This episode made with blast processing! Thought Slime does what Nintendon't! Hello, only 90's kids will get this video. I'm Brain Think. Nostalgia is not an ancient Greek word that means "the pain of an old wound." It'd be very poetic if it were, but it's not! It's more accurately translated as "the pain of homesickness." The fact that the meaning of this word has been misremembered is very fitting, in my opinion. We're all remembering a better version of the past that never actually existed, where "nostalgia" had a cooler definition. Nostalgia is a longing for the past, a desire to return to a better time. Everyone feels it sometimes as they age, but people of my generation in particular, in my corner of the world, tend to have a far less healthy relationship with it. We grew up in a time that was very stable, or rather, appeared quite stable to us, the benefactors of the instability everywhere else. We came of age watching that stability become dismantled after 9/11 and the Bush administration's erosion of civil liberties. Then, when we entered the job market, an enormous recession kept us from building up the type of self-sufficiency that our parents had enjoyed before us. Robbed of that seemingly natural progression, we escaped into happy memories of childhood and tried desperately not to grow up. And maybe I'm projecting a little bit here. A lot of people didn't have the privilege to regress in this way, but I sure did! And so did plenty of other people. The sewer background behind me is sometimes pixel art because I grew up playing Super Nintendo, like on my shirt. Like on - like on my shirt? So I drew a bunch of pixel art, and it frustrated Hammerbeam Teacorp so badly that she had to make a good one. And it's a sewer full of slime because I grew up watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! The Eyeball Zone, whatever that is, is aesthetically similar to a Canadian children's programming block from the 90's. I spent a considerable amount of time last week modding an SNES Classic so that I could play Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure. Which I played to the end and beat even though I'm an adult and I'm very busy and I definitely, definitely had more important things to do. Doing literally anything is more important than beating Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure. I literally had video games that were more important to play. I've been trying to start a gaming channel for weeks. I could've been playing video games more productively than I was doing. And all of that is spiritually pathetic, but also harmless. Who cares if I wanna smoke weed and watch Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers? Might not be edifying for me, but it's not hurting me, and it's certainly not hurting anyone else. But it does mean that I care about silly stuff sometimes. I get mad if DC Comics makes a bad editorial decision, which means I'm always kind of mad. But some people care a lot more about this cultural ephemera. Some people care about it to the point that they're willing to hurt others. Hey, you know that part in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke heads into a spooky cave and he sees Darth Vader, but then he kills Darth Vader, and he finds out that Darth Vader has his face because guess what, dickhead? You can't hate someone without carrying them within you! We hate most that which we cannot face within ourselves, dummy! If I were to head into that cave, which I would not do because I have no interest in becoming a Jedi - Jedis are cops - I would see Jeremy Habley, or "TheQuartering" as he calls himself online. I've talked about this dingus a lot on my channel. A lot more than I probably should. I'm a little bit obsessed with him. For those that don't know, TheQuartering is a
[laughs] pop culture commentator who got famous for being too toxic for the Magic: The Gathering community. Because he kept harassing women within it. Nowadays, he sits in front of a wall of all of the same stuff I like, the same stuff that makes me happy because it reminds me of my innocent childhood, and weaponizes them to spread hate and bile. I can't help but think that if I met this guy at a party, if no touchy political subjects came up, we'd probably hit it off. We have a lot of interests in common. On paper, we're practically the same person: shlubby white dudes who rant to YouTube about their political views, often guised in the pretense of pop culture analysis. What's more, he's wildly more successful, which is... golly. Audience, you know me, Thought Slime. I don't tend to self-aggrandize very often. I know that I am garbage and I make garbage. But I think the garbage I make is... much better than the garbage he makes. So maybe some of my obsession is bitterness. But I feel like I suffer a lot of guilt by association with dickheads like this. That the communities I want to be a part of - video games, cartoons, comic books, sci-fi, horror - are all dominated by some of the worst chuds on the face of the Earth! They become breeding grounds for reactionary weirdos, and the more toxic they become, the more I feel like I have to hide my interests because I don't want anyone to think I'm like them. Or worse, maybe I am like them. Maybe I'm more like them than I'm willing to admit. There are a lot of reasons that it got this way. I don't wanna simplify this too much, but it's Gamergate. Gamergate