at least the left has real actual problems.  

3) Utter lack of Nuance.  Again if you spend time on right wing media, you notice that they tend towards dramatic demononization vs. idealizing of public figures.  Anybody in their circle is good, and those that aren’t are pure evil.    because again....complex thinking is literally antithetical to right wing thinking.  It would be really really nice if the left could avoid this...but nope.  

This can be the sort of Moral Cholesterol thing that I’ve talked about before (and thank you @archpaladin for coining that term), where people are like “oh i morally agree with this movie therefore it is good” or the inverse which is just the most simplistic way you can possibly view art.  Or it can be how certain elements of the left views historical figures.  

You see this the most with equivocation, I have met leftists being like “oh the US interment camps are equatable to the Rape of Nanking” which like...no....one is bad one is far far worse.  

I could write a whole series of post on this one its 

4) Embrace of Conspiracy Theories, Pseudo History, Pseudo Science etc

The Right thrives on conspiracy theories, because again...facts don’t care about feelings but I get really testy when I see the left embracing these tactics as well. Again, the right is worse at this, I’m not equivocating, but lets remember Anti Vaxxers were a left wing bullshit theory. Actually the entire “new Age” movement is rife with grifters, conspiracy theorists, and associated bullshit.  

I mean on tumblr you will see posts talking about how China really discovered American (nope), how Beethoven was African (nope), how a Jewish lobby controls Washington (ugg) or 

I mean just a few days ago, a classmate of mine was claiming that Christianity invented patriarchy and mentioned the example of “like with overthrowing cleopatra” which like....nooo on every possible level

This goes from annoying to outright sinister when you take into account that some leftists are willing to serve as apologists for certain horrific regimes, like I keep finding Mao apologists on this site.  

5) Mob tactics.  Again, the Right is so much worse about this since they deliberately artificially create mobs for the purpose of mass harassment (cough Gamergate cough) but the left is pretty guilty of this as well, I refer to you that entire contra points fiasco as one example.  

6) Not Checking Sources.  I swear to god, if I could get everybody on tumblr to change just one thing about their behavior it would be

.....to get ride of the nazis...

but somewhere on the list would be this public service announcement 

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING CLAIMED ON TUMBLR.....DOUBLE CHECK IT FIRST

the amount of times i see people just spreading utter bullshit that was just posted on this site which a basic google search could stop is just...ugg

7) Nostalgic.  I see a lot of leftists engaging in primordial ism, romanticism and “appeals to nature fallacies.  Again you will find a lot of leftists indulging in “oh things were better before modernity” nonsense

8) Fetishistic of violence, especially revolutionary violence, ignoring the consequences that tend to emerge from that.  Still better than the right obviously

9) Finally dehumanization.  This one i’m a bit understanding of, after all the Alt Right are basically evil, and the Republican are a death c ult at this point, but even so quite a few elements of the left are just a bit too gleeful.  And the thing about that militant mindset is that while it might be directed against bad people at first, it quickly can get corrupted.

Take RadFems for example, a group who I’ve always thought were a great example of anti intellectualism, militancy and violence from the start, with their almost Manichean attitude towards men.  The thing is that this approach didn’t really hurt any men ,not really but it was this “with us or against us attitude” that lead many of them to go on to become TERFS.  

This “the enemy must be destroyed” attitude is like a poison which sort of consumed yourself in it, and leads to hurting those who can’t fight back.  

In Short, the left frustrates me when it behaves like the right, who are utterly awful at their core. 

[nicemango-feed]

About that NYT Nazi Article...

