[POLITICS] Extra Credits seems to have driven off a cliff

[BrawlMan]

Ehh, I wouldn't give him any credit. Hes an idiot who is just saying the standard take on things, pretty much everyone thinks that extra credits video is stupid. If he wanted to have any nuance at all then he would have addressed the real weakness of their argument which is more that the aesthetics of being a nazi in a ww2 multiplayer game isn't the same as being a nazi.

He more or less did that in the video. He just did not have the extra stuff you described. Act Man was nothing more than a palette cleanser that was EC. He has passion for gaming and I respect that, but is whole stop politicizing games agruement holds no water. He does have a few decent videos.

I don't know who Foucault is, but he sounds important...I am glad the same applies to this EC video too.

Understanding Foucault is absolutely, positively, sine qua non critical to the topic at hand. No if's, and's, or but's; period, the end. Which is why people who perennially fail to understand Foucault, intentionally or not, and appropriate his work to push their own agenda get me seeing red.

This is what "normalization" actually is: the systemic use of disciplinary mechanisms by institutions to control ideation and behavior, into a form idealized by the institution. Notes: disciplinary mechanisms are both reward and punishment. Foucault's original analysis only extended to formal institutions, although informal institutions also apply.

In other words, the phenomenon to be normalized has to be idealized, and engagement with that phenomenon has to be rewarded and punished accordingly. All those mechanisms have to be in play.

So, let's say I'm an executive at Baskin-Robbins. I have an idea to make and market tuna-flavored ice cream, but because tuna-flavored ice cream sounds disgusting, I'd have to normalize it. So, I have to idealize tuna-flavored ice cream by running ads talking about how delicious it is, how only Baskin-Robbins carries the tuna-flavored ice cream, how cool tuna-flavored ice cream is and how cool people eat it, get celebrity sponsorships, typical advertisement bullshit. But, that's not enough; I have to reward consumption of tuna-flavored ice cream (buy one get one free coupons, price reductions, promo offers, etc.) and punish non-consumers of tuna-flavored ice cream (price increases to flavors that aren't tuna, smaller ice cream cones and sundaes, fewer available toppings, etc.).

People might think tuna-flavored ice cream is disgusting at first and won't buy or eat it. But, stack the market in favor of tuna-flavored ice cream, and people will start buying and eating it for the other benefits even if they don't like it. They'll start accepting it, and as the advertising works its magic, people will eventually start thinking tuna-flavored ice cream is good, and buy it for its own sake. Then, you can say you've normalized tuna-flavored ice cream.

This is where all these social justice-y arguments fall flat on their ass, and why they want to misrepresent normalization. No game designer worth their salt idealizes Nazis, there's no reward-punishment mechanism for playing Nazis in video games. Normalization does not, and cannot, occur in that media landscape.

What they're actually talking about is cultivation. Cultivation is the theory that sustained exposure to fictitious or fictionalized settings through media consumption, causes people to believe the real world aligns to, and operates in accordance with, that setting. In other words, watch enough police procedural television, and you start to believe detective work and forensic analysis are a fast-paced career paths dominated by personal drama, and crimes are solved quickly and with decisive outcomes.

The issue is, cultivation theory has been predominantly studied with regards to television and radio, and studies involving cultivation in interactive entertainment are spotty, mired in problematic methodology, and rarely conclusive. And, cultivation only influences ideation and behavior insofar as audiences react to shifting beliefs about the world around them. If I only consume media that depicts German people as Nazis, which cultivates the idea all Germans are Nazis, I'm more likely than not to treat all Germans as if they're Nazis (rather than, say, become a Nazi myself). Which brings us full circle back to EC's galaxy-brain take on the issue.

A really good read on this topic in particular is the book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, in terms of how the media weaponizes cultivation to sway public opinion.

Thanks for the info; learned something new.

