Raceplay videos where they have to specify the identities with onscreen flags and you have no idea what the dynamic between those two means
Playing Yakuza 6 and suddenly taken aback to realize the State of Japan – or rather, nation of Japan – has probably recruited at least $50k of lifetime value – maybe more! – out of me from the fact that Sony’s PS4 offered SEGA’s Yakuza Kiwami as their free game one month
Like, first off paying for 0, Kiwami 2, and 6. But also since “walking around, eating a variety of Japanese food and drinking Japanese liquor” is like a central mechanic in the series, I’ve had that on my mind. To start with, I got sushi more often.
And I got to thinking “boy, I like ikura” and then “huh we don’t have much in the local cuisine, given the salmon focus from Oregon to Alaska” and now whatever idle share of my brain is dedicated to how I can match up local resources to Japanese expertise
Gave me a better sense of ramen varieties that I bothered to order from the ramenya again after my first try was disappointingly pork-fatty. Tried the slightly-more-sophisticated-than-college packaged ramen from the convenience store. Was nice, but I thought “man I wish they sold surimi and dehydrated add-ins, though!”
They made Japanese whiskey look intriguing, tried it, and I like the light golden taste. Suntori Toki and Hatozaki are now regulars in my cabinet.
I’m not coming in as a novice. For a decade I’ve had a certificate from the Japanese state department I got by paying them to take the hardest test of my life saying I’m somewhat competent in Japanese, which I learned in a program that America uses to train spies and diplomats. I have years ago looked into how the local consulate could help with my dream of retiring to a mountainside hot spring and establishing an onsen ryokan.
So I was primed. But part of that was, I already had a latent base-level familiarity and I’ve been astounded how well this series activated it.
Like, all the faces and the types I had got just enough glancing exposure to from a childhood of Lupin III and Capcom games and Time articles about the salaryman as modern samurai, not only realized in better depth but situated in a matrix where you see how they all fit with and relate to everything else I’ve seen of Japanese culture.
And the way I could pick up things from it and apply it back to what I knew before, like oh, shit, those anime mooks were Korean-coded, huh?
The way the series covers like 30 years’ development of Tokyo (and what went before, with their Golden Gai-alike) and Osaka, and early modern rust belt Hiroshima and semitropical possession Okinawa, helping put together the pieces of Japanese geography and history and culture
(Like, the side missions in 6’s backwater Hiroshima underline how slice-of-life tropes AND pop-mystical youth tropes – “time leaps”, ghosts, “we hit our heads now we switched bodies” – are flip sides of the issue that nothing really happens there compared to the big cities)
The language – just hearing the rhythm of it. I’ve developed an instinctive sense of the uses of makaseru. The way the subtitles help me pick up things where I already know 70% of the words they’re just so fast, the bits where I actually understand every word but I’ve got to parse how the laconic yakuza speech means what the subtitles indicate.
It’s rekindled a flame! From since I was young and my parents’ old neighbor Mr. Tamura, since recalled to home office, visited on business trips. It’s given me a glimpse at the more textured understanding I didn’t even realize I wanted.
A funny thing is amidst all the walking simulators and woke checklists (Depression Quest was MAYBE the third best Twine of its era about chronic depression) of 2010s vidya criticism is AAA games have taken the place of movies as widely shared narrative experiences and have been doing interesting things!
Part of it they learned how to leverage them to promote other properties. The Arkham series got you caring about the whole Bat-collective! “Oh, Nightwing, the butt model with the sticks?” Well, yes, but also the guy who can rival Bruce but isn’t gloomy and can give him hilarious shit about it!
