About Face: Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men | Hacker News Reader

About Face: Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men

popula.com

58 pointsmml24 comments

A wonderful exercise in forced narrative. A pastiche of turgid ramblings and half-glimpsed reasoning. A tour-de-force of self congratulation and confirmation biased wrapped in the used-toilet-paper-sheet of ideological agenda. As emetics go I can not recommend it highly enough.

Exactly. You can tell how badly the author wants this demographic of people not just to exist, but be some credible existential threat, the evil white man-child alt-righter set out to destroy everyone else.

Of course people like this exist - they are by no means representative and they haven't ruined the world yet ...

So you're saying you liked it, or...?

Started out interesting, got out-of-hand pretty quickly.

I've been noticing lately how politically-motivated clubs constantly need to incense their base by exaggerating the problems of the era. This is true right or left. Be it "war on Christmas" or "polluting black punisher pickup-trucks of death" (i.e. this cartoon). I see it in newspapers, youtube videos, podcasts (even more balanced ones like Joe Rogan).

Of course, really in the end you can't put the blame on the pedagog. People opt-in to following angry blow-hards for a surrogate sense of purpose in their otherwise dull lives.

The cartoon does get pretty silly, but there is a real danger to a large segment of the population having dull, lonely lives. They are full of discontent and ready to be lead.

urgh - so simplistic and completely without nuance, just merrily spinning it's own logic and coming to weird ultimate conclusions. This stuff is seductive because of it's format, but conspiracy theories also layer the logic on slowly until it's so thick you don't know where to begin to pick it apart.

I agree that it's conspiratorial but I do like the attempt to analyze this shift in a sub-section of men's fashion. So many men are "operators" operating operations nowadays. I get the attraction to the aesthetic but it just seems so out of context in every day life.

This isn't a new phenomena in that it's really no different than say, the dime store cowboy or the popular 90's thug look. It crops up whenever people are bored and or disaffected and want to feel "tougher."

That's an interesting point. I read the Preacher comics waay back in the day (also 90s, I think) and after I finished them it really did seem to play up Jessie as the tough cowboy-thug-alternative-grunge-priest thing. I enjoyed reading them in the moment but was ambivalent immediately afterwards.

I was impressed with the illustration in OP but it was paired with this emotionally unsophisticated/immature narrative that was just so jarring. There are one-man bands that are similar, where the vocals or music may be top notch, but the rest is cringeworthy.

That was a giant logical leep pretty early in, I had to stop reading. He says his father was in the military which allows him to claim some kind of inherited expertise. That's not how it works. Making sweeping generalizations about uniform of the day when he isn't even familiar with that term is absurd. Tangential pathologic mental processes are going on here.

Not at all what I was expecting, but a great read nonetheless.

Are there really police forces in the US with large punisher skulls on the hood of their cars? Or on their uniform?

There have been a few. One ended up removing it for copyright/trademark reasons.

Loved it.

If you liked this, you should read Art Spiegelman's Maus.

Could use some editing but brings up some interesting points.

Wow. What a different website compared to most styles.

I really enjoyed reading this piece right up until he labeled Steve Bannon a fascist. Because this comment is so wildly nonsensical, I lost interest in the rest of the piece and hit the back button.

Exactly this. The whole conclusion is a beautifully illustrated strawman.

I’ll fight Fascism in any way I can, and I’ll stand on any side of the aisle and denounce racial supremacy in any way shape or form, but holy cow did this web comic jump to some pretty zany conclusions at the end.

seems like a pretty widely held view?

Perhaps widely held by a very small and very loud group of people.

how would you describe him?

Well, to start, almost anything but fascist. I think being non-globalist is literally the only thing in common. About the only description more incorrect would be to call him a communist.

Bannon sure doesn't sound at all like Mussolini describing fascism. Think about who in the modern world comes closest to agreeing with what Mussolini says:

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

“I declare that henceforth capital and labor shall have equal rights and duties as brothers in the fascist family.”

“God does not exist—religion in science is an absurdity, in practice an immorality and in men a disease.”

It's definitely not Steve Bannon or anybody associated with him.

FWIW, my tastes in military attire run a bit old-school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Cavalry_Regiment_(United_S...

Oh, and the illustration of the poor peds being mowed down by the big truck - Bravo!

Long, slow, sardonic clap follows...

Funny how a complaint against dehumanization resorts to dehumanization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com