[Xmca-l] Re: Burning...

[David Kellogg]

Wagner:

You were, I remember, interested in gaming culture. But if I remember
correctly, you weren't just interested in gaming culture "in the
wild"--when you look at gaming culture on line  in the wild, you see that
it's often associated with misogyny, violence, and Alt-right motifs (e.g.
the "Lost Cause" of southern slavery in the USA--my brother, for example,
has been doing a regular blog for Matrix games on the anniversaries of the
civil war, and his work is very often commentated by pro-slavery gamers).
You were interested in gaming culture as a vehicle for
teaching-and-learning in schools--both as a vehicle of conveying content,
and as a way of mediating the role of the learner from passive recipient to
active participant.

Well, consider THIS video, which was made by a transexual woman who started
out (male) in the on-line gaming culture making videos to try to talk to
Alt-right people about their support for Donald Trump. I apologize for the
coarse language, and some of the rather risque jokes, but you will see it
is part of the message. (I also do not endorse the call to vote Democratic:
Al Gore ended "An Inconvenient Truth" with a stirring call to elect
democrats, and in 2008 Americans dutifully did, with no discernible effect
whatsoever on any of the issues raised in this film.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6GodWn4XMM

Now, in some ways, it is srikingly similar to your video--the spokesperson
is carefully chosen and made up, there is a direct appeal  to the (male)
viewer which doesn't eschew sex appeal. But here's what I think is
different.

a) ContraPoints manages to use many of the Alt Right's own arguments--their
aesthetic, their humor, and even, at one point, their own racism (when she
argues that unless climate change is tackled, we will have to deal with
hundreds of millions of dark-skinned refugees). She even ends with the idea
that all successful political struggles are essentially aimed at mythical
enemies.

b) ContraPoints, nevertheless, does not have to disguise her own Marxist
agenda or her own actual persona--she simply presents it as part of a
panoply of gamer identities.

c) ContraPoints is neither minimalist ("don't take an airplane to
ISCAR") nor maximalist ("no es fuego, es capitalismo!")--she doesn't want
to simply "meliorate" capitalism, nor is she happy to simply blame
capitalism for everything (in fact, elsewhere she points out that
capitalists themselves are not to blame--since they are helpless and
largely harmless patsies for Capital itself, hence Martin's appeal to Bill
Gates!)

d) Instead, ContraPoints is a transitionalist (no pun intended). That is,
she begins with simple demands which are in no way anti-capitalist--but
which neveretheless compel attention even in children (that's the point of
the eroticism, the watermelon, the knife, etc, but she could also do the
same with the demand for a living minimum wage, or protection for
indigenous peoples, or simply putting out the fires). Because these demands
are not inherently anti-capitalist, the inability of capitalism to satisfy
them needs to be explained. In real political struggles, this is often done
by the capitalists themselves: we cannot make a profit if we increase
wages, protect indigenous people, or--in the case of Bolsinaro--try to put
out the fires (Bolsinaro says Brazil doesn't have the resources, which is
probably true). A transitional programme then demands proof--open the
account books to prove that there is no money for minimal wages, no land
for indigenous peoples, no resources for fighting firest. It is then
capitalism itself which has to demonstrate its own bankruptcy--and create
its own, united, educated, and purposeful gravediggers.

Of course, the most obvious objection to this kind of transitional
programme is that her humor is misplaced and that this struggle is not a
game. Sometimes the humor is beside the point--the suicide rate among
transgender women is somewhere around forty percent, and some of
ContraPoint's work has a strong flavor of the person in the bath
self-medicating and self-treating. But I know that you, of all people, will
never object that struggle is not a game!

(By the way, I'm not going to ISCAR either--same reason!)

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663



On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 7:35 PM Wagner Luiz Schmit <wagner.schmit@gmail.com>
wrote:

> A short video about this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfiutlJ7uWc
>
> So yes, it is capitalism
>
> Wagner
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:08 PM Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:
>
>> This is a satellite image not of fire per se but of the carbon dioxide
>> the fire is releasing (redder = more CO2) from the weather site Windy.
>>
>> Perhaps worth sharing? Who has Bill Gates' email address?
>>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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