and come join us here on lemmy. The community you're describing is the kind of use case that lemmy seems perfect for. If enough people from that community are willing to make the switch, it may even have a snowball effect such that the fediverse community over time becomes the place known for Turkish LGBTQ+ to congregate, free from all the bullshit (like lack of anonymity when it is most needed) that reddit imposes. I realize you can't just freely and openly advertise lemmy there and that it would be a slow process that will not help you with your immediate need of a sizeable community, but if you could just let a few people know here and there, some may be inclined to make a comm (or entire instance) free of the reddit shackles, and get that snowball starting to roll, especially as reddit continues to degrade.It's a 2016 dialog choice and QTE driven game along the same gameplay lines as Telltale games like The Walking Dead. Of the writer-director, wikipedia describes him:
Khonsari was raised in his homeland Iran until 10. He fled Iran as a political refugee to Canada after the 1979 Revolution with his family.
My assumption is that there are two possibilities for this game. It's either just another run-of-the-mill both-sides-bad centrist-brained libfest that paints the revolutionaries as being "well intentioned" but all revolutions (except for bourgeois ones of course) inevitably lead to "authoritarian" dictatorships that are even worse than what existed before and any good-guy revolutionaries presented at the start of the game either turn out bad or are shown to have been naive fools for ever hoping things could be better. That's what the game is painting itself to be, regardless of whatever it is. The other possibility, made more likely given the writer-director's background, is that it's flat out unabashedly pro-imperialist, anti-Iranian unmitigated western propaganda.
I guess those two aren't mutually exclusive, but I think you know what I mean, where they kind of represent two ends of a shitty spectrum. (There's also the exceedingly slim possibility its politics are halfway decent, but I'm not really entertaining that thought because the chances are too close to null.) I'm curious enough about where this game lands on that spectrum that I think I'll go ahead and play it. I'm not one to rage quit in the traditional sense, but if it gets bad enough, I probably won't subject myself to it any further. So before going in, has anybody here already experienced whatever this game is pushing? Any thoughts about it one way or another?
Some quotes from the "Political and institutional responses" section of the Natopedia article on it:
When the game started gaining popularity in June 2012, Iranian conservative newspaper Kayhan published pieces naming it "pro-Western propaganda" and accusing Khonsari of espionage; he subsequently felt afraid to reenter the country. Some developers used aliases to protect themselves, and the concept artist fled Iran due to his involvement. Khonsari said that "anytime Iran has something written about them in the west, they feel as if it is propaganda against them." Following the game's release in 2016, the National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) blocked all websites distributing it in Iran and began gathering all illegally distributed copies in the country.
featured in a November 2016 UNESCO report by Paul Darvasi about the impact of games on learning about conflict resolution; Darvasi noted the game "might be studied to determine if [it] can be used to support the production of historical empathy, global empathy, and ethnocultural empathy, all which contribute to the acquisition and development of intercultural understanding". In 2022, a branch of Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education critiqued the game; teacher Alexander Zart found it affected by subjective depictions due to Khonsari's significant personal background, despite its framing as an "interactive documentary".
We will. The problem is that what they want is to wall us off from the rest of the fediverse so that as it inevitably grows (as corporate social media continues to enshittify), no one will see what anti-imperilaists and communists have to say. They want to keep the politics a well-manicured liberal-only garden - with exceptions made for reactionaries and fascists of course. They want to make sure any reddit alternative still maintains the same narratives that reddit maintains, curbing the spread of radical thought. This is the raison d'être of piefed, of lib.world, and of all the calls to boycott the "tankie" instances.
Obviously they'd love to totally kill off the principled Marxist instances entirely, but since that's not possible, they want to cut us off, the purpose is to keep us sequestered and hidden so they can demonize us without anyone seeing how much sense we make and how explanatory Marxism-Leninism is with regards to geopolitics and the absurdity of the state of the world.
It's literally why so much hate is poured on Cowbee in particular because he is so good at just laying out the facts in a straightforward and totally non-combative way that any lurkers who read his comments won't be able to deny he's correct. And that is what they can't have, what is truly intolerable to them: more and more people recognizing we aren't this extremist fringe, but are simply people willing to do the radical thing of applying scientific methodology to social, political, and economic realities rather than accept whichever propaganda is most convenient.