[KirinDave]

Maybe take it as a mark of grim respect.

Far left and anarchist groups are generally considered to be unsuccessful in the arc of modern history, with even China partially adopting western aspects of governance to remain competitive. Their successes are almost entirely in appealing to moderates and with heavy appeasement of capitalism. One of the most famous attempt at true communism ended spectacularly, with a bulk victimization of many marginalized people who had been coaxed out of the shadows by a regime that failed to hold power to protect them.

Far right groups are taken much more seriously, because a conflict they started and escalated blighted an entire continent.

If it seems unfair that it's okay to make a video game (admittedly: a very fun, enjoyable game) about killing nazis by the dozen is pop culture but games about killing antifa can't even get news coverage, maybe that's true. It's because the victors of the last conflict against organized fascism accept violence as a constant reaffirmation that the binding substrate of civilization is democracy. You're "in-tribe" if you're on that train. If you seek to subvert or destroy democracy, that triggers violent a rejection by most of the western world.

A topical example: It's generally regarded as somewhat funny that Richard Spencer gets punched. Technically, it's illegal and we accept violence is no way to treat citizens in principle. Yet a lot of people in the US do hold racist views even if you take a very narrow definition of racism, and we don't see mass punching at scale. Spencer's singled out because he's publicly part of the ideology proposing the subversion and destruction of democracy. This turns off many of the typical restraints we'd exercise. Bannon and Yarvin probably need to be cautious of punch sqads as well as their profile raises.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (and imo, justifiably) so. As a general rule, America bends its own rules when it perceives something taking advantage of said rules. That's not a new thing, and it explains a lot of the legislative dithering that we have seen over the decades and a lot of the political rhetoric we see playing out today.

But I really do want to stress how much fun it is to have pop cultural license to go back and play a mindless game like Wolf2 for a bit.

[zanny]

I had to do a double take that the KirinDave talking about politics on HN is the same one I watched years back play and manage a Minecraft server with the Yogscast. What a small world!

[KirinDave]

Yeah I used to make modpacks for them. It got boring. But I do still stream Minecraft irregularly.

[jquery]

> Far left groups are generally considered to be unsuccessful in the arc of history

Um, what? China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, just to name a few of the more famous ones. Tens of millions killed in the name of a communist utopia.

[KirinDave]

China is a more complicated story, I think.

But North Korea and pre-Stalin Communist Russia are not regarded as "successful" and Post-Stalin Russia is reasonably rejected as a tenable example of leftism. Cuba, I think, is looked upon more favorably now than when it was more centrally managed?

[jquery]

Is "not real communism" still the go-to counterpoint? Can we excuse the failures of Nazism and fascism by saying they weren't real fascism? I don't think so. Judge political ideologies by their results, not their lofty intentions.

[KirinDave]

The failure of Communist Russia was in losing power to someone who used fundamentist rhetoric to sieze power and then subvert that system.

Stalin's late Russia was something quite different from where it started. In much the same fashion that we recognize China's form of government fundamentally changed TO Communism we can recognize that it lost hold.

And if you need a source of negative propaganda about Communist government, look no further than China. A sexual harassment crisis it's illegal to talk about, systemic religious and ethnic persecution, a 2 tiered oligarchic economic system, dark but weighty rumors of involuntary organ harvesting... You name it, they got it, where "it" is bad outcomes.

I'm always surprised that there aren't more proponents of modern, IT-informed government systems in our community.