I met a trans lesbian socialist who does a lot of pro-Palestine organizing recently.
She also really likes Rick and Morty.
No one ever talks about how this show is literally a rip off of the comic series “Black Science”.
Which is actually very good btw.
i think in general online leftists care too much about the media someone else consumes. like…oh you watch rick and morty?? cool i guess, not really for me. i don’t really think it invalidates their politics lol
i think this is a function of consumerism intersecting with calvinism in the west. like if you are defined by the media you consume and the media is defined by its author, then if the author is a Sinner™, so are you. i want to read a more in-depth analysis so if any of you have one please send it
Consuming media is a safe and permissible form of political expression. You can watch a movie about overthrowing empire just don’t attempt it in the real world. If your allowed range of political expression is making media, then media becomes your politics. Who you are, politically, is what media you consume. As your actual ability to participate in political action is crushed, capital allows you to sit in a corner and make believe. This is why there was so much radical art, music, poetry, etc coming out of the 60s and 70s. Actual protests were being squashed, capital made some concessions, and then stuffed all the radicals in a play pen and gave them a box of crayons. By the 80s and 90s, radicalism was just another brand and rebellion was a genre. If you are into really subversive art then you are a radical. If you don’t like that stuff then you are supporting the status quo. This is where we start to get these notions of attention and support being mystified, something that the internet would throw into overdrive. Just passively viewing something gives it power. This goes against Marxist materialism as it goes against the idea of practical activity. Viewing political actions as simply observing and making the right observations cannot lead to understanding or change.
This is how you end up with people obsessed with media choices and consumption. It also bleeds into other aspects. The internet turns everyone into a passive observer. You can observe anything anywhere at any time. It feels powerful. Couple that with a tiny range of political expression and you get your online left. You get people who obsess about the curation of online spaces and all the media that goes along with it. You have the veneration of passive observation where attention is the physical driver of politics. This is why you can easily catch people here talking about politics like it’s everyone clapping their hands for tinkerbell. If we just pay attention to the correct things, and pay attention hard enough, good things will happen. If we stop paying attention to the bad things, they wither and die. In some ways the structure of the internet does allow this to happen, like upvotes and social media algorithms that work on engagement. But that’s not reality. Passive observation does not move the needle. Social media companies abstract social relations much in the way capitalism abstracts them. They depend on everyone thinking that engagement is the same thing as Marx’s practical activity.
how do the people get so easily satisfied? i guess a lack of ideology combined with the concessions makes some movements satisfied with consuming? like how they painted that crosswalk in 2020 and a bunch of liberals immediately went back to brunch
the average Langley Dominos worker has a succinct read on western politics probably because of all the pizzas they have to make anytime shit pops off
I think SarahZ had one or a few videos about it. Something about problematic media, i think?
oh yeah i had one of those open in a tab somewhere and i forgot about it so thanks
There’s that legendary SigMarxism post about the thermian argument and all that. It’s probably what you’re looking for?
i can’t find it do you have it on hand?
I think everyone not pirating is sus inherently, and harboring bourgeois tendencies
i think even having qualifications on whether or not it is ‘sus’ is pretty damn dumb lmao. do you think that if someone who turns on Adult Swim at like 10pm and falls asleep has given financial support to Justin Roiland or something by letting it play on their TV.
I don’t watch R&M btw but like I said, online leftists care way too much about the TV or movies others consume when at the end of the day, 90% of people are not going into a movie or starting a show to take political opinions from it or otherwise
It’s a blanket statement on piracy, people watching ads or willingly paying big corpos are on their way to being brain broken. Sure there are exceptions, like some old ladies and whatnot, but majority don’t survive successfully treats delivery system.
If you don’t bother with big nas shenanigans, usb stick to save couple of seasons of office or friends or rick and morty is still cheaper than a month of slopscription.
Watch whatever you want to watch as long as you stole it
Yeah I dont admit it much, but smoking a joint and watching Rick and Morty with my partner is a guilty pleasure. Some of it’s horribly cringe, some just horrible, of course, but when I’m high I can just ignore it and laugh at funny gags
Happens like once every 6 months, but I do look forward to it when we plan a high night tbh
But I don’t necessarily think this reflects on my politics much at all.
online leftists
That’s just being a liberal with extra steps.
spoiler
See what I did there?
i care too much about people ‘consuming’ media… reading that phrase makes my blood boil for a reason i can’t quite understand
who fucking cares
This is the only proper response.
Agreed. We don’t need gatekeeping to be leftist enough. I don’t care about someone’s taste in comedy, music, etc. I care about their political/social opinions and actions.
