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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Punk is an aesthetic
That's all
An aesthetic that developed from rebellion against unjust hierarchies in society. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum.
No but like, using "-punk" as a suffix denotes an aesthetic that is based on imagining a society built around a core aspect, generally an energy source. Like, steampunk is all cooper and big buttons, dieselpunk is all dark steel and plastics, and solarpunk is contemporary utopian urban design with a lot of green space
The relationship to the anarchist punk movement ~~is almost nonexistent~~ remote
If I'm not mistaken btw
Edit : it comes from "cyberpunk" which definitely has punk vibes
I had never heard of this and now all I can think is who the hell conceived of a world even more dependent on petrol. Why bother, just go outside and take pictures.
Dieselpunk is literally a fascist aesthetic derived primarily from the third reich. Like the primary examples of dieselpunk art are the more recent Wolfenstein games. It's literally just fascist tank worship.
I enjoyed the ones I've played so far, but have some real mixed feelings on the setting. In a vacuum there's nothing wrong with an alt-history world like that, but since it isnt in a vacuum, i hate how it buys into and therefore promotes the idea of Nazi scientific superiority and "superweapons" and over inflated sense of the wehrmachts power. It also completely erases the Soviet Union obviously. I don't remember but it probably puts forth human wave theory as why they lost
On the other hand, it's pretty fun to gun down nazis
The second game also has cool Communists and Black Panthers in it which made gamers big mad.
Grace is cool as hell and she got more hate than the actual nazis or the abusive father figure. Stay mad
gamers
Actually saw some real
brained people saying "yeah B.J.'s father is terrible, but it turned B.J. into the ultimate Nazi killer so that's good." The gamers have never been alright but damn
Oh hell yeah it is! I just played The Old Blood so this minor gripe was fresh on my mind.
If I recall correctly, the soviet government surrendered after getting nuked
It's on a newspaper snippet in the HQ in the first game
Oh cool, that's a way better way to write that happening. Glad to be wrong on that. It's been a while since I played The New Order
Wehraboos. Nearly all of dieselpunk works i seen is glorification of either straight up nazism, or the american roots of nazism or the postapo evolution of nazism.
There's also whalepunk, which is based on Victorian pre-petrol aesthetics. The Dishonored games, for instance.
Most of those are just derivatives of "cyberpunk", which is very much connected to the anarchist association of punk because it's about the cyber-lumpenproletariat and such
Oh yes of course, that's the piece I was missing thanks for pointing it out
Yeah, it got its start that way, but at the end of the day, if you picked out 5 self-described punks, you're liable to get a bunch of really disjointed political beliefs
The punk scene has been divorced from its origins and is mainly just set dressing for a kind of aimless, plaintive rebellion
Not to say that there aren't any punks out there who aren't cool, just that like a lot of other movements its been reduced to a commodity
The point I'm trying to make is that you can't completely disassociate art from the material conditions that created it. I was having a conversation about this with someone else earlier today when we made the observation that He-Man is basically western Sailor Moon, complete with queer identities, similar criticisms of society and even does transformations similarly.
They more or less independently ended up at the same thing, in the same time period, because the conditions in which they were created produced very similar outcomes. Both of them became gay cult icons to their audiences.
You can't divorce art from the conditions that creates it. We could take the entire aesthetic from either of these shows and port it, then try to remove as much ideology as possible from it to transform it into something else... But the key element grounding the art can't be removed or you ultimately remove its identity, you turn it into an entirely different "aesthetic". The gay elements and style are a core part of the dna for these shows, a rebellion component that criticises the conditions in society at the time of their creation. They physically can't be removed from these shows without transforming the aesthetic feel of them too far for everyone to feel they're comparable or correct evolutions of the original art.
The suffix -punk usage attempts to do this, but ultimately it continues to maintain a very small and un-removeable element of its core leftist DNA criticising society because it simply can't be entirely removed without transforming it into something nobody would call -punk anymore. They'd call it SolarFascism or some shit I don't know. Either way it would look transformatively different to Solar-punk in a way that people would no longer want to describe it as such.
Pretty much these days
Kind of sad really
Drink verification can
I have certainly seen a lot of punk media with the American flag in it
The correct amount of American flags is directly correlated to the amount of those flags getting burned or pissed on
An aesthetic under capitalism is like a culturally distributed type of brand. Punk used to have more common and distinct cultural signifiers, but capitalism forces us to abandon those in favor of aesthetic ones. Aesthetics are easy to recognize, to sell, and to consume. So that’s what survives. This doesn’t change anything about the history of punk and what it used to mean to be punk. It also has a queer history as well as a leftist one.
There is still plenty of DIY underground punk mostly done by leftists and there's a worldwide network of bands, traveling kids, people operating venues or community centre's etc. It's just really underground and inaccessible. Pink belongs to the punks. It still exists, you just aren't necessarily part of it.
Yeah, I had a folk punk musician crash on my couch after a show at one point but that’s about it.
Folk punk doesn't count either.
Then I’m completely out of touch. I got nothin