Goalpost moving

 Recently I've heard again that sentence of "The extremes touch", referred to political movements. I've discovered that in English, this is referred as the Horseshoe Theory. 

I really hate this sentence, because it's usually used by "moderates" to justify not taking the side of the oppressed, and I wanted to address it. 

I've commented before and I'll comment again, that we're at war with strong forces that are aiming for a big regression of rights and the funnelling of all wealth towards a little few. Part of this war has been based strongly into a constant moving of the goalposts.

By that I mean that the right-wing parties have pushed and pushed and pushed their ideologies to the right. "Moderates" consider that in any situation, the average approach is the most reasonable, and by pushing the right-side, the "Moderate" becomes really just Right-Wing. 

I am baffled why people eat this up all the time, or why would you think that anything outside of a radical change in the situation may really improve our general lives. Or by the fact that a lot of people that believe that a radical change is needed tend to go to the extreme-right side when it's organized by the same people that created the problems and want to make them worse. 

Anyway, this goalpost moving makes people forget what is extreme left and what is just moderate left. Plus people confuse the point of extreme left, and compare them with extreme right. 

Basically, any time you criticise extreme right, you're presented with: "Left equals Communism! Also so bad, killed thousands! Therefore, your argument is invalid!".

So, let's start by saying that yeah, dictatorships as seen in communist countries are bad. But they're bad because of the "dictator" bit. Someone or some group of people with limitless power that can do whatever they want is bad, period. You need checks and balances. We said that before with the police, and the same applies to the government. If you can do whatever the hell you want because you make the rules, you execute them and you judge people as per your whims, yeah, that's always bad, no matter anything else. This is not a political spectrum of anything, this is what happens in any situation you give that much power without balance to someone or a group of people, and it's always bad because people tend to abuse this power like a lot.

The core idea of socialism/communism? Less bad: We all share resources and provide for everyone so we have equity, and we don't let people hoard wealth. I mean, this is nice. The opposite of this is unfettered capitalism, which basically says that if you can become the richest person in the world, you deserve it, even if this fucks indirectly or directly with 98% of the rest of the population. Then it's a matter about how to implement it efficiently, and please remember that in the world, any place that has tried to apply such things more strongly has seen USA and their allies fuck them so very hard that it polluted any results. Also have in mind China is not communist any more, they just kept the dictatorship part and are now ruling a capitalistic hell-scape with a brutal social control.  

But I digress. What I also wanted to say is that people don't even know what is an extreme leftist any more. Extreme leftist would be to, for example seize all factories, all service providers (like water or energy), seize all fields owned by companies and not particulars, dissolve all companies by law and enforce them to be publicly organized, or seize any house owned by a company or that is owned by a particular that doesn't live in there and already has two main residences.

That's just a few policies that are extreme leftist. And I have to say that I agree with several of those (for example, the house thing or the energy thing). However, it's true that some competitiveness can motivate sometimes to do better things. So I'm willing to compromise and accept more moderate approaches, like limiting company sizes but letting small companies work and try new things in a capitalistic approach to competitiveness. 

Anyway, my point is that NO ONE currently is even proposing that. What most "left" parties are proposing is just some more regulation of the markets, plus dedicating public money to reduce inequality and taxing the rich (and just fyi, you're only rich if you could have afforded to do nothing all your life without anyone paying for you and would never had any issues buying food or paying for a place to stay. Anything else is just poor or middle-class, and in denial about the situation). 

I'd be perfectly happy with just seizing the money of rich people and turning it public, videogame-style: after your first million you cannot gain more money, it all goes to public funding, as if you were missing bytes to write the money you have. But again, the "left" parties are not even proposing this. 

They're just asking for small reforms that would benefit everyone indeed, but they're not like radical reforms, most of them. 

And even that is seen as suspicious by people, because it seems everyone thinks they're rich but temporarily poor or something, and the idea that the money you earned goes to a few that don't deserve it is such a strong instinct that people are like wary of these ideas. 

But, guess what?

YOUR MONEY ALREADY GOES TO THE ONES THAT DO NOT DESERVE IT AT THIS TIME!!

Or what do you think is happening when the right-wing governments give funds to big companies that are failing, like banks, and they don't have to return that? Or when they let rich people avoid taxes? Or hell, just producing value for a company that goes to their net benefit while you,as employee, never participate in that net benefit is exactly giving your money to the ones that do not deserve it! Left-wing policies just try to redistribute it more, which means you will see more of a return, while right-wing is letting the same 10 families that always had money to just keep having more and more money, YOUR money!

