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Comments
Look no further than the right's immediate pivot to defending the police at all costs after the 2020 protests. There's literally nothing more pro-rules and pro-norms than supporting law enforcement.
This guy is right that conservative politics are driven by resentment, but it's not carte blanche rejection of "those above them," it's an ideological rejection of specific political outcomes.
I get the sense that you had some conservative/right-wing ideologues that basically went along with the populism aspects out of de facto political expediency (not necessarily, though possibly, an explicit intention), and some populists that did the vice versa for the same reason as well. Or, perhaps more accurately, these categories aren't as much individual groups of people as much as motivations/sentiment, so you could have the same person who's an ideologue but who adopts the language and stylings of populism just because that's the political fad of the day in their crowds.
Trump was something of a "perfect storm" that accidentally rode this combination to victory, but these aren't necessarily married to each other. So you have stuff like the DeSantis as a governor and as a presidential candidate trying to be (and to run on being) as horrible of an asshole as possible (to LGBTQ folks for example) for the sake of ideological points and he's just falling flat to the Republican primary electorate at large.
In this vein;
I know conservatives are basically champs at playing "the feds are evil and trying to entrap us all" but right now we have this 'genuine' ambiguity about who won the 2020 election till this day, with multiple primary candidates outright supporting the guy who says it was stolen from him, and then whatever is going on with the martyring of the J6 rioters.
Well, you get a sense of what the dominant American culture is right now at least, and conservatives are constantly developing some weird anti-that mentalities. Boycott all popular culture, don't go to college, move away from 'degenerate' cities and live in the countryside, have more children than you can afford (and a stay at home wife), be close minded, etc.
someone commented: "David Brooks getting roasted by the restaurant he ate at"
edit: I mean, there's still time for plenty of tension, so that's why I say I'm not yet relieved, but I'm emotional in a positive way. Kind of like you finish your exam and you know you did well, but technically the results are yet to be revealed.
edit 2: woah.
Going by the stuff you've said about Polosh politics before I'm surprised that this is apparently not super easy.
I mean, if the Party really wanted to they could, but that's the scale where you want to subvert entire parties or factions within parties rather than buy or blackmail one MP after another, and so far the opposition parties seem to hold fast. There already were opening moves towards such subversion, but soundly rebuffed.
Now, on whether they would want to... On one hand, it certainly feels like there are no boundaries they are not willing to blatantly cross. On the other, gossip says they discussed bringing out the army into the streets back when we had mass protests a few years ago, but opted not to go that way, so apparently they're not quite at that point. That said, like half of the stuff I saw debated on the internet before the elections began, involved hypothesising about how far the Party will go, and what kind of dubiously legal shenanigans they're still up to. So the bar is pretty low when it comes to them. If they just hand the power back to the opposition, they're gonna get praised for not trumping out.
Technically speaking they won, but low enough that they can't form a majority. Prezzie will most likely nominate a Party plant as PM and if they fail to secure a majority, the opposition will try a coalition government. One of those hypotheses I mentioned posits that the Prezzie will sooner nominate another Party plant, then another, and so on and so forth, but AFAIK there are legal limits to that.
The opposition will have a majority in the upper house, but they already did and the Party did circumvent upper house vetoes a bunch of times, so it's more of a confirmation than a big deal.
So far the count has reached some 34% of votes and it looks like the Party is gonna get a few more percent points than late polls predicted, but there were places where people stood in queues till 3 AM and it was supposed to be over by 9 PM. I'm willing to assume the full count may take a while.
45% votes in, Party results approaching the late polls. Looks like their supporters were over-represented among the early counted.
The left seems steady with 8%, less than they hoped for, but as a part of a ruling coalition it would be their first time in power in 18 years.
The opposition is led by the old liberal centre party. No edge, but their old leader returned from Brussels like some fugging King Asleep in the Mountain come to save Poland from danger, and this had a galvanizing effect on the opposition.
The big winner - not in the sense of the biggest opposition party, but the biggest junior partner to the leading one - is an alliance of the peasants' party and the New Guy. The New Guy came in as an outsider figure in presidential election a while back, did well but not enough to reach the second stage, then decided to recycle this support into parliamentary elections. The New Guy is a liberal Catholic type, not much more to him, but he has this sort of "religious nice guy" image. The peasants' party is a political survivor, this time they opted to present themselves as the sensible, reasonably pro-free market centre-right. Together, they are now the moderate centre-right part of the opposition.
