Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
I met a trans lesbian socialist who does a lot of pro-Palestine organizing recently.
She also really likes Rick and Morty.
i think in general online leftists care too much about the media someone else consumes. like...oh you watch rick and morty?? cool i guess, not really for me. i don't really think it invalidates their politics lol
i think this is a function of consumerism intersecting with calvinism in the west. like if you are defined by the media you consume and the media is defined by its author, then if the author is a Sinner™, so are you. i want to read a more in-depth analysis so if any of you have one please send it
Consuming media is a safe and permissible form of political expression. You can watch a movie about overthrowing empire just don't attempt it in the real world. If your allowed range of political expression is making media, then media becomes your politics. Who you are, politically, is what media you consume. As your actual ability to participate in political action is crushed, capital allows you to sit in a corner and make believe. This is why there was so much radical art, music, poetry, etc coming out of the 60s and 70s. Actual protests were being squashed, capital made some concessions, and then stuffed all the radicals in a play pen and gave them a box of crayons. By the 80s and 90s, radicalism was just another brand and rebellion was a genre. If you are into really subversive art then you are a radical. If you don't like that stuff then you are supporting the status quo. This is where we start to get these notions of attention and support being mystified, something that the internet would throw into overdrive. Just passively viewing something gives it power. This goes against Marxist materialism as it goes against the idea of practical activity. Viewing political actions as simply observing and making the right observations cannot lead to understanding or change.
This is how you end up with people obsessed with media choices and consumption. It also bleeds into other aspects. The internet turns everyone into a passive observer. You can observe anything anywhere at any time. It feels powerful. Couple that with a tiny range of political expression and you get your online left. You get people who obsess about the curation of online spaces and all the media that goes along with it. You have the veneration of passive observation where attention is the physical driver of politics. This is why you can easily catch people here talking about politics like it's everyone clapping their hands for tinkerbell. If we just pay attention to the correct things, and pay attention hard enough, good things will happen. If we stop paying attention to the bad things, they wither and die. In some ways the structure of the internet does allow this to happen, like upvotes and social media algorithms that work on engagement. But that's not reality. Passive observation does not move the needle. Social media companies abstract social relations much in the way capitalism abstracts them. They depend on everyone thinking that engagement is the same thing as Marx's practical activity.
the average Langley Dominos worker has a succinct read on western politics probably because of all the pizzas they have to make anytime shit pops off
Half the place likes cumtown here
And the other half love it
(I've never listened to cumtown, but once I thought of a bit and someone accused me of lifting it straight from an ep, so I've sworn never to give it the time kf day
This happens more often to hexbears than one might imagine.The only bits safe from accusation are about 
Not too surprising, Nick Mullen was the president of DSA after all
Legitimately, the only reason Rick and Morty is "bad" is because it's so good that a lot of people got into it to an embarrassing degree.
If it were a show with no baggage attached, nobody here would have a problem with it
eh, my coworker made me watch half an episode and i really hated that cruel asshole of an alcoholic grandfather. really, i hated all the characters.
And the creators. 
Yeah, the show itself doesn't really have egregiously bad politics. It's not South Park.
sounds like her IQ is pretty high
She did seem pretty cool
I mean, it's not exactly like there's an eco system of communist media in this hell scape
hey at least it's not south park
both Futurama and the Simpsons (earlier seasons) are liberal and I really like them
Rick and Morty is a legitimately good show. They also got rid of Roiland the sex pest and are independent of him now.
yeah like a lot of things the cringe of the fandoms affect people's views of the underlying media
cries in Steven Universe
You present the idea that media consumption should match a person's political actions. You say that you know a political organizer who does a lot of good activism work, and that person also watches a cartoon with reddit humor and a problematic creator. Your observed reality contradicts your preconceived expectation.
Are you confused because your expectation was wrong? I don't really know why every person chooses to watch whatever they watch. There are a lot of progressive people who seem to watch South Park, which is way more problematic than Rick and Morty. People will resent you if you scold them for what they watch.
Aren't you like a huge fan of cumtown? You post about it all the time. Many people consider cumtown to have problematic humor and a problematic creator. Do you want people to judge you based on your media consumption?
I know many anarchists who like Star Trek.
Fucking same! All the anarchists i know like startrek in some way shape or form, but all of them hate the federation.
hello comrades i am here to explain to you why the borg is actually ideal anarchist society and everyone should be borg for anarchist reasons
no i am not the borg why do you ask
I'm a communist and i like old James Bond, and The Mines of King Solomon and all those orientalist movies that were basically travel agency ads for british boomers.
"Looks at user name being a mass murdering bourgeois royalty" I owe you no explanation 
Liking any media not produced in USSR before Khrushchev's secret speech is sus
/s
I judge people hard if ds9 isn't their favorite star trek. But I also respect that picture box go ha ha for most people.
What’s wrong with Rick and Morty?
turned himself into the most wretched of commodities, a pickle
Wretchedest shit I ever saw.
Justin Roiland, the show's creator, is a domestic abuser and a sex pest
edit: and a pedo
I also like me some Rick and Morty though
shit like "Roy: A Life Well Lived" goes hard
"That's the difference between us, Morty. I never go back to the carpet store."
sometimes the show drops these lines that go hard. or they have these extended sequences without dialogue that are incredible. like the "space snake" sequence... or the reminiscing final moments of the guy from the spaghetti planet. i thought about that one for days after. each season seems to have like 1 or 2 episodes with a sequence showing the lives of some minor character of that are deeply emotional, as if to imply that everything, everywhere does matter regardless of how frequently rick insists nothing ever matters.
also, as the lore develops the characterization gets richer, like the history of rick's trauma betrays his nihilism as a coping mechanism. i didn't really appreciate that larger arc until i pirated the whole thing and started working through it.
it was kinda like how when you get far enough into Better Call Sail, you find out that Jimmy retreated his personality into Saul out of loss of his last friend.... so while saul is hilarious, he's tragic.
I love Tom and Jerry but I don't exactly endorse cruelty to cats. Sometimes a hobby is just a hobby.
First few seasons of Rick and Morty can be pretty funny. A lot of people have a "switch brain off, laugh" approach to tv shows and don't want to think about politics or whether a show is "problematic", they just want to enjoy their slop.
I liked their image of Jesus with cum gutters
You're not a liberal, CliffordBigRedDog. Get the fuck out of here.