#semi-fascists

[tomorrowusa]

Semi-insane would be treated in a similar way by Trump Republicans.

The Trump administration tried to normalize far right extremism. We need to shift the Overton window back to the area of democratic normalcy.

[filosofablogger]

The Week’s Best Cartoons 9/10

The Week’s Best Cartoons 9/10

As always, TokyoSand over at Political Charge has found the best cartoons from the past week, and as usual, I am a few days late in re-blogging her post!  This week’s biggest story was the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and I know from following Clay Jones’ blog, just how difficult it was to do a political cartoon that showed the respect we all had for her.  Second in line was Steve Bannon’s…

[homefryboy]

some ppl...confuse me

[funnuraba]

Anyone who tries to tell you that fandom used to be chill before Kids These Days came along is lying to you, because I've been in the trenches going through old zines from the very beginning of organized science fiction fandom in the 1930s, and let me tell you, it was the autism Thunderdome. They were calling each other Hitler, getting into physical fights, writing into letter columns suggesting that other fans kill themselves.

To give the briefest of summaries: the first convention happened in 1936 with about 9 guys, and within three years they and all of sci-fi fandom had split in two over who got to plan the cons and who was a card-carrying Communist. By 1943 they'd had the first attempted fandom cult and the first faked suicide. Two different sex offenders were exposed, one the attempted cult leader and one a major player in the Communism feud. Another sex offender was only exposed in the 21st century after his death; in the 1940s he publicly proposed to a lesbian Satanist in the pages of A FANZINE and she had to politely suggest that this was best discussed in private. Everyone kept making fun of a teenage Ray Bradbury for being a terrible writer. They would tear their own friends' work to absolute shreds in public if they didn't like it!

Two young men got to the Chicago Worldcon by stowing away on boxcars and riding in the freezing cold for 30 hours (they got an award and cash prize for doing this). All this is taking place at a time where there were maybe 50 genuinely active fans, and they all knew each other and had to pay money to mail their fights to each other. It was wild out there, my friends.

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Something I've been considering recently: the big storytelling difference between Hideo Kojima and Yoko Taro.

There's an obvious reason I've been thinking about this, I feel: both these guys are, on the surface, exceedingly similar. They're both well-known Japanese video game creators*, they're both known for their eccentricities, they both tell stories that run the razor-thin line between 'Violence is corrupting and immoral' and 'Okay, but that bit of violence was pretty sick, right?' really well, as well as throwing in some really funny 'Hey, what the fuck did I just watch?' energy, hell they even both had a game in their series directed by Platinum Games, I don't especially think this is an overreach, here.

But they are different creators, and I've been thinking about their differences (specifically in storytelling - obviously one makes Action-RPGs and one makes Stealth Games and Baby Postman Simulators) as I play MGS3 and Nier Replicant, and I think I've come down to this: it's in how they condemn violence, and especially war.

Kojima bases all of his stories in reality - a heightened reality, perhaps, but there's a reason multiple MGS games end with long lists of dates and events, Kojima's made-up ones slipped in-between the actual history. Kojima bases his critiques on things that are real and tangible - MGS3 itself, more than any bee-wielding supervillain or photosynthetic sniper, is about the Cold War, and it's no accident that the Boss' speech at the end isn't about the Philosophers, or Volgin, or Metal Gear (METAL GEAR?) it's about soldiers, their fates and their traumas. Kojima lives in the world of... not exactly reality, but allegory-through-reality, and it makes his games pretty explicit in their messaging - which in my mind is a good thing, because it means that people who fundamentally misunderstand MGS aren't just wrong, they're obviously wrong - show me an MGS fan who thinks they're pro-America and pro-military, and I'll show you someone who did not pay attention to MGS.

Yoko Taro, on the other hand, is entirely a creature of allegory. Yoko himself has said in interviews that he tells stories primarily as a way to get people to feel something, and all other things like connections to the other games or even internal consistency comes as a secondary concern (as someone who's tried multiple times to tie everything Drakenier related together - that's believable.) As an inevitable result of this, his stories aren't really 1:1 parallels to history or the modern day, they're very general conflicts that speak to a wide range of topics.

