c_man posted:The post i responded to was discussing joining orgs and the red guards in the context of red_dread's thread, and i responded within that context. You dont appear to have a different take on the red guards than the one that i posted so its clear you dont disagree with my assessment, so im not sure why you think its a weird post.
nothing in the discussion of red_dread's thread involved advocating joining the red guards at all which is why acting as if the context is "psl/wwp/whatever vs. red guards" was strange. obviously nothing in that thread would convince you that the red guards are preferable because nobody was trying to convince anything of that. That's why i think its weird.
Sunday posted:i hope everyone manages to get some good gamin' in this weekend
blinkandwheeze posted:nothing in the discussion of red_dread's thread involved advocating joining the red guards at all which is why acting as if the context is "psl/wwp/whatever vs. red guards" was strange. obviously nothing in that thread would convince you that the red guards are preferable because nobody was trying to convince anything of that. That's why i think its weird.
I sort of disagree tbh. He was drawing a clear contrast between wwp/psl which he had clear, concise criticisms of and the various red guard groups which werent really dissected in any detail but were presented as serving some meaningful purpose and having had meaningful organizing successes without any real support for those claims. Just because it was couched in ambivalent language doesnt make it not effectively a guarded endorsement, at least relatively speaking, which is meaningful because, again, the context of this conversation was about joining organizations that you recognize have structural issues and the value there is in working with/around them anyway.
Sunday posted:i hope everyone manages to get some good gamin' in this weekend
all the good mods have finally made it to Skyrim Special Edition, so the answer for me is No.
karphead:
c_man posted:I sort of disagree tbh. He was drawing a clear contrast between wwp/psl which he had clear, concise criticisms of and the various red guard groups which werent really dissected in any detail but were presented as serving some meaningful purpose and having had meaningful organizing successes without any real support for those claims. Just because it was couched in ambivalent language doesnt make it not effectively a guarded endorsement, at least relatively speaking, which is meaningful because, again, the context of this conversation was about joining organizations that you recognize have structural issues and the value there is in working with/around them anyway.
I think it's clear that there was a direct and concise criticism of the wwp/psl in that thread because that's what he had the most experience dealing with in a discussion that was based on very personal accounts of organisational involvement rather than a broad and comprehensive account of the political landscape. In any case these efforts to intuit the narrative of those posts don't make any sense when r_d is an actual participant in the conversation here who clearly isn't advocating people join the rga in spite of whatever judgement you're making based on the asymmetry of rhetorical attention or whatever. at no point has anyone denied that there were comparable & endemic structural issues unique to the red guards formations that are entirely destructive ends for participants.
If what you and cars are arguing is that there is exclusively a choice to be made between ageing crypto-trot orgs, minoritarian adventurist maoist sects, or political nihilism -- & any insufficiently extensive denunciations of one of these options must necessarily be advocacy for another because these are the only possibilities that exist -- then that should be ridiculous on its face.
c_man posted:I sort of disagree tbh. He was drawing a clear contrast between wwp/psl which he had clear, concise criticisms of and the various red guard groups which werent really dissected in any detail but were presented as serving some meaningful purpose and having had meaningful organizing successes without any real support for those claims. Just because it was couched in ambivalent language doesnt make it not effectively a guarded endorsement, at least relatively speaking, which is meaningful because, again, the context of this conversation was about joining organizations that you recognize have structural issues and the value there is in working with/around them anyway.
i think the substance of whatever "glowing"/"guarded"/"ambivalent" praise i've made of the red guards is that i've attempted to engage with their activities and intellectual output in good faith and in relation to marxism-leninism-maoism when they've been uniquely reviled by basically everyone on the organized left (either for good reasons or essentially baseless ones derived from rumors and their own reliance on sensationalism and contrarianism). i didn't dissect their organizations because i didn't have any real basis or experiences to go off of at the time, and the purpose of the spiels that i went on wasn't really to point out which orgs were good and bad but to elaborate on certain problems that dominated the organizations i had direct experiences with. or to like say "well, here's all the irredeemable bad things that exist so let's just stop this organizing shit entirely".
with what i know now and the experiences i've had with the red guards, their issues are definitely far more different than what my initial focus was when i started writing the thing that keeps being talked about, that has a thread on this very webpage, somewhere. it's just that what they lack are the problems that the cryptotrots consistently seem to have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nautYuAgWRs&t=41
blinkandwheeze posted:If what you and cars are arguing is that there is exclusively a choice to be made between ageing crypto-trot orgs, minoritarian adventurist maoist sects, or political nihilism -- & any insufficiently extensive denunciations of one of these options must necessarily be advocacy for another because these are the only possibilities that exist -- then that should be ridiculous on its face.
