Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson

they/them

Lord, where are you going?

  • 7 Posts
  • 94 Comments
Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: April 22nd, 2025

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  • Isreali propaganda is always going to have Isreal as the one true king, god’s favorite little girl, etc. This show aint that

    This isn’t true at all. There are plenty of movies like Beaufort that attempt to thread the needle of “maybe a state of perpetual war and occupation is bad” (because our soldiers get sad and weepy when retreating) without confronting the fact that the logic of Israeli ideology and it’s self characterization as a state, requires it to be in a state of perpetual war and occupation. TLOU2 does this same thing where it attempts to separate the consequences from the choices that precipitated the consequences without truly examining them. It makes you feel that the choices are sacrosanct and understandable.

    A good example is what you mention in your other comment:

    spoiler

    In the beginning of Part 2, Ellie’s friends attempt to dissuade her from seeking revenge by her friends out of the fear for her personal safety not out of the position that violence begets violence or any sort of moral hazard. Ultimately the moral of the story is the moral hazard. This tension is never actually resolved.

    Ask yourself, at what point does Ellie regret or feel anything but vindication about her choice to seek revenge for Joel? She doesn’t. What ends up happening is that she decides to kill Abby because she thinks it will stop her PTSD, and then she realizes during the fight scene that it won’t.

    Neither the game nor Ellie actually confront the original sin or the subsequent choices to sin. Neither does the WLF/Seraphite storyline. The same exists in Israeli propaganda, the re-framing and argumentation about a year zero while committing atrocity. The description of the tactic through visual form e.g. the torture scene, is not necessarily communicating a refutation of the tactic. That’s you engaging with the work through your morality, not the morality of the work itself. The WLF is framed as the antagonist, and Ellie is framed as the protagonist, but their arcs are the same in terms of how they act and the consequences of their actions.The context is fairly interchangeable. They’re simply cast in different lights for the purpose of narrative. Ultimately this means that the stance is “well I guess it’s bad but it’s just kind-of a wash so you shouldn’t be too hard on other people or groups that have this same form and maybe do the same things you did with Ellie where you focus on the good stuff not the bad stuff”.

    The moral ambiguity in the work matches the moral ambiguity and squishiness of Neil Druckman’s liberal Zionism and of all liberal Zionists.



  • Propaganda doesn’t have to be a thinly veiled metaphor rich in polemics like Iron Man. That’s actually often the most boring an ineffectual propaganda. Propaganda works best when it creates a heuristic response that muddles emotions and logic.

    The propaganda in TLOU Part 2 comes from the ludonarrative dissonance that actually just reinforces the idea that “this is just complex stuff and you shouldn’t be ‘too moral’ about it”. For example are we ever really made to feel that Ellie is bad for choosing to avenge Joel?

    Ellie’s story and the WLF/Seraphite conflict mirror each other in the whole “I don’t want to have to do this but I have no choice” -> “I did a thing and I had no choice and now I’m traumatized from my non-choice” -> “more non choices incoming”. The reality is that the story consistently creates apologetics to further and further these cycles in the eyes of the player who themselves commit the atrocity. This essentially undercuts the eventual resolution of “you didn’t have to do all that”.

    Comparing this with a game like Spec OPS the Line that forces you to commit atrocity because you’re playing “da hero” and then admonishes you for the immorality of it. Martin Walker is shown to be a piece of shit. He’s traumatized and abused sure, but that doesn’t take focus away from the fact that he’s a piece of shit that burns women and children alive with white phosphorous.

    spoiler

    The emotional resonance and the visceral nature of beating the shit out of Nora with a lead pipe is explored and centered more than the supposed “moral of the story” that you shouldn’t travel 200 miles and kill 2 people one of whom was just a victim of circumstance to get information on the next person you’re gonna brutalize with a lead pipe. How does the game handle these scenes? We’re made to feel bad for Ellie! She’s traumatized! These scenes aren’t clearly shown for their ultimate immoral implications that create dissonance with the supposed moral of the plot.

    We see so much “consequence” to validate the “cycle of violence”, but we don’t really see or play through any significant consequential atonement that bears the same emotional weight as the atrocity itself. It’s more of a shrugging apologetic for cycles of violence than an argument against it. On top of that the ludonarrative doesn’t give us much choice about it, nor does it give us commentary about that lack of choice unlike Spec Ops.

    A good example as to how these stories can be written in a “game style” but not have this dissonance that’s both plot based and ludonarrative based is if you stack the emotional and logical judgements of the PC’s actions towards the end of the game and heighten the impact. A good example is Mouthwashing where over the course of the game you discover that you’re actually a huge piece of shit in context. The things that seemed innocuous at the beginning of the game were actually your PC being a huge piece of shit. Ultimately these actions got a whole bunch of people killed and they were done because the PC is an incompetent ego maniac with a huge chip on their shoulder about their lack of achievement in life.





  • This is actually the “find out phase” from trade war. China strategic export bans prevent antimony from being available. China dual use export bans prevent any entity on the dual-use list (mostly defense contractors) from exporting dual-use materials out of China, which is the TNT and nitrocellulose shortage. At the same time demand has been constantly increasing because the US supplies Ukraine and has depleted its stockpiles significantly.

    The focus and pretense that Chinese exports aren’t used for NatSec reasons pretends that these materials are available for purchase for military use which is not the case.

    These export controls have been a direct response to CHIPS and Tariffs (e.g. the red-blue bipartisan trade war).



