At this point I think Godzilla could only improve conditions.

Rails gang stat winning

It’s also a terror tactic. If you don’t know who is kidnapping you then you don’t know whether to call city, state, or federal. You don’t know if you’re resisting local cops or the feds. And if they gun you down there’s not much chance of them being idd. A big part of state terror is often the anonymity of the perpetrators.

Skirmishes in the middle east between the US Air Force and the US Navy. Northrup Grumman stocks up 15 points

The way so many American’s and Euros are just utterly indifferent to the existence of nukes and MAD is horrifying. They don’t view nukes as real things that are a factor in war and diplomacy, and if htey don’t believe in nukes in a real immediate way they might blithely use them, or provoke the use of them.

Eastern Europe’s whole mythology for justifying their own existence has been warped in to fighting a righteous war against a Soviet Union that doesn’t exist.

The depths of anti-communist delusion are fully on display when Euros think that a fragmentary rump state can or would do what the USSR never attempted at the height of it’s global super-power

The “ninja swords” he seems to be referring too are more or less sharpened crowbars ordered for a few bucks from mall ninja shops. This kind of junk

As time goes on I’m increasingly convinced that “appeasement” was a post war framing and at the time they weren’t trying to sate a beast but rather heaping gifts on a friend.

Why didn’t Hitler form an alliance with Europe against the Soviets? It seems like he wouldn’t have had much trouble getting them on board if he could manage to create an inciting incidient.

I think you’re on to something with liberalism as negative cultural hegemony. All of this is a good, dense post but that contrast between a culture that envisions a future and a culture that denies a future is going to keep me up nights. Like liberals don’t have falgsc, they have the west wing. And fascists don’t even have that, all they have is some hazy nostalgia for a fake past.

I think we are/were/have sent that upstream to the main lemmy code doohickey.

I mean i guess? Male pattern baldness is highly gendered and baldness is to some extent treated as shameful in society. If you’re bullying some guy over hairloss then yeah, that’s gendered harassment.

You can get NPCs to do effective small unit tactics with like three lines of code but when I try to train a rifle team I have to break out behavioral psychology to convince people to hide from bullets.

Word. ER has a ton of features to make the game easier for folks who want them. Hell, i’m one of those features, i’ve got my summon sign down to help with bosses all the time.

I like that analysis, thank you.

You love to see it. It’s wild how outright piracy has become a normal tool of international diplomacy.

It’s not not cyberpunk.

It’s close enough and shares enough of the same things to be analyzed as part of the genre.

I do think that to a large extent the big evil bowling ball of doom is supposed to abstractly represent capital or something adjacent.

Things like the depiction of the indigenous resistance movement as unsophisticated dupes and terrorists merits analysis; why did the French director depict them this way? How can this be a reflection of French colonial history? Same with the depiction of the white Archeologists and the presumably middle easter kid subjected to colonialism in the beggining though I think there’s less there.

Leelu can be analyzed through the “born sexy yesterday” trope and there’s a lot of questions to ask from a Feminist slant.

The movie actually acknowledges some of the harms and contradictions of capitalism, while underplaying others. Showing the relationship between Corben as a cabby working for Zorg and ultimately being one of the people who thwarts Zorg is nice.

The decision to never have the protagonists and the antagonists directly interact is a neat one and opens up some very good questions about narrative norms - turns out the hero doesn’t actually need to confront the villain!

It does have a lot of cyberpunk themes; mighty and powerful corporations and governments can’t save themselves so they need a working class guy and his weird buddies to save the world. The upper classes are depicted as a gaggle of decadent idiots who have no idea what’s happening, while the corporate leader is a hyper-competent bastard who completely understands all the harm his sytem causes and loves it.

And it’s also just a silly adventure film with lots of style and cool visuals and a sappy power of love resolution.

While initially criticized as having strong fascist leanings in ideology and aesthetic, it has become clear during the final arc of the series that Attack on Titan is not a celebration of fascism but a whole-hearted criticism of it. This is mostly due to the existence of Marley, which provides an excellent foil to Paradis in that while Paradis is fascist out of a need for survival, Marley is fascist of it’s own willingness. Even when arguing that Marley could be justified in keeping the Eldian population oppressed out of fear of their Titan Shifter abilities, it is shown that many Eldians actually agree with the Marleyans that the Nine Titan Powers are dangerous and should be kept in containment. This, combined with the years of socio-political oppression and xenophobic hatred towards the Eldians is actually re-igniting the race war that apparently almost destroyed the world, and many Eldians simply want to be equal to their fellow Marleyan citizens. It is also made clear many times in the narrative that the fascist tactics of both nations are only working because of their respective situations- Paradis needs to have a strong military force otherwise it will be overrun by the Titan threat, and it is shown at the end of the Uprising arc that the average populace would much prefer a monarchy or democracy rather than a fascist autocracy. Marley on the other hand is said to use the Warriors as a weapon to oppress other nations despite being oppressed more than any other by the Titan threat, repeating the mistakes of their past in a vain attempt to keep a fascist stranglehold on their nation and the surrounding ones. This, combined with how critical of warfare Attack on Titan is, shows that Isayama intends to criticize fascist ideology by showing what a permanent modern total war state would actually look like- political unrest, xenophobic segregation, and utter devastation.

I dug this out of the depths of TvTropes and I think it’s a very good example of my point; a superficial read of the story by folks without much experience in critique and analysis says that the story is anti-fascist because it shows that fascism sucks. A more experienced critic asks why the author created a story where fascism is the correct and only choice.

Studying Democratic Party politics, huh?

I sincerely don’t think Casper ever got the joke or understood the point of the movie. He did several sequels and seems thrilled about playing Johnny to this day. basically perfect casting.