mr_world [they/them]

  • 3 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2021

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  • Wow it would really suck if “Russia” nuked a US city right now. A city like NYC that is the old center of financial power. It’s not like there’s a new order in California of fintech ready to replace it should it fall. It would just be so surprising if a US city was nuked. Then continuity of government kicked in, a hapless senile President was retired and the private-public partnership military industry took over. Surely nobody is planning on retooling the US government as a major power against China and haven for the wealthy during climate wars.

    Anyways. We gotta get that Putin guy, he has nukes.




  • Star Wars was a product. Think of all the Star Wars that never got made because no studio would pick them up. Think about the vastness of human experience and commentary that exits outside of white guys in Hollywood, CA in the 1970s/80s. You’re thinking too narrow. There could have been much more and overt anti-imperialist films being made and Star Wars would have been one thing in hundreds or thousands. The fact that it was a brand meant it had to be reinforced in culture and continued to keep churning profits. Thus it was further embedded in the mythology of Hollywood. Plus they were fine with making an anti-imperialist movie because Americans never saw themselves as the Empire. It was modeled after Nazis. Anti-imperialism was fine a long time ago in the US because it specifically meant anti-European imperial powers. The US wanted to cement US capitalism as the world order. JFK was all about anti-imperialism. Though we all know that American capitalism is just another form of imperialism, liberals don’t. The average person doesn’t.

    Star Wars is not anti-imperialist because the movie had rebels fighting an evil empire. It’s a product of empire. You can’t separate it being a product of empire from the story or plot or message or whatever else. The idea that Star Wars planted a seed of anti-imperialism and therefore that’s why people are leftists now is pretty immaterial. Don’t get lost in idealism. People were anti-imperial before Star Wars but for different reasons than you think (as I said above) and people were anti-war because they could be drafted. Then, after Star Wars came out, Americans very much became okay with being the Empire. In fact they doubled down on it right around the time the Prequel Trilogy came out. Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005, during the height of Americans wanting to crush the rebels for blowing up their towers.

    Movies are downstream from politics, not the other way around.





  • Yes. Steve Buscemi is good. It has a lot of the 1920s corruption and vice. Tons of historical eastereggs.

    spoiler

    It’s a period piece obviously so a lot is not technically eastereggs but just plot. Like how Margaret gets a pamphlet by Margaret Sanger, about how to do birth control by douching with Lysol after sex. Then later Margaret is confronted with a woman who has a miscarriage. She had drank ecoli-infested milk to induce an abortion. Her husband kept assaulting her and she had no choice as they already had several kids. That’s based on a real woman who drank ecoli milk by mistake and had a miscarriage. That’s what partly inspired Sanger to get into reproduction rights. So the show takes real stuff and integrates it into the plot, like any historical piece does.

    There’s also cameos and brief shots of stuff that are more subtle. Gaston Means shows up in S3. There’s tons of Irish Republican stuff and the war with England. Black and Tans, all of that. There’s also a bit about Cuba under Machado. Tons of stuff.