Half the place likes cumtown here
And the other half love it
(I’ve never listened to cumtown, but once I thought of a bit and someone accused me of lifting it straight from an ep, so I’ve sworn never to give it the time kf day
This happens more often to hexbears than one might imagine.The only bits safe from accusation are about
Not too surprising, Nick Mullen was the president of DSA after all
Legitimately, the only reason Rick and Morty is “bad” is because it’s so good that a lot of people got into it to an embarrassing degree.
If it were a show with no baggage attached, nobody here would have a problem with it
Idk everything after season 2 for me has been very hit or miss leaning heavily into the miss. I still think the shows ok though
eh, my coworker made me watch half an episode and i really hated that cruel asshole of an alcoholic grandfather. really, i hated all the characters.
And the creators.
Yeah, the show itself doesn’t really have egregiously bad politics. It’s not South Park.
The art sucks
Yeah, I guess so. Animation is hard.
sounds like her IQ is pretty high
She did seem pretty cool
I mean, it’s not exactly like there’s an eco system of communist media in this hell scape
I mean, there’s always old Soviet stuff, but it’s certainly harder to find since the war and the resulting anti Russia freakouts, because of the way Westerners view the two entities interchangeably.
hey at least it’s not south park
both Futurama and the Simpsons (earlier seasons) are liberal and I really like them
im a massive fking liberal and i love disco elysium
You’re not a liberal, CliffordBigRedDog. Get the fuck out of here.He smiles warmly.
A liberal on Hexbear, ooh!
Go read some theory. Burn that useless liberalism out of you and fill the hole with a political framework that actually works.
Are we not supposed to like that show or something?
Yes.
Or at least say you only like the early seasons.
Idk I kinda like it when rock goes to therapy and slowly works on his many obvious issues
Legit and unironically, I really think the show gets better as it goes on, insofar that women actually enter the writer’s room. Like, the therapist scene deconstructing Rick is incredible (given the show up to that point) and the fans that hate that scene are a shibboleth for the chuds among us
The scene is both great and bad because it is basically the writers turning to the camera and saying “you shouldn’t worship or idolise Rick, or even like him, he’s an awful person because he refuses to put the work in to be better.”
It’s terrible from a writing standpoint because it is so on the nose, but it is great because it is exactly what the worst fans of that show needed to hear.
See also the final episode of Seinfeld
And the last season of The Sopranos
Is that the pickle Rick episode? I think that’s the latest I’ve seen.
Morty’s Mind Blowers (S03E08) also reveals Rick to be a piece of shit who will erase a person’s memory simply to save himself the embarrassment of having mispronounced a word.
Yeah, like it said he has issues. He’s still a piece of shit, even after he starts to confront them. Nobody in the show is a good person, but they don’t have to be moral paragons to be funny.
A show with perfect characters would be boring.
Doofus Rick was pretty good natured, but he eats his own shit
The latest season is my favorite. What now?
This is interesting to me because all the chuds who like Rick and Morty also say only the early seasons were good
Rick and Morty is a legitimately good show. They also got rid of Roiland the sex pest and are independent of him now.
yeah like a lot of things the cringe of the fandoms affect people’s views of the underlying media
cries in Steven Universe
You present the idea that media consumption should match a person’s political actions. You say that you know a political organizer who does a lot of good activism work, and that person also watches a cartoon with reddit humor and a problematic creator. Your observed reality contradicts your preconceived expectation.
Are you confused because your expectation was wrong? I don’t really know why every person chooses to watch whatever they watch. There are a lot of progressive people who seem to watch South Park, which is way more problematic than Rick and Morty. People will resent you if you scold them for what they watch.
Aren’t you like a huge fan of cumtown? You post about it all the time. Many people consider cumtown to have problematic humor and a problematic creator. Do you want people to judge you based on your media consumption?
I know many anarchists who like Star Trek.
Fucking same! All the anarchists i know like startrek in some way shape or form, but all of them hate the federation.
hello comrades i am here to explain to you why the borg is actually ideal anarchist society and everyone should be borg for anarchist reasons
no i am not the borg why do you ask
The captains are usually in conflict with the higher ups of the federation, so it’s a fair point.
Yeah, I’m exposed here.
I like star trek, but I hate the misogyny that went on behind the scenes :(
I’m a communist and i like old James Bond, and The Mines of King Solomon and all those orientalist movies that were basically travel agency ads for british boomers.
I actually really like Cold War era spy films and action movies. The kind of shit where the villain is the Soviet Union every damn time. They try not to make commies look badass and fail every time.
(I also like the trope subversion of both the earlier “bad guys are always from Nazi Germany” trope and the “bad guys are always Soviets” trope, that tends to occur with late Cold War stuff where the villain’s German but they never explicitly state East or West. Or when they’re self aware enough to essentially use old as shit Nazi bad guy tropes and then say the guy’s West German. Pretty funny.)
“Looks at user name being a mass murdering bourgeois royalty” I owe you no explanation