 

[stroopwafel]

Here's the ticket: You don't need to be a Nazi to help or acquiesce to their plans, you just need to remain passive and not resist when they get to power. No one in Germany could pretend as if they didn't know that the Nazis wanted to murder all Jewish people and start a war of conquest to eliminate the USSR, kill its population and take all their land. They knew this because Hitler wrote a book about it, then forced everyone to own it and talked about these plans constantly. I am not saying that every person in Germany in 1932 to 1945 was pure evil, but they all enabled the Nazi regime to start a world war, the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost. By not resisting the Nazi regime they became culpable, in the same way that you become culpable if your buddy presses a gun into your hand and tells you to help him rob a bank and you go along with it. So every person who took up arms for the Nazis, no matter how unwilling, naive or indifferent they were aided the Nazi cause. We can lament the people who did resist and still died due to Allied or Soviet warfare. But the average German who kept going to work to make war materials, who sent their sons and fathers to serve in the Wehrmacht and who never tried to stop the Nazis are just as culpable as those that volunteered for the SS and fought willingly.

That is just ridiculous, how can simple people stand up against an army? The vast majority of people aren't suicidal heroes, most are scared and do as they are told. They didn't 'enable' anything. On top of that they were brainwashed with non-stop propaganda as well with no alternative news sources. Do you honestly believe the majority of the German people wanted the holocaust?

The same argument was used by Osama Bin Laden when Atta & co hijacked the planes to fly them into the twin towers. Those office workers were responsible for the U.S. policies that protect the Saudi monarchs as the American people were the ones who elected their presidents. Holding regular citizens responsible for government decisions is just ridiculous reasoning. A cheap justification for indiscriminate, homicidal bloodlust.

Same goes for WW2. Dresden and many smaller German towns were of zero strategic importance. And how did Churchill ''hinder the war effort'' when the RAF dropped more bombs in 1945 on an already defeated Germany? 600,000 civilians died in those campaigns with over 76,000 children; bleached skeletons of babies killed during air raids. What did they do? Sure, you can say everything is overshadowed by the holocaust but that doesn't make these atrocities anything less of a war crime.

But well, if you honestly believe Stalin and Mao were the good guys here then their people were truly blessed to have them as leaders.

 

[CaitSeith]

its okay to be the villain so long as you know you're the villain.


That's why I play Chaos Space Marines. Its not because I'm a literal Chaos god worshiper, its because I understand the need for villains in a story.

Nazis aren't just fiction villains in a story. Forgetting that fact is what normalization means.

The real Nazis are dead, ie the 1940s global super power Nazis. Current era, or Neo-Nazis are not in control of Germany, do not have sizable armies, have some of the most advanced weapons of war and are not currently besieging London having taken over most of continental Europe.

The 1940s global super power Nazis were the same as the 1930s german nazis whom raised with the help of no other meaningful power than the power of propaganda.

They might be dead, but their ideology still survives and it is still as infectious and potentially dangerous as in its beginnings.

 

[Avnger]

its okay to be the villain so long as you know you're the villain.


That's why I play Chaos Space Marines. Its not because I'm a literal Chaos god worshiper, its because I understand the need for villains in a story.

Nazis aren't just fiction villains in a story. Forgetting that fact is what normalization means.

The real Nazis are dead, ie the 1940s global super power Nazis. Current era, or Neo-Nazis are not in control of Germany, do not have sizable armies, have some of the most advanced weapons of war and are not currently besieging London having taken over most of continental Europe.

Interesting. Would you mind sharing that with these fellas? They seem to disagree with you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nazi_Party

 

[CaitSeith]

its okay to be the villain so long as you know you're the villain.


That's why I play Chaos Space Marines. Its not because I'm a literal Chaos god worshiper, its because I understand the need for villains in a story.

Nazis aren't just fiction villains in a story. Forgetting that fact is what normalization means.

The real Nazis are dead, ie the 1940s global super power Nazis. Current era, or Neo-Nazis are not in control of Germany, do not have sizable armies, have some of the most advanced weapons of war and are not currently besieging London having taken over most of continental Europe.

Interesting. Would you mind sharing that with these fellas? They seem to disagree with you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nazi_Party

Don't waste your breath. If they haven't gassed a whole ethnic group and militarily occupied half a continent, they aren't real Nazis...

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

its okay to be the villain so long as you know you're the villain.