And that works for whole nations, too. Like on the one hand okay Poland is “illiberal” and “a challenge to the human rights foundation on which post-60s first world international relations have been based” but on the other
now whenever i see ppl talk about the iraqi journaist who threw a shoe at bush, i remember when he bragged on his page about beating his ex-wife to a pulp 😔 😔 😔
part of why i no longer engage w any content about him. i looked up to him as a kid but now as a woman i cant bring myself to ignore his virulent violence against women especially since hes in the parliament now. not only does he have a history w domestic violence but also hes always posting shit abt how decadence of middleeastern societies can be traced back to women “reading books”, “getting ideas” and wearing what they want
Two years ago, journalist Mariam Yaghi, Al-Zaidi’s Lebanese former wife, posted photos of her bloodied face on Facebook page and said the injuries happened when Al-Zaidi, the celebrated Iraqi hero, hit her.
Anyone who has seen Al-Zaidi’s Facebook posts cannot fail to notice his aggressive and masculine attitudes toward women. He is currently engaged in the Lebanese religious courts in a legal battle with his wife for custody of their children. Bear in mind that these laws are often unfair to women and marital violence is not considered sufficient grounds for divorce.
[…]
“When a stupid woman reads about freedom, she takes off her clothes,” wrote Al-Zaidi in one of his Facebook comments. “And when a foolish woman reads about freedom, she ruins her home.”
(re:)
I get that model, but I bring up 19th century Euro nationalism because it was a real thing, like “let’s use some rustic themes in this symphony”, “let’s look to our own rural traditions as just as real and valid as Greek Antiquity” quickly became “let’s kill the aristos and realize the National Destiny”.
And if that was just a mask for robber baron magnates to make the agrarian->industrial turn and build a system that favored their own arrogations over any principle just like the Ancien Regime, it still happened like that
The Iron Pill Episode 7
I’m serious, when’s the last time that “4chan is consciously working up the mythology for a transcontinental white nation” was trivial? We’d noticed for a while already, but it was kind of a lark
(This was basically how a lot of nationalist projects happened in the 19th century)
So, I think that part of the problem with the whole “Internet Utopianism” thing in 80s and 90s science fiction is that these sorts of books were generally written by idealists who were inclined to thinking idealistic thoughts and surrounded by other like-minded individuals, and so didn’t understand just how many people believe terrible things that can’t be disestablished through facts or arguments
and that technology doesn’t trump politics, even if it does shift it.
Technology tells politics how to move; politics tells technology how to bend.
Then unexpected consequences tells both to get knotted.
but if you sing the song well enough people walk around humming it
and then years later their kids improvising their way out of a funk think
hey! we should sing that song!
half the time mapsontheweb reads like a backwards reasoning game like “what obscure nationalist forum dispute did someone try to win with this map?”
salafis on facebook in the year 2100 getting into heated and doctrinaire arguments over whether al-qaeda or the islamic state had the more correct approach to revolution, the phrase ‘actually existing caliphate’ gets thrown around repeatedly, everyone makes jokes about the thousand different campus-based muslim brotherhood splinter groups even though everyone was in one of them at one point
It was the priest as an idler and destroyer of the household, who gained ascendancy over women through the confessional, that the soldiers and leaders attacked more than the priest as magician or upholder of the old order. The revolutionaire was no theologian. even if he talked of superstition, and the real reason for his prejudice against the confessional was the power he felt it gave the priest over his womenfolk. Such prejudices at times came near to misogyny and there are many examples of this in the expressions of the san-culottes, the commissairs and the representants en mission. This anti-feminism was fortified by the frequently furious opposition from the village women which they encountered on their iconoclastic missions-more than one revolutionaire had to take to their legs to escape their fury. But most of all the soldiers held a grudge against women because of the way they let themselves be seduced by the lying and lazy priests. At Bec du Tarn, Huegny, a Toulouse commissaire civil ‘thundered against fanaticism, and in particular against women, who were more easily seduced by it; he said that the Revolution had been made by men, and women should not be allowed to make it backtrack…” Dartigoeyte, representant en mission in the Gers, gave vent to similar feelings in his tirade against the devotes of Mirande: “And you, you bloody bitches, you are their whores [the priests’], particularly those who attend their bloody masses and listen to their mumbo jumbo,’ but he also had a word for the “jean-foutres of husbands who are naive enough to accompany them [and who] simply show what cuckolds they are by doing so.’