Remember when we didn't need to discuss Nazis all the time? Like...back in the day...early 2016-2015. Good times, those were :( So what's this big fuss over the New York Times Nazi Article? What's got everyone so upset? Are the Regressive Leftists being regressive again? God why can't they tolerate different ideas... Did these lefty cucks really think an article would push people into being Nazis? ------ *deep sigh* ---Well--- ...While there were some (I didn't see too many tbh) people going overboard and calling the NYT a literal Nazi Sympathizing paper (like come on, I don't actually think they have a secret Nazi agenda), there were a lot of other good reasons to be disappointed with this article. I'm wary of both ends of this too, carelessly throwing around the term Nazi *and* being overly defensive/underusing the term Nazi, even when it CLEARLY applies. There are people who have accused me of being a 'Nazi sympathizer' because I have been critical of the hijab and niqab as a woman who had to live through 'modesty' enforced by the state in Saudi Arabia. You bet your ass I'm going to be critical...and it's not at all for the same xenophobic fear-mongering reasons most far-righters hate muslims/hijabs in this current climate....And then, there's the other side, where I'm surrounded by supposed 'Rational Skeptic' thinkers who are so 'anti-left' that downplaying Nazis is kind of their embarrassing trademark now. They will literally argue that someone shouting 'Heil Hitler' at a white nationalist speech is "not a Nazi" - because they aren't time-traveling from Nazi era Germany, you see...so technically they can't be Nazis.

Wtf? I thought there were no nazis any more. http://pic.twitter.com/oGZBTTxq3Z

— ＣＨＲＩＳＴＭＡＳ ＩＳ ＣＯＭＩＮＧ🎄 (@Neobabylon2) November 7, 2017

(clip via @neobabylon2)

Some are simply so anti-Muslim that it serves their interest to downplay Nazis in a way that would be better suited to The Onion. 

There are great intellectual Atheist takes that will put the swastika and Star of David in the same category, and when someone politely explains why that's an issue they will double down and insist that Judaism is *worse* than Nazism actually....

There are tons of examples of this type of ignorant nonsense from Rational Skeptics in the online Atheist scene. If you were to go by some of these commentator's timelines...there is apparently *no* problem with a rise of (neo) Nazis in Trumpian America. It's all just leftist hysteria. According to them, time is best spent arguing against those who refer to Richard Spencer as a Nazi....because he's not a time traveler... *eyeroll* So while I agree, that there are definitely people who overuse the term, I'm also increasingly frustrated by people who downplay the danger of the far-right, who insist Nazis don't exist at all today, who pretend like this is still some fringe issue and not a growing movement with a President who has has created a welcoming space for them. The rest of us, as reasonable humans, should try and exist between these two incredibly stupid and toxic extremes. And with this article, it seemed that NYT was sort of playing the tune of the 'Nazi downplayers'... ----- Let me jump right into why I think the piece was not well received....In fact it was so badly received that the editor had to chime in and explain wtf they were thinking. How the NYT put it in their headline, "Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond" is a fairly accurate description of most of the criticism. So while not literally Nazi sympathizing, but *normalizing* a Nazi sympathizer....I think that's fair...a case can be made for this article doing exactly that, whether it intended to or not. There's also the fact that the writer of this now notorious piece also wrote an additional piece about how he knew it was missing something, and how he could 'feel the failure' because he didn't get to the heart of why this Nazi turned to his vile belief system. It read like an excuse, something else to pin the colossal failure of this article on, other than the awfulness of the piece itself. I can tell he had enough to write a better piece on this very subject just by reading what he put out. And come on, if you're writing to explain your article and saying you could feel the failure, then I think you've conceded that it was pretty bad. On top of that, there were also factual errors:

The @nytimes "Nazi next door" article appears to have basic factual problems, too https://t.co/EKGTsvemJn http://pic.twitter.com/fpRvrVpA6X

