I read an interesting article about 40K Space Marines last year, the problem with them is that some people just don’t get satire no matter how glaringly obvious it is
Starship Troopers is so badass!
My dad legitimately thinks that’s a great action movie. And to be fair, it is.
But he doesn’t understand the deeper meanings.
More meat for the grinder is totally just a bad ass thing to say! Not at all like an orphan crushing machine, for sure.
“The mobile infantry made me the man I am today” shows off two missing legs and one missing arm
All the teachers are injured and in need of prosthetics and assisting devices, all of them served.
As Rico’s dad said, it should be illegal to use schools as recruiting centers.
And while they all need a prosthetic, none of them have one unless it specifically pertains to something that will benefit their military job.
The front desk guy needs 2 legs and an arm, but only has an arm and is in a wheel chair. The arm helps his job stamping new recruits in. The legs serve no purpose but to make his life better, but unnecessary for the job.
Ricos teacher needs an arm, but while he’s teaching, he doesn’t have one. Once he’s back on active duty, he’s allowed a prosthetic arm because it helps the Federation. He doesn’t require an arm to teach.
If it’s not required for your specific position, you don’t deserve to be made whole. It’s a pretty fucked up society overall, and not nearly enough people understand that the humans aren’t the good guys.
Not only are they not the good guys, the military started a fight where none existed in order to justify its existence.
Buenos Aires was 100% a false flag, there’s 0 chance bugs in any system other than this one could have, in less than ten thousand years, encountered humanity and started lobbing asteroids at them.
Even if they had the knowledge of where humanity is from, and the ability to target asteroids in order to reroute them, they simply don’t have the technology to speed an asteroid enough to be a threat to another planetary system.
The military hauled an asteroid to hit a human population center. 100%.
Was Buenos Aires the first attack?
In the book there’s an additional interesting scene with Rico and the recruiter: Rico runs in to the recruiter as he’s leaving the office. The recruiter does actually have prosthetic legs, and he’s walking out the door. Rico asks why he didn’t have them on before. The recruiter explains that his job is actually to scare away recruits. He’s supposed to show potential recruits his missing legs as a consequence of his service. That way those that aren’t really serious about it, those who are doing it because it just seems like a cool idea, don’t go through with signing up. He then explains that the government doesn’t require him to be a living warning sign in his off-time, so he puts on his legs and goes about his life that way.
Yeah, but the film is a glaringly obvious satire of the society it depicts, the book isn’t.
Making the aliens actual bugs in the movie was a mistake and washes the rest of the critiques inside the movie away with it.
I really disagree. The aliens being insects is perfect because it provides a justaposition with the human characters. The idea is that the insects are a swarm of mindless drones. Meanwhile, the humans are…well, also a swarm of mindless drones. Which is sort of the point of the movie. The fascist society they inhabit actively dehumanizes them and robs them of their ability to think for themselves. The visuals of the film reinforce this in the larger fight scenes: the mass of gray bodies that constitute the human forces all blend together into a single swarm, much like that of the insects. And by the end of the movie Rico is completely hollowed out as a character: literally just inhabiting the same role as Rasczak, and even parroting all of his phrases from earlier in the film.
In the books it’s explained the man is missing his legs specifically to scare people away and show them the potential consequences of service, so people really understand what can and does happen and do not sign up just for fleeting glory or to look cool.
I really didn’t feel like that needed to be more obvious than it was in the movie. Where would you even find trees to make even more massive clue-by-fours to hit people over the head with?
Wut?! How can someone not understand Starship Troopers is satire? What about all of the propaganda cut ins?!
There really is no limit to how dense some dipshits can be. Hell, there are even fascist Star Trek fans, despite the show beating them over the head with stuff like this all the time!
“star trek went woke”
BITCH STAR TREK WAS WOKE FROM DAY ONE GET BENT
Unfortunately that’s rather understandable. A largely ‘white’ and mostly male cast of mostly humans running around saving the day and ‘defeating/ enlightening’ backwards ‘alien’ cultures in what are basically military ships.
So if you ignore the messages and the actual stories being told and only look at the superficial stuff (as MAGA Morons are wont to do) it does, sadly, pass the facist vibe check.
