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

https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/

by mml • 7 years ago

58 24 7 years ago

popula.com

TaylorGood• 7 years ago

Wow. What a different website compared to most styles.

unionemployee• 7 years ago

Loved it.

wooboo• 7 years ago

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

ambicapter• 7 years ago

Could use some editing but brings up some interesting points.

grayed-down2• 7 years ago

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.

barnhouse• 7 years ago

seems like a pretty widely held view?

grayed-down2• 7 years ago

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

shijie• 7 years ago

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.

lsh2• 7 years ago

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.

86carr• 7 years ago

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.

Junk_Collector• 7 years ago

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."

caramelsuit• 7 years ago

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.

o_____________o• 7 years ago

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

subjectsigma• 7 years ago

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 ...

Para2016• 7 years ago

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.

alexandercrohde• 7 years ago

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.

ericmcer• 7 years ago

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.

squozzer2• 7 years ago

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.

occamrazor• 7 years ago

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

burfog2• 7 years ago

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

squozzer2• 7 years ago

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

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

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