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) November 27, 2017

So much went wrong here. --And it's not that I don't understand what was being attempted. I know this kind of piece, and it can indeed be done very well...the juxtaposition of horrific genocidal beliefs with mundane snippets of everyday existence. There is something to that contrast for sure...but there has to be an actual, proper contrast for that to work. It won't work if it's heavy on the minor details of what everyone was wearing and eating but glosses over the, ya know...genocidal beliefs part. That's when it becomes lopsided..and people start to wonder wtf you were even trying to do, if not a cushy profile? There also has to come a point where the article serves a purpose beyond describing what the nazis were wearing/eating/having on their wedding registry. It should inform us in some way? Tell us something about the movement and radicalization process...other than making the Nazi grievances seem legit. "His faith in mainstream solutions slipped as he toured the country with one of the metal bands. “I got to see people who were genuinely hurting,” he said. “We played coast to coast, but specifically places in Appalachia, and a lot of the Eastern Seaboard had really been hurt.”" This type of article done properly, delves into the extremist's beliefs and frames them in a way that no borderline-nazis reading, could mistake for free promotion. It lets the subject hang himself by his own words, so to speak... but it doesn't jump immediately from him saying *Hitler was chill* to sympathetically telling his story about how society is not fair to him, and what his dream fascist-utopia would look like...punctuated with cute details about Cherry pie tattoos and wedding planning. I mean yeah, of course I understand the need to humanize evil, and to show us that it doesn't come in the shape of an unrelatable monster, it can live, breathe and walk amongst us in the form of our neighbours, coworkers, teachers, friends, etc. That's an important message...it's just that this article failed to deliver it. There is a line between 'humanize' and 'sanitize'...the same line exists between whether one is journalistically exploring an extremist subject or providing a glossy advert for them. This is the difference between Louis Theroux and Dave Rubin (alt-right propagandist) for example. Louis can explore all manner of disturbing extremist subjects but people don't assume he is sympathetic to them because of the way he frames those stories. Dave on the other hand enters his interviews with a clear agenda of wanting the extremists to present their best side, while talking shit about The Left with them. Now, I don't think this NYT piece was like Dave Rubin sanitizing 'migrants are cockroaches' 'we need a final solution' Katie Hopkins bad....There was better intent behind it and it just didn't work out, I want to make that clear. Dave's is an intentional sanitization, this was a poor job of framing the article which resulted in what appeared to be a normalizing effect. When you are trying to show that evil exists among us and goes to Applebee's just like us...then actually position the piece in that way. Then the absurdity of combining white supremacist ideology with a causal turkey sandwich will perhaps even be entertaining. But the key is you make it clear that you are trying to demonstrate how banal evil can be... If done well, this kind of piece can be very effective. The 'banality of evil' genre isn't a write off...but you've got to get the tone right. Don't approach Nazism as if it's a mere cultural curiosity. Don't do it in a way that it serves no purpose other than simply boosting a white supremacist signal out into the world...on a popular, respected mainstream outlet - Because *that* could potentially embolden more borderline white nationalists in this particular white power-y climate....they'll see that they're getting such a fuzzy profile which isn't really demonizing them at all. One that's in fact helping to mainstreamize them! See guys, their hopes and dreams are just like ours! They have muffin tins on their wedding registries! They talk about having kids too! Aww... Nazis *love* mainstream media coverage, so at least try to do it in a way that makes them not love it? “I love mainstream liberals. Those are my favorite journalists.” - Richard Spencer  If you're going to give someone space to say 'Hitler was chill' ffs, the next paragraph better be something to balance that and signal to others like him that this ideology is not tolerated. The shiny new Nazism of 2017 isn't some rare ornament that you can report on in a detached manner...it's a pretty urgent issue we're facing in the west, lives have been lost. Pieces on this subject without a sense of urgency or a sense of purpose will cause people to question the motives of such a project. Picture this same type of article featuring a Jihadist or an Islamist.. the same people whining that The Left wants audiences spoonfed basic facts like 'Nazis are bad' would themselves be outraged. Not an exact comparison, but this situation reminds me of the time a ridiculous Asim Qureshi of CAGE referred to ISIS murderer Jihadi John as 'a beautiful man', and people were rightfully appalled. Now obviously he wasn't referring to the ISIS version of the guy as beautiful, but rather the guy he knew in the past. But *still* wtf was he thinking saying that about a beheader? Similarly, its not that people need to be spoonfed the position that Nazis are bad, but they are just appalled that someone with genocidal beliefs and sympathies for a monster like Hitler can be portrayed in such a soft lens. People are understandably sensitive about how vile ideologies and their adherents are portrayed. You just can't be downplaying this kind of thing....The Asim Qureshi thing was a sentence, but imagine the outrage if he was profiling a Jihadi for a known publication...and he focused on his wedding plans, and on the fact that he didn't see himself as a jihadist, just someone fighting for freedom for his family, the kinds of sandwiches they shared and didn't address the elephant in the room, that woah those are some very fucked up and dangerous beliefs. The most upsetting thing to people is that this story ran in a climate where nazis are becoming emboldened by the day. Where the US president is inspiring them and is unable to properly condemn them. This article came across cold and with no comment on the victims of this ideology. Despite mentioning Charlottesville, there was no sympathy for Heather Heyer. They literally included a link to where you can purchase a swastika armband ffs. WHYYY.