A lot of - I dare say most - people reach for fiction as a form of escapism, and they do need a suspense of disbelief to enjoy it. So if someone points out that in-fiction events are obvious caricatures of real ones, they don’t like it because they don’t want to see it, that’s why they are there and not in the real world.
Honestly I don’t know. Even when I point out super obvious ones, I’m “reaching to make a point”
I have no doubt it’s satire, but for me it’s always been more of a fun escape into a ridiculous, militarized sci fi fantasy world. I’d never want to genuinely set foot in that world though. Except the sexy coed showers. Booyah!
I really blame the games industry as a whole for this. They keep making games with Space Marines as the protagonists, where their violence is presented as justified, when a lore-friendly space marine game should be like “No Russian” missions all the time and the resulting failure this causes to their Empire. This constant “whitewashing” of the lore, is what has attracted a ton of people.
I would LOVE to see a WH40k setting where the space marines are lore-accurate murdering an entire multi-billion hive-city for some minor heresy by a few thousand of the people on the 925th-sub-basement, and you’re playing random ganger Scumface Mc Spikearms who’s just trying to survive.
Apropos , the Necromunda video game was such a disappointment :(
yeah, agreed. But Rogue Trader was remarkably on brand.
There were a LOT of parts where you basically had to decide the life and death of tens to hundreds of thousands. And often, the ethical thing was NOT the in-game right choice. For example, you could allow refugees aboard, it gets you nothing, but some of them will try to sabotage you. If you kill them all, you even get piety points for killing (some) heretics.
I recall one of the developer replying to a comment that said “If I’m evil, I get cool items, if I’m good, I get nothing, why is that?” and they replied with “If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
“If you’re doing it for a rewards, you’re not really being good, are you now?”
This is moon logic. Yes, that’s how it works in the real world, but you aren’t in the real world. You’re playing a game.
You do in fact score points in the “people love me” stats if you do things like that. But the “people love me” path is far less powerful than the either of the “Religious fundamentalists love me” paths.
RDR2 I think did it really well. In RDR2 you have that good/bad meter, and people react to your presence based on that. Do good stuff, and they’ll greet you nicely. Do bad, especially in a specific town, and they’ll shoot first ask questions later. You didn’t even need to do anything if your bad meter was even full a little bit, they’d just be more hostile to you, and scales based on just how far the meter was on bad. Anywhere from NPCs mouthing off telling you to kick rocks, getting punched, getting shot at, and having a posse gathered hunting you down.
I don’t think warhammer can do that though, because if you know anything about that universe, you’re solidly in the evil category. But that’s every species, even the “good” sect of the Eldar aren’t exactly good guys.
A Warhammer game. Being good is meant to be hard and I never consider evil options any more in games because they are just stupid when there is no reason to do it.
So a WH40K/Spec-Ops: The Line mashup.
The Line was an anti-shooter, in the sense that it felt like a generic third-person shooter while constantly hammering the “you shouldn’t be having fun playing this because war is awful and full of atrocities” messaging. It was actually a fairly decent critique of the shooters that were prevalent when the game was developed. It came out when games like Gears of War, Resident Evil, Mass Effect, and Red Dead Redemption were dominating the third-person shooter market, while the FPS market was dominated by Halo and COD.
Eh, I feel the message of Spec Ops was really sabotaged by the poor in-game systems.
There’s a mission where you have to defend a point, and you get the option to drop white phosphorus. But that mission is really easy, and you can easily play it for hours and hours, killing an infinite number of enemies. It doesn’t progress without pushing the button.
And then it berates you, the player, for pushing the button.
This feels really weird to me. I can see the point in the distance, but it really doesn’t work for me, since you can obviously just murder people till eternity as well.
And the game has several hidden “better ways”, like shooting the rope at the hanging, where it will reward you for doing it better. But it doesn’t have that option elsewhere, like the white phosphorus option.
Honestly, there’s a big disconnect between some of the scenes, and the heavyhanded message.
Contrast it with “no Russian”, which is a map that’s offered with zero commentary, letting you shoot unarmed civilians, but not punishing you at all if you don’t. And no matter what you do, the end result is the same. That’s a system that fits with everything in the game, it doesn’t have to swing a message in your face, and it doesn’t have to break with normal gameplay to insert elements required for the message.