did it. Gamergate brought it to the forefront. Gamergate transformed these spaces from... "you know, there's simmering reactionary subtext", to spaces exclusively for dipshits. Spaces where it was no longer just annoying or disgusting and sometimes even unsafe to be anything but a straight white dude, but actively unsafe at all times! It started this constantly escalating pushback to diversity in media. The frothing hatred to even the recognition that other people exist, let alone any changes to accommodate them instead of us. Diverse representation in mass media is not a huge win for marginalized people. It is an extremely small win. It does not fundamentally alter the power structures which have marginalized them. It simply allows them to exist within those power structures. Even that, the most minor concession imaginable, is enough to inspire frenzied contempt among the man-baby industrial complex. But it wasn't hard to see coming. That type of yearning for an idealized prelapsarian past is the foundation of all reaction. It's a difficult balancing act to find joy in the past without developing a fear of the future, of progress. Because what if they take away your fake maple syrup? And that leads to some far worse territory. There's a phrase you've probably encountered online. Maybe as a meme mocking the original concept, or maybe sincerely. The phrase is "Reject modernity; embrace tradition." The first time I read these words, it was on a poster for the group "Generation Identity", a far-right xenophobic hate group dedicated to fighting immigration and the "Islamification of the West", i.e., Muslims being allowed to live free of persecution. And this is the part of the video where I have to trot out Umberto Eco's definition of fascism from the essay "Ur-Fascism", as all people on left RedTube are contractually obligated to do. He lists off a series of traits that nascent fascent mo- He lists sauces - He l- He lists off a series of traits that nascist - Jesus, man. He lists off a series of traits that nascit - He lists -
[laughs] He lists off - [slowly]
He lists off a series of traits that nascent fascist movements possess, the first of which being the cult of tradition. Jesus Christ, that sentence was harder than I thought it would be. The cult of tradition, mind you, is not of any particular tradition. It's tradition itself. It is not relevant to a fascist or proto-fascist whether different traditions are compatible or contradict one another. Taken as a whole, they reveal some sort of wisdom or esoteric mysticism that reveals a higher truth. Quote, You might notice that the far right tend to combine a lot of cultures into one mishmash to claim all the stuff they like in history. Somehow, their ancestors were Vikings and Romans and European Crusaders at the same time! These groups fought one another. They hated one another. They didn't see themselves as one shared race or identity. They were bitter enemies. In the mind of the Ur-fascist, though, that contradiction strengthens this connection rather than weakening it. Because you're arriving at the same esoteric truth across multiple contradictory sources. And that esoteric truth just so happens to be whatever it is you wanted to believe in the first place. The second trait a fascist or proto-fascist may possess, according to Eco, is the belief that traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. So it's hard to read a phrase like "reject modernity; embrace tradition" without seeing it as almost a direct invocation of this definition. An explicit statement that they agree with Eco about what a fascist is, and that they are that thing that it is. That's why they hate modern art, for example. All the best art has already been made and rather than trying to improve on old techniques, the best we can do is imitate the great masters of the past. Searching for new modes of expression simply degrades what has already been made, which contains all the beauty and truth you could ever possibly hope to discover. Who are you to think you could paint better than da Vinci, or write better than Shakespeare? They're also obsessed with the idea that modern art is scatological in nature, which is really funny because the only reason so much scatological modern art is still produced is to provoke that exact impotent anger. [Prager] Throughout history, the primary purpose of art was to elevate people. Through beauty, artistic excellence, and emotional depth. To the left, the primary purpose of art, sculpture, and music is to shock. That's why so much contemporary art is meaningless and involves the scatological, meaning urine and feces, yes, urine and feces! [Thought Slime]