'Facepalm' doesn't quite cut it. 

Now, I personally enjoy the use of absurd and comedic tactics to combat extremism, It's why I liked the real housewives of ISIS skit...it's why I enjoy Contrapoints' channel, especially her older videos involving bedazzling swastikas on her chest....it's why we've done two episodes together on a strangely specific topic like 'Fascist Fashion'. I absolutely think theres a way to talk about a Nazi's food preferences and make it valuable and entertaining. But it has to add something, it has to have a point...and the point can't just be detailing the kinds of sandwiches they eat. The article seems incomplete...like there could have been a useful point made afterwards but there just wasn't and the writer stopped at minor food details. Ok, so he eats at Applebee's and? This could have been a piece about the tactics they use to mainstreamize their views and almost appear normie, but it wasn't. Heck this could have even been a piece about how Nazis consume the same pop culture as us and the cognitive dissonance behind that... it could have been a 'how to spot signs'....but instead it really served no purpose at all. ----- Here are some excerpts from the piece that I found particularly cringeworthy:

I mean look at how it starts off, painting them as any other sweet couple with a wedding registry at Target, people who bake muffins and slice pineapples.....and? AND wouldn't mind some ethnic cleansing of non-white people....how about adding that? 

Then there was this gem....like...what...?

 O___O 

I had to check a couple of times to make sure I wasn't missing some quotation marks or something...because, did the writer really write that himself? Is that his opinion? Or is he sharing what he thinks the subject of his profile feels like? It's all too vague and blurry to be reassuring that it's not the writer himself saying that, "it can FEEL toxic to openly identify as a far right extremist" - What do you mean it can FEEL toxic? It is toxic, it's fucking extremism...  

What is he trying to do there, I don't know tbh....Aww poor white nationalist is having a hard time coming out of the closet because the horrible environment is too toxic for him to be his genuine self. Ffs. 

So here we start with how polite and 'low-key' he is, aww....he's literally the Nazi sympathizer next door...what a 'wholesome' image. And then we actually hear a tiny sprinkling of his vile views...almost as if they slipped in by accident to ruin his nazi-next-door image. No worries, the writer jumps straight to his cutesie cherry pie pop-culture tattoos because we can't dwell on the uncomfortable vile beliefs too long for some reason...

Here, again with the fucking manners. He's a fucking Nazi who thinks white people are superior to other races and Hitler wasn't so bad....that's not very polite is it now? 

It just seems odd to give him space to spout this anti semitic conspiracy on such a large platform without adding a remark or two, or at least a mildly disapproving adjective somewhere. 

See how harmless and non-racist he is? He's even having mixed-race couples at his wedding. 

--How about you don't add that right after talking about how he says he's not a white supremacist?--

People trying to split hairs between white nationalist and white supremacist should really be challenged on that at the very least if they are being given such a large platform. 

I don't know maybe it's just me but you've got to inject some expression or commentary as a writer when your subject is engaging in holocaust denial and saying Hitler was 'chill'. In a documentary profiling extremists perhaps the interviewer can rely on facial expressions or just a tense awkward atmosphere... to convey appropriate framing. But in an article if all we get is cold detached reporting and obsessive detail on nazi eating habits, people are not going to take it well. 

And it ends on a note of them sharing their hopes and dreams like any other couple (exactly how it began), woven badly with a quick mention of Charlottesville. And what. is. with. the. food. obsession. in. this. article? Turkey sandwiches, muffin pans, Applebees, Pasta. What a normal year 2017 has been. ----- A huge thanks to Patrons who make this work possible. If you enjoy my work please consider supporting via Patreon here. 

from Nice Mangos http://ift.tt/2kcfc0B via IFTTT

[kickstarter-promotion]

Another Amazing Kickstarter (The Man Came Around - A survival game and political fable by Pipette Inc. —Kickstarter) has been published on http://crowdmonsters.com/new-kickstarters/the-man-came-around-a-survival-game-and-political-fable-by-pipette-inc-kickstarter/

A NEW KICKSTARTER IS LAUNCHED:

Located in the harshest mountain range of the country, the Northern Border is full of dangers, natural or man-made. Accidents, wild beasts and governmental agencies will stand in your way.