I always hear people talk about the white phosphorus part of the game, but the game doesn’t give you a choice there. I much prefer the parts where you are actually given a choice. The one that I remember the best is the civilians, you don’t have to kill them and I just fired a warning shot and they quickly dispersed. Apparently some people will gun them down.
You hear people talk about it, because it’s so bad and jarring and forced. People keep bringing up specops as some great writing inversion of a shooter trope, when it really just doesn’t get what agency is.
If you don’t give a player agency, you can’t then berate them for doing something wrong, because they didn’t actually do a thing. The phosphorous part of the game is a thing you don’t get a say in, but the game blames you as a player.
It’s like me blaming you for reading the word phosphorus, when you had basically no choice in that.
If you don’t give agency, you can only ever blame the character. And the writer made the characters, not the player.
Maybe that’s kind of the point? Both the player and the character chose to be there in the first place and civilian casualties are accepted as an inevitable during war.
See, I always thought this comparison falls flat, because No Russian and Spec Ops both give you the same amount of choice - either you complete the mission or not - and both give you no alternative way to proceed and no way to prevent it other than close the game. That Spec Ops makes you push buttons for the bad thing to happen rather than allow you to chicken out and be a passive rather than active participant is a point in it’s favour.
I think it forms part of bigger meta narrative, and the end of the day you still go through with the white phosphur attack as the game is forcing the choice on you to proceed as the only way to solve the problem - which is what the character believed in
Its message is,to me, “are you having fun” playing a game of murder -it forced, albeit clumsily, the reality of war when you feel you have no other option - a choice you are forced to make like pulling the trigger of a gun. You can leave the game and not do it or you pull the trigger.
You are still killing after that point soon after, with character quick to stat blaming others and you are still going on for the ride by playing- to finish the game, to get to Komrad- it comes off pretentious i admit, but the wp was acting as a turning point and was using a blunt force narrative to make you start asking questions about the character’ sanity
Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player’s character you are playing decided that it was the “only way” and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.
“No Russian is shock value, but there really isn’t much player consequence as it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it”
If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don’t and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.
Again, conveying that is not easy and what they did could have been conveyed better. You are seeing things from the perspective of a dude with severe ptsd and you have been murdering people up to that point on fragile pretense
spoiler
Especially since the whole point was to scout for survivors and head back - and that turned into a quest for Konrad that destroys whats left of Dubai on the orders of a broken man
Could it have been done better - sure, but the thing is you, the player, still went through with it and pressed the button instead of putting the game down and refusing - it is trying to sell the point of view of the player’s character you are playing decided that it was the “only way” and by continuing to play the game you have accepted the condition forced upon you and continued to be complicit in the events that unfold because you wanted to see the story through.
My problem is that the game does tries to do it both ways. It tries to give you in-game options to “be less bad”, in the crowd scene and the hanging scene, doing a very game-y thing by going straight. But then it ALSO does the WP scene where it’s going for “The only winning move is not to play” thing by breaking outside the game.
And that ruins both angles for me, it feels really lazy, like they just kinda shoehorned the angle in and felt super smart afterwards, when to me it just feels like they’re covering up for bad writing. They didn’t commit.
“No Russian is shock value, but there really isn’t much player consequence as it doesn’t matter what you do so long as you keep up, you could even skip it”
If you wanted to avoid the nastiness of what you were doing you could in No russian, specs ops decided to comfront the player with deciding for the player to either accept the nastiness or don’t and if you want to see the story to completion you better get your hands proper dirty and not half ass it.
You couldn’t skip No Russian way back when it first released, that was patched in later because of the massive public outcry over that map. That’s not really my point, my point is that as a writer, it’s fine to engage inside the game with the characters OR place it on the reader/player, but doing both makes both miss the mark.
