[quote=@Vilageidiotx] Mainstream media in a market-based system becomes diluted by pandering pretty much always, so long as it is truly mainstream. And in every one of those cases, niche markets rise up parallel to the mainstream, sometimes producing art, sometimes just pandering to a more specific demographic. Video Games are at that point now, with small developers getting way more attention then they did ten years ago. I think Minecraft started that trend. [/quote] See: Meet and Fuck. Or all those other anime dating sims. [quote=@Vilageidiotx] To that guy's question: a person can have a job and be a leftist. I have a full time job, that pays well and doesn't give me shit, and I'm perfectly content with it. Doesn't mean I have to pay homage to capitalism in some religious way. My leftism comes from a complete lack of faith in capitalism's permanence going forward. I think people have fallen for this bizarre black-and-white fantasy that, because Leninist Communism collapsed, capitalism is now the permanent system of human civilization for all time and always. If you even spent a moment thinking about alternatives, you are a heretic. And that is alarming. If you make something sacred, even necessary criticism becomes a heresy. If I thought that I'd have my [u]current[/u] quality of life for the rest of my life (barring biological impediments), and that everyone else would be slowly raised up to the same level, then yeh, I'd be a political centrist. But from what I've read and seen, I think we are running headlong into peak-capitalism, when my life and the lives of most everyone else starts getting worse. Some art is produced by working folk. You do get stories like the conditions in which Steven King wrote Carrie. But it is generally true, and not even a controversial idea really, that part of the function of the working class is to make a class of people who experience and create culture possible. Shit, the idea was pretty much mainstream until the 19th century. I'd even bet that similar things are whispered in garden parties by our own rich and famous today, even if it is less fashionable in a democracy to admit it. [/quote] I actually had to leave a Discord chat recently because I had gotten a quick reputation of deriding capitalism which made everyone no longer take me seriously. In one particular major point I found myself arguing with three or four people in the debate section who were trying to defend the capitalist system as being the most purest and moderate centralism is the best option, where I was arguing from an albeit amorphous left-lib, AnarcoCom, even straight-communist perspective. I think I told you about it before when they were using undefined "human nature" and "shit's too hard" as counter-arguments. In any case, it got to the point they weren't taking the argument seriously and were strawmanning and taking it all as such a hilarious heresy I had to cut things. Later someone was telling big-daddy Right-Lib when he returned about "the anarchist" who was just there and he made comments about how "special" those sorts of people are. So there's a sort of cultural antipathy I guess you could say, and I say this because as it turns out these people were either college freshmen or high schoolers so they've not yet learned what it's like to bleed for pay or really plan things out because mommy's money's got them. But it kind of reinforces for me this anti-intellectual notion from self-described moderates using intellectual fallacy has convinced itself centrism is best and the current system is OK, which is starting to sound more like a new conservatism. And then I got tired of them because even in casual chat they believed going "boop" was the height of conversational quality. But per what I mentioned earlier, I really wish I could find that post. It was posted as a screenshot, but I can't help but feel I fucked up the retelling. Oh well.