The ultra-right party, which had reached as far as ~15% in polls over the last few months, got about less than half of their best poll results. Looks like they were done by a mix of assault from all sides (including the Party which wanted to secure the right), a well-known economist hounding their chief theorist with questions about basic economics, and one of their leaders going off on a rant how a 12 year-old is perfectly ready for sex just a few days before the elections.
Sounds intriguing.
Polish Pope?
Also you will not believe how common that age if consent stuff is in the deeper recesses of the alt-right. Probably why they want certain types of speech removed from the internet (or world/society as a whole) but riot when Sony cuts some weird Japanese anime schoolgirl thing from a game.
Like, John Paul the Third? (Or Fourth, if Pope John Pauls are like Star Trek movies.) Nah, you'd wish. A liberal secular Catholic journalist. I'm pretty sure you know a few choice terms for folks like these.
Also, it's 95% votes by now. The Party consistently fell and now it's just a bit below 36%, the main opposition party is just a bit over 30%, the PeasantLibCath ca. 14.5%, left 8.5%, the ponies (alt-right) over 7%.
(Not the wrong thread.)
I almost forgot, I went looking for post-Polish-elections memes, didn't find much but it's something:
("Looking for a job")
In more local stuff, if two years ago someone had told me María Corina Machado would be president material, I would've told them "that's unexpected but okay".
Good Christian rock: Stryper (and... that's pretty much it?)
Good Christian video game: ???
(Note: there's a lot of good Christian music, but I wanted to single out Christian rock as it's proverbially bad and seems to be a better comparison to video games than music at large.)
What the Party did with state TV is hard to believe, but what the news anchorfolks did to themselves is perhaps even harder. I mean, it feels like a satire on biased media. Once the exit polls came in saying the opposition beat the Party, on the day of the voting, in the studio, the woman you see here was nice to the opposition guests for, like, the first time in years. Like, she smiled, called them "friends".
Also, I didn't bring it up before because I felt like that would be me talking too much about us, but since you brought it up: the new Parliament is about to gather in a month or so, and then the new government will be confirmed. Could've been sooner, but the Prezzie is stalling by claiming the need for debate, to give the winning party (ie. the Party) time to gather up a majority (they're desperately trying to pull the opposition apart), and so forth. Meanwhile, a bunch of government agencies have issued a call for bids for heavy-duty paper shredders capable of continuous work. Surely, that's a coincidence.
*looks up*
...oh. (I kinda expected you're going the Sanna Marin route.)
I'm reading through the wikipedia entry on her politics and I wonder if I should be concerned for you guys. I mean, if I am to judge by what I've been reading recently, you over there in S. Am. seem to ever only have a choice between some weird-ass populist leftie about to manhandle the state like an elephant a china shop and a creepy upper-class industrialist/landowner who struggles to contain their anger over not being allowed to keep slaves anymore.
Other than that, you perception of her is probably not too far off. What could have been.
Interesting video; thanks for sharing.
I'm not sure I agree with it fully though.
First, the moralistic idea of rejecting pleasure for hard work isn't uniquely American, nor even uniquely Protestant. This idea exists in various forms across multiple cultures, though to be fair it can manifest differently depending on the culture. But, as mentioned in the video, Catholicism holds that one needs to do good things, which directly provides reason for hard work, and Catholics are definitely not strangers the idea of so-called "Catholic guilt" and a desire to reject pleasure for hard work -- as well as the practice of proselytization, for that matter. The United States is also not the only country that has experience "moral panic" movements, nor are emphases on hard work are not even restricted to Christian cultures anyway (it exists in Japan, even, and that's home to some of the biggest video game companies). So I feel like the mention of American exceptionalism doesn't really fit here, and the idea of a "Protestant work ethic", while perhaps part of the picture, doesn't fully explain why Christian videogames have frequently been of low quality.
I'd argue that it instead explains the moralistic reaction against video games, and that more directly explains why these games have been of low quality. It basically goes like this:
0. Distrust of/backlash against new pop media craze
1. Misunderstanding of new art media/form, from people who are largely unfamiliar with it
2. Misguided attempt to "replace" such things in order to pacify a desire for them, without the experience of actually understanding them
This feels in some way like that meme of "we have [thing] at home". You're not supposed to want the pleasurable thing (the "McDonald's"), but here's (an attempt at) a replacement so you don't want the pleasurable thing as much.