  • Because the economics of local MSPs implicitly competing with large vendors like CISCO, Microsoft, etc as well as large scale MSPs like accenture ruined the industry in the 2000’s and the subsequent bad practices of “call centerizing” the industry got internalized in a lot of corp environments esp at user facing support.

    Management essentially became less and less technical because they needed to represent capital more and more to keep the business “afloat”. Essentially everyone turned into Michael Scott because you couldn’t make money hand over fist selling paper anymore.

    Similar to the ZIRP problem for SE’s. Technical excellence, OSS contributions, and cooperative open standards can only exist if management feels like they’re rich and doesn’t feel the need to be efficient and micromanage its money.





  • I agree with you here.

    But the focus of your comment and the focus of the article are different. The article is inherently comparative between China and the US, while your comment explicates the situation in China alone. The compares the US, but it is missing the state of play for the US half of the equation.

    The US part is complex and there’s not a comprehensive rundown (because nobody cares), but we can start with something like this.

    The majority of college graduates are underemployed. Meaning they’re taking jobs at McDonalds or running Uber Eats rather than using their degrees.

    We have several crises simultaneously here:

    1. a lack of expansion for knowledge based jobs.
    2. elite over reproduction
    3. a market demand for labor that is detached from the day to day needs of a job (e.g. demanding degrees for jobs that don’t require them, laundry list of demands that feed elite over reproduction and end up with job seekers who are unfulfilled because of lies the system told them)

    Starting January 1st, 2025, the retirement age of male worker has been increased from 60 years to 63 years, while female worker from 50 to 55, and 55 to 58. This is straight from the State Council of the PRC.

    This is a great example of what I mean. This is happening all across the Western world as well, except those ages are rookie numbers for us. In the US full retirement age went up to 68 this year, and that was planned not a reaction to the current economic state. What we’re hearing from the right wing is numbers like 72 some as high as 80. France was 62 now 64. Etc.

    I think both systems are facing the same general problem of the bottom falling out of the economy in various ways. However even under the “blue guys” from my perspective the US has not been taking this problem as seriously from a cultural, political or governance standpoint as China. Thus it has no right to comparison. Like I said I agree that there is more that the CPC can do, and I’m not trying to reflexively defend the sainthood AES countries, but it’s one of those American things where we just need to hear that other people are doing bad so we can feel good, regardless of the reality of our living situation. It’s culturally the way this country is ruled internally as well.

    We’re simply in different leagues, and comparisons that are for upper-middle class Western audiences cannot be honest about Westerners being in a worse league.


  • My biggest issues with these articles are:

    1. Flattening of Chinese systems into mystical bad guy shit (like you said the lulzy idea that Xi Jinping personally selects investment vs a system of municipal sovereign wealth funds chasing the bag).
    2. Inherent comparison without actively understanding the complexity

    I think China’s misstep with and flirtation with land speculation certainly warrants a retrospective, but it’s inherent comparison with the United States is flawed at best. While China’s strategy did prefer their middle and richest over their poor, much like the American counterpart, and much like the American counterpart it individuals ended up holding the bag, the outcomes are slightly in favor for China. CPC has the ability, will and capacity to repurpose overbuilt areas, while in America they would legalistically and realistically end up rotting.

    And I think one of the big problems that we’re gonna see in China is going to be getting a handle on the practical decentralization. The Evergrande fallout was similar to the US financial crisis, however it’s causes are similar to US de-industrialization and tax policy where localities compete with each other for economic development (e.g. every mayor bending over backwards to tongue polish Bezos boots for the mere hope of Amazon H2 in their area). This leads to suboptimal development and a race to the bottom. China however can still protect itself from this, the US needs such a deep and massive reform to the point where the system will be alienated from itself to even call it a “reform” rather than a revolution.

    I think the problem with these kinds of comparisons is they always seek to pretend China is worse when China is just running a mod on top of what other capitalist countries have been doing for a while. Sovereign wealth funds are a tweak on pension funds that have disappeared or privatized in the US. China just has much more active investment strategies and the CPC’s regulatory state protects them from the kind of open market dumping we have with IPOs for companies like Tesla, Uber, WeWork, etc whose product can never actually be profitable without a particular set of economic constraints. While incidents like Evergrande can still happen, there’s no “mining” of retirement funds by venture capitalists riding high on pure speculation and mythology.

    However, the article gets very much into meme territory redressing the primary issues. For example, the dreaded 17% youth unemployment numbers. Seems scary but in proper comparison America is not doing much better, in fact in comparison we don’t know how bad we’re doing.

    For example the U3 rate which is what US considers “real unemployment” (because all the higher U rates have this aspect of individual immoralism to them) is currently 4.2% among the “youth”, U3 is 8.2%.

    However these are not the same number, what the 17% number (as far as I understand it) represents a population much closer to 100% - labor participation rate without disability in the US. The numbers are not the same because China’s actual measure of labor participation has issues considering rural labor (shadow economy issues). The actual 17% is based on surveyed unemployment. In the US these numbers are not counted and easily accessible. For example the “youth” labor participation rate is 72.1% including disability. Which paints a more grim picture of American youth unemployment than Chinese.

    China has certainly failed into some capitalist style development traps, but it’s understanding of where it is is much more honest and much more pro-social compared to the US. The reality is that in US we have the ability to collect and analyze these statistics in a pro-social way, we choose not to because it would reveal some pretty ugly truths about the country. U3 is used because our economy is set up to have losers and we want to forget about them. China does not fool itself in this way.