It long ago stopped being shocking to normal people that someone submerged a painting of the Virgin Mary in piss or put a urinal in an art gallery. But they can't just let it go because they think it so strongly confirms their belief that modernity leads to degeneracy. The reason people make these artworks is because they love piss and if modernity is allowed to proceed unchecked, everyone's just gonna be pissing on each other all the time! We're gonna live in a piss culture. Nostalgia is a powerful political tool. If you can leverage people's general unease with the forward march of time, the feeling that things used to be better, you can convince them that you can return things to a state of glory. You can bring back the good times. You could... make America great again. It's worth pointing out, though, that the glorious pasts these guys want so badly to return to... were largely imaginary. When was America great? Was it during slavery? Was it during Jim Crow? During segregation? During the war on drugs? During mass incarceration? And it's not like they like those things - though... y'know... some of them do, especially segregation - or even just that they wanna sweep them under the rug - although, again, they do also wanna do that. It's that the past they're imagining is a contradictory mishmash of the best parts of all of history and the best parts of now. The perfect world has already been revealed to us by tradition. It's our job to discover it through study of tradition rather than pollute it further with dangerous new ideas. Now obviously, not all nostalgia is a sign of latent fascist sympathies. I'm not trying to imply that liking old stuff makes you racist because people were racist in the past. I'm just pointing out the observable fact that some forms of nostalgia are useful tools for the far right. So on the one hand, you have harmless nostalgia: "I like old video games!" On the other hand, you have a dangerous nostalgia: "My people were great once, until they were conspired against and humiliated! And we must return to our former glory through bloodshed!" It's not hard to see how the connection was built. One thing that gets geeks in a snit is when people mess with "established canon". You can't go back and change the way a character looks! You're not sticking to the source material! You can't cast a black woman as Mary Jane! She's white in the comic books! Cookie Monster doesn't eat vegetables! He eats cookies!! In their minds, the very best version of these properties has already been delivered to us. It's not our job to change them or to iterate on them, but to simply imitate them in perpetuity. Deviations from established canon, deviations from the source material, represent a threat to the thing you care about, an attempt to change it, to subvert it. And this passion isn't archival, either. I think it's an unassailable good to maintain an archive of old works. I think it's bad to alter those works when and if the altered version is the only archived one. No doubt, future generations deserve to have the original versions of things preserved for them for study. And just, you know, to enjoy. I think it sucks, for example, that the original prints of Star Wars of Star Wars were destroyed in making the special editions. And just to head this off at the pass, cause I can hear you typing in the comments, I don't think that statues of Confederate generals have much cultural value, so fuck them, kill all statues. But that isn't the thing which usually upsets these nerds. What upsets them is usually some new thing that comes along and presents a new angle on a work of art that they liked in the past. Something which recontextualizes an older work, not something which destroys an older work. Take a look at how TheQuartering responds to Elmer Fudd not having a gun in a new Looney Tunes cartoon. [Habley] Not even the Looney Tunes is immune from modern-day retconning to appease twelve weirdos with Twitter accounts. Right. And now, nothing is sacred. "The new series 'Looney Tunes Cartoons', which premiered last week on the streaming service HBO Max" - who will now not be getting my money, although I was excited to see The Snyder Cut. What about, you know, all the millions of kids that see their fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters go out hunting? I don't get it. What's next? Is Pepé Le Pew gonna lose his spray because it's too much like chemical warfare or something like that? Is that what we're gonna do now? Pepé Le Pew's spray is torture, so we had to cut that from the show? "- reboot will not be the first in the entertainment world to eliminate these things from production. In 2016, the musical "Hamilton" chose not to use them during the performance at the Tony Awards in wake of..." another terrible thing that happened at a nightclub. Let's look at how the comments react. " - in wake of..." another terrible thing that happened at a nightclub. [Thought Slime] What's really telling is, he even says in the video he doesn't even really like Looney Tunes all that much. [Habley] Like most kids in America, I grew up watching Looney Tunes - Bugs Bunny, all the various tales there - I don't remember them very much, but it's like if they're on TV, I kind of remember them - I'll always see an episode and think "I remember seeing this when I was a kid." None of them very memorable, but a good time killer. Maybe not always the best messaging, but it was cartoons, right? This whole rant is just a kneejerk impulse to anything from the past being changed! It's those dastardly SJWs! They took away Elmer Fudd's shotgun in a cartoon I'd never watch in a franchise I don't care about at all! And how am I supposed to sleep at night? Is nothing sacred?! If we live in a society that cannot respect Elmer Fudd owns a gun, then what's even the point? I thought that could just be the one thing they would let me keep, the one thing that tethers me to this sin-cursed world, but they took it away. Now don't get it twisted, I love Looney Tunes and I think it's a little silly that they took away Elmer Fudd's gun. I don't think Elmer Fudd owning a gun promotes real-life gun