GOP Will Shit Itself

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jun 12, 2022 7:28 pm

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Mon Jun 13, 2022 12:12 pm

To save everybody a click: the response is "at least the pronoun police will go into a classroom"

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Mon Jun 13, 2022 1:18 pm

It's kind of weird how Twitter's auto-cropping works differently on Twitter itself than it does on embedded tweets even though they're the same size. I assume there's a reason, but I don't know if it's intentional or simple technical faffery.

(in the original the top is cut off, so instead you have to click the image to see it's a George Will quote)
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jun 17, 2022 2:25 pm

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jun 19, 2022 2:09 pm

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:24 pm

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jun 30, 2022 2:11 am

Ted Cruz started another fight with Elmo.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Wed Jul 20, 2022 6:17 pm

CNN poll shows a massive drop in support for Republicans since May, most notably a 15-point drop among registered voters over 65.



Usual caveats about polling apply, including that registered voters are a less predictive group than likely voters, the election is still three and a half months out, and the same poll shows they ain't exactly impressed with the Democrats either. But if you're looking for evidence that a large number of people are really unhappy with the GOP right now, this is that.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Friday » Wed Jul 20, 2022 7:48 pm

The 65+ crowd dipping below 50% support for the GOP is news in itself, completely detached from everything else.

I mean, I know you said it was the most notable part, but I'm actually thinking it's bigger than notable. Has this age group been below 50% for the GOP... in recent history?
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 21, 2022 1:27 pm

Oh, it's potentially absolutely seismic. But as of right now it's one poll, more than three months out from the election. So far we don't have enough to consider it a trend, just an outlier. Even assuming it's accurate, there's no guarantee the numbers will look similar by November, let alone 2024; reversion to mean is usually a safe bet.

And even if those numbers do still look the same come November, Republicans could still take the House. They have a lot of built-in advantages, from gerrymandering to being an opposition party in a midterm election; even depressed turnout among their voters might not be enough to cancel those advantages out. And Democrats have collectively whiffed their messaging in the wake of catastrophes like Dobbs (though some individual Democrats have done a good job); I wouldn't take it as a given that a lack of enthusiasm among Republican voters translates to enthusiasm for Democratic ones.

But. If those numbers hold, if support for the GOP among seniors really has collapsed that badly and doesn't recover quickly, then yeah, that's very bad for the GOP's future prospects. (At least, at the federal level. At the state level, purple states might start to shift blue, but red states are only going to move harder to the right.)

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Wed Jul 27, 2022 11:19 pm

You know, not all the senate races look as good, but watching human cartoon and good oaf guy Fetterman WWE bodyslamming Dr. Oz has been fun as hell to watch, mostly on the back of jokes about his being an NJ resident parachuted in to the state, so I can't wait to see what Fetterman's campaign does with this.


(realizing that making fun of Oz for being from NJ rather making fun of his being from Turkey was both morally and tactically superior shows some really brilliant political instinct).
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 28, 2022 2:34 pm

Mongrel wrote:(realizing that making fun of Oz for being from NJ rather making fun of his being from Turkey was both morally and tactically superior shows some really brilliant political instinct).

I mean it could just be basic fucking human decency, but I can understand why that's unexpected in a Senate candidate.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Friday » Sat Aug 06, 2022 8:37 pm

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wait was Big Boss a fascist? I thought Big Boss was a misguided dude fighting against the fascists/patriots or whatever.

or is that not the dad he's referring to
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby nosimpleway » Sat Aug 06, 2022 11:17 pm

Big Boss was a mustache-twirling villain with approximately the subtlety of Albert Wily in the first couple games. They made him more sympathetic via the plot to Metal Gear Solid, and particularly once he became the player character in MGS3.

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Yoji » Sun Aug 07, 2022 12:14 am

Meanwhile, it still hurts to remember that Quinton Flynn, aka Raiden's voice actor, blamed the January 6th attack on an Antifa false flag. And as I understand it, it wasn't a one-off.

