Back on reddit I once mentioned that Star Trek was a Marxist post scarcity society in a center conservative sub. It wasn’t my point, I just mentioned it like mentioning the sky is blue. I got down-voted to oblivion and tens of replies ‘correcting’ me.
(Re)Appropriation is practically a part of the job description for these chucklefucks. Things mean what they want them to. And while that’s part of how one enjoys art, in this context its routinely used to hurt people and contrary to the author’s (sometimes clearly documented) intent.
Example: Using Rage Against the Machine at a conservative political rally.
I was hoping it would pierce her liberalism, but it all bounced off: “I wouldn’t want to live in a society like this” and “Oh, I get it, they don’t actually live in a democracy, the government controls everything”.
The thing you have to realize is that the Conservatives have been moving the goalposts for decades.
When he was alive, Martin Luther King was considered a hard core Communist revolutionary whose goal was the complete destruction of the American way of life. There were public burnings of Beatles records. Hell, early in the Reagan administration, The Beach Boys were kept from singing at a national July 4 event because a Cabinet member thought they were dangerous radicals.
They can play off that Star Trek Original series was okay, but newer versions are walking away from the original intent.
Hank was racist (albeit more of a “tells racist jokes and uses slurs” than a “uses his police powers to murder minorities”) and that scene where he harasses that woman as a “lesson” for Walt Jr was disgusting. It captures the ACAB thing pretty well, especially since I’m not sure Hank was meant to be a bad guy by those writing the scene.
And Marrie was a kleptomaniac, iirc even going into people’s homes under the guise of being a potential buyer to steal shit from them.
Andrea and Brock were ok. Andrea had an addiction but seemed to have her life pretty together by the time Jesse meets her. The most questionable thing she does is gets involved with Jesse when there were warning signs. But even with that, she creates some distance after recognizing the signs, though I don’t recall how exactly they left things off the last time they spoke.
Hank is a misogynistic, bigoted blowhard that admittedly does improve towards the end, but mostly by contrast to Walts own horribleness. Mary has her own problems that she fights against addressing and won’t take anyone’s else’s input. Jr is just a kid, so most of his dickishness can be attributed to that, but he can be a knob in his own right.
I look up to Rick because he refuses to delude himself into seeing the dystopia our species has made for itself with rose colored glasses. I respect those that prefer the unvarnished truth over happiness, as it is an exceedingly rare quality. He even openly hates himself on the merits of who he is.
I also appreciate his coping mechanism: Nihilism, because it’s based on objective fact. The sun will eventually continue to heat until all life is extinguished, the universe will suffer heat death, and billions of years before that, humanity will destroy itself, and if we somehow, beyond astronomical odds don’t, we will recklessnessly use our technology to alter ourselves in every conceivable way for every conceivable reason to the point that humanity will no longer apply.
I find peace in recognizing the futility of what everyone finds so important. That doesn’t mean I don’t or can’t enjoy the temporary beauty of it. As Rick said to his daughter trying to save a universe that didn’t want to be saved from an Evil empire that would just be replaced by another, “don’t forget to have fun.”
hey, scarface is solid, it is about a man who achieved everything he wanted, but because he was an asshole and fell into hubris, his life ended corresponding to this. Guy commits crime then recives punishment for it.
Breaking bad is telling that even such a weak man as Walter White can become a horrid monster if he won’t tame his pride and ego and let them guide him.
The Jocker is a commentary on what the hostility of modern society could do, and how unwelcoming it is, especially towards people with issues, mental and parental ones.
The other ones I either haven’t watched, or i had, and totally agree with your opinion on them, for instance, Rick and Morty is a shallow pseudointellectual show with stupid jokes whose main hero, not antihero, mind you, hero, is a psycho which does what he wants. Its agressive and childish nihilism disgusts me. Fight Club doesn’t, but if its your favorite, you must be 15. I can absolutely see why lots of people like it though
You hit the nail in the head. It’s not that these can’t be your favorite pieces of media. Just that it’s key to make sure you’re dealing with a person that doesn’t think these people are role models. Protagonist ≠ hero. But if someone says they loved Taxi Driver because they want to be like Travis or that Rorschach was wronged, they’re probably not the type of person you want to keep as company.
in that way i totally agree with you, moreover, it scares the shit out of me when i see people iconize Walter White and co. It scares me with the fact that despite all the good in it, our modern culture still managed to raise whole subculture that idolizes psychos.