violence, because he's a hunter hunting a rabbit. It's all very silly. But on the other hand, I'm also an adult, and I have a job, and I don't care if they make a cartoon that I do not like. There are many cartoons I do not like. What I do about that is I do not watch them, and it is fine and nothing happens to me. Jeremy is also an adult - physically, anyway - and he doesn't even really like Looney Tunes. So why's he even so upset about this? To Jermbo, the removal of Elmer Fudd's gun is part of a larger pattern, one where creators and artists are needlessly kowtowing to the demands of a vocal minority of SJW interlopers. These nefarious SJWs aren't making these changes because they believe what they're saying. They're just trying to erase traditional imagery and traditional values by turning pop culture into insidious propaganda! [Habley] But yeah, keep telling us it's "about the kids" and not about pushing your own weirdo agendas. I'm sure people will continue to believe you. [Thought Slime] He spends a considerable portion of this video complaining that one of the lead animators on this show made a drawing with a gun in it. [Habley] What's this here? This looks like a weapon. Why did you draw that? Here's a tear gas canister. Why are you drawing such - Why are you drawing cartoons that may actually represent real life? That can't be. You should probably take this down. [Thought Slime] J'accuse, you hypocrite! Why is it that it's okay for you to draw a gun on your personal Twitter account all the while obeying a mandate not to do so in a property you're working on for one of the largest media companies in the world? You're trying to trick my kids! I'm onto you. You're trying to take their guns away so that the wascally wabbits can take over! Bit of a tangent here, but I don't know where else to talk about this. Before I move on from the Elmer Fudd video, I gotta bring this part up. [Habley] "In the new series, the character will carry a scythe." Won't that foster opinions of slavery? You know, the tool that people used to hand-work the fields, what about that? I wonder if anyone's pointed that out. So now we have Bugs Bunny glorifying that kind of behavior. You know, plantations. Why not have him use a cotton gin as a weapon? What? What the fuck are you talking about, dude? All farmers used scythes. It wasn't a slave thing. You know the hammer and sickle? The sickle represents farming 'cause farmers use it. That could've been an analogy you made. You could've said it was communist, it represented communism. That'd still be shitty, but it'd make sense. What the fuck are you talking about? Okay, had to get that off my chest. Thanks for indulging me. The nefarious SJW eerily mirrors another of Eco's hallmarks of Ur-fascism: obsession with a conspiracy to undermine you. Quote: Hey, everybody, just... Okay, look, I'm not equivocating these things. Being an antisemite is self-evidently several orders of magnitude worse than being an anti-SJW or whatever. Jews are a very real group of people who suffer the very real consequences of antisemitism, while "SJWs" is just a label that you apply to people that you don't like and aren't really persecutable in any organized way, 'cause how do you even decide who they are? I'm not saying that Jeremy is being antisemitic here. Jeremy's just being a buffoon here. However... this line of reasoning is extremely useful to antisemites. You prime people by saying that there's a powerful group of people manipulating the media to erode your cultural values, your identity, and your past. Whether that be the nation or the Nintendo, it's being attacked by the modernist degenerates. Once you've accepted that this secret propaganda apparatus exists, it's relatively trivial to switch who exactly you think is operating it. Also, Jeremy definitely was being antisemitic when he made this joke: [obnoxious boinging] Hey guys, here's a funny joke for you: Should Jews exist? [laughing] Oh stop, stop, my sides are splitting open. I'm losing it over here! I'm laughing my ass off at your funny, funny joke! It's so fucking funny! What a funny joke you made! [obnoxious boinging] Memory is fallible. Each time you remember something, you alter your own memory of it, until eventually, your experience of the past is nothing like the reality of the past. Also, each of us remembers things from our own point of view, and the past is rosier for some of us than for others. Pretty clear to me that there is a pipeline from the anti-SJW geek squad to far-right xenophobia. But it by no means has to go that far to be dangerous. The pop culture garbage that these nerds obsess over are the products of a culture where certain people had power and others did not. These things were not produced in a political vacuum. We just took the politics within them for granted as, you know, just the way things are. The choice to insert more people of color into superhero comics, for example, is no more political than the fact that for most of the genre's history, the overwhelming majority of popular characters were white. That, too, was political, just like this. This is just more thoughtful about how these politics are handled and the effects they'll have on readers. Bits of media by no means create these power structures. They were created BY these power structures. But they do help to perpetuate them. By refusing to acknowledge or change the problematic aspects of things