And again, the little measures that left-wing parties tend to propose are just slightly moderate! They're just saying "maybe we should not let markets do whatever they want to the point that a global crisis can be nice for them and then they may want to keep an ongoing crisis forever?" "Maybe we should regulate things somewhat?". That's mild! And no one with a sane mind should propose dictatorships anyway, and no one in the left is proposing that any more!

You know what also touches the extremes? The fucking middle! So, please, start thinking a bit more and realize that one side is not like the other, and what all these excuses are defending: they're defending the same people as forever, the ones that have power and wealth and want to keep it from everyone else.

PSOE/PSC is a right-wing party

After Catalan elections, a number of in theory progressive people keep insisting that JxCat is extreme right and PSOE/PSC is left-wing.

Among them, there's the En Comú Podem people and Podemos in general. And it's baffling that they're taking this attitude. I mean, they're currently ruling with PSOE, yes, so some protection is understandable. However, claiming JxCat is worse than PSOE/PSC in right-wing matters is simply not true. 

Let's just look at facts here, shall we? I'll just list their latest actions:

-PSOE has a big number of people in executive positions in the most powerful Spanish companies, and has legislated in their favour several times.

-PSOE reformed the constitution (together with PP) just once recently in order to include the clause that the country's public debt  must be paid first, before any other expense, in 2011

-PSOE increased the age of retirement to 67 years. 

-PSOE applied a labour reform that made firing cheaper, made it easier to fire people if a company is having loses, and allowed companies to bypass worker agreements if they managed to negotiate this with employees (while not having an even ground since the company has a lot more power). This resulted in a big decrease of job quality in Spain, plus created the perfect conditions to fire people that had better contracts.  

-PSOE defended not investigating the previous king of Spain and helped him exit the country as if that solved the corruption issues. They're also a big defenders of Monarchy as a good thing to have.

-PSOE is refusing to regulate the price of rent to try to stop it from raising indefinitely. 

-PSOE tried to rule with Ciudadanos (right-wing) before negotiating with Podemos (centre-left).

-PSOE made a pact with CIU in Catalunya to make corrupt healthcare organizations that control and privatized a big section of the healthcare market in here. The people in CIU that were part of this are currently in PDECAT and not in JxCat.

-PSOE has made pacts with PP to split important positions inside the tribunals and has been using the judicial system as a repressive arm of the state exactly the same way as PP. 

-PSOE has not removed recent laws promoted by PP that constraint freedom of expression and is using them to jail critics and repress different sections of the population.

-PSOE members are part of several economic circles that do not follow any democratic laws, are there with PP members and support more power and money for the economic elites. 

-PSOE privatized several public companies that were having benefits with the only objective to transfer this benefit to private owners. 

I will add that during the 15M protests that directly resulted in the creation of Podemos, a common slogan was "PPSOE" and "PP and PSOE is the same shit". This served to indicate that both parties were complicit in keeping the status quo where a few companies and rich people keep the power and society doesn't improve their well-being. PSOE may implement some social measures like defending abortion, promoting more equality for women, hinting at allowing euthanasia, or trying to protect LGBTQ+ rights, that is true, but that's about it. These two parties were correctly identified as the problem that is preventing Spain from improving the life of all their citizens, and Podemos until recently understood they had to defeat both to change things(Just a clarification here: PP is the same as Ciudadanos which is the same as VOX. All these are the same, so defeating PP in the past now means defeating these three parties so they never have power again). That is, until they lost support and realized they could not rule alone, and then they decided to try to associate themselves with PSOE. They forgot about one of the core principles of the protests, and now they're unable to create much change because of it, and are losing voters left and right because of it.

I would not vote for JxCat (too centre for my taste), but they've separated with their worst elements, now found in PDECAT, and they've voted for the following laws, to say a few:

-Tax big bank deposits

-Force energy companies to provide service to poor people. 

-Tax empty houses

-Forbid fracking

-Regulate apartment prices

-Forbid kicking out people from their houses

-Promote protections towards climate change and use renewable energies and good practices

Of course Spanish government and tribunals have annulled all of these because they considered them anti-constitutional or that Catalunya has no right in regulating these things or they created worse laws soon enough (like a national 0% tax on bank deposits) that made these invalid, so we couldn't experience this effect, but they're certainly a lot more to the left than what PSOE has been showing for a long long time now.

Any party that says JxCat is more right than PSOE/PSC is straight-up lying and not acting thinking about real left-wing policies, and this really undermines any respect and good reputation they might have before this.

