I agree.

I’ve always thought (and still do) that making remakes is just developers being too lazy and unoriginal to make something new and going with a safe bet instead, but i guess the good thing about these remakes is it gets people into playing older games that they otherwise would not have picked up. One thing they can’t do though is recreate the impact these games had at the time. We weren’t as used to this kind of game as we are now so they just hit harder then.

Or maybe i’m just old and jaded…

Did you play the original or was this your first Dead Space game? At the time when it came out the original game was scary af. At least for someone of my age back then. It had a lot to do with the unusual lateral camera position, i think that’s what scared me the most. The second game was good too but not as scary. Maybe because by then i had gotten used to the genre. I would still recommend it to anyone who liked the first one.

The claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes back hundreds or thousands of years is a lie. It is a lie designed to obfuscate the clear and simple fact that it started in 1947 and is NOT about religion but about settler colonial land theft, occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

The ten steps of genocide:

The Zionist entity is already on step 9 in Gaza. The West is actively involved in step 6 and laying the groundwork for 10.

Most people believe what they want to believe.

It is critical to investigate not only the evidence for but also the sources of claims made by Zionist propaganda:

Alleged atrocities committed by Hamas. They have yet to present credible evidence for most of the allegations.

Often the kinds of atrocities that people fabricate about their enemies are the very things they themselves do or fantasize about doing…

It takes a special kind of disturbed mind to come up with some of the shit that the pro-Israel crowd accuses Palestinians of doing, or the pro-Ukraine crowd accusing Russians… a normal, mentally healthy person does not spend as much time as these people do imagining these sorts of disturbing, grotesque things.

Most likely yes. The concert/rave story has also been exposed as seriously dubious. Expect now the war propaganda machine has been put into overdrive it will be producing atrocity propaganda on an industrial scale. Critically question everything you read (and most of what you think you see too, considering that deep fakes exist…). It doesn’t mean the Palestinian fighters behave perfectly in every single instance, but clearly allegations of systematic abuses are being fabricated wholesale in order to dehumanize the enemy and justify genocide and atrocities.

Virtually this exact same atrocity propaganda trope was being used all the way back in the 17th century by the English against the Irish, as you can see in this thread on the history of atrocity propaganda. And remember the Nayirah testimony in the early 90s?

That is the unfortunate reality of decolonization and national liberation struggles. The liberation of Algeria from French colonialism was extremely bloody, the fight against apartheid South Africa in Angola, liberation wars across Africa and Latin America, and of course we know about the bloody toll of conflicts like the war in Vietnam…

But the occupation, apartheid and slow genocide that has been happening in Palestine for decades is no less gruesome and grotesque, and the Palestinian people have decided that if they are to die they will at least do so fighting against their oppressor.

Hezbollah is already beginning to become involved on the northern front. It takes time for these sorts of things to develop. There is a bigger picture of the entire conflict in the middle east that extends beyond just what is happening in Gaza, and big players like Iran have to consider all of the various fronts and actors involved before making a move.

All i will say for now is we have to wait and see what happens. What i can tell you for certain is that this is just beginning. I can imagine for instance many of the other forces on the side of the resistance waiting to make their move until the IOF have committed themselves irreversibly to a ground incursion into Gaza and are bogged down in urban guerilla warfare.

It appears very much that Hamas has set a trap and that the occupation regime is walking right into it.

Iran is fully ideologically and politically committed to the liberation of Palestine and to the fight against Zionism and the forces of US imperialism in their region. I believe that they have a plan and know when and if it will be appropriate to intervene directly, or if it is smarter to continue working through proxies. There was a time when i did not have such a high opinion of Iran and their capabilities (and i will fully admit this was me as an atheist being prejudiced against them) but the more i have studied their actions over the years the more they have impressed me with their strategic patience and their ability to play the long game just like Russia and China.

I have no sympathies for settlers. The problem is, i am not sure she is a settler, she may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I sympathize with her if this was the case but i will also say that she probably should never have been there in the first place. You don’t go as a tourist to have fun and party in a military occupation and conflict zone, which is what all of occupied Palestine is. Also, unfortunately, unintended collateral damage - for all that this term has been abused by the US and used as an excuse for deliberate and conscious murder of civilians - does happen in war sometimes. War is never going to be perfectly sanitized. Human beings are not perfect and they make mistakes or have lapses in judgement. And all armies are going to have individual bad actors, more so in less formally structured/disciplined guerilla forces.

One of the saddest facts that you can learn as communist about the history of the Palestinian occupation is that the settler colonial army was as successful as it was during the first few decades of its existence thanks to incorporating a large number of Red Army veterans with experience conducting operations on the eastern front in WW2…

I am also not convinced that executing the POWs will help, but that being said i think you’re overestimating the degree to which international opinion has any ability to impact this conflict whatsoever. It has been clear for a while now that neither the occupation regime nor its international allies care to mask their brutality anymore. They are not concerned about what anyone else thinks because they believe no one can do anything to stop them. And frankly i think at this point Palestinians just don’t and can’t afford to care anymore about the optics of their struggle either. It is life and death for them and they have to do whatever it takes to survive.

I would have to respectfully disagree that it is acceptable to vote Democrat at the local level. The local level is the base upon which the rest of the pyramid of a party rests. By reinforcing the uniparty at the base you stabilize it at the higher levels.

Furthermore, it is precisely because the local level is where you can make the most difference that you should vote for third parties, because there they actually have a chance of winning seats. If we are to engage in electoral tactics, and i think we are still in a phase where that avenue of struggle cannot and should not be completely neglected, then we must do it intelligently and build up the political power and mass appeal of parties that challenge the corporate, warmongering uniparty starting from the ground level.

I have said this before but for all the reactionary aspects of US society there is still an element there that is quite a bit more radical than we have here in Europe. This partly has to do with the brutal hyper-capitalism having created material conditions for the bottom of society that are relatively worse in the US than in Europe’s social democratic welfare states. There is an interesting contradiction in that the US simultaneously has some of the worst reactionary tendencies due to its settler colonial nature and history, as well as its role as the center of world imperialism, but also one of the populations that is potentially most easily radicalizable among the nations of the imperial core. In Europe the absence of a social base that is as rife for radicalization as the indigenous and black communities in the US, for which current material conditions and historical injustices align to produce a real revolutionary subject, and with European countries having much more homogenous populations there is much less potential for development of revolutionary consciousness. Notable exceptions do exist such as in Ireland or Serbia, in the case of the former due to their specific history of anti-imperialist struggle and for the latter their recent experiences being directly victimized by imperialist aggression, though unfortunately both of these countries are currently governed by neoliberal sellouts.

I don’t know how we, the general populace, can even begin to end this shit.

For one thing stop voting for the uniparty. The biggest lobby groups putting pressure on politicians to be pro-Zionist are their own parties. Only by voting for politicians who are not associated with and not dependent on either the Republican or the Democrat parties for their campaign funding can this even begin to be resolved. Obviously most of the pressure must come from non-electoral action, from protests and boycotts and strikes, but you can at least stop ever, and i mean EVER voting for a Democrat again. There is no excuse for it, no matter how much the liberal media try to scaremonger with the threat of some unhinged Republican monster coming into office instead. That is blackmail pure and simple and must not be given in to because we see that the result either way is still more war, more imperialism, more corporatism, more fascism.