• 138 Posts
  • 13.7K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle








  • Destroying the lives of many people indirectly in pursuit of money, however, is just an unfortunate fact of life.

    Hey now. That’s not always true.

    Consider the Twin Towers Attacks (which indirectly enriched the Saudi Royal family immensely). Americans were so enthusiastic to avenge the honored dead of Cantor Fitzgerald financial services that they flew to the opposite side of the planet and started wars with multiple other countries on totally false pretenses.

    Similarly, we’ve been gungho in funding the massacre of Gaza residents when they greedily and villanuously attempted their Right of Return to homes lost in the '47 Nakba.

    And let’s never forget our 50 year crusade against the money grubbing, land stealing, economy looting Communists.

    The Suez Crisis, the Iranian Revolution, Vietnam? I think we can all agree they were unconscionable and deserving of an unlimited Holocaust of native peoples in response.





  • George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.

    If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.

    All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader’s Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in “Hutt Space” - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. “The Clone Wars” wasn’t just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope’s Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was “Episode IV” should say it all.

    One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director’s notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.





  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoOpenChristianSomething Funny I Found on Reddit
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    Might also be worth throwing out that “And then he came back… as a spooky magic ghost!!!” is some Grade-A evangelical cope.

    So much of modern Christian dogma was just gossip and philosophical conjecture prior to the Council of Nicea. Christians hadn’t even settled on whether Jesus was the legit Son of God until 300 years after he was pulled off the Cross.

    Go pick through the Gnostic texts. That shit is wild. You’ve got people hypothesizing that Jesus was a trick sent by Satan to lead people away from a second occluded messiah. You’ve got all sorts of wild speculation about the nature of human souls and God as this layered being that emanates down to the mortal plane. It reads like the weed-smokers favorite parts of a D&D splat book.

    There’s a reason modern Christians stick to some Dutch-Irish guy taking a power walk to Jerusalem and getting crucified for it over the “I licked the wrong frog, now lets talk about neo-pagan metaphysics” shit we had going on during the 100s-era AD Christian Era.


  • Voters chose the option furthest right

    Politicians picked their voters in order to guarantee this outcome. Gerrymandering, mass disenfranchisement along social and ethnic lines, vote caging, intimidation, misinformation, straight up sabotage of voting venues… It happens all the time in liberal democracies, particularly in poorer, more homogeneous, and more rural neighborhoods.

    As soon as the politicians fuck up on the math and a socialist breaks through (as with AOC beating Crowley back in ‘18 or Mamdani trouncing Cuomo last week), you get to see the “moderates” and their conservative cats’ paws rush in to subvert the popular will.

    This happens every time the left most option isn’t chosen.

    The joke is how quickly a government will move to the right when the left-most option is chosen.


  • It’s a hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks.

    The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn’t all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.

    In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment… fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn’t feel like a thing that could really happen.

    Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.

    The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence… as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.

    Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.