That's why I play Chaos Space Marines. Its not because I'm a literal Chaos god worshiper, its because I understand the need for villains in a story.

Nazis aren't just fiction villains in a story. Forgetting that fact is what normalization means.

The real Nazis are dead, ie the 1940s global super power Nazis. Current era, or Neo-Nazis are not in control of Germany, do not have sizable armies, have some of the most advanced weapons of war and are not currently besieging London having taken over most of continental Europe.

The 1940s global super power Nazis were the same as the 1930s german nazis whom raised with the help of no other meaningful power than the power of propaganda.

They might be dead, but their ideology still survives and it is still as infectious and potentially dangerous as in its beginnings.

No its really not. People forget everyone was a dick back in the 30s and 40s, at least by our current standards. Fuck sake Truman as a senator is on record, on the senate floor, saying we should join WW2 on the side of the Nazis so we can all gangbang the communists.
"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
So while he was anti Hitler, he was so anti Russia he would have sided with the Nazis to beat them.

No one was good. The self same soldiers who came home from the European campaign became the officers who hosed down black civil rights workers, and started the FBI to hunt down gays and blacks and liberals, and the CIA to assassinate liberal candidates in South America.
Nazis as an ideal worked so well because everyone was basically already a Nazi or as close to as damn, and very very very few had any objections to their genocides.

The pendulum has swung so far left in 80 years that it can't swing back - its lodged in the ceiling. California would go to war with Texas before letting actual extermination camps be built. In most of Europe its illegal just to say Nazi.
And before you say 'Well it was a gradual slide with Hitler', no it wasn't. He was always antisemitic and the German people were historically super antisemitic. Hell they blamed the Jews for the black death and did their own little baby Holocaust hundreds of years ago. Hitler's ideology fell on already super fertile ground with a history of basically being Crusade era Nazis who won.

Thinking that playing a fictional game where you're a fictional version of an extinct brand of Nationalist European soldier is in any way going to influence the brain of a literal different millennia adult is as insane as thinking playing for the Allies is going to get a bunch of kids to relaunch D-Day or firebomb Europe. Why aren't we worried about that? Its not like the Nazis held a monopoly on war crimes during WW2

 

[Caramel Frappe]

Damn, I remember a time when I would genuinely enjoy their videos on The Escapist, admiring the artwork, and firmly believe they're standing up for gaming as a whole. Then the whole Escapist incident happened, they reacted poorly to the situation (long story short, one of their female artists got into a crash, needed surgery on her arm, they did a donation pool, Escapists and others donated way more than the $15,000 required to fix her arm, and instead of using that money to fuel the show's quality, they wanted to spend it on their own indie studio. Escapist wanted a talk, but the guys immediately resorted to lawyers, lied about how things were going down, then quit before the dust settled. I never really got over how they handled it).

Fast forward, and yea .. their videos have dropped in quality. As a matter of fact, the video that got downvoted to oblivion kind of shows their aim- they are trying to gather attention through heated arguments and controversy. Also after watching the video, they continuously said things that went against their previous beliefs, making them out to be hypocrites.

... I wish them the best, but this is only going to get worse from here. Almost a million views, and the video got obliterated with downvotes, it's pretty much a given they've definitely hit more than 'just a nerve'.

 

[Marik2]

I remember when they angered the internet by saying science is also a kind of faith or something.

 

[Leg End]

When growing up, gamers hated the likes of Jacko or the Government coming in to say stupid stuff and try to restrict games, and generally shit all over people screaming in moral outrage over everything, like games or music or what have you. As the years went on, some people turned into their parents and became these very people and entities they hated. Extra Credits just joined the club.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

When growing up, gamers hated the likes of Jacko or the Government coming in to say stupid stuff and try to restrict games, and generally shit all over people screaming in moral outrage over everything, like games or music or what have you. As the years went on, some people turned into their parents and became these very people and entities they hated. Extra Credits just joined the club.

I'm a firm believer that most of those were not the same people, they were new additions that were never really into games to begin with but since they became popular they had to keep up with them somewhat to stay relevant with their peer groups but the way they approach them is like how an ignorant person would.