I know this is subjective, but I had embraced the narrative and got into the character’s head as he slowly lost patience with everything
My decisions were at :
“The hanging was screw you, I am not playing by your rules”
and
at the crowd scene, things leading up to it made me just as frustrated at the characters, that I also was getting sick of things, and gunned them down because I got tired of it all and I inhibited the character - that was a point that I felt just as tired as the characters and thought everyone can die, no one here is worth the effort,
Them doing the cop outs does make the scenes weaker, I agree, - the hanging I feel was early enough before things went off the deep end, but the crowd scene, for me, was memorable because I made a mistake in the heat of emotion, when I let myself be engrossed in the role-playing as the soldiers physically, mentally and emotionally break down, it was what stuck with me especially when you reach the end and you realize how you’ve been played for a fool the whole time.
Would it have been better if it was tighter and they fully commited to that descent into madness, yes. Did they have to go so heavy with the messaging, not really.
The no russian mission, I felt initially shocked the first time, but once the police arrive my illusion was broken. You can just walk through the whole civilian section and do nothing and be blamed for the attack anyway - it had more impact if you were killing people but it also has initial shock value but it is all an illusion like the choices in Spec Ops.
There was a bit of a disconnect with how was it, 5 men in only body armour made a fool out of russian equivalent of swat - they were performing riot police procedure on men armed with machine guns and grenade launchers - no different than spec ops in the last stretch of the game where you are killing juggernauts and armoured vehicles, the airport guards I can understand - but the special police were funneling into killzones - and maybe that was the idea for the context for war but it was like the North Hollywood Shootout, only both sides were carrying equivalent weaponry and only one side was really using it
I know Makarov was connected with politicians and the whole thing could have been decided to be green lit as a false flag to have a pretext.
GW constantly pushes Space Marines and to a lesser extent the Imperial Guard as a majority of time as the protagonist. People don’t have the media literacy to understand that protagonist does not equal the hero. The protagonist is just the main character of the story and they can be evil or good or anything in between.
I feel like the satire is being washed out to support the line that shall always go up.
But hey, Space Marines goes “Pew! Pew! Pew!”
The article discusses this; basically the video games want you to at least slightly like the protagonist you’re playing as, which means they can’t entirely be the monstrous caricatures they were designed to be.
I don’t get it why not though, Spec Ops The Line was not a technical marvel or an outstanding gameplay experience even for its time, but we are still talking about it for its message.
Meanwhile stellaris exists with multiple different options for genocide.
Dude, you can genetically modify a race to live shorter lives, taste good and make them more subservient and weaker. That shit is beyond genocide. From chattel to cattle.
I would like some more grimdark in warhammer games. At this point Rimworld seems better for it, as you can commit most warcrimes in that just fine. Even new things that are not yet yet in the Geneva suggestions! Like executing POWs with eldritch horrors after you have harvested them for most of their organs to sell on the blackmarket.
God-Emperor (mostly dead sitting on a cybernetic throne preserving his life, requires like 100 psychics a day to feed on to live) wants to spread his Religious-no-religion religion across the cosmos, and the brutality with which is required is a small price to pay for industry.
And then they choose to like the guy unironically. But if they’re really into Slaneesh then they just get a special brand of weird.
requires like 100 psychics a day
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years.
So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
And to be fairrrrrrr… The emperor himself wants no religion at all, and it’s the corrupt and zealous officials that spread the “the emperor is a god” thing, he straight up destroyed a planet because a chapter of marines converted it to Emperorism once. That was before he got stuck on his death throne, obviously.
Anyone who genuinely admires ANY of the factions in 40k just doesn’t understand it.
They all suck. There are no good guys. Honestly I’d say the closest thing to good guys there are would be the tyanids, because they’re just doing what tyanids do. You don’t get mad at cows for being cows. Or wolves for being wolves. They are what they are and they do what they do. It isn’t malicious intent.
It’the A̴l̴l̴ C̶̳̑ọ̷̓͂n̴̼͕͂̄ṡ̴̹̕u̶̘̿m̶̜̿͜ȋ̵̲́͜n̴͈̜̎g̴̰̝̈̇ Ḩ̴̛͖͚̣̯̟̗̮͔͓̝̜͆̓̈́̈́̇̓͒̕Ừ̶̲̓̃̂̉̎͛̀̒̕̚N̵̨̳͈͙̘̭̩̹͈̙͈͙͕̮͋̿̆͐̅̇͆̅̋̈G̵̛̛͇̗̘͓̐̓̆̓̌̓̃̀̂͛́̉͘͘͝Ę̸̙̩͈͕̒̄̋́̍́̔̔̉͝͠R̸̛͇͚̜͍͉̺̋̽̀̎͌̈́͗̀͌̓̊̂͜
I think the problem is that despite everyone being evil, they are all also cool, and there is no real satire in it when there is no point being made.
they are all also cool
looks at nurgle
Uhhhhhh I’m not so sure about that one.
