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amber2 [she/her,they/them]

@ amber2 @hexbear.net

Posts
1
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5
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • So umm, how are things with Iran? Is there still a ceasefire and is that sticking for now?

  • Also hi everyone long time no see. This whole thing seems pretty bad, but also Iran didn't do much last time when trump killed their number 1 general? And, I wonder, will Iranian missiles overwhelm the Israeli anti-missile missiles? Is it possible they run out or something?

  • Besides this megathread, what are good places to get info about the Iran situation that aren't totally influenced by mainstream media?

    I get most of my geopolitics from Radio War Nerd (I've been kinda checked out over the last few years, I've been focusing on learning history. Revolutions by Mike Duncan is really good) but basically I'm looking for somewhere to go to check

    -what just happened

    -what kind of retaliations are we expecting

    -are we going to war oh fuck oh fuck should I panic

  • Im reminded of the folding ideas video about how video games mirror colonialist views

    As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, part of the appeal of video games is their status as new frontiers. In an era when physical space has been thoroughly explored, virtual spaces harken back to the romance of the colonial frontier—as new regions to discover and conquer. 7 Such conquest is not just psycho-symbolic, but also sensitive to the legacies of colonialism and underdevelopment. Since most mainstream video games are produced and disseminated in the “developed” world, they are spaces in which primarily ex-colonial nations can continue to “conquer” the “other,” even in postcolonial periods.8 Such colonial narratives often promote a still widely prevalent Western brand of historical consciousness which depicts the history of colonialism as one of “white man’s burden”—as a benevolent process of taming the wild frontier through sword and scripture or, more recently, drones and democracy. For example, in many popular action-adventure or FPS games, the European or American white male avatar is thrust into a realm of chaos and disorder, and tasked with bringing civilization to the land—either through ridding the “noble savage” of evil and depravity, or through intervening in conflict on foreign soil.9

    In sandbox-building games such as Minecraft, the player arrives, like Robinson Crusoe, into a terra nullius and encourages him to “improve” this land—by clearing jungles, draining marshes, building infrastructure and mining minerals. Its inhabitants—hostile monsters or local villagers—appear simply as obstacles in the path of development, or as resources to exploit. In the map-based interfaces of strategy games, entire regions are transformed into dehumanized tracts of land and resources, ripe for exploitation.10 Cartography, in the history of European colonialism, has been argued as a means by which to render land “legible”—that is, to point out its essential resources, enable their exploitation and minimize any competition to this supply of resources, such as the local population

    .

    Adding actual 3rd world inhabitants as underlings in your game is the next step of the colonialist fantasy that many games offer, and this wouldn't even be the first game to do it, the economies of MMORPGs like RuneScape and World of Warcraft are supported by "gold farmers" who live in places like Venezuela or China, who do mind-numbing grinds to sell resources to western players with real life money to spend. It's fucked up