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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by QuietCupcake@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net

It's a 2016 dialog choice and QTE driven game along the same gameplay lines as Telltale games like The Walking Dead. Of the writer-director, wikipedia describes him:

Khonsari was raised in his homeland Iran until 10. He fled Iran as a political refugee to Canada after the 1979 Revolution with his family.

My assumption is that there are two possibilities for this game. It's either just another run-of-the-mill both-sides-bad centrist-brained libfest that paints the revolutionaries as being "well intentioned" but all revolutions (except for bourgeois ones of course) inevitably lead to "authoritarian" dictatorships that are even worse than what existed before and any good-guy revolutionaries presented at the start of the game either turn out bad or are shown to have been naive fools for ever hoping things could be better. That's what the game is painting itself to be, regardless of whatever it is. The other possibility, made more likely given the writer-director's background, is that it's flat out unabashedly pro-imperialist, anti-Iranian unmitigated western propaganda.

I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive, but I think you know what I mean, where they kind of represent two ends of a shitty spectrum. (There's also the exceedingly slim possibility its politics are halfway decent, but I'm not really entertaining that thought because the chances are too close to null.) I'm curious enough about where this game lands on that spectrum that I think I'll go ahead and play it. I'm not one to rage quit in the traditional sense, but if it gets bad enough, I probably won't subject myself to it any further. So before going in, has anybody here already experienced whatever this game is pushing? Any thoughts about it one way or another?


Some quotes from the "Political and institutional responses" section of the Natopedia article on it:

When the game started gaining popularity in June 2012, Iranian conservative newspaper Kayhan published pieces naming it "pro-Western propaganda" and accusing Khonsari of espionage; he subsequently felt afraid to reenter the country. Some developers used aliases to protect themselves, and the concept artist fled Iran due to his involvement. Khonsari said that "anytime Iran has something written about them in the west, they feel as if it is propaganda against them." Following the game's release in 2016, the National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) blocked all websites distributing it in Iran and began gathering all illegally distributed copies in the country.

featured in a November 2016 UNESCO report by Paul Darvasi about the impact of games on learning about conflict resolution; Darvasi noted the game "might be studied to determine if [it] can be used to support the production of historical empathy, global empathy, and ethnocultural empathy, all which contribute to the acquisition and development of intercultural understanding".  In 2022, a branch of Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education critiqued the game; teacher Alexander Zart found it affected by subjective depictions due to Khonsari's significant personal background, despite its framing as an "interactive documentary".

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 47 points 2 months ago

That's really interesting and not a perspective I see voiced around here much. It's always the TrueAnon/Hasan rules: have nukes and if you're ever accused of having nukes get them immediately. Which tbh always made good sense to me. But I realize podcasters and streamers aren't necessisarily the most geopolitically astute.

All of the reasons listed above for not having them, despite everything that has happened, seem like really good points though. Then again, if Iran had developed nukes and demonstrated them a decade ago or more, it would be a completely different situation now that (I would imagine) would probably not bear much resemblance to how things panned out in this timeline.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 47 points 2 months ago

Common China W.

Forgive my ignorance but how much energy does that produce vs how much Cuba needs? Is that a significant amount on a national scale or is it just a tiny drop in the bucket, and can they produce right away? More to the point, how far will this go to alleviate Cuba's US-caused energy crisis? (It's great no matter what).

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by QuietCupcake@hexbear.net to c/covid@hexbear.net

Thanks to ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @yogthos@lemmy.ml for this one, I saw posted here. Wasn't expecting to see a comic so perfectly nail it.

Edit: Aaaand now I see that this was basically posted yesterday, but as a link to the xcancel thread about it. So I guess here's the direct link to the comic at least.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 46 points 10 months ago

Are they STILL banging the "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" drum?

That rhetoric is foundational to the Zionist project. It will never not be a drum they bang on.

So fucking tired of being called antisemitic for suggesting Israel should stop doing genocide.

finkelstein - "tell me about it."

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 57 points 1 year ago

I feel like Trump operates on the assumption that no one will react to counteract whatever strategy he implements.

Well, when his greatest domestic opposition is the democratic party, it's been a correct and winning assumption. The logic becomes "What's anyone gonna do, impeach me again?" On top of that, when most of the vassals fall immediately in to line when he says so, being good dogs for the US, and the strategy keeps working even with foreign policy, there's not much incentive to do otherwise. Fortunately China is not the Democrats nor are they Europe.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 54 points 1 year ago

Similar to what others said, it is about control. The US state has complete control over how the "algorithm" feeds people the narratives that the US wants to feed them when it comes to the major social media platforms. But not with TikTok. It is not a national security threat in the way they want people to think it is, but it is a national security threat in that they can't force their curated propaganda through it as they see fit, like they can with the other platforms. It's a propaganda liability.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 59 points 2 years ago

So you appear to be one of those dorks who thinks that all political positions exist only as a binary, falling somewhere on a spectrum between liberal and conservative. This is fucking stupid. It's not entirely your fault, since that's all that's allowed to be officially acknowledged in amerikkka, but really you should know better by now. Hell, you should know better simply by virtue of the fact you're posting your ignorance on a communist website. So apparently I'll be the first to inform you that both liberalism and conservatism are very similar rightwing ideologies, with conservatism being essentially another branch of liberalism. This is recognized by most of the rest of the world, even many other "LiBeRaL dEmOcRaCiEs." As communists, anarchists, leftists in general, we wholly reject liberalism and that includes conservatism (conservatism itself still subscribes to almost all liberal doctrine such as worship of private property). See, learn something new every day. :new the-more-you-know

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 44 points 2 years ago

I think AssortedBiscuits answered your question in the first couple sentences of their comment:

Most Westerners already hate communists and carry the grudge against the USSR. Anarchists don't really deviate too much from some generic Westerner.