But hey, if you want papa nurgle’s blessing, go for it.
While the runners these days may not have any kind of satire in mind, it’s pretty obvious a large portion of the Imperium is based on a mixture of 1940s German and (80s-now) modern American ideals, as well as capitalism in general. The Eldar are arrogant isolationists and the dark Eldar are gluttonous.
Most of 40k can have parallels drawn to modern society and the dials are all set to overload.
While they may not have a direct point, I do think it still can have a message.
“don’t be like this”
Too bad we are failing…
Originally it was a parody of Thatcher’s England.
Given the time it was created, that’s not surprising.
Also a good time to remind everyone that thatcher’s grave is a gender neutral bathroom.
The tyranids are an expression of entropy more than they are a species, they’re very nearly a force of nature. They’re not really “good” or “bad” in the same way that gravity isn’t good or bad.
Now the Orkz I think are just fun and good dudes. They don’t really hate anybody in particular, they just LOVE to FIGHT and will keep doing that unless stopped. They will gladly fight amongst themselves if no one else appears to fight with them. They don’t really have grand dreams of conquest beyond swarming over the horizon to fight whatever is on the other side of it. The optimal end state of Ork supremacy isn’t galactic domination, it’s one big WAAGH cloud that rips across the galaxy in a giant loop and takes long enough doing it that the survivors can settle back down and bunker back up before the Boyz come back to town. They don’t even necessarily want to win, they just love to fight, they think it’s the best activity that you can do, and they want to share that with any and everyone.
From anyone else’s perspective this is a horrifying wall of green skinned, brutal cunning monsters that will sprout up out of literal nowhere and reproduce faster than you can print more bullets for them. But from the Orkz perspective they’re basically just asking you to join their football game. They’re fun guys.
But from the Orkz perspective they’re basically just asking you to join their football game. They’re fun guys.
Different cultures I guess but in my neck of the woods, the hooligans down at the local football club don’t rip my arms off if I refuse.
Oh sorry, I just realized I’m whispering.
OI YA GIT, HUMIES AIN’T GOOD KRUMPIN’, MOST OF EMS IS TOO SMALL FER PROPPA FIGHTINZ, CEPT THE BIG BOYZ WITH THE BIG DAKKAS
1,000 per day. Every day. For Ten. Thousand. Years. So you know, just a drop in the bucket, no big deal.
3,650,000,000 psykers are sacrificed since the Emperor went on the Golden Throne. That’s just over half the population of Earth.
Writers have issue with scope. 1,000 a day seems shocking until you compare it a 1,000 out of a galaxy of trillions or whatever comes next. It is a literal drop in the bucket.
I think the 1,000 was picked cause it’s high enough of a number for our brains to be like “That’s terrible!”
Honestly I keep forgetting the Imperium supposedly controls over 1 million worlds.
They really do have a problem with scope.
Space marines are bad ass in a fight but there’s only 1000 per chapter if they’re adhering to the codex, but that’s nowhere near enough for an entire galaxy.
Even at a planet scale, 1k troops are not enough. Sure, each is worth 100 men or whatever, but that makes them always spread too thin. In a planetary invasion, which orks and 'nids often do, if they can’t trick the enemy into chokepoints, they’re fucked big time.
The Armageddon war had, what, 20 chapters deploying marines there? And that’s with massive support from the local IG regiment, plus space navy
Totally agree. Space Marines are demi-god, death machines however there would be no way a 1,000 of them could take an entire planet, as you correctly pointed an entire galaxy.
My head cannon is that the Guard does all the work and their achievements are forgotten while the Space Marines get all the credit.
Well they don’t want to sacrifice all of their psykers. It is cheap, just a small part in the vast war machine.
Look at this traitor here^^^^
All praise be to Omnissiah. May his leadership and grace guide you to the one true path. Give yourself to him and become one.