Resident Evil 5: We're not racists, we have a black friend

After the bad experience of RE4, the saga lost plenty of my interest. However, when the fifth game appeared for my console I did give it a try after some time had passed from its release.

RE5 surprised me at the time. It's still very similar to RE4, but it did streamline some parts of the game, trying to get rid of some unnecessary things in the process. The end result was...not bad. Better than RE4 definitely. 

It's still pretty ridiculous, mind you, but the way it plays out has some improvements. 

First, graphics are better and more colorful. Not everything is brown and this makes the game prettier. The graphics are even more realistic and well, it's fun to see so much detail, I cannot deny that. Technologically speaking it's clear there has been improvements and the game is using the new consoles and looks. 

Second, the gameplay is almost the same, although movement is easier this time. You still need to aim and shoot, trying to get certain points of the enemies. The enemies themselves are again parasite-based, which means they're highly mobile, strong, smart, and sometimes they have parasites inside them that come out when killed. The inventory has been revamped and reduced, but every item occupies one slot only. An important difference now is that using the inventory doesn't pause the game, and you need to be fast using health items or changing weapons. This is definitely more realistic and adds to the action, you cannot just pause and heal, you need to run away far enough and then lose some time to heal yourself. Also, this time there are two characters, you control only one but you're not escorting the other, the other also has weapons and shoots enemies and defend themselves. If you're hurt, or they're hurt you can revive each other, with a bit less life than before but still better than outright dying. 

In general the game is trying quite hard to enforce multiplayer where you play with somebody else. This is not bad per se as long as you're left with a single-player mode that is strong enough that you can play and not be penalized, but I do prefer games that are designed around single-player and expanded with multiplayer and not the opposite. In this case playing alone is perfectly possible, but your partner doesn't help as much as they could, and you need to be careful because if left alone they may, for example, use all the ammo of the good weapon for a mere mook instead of the final boss. Its AI could be better, that's what I'm saying, but at least you're not left with a permanent escort mission, that's true, and it is useful that when you "die" your partner automatically comes to save you before really dying for real.

The game is divided in chapters, like in RE4 (I forgot to mention this), but one streamlined aspect is that you save the game only at the end of a chapter (before that there's automatic saves and checkpoints too), and that at the end of a chapter is when you can spend money, sell or buy things. What's more, your saved game saves the status and progress, but you're free to repeat a chapter as much as you want to get extra money for example and then buy improvements for your weapons that will help you in the next one, before continuing. This makes the game more "agile". IF you feel stuck, you can revisit a previous one, get better equipment and then continue. You know you won't get stuck because you were playing the game wrong and you need to restart the whole thing, you can just play some sections again and gather resources and train. This is not bad with such an action.oriented game, where all pretense of survival horror has been lost. 

That's the thing with RE4 and RE5, though. They're action games, they're not scary, really. At max, some areas are dark and some enemies feel more creepy than others, but that's about it. The game continues to be very very linear, and also doesn't have difficult puzzles, although there's a bit more complexity in some areas sometimes, having to solve simple tasks, a bit more than what RE4 had.The game is also shorter than RE4, but in a nice way. RE4 felt outstretched, with some chapters taking forever, and some areas feeling more like a chore or fake padding that having real substance. It's hard to tell fake padding from just nice game content sometimes, but in general if a section brings no originality, no new enemies, no new puzzles, and it just prolongs a certain area unnecessarily without advancing plot, that is there so they can claim the game is long but without giving new stuff in that area. RE4 had such things, RE5 has a lot less of them and this makes it better. 

Ok, after mentioning the good parts, let's have some fun with the bad ones. 

Let's start with the setting: A fictional country in Africa. This should tell you a lot already, but to elaborate, yes, this game feels racist as fuck. This fictional area is poor and violent. Of course this is explained as in RE4, because the people are infected, but still. Then, the main character is Chris Redfield, again, a very very white and typical action guy. Seeing a white guy mowing down black enemies in the first images that were released of the game? Not great, nope. So, developers rapidly said they did have white enemies too, it was just a representation of the general population of the (fictional) area, and when the game was released you could see that not all enemies where black, yes, some of them were white too, but still feels quite wrong, really. Also in the first half you see black people dressed normally, but soon enough you find an area where they say "the parasite made them more primitive and regress to ancient traditions" or some bullshit like this and they're living in mud huts, wearing leopard-printed little cloths and handling spears and shields. VERY racist indeed. To try and counter this a bit more, Chris partner is a local woman, Sheva Alomar. Sheva is black, but just a bit black, not like the black enemies. You know, not like dark black, that would be probably not beautiful enough for the developers of the game and is just reserved for enemies, as I said. But like this they can claim that, hey, we're not racist! This is our token black friend! 