Like, c'mon. Your most famous character fought a plan to conquer the world with nukes and nanomachines, armed with a sword that at least once had to be clenched in his teeth. Doesn't get much more anti-fascist than that.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Mongrel » Sun Aug 07, 2022 12:33 am

RAIDEN

LOSES
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby JD » Sun Aug 07, 2022 2:28 pm


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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby LaserBeing » Sun Aug 07, 2022 8:24 pm

hi I don't post here much but then I happened to see Friday asking a question about Metal Gear and the Patriots' VR conditioning caused me to just start typing uncontrollably

spoiler-filled wall of text below:

Big Boss worked for the CIA in the 1960s, so for all intents and purposes a fascist by occupation even though he personally didn't seem to be racist or really have any political views at all. In MGS3 he is portrayed as someone who is not evil, but is not particularly good either. Compared with a vicious sadist like Volgin or a smirking creep like Ocelot he seems like a decent enough chap but he is still a weird misanthrope who has "never been interested in other people's lives." As The Boss says, "he is still too pure. He has not yet found an emotion to carry into battle." He doesn't come across as believing in any idealised notions of democracy, capitalism, or America, and despite projecting the image of the world-weary, stoic man of action he is a profoundly lonely individual who is visibly uncomfortable speaking to other people unless he has a loaded gun pointed at them. The only thing he has to define himself is his particular set of skills and a vague romantic warrior ethos of honour and loyalty, so when the incredibly traumatic events of MGS3 reveal to him in the most painful way possible that all his silly bushido crap was just dumb nonsense for idiot babies—a cruel joke at his expense by the country he had been ready to kill and die for—it totally shatters his self-image. He spends the rest of his life trying to fit the pieces back together in a way that can never be broken again.

So then in the 70s he was like "Nah you know what? Fuck the United Snakes of Amerikkka, I'm my own Snake now. I think Che was cool actually and the Sandinistas are my new best friends" and basically tried to create a workers' co-op for traumatised military veterans where they could all just chill out sipping maté and listening to Joan Baez records. So maybe not such a fascist after all! This seems cool, right? Kicking back on the beach in Costa Rica with all the homies, pranking imperialist spooks with party balloons full of funny knockout gas, making mixtapes with that fancy new Sony Walkman and doing it all in the name of world peace!

But then by the 80s he had gotten into synthwave and gone all-in on creating his very own military dictatorship. Outer Heaven never lasts long enough to see how it would function as an actual country with, presumably, a civilian populace that is not just whatever stray child soldiers Big Boss happened to adopt along the way (maybe it would have been more like 19th century Prussia than 20th century Germany), but MGSV tries to show (in its admittedly clumsy, unfinished way) how that structure would inevitably devolve into endless bloody retaliation against external rivals, internal purges of suspected traitors, and a never-ending litany of excuses for why a little bit of torture is OK just this once. You could argue that Mother Base stands in for the USSR: sure the intentions were good at first, but the outside pressure from the hostile global capitalist order (The Patriots) and the need to rapidly industrialise and develop your own internal economy in order to compete ends up leading them down the dark path to stockpiling their own nuclear arsenal, doing war crimes in Afghanistan, and just basically becoming state-capitalist merchants of death like any other imperialist nation on this God-forsaken blue rock. I think that's a bit of an oversimplification; Big Boss respected his revolutionary buddies for refusing to bow to US hegemony and for being badass fighters but I don't think he spent much time setting up Marxist reading groups on Mother Base. He hated the West for its corruption and betrayal but that certainly didn't translate into support for the Soviets, critical or otherwise; he was just as happy to keep shooting at the KGB as he was shooting at his former colleagues at the CIA. His ideas about anti-imperialism rarely seemed to get much more progressive than "hire more women mercenaries". Mother Base ends up feeling more like a libertarian tech startup or a Jonestown-style cult (same difference?) than a militant worker's party. At the end of the day, Outer Heaven is a corporation, not a commune. I mean in MGSV they literally start their own fast food chain!

MGSV's villain is Skull Face, who is a literal ex-Nazi and an unambiguous fascist with explicitly genocidal aims, but the whole point of his character is to be the dark reflection of Big Boss; they both worked for the same agency, on the same missions, and they both turned against the Patriots in search of their own concept of "freedom". Skull Face represents the real face of the military intelligence apparatus that both Big Boss and Zero were desperate to disavow, a sneering Totenkopf revealing itself like Bloody Mary in the mirror to haunt the guilty consciences of the men who sold the world. Like many real-world fascists, Skull Face was able to put forth his own critique of capitalism, it's just that his final solution wasn't "equitable redistribution of wealth and common ownership of the means of production", it was "release a bioweapon that will kill everyone on Earth who speaks English" (like Lyndon LaRouche he pretty much believed that everything antisemites say about Jews is actually true of the perfidious, blood-drinking Angloid... jury is still out on that one). Big Boss's response was "no, that sucks, and you suck"... but then look what ends up happening.

