zifnab25

If you strip out the "Communism Bad!" agitprop, that's not the worst place to start. Orwell does a great job of enumerating methods of media manipulation and exemplifying them. What's more, the material itself is an excellent example of media manipulation. And Orwell's own history is littered with examples of manipulation and agitprop.

So, in the proper context, yeah. Fucking include it. Maybe run "The Jungle", "The Wizard of Oz", and "Letters from Birmingham Jail" beside it, along with a bunch of those late-19th/early-20th political cartoons, into the curriculum as well. But Orwell absolutely deserves to be a part of any critical understanding of media manipulation.

At least in my high school, there was definitely an element of "This information is trustworthy" / "That information is fake" when it comes to distinguishing between mainstream press and alt-media. But the focus was far more around the check-out section tabloids, which were all right-wing shitrags anyway. Growing up in the Houston suburbs, you didn't have a lot in the way of Ad Busters or Processed World, much less Trotsky agitprop. The Onion was the closest we got, and I only started seeing that in college.

With online media giving a much broader and less well-defined venue for news circulation, I would genuinely be curious to hear what a California middle school classroom discusses wrt Twitter journalism and TikTok Did You Knows. Its not like you can just take or leave the particular app, as there's a pretty wide spectrum of credibility on any given platform.

Just call me Mr. 1000th Post

Bitch, you were born in Azerbaijan and grew up in Minsk. What the fuck do you know about living in Russia?

eye-roll

Its a video game. They're all power fantasies.

Neil druckman has said Joel was a bad person and not a hero.

He's the protagonist and the prime mover of the story. You can credibly describe him as an anti-hero. But when you set him up as the avatar of the player, you're inviting sympathy. That's before you get to the point where his primary motivators are grief and love.

Imo he got what he deserved.

There's a (heavily doomer-slanted) view that everyone in The Last Of Us gets what they deserve. But this comes from the portrayal of the various characters as desperate, short-sighted, and inherently flawed beings. That ads a great deal of artistry to the setting. The fungus-zombies become more of an environmental hazard than antagonists, while the humans continue to plot their own futures in increasingly dire circumstances.

I also think last of us 2 is a great (albeit brutal) game

LoU1 ends with a certain sense of hopefulness. Survival in the face of tragedy and desperation.

I think LoU2 might have been a better game if it changed genres. Move away from the 3rd person survival-puzzle-horror and into civilization building, where you collect survivors and build up your neighborhood in the style of a Co-op Fortnite or Arma game. Maybe even flirt with a 4X style, where you get a certain number of days between major events that you can use to explore, hunt/gather, tech up/diplomacize, and finally try to wipe out the zombie menace with your coalition of family, friends, and allies.

Instead, it feels like the game fell into the Walking Dead trap, where they just kinda repeated the same themes and tropes from the original with a different suite of secondary characters.

forcing long wait times on them

When you cannot handle waiting even a full two minutes in between your last treat and your next treat.

Being a 10/10 stacked hottie with awful politics and a personality to match

Being a chill friendly comrade who is welcome in any polycule and knows the recipe for some muy caliente cruelty free tacos

Unfortunately it has to happen that way because so many don't want to confront the cruelity their diet causes.

Individually, their diets don't affect the volume of cruelty. This is a moralistic decision, not a consequential one. The volume of waste demonstrates as much. When we're simply trashing 40% of our agricultural product, whether or not you eat the meat has no effect on if the cow is raised and slaughtered. All it affects is whether the meat goes in your mouth or in the trash.

Which isn't an argument for or against veganism. But its trivial to reconcile the decision one way or another, knowing your consumer choices have no impact on whether these animals live or die.

Unfortunately, this is as good as it gets from the polling suite.

It sure as fuck isnt for everyone.

No. If I had to process all my meat, I'm reasonably certain I'd throw my back out inside the first month. Nevermind fainting at the sight of all that blood. But also, "if everybody had to do their own X" is a tired hypothetical that ignores why we have all these surpluses to begin with. If I had to drill my own oil wells and smelt my own steel and assemble my own fan motors and stamp my own computer chips and synthesize my own techno beats, I wouldn't have anything resembling a modern quality of life.

But raise somebody to kill animals from a young age, and it absolutely could be for everyone. This is, again, a basic tenant of FFA and other such organizations. Normalize the brutality of the agrarian economy before you reach the age where it feels weird. Get a ten-year-old's hands dirty, so that they'll be mechanically slaughtering animals by the time they turn 20. Inure people to the screams and the sad eyes and the horror.

Then everyone can have the mentality of the cast of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

if everyone could only eat what they processed personally, r/steak would not exist

It absolutely wood and it would be even worse than it is now. A grotesquery of macabre horror that fans would call you a pussy for failing to enjoy.

Humans are capable of frightening detachment. Ask any omnivores that has never stepped into a packaging plant.

At some level, it is necessary. If I had to consider all the ramifications of each of my actions, how could I ever bring myself to poop?

I hope lab grown meat brings that about.

Me too. Honestly, given the state of the agricultural industry (particularly with increased rate of disease and the impact of heat waves on herd stability), I could see large livestock herds as economically non-viable in my lifetime. I guess we solve the problem of animal cruelty by everything just kinda... dying out. Then lab grown meat becomes a delicacy and we just get to live in Demolition Man's future.