The rich can easily exploit the political system and lobby for favorable laws = Not only is it pay to win, the devs suck the dicks of their biggest whales
Whistleblowing corruption is dangerous and might often end in persecution against the whistleblower = Reporting cheating whales is a surefire way to get yourself banned
The wealth inequality gap is mind-boggling = You'd need to grind nonstop for a total of 5 billion hours to buy one of everything on the cash shop
Edit: Sorry for my harsh words. It's just ... the raw urgency and essence of the original criticisms here have just been squeezed out when converted into gamer-code language...
Yeah the consumerist rhetoric in game reviews (and the entire technology press more broadly) dooms all of their attempts at analysis to be extremely shallow. Maybe one day a journalist will pay attention in one of their media studies classes and read the fucking Adorno reading that one of their teachers assigned, but that day has not yet come.
Arise ye gamers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of ea
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of games journalism.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dorito dust to win the prize.
So squad mates, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the pc master race.
No more deluded by reaction
On pay to win only we’ll make war
The pvpers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll teamkill the generals on our own side.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E’er ea will out with their booty
And give to all a happier lot.
Each at the xbox must do their duty
And we’ll strike while the iron is hot.
The American Dream is not a myth. People will cry abt how they "can't afford" a $2,000 a month apartment after choosing to live in the city with the $2,000/mo apartment. Literally just move to the Midwest?
They were doing pretty good until they blamed everything on neoliberalism, what a fucking joke
Edit: If the wikipedia page wasn't clear enough, the 14 definitions and comments below should show that the term "neoliberalism" is a broken dog whistle at best. You might as well go outside and yell at the clouds while you're at it.
Is it? Neoliberalism describes a modern conservative movement closely aligned to libertarian philosophy. Privatization, elimination of government programs, tax reduction, laissez-faire capitalism are all under the neoliberal umbrella.
Wow, that is not what I expected Neoliberalism to mean. Thank you for the lesson. When I read about Neo-(x-political-term) I generally think of new ideas around it, not ideas reaching back to WWII. My biggest concern after reading your link is:
The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively.
Also, the last few paragraphs of Current Usage emphasize it's use as a dog whistle:
"Several writers have criticized the term "neoliberal" as an insult or slur used by leftists against liberals and varieties of liberalism that leftists disagree with."
and
"the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power"
I still think it would serve us all to be more precise about what exactly is failing us.
Important to mention that Neoliberalism is a therm not really used by people by people who defend liberty, capitalism and free market policies. It's not something academic for example. Basically you won't find liberals calling themselves neoliberals.
It is often used by people that does not agree with liberalism, sometimes in a pejorative way, other times to aggregate a group of heterogeneous people, and sometimes mixing different policies and aspects of modern western societies.
Citing the Wikipedia article that explains and has sources on this:
The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively.[21][22] English speakers have used the term since the start of the 20th century with different meanings.[23] However, it became more prevalent in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; it is used by scholars in a wide variety of social sciences,[24][25][26] as well as by critics,[27][28][29] to describe the transformation of society in recent decades due to market-based reforms.[30] The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[31] Some scholars reject the idea that neoliberalism is a monolithic ideology and have described the term as meaning different things to different people as neoliberalism has mutated into multiple, geopolitically distinct hybrids as it propagated around the world.[32][33][34] Neoliberalism shares many attributes with other concepts that have contested meanings, including representative democracy.[35]