Big Boss's most admirable quality was his deep affection for the soldiers under his command, but as with any cult of personality that affection can easily turn toxic, and that goes both ways. His own mentor had asked him to choose between "loyalty to the mission, or loyalty to me". Big Boss's answer was an army without a nation, without ideology, a haven outside of the murderous power struggle between capitalism and communism. The mission is whatever we want it to be. The only requirement to join this brotherhood is the "loyalty to me" and by extension the "loyalty to we"; the only ideology is the will of Big Boss. The soldiers of Outer Heaven, whether they join voluntarily or are conscripted through torture and brainwashing, all begin to see themselves as reflections of their dear leader—the Sons of Big Boss. WE are all Diamond Dogs... and FUCK anyone who isn't!

Big Boss's worldview may or may not fit a given definition of fascism, but Liquid Snake is a bit more on-the-nose: Liquid considered himself and the Genome Soldiers to be a "family" with a shared genetic destiny and he wanted to create what is essentially a nuclear-armed ethnostate for war criminals. Solidus Snake, the "perfect" genetic copy of Big Boss, didn't give a shit about genes—he believed people are governed by ideals, not biology. Unfortunately the "ideals" that Solidus believed in were a kind of deranged liberal individualism that had curdled into pure Objectivist megalomania, every bit as destructive and contemptuous of human life as Liquid's blood and thunder dream of heroic forever war.

These men all yearned for autonomy and community but their deep-seated psychological need for control and vengeance ended up turning them all into violent, domineering sociopaths. Solid Snake is the only one that actually ends up making any kind of positive impact on the world and it's arguably—at least in part—because he is the "inferior clone". The "soldier genes"—the sociopathic traits that make all his brothers perfect soldiers and imperfect men—are less pronounced in Solid, allowing the humane qualities that are occasionally glimpsed in Big Boss (anyone who loves dogs can't be all bad, right? ...don't answer that) more room to breathe. His relative weakness leads him to rely more on others and therefore build stronger social bonds, not through the paternalistic hierarchy of a military command structure but through equal cooperation with comrades in the same struggle. He is put through the same brutal program to create the ultimate warrior that all of Big Boss's clones, phantoms and proxies were put through, but because he is more receptive to the people around him he ends up developing a worldview that's closer to The Boss's original dream of a world without borders than either Big Boss or Zero could realise in their paranoiac terror of anyone and anything outside their own control. Solid Snake is able to win his battles despite being the weakest clone, even in MGS4 as a rapidly aging, terminally ill nanomachine addict, because he is the only one able to put aside his fear of other people and draw on a deeper resolve—to put it in the most annoying way possible, he is the only one who manages to develop true Solidarity.

(Note that even Solid Snake is considered a monster by the world at the end of the series. I've heard that Kojima's original plan for the ending of MGS4 was to have both Snake and Otacon executed for war crimes, but that idea was scrapped as being too much of a downer.)

Was Big Boss a fascist? In my opinion, no, not quite... but as someone once said: "This ain't Hell... but you can see it from here." In the original MSX manual the Outer Heaven emblem is a death's head with a big ol' swastika planted right in the middle. They removed the swastika in later games but it's still basically a cooler version of the Punisher logo. On the other hand, I must admit that the idea of "let the pirates have nukes" does have a certain heady appeal these days.
In conclusion, Outer Heaven is a land of contrasts

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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Newbie » Sun Aug 07, 2022 11:39 pm

LaserBeing wrote:spoiler-filled wall of text


Amazing post, said what I wanted to better than I could, karma++, etc.
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Re: GOP Will Shit Itself

Postby Upthorn » Mon Aug 08, 2022 12:15 am

I think that character-centered analysis meshes well with the idea I've seen presented elsewhere that fascism isn't so much a political ideology as like, the inevitable endpoint of any institution deciding that their power is more important than their ideology
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