As for EC, I blame their change more on Dan having been gone for a full year and change by the time they made that video. His was likely the voice of reason that kept the crazier tendencies of some others in check.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

Wow its almost like you do understand! Unless of course you're being sarcastic and believe video games cause violence, which is the exact same argument as video games cause Nazis, but that would be ridiculous because that argument is long debunked and doesn't get any more clicks in YouTube anymore so we could possibly be entertaining such an outdated, outlandish idea. That would make us look really silly, and we wouldn't want that, would we?

SNIP

Sure, here ya' go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany

Please note the end date of Nazi Germany, and the start date of the American Neo-Nazi party. I'll await the battles won and the causality costs of the American Neo-Nazi wars. It better be in the hundreds of millions for all this effort googling one thing has taken me!

 

[Erttheking]

I'll await the battles won and the causality costs of the American Neo-Nazi wars. It better be in the hundreds of millions for all this effort googling one thing has taken me!

Don't waste your breath. If they haven't gassed a whole ethnic group and militarily occupied half a continent, they aren't real Nazis...

Well, you didn't exactly prove him wrong, or even moderately hyperbolic.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I've not been a fan of Extra Credits for a long time, but I have to admit that I'm not really seeing the supposed "moral outrage" here. At absolute worst what this is is a poorly made argument. That doesn't mean its conclusion can simply be dismissed out of hand.

I'm also getting kind of sick of the argumentum ad Thompsonium, it's a dumb, reactionary impulse which says more about the thin skins and outrage culture of quote/unquote "gamers" than it does about anything else. It's also utterly, utterly hypocritical in application because the kind of people who come out with this stuff are generally fine with calling out games as "political" or "propaganda" if they, for example, feature minority characters in prominent roles. They just don't think that should happen to games they personally like.

But it should be immediately obvious that talking about the political framing of games, and how they might be operating as propaganda, is not the same thing as saying that playing a video game will cause otherwise normal people to go out and murder someone. If you take a bad argument about how media influences people to become murderers, and extrapolate from that that media has no effect on people at all, then you're wrong, and your argument is bad and politically motivated.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I'll await the battles won and the causality costs of the American Neo-Nazi wars. It better be in the hundreds of millions for all this effort googling one thing has taken me!

Don't waste your breath. If they haven't gassed a whole ethnic group and militarily occupied half a continent, they aren't real Nazis...

Well, you didn't exactly prove him wrong, or even moderately hyperbolic.

So...I'm right. Neo Nazis are not the same as 40s WW2 Nazis, you both know this, and accept my point of view. Cool. Thanks. Happy to help. Let me know if you need help determing the difference between Shit and Shinola.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Though somebody made an excellent point in the videos comments by mentioning how its fine to play as Americans even though they dropped nuclear bombs genociding whole cities in Japan. We like to focus on the Nazis as the only bad guys of WW2 but they aren't the only ones who did horrible things. Terrible things happened to the Nazis too like the mass rape of German women(at the hands of the Red Army mostly, but the allies let it happen)

Everyone did horrible things in WW2, sure. The USSR, UK, France, Belgium and USA also did terrible things outside of WW2 too, whether that was colonial oppression, political terror or mass murder of their own population. The difference is that all of those countries fought in World War 2 as a defensive action. Whatever else the USSR, UK or USA did, they committed what atrocities they did to prevent the Axis from succeeding in their goal of colonial terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide on a level that is frankly unimaginable. It was Japan and Germany who wanted to depopulate China and the USSR to use as future colonies for their own people. It was Germany who started an industrial genocide with the express intent to eliminate all the Jewish and Slavic people in the world. And it was Germany and Japan who started the war to realize these ambitions.

That's not to say that the Allied strategic bombing campaign, the atomic bombs or the Red Armies "revenge" on the German population were good or decent things, they were not. But we should never compare them to the atrocities of the Axis, because none of the atrocities the Allies committed would have happened if the Axis hadn't decided to fight the world in a bid to commit the largest genocides the world had ever seen. That's why the Nazi's (and Imperial Japan) are a particular kind of evil, because they didn't see their atrocities as a necessary evil of war (as the Allies and, to some extent, the USSR did), the intention to commit atrocities is why they went to war.

