simontherockjohnson

REI is not a workers coop. It's a consumer coop. It's not even the same thing. The fact that it's so difficult to even find a workers coop that is a national retailer shows you exactly why competing as a coop on the capitalist market is difficult.

I think the moralistic inclination that's derived from consoomer culture that you must like things that are "good" and dislike things that are "bad" is awful and focuses people on the dumbest things in order to extract the max amount of money via advertising/marketing spend.

I think it's perfectly fine to like works regardless of their morality or quality, I just think people should be honest about it. I like plenty of things that are shitty or problematic I'm just clear eyed about them. I do like The Last of Us, but I'm not going to pretend that it's something it's not.

DNC claims that Hogg is al-Qaeda and must sign a Jolani style document to rebrand his image to "moderate reformer".

Do you get clowned on by the other owls because your gigantic traps prevent full range of movement for your head?

Is everyone like "oh this dirty mf can't even look directly behind him without turning around"?

Thomas L Friedman, of all people, saying that you can't just put your feet up and coast because you have a Pulitzer is sending me.

It must be so hard to write Atlanticist propaganda laundering the reputation of the West's newest darling that's crucial to fulfilling the newest hare brained scheme to keep the empire together.

Yes? She lost everything in her pursuit of revenge. Who walks away from the end of the game and thinks “worth it 😄”

There's a ton of mouth breathers on forums arguing that Ellie should have killed Abby. I don't think they're stupid because they "don't see the real message", I think they're stupid because they don't reject the message they actually see. There is a real argument for the existence of the message of "why not just kill Abby" in the construction of the game.

Isreali propaganda is always going to have Isreal as the one true king, god’s favorite little girl, etc. This show aint that

This isn't true at all. There are plenty of movies like Beaufort that attempt to thread the needle of "maybe a state of perpetual war and occupation is bad" (because our soldiers get sad and weepy when retreating) without confronting the fact that the logic of Israeli ideology and it's self characterization as a state, requires it to be in a state of perpetual war and occupation. TLOU2 does this same thing where it attempts to separate the consequences from the choices that precipitated the consequences without truly examining them. It makes you feel that the choices are sacrosanct and understandable.

A good example is what you mention in your other comment:

Neither the game nor Ellie actually confront the original sin or the subsequent choices to sin. Neither does the WLF/Seraphite storyline. The same exists in Israeli propaganda, the re-framing and argumentation about a year zero while committing atrocity. The description of the tactic through visual form e.g. the torture scene, is not necessarily communicating a refutation of the tactic. That's you engaging with the work through your morality, not the morality of the work itself. The WLF is framed as the antagonist, and Ellie is framed as the protagonist, but their arcs are the same in terms of how they act and the consequences of their actions.The context is fairly interchangeable. They're simply cast in different lights for the purpose of narrative. Ultimately this means that the stance is "well I guess it's bad but it's just kind-of a wash so you shouldn't be too hard on other people or groups that have this same form and maybe do the same things you did with Ellie where you focus on the good stuff not the bad stuff".

The moral ambiguity in the work matches the moral ambiguity and squishiness of Neil Druckman's liberal Zionism and of all liberal Zionists.

Yeah I agree with that. Ironically all of those messages were from the other WLF members towards Abby in E2.

Propaganda doesn't have to be a thinly veiled metaphor rich in polemics like Iron Man. That's actually often the most boring an ineffectual propaganda. Propaganda works best when it creates a heuristic response that muddles emotions and logic.

The propaganda in TLOU Part 2 comes from the ludonarrative dissonance that actually just reinforces the idea that "this is just complex stuff and you shouldn't be 'too moral' about it". For example are we ever really made to feel that Ellie is bad for choosing to avenge Joel?

Ellie's story and the WLF/Seraphite conflict mirror each other in the whole "I don't want to have to do this but I have no choice" -> "I did a thing and I had no choice and now I'm traumatized from my non-choice" -> "more non choices incoming". The reality is that the story consistently creates apologetics to further and further these cycles in the eyes of the player who themselves commit the atrocity. This essentially undercuts the eventual resolution of "you didn't have to do all that".

Comparing this with a game like Spec OPS the Line that forces you to commit atrocity because you're playing "da hero" and then admonishes you for the immorality of it. Martin Walker is shown to be a piece of shit. He's traumatized and abused sure, but that doesn't take focus away from the fact that he's a piece of shit that burns women and children alive with white phosphorous.

We see so much "consequence" to validate the "cycle of violence", but we don't really see or play through any significant consequential atonement that bears the same emotional weight as the atrocity itself. It's more of a shrugging apologetic for cycles of violence than an argument against it. On top of that the ludonarrative doesn't give us much choice about it, nor does it give us commentary about that lack of choice unlike Spec Ops.

A good example as to how these stories can be written in a "game style" but not have this dissonance that's both plot based and ludonarrative based is if you stack the emotional and logical judgements of the PC's actions towards the end of the game and heighten the impact. A good example is Mouthwashing where over the course of the game you discover that you're actually a huge piece of shit in context. The things that seemed innocuous at the beginning of the game were actually your PC being a huge piece of shit. Ultimately these actions got a whole bunch of people killed and they were done because the PC is an incompetent ego maniac with a huge chip on their shoulder about their lack of achievement in life.

Bonus Video Game Brain content:

Why does the actor who is playing a character that canonically has PTSD from watching her father be tortured and killed in a brutal way look haunted / sad / upset all the time? I feel like the actor doesn't have the skill to play this character with such a shallow emotional portrayal. That thread very obviously gets misogynistic and ablist very fast.

Mortal Engines is literally a refutation of liberalism in a capitalist system. It's about how municipal darwinism doesn't work.

1/7 people who solicit a grifter want a refund.