So, part of the reason is a misunderstanding of the medium. But part of the reason -- and this is basically where all that stuff about the Puritan work ethic comes in -- is simply the notion of "you shouldn't be enjoying this", which provides the motive of making something to (attempt to) replace it, rather than to truly grow the art form within one's cultural setting. This is analogous to the proverbial parent who tries to substitute for "McDonald's" with some cheap knockoff replacement that turns out badly. (And this is also why many such games were derivatives of other games.)
In this sense, I agree with the idea that pleasure or appreciation from the audience isn't the focus; the focus is basically just a reaction against the audience liking something else.
But things do gradually change. Christian literature and music (even modern Christian popular music) is more mature of an art form than Christian videogames, and thus those people who make such things have more experience to draw from. I suspect that Christian videogames (in this American sense of the term, as the video lays out) will also gradually mature as an art form and such games will get better.
I know the video tries to offer some contrast with educational ("edutainment") games, but I'd say that the criticisms that the video mentions about Christian games are actually often also said about educational games. A lot of them can be criticized as being contrived and unfun (or only fun in stilted ways), but just preachy about something other than religion. And similarly, as the medium has matured, edutainment games have gotten better as well.
And the contrast with That Dragon, Cancer is illustrative of what I'm saying. This game (from what I understand) isn't meant as a "replacement" to get people away from other videogames (not any more than any other commercial videogame, at least), but meant to stand on its own as art. It tries to do its own thing rather than merely imitating something else, and its developed with a firmer understanding of what makes the medium tick. Christian games as a replacement for other video games are still going to be cheapo "shovelware", the same way that non-Christian knockoffs continue to be, but Christian games meant to actually be their own game (and thus can play on the strengths of the medium while presenting their own narrative experience) can chart a different path.
I'd say the Catholic way is to reject pleasure for flagellation or a rosary marathon. Like, mortification of the flesh is a thing. Why would you do something constructive like some sort of heathen when you can lie prone on the church floor for twelve hours?
Also, I've seen it claimed that the idea of Christian-themed "moral substitute" ersatz is a peculiarly American phenomenon. From other parts of the world, I could probably find some works or creators who try to pull off that sort of stuff elsewhere, as singular cases and not an entire industry. Although I never went out of my way to check that claim, so, I might be wrong.
But yeah, I expect increased development of Christian games in the future, both as the medium matures and as game development becomes more globalized. Touhou but with saints as anime girls when?
* Relevant video from the same channel, though I find it gets reachy by the end.
Depends how good you are at coding.
I mean, if I was the kind of guy who posts indie videogames of his own making on itch.io, I'd be dropping that relic farming game right now. Alas, I'm not even competent and creative enough for my own day job.
==EDIT==
Oooh! Actually, I do have an example of a "moral substitute" that we have in here!
Our wackos have a hate-on for Halloween. (Which, the hate-on, too may in itself be an American influence, but that's a longer story to be told another time.) Instead of Halloween parties, they push "all saints balls": costume parties where you have the kids dress as Catholic saints. The irony is that many saints are traditionally depicted in ways that are hardly child-friendly. That said, so far I haven't heard of a parent deciding to troll the fundies a bit, and given the fact the Church seems to be losing its sway over our society, there is the chance this movement will prove ephemeral.
Well there goes all the goodwill I had for Polish fundies.
Did this have to be like an hour plus long?
I was about to say that I'm pretty sure the JRPG reputation for killing gods largely stems from a handful of games from a sort of "golden age" period of the popularity of the genre.
But then this one-and-a-half-hour-long video has to exist and now I have to watch it just to be able to respond to it. dangit dagnabbit damnit
fortunately i don't think i care about spoilers for any of the games mentioned. (i already know them all for ff7 and ct)
TIL
...i should probably move the discussion to a more relevant thread
(clarification: I moved my reply to the Vidya Gaems thread)
Ditto.
I posted stuff in the images thread, that one's easier to reply to.
*yeah, we do have foreigners studying here. Apparently our med schools are just as good but cheaper.
Good gosh, that conflict and the discourse surrounding it have included so many idiots/assholes who keep (very wrongly) equating Israel and Jewish people and (equally very wrongly) equating Hamas and Palestinians.
Suella Braverman is the Secret Ann Coulter toughcon we all needed.
(ngl GMH I won't read what you say so don't make it too long)