Put it this way: in MGS4, Kojima describes in great detail a situation that is the natural endpoint of the geo-political situation (especially re: America) during most of the early 21st Century, especially The War on Terror - instead of war being a means of obtaining resources to generate income for big corporations, now war is the means of income, and all the inherent flaws of American late-stage capitalism have been applied to it - to the point that soldiers have to pay extra to use someone else's gun. It's a heightened, at times absurd version of reality, but it focuses on specific issues and flaws with the subject matter - The War on Terror, and through them highlights issues with our current world - hell, Kojima may have predicted some of the issue we currently face with capitalism.

In Nier Automata, however, Yoko doesn't present an exaggeration of a real-world conflict to portray it's flaws and its hopelessness. Instead, he constructs an entirely hopeless war, a war that is literally pointless on every side, and explores how people react to that. As opposed to Kojima's slight exaggeration of the War on Terror, by the end of Automata Yoko has presented a proxy war fought on behalf of two races that died off millennia ago, between two groups that are, at their core, exactly the same, made from the same components, fought on one side because of a poorly worded instruction from their creators that necessitates eternal total war as a basic fact of their evolutionary cycle but also inevitably results in their evolutions being violently purged because any form of passivity is betrayal, and on the other as a grand Machiavellian scheme to kill off their own troops, thereby concealing the deaths of their creators – a scheme, it’s worth noting, conceived of by an android that no longer remembers conceiving it, because his own scheme necessitates his constant assassination by the person he cares about the most to prevent him from discovering his own plan. Kojima's wars in MGS4 are absurd and pointless for us because we know what the results of the War on Terror were, Yoko's war in Automata is kinda like an onion - every layer you peel back on it, you discover a new way that it's pointless, and every time you do, you're crying a little bit more.

So, wrapping this up before people realise I just used the ultimate cliche of poorly-worded food metaphors, if you were to ask me what the big difference between Yoko Taro and Hideo Kojima was... well, I'd still go with the gameplay genres, but I'd also say that it's a slight, but really interesting, difference in how they go about their metaphors. As for which is better... neither, obviously. They're both really talented creators, this is just a style thing. You seriously expect me to choose between a series that includes 'a man pretended to be possessed by the ghost of his crush's son because he grafted his arm onto him and everyone bought it' and a series that includes 'at some point the Earth stopped spinning. This has never been explained in any of the games'? What are you, a cop?

*albeit if Yoko ever heard someone compare him to Kojima he'd probably simultaneously die of embarrassment and make a joke about being a younger, hotter Kojima.

[icantalk710]

Have to figure out a way to blacklist these liberal Biden/Trump leftist-chastising posts or I'll lose my mind

[ardentperfidy]

.

[eldritchdyke]

Sitting down to sketch out a scene in Locusts and realizing I 1. Still haven't named the main NERV-esque organization and 2. Still don't know what the planes the whole story revolves around look like

[slimethought]

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[kp777]

By Niko Mann

Salon  (from RawStory originally)

Aug 28, 2022

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told President Joe Biden to "go to hell" on Friday. The MAGA Republican made the comment following the Aug. 24 reveal from the White House that Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.

Greene made the remark on Twitter and also shared a video of Biden saying that he did not respect MAGA Republicans. "I don't respect these MAGA Republicans," said the president in the clip. Greene responded by accusing Biden of allowing drugs into the country by leaving the border "wide open," arming the Taliban and supporting the genital mutilation of children.

"I don't respect you for leaving our border wide open allowing an invasion & deadly drugs in daily," she whined. "Arming the Taliban, wrecking our economy, killing our energy independence, & supporting killing the unborn & genital mutilation of children. Go to hell Joe."

Journalist Aaron Rupar shared the entire clip of Biden's comments in which Biden said that he respected conservative Republicans but that he did not respect MAGA Republicans.

"There are not many real Republicans anymore," said the president. "By the way, your sitting governor, he's a Republican you can deal with ... I respect conservative Republicans. I don't respect these MAGA Republicans"

Link.

According to NBC News, Biden was speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Bethesda, Md. when he made the comments. The president also noted that the MAGA philosophy is "like semi-fascism."

"What we're seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It's not just Trump, it's the entire philosophy that underpins the — I'm going to say something, it's like semi-fascism," said Biden.

