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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   28160 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Thats what we have now! Capitalism produced Reagan, a square jaw movie hero turned president. Communism gave us Brezhnev, Castro, Mao and Kim Il Sung, all manner of fat ugly aesthetically and behaviorally discomforting golems.

That was half a century ago. We now have Biden, Trump and Kamala.

Even communist attempts at beautiful art were mediocre shitpiles, with Soviet Realism being a pastel pastiche of the colouring of Old Masters overlaid onto garish parodies of reality.

Still better than capitalist attempts at beautiful art we are currently being served. We just had a thread about how capitalism can't even do proper pop-culture slop anymore.

Communism is UGLY and gave us brutalism, plasticised film dolls ironically more unnatural than the west, and unaccountable leaders who didn't have any physical charisma at all.

In capitalism the mere suggestion that we should have beautiful public spaces will get you purged from the party.

That was half a century ago. We now have Biden, Trump and Kamala.

Who are marxists in all but name.

Even Newsweek has acknowledged that republicans are more attractive

Well, I included Trump on the list, he's no Adonis either.

Ben Garrison shows us the Trumps we see in our hearts but not our eyes, for his radiance burns our feeble eyeballs.

Age will have that effect, dude is 78.

Yea I get that, I truly truly truly do! Modern DEI wokism gives us distorted faces from ME:Andromeda and Star Wars Outlaws to design shitpiles like Concord or Dustborn, while the successors of communism give us gacha ptsd waifus and robot fuckdolls.

BUT that doesn't change the fact that communism is STILL ugly. Modern Starbucks seattle commies overlap with the capitalist class you rightly decry, pinning the hammer and sickle badges on their newsboy caps as they slave under capitalism, showing that true commies can't make anything beautiful. I think even the commie furries make ugly shit, with anything resembling beauty overlapping with nazbol furries.

I do not mean to be purely combative, but I really wish to know: what communist beauty actually is there? I am probably cheating by excluding modern China and its cultural/physical outputs, but like I really don't see communists producing anything beautiful historically.

If the Wikipedia page on “Stalinist architecture” is anything to go by, then communists have produced some things of beauty. Although a quick wiki skim suggests that the communists pre-Stalin were just as strongly married to their hideous architecture as our own architects of today are.

/images/17254340944042058.webp

That space realism shit they had going on in frescas was great, you got your muscular dude grabing the atom flying through space, you got your worker man and woman both beutifully detailed with their muscles wrangling a work implement vaguely in the direction of forward or upward. At least the artists in the CCCP knew what human beuty looked like.

Just look at it.

The west has lost even the will to depict this energy. I want my mass media to tell me, we're fucking going to space, and you and your wife will toil to make it happen. We're getting on that bloody moon rock or die trying.

Are you telling me that Memphis Corporate doesn't get you fucking JACKED UP to knock out some spreadsheets?!

Ok this one goes pretty hard. I dont put much stock in soviet films, architecture or music (plastic people of the universe arent soviet and its not possible to enjoy their music sober), and i already expressed disdain for soviet realism, but this poster fucks.

I personally blame the hays code for the weird plastic archie comics style plasticised all american boy aesthetic that permeated even the space raygun era of american science fiction art. ironically, watching out for commies made the outputs commie level fails. thanks hoover.

I do not mean to be purely combative,

That's ok, I was mostly being contrarian for the fun of it, though it is interesting just how far I can take stuff like I wrote above without leaning into LARPing.

Though one problem I have with the question you're asking is that the parameters aren't clear. What is "communist beauty"?

  • They do get some points in my book for preserving / restoring the beauty of the past, which is rather controversial under contemporary capitalism. Does it count? Or do we say it doesn't because someone else built it? If the latter:
  • Does any work created under communism count? They did have some bangers. Good fantasy, good scifi, some decent songs... though you might say they're just a product of their local cultures, and not exclusive to communism, and therefore they don't count, so:
  • Do only works created under communism for the glory of communism count? Because if we do that for capitalism, we're only left with Ayn Rand. I think only the religious were able to pull that one off, and they lost their mojo by the time we started getting Christian Rock.

They do get some points in my book for preserving / restoring the beauty of the past, which is rather controversial under contemporary capitalism.

Not just purely preservational/restorative. The Saint Petersburg and Moscow metros are gorgeous and clean. Compare to the metros in American cities, where you have a decent chance of having to step over poop or deal with a meth addict smoking on the train, surrounded by Corporate Memphis posters.

The ONLY thing appealing about communism is 'we promise to get rid of the degenerates you hate'. The low hanging fruit of public drunks and mentally incapacitated malcontents is a universal scourge everyone cheers to have removed. It is when the jackboots search for more necks to step on when the appeal loses out.

Whether the removed are helped or locked up is inconsequential. We just son't want them enshittifying our public space.

The downfall of western public spaces is entirely because criminal malcontents, especially but not limited to the highly melanated, act freely without sanction. Get rid of them and the animating disgust normies have will no longer be misdirected towards progcommie 'harm reduction' bullshit.

Seriously? The only reason people endorse communism is to stomp on black criminals?

If you’re going to toss out theories like these, you need to put in more work making them coherent. There are any number of ways to be more accurate and less inflammatory.

Banned for one week.

I thought the St Petersburg metro got started under the Tsar? If they continued to expand it while keeping it's style, I guess that should still count.

Looking at Wikipedia pages, both Moscow and Saint Petersburg appear post-revolutionary. There were talks of a metro in pre-revolution times, but those plans were for it to be above ground.

Well then, definitely a point for the commies!

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