From The People’s Armies by Richard Cobb (via lovegodsmashtyrants)
“The Cathedral has cucked us!” - the fucking French Revolution
I’ve been tracking the “nationalism” tag for years now, and it’s this
constant low rumble of yay-nationalist stuff from every anglophone and anglophone-adjacent nation, punctuated by a spike of 16-year-old
anti-nationalists every time something particularly nationalist happens
this armenian guy i know speaks english with a lisp and posts flagrant (i mean flagrant) bear pics on facebook and i think this country is so homophobic that it just loops around and the whole thing goes completely over everyone’s heads. i don’t think anyone is aware
or it might be that he’s married with kids and people straight up don’t care what you get up to as long as you fulfill your god-given responsibility to Propagate The Nation
obviously a lot of the homophobic rhetoric here borrows from the same thing going on in russia and casts the gays as like NATO spies but i think it is telling that a whole chunk of the critique seems to boil down to ‘why aren’t you nationalist enough to have kids’
This is a dumb nationalist merchandising stunt that is absolutely going to trick me into buying a case of America for my 4th of July party
When I was growing up, flying the Australian flag was a weird thing to do.
There was one house in my 1980s neighbourhood that had one out the front, but everyone regarded its occupants as freaks. It seemed like the sort of insane teary-eyed British patriotism that we’d seen satirised on The Goodies, and we half suspected they would be wearing Tim Brooke-Taylor-style Union Jack belly button protectors. Weird.
Jump forward 30 years and the picture is very different. Increasingly, the thing seems to be hoisted over, pasted upon, sewn into or painted on any surface you could imagine – from processed snack foods to garbage bags, and from toilet brushes to F-35 fighter planes.
Ever since Pauline Hanson first appeared in photos with the rotten thing draped around her (the first time in my life I’d ever seen a person behave in such a way), we’ve seen an explosion in the numbers of racist thugs in Australian flag capes.
From the Cronulla anti-Lebanese riot to the rise of today’s fascist United Patriots Front, the sight of a young white male wearing a flag now carries the threat of impending racist violence.
The Labor Party too is caught up in the flag frenzy. They might not wrap themselves in it, but they certainly like to fly it. What a difference from the situation when Paul Keating was prime minister and refused to fly those ridiculous little flags on the bonnet of the prime ministerial car. When journalists asked him to explain, he brushed it aside as “no big deal”. And it wasn’t.
What has changed in Australian capitalism to make the flag so important? It’s partly rooted in the continuing neoliberal push, with its attacks on the old traditions of social welfare and the ongoing erosion of the welfare state. In that context, a resurgent nationalism is central in forging a fake sense of community and papering over the real divides in society.
But it’s also bound up with the renaissance of Australian imperialism from the 1990s, when the Australian state sought to rehabilitate the image of its armed forces. This has involved a torrent of propaganda linking the flag with the glorified and fictionalised war heroes of old.
READ MORE: How flag-waving foolishness became a national pastime
(He was like “but after three generations they should be just American” and I was like “how long have your ancestors been British and you’re still Scottish” and he was like, seriously affronted, but that was the point)
The Scotsman asked what was up with “African-American” as distinct from incidentally African “American” and I was like, “Ah, you want to understand race in America? First, you must learn everything.”
There are three classic topics in American history and they go
1. Race, huh?
2. Why no socialism?
3. The frontier, huh?
and basically the answer to any of those is the other two
XD So accurate! We avoid the branches in Sweden though………
Read the whole archive of Scandanavia and the World, and finally learned me to distinguish and properly stereotype a bunch of countries I always got confused. As far as National Personification Comix go, it’s halfway between Hetalia and Polandball in a lot of ways.
A little weird we even have three to compare right now, but I guess nationalism is hot in the zeitgeist lately. Marxism’s making a respectable comeback too, shame we don’t have a class-based comic. Prole and Bougie at each other’s throat, Petit scheming to play each off the other while Lumpen picks his pocket, Labor Aristocracy with his nose up and his hardhat crown down over his eyes… there’s material there, just saying.