The downfall of Occida, the mysterious organisation known as “The Many”, the shaddy dealings at the border…

Discover all those hidden truths and dark secrets as you search the best way to reach the border. 

Or should I say the best ways. Because some paths are clearly not for everyone…

    Don’t play one character but five!

Each has its own reason to flee the country, moral compass and abilities. They’ll be great in some fields, and suck in others. 

In a classic survival way, you’ll have to manage their stamina, warmth and health with the equipment you’ll find. 

Buried in avalanche, frozen by the wind, or beaten to death by the special forces. It’s up to you to finish the game with the whole group alive, or just a sole survivor. 

There are usually two ways to deal with the various obstacles on your path. Take the risk as a group and hope for the best or endager only one of your member. 

Will you sneak behind the guards as a group or send someone to get their attention -and a possible bullet in the chest- first? 

But wounded characters will slow you down and you probably won’t have enough food at some point… Will you try to save everyone or leave the weak behind? 

Managing a group sure is hard, but you’re not the center of the world. Meet various characters and face some intense moral dilemmas! 

Will you sacrifice a member to save the group? Make deals with crooked individuals? Steal ? Hurt people? Or just do nothing when facing evil?

Intense stress and guilt will impact your heroes. 

No one knows how they will react when pushed to the edge. Bursts of anger, depressions or betrayals: everything is possible. Try to keep them alive and sane…

Depending on the choices you make, some situations will or will not happen further in the game. Play it several times to discover them.

Plus, an additional Story + mode will make the adventure even more unpredictable. 

    My name is Thierry and I’m an independent gamedev from Brussels, Belgium.   

After my studies in Corporate Communications -Yes, I know. Please don’t judge me- I decided to follow my dreams and start creating games. I learned to program and to draw -or at least I pretend I have- and started working full time on The Man Came Around.

  So, instead of telling you to buy useless stuff, I’m telling you to buy entertaining stuff made by my tiny hands. Hooray!

  I’m also an incorrigible leftist.

One year and a half ago, as I started working on this game – a simple plane crash story then called To the Sky– I asked myself what I could to do to make the world a better place. 

I decided to use my games to relay progressive values and express some of my frustrations about the system. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like explosions and stuff in games, but more variety cannot be a bad thing. All movies are not action movies, are they ? And if a game talking about politics and social issues can impact only one person positively, it’s definitely worth a shot. 

Since I made that decision, a lot of things happened. 2015 and 2016 were pretty f****d up.  Scandals, protests, bombings – sometimes close to home -, elections… Some made the game looks more like a documentary than a dystopian fiction.

So Pipette Inc., my studio, will only produce games containing a meaningful critic of society.  It’s not just about The Man Came Around, but the entire studio’s philosophy. So here’s my whislist for our poor world and the values that Pipette Inc will defend and promote : 

Let’s stop discriminating people based on their race, gender or sexuality. And I’m a cis white male, so to all my counterparts around the world : stop being douchebags.

I don’t want polar bears to die. Oh, and no climate wars, droughts, floods, massive pollution and the end of the world either. Climate change is real. Deal with it! 

We should always fight fascists. Insert a whiny « Aren’t you a fascist because you want to beat fascists, you fascist ? » comment here. Well, sorry alt-right nazis, but “We don’t like your kind here.” 

    I’ve been working full time on The Man Came Around for a year and a half now. I learned a lot in the process, and I’m finally sure to have all the tools and abilities I need to finish the game. Which is why I dare bring this project to kickstarter.

As you know, an artist doesn’t live from just love and fresh water. We also need some dry bread, a cardboard house and a wifi connection. I’m currently financing the game with my savings and the support of my family, but I need a little help in order to make the game better and replenish my pasta stock. 

