Slovenian “national reconciliation” during capitalist transition rehabilitated fascist collaborators, weakened anti-fascist memory, consolidated new elites, and legitimized capitalist restoration.

you will never hate the capitalist enough.

The intended conciliatory discussion between (former) partisans and their associations on the one hand, and the Catholic Church and representatives of the new state parties on the other, remained rooted in cultural struggle and did not actually deal with the past. Instead, the logical consequence was the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators as equal – if not more morally worthy – actors of World War II.

We're very much in the 'radium underpants' stage of the surveillance economy. A lot of the hype is silly, some of what we're doing is useful, and some of it is downright harmful.

On surveillance, data, and the military-industrial complex.

There's been chatter for the better part of a decade about "wholesome" as a marketing term. Small groups of people online criticize it, then participants in that scene are outraged. It continues, apparently, to attract an audience of people who believe that the term "wholesome" reinforces their sense of self.

Laura makes a great argument for "nurturing" as a genre title and opposed to the morally weighted (& politically fraught) term "wholesome".

Agency and choice are slippery devils, and people are not always very good at pinning down and articulating their real concerns about them. Like ‘freedom’ in politics, I think that when people talk about ‘choice’ or ‘agency’ in games, they are often not talking about the same thing, or even about any single thing, and therefore don’t convey their concerns clearly enough to allow useful discussion.

U.S. oligarchs desperately want to build the biggest right wing propaganda and infotainment machine ever constructed. One that pummels the misinformed plebs with soggy class warfare and divisive culture war agitprop. But they're all profoundly stupid, wildly overconfident, and drunk on sycophancy.

Good, stirring writing with only one head-scratching implication of Evil China, which I have to call out because it is stupid. Rest of the piece is good though. I appreciate the anger!

I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.

Good piece on the recent Ren'Py generative AI debacle. For what it's worth, I'm making a game in Ren'Py and have no intentions of stopping doing that, but this sucks in a very particular way. I hate the modern age sometimes, you know.

It is undeniable that Jewish history hurts, that it leaves lasting wounds on its victims that reverberate through the generations, turning the family into a site of remembrance for a tragic history that is deeply felt, yet can never be truly known. But history is ultimately a narrative form, and its utility lies in how that narrative is constructed. In other words, what we are calling trauma is more likely a collective story with a discrete political function. To place our faith for defeating Zionism in the demand to heal is to treat politics as a pathology, and obscure politics as the method we must use to fight.

The creeping nature of "trauma" as a complete explainer for most/all modern problems is something that I simultaneously feel is adequate and wholly inadequate. On the one hand, yes, trauma is real and can affect (in many cases severely affect) one's way of living in the world. On the other hand, to use 'trauma' as a single, be-all-end-all explanation for worldly concerns is to misunderstand its nature.

This is a piece about Jewishness, which I don't have any familial history of to my knowledge. But similar frameworks around "ancestral trauma" are common in Black circles, and this is something that I have to be very delicate about: yes, of course, trauma due to racism exists. But I quibble a bit at the idea of "ancestral trauma" as something immaterial, something "intrinsic to the soul/body" or something like that. There is systemic injustice, which can certainly shape a culture, and thus the culture can shape the self, but I think that is often misdiagnosed as "ancestral trauma", if that makes sense.

Rubin even goes so far as to argue that Jews constitute a “collective body”—a “whole and unified organism” or “soma” that can act in concert in the way that redwood trees “shape their bodies to support and heal together” when one tree experiences an injury.

Yeah, like that sort of thing, exactly. That is a fiction. It is a narrative. There is use in that narrative, but it is not true (I am nearly echoing word-for-word one of the things that I praise Umineko for teaching me, so this is, I guess, also an advertisement for Umineko (??))

The reality is that humans are not redwood trees, and—as the historian Saul Friedländer observed in a 2013 lecture about the enduring prominence of the Holocaust in Israeli national consciousness—trauma changes form when it moves from the individual to the collective. While individual trauma typically takes root in the family or a similarly “closed emotional field,” Friedländer noted, collective trauma comes about through the communal process of giving meaning to such an event, turning an “incomprehensible occurrence” into a coherent narrative. This resulting story serves a “social function,” providing an “empowering mandate for the community.” Jewish collective trauma, of course, has been transformed into a mandate for Zionism’s crimes, and progressive Jewish trauma discourse is at its most cogent when it acknowledges this as a social and political process.

Also, as always, free Palestine.

It is trauma, [Firestone] argues, that “often complicates Israel’s military policies in the West Bank,” leading to disproportionate responses among soldiers facing down children with rocks. By this logic, Israeli violence toward Palestinians is not the outcome of brutal state policies, but an organic expression of collective Jewish suffering that disrupts an otherwise “healthy” instinct for self-defense. Politics, here, is fully subsumed by the psychological. Healing opens a path to redemption for the perpetrators, while relegating the victims’ claims back to the margins.