Yeah they are really fucked up, but man…what great lore! Best thing about 40k baby
Yeah, this was on full display when Helldivers 2 launched. So many people just didn’t get the satire, and unironically leaned into the messaging.
For the unaware, Helldivers 2 is basically a Starship Troopers video game.
Starship Troopers the book was flat out propaganda. It’s only the movie that is satire.
The book is an exploration of and presents an argument for militarism. That alone doesn’t make it propaganda. While many of the sentiments, implications, premises in the book carry a clear bias, the book nevertheless invites the reader to engage with and reflect on the ideology rather than aiming to manipulate and indoctrinate the reader.
I’d say the earnest argument presented by Heinlein in ST is flawed and morally objectionable, but not a piece of propaganda.
So the book presents an argument for and has a bias towards militarism, but it’s not propaganda? Are you also going to tell me that Atlas Shrugged invites the reader to explore whether capitalism is good or not? Hard disagree.
I mean… yeah? I don’t agree with it, but I feel like its to detailed and nuanced to be merely propaganda. Propaganda would be shit like the Red Dawn remake or almost any movie involving the US military that tends to be to shallow to be anything but propaganda.
It’s nuanced like a brick is from what I remember and was basically a commercial for the military. The enemy were nonhuman arachnids, which doesn’t come off as terribly subtle.
I think it would help if you clarify what “propaganda” means to you, as I have a sense we mean different things.
For me, I understand propaganda as media/content/communication aimed at manipulating people towards a particular point of view. It’s often characterized by reduction, misrepresentation/deception, disingenuous argument, and etc. That is also to say that I make a distinction between manipulation and persuasive argument. So, a piece of content can make an argument, display inherent biases, employ persuasive techniques, without being propaganda. That’s because all forms of expression necessarily hold an ideological position.
It was basically a commercial for the military from what I can remember. There wasn’t subtlety. The military was put on a pedestal. People that hadn’t been in the military didn’t get to vote. The enemy were reduced to inhuman arachnids. It’s propaganda in the same way Top Gun is.
But my point was mainly the movie and book were very different.
Are you arguing the book is propaganda or the society of the book is heavily propagandized? The book itself is not propaganda if you fully read it. The horrors of war are on full, gruesome display. Heroism, cowardice, death, and dismemberment to the humans and arachnids. The society of the book is heavy on the propaganda, but the book itself is not propaganda.
It’s just a glaring lack of critical thinking brought on by our (sometimes willingly) ignorant masses. Satire is dead in this country because we didn’t have the capacity to comprehend it.
This country of Lemmy?
Is my American-centrism showing? My bad, but the majority of this problem is from here unfortunately.
I think we’ve all got our idiots, yours are just a bit louder!
Yeah I am having a great time with Helldivers 2 but damn if I don’t feel this pretty much every time I play
Ooh, thanks for sharing this. I clicked on it thinking I had already read it before, but this is actually new to me. It looks interesting
People who like Rick and Morty.
People who look up to Rick.
People who like American Psycho because it is a brilliant satire of the sociopathy of the elite.
vs
People who like American Psycho because ‘I’m just like Patrick Bateman, fr fr.’
…
Its the same with Fight Club, Falling Down, Taxi Driver…
Its possible to enjoy and be a fan of these movies without actually idolizing a psycopath… maybe you sympathize or empathize with them to varying degrees, but you don’t hold them up as idealized character role models, you realize these are all very flawed, often tragic characters who … basically become villains in (semi?) plausible ways, that showcase how brutal and broken society is…
But, so many people do actually idolize these trainwreck characters that now we’ve spent basically the entire era of internet based cultural dominance/exchange where any kind of admiration of these ‘cautionary morality tale about a disaffected man’ type movies is just immediately, often instantly viewed as a red flag by a whole lot of people.
American Psycho satirization of the cold and unfeeling aspects of 1980’s yuppie culture. Bateman might have hallucinated the entire thing and Paul Owen really could have been in London given how frequently Bateman is mistaken for another person by colleagues. It’s not about the sociopathy of the rich.
I mean… your plot notes are on point… but ‘yuppie’ derives from ‘YUP’, which means ‘Young Urban Professional’.