The game doesn't let you play like Sheva on the first time you play, another thing I believe to be quite nasty, it forces Chris on you. And once you complete it, you can play again as her, which shows that they could have allowed you to do that from the start and just didn't want to for Reasons (a.k.a. sexism).  Sheva is also the one that is more "nimble" and therefore gets thrown or jumps in certain sections where you need to do so. It's now worth mentioning too how Chris has been modeled in this game. In previous games he looked like a buff strong guy, but here he's like deformed. His biceps is the size of his head. Let that sink in. I mean, it could be he has a very small head, sure, because his intelligence seems to have downgraded since the first games (especially in RE6 where he also appears and he has the same big muscles/small head and serious intelligence issues), but still. Sheva is more proportionate, although of course girly-style with less muscles (buff women are too scary for the developers, probably), but one of the evil guys, an evil female CEO, does have the breasts with the same proportion of Chris biceps and head, so maybe they used the same ball model for all three of them? Probably. 

The plot of the game is...a bit of a mess. You're investigating something in that area, because you are working for some organization against bioweapons. There's a company that is supposed to be good, but you find out they allied with Umbrella actually, and there's some old virus found in some caverns where some investigation happened, and this virus can make a new type of enemies, Uroboros, that are like black slime/tentacles that tend to consume everything and is hard to eliminate. You find 4 enemies successfully infected with this in all the game, and it's true they're pretty tough to defeat. Another thing is that this virus can infect and consume or, if you're "worthy" enough, you gain control of it (only the last one has control of it). The parasite-infected enemies (called Majini now) are just a by-product of bad guys operating in the area it seems, like their foot soldiers basically. Also, the final goal of the "bad guys" this time is to directly infect the whole world, so only the strong will live and it will create a new type of humanity or some crap like that from the wet dreams of eugenicists and incels about alpha men and all that. As I said, a mess. 

In the game, they say that Jill Valentine died in a mission Chris and her did, where they visited the umbrella founder, and found Albert Wesker, now with superpowers, had already visited him and killed him. Then Wesker seems to kill Jill by cliff-jumping together, which clearly means she's still alive. You find Jill again, being mind-controlled by Wesker and being all fast and cool as if she also had superpowers, and discover she's controlled by some conveniently-placed gem that you can then remove to make her feel better. Jill has turned blonde in this game for some reason, smaller and more in distress than previous games in the natural trend starting in RE4 of making everything a lot more sexist than what was needed. At least you save her, that's true. The game is full of over-the-top action and nonsense scenes where everybody involved should end up very very dead but they don't.

And as I said, the big bad in this one is Albert Wesker, who's turned into megalomaniac evil by wanting to change the world and all this crap. He's still a superhuman, he betrays everyone just because, it seems, and moves (and dresses) like Neo in The Matrix, dodging bullets if you shoot him. The final fight with him is pretty hard because of these reasons, but somehow you end up managing to kill him for good this time, in an active volcano surrounded by lava (because of course this game exaggerates everything plus lava is only deadly if you step on it, everyone knows that). He's the final guy that infects himself with the virus and takes control of it, but before that you do have some other fights with giant animal/monster hybrids, Uroboros-infected people, and the aforementioned possessed Jill Valentine. Special mention too to the lickers, that reappear and are fun to fight although you get to fight a bit too many of them for comfort, and also special mention to the incredibly racist big black guys with heavy weapons. 

The whole thing as I said continues with the ridiculous trend of RE4, but at least it's shorter, you defeat a big guy from the saga and not some random weirdos in a cult, and the gameplay has been adjusted and made better overall. While RE4 felt long and a chore sometimes, I have to recognize that RE5 is fun enough that I did play through it several times. The saga continues with its ridiculous and action-based trend though, plus their usual total lack of research, which is still very shameful. New plot points are introduced, new companies, new world situations, and there's really little sense of continuity between the games like this. In a way the game is trying to go globally, but that's a lot to take and in general the plot has become very messy. I believe around this time some movies were produced in the same style as these games, which explains maybe that there are unexplained concepts and things between these games. This sucks, I don't want to have to see a movie to understand what has happened in a game.

Anyway, it seems there's hope at the end of the tunnel with some clear improvements done in RE6 and specially, RE7. We'll talk about RE6 next in detail, because it does some things good again. Some other things, it does even worse than RE4, that's also true, but there's a clear intention of evolving and trying to go a bit back to better roots than action-based ridiculousness, even if RE6 is still very very VERY guilty of that.