And yet, its just not the thought you expressed in your first comment (:
Kinda? The Fallout series definitely attracts these kind of people, but the message of the games go completely over their heads. Because they can play out their facist fantasies, they don’t realize how those routes are showing what’s fucked up about that kind of thinking. If they could realize that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be have those sorts of fantasies in the first place.
That’s my point, fascists idolize factions like the Enclave, Legion, or even Brotherhood, despite overt text and subtext decrying their views. The Fallout series as a whole is leftist, but is well-known for having a large subset of the fan base that is overtly fascist.
Yea, but tbf I was pretty clearly referring to the 1/2/NV/4 strains of BoS. Even in 3, though, they are racist against non-ferals and you can’t really confront them on that.
This is why it’s important to ask “Why do you love that?” Starship Troopers and Helldivers can be seen as fascist by those who don’t see deeper meaning in things. But both are satire, making fun of the thing by showing how it works and how ridiculous it looks. No one acts like a person, they talk like a movie trailer. Well adjusted folk will understand what they like and be able to elucidate it clearly. Idiots will parrot broad generalities and be unable to explore why they like that stuff (or they realize they are a monster and get defensive about it).
Yes, what you described is the point of the meme and subsequent comments. People that like these things without understanding they’re satire are problematic.
The Starship Troopers movie was self aware - the writer-director combo also worked on Robocop and that is pretty unambiguous about regulatory/corporate capture and malfeasance.
The book however… Heinlein was a weird political mix of right winger who had an open mind about hippies, but he uncritically promoted a militaristic society as a virtue, a permanent junta as a normal thing, and absolutely brushed up to fascism.
I suspect idolisation by reflection. When Patrick Bateman is one upped socially he turns into a liquidy angry mess, thus serves as a reflection of how some autists feel when they’re out of their element socially or emotionally.
…and I think there’s something for autistic people to idolize in the fact that he just goes on, regardless of his disassociative breaks from healthy socialisation.
No, he’s not a healthy model, but I can understand people feeling something is reflected there.
Of course in actual fact it’s satire of the high society side of the 1980s patriarchal finance bros… But post modernism dictates that each individual will have their own interpretations.
I have yet to meet a lib who understood To Kill A Mockingbird
You’d think they read a book where Atticus, backed by intellect and truth and a lifetime of working within the system, righteously proves a man’s innocence despite all odds, and then the system worked and everyone lived happily ever after.
Edit: What are the downvotes for? The whole point of the book is that the system and all the justifications are just a pretense for those with power to wield it the way they want, and all the rightousness and superlative competence applied within the system could not stop the jury from convicting Tom or the prison guard from shooting him in the back.
Libs of course just see how great attacus is and don’t understand why the trial didn’t end with Tom getting declared innocent.
This doesn’t even require reading subtext, there’s a whole scene on the courthouse steps after the verdict where it’s spelled out for Scout and the reader.
A lawyer who confronts the white people of the whole village with their racism. The way he makes them all see loud and clear that their choice is either to stand by their racism and let a child rapist who raped his own daughter (and does a lot of other bad things) go free because he has the same skin colour as them and drag themselves down to his level, or to admit that a white person could commit such a crime. On that day, no one in the courtroom could lie about what decision they made, that it was made solely out of racism, and what the price was. Tom paid the ultimate price, but everyone in the courtroom paid a price too. None of them got off scot-free.
Do you really think that hasn’t changed something? That doing the right thing is only worth something if it changes the world immediately? Atticus may not have saved Tom, but he made a difference, because everyone understood that Tom was innocent. If more people made that kind of difference, we would live in a different and better world. People who are racist need to be confronted with the damage they are doing, why they are doing it, and the damage they are willing to do to themselves and others.
And of course the children needed an explanation. They were hoping for immediate change, a happy ending, and they understood the explanation better than you, it seems.
It’s one thing to be angry at the system and feel helpless, it’s another to give up and just shrug your shoulders because “there’s nothing I can do about it” or to use what’s there and do the best you can and make the change you can. If Atticus had not used everything the system gave him and not defended Tom, the result would have been the same for Tom, but the people in the courtroom would have been able to pretend that everything was fine, that Tom was guilty and cheer for Tom to be convicted. He took that away from them, they left the courtroom with their eyes down, because they put a proofen innocent man into jail. He won. Believe it or not, the far from perfect court system, even in a village like this, allowed him to force them to look in the mirror.