And since The Man Came Around criticizes a lot the political corruption and the neoliberal greed, chances I’ll get money from a bank or my right-winged government are … hem… pretty slim. 

So I prefer to ask progressives from around the world to back the project, if the idea of a studio producing entertaining and committed games appeals to them. Call me a crazy socialist, an anarchist or a fool, but that’s the way I roll! 

I’m asking for ten thousand euros. It’s a lot, and at the same time, it’s not. To be honest, making games cost a lot of money, especially if you want to pay talented people to work and eat pastas with you.

The developmental cost of the game is much higher than what I ask here. The budget of an independent game can vary a lot, but it varies between 50 and 100K. So, I’ll combine the Kickstarter money with my own savings to make it work.

The initial ten thousand will serve to pay :

The sound and music of the game 

My food and my rent (let’s be honest)  

Another starving 2D/3D artist to help me

Any stretch goals attained will help me make the game better and finish it faster. Mainly be hiring talented people to help me improve some parts of the game.

Here are some graphics to explain the whole thing. Everybody loves graphics! (Damn you, marketing :'( )

    Some artworks from The Man Came Around. Also, a big thanks to Mary for her work on the HUD and some levels of the game !

         Poster, Artbook and T Shirt etc.

I don’t need to really explain those ones, so FEAST YOUR EYES ON THE MAGIC.

The Artbook, Poster and T Shirt. Also known as THE DREAM, people!

The Many’s Manual for Revolution vol. I

A booklet wrote by the activist organization known as “The Many” to oppose their corrupt government and greedy corporations. The manual is filled with good advices to protest and challenge the oligarchy. And also with dank memes.

  The Man Came Around Boardgame prototype

Play The Man Came Around with friends with this experimental and yet highly promising version of the boardgame. Playable from 3 to 6 players, TMCA the Boardgame is a semi-cooperative adventure where your group has find a way trough the murderous borders and face multiples dangers.

By taking all those decisions almost democratically.

Indeed, players can use card to influence votes, steal objects or just send someone else to a probable death…So, what will you do when the food runs scarce and Walt spent the whole game backstabing you?

Sometimes, you need to save your own ass. No hard feelings, Walt!

Tables of rewards

        INFORMATION PROVIDED BY Kickstarter.com and Kicktraq.com VISIT PAGE SOURCE

[evilelitest2]

Here's a tricky one: define cultural marxism

The actual movement of cultural Marxism or the Right wing Conspiracy theory?  Ok well lets do a bit of background

First off, the Progressive movement and most of its subgroups (Feminism, Class reform, Racial Equality then the abolitionist movement) started in the Enlightenment, we see the birth of the modern left in the American and French Revolutions long before Marx was born, so this notion that say, feminism comes from Marx is just temporally stupid, because you see early feminists (though the term didn’t exist yet) back in the 1790, again before Marx was born.  So the the Right wing conspiracy theory is basically an attempt to link all progressive movements into this single monolithic thing that is descended from Marx and since Marx is bad therefore progressiveness is bad therefore Far Right is good.  This was a literal Nazi conspiracy theory, they called it “Cultural Bolshevism” back then and liked it to the giant Jewish conspiracy.  Becauses as always, when you look at the specific progressive issues one by one, you see that most of them are not only really popular but also you know…just good sense.  Like take Gamergate for example, there was no Nathan Greyson article and the notion that feminists are controlling the gaming industry is absurd, but if you take all this bullshit and make it an attack on a vague nebulous “Cultural Marxism” then you can avoid getting into the specifics, because Far Rightists almost always fail when you talk specific policy rather than abstract rhetorical ideas.  

     The vast majority of leftist aren’t Marxist, Marxism is a very specific political philosophy that is actually quite stringent, for example I am very progressive but I also like capitalism (though I want it to be more regulated, more taxed and include better social programs) actual marxists don’t like me and I’d likely find a bullet in my skull in a Marxist goverment, but I’m lumped into with Marxists by the right because if we actually talk about wealth inequality in America, they don’t really have a leg to stand on.  Cultural Marxists is just a vague “Other” who people can rally around to oppose and avoid talking about actual issues with you know…facts.  Again, Marx is taught a great deal on college campuses, but many of those classes are talking about how he is wrong or what mistakes he made or why Communist countries tend to fall apart so disastrously.  But in the grown up world somebody can be a critic of Marx and still like some of his ideas, or dislike Marx and still be a leftist. 