we love, we demonstrate a deeper willingness to tacitly endorse those power structures so long as they continue to give us what we want. And I don't think that it's worth having racism so that we can also have Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure. Maybe that's just me. I think that I would trade Boogerman to get rid of racism. That compromise is very good to me. Hello and welcome to the Eyeball Zone! Here in the Eyeball Zone, all hope is lost. Hey, I got a fuckin' banger for you this week, folks. "Pre-Colonial Africa and the Myth of a Savage Continent" by satenmadpun blew my fuckin' mind. I didn't know nothing about pre-colonial Africa before watching this, and it really brought home just how much racist indoctrination I'd swallowed uncritically my whole life. And somehow, they managed to take that story - which as you can imagine, has a very bleak ending - and make a video that is entertaining, informative, and funny as hell. I am in awe of this video, and I can't wait to dig into more of satenmadpun's catalog. And it so perfectly fits this video, because how do we fight bad ideas about the past constructed to maintain toxic power structures? Through education and scholarship. I give this video my highest possible recommendation: ten eyeballs out of ten. Do you have a small leftist project you'd like to see featured here in the Eyeball Zone? Send me no more than one email at thoughtslimeeditor@gmail.com with the word "eyeballs" somewhere in the subject line, and perhaps you, too, will know the eternal despair of the bittersweet embrace of the Eyeball Zone. Thanks for watching my video. Like this video if you remember the video game Super Mario World. Do you remember that one? Like the video if you remember that video game! Please also subscribe to me here. Also, you can go to patreon.com if you wanna give me money. If you can, do that right now. I know times are tough, I just - I just gotta put it in the video. I gotta put it in the video, okay? I'm fine. Don't worry about me. Everything's good on my end. It's just - I put it in the video, okay? I'm sorry. Also, did you know that if you want, you can watch more of my videos at youtube.com/ScaredyCatsTV? Those videos are about horror movies. Go watch those too, as well as these. Watch all of my videos. Only watch my videos. You have no right to watch anything that I didn't make. I also stream video games every Thursday at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time, usually on twitch.tv/ThoughtSlime, sometimes here on YouTube, so just subscribe and smash that bell button if you wanna know when I go live. It's real fucking hot in my apartment and I'm sweating again, but don't worry, soon I'm gonna be moving somewhere with central air and this long, sweaty nightmare will finally be over.
"The man-baby industrial complex" is such a spot-on description of that part of the internet, damn.
Matt dunking on right-wing shitheads is one of my favourite things.
Referring to the first part of the video, I also constantly deal with the fear of association with the Capital G gamers who spout prejudiced bullshit, which is why I have a hard time getting back into things such as Minecraft and Steam. I know that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, but I still kind of struggle. Very thorough video!
The quatering guy is the biggest crybaby toxic cuntbag. I randomly stumbled on his channel, and was amazed this guy makes a career just literally complaining about every fucking thing; complete loser.
I've seen this phenomenon occur among car enthusiasts as well. All you have to do is convince them that environmentalist movements will take away their project cars, and you have them wrapped around the right wing's thumb.
I'm reluctant to hang out with other car enthusiasts since the space is infested with chuds. The hobby seems to have a serious old boy's club problem.
I've been thinking a lot about the close relationship between childhood nostalgia and far right recruitment tactics, so this video pleases me.
He could have leaned harder into how much a bunch of bullshit it is.
I can totally confirm this. As someone who was part of the alt-right, a big part of it was longing to "go back" to my childhood or younger years. Nazism seemed like a way to make the world "innocent" again. Obviously this is foolish in retrospect, as you can't make the world be how you thought it was a child, as that was literal fantasy. What you can do is improve society to a point you no longer have that need, where your adulthood is better than your childhood.
My transition away from fascism was also closely interlinked with my personal """glow-up,""" i.e. just becoming actually happy and content with my life.
Thought Slime blew up my recommended and he was my introduction to breadtube and remains my favorite breadtuber. I think he's incredibly smart and elegant speaker. I only wish he wouldn't be so self-deprecating. I see him as probably the best public speaker for the leftist community.
I used to see a lot of the nostalgia/authoritarian/source-material-traditionalist sentiment in the D&D community. Recently though , with the latest example this week being a debate about whether "Orcs" = code for black people, and whether or not orcs should all be evil or not, I'm seeing a lot of encouraging pushback for improving things going forward.
Edit: Click here for the recent announcement I am referring to.