I'm not sure how to argue with this. First off I don't want to seem like a Nazi apologist, can we all agree nobody assumes I'm nutty enough to think the Nazis and their industrialised genocide were a good thing. I also don't want to be looking like some virtue signaller pointing fingers and condemning different opinions on WW2.

Second of all, I sort of agree that the Nazis definitely were evil and had to be stopped... But I don't know how to phrase why exactly your argument is making me uneasy that its okay to go all out because they started it and they had to be stopped. Like its kind of an 'ends justify the means' thing you are putting forward here Gethsemni right? I don't know, that just makes me feel uneasy. Not that I think you're a bad guy or anything it seems very practical.

I think an interesting perspective might be to look at modern conflicts and apply the same logic, say lets take an admmiteddly absurd idea that ISIS all gathered in one city, we could nuke the city and get rid of them all forever but kill lots of innocents, would that be okay? Would the ends justify the means or would we be screaming they are murderers? ISIS is obviously far weaker than Nazis were but they are also evil right? What if there was a big army on the ground killing ISIS en masse and making headway but also were raping the wives and daughters of ISIS flat out, would we say its total war and this happens or demand mass punishment?

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I've not been a fan of Extra Credits for a long time, but I have to admit that I'm not really seeing the supposed "moral outrage" here. At absolute worst what this is is a poorly made argument. That doesn't mean its conclusion can simply be dismissed out of hand.

I'm also getting kind of sick of the argumentum ad Thompsonium, it's a dumb, reactionary impulse which says more about the thin skins and outrage culture of quote/unquote "gamers" than it does about anything else. It's also utterly, utterly hypocritical in application because the kind of people who come out with this stuff are generally fine with calling out games as "political" or "propaganda" if they, for example, feature minority characters in prominent roles. They just don't think that should happen to games they personally like.

But it should be immediately obvious that talking about the political framing of games, and how they might be operating as propaganda, is not the same thing as saying that playing a video game will cause otherwise normal people to go out and murder someone. If you take a bad argument about how media influences people to become murderers, and extrapolate from that that media has no effect on people at all, then you're wrong, and your argument is bad and politically motivated.

You can both think that something isn't capable of being effective propaganda, and also still be upset at the ATTEMPT at being propagandized by a game you purchased for entertainment, no matter how inept the attempt was.

For your point to make sense, the outrage would have to stem from a perceived risk of being converted into some crazy ideology. No, people don't feel like there's any risk, they just dislike that those who DO believe that you can propagandize people with games are attempting to propagandize them.

Even if it doesn't actually have an effect, even if you believe it to be ineffective, the attempt, no matter how useless, it still an affront.


Finally, there's a thousand Japanese games with minority characters that nobody is calling political or propaganda just because the characters are Asian, so that point doesn't make much sense either.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Second of all, I sort of agree that the Nazis definitely were evil and had to be stopped... But I don't know how to phrase why exactly your argument is making me uneasy that its okay to go all out because they started it and they had to be stopped. Like its kind of an 'ends justify the means' thing you are putting forward here Gethsemni right? I don't know, that just makes me feel uneasy. Not that I think you're a bad guy or anything it seems very practical.

I get where you are coming from and there is a moral line to be drawn where the means used to stop the Nazis becomes immoral too, like when you start rounding up and executing German civilians because they might be Nazis. Depending on how you weigh different options the atomic bombs might be what pushes the USA into immorality, when it deploys the ultimate weapon on a nation that is all but incapable of offensive military action and has maybe half a year tops before its entire core area is starving due to naval blockades.

