The Cracked Thread

Jason Pargin is Wong's real name. It's been used as a bit of an argumentative bludgeon against him on occasion.

Do you have any specific criticisms of the article?

Certainly my biggest turf with the article is painting the whole left or whatever can be called left wing in the US as being something just as bad as the US Tea Party and the Alt-Right, when the US as a whole is way more hostile to anything that might be considered left wing and historically, the right wing movements have been more violent and the left wing movements weren't.

There is the Antifa but they behave more as a reaction to the people yelling Jews are not going to replace us and Make America White Again than an organized movement with clear political goals.

Equating someone who was spamming hate speech and then being prosecuted because of it could be considered harassment in Cali and then calling it a suppression of the First Amendment, was another big offender in that article. The Oprah also elicited a knee jerk are you kidding me? reaction from basically everyone and yet it is being played as totally serious business.

Then you have the stawmanning of the points about left Trump and his voters. Basically it mirrors Sander voters but even then, he wasn't all that popular to begin with and people were also quick to call out his brand of left wing populism, including how much of a pipe dream his policies were in the US.

And basically the whole article assumes that the lefty Trump and Co. will be just that, a left wing version of Trump and Trump voters, who will act the same and use the same tactics as Trump did. Without even putting some sort of evidence or indicating that there are people opposing Trump actively engaged in doing everything Trump and his supporters did.

Besides, even with the disapproval rates of Trump being high, the Republicans voters will remain Republicans and the Democrats aren't exactly propping up populist leaders or hyping the next American lefty Jeezus.

Maybe if he was talking about some Latin American countries like Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia where the left wing parties have plenty of cult of personality policies and a heavy grip in the internal politics and public spaces, I'd find it more credible, but the US as a whole doesn't have nearly not enough of a left wing to even present a viable left wing candidate that is actually left wing.

It also rings a bell about everything they said Obama would do after Bush and 8 years later, none of those ebil left wing communist cultural marxist they promised Obama would do ever happened.

Also, the overuse of but Nazis! sounds ridiculously hollow after Charlottesville Unite the Right march happened and the ones being actively violent were, for no one surprise, the Nazis and not the counter protesters.

edited 18th Jan '18 7:07:58 PM by AngelusNox

Looks like Cracked caved in to white supremacists after all. Now everybody who screamed "biased", and "teh sjw", and "women aren't people" can be happy, huh?

Sigh. At least during the actually left-wing days, Cracked stood for something. Now it's going to cater to Nazis and every comfy mid-to-high income twat who thinks Trump doesn't affect him, so everyone else should shut up about him.

To add to the above, seeing Wong, who wanted the comment section gone for years, go "muh fried peaches", is hypocritical as fuck.

Aaaand that will be a wrap-I have read Cracked most mornings for the last decade, in spite of what I perceived as a steady drop in quality and increasing soap box tendencies. That article is the last straw for me-I nearly dropped the site after that article where they interviewed a child prostitute and played it off as positive thing for 'a different culture'. This particular article was just so tasteless and bothsiderist garbage that I am not sure there is any coming back-if that had been posted on some looney fringe Left or Alt Right board, I would have absolutely believed it originated there.

You know, I only started that article when it came out and it seemed fine. Accurate, even. The first few points are things the left legitimately need/want to watch out for. But I got bored and abandoned it.

So after all this vitriol and I decided to actually read it... a little less than halfway through it really does go off the deep end. It stops being "cautionary" and becomes a straight up strawman. By point 3 it's... almost nonsense.

That said, it just goes to show and emphasize the point that frankly, no one in the media is "on your side." They're in it to make money. We saw this with NBC when they turned on Trump when he said racist comments and then became a pro-Trump network when they thought it was profitable. We see it with the NYT when they denounce Trump one day and then say "Nazis aren't that bad" the next. The media isn't inherently a force for good or for bad, and those selling the media likely can never be assumed to be "on your side." They're on the side of making money, especially struggling ones.

Still not in my top 3 for DMOS. Well, arguable for third, but compared to the aforementioned "underage prostitution is great and sex tourism is fantastic for everyone" and them unceremoniously firing almost literally everyone I like, it would be a distant, distant, DISTANT third.

edited 19th Jan '18 10:12:15 AM by Larkmarn

“Looks like Cracked caved in to white supremacists after all.“

Yeah sure. That’s a fair assessment.

Are you being serious? I honestly can't tell.

Seanbaby wrote a new article about a... peculiar pick-up artist. Seriously, this thing just gets crazier and crazier.

The comments on the article were paltry so I decided to search for other discussions of the article, in which I came across this comment:

whew

edited 16th Feb '18 4:51:31 PM by Pachylad

So, about the whole lefty trump article.....

Yeah fuck him on, as someone living in venezuela, we got chavez and now Maduro who have almost all trump chararteristic in him: rude? check, anti intelectual? check, want to stamp out dissidence? sure, kill country soft power? sure as hell it did and so own.

This only show me how many gringos are so acostume to the ways their country operate that they cant really process Trump being elected means, it really surprise me every time.

“Yeah fuck him on,“

I’m not sure how to take this. Are you in favour of the article or not ?

5 important jobs facing labor shortages

Well, this is depressing. On the one hand, jobs with actual labor shortages still exist... yay for those stuck in a job scavenging loop? On the other hand, those labor shortages also exist for a reason. Usually more than one reason.

As always in America, the reason for most of these is the exploitative greed of corporations.

edited 21st Feb '18 10:10:21 AM by Luminosity

Wow.

Number 6 actually completely negates the need for one of my book villains to even use magic at all, as his whole thing was "I shoot bullets...that are on fire, and which make you catch fire."

Writer is apparently a gun nut (note the fascist thing), yet these things have even him wondering "what the actual fuck?"

edited 5th Mar '18 10:28:47 PM by NickTheSwing

I knew about the Dragon Breath shells, but the shotgun spear is kinda funny.

It is like you could load Dragon Breath shells on your shotgun and slap a wood stake on your shotgun and then go hunting the undead.

Don't know why they're calling the angle holder thingy stupid.

The ability to shoot out of cover while not risking getting shot yourself is legitimately viable. That this thing doesn't compromise the integrity of the gun itself for that is a huge plus.

Oh, I thought Dresden Files had made that one up.

1/10 gun doesn't shoot stakes

I'd take a gun that shoots steaks.

Steaks that set you on fire

A gun that shoots whole cows (ergo, steak) that set you on fire on impact.

A gun that shoots cows that are on fire and the cows explode setting everyone around them on fire and showering the surroundings with steaks, which are also on fire...

Cody Johnston has started his own continuation of "Some News" as... honestly, I can't figure out if it's called "More News" or "Some More News."

Either way, it's great.

Check it out.

I, for one, am going to back him on Patreon because these manage to be hilarious and genuinely informative.

Wow, I only just heard about Cracked's rapid degeneration over the past few years. This is kind of shocking- I basically stopped reading Cracked when I got sick of my older brother shoving their articles in my face all the time, but I didn't realize they'd gotten like this.

Being forced to pay for the privilege of rating comments, most of the quality writers except of course David Wong (that pretentious hack) being fired, the Cracked Store always on the front page shilling shit like Bitcoin, those user-contributed Pictogram lists...

Cracked is a hollowed out shell of what it once was. And let's be honest, it wasn't that great in the first place.

Eh, I find all the doomsaying annoying. It's still Cracked, it still has articles worth reading, and while I might be biased because I am a contributor on Pictofacts, I don't see them as bad either.

Not to mention, the loudest doomsaying comes from not the most trustworthy of sources - alt-right Nazis decrying "teh SJW takeover" like they always do.