“If you’re inhumanly competent, you might make the murderers feel bad before they choose to murder that man” is not an endorsement of working within the system, it’s showing you that you must work outside it.
The Civil Rights Act wasn’t passed because civil rights activists were victimized until the oppressors felt bad for them and saw their humanity, it was passed after MLK got shot and every city burned for a week.
The Civil Rights Act wasn’t passed because civil rights activists were victimized until the oppressors felt bad for them and saw their humanity, it was passed after MLK got shot and every city burned for a week.
The Civil Rights Act was passed 4 years before MLK died.
I confused the voting rights act with the housing rights act; the point still stands that it wasn’t a recognition of the humanity of the oppressed by the oppressor that dictated progress, but the threat implied by millions of people mobilized.
And yet the whole world is still feeling bad for MLK getting murdered so many years later, he will stay in every American’s mind forever, his death a stain on this country because people saw his humanity, his death made them feel ashamed. Even you needed to mention him. He was working within the system, he won. His words are still present and an inspiration. He changed more than burning cities did. Without his work and dedication the burning cities would just have been meaningless violence easily dismissed as Black people being bad by the racists. Even the people who ignored racism and pretended everything was fine understood through him that there was something wrong, that change had to happen. Violence and destruction alone will always only spread fear and change who is the next oppressor, good people can change the world into a place where we all hinder oppression to happen, where we don’t need oppressors anymore.
And it was the system who brought the housing rights act. Boring, peaceful lawyers who were there waiting for their chance to make something good happen inside the system. Witout them the fires would have burned out and everything had stayed the same until the next violence.
He did not work within the system, nearly every march he had was declared illegal. He was despised by white moderates for a generation until his image could be recuperated to serve the very system he spent his life fighting.
“I’ve yet to meet a conservitard who doesn’t have to suck their own dick every night to fall asleep.”
Whether that’s true or not it starts with grouping some people into a predjudicially named group, then saying they are have some negative quality, or at least worse than you, and then extrapolating your personal experience to imply it applies to the entire group.
Result… Downvotes.
Maybe if you hid it further down more people would have missed it, but you put it in the first line.
I understand that much, I forgot liberals don’t consider themselves right, and wouldn’t understand that OP includes them given how anti-capitalist Star Trek is.
It’s funny that people are mad at your usage of “lib.” It’s obviously pejorative, and maybe they’re reacting to that, but I doubt it would have gone better if you said “liberal.”
OP here is obviously criticizing center-right liberal thinking from a leftist perspective.
I had a conversation about satire recently and found its most interesting trait to be the divergent paths to understanding and misunderstanding its intent. A caricature can be taken as criticism or instead as CrItiCiSm.
For example, Homelander can be perceived as the monster that he is and a trump allegory. In this case, the intended message is that trump is a monster. However, homelander is such an over-the-top monster that it can also be perceived as mocking the “over-the-top” criticism of trump while fully acknowledging that it is a satire. The former is the intended message but the latter is a reasonable take for someone who doesn’t see trump as a monster. They might say that the critique is meant to be so ridiculous that it exemplifies the calls for action against an “innocent man.” “He’s not that monstrous, they must mean something else.”
South park’s manbearpig, personally, is a more interesting example. Before it was retconned, it was Al Gore‘s reputation-ruining hunt for an imaginary creature, manbearpig, which served as an allegory for his fight against, what Stone and Parker believed to be, the fictional premise of global warming. I perceived it not as criticism of Al Gore but as CrItICIsM, given that global warming factually exists. The intended message was that Al Gore ruined his reputation on a snipe hunt while I took it as the republican view of the situation being so ridiculously discordant with reality that this was their perception. In a way, that was right.
All of this is to say, satire can be difficult to understand even when it is understood to be satire, let alone when it’s taken literally. Poe’s law isn’t just an issue on the internet. For those of you scanning through and looking to pick a fight because you’ve misunderstood, yes trump is a monster, yes global warming is real, yes you should work on your reading comprehension if those were your criticisms.
My favorite part about pro-Homelander fans of The Boys is that THE SHOW IS NOT SUBTLE. HOMELANDER IS AN EVIL PSYCHOPATH IN EVERY WAY. THE ONOY WAY TO BE MORE OBVIOUS IS IF MORGAN FREEMAN NARRATED OVER IT SAYING “HE’S THE VILLIAN” EVERY TIME HKMELANDER IS ON SCREEN!
Add comment