   Ok so unto the actual real life Cultural Marxists who were a very specific thing. 

    So Marxism talks about how it is about the people and it represents the common folk against the elites but if you look at it in practice it is actually a very elitist philosophy, particular Leninism.  Its not only very anti religion, anti tradition, and anti national culture (all of which make you pretty unpopular with every day people) but it is very urban worker focused and also tends to subscribe to Vanguardism, the notion that you need this special elite of ideologically pure Marxist intellectuals to run the country as a dictatorship for your own sake until you are ready for the glorious communist utopia which will come about any second I swear.  The Reds in the Russian Civil War never had the most popular support, and until WWII the Soviets were mostly unpopular among their people.  So for a lot of international Marxists, they were left with a question 

“If the current system is so awful for the common people, why do the common people keep siding with conservatives”.  And then with the rise of fascism in Europe, they were like “wait why are people getting behind this pseudo populism which doesn’t actually serve their interests?”  Thus was born the Frankfurt School, people who wanted to study culture itself from a Marxist stand point.  Normally Marxism is quite dismissive of culture, so these guys were never really popular with mainstream Marxists since they focused on entertainment rather than economics.  

   Now the Frankfurt school actually had a lot of really interesting and valuable insights about media which i recommend everybody checking out, but with the major caveat of remembering that like all Marxists, they really love to simplify complicated issues into nice little simple formulas just like Marx did with his linear view of history, which as somebody who studies both History and Film I have…..complicated feelings towards Marx.  But Cultural Marxists did have a valid point about how if you look at popular media as a whole rather than specific examples, patterns emerge.  They weren’t the first to notice this and not everybody who notices this is a communist, but they talked a lot about the movies that came out in pre Nazi Germany.  Because films are a popular media made by a group of people for a mass audience, if you notice reoccurring trends in a film, it likely say something about the culture as a whole.  The point they made was that even works that weren’t overtly Nazi propaganda (Triumph of the Will, the Eternal Jew and all that) and instead look at the non Nazi works that also had similar themes.  For example, a lot of movies in 1920s and early 30s germany were about a society who have lose their identity and are subjected to some sort of humiliation, and many of them involve either

Strong men taking upset people and driving them to murder (M, Dr. Mabusai, Caligari) 

A secretive manipulative cabal who are secretly causing chaos in society (Nosferatu, D.r Mabusai again, 

A people stripped of what made them respectable and distinct (Metropolis, the Last Laugh, The Blue Angel) 

or 

Movies about how great Nature is and how wonderful it is when people work together to deal with a natural disaster.  (People on a Sunday, the Mountain Films like Holy Mountain) with the city as a negative bad thing that we hate.  

There are reoccurring trends and themes in all these films which hint at what is going on in germany at the time and if you look at the films at the time you see a culture which has lost its way and is in a state of confusion and fear.  

“Again Caligari to Hitler” is a really good book to check out, even if I don’t agree with it at all, cause it really loves its simplifications.  

This is a good introduction to the Frankfurt School though I think that it buys into their arguments a bit too much, if people are interested i could offer my criticism of Kyle’s criticism (for example, Cultivation theory predated Cultural Marxism)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndFysO2JunE

     But the main point is that it is about looking at the larger culture as a whole is a viable form of critical observation that reveals a great deal.  

While the Frankfurt School did get critical acclaim among intellectuals world ride, liberal and non liberal (notice how the Alt Right basically uses the same  times of criticism against popular film like Star Wars or Ghost Hunters), the communist aspect of it never caught on, because as always, Marxist is very good at noticing patterns and identifying problems, not so much with the solutions, bit of an underpants gnome problem.  

Very Good Question, let me know if youwant any follow ups

Edit: Wait, did I even answer the question?  Let me know @connard-cynique  cause I don’t know if I actually defined it so much as explained it