I personally think that neither the Allies nor the USSR crossed the line into immorality or unjustified actions during WW2, because you've got a lot more leeway with doing dubious stuff when you do it to stop someone who's doing things that are much, much worse. Had Germany, in some magic wonderland world, acted like total Saints and never committed a single war crime or crime against humanity, then the bar for what would have been good conduct in war for the Allies would have been much, much higher. I guess you could say that I'm arguing for proportionality. In the case of WW2 the Axis were so heinous and had such terrible plans for their victory that what's proportional and adequate to stop them is far beyond what's reasonable to invade Iraq in 2003 as the USA. Because, once again, the end result of the Allies being too meek in WW2 is that the Nazis get to go through fully with the Holocaust and continue to occupy continental Europe. Those are some pretty high stakes.

 

[stroopwafel]

Because, once again, the end result of the Allies being too meek in WW2 is that the Nazis get to go through fully with the Holocaust and continue to occupy continental Europe. Those are some pretty high stakes.

Not making deliberate, unnecessary civilian casualties has nothing to do with being 'too meek'.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Not making deliberate, unnecessary civilian casualties has nothing to do with being 'too meek'.

Define unnecessary. The Western Allied strategic bombing campaign was started as a means to weaken Germany's industrial capacity and thus, in extension, Germany's ability to conduct a war. It was thought of at a time when the Commonwealth had neither the physical possibility, nor the military strength, to conduct a land war against Germany. The ethical crux of the matter was that targeting industrial centers also meant very high civilian casualties as collateral damage, this because the CEP (dispersion from target) of strategic bombings at the time was in the realm of 2-3 km during day time and double that during night time. Such a large CEP in combination with the fact that industrial areas tend to be located in or adjacent to cities meant that civilian casualties were unavoidable.

At the time when the strategic bombing was being conducted there was no certain way of knowing how much war material Germany could produce and hence no real way of knowing if the bombings were having their intended effect. It was, however, concluded that the threat of the strategic bombings diverted a lot of important air force and anti-air assets away from the Eastern Front, which allowed the USSR to more effectively contest the air space and conduct tactical bombings. The need to produce a lot of AA guns also took away from the production of artillery and tank guns, which effectively diminished the German ability to produce war winning weapons further.

Would you have preferred that the UK, and later US, just sat on their hands and waited until they could storm the beaches of Europe? Would you have preferred that the war dragged on for another year, with all the millions dead in the Holocaust and Nazi ethnic purges in Eastern Europe that would go along with that? The Western Allies decided that the lives and well-being of German civilians was less important then that of the people the Germans occupied and persecuted and that it was an acceptable trade off to cause high civilian collateral damage to Germany if that meant shortening the war by impeding German war production. Personally, I'm very much inclined to agree with that assessment, since most German civilians (discounting children and slave labor, really) supported the Nazis and the war. Had the German people not given close to 50% of their votes to the Nazis in 1932 and then sat idle when the Nazis geared up for war and ethnic cleansing, they would not have been in a situation where the RAF and USAAF dropped thousands of tons of bombs on them. This as opposed to the 12 million Soviet civilians that died during WW2 because Germany invaded their land and started killing them indiscriminately. The Germans were not victims in WW2, they were happy to go to war as long as it went their way.

As a final aside, I sympathize with the suffering the German people went through during WW2 but I sympathize more with the suffering of the victims of the genocides that the German people helped perpetrate. In a choice between sparing Jewish and Soviet people (and all the people of a dozen other ethnicities and countries that also suffered) from suffering or German people during WW2, the Germans will get hurt, every time.

 

[Erttheking]

I'll await the battles won and the causality costs of the American Neo-Nazi wars. It better be in the hundreds of millions for all this effort googling one thing has taken me!

Don't waste your breath. If they haven't gassed a whole ethnic group and militarily occupied half a continent, they aren't real Nazis...

Well, you didn't exactly prove him wrong, or even moderately hyperbolic.

So...I'm right. Neo Nazis are not the same as 40s WW2 Nazis, you both know this, and accept my point of view. Cool. Thanks. Happy to help. Let me know if you need help determing the difference between Shit and Shinola.

Silent. I can put up with a lot. Do not twist my words to better suit your world view. I am not your mouth piece. And frankly your little bit of dishonesty there has me utterly infuriated. Nazis are Nazis, just like Klansman are still Klansmen, it doesn?t change just because they?re not as influential as they used to be.