Greene has repeatedly attacked Biden after the president announced this week that most Americans trying to pay off university loans will get $10,000 forgiven.

The official Twitter account for the White House responded on Thursday, noting that the congresswoman "had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven."

[tomorrowusa]

Rightwingers in the US just plain hate freedom. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s surprise arrival in Washington on Wednesday for a meeting with President Joe Biden and a speech before Congress has unhinged the always-seething anti-Ukraine Trumpian right, triggering a deluge of snark and grievance.

Trumpsters naturally don’t like Zelenskyy. Not only is Zelenskyy inflicting major pain on Vladimir Putin, Trump’s liege lord, but Zelenskyy was unable to supply fake “dirt” to Trump about Joe Biden during the infamous perfect phone call of 2019.

The politics of vengeance is a major aspect of Trumpism. But the anti-Zelenskyy and anti-Ukraine hysteria on the far right does go beyond the Ukrainian president’s unwillingness to play footsie with US semi-fascists.

The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. 

The Trumpsters have no problem siding with Putin’s Evil Empire in order to “own the libs”. Ronald Reagan would be spinning in his grave if he knew that so many members of his party were lining up to kiss the ass of a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet secret police.

Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/”Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.

The Trumpsters regard anybody who is not a creepy ethno-nationalist to be their enemy. They act like the America First isolationists who admired Hitler and Mussolini in the years leading up to World War II.

Being anti-Ukraine and anti-Zelenskyy makes Trumpsters anti-American too. History will treat them as it does the Hitler-curious US politicians and commentators of the 1930s and early 1940s. It’s fitting that the “national conservatives” – as many call themselves – can be abbreviated as Nat-C.

[ravensilversea]

🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?

Writer Truth or Dare

I'm very tame and definitely did not once try (and fail) to Google just how much bleach a person can consume without dying in my angsty teen writes angsty Mary Sue fanfic phase

HOWEVER, I am still infuriated that I learned about the Cold War like 5 fucking times when Italy was having a soap opera of post-war mafia bullshit then. Like they made an ENTIRE COMMISSION to investigate the mafia (TWICE or THRICE) and couldn't do anything about it??? Because the mafia was already in the government by then??? Also being in the mafia itself was not a crime until the 1980s and instead they were charged with "Organized delinquency" which still sounds like a bunch of teenagers skipping class to smoke cigarettes under the bleachers to me.

And that's just from a Wikipedia dive

I should see if my library has history books about Italy's Mafia Wars actually

[sweaty-confetti]

so much “leftism” and “activism” I see on the internet is like a weird semi fascist “destroy all the evil” jerkoff fantasy wherein we kill all the Bad People and have a Perfectly Pure New World or something and it’s so fucking annoying

[if-not-now-tell-me-when]

Semi paraphrased from another post about Crowley’s portrayal in the Good Omens book versus the show. On the importance of hope, even when you don't have optimism.

Crowley as written in the early 1990s called himself an optimist. Crowley in 2023 is very much not an optimist, and I think this reflects what the audience for this story needs now. (And keep in mind, I'm an American writing from my personal, individual American worldview. I'm aware that there are other countries besides America).

The 1990s were a time of optimism in the West. The Cold War was over, the threat of nuclear armageddon was finally lifted, the economy was booming. It was a pre-9/11 and pre-Columbine world, a world in which you didn't have to pass through metal detectors and x-ray scanners to board a plane or enter a government building. Readers in 1990 had reasons to be optimistic in their future.

We in 2023 do not. We live in a very dark timeline. Climate change is barreling down on us, and time is quickly running out to stop it. We've emerged from the wreckage of the War on Terror, and we've realized just how much we were lied to in order to justify 20 years of war. Rent is soaring and wages are stagnant. Income inequality is at historically bad levels. Fascists openly march in the streets and storm our houses of government.

So why would we carry on? Why would Crowley of 2023 carry on? Because he has to. We have to.

Be brave. Do the hard thing. Do it anyway. Do it while not being an optimist in the slightest.

Even in the face of impossible odds.

Especially in the face of impossible odds.

There is nobody coming to save us. All we have left is each other. So we must keep on loving, and keep on living.

All is not lost.

[know-news-is-good-news]

IF you can't report the truth, you need to be in another business ! !