I really dont feel like youre getting what im trying to express here. First, the conversation was already about marcyist groups and red guard groups before i entered it, at least in part because those were the two groups that were discussed in the article. Any limitation of the discussion to those two sets of groups is not something im interested in arguing for. In any case its certainly not necessary for r_d or anyone else to explicitly advocate for something for their work to function as something like it when disseminated. This is pretty basic, i would think, and underlies the whole reason we generally dont consider it to be valuable to belabor whatever criticisms we may have of whatever actually existing socialist states when talking about the importance of communism to others. I dont think this is of the same order of importance, really, but the idea that you should pay attention to how what you say publicly is going to function regardless of whatever intentions you have or whatever is valuable. I dont think the choice is between psl/wwp, red guards, or nihilism but i also dont think but i also dont think the discussion on the topic has been useful or thorough in that limited set of options. And since the discussion about the red guards seems to be a hot topic for a number of people it might be a good time to talk about it more seriously!
Edited by c_man ()
i don't think you're advocating a limitation of the discussion here, but you're acting as if rhetorical limitations reflect a limitation of the actual scope of real possibility in question. Rather than making the basic charitable assumption that the discussion is simply limited to the degree of the author's personal experiential scope in practically addressing these questions which is a necessary part of any personal account
it's not just "not the same order of importance" as abstaining from going into the minutiae of historical accounts when advocating a communist perspective to a general audience, i don't even see these situations as comparable at all. if r_d was attempting to convince a broad audience, that don't share the same assumptions we as a tiny irrelevant message board clique do, of the general virtue of socialist organisation then you'd have a point. instead it's a discussion of a very particular concern among a very small discussion group that largely shares the same idiosyncratic frame of reference. without some external audience we have to moderate our appeals to. making judgements based on rhetorical posture rather than attempting to identify the real content of what people are saying just causes arguments out of thin air.
frankly i think red guards are a "hot topic" here exclusively because of a few posters throwing empty accusations that there is some imaginary sect of sympathisers here. if that didn't exist nobody would be talking about them at all except in a trainspotting or derisive sense and a minor detail in people's accounts of activist experience. we should be talking about them far less seriously than we are, nobody is trying to hold water for them and these arguments are coming from nowhere. Besides the universal advocacy of nailing pig heads to the doors of DSA meetings which is universally praised.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
blinkandwheeze posted:if r_d was attempting to convince a broad audience, that don't share the same assumptions we as a tiny irrelevant message board clique do, of the general virtue of socialist organisation then you'd have a point
It was posted to medium and had certainly been seen by plenty of people who arent on here. And even if it were, i think its important to take our discussion here seriously and making lots of hay about being "tiny and irrelevant" doesnt actually lead to anywhere useful or productive. If you dont think what we're talking about matters at all then why are you reacting this strongly about me posting this stuff specifically, instead of the other people talking about it earlier who i was responding to? Again, youre acting like ive brought it up time and time again with no prompting, hunting for fearful or imaginary red guard supporters when ive been responding to people who bring up the organization in the context of the article r_d wrote.
blinkandwheeze posted:we should be talking about them far less seriously than we are, nobody is trying to hold water for them and these arguments are coming from nowhere. Besides the universal advocacy of nailing pig heads to the doors of DSA meetings which is universally praised.
I dont understand this at all. Why should discussion of the groups be limited to the stuff you like about them? If its all a pointless joke that has no bearing on anything because its all so tiny and irrelevant why not talk about whatever crosses our minds? Why take discussion seriously in the first place?
i'm not saying discussions here don't matter in any way -- i'm just saying that they're for a very niche audience with a shared & novel frame of reference & general set of shared values. it's a valuable place to discuss things and learn together but we don't have to wring our hands about an imaginary general audience might have with the rhetoric here. all of us generally know where each other is coming from, rather than attempting to intuit the motives of a poster -- or worry about how some random lurker might do the same -- it's far more productive to just take things at face value. It's bizarre to identify someone who clearly wasn't advocating any kind of superiority to the red guard formations was trying to argue for such, & i think the handwringing about what this rhetoric might imply to others is pointless when this is a small-knit idiosyncratic community
i've never asserted that we shouldn't talk about any particular subject. i just said that we should do so less seriously, i.e. not set up elaborate rhetorical standards lest we imply some hidden political allegiance to the wider world. i'm saying we should be free to talk about any particular subject without having to constantly think about how some imaginary neutral third party might read into the insufficient denunciations or whatever shortcoming you're perceiving.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
red_dread posted:the red guards ... their activities and intellectual output
lol
toyotathon posted:i'm probably just going to keep studying with revolutionary fervor until the red army rolls thru. sorry cars. been to a lot of PSL & some DSA shit and PSL has no momentum, and DSA is a deliberate whitey confusion device. seems like every revolution has survived ppl like me, who wait for the water to go out. tailoring a land revolution to settler society needs more thought than we've given it, importing the party-form to the land of the free land, w/ this many amerikan kolonization flags flying proud everywhere on every car lot and suburban block.
