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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Maybe you know (from back when the web was still young) the comic Sinfest by Japanese-American artist Tatsuya Ishida. His turn from fun webcomic to ultra-anti-woke/anti-porn/pro-maga wingnut is maybe the most surprising heel turn in history.

What confuses me though is his unashamed hamas-freedom fighter sentiment and Jews-are-the-villains narrative:

https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-13

https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-11

https://sinfest.xyz/view.php?date=2023-11-01

Similar to Stonetoss anti-Jew/Israel comics:

https://stonetoss.com/comic/the-great-pumpkin/

I find it surprising because they align their politics suddenly with the woke blue-haired decolonization genderfluid hipsters they are normally opposed to. Instead my guess would have been, now that israelic comedians make fun of such US-student (https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbfccVBo9tE), that right wingist would latch onto that and try to flip Jews to their side. Is it just being contrarian and being opposed to whatever the mainstream media is for? Do they secretly have a hard on for homophobic/antifeminist Islam? Or maybe, as a non-American, I simply underestimated the strong JewishWorldConspiracy-Nazism-undercurrent in some right wing circles?

Wait, what happened to Sinfest? Jesus, I don't think I read that comic for like, 8 years. It got insufferably feminist and preachy. It took further bizarre ideological turns?

I saw random speculative comments that his hard feminist turn was a result if a relationship he got into. Maybe they broke up.

I wasn't reading comics when Dave Sim went over the deep end during his Cerebus run. But I did see Ishida skew his views over the years. And Jon Schaffer go from "historical re-ennactment" metal to 6Jan attender. I guess if you're going to be playing with ideological tropes in your day-to-day work, you're likely to get changed by them.

I - for one - am thankful I never made a career out of being creative. Probably would have been at least as insufferable as these folk.

The only one I really saw happen was Randall Munroe.

I can't recall any way Munroe went off the deep end. Unless abandoning the What If column without explanation counts.

Oh, not to, like, Cerebus extent. But there's a lot of Blue Tribe sneering in it for the past decade or so.

Also there's a fairly-obvious explanation for the What-If column: he started putting it into paid-for books instead. There are ads for these books at the top of said column.

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