It's really not any deeper than that. There's no need or reason to single out anarchists from any other average westerner when analyzing the source of animosity for the USSR because the answer is going to be the same whether you're talking about chuds, liberals, or anarchists. Even the non-western anarchists who hold a grudge against the USSR, the answer is probably still the same just because of the prevalence of western cultural hegemony all over the world. In your edit, you specify:

I'm curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them.

But the answer to that is the same information sources you yourself were probably exposed to early on. It's all the same shit we're steeped in, the ubiquity of anti-communism throughout western culture. Animal Farm and 1984 were required reading for me in junior high and high school respectively. The class discussions around these books were centered around teaching us that the USSR was corrupt, oppressive, and that these communist ideals that may sound like good ideas will always and invariably lead to "authoritarianism" and "totalitarian dictatorships" like the Soviet Union. Everyone absorbs that shit young, even the people who might later go on to question the truth of what they were taught, like anarchists.

You say

Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against.

But no they don't. Not as newly-minted anarchists anyway. That brainworm software was already installed long ago before they became anarchists. A major part of becoming a leftist is going through a process of uninstalling all that brainworm malware. Anarchists who still hate the Soviet Union are people who have been successful at uninstalling much of the brainworm malware, it's just that they haven't completed the process by uninstalling the anti-Soviet or anti-"tankie" worms... yet. And I say all this as someone who long considered themself an anarchist.

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by QuietCupcake@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

Edit: So it looks like there are a couple posts about how this crackdown is fake news. Even in this very thread, someone is doing that, though they actually don't have a clue as to what they're talking about.

No, this is not fake news. These sites that are still up are not fmovies, which was itself part of a large piracy network, the rest of which has been dismantled as well, as has been discussed in other posts here. The sites still up are merely copycat sites riding the success of fmovies and trying to cash in themselves. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that, and if you can still watch movies like you did with the real thing, great. But some of them it appears are not the most scrupulous of pirates and have or link to potentially dangerous malware.

Regardless, please don't jump to "fAkE nEwS!" accusations when you don't know what you're talking about. All you're doing is muddying the waters about what really is going on and possibly leading people to think that misleading, potentially dangerous sites are fine. Don't do that.


So that's what happened to my beloved free treat-dispensing Fmoviesz. It hasn't worked for a month or so, but now there's no more need to speculate exactly why. There has been a huge wave of "piracy" outfit takedowns recently, which is both sad and worrisome and I wonder why this is all happening so all of a sudden. Why the severe crackdown now? Or is it the sort of situation where a big domino fell and they're all connected? They're really making sure any hint of commons gets enclosed and demonize it in the meantime.

I also wonder about the political motivations of Vietnam to go along with this and make the actual arrests. Is it due just to pressure from the west? Does Vietnam have any stake in copyright laws and this takedown, or the precedent of it, does actually benefit them somehow? What's the deal with all that?

From the article:

The efforts marked “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe”, said Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the Hollywood trade group the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the chairman of Ace, in a statement. Larissa Knapp, the executive vice-president and chief content protection officer for the MPA, said the takedown sent a “powerful deterrent message”.

“We look forward to ongoing joint efforts with Vietnamese authorities, US Homeland Security Investigations and the US Department of Justice International Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property (Ichip) program to bring the criminal operators to justice,” she added.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 49 points 2 years ago

No prob! I get a kick out of reading the modlog and was kind of in awe when I saw this massive line of bans filling a page-height with what amounted to "Nakoichi BANNED for being an EVIL TANKIE!" Naturally, I was curious what heinous, egregious thing you had said, but I couldn't find any removed comments of yours in the log. I thought it must be some new mod with an old grudge or something. Then I happened on that post to see that your great unforgivable sin was to mention that the BBC didn't consider Tiananmen Square to be a massacre.

walter-shock rage-cry How dare you?!

Then I laughed. Tbh, I thought about posting it to the dunk_tank, but 1) I figured it would probably get removed for being low-hanging fruit, and 2) I wasn't sure if you wanted attention called to their dipshittery but regarding you. Glad to see that wider hexbear gets to point and laugh at them too now.

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 57 points 2 years ago

Meanwhile, what is it that actually makes it to the front page of that shithole copaganda site?

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 44 points 2 years ago

According to some in here (even hexbears?!? blech), the genocide perpetrator you know is always better than the one you don't, so yeah, you'd better vote for the one you already know is committing a genocide to reduce harm. That's just facts and logic. shapiro-poplar

[-] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 48 points 2 years ago

I'm not sure where the lines are in these definitions, or how much the difference really matters but I'm hoping he will be remembered not just as an enabler but as a direct accomplice, which he is. He could have chosen to stop it at any point, instead he has goaded it on and knowingly, unhesitatingly provided the material means to perpetrate it.

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QuietCupcake

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