whenever someone says “sorry cars” on here, I can take it for granted that whatever they’re saying has nothing to do with me. like, the DSA...? what??
ialdabaoth posted:i have never liked racing games and dont understand the appeal of say forza. sorry cars
i think Forza is very good and cool. Ironic.....
serafiym posted:i enjoy reading bizarro assassin's creed alt-history, but i wish the Templar guy that manipulated Stalin was Yezhov instead of some random made-up no name. https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
I mentioned this in my Superman article but when a writer wanted to use "Stalin" as a pun to write a Superman story, the only guy he could think up to be around Stalin other than Superman was a fictional son of Stalin's, who was also just an old Superman character with a Slav-ized name and was on track in the story to become King Stalin II of the Soviet Union, as you do. I feel like Western schools work hard to make people frightened to do even basic research on the USSR before trying to write fiction about it.
cars posted:A new hideo kojima video game trailer is out, which means another round of Hideo Kojima Is So Japanese And We're Loving It, followed by another round of Most People Don't Know The Poopie And Boobie Jokes Are Poopie And Boobie Jokes, But I, The Kojima Knower,
lol here we go. i wonder if 3000 likes from mostly United States will shake this guy's confidence at all in how no one there understands his wisdom thoughts about Game.
blinkandwheeze posted:frankly i think red guards are a "hot topic" here exclusively because of a few posters throwing empty accusations that there is some imaginary sect of sympathisers here. if that didn't exist nobody would be talking about them at all except in a trainspotting or derisive sense
hey this is my bad, i really did have a total brainfart and should have actually looked back before opening my mouth. at first i was really embarrassed, content to sneak off and let it all settle but i have grown as a person and realized that the video game thread being back on topic is far worse than my own self humiliation
The reason Kojima's humor doesn't always carry over to the audience is because, unlike, say, Suda51, Kojima's projects suffer in their weakest moments from severe whiplash in tone. A common and normal response to that in any medium is fatigue. People stop discerning between what's tongue-in-cheek and what isn't because the story's lost its impact, whatever it was supposed to be, so why bother? This is one of those situations where people don't get the joke sometimes, because sometimes, it just doesn't land. Even if you know what the goofy part is going for, like the convoluted 007 reference built into Quiet as a jiggly bikini lady in a war zone who "breathes through her skin" but who you can coat in gold paint anyway if she likes you enough, it's not really going to get a laugh out of you. If you smile at it, you're just smiling at yourself for having seen that one old movie, unlike those craven kids and their electro-filled Zunes, I guess.
MGS3 works best because it's much more focused in its conscious imitation of a Cold-War-era James Bond movie, where the goofy and dramatic parts pull together to tell a simple story, and that lets Kojima turn the part where you actually play video game into maximum Kojima, where you're mini-gaming bullets out of your wounds and using more bullets to transform animals into floating food discs so your character doesn't starve, where one of the hardest tricks in the game to pull off is catching the common cold and one of the easiest is to get past a hidden sniper's kill zone by turning the game off for a few days and doing something else, or at least fooling your Playstation for a few minutes into thinking it's not a record-keeping system for a pattern of compulsive behavior.
blinkandwheeze posted:Someone find & post the photo of michael kirkbride after locking himself in his bedroom & tripping for several days in order to write the 36 lessons of vivec. What a grand & intoxicating innocence...
blinkandwheeze posted:i found it
i kind of wish I never found out that all the mushroom stuff in Morrowind was a Newgrounds video about Mario come to life. i think it's cool how Elder Scrolls uses the books the player can find to muddy the waters of its fictional history whenever the latest game wants, driving "lore"-obsessed super-fans up the wall, and the books are realistic histories in the sense that the fictional author tells you the other history was written by an idiot who's probably a Communist and this is the real story by me, the reliable unbiased historian with the good politics, so you know it's true.