Right on, that’s good on them. I was honestly disappointed to learn that they were deniers years ago, which definitely effected my ability to watch the show afterwards. I’ll have to check out the episode when I can.

Oh, I didn’t realize they’d revisited the gag. Thanks for the head’s up.

Kudos. That got an unexpected, but much needed, hearty chuckle out of me :D

That episode is commonly misunderstood. I too had always thought they were lampooning climate change deniers, but Matt and Trey were actually poking fun of Al Gore and An Inconvient Truth as alarmist. They’ve since apologized for the episode, but it’s wild that it’s so often confused for satirizing the very thing it was mocking. For me I just assumed that Matt and Trey wouldn’t be deniers so it never occured to me until I found out their true intention and now it’s pretty cringy to watch that episode since it’s a lot more obvious. Here’s an article about it:

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a25127458/south-park-climate-change-manbearpig-apology-season-22-episode-7/

Just because I’m already on .ml

It’s gotten a fair amount of attention so far, I’m sitting at 49 subscribers now. So, I think it’s best to stay where I’m at. I’d hesitate to move it right now after almost 50 subs. I could see if there was less traction, but right now it seems like it’s alright where it is.

You find tiny phonographs attached to each flower, playing a symphony of staccato squeaks. The music swells and as it does your thoughts become scattered and erratic, you feel your limbs begin to involuntarily move in jerky motions. Describe how you stop the maniacal music from controlling your mind and roll a D6!

The gazebo cries out in agony, a series of high-itched squeaks emit from it and it breaks apart into a swarm of purple rubber duckies that amass into a giant fist, pummeling you for your audacity. The fist swings, the purple duckies bobbing and undulating like a wave of scurrying ants. When the the fist hits you an enormous SQUEAK rattles you teeth. You fly backwards in an arc, hitting a nearby flower stand, the flowers explode out in a flurry of daisies, roses and tulips, the startled flower-seller jumps in the nearby shallow creek in a panic. You are now covered in assorted flowers. What do you do?

Direct link to the community: [email protected]

Direct link to the Stuperheroes game

Awesome! I am very familiar with Zot, Understanding Comics and Mr. McCloud in general, but I’d never heard of this. Thanks for showing me. I’ll have to check it out sometime!

Excellent! I noticed that there seems to be a lot of UK stuff that is explicitly working-class versus American. Interesting to say the least. It seems like, for whatever reason, it’s a little bit more prevalent in the UK. Maybe it’s just the responses I’ve gotten so far, but I have noticed there seem to be a disproportionate amount.

Parenti, in Blackshirt in Reds, covers this topic excellently. He does not gloss over the flaws and corruptions in the USSR, but he is realistic in giving a fair assessment of their successes in the midst of their failures. A big point being what you mentioned above: the USSR had to continue focusing production towards just being on even footing with the US in terms of defense, to protect against the very real threat of the US overthrowing the government as they were doing in so many other communist countries. At no time during the USSR’s existence were they ever not under attack by some outside force or another (the NAZIs, CIA, multi-national capitalist interests etc). Here’s a good quote talking about the Stalin era and progressive policies during that time:

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism didn’t work” is to ignore that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in the living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti

That’s…gross. But entirely unsurprising. I never knew that there was a neutered version in the US. I actually had to look it up. Wow. Go us. This country really just continues to depress me day after day.

Ken Loach

Thanks! I’ll look into him.

Yes, yes! Embrace the power of the dark side!

After the past twenty years, coming of age during the Bush W years, I’ve tried hard to resist becoming a misanthrope. But good, goddamn is it harder than ever before. I thought it was bad (and it was) when W. was the president growing up, but the amount of insane and woefully misinformed and hateful people in this country has reached a fever pitch I never could have imagined back then. It’s truly awesome in the most negative sense of that word.

Right on. The small snippet I read was intriguing. I look forward to it.

Ooo, sweet. I enjoyed The Plague. I’ll take a look. Thanks ;)

Haha, thanks. I’m surprised there’s someone out there that isn’t even familiar with Rent in passing. My ex was a theater major and she looooved Rent, but even I had heard of it before that. I’m not sure I could survive watching the movie again. I think seeing a stage production of Rent would have been awesome though, especially if I knew someone in the play. I DO dig the overall perspective of it, from what I do remember of watching it years ago.

Thanks! Those all look pretty interesting. I’ll probably watch Vast of Night over the weekend.

Interesting, however sitcoms in general really aren’t my cup of tea as well. It was mentioned in other places that Roseanne was one of the few shows to depict working class life somewhat accurately, and with some dignity. A lot of the time the working class is shown in a shallow, stereotypical depiction of what upper-class people imagine it’s like.

Yes! Kids shows are particularly egregious about this. All the kids shows are about rich kids and their rich parents. That’s not to say that kids shows need to explicitly put the problems of class society front and center (although, some small discussion of class and social relations would be nice) but consistently showing kids living out these hyper-capitalist consumerist fantasies is pretty cringe-worthy.

Exactly. The thing that repulses me the most is the fake-y, artificial looking life that is so often represented in entertainment, and then that is what is spun as “normal”. Which I imagine is why these upper-class people even in real life look like the shallow Stepford Wives aesthetic that the movies and tv depict them as, life depicting art it seems.

In my initial short searches I did earlier, Antonio Gramsci comes up as addressing the issue of “cultural hegemony”, where art and entertainment tends to represent the dominant bourgeois culture, which makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard of Gramsci in passing, but haven’t read anything by him yet. I think it’s a good place to begin regarding a critical analysis.

Although, even without a thorough critical analysis, it’s pretty straightforward to realize that the economic barrier for art, entertainment and creating media in general leads to an over-representation of the wealthy since they have the money and means to create and distribute media to the masses, which in turn consolidates their dominance of the popular narrative.

What’s particularly sad about this, is that people that grow up working-class are absorbing messages from media that marginalize their narrative, and cause them to internalize a narrative that leads them to being oblivious towards their class standing and even hostile towards it. The whole “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” concept that causes people to denigrate the poor and working class, even if they themselves are a part of it.