• Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        I will make that argument. I was there, Gandalf, 3,000 years ago, when the strength of gamers fail. Looking back, we were 150% watching white male gamers being radicalized in to neo-fascism, but I at least didn’t recognize the scope or importance of what was happening.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          Bannon’s goldfarming business on World of Warcraft, by his own admission, gave him many of his pre-a-little-trolling regime political front ideas: specifically, that freeze-gamer were a bunch of easily led, credulous assholes just waiting for something to rally behind.

      • LanyrdSkynrd [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        It says something about the state of America that you can’t get people to care about politics by talking about health care, mass incarceration, housing prices, etc. But tell them woke is why vidja games are bad and they’re ready to go for fascism.

        • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          Especially wild when the downfall of gaming is a ham fisted example of the natural conclusion of capitalism.

          Turns out when giant corporations just try to charge you a subscription for the same thing every year instead of improving or developing the product because Gamers pre order every piece of shit they wrap in foil paper you get shitty over priced cookie cutter games.

          Clearly what would solve that is being more racist.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        The “nothing ever happens, propaganda has no effect on me” head-in-grounders crowd has claimed that freeze-gamer gate had zero influence on the election, but it was a squeaker, and even an upset for many in the ruling class that actually did put their money and expectations behind hillgasm . A nudge was enough.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          And beyond that it’s created a persistent, ongoing cultural shift in how media is viewed and evaluated. And it was 10 years ago, a lot of those gamegaters who were teenagers and young adults are edging in to their 30s, in to real big kid jobs where they have some degree of influence.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            2 months ago

            And it was 10 years ago, a lot of those gamegaters who were teenagers and young adults are edging in to their 30s, in to real big kid jobs where they have some degree of influence.

            And some are old enough to already be very, very divorced, and it shows, now shepherding the next generation into following them. heated-gamer-moment

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              2 months ago

              Reactionaries hated The Last Jedi because feeemale and political us-foreign-policy

              I hated The Last Jedi because Rian Johnson can make an entertaining whodunit movie, but “hehe GOTCHA! AGAIN!” is obnoxious and tiresome and out of place in the Star Wars franchise.

              We are not the same.

                • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  2 months ago

                  They all sucked and the worst part was the back and forth narrative slapfight between Abrams and Johnson that lead from the thesis-antithesis of the first two to the clownish synthesis of the third and worst one of all.

                • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  2 months ago

                  He couldn’t even stay with his gotchas. “Oh the ancient texts are now destroyed GOTCHA no they’re fine,” for example.

                  “Oh wow maybe Rey will join with Kylo after all NOPE GOTCHA” and so on and so on.

                  • doublepepperoni [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                    2 months ago

                    Yeah, those were the more interesting bits but then those were just walked back or resolved before the movie was even over

                    Then you had the insanely convoluted hyperdrive chase premise forming the backbone of the entire movie, the sidequest casino planet and the movie’s opening cutting from yo momma jokes to characters sacrificing themselves

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                2 months ago

                Biden has killed like eight times the amount of people

                Explain what you mean with this. I have no idea what you’re referring to.

                  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    2 months ago

                    Maybe the numbers do add up there. Well, shit.

                    That doesn’t make them equally Hitler, then. Makes one more accomplished as a Hitler, while one is more obnoxious, sloppy, and directly incompetent as a leader (which is arguably more like Hitler anyway under some metrics).

                  • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    2 months ago

                    Fuck Biden but the reason more people died under Biden is because Trump literally encouraged the spread of it with culture war bullshit until thousands of people were dying every day at the start of bidens term.

                    Fuck him and he didn’t do shit to stop it but getting a car up to 100 mph, jumping out of the drivers door and then blaming the person who grabbed the wheel for the crash seems shitty, even if the person that grabbed the wheel dumped it straight into the ditch.

                    I hate Biden and don’t think he’s any better than Trump but I think there’s a bit of a tendency to overcorrect and act like Trump actually isn’t that bad, which even if its lib shit the orange man is in fact bad.

      • Riffraffintheroom [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        One thing that struck me about the Jan 6 riot is that, especially compared to the 2017 unite the right rally, everyone was fucking old. My read on that is that Facebook and it’s corresponding propaganda style has been much more fertile ground for activating reactionaries IRL than 4chan and Reddit has. There’s definitely millions and millions of gamer chuds, but they seem over represented online and underrepresented in voting booths, protests and riots

        • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          Yea the downside of trying to specifically radicalized antisocial NEETs is that they’re pretty useless at anything other than calling people slurs from the safety of their troll cave.

    • Riffraffintheroom [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      I was thinking about how while it’s nothing new that reactionary groups attempt to co-opt youth subcultures, this one is maybe their most successful attempt of all time in terms of both per capita conversion and raw numbers.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 months ago

        Yeah, it’s not a new thing at all, but freeze-gamer gate was remarkably and lastingly successful compared to duds like, say, “Metalgate” that tried to ride its coattails but was such a failure that only fucking Green Day could be found to say that SJWs were ruining metal.

        I don’t need to tell you that Green Day is not metal and never was and fuck them anyway.