At the time, the 80s and 90s, yuppie was synonymous with … the people making huge incomes in white collar jobs, in large corporations, by being cutthroat businessmen, usually earning their keep by orchestrating deals, layoffs, mergers, downsizing/rightsizing, etc… stuff that was good for the shareholders and execs, but bad for pretty much everyone else.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying?
I don’t see how you think yuppie culture and sociopathy of the rich… are any different, I don’t get why you are drawing a distinction there, or what the boundary is.
Yuppie culture is sociopathic, and the young rich people of the era … were largely yuppies.
Bateman is a yuppie, he is a rich person, and he is a violent sociopath/psycopath… or at least, he seems to think he is… he may just be utterly delusional.
The way I see it is … he is a hollow person, a husk, with no actual values, but is a brilliant actor, acting out the fake corporate/socialite norms… which are fundamentally built on a kind of sociopathy: Nothing matters other than the pursuit of profit and status, superiority in all aspects is the goal, any means to achieve this are justified.
Thus he is the uber yuppie, the ur yuppie, the ‘perfect’ yuppie… and he cannot maintain sanity as a ‘perfect’ yuppie.
When Bateman snaps, we’re seeing the violence that is normally done indirectly, sanitized through the layers of corporate governance and influence upon government and society as a whole… all of the complications of politics and economics are removed, and we see a disintermediated, rich corporate mad man in a suit (or his birthday suit) just directly doing the violence that is normally obfuscated and done via societal systems and layers of bureacracy.
You show the truth with a lie, kind of idea.
Maybe a more succinct way of saying what I’m trying to say:
Yuppie culture was the culture of the rich, or at least a prominent subculture of a prominent subset of the rich, in the 80s and 90s. Bateman is basically a cariacature of this, thus the movie is a character study of a person who represents an entire class… of wealthy people. (We also get to just see the culture outright via Bateman’s interactions with others in that culture)
- Sociopathy wasn’t common with yuppies. Seriously, sociopathy is not that common despite what the internet leads you to believe. Yuppies weren’t sociopathic. They were materialistic yes but they weren’t manipulative narcissists with no emotional capacity for empathy.
2)Bateman might be a psychotic killer OR it is all a delusion. Multiple events in the book happen that make it pretty clear that Bateman might just be crazy and bored and isn’t killing people. That bit about Paul Owen being seen alive in London could be real because just like people think Bateman is Halberstam people also mistake him for Paul Owen. This is because everyone is so shallow and replaceable that no one really knows anyone so it is heavily implied Bateman might just be crazy like his lawyer tells him.
Where we differ is I don’t think anyone other than Bateman and maybe Owen show signs of sociopathy. The average yuppie was no different than the average bro of today. They just had better whiskey and worse haircuts.
To people who like American psycho: read the book and get cured, it’s one of the worst books I have ever read (long story short, I only had that one book over like months, so I finished it. A scoolkid could have written it + some unnecessary ultra violence, IMO).
Rick and Morty bangs and had some subtle anti-capitalist elements to it.
But yeah Rick is a nihilist with severe empathy problems. Although he is showing some very minor character development.
Rick is a narcissist. He’s a pretty good example of one.
Honestly all the characters in that show suck. Except that one girl morty time-looped himself out of marrying. She seemed normal.
Oh and Planetina. There is only one solution to earth’s pollution.
I’ve only seen a few episodes, but isn’t that part of the joke of the show?
Weirdly, I haven’t seen a lot of people who think The Gang in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia are cool role models. I guess the difference might be that Rick is canonically a genius where The Gang are canonically morons.
As far as I know, yes. If it’s not, then I should probably stop watching…
But they get pretty self-aware at times, they don’t make any of the characters really look like they’re doing the “right thing” for too long before they curb back around.
I quite liked her methods tbh. Morty was just not willing to solve pollution.
He wasn’t willing to do the things that need to be done to save the biosphere for as many creatures as possible.
Is there a big connection between them and “Dark Enlightenment” chuds or what?
They’ll glom onto any super smart asshole character and pretend that’s what Elmo is like.
I love Rick and Morty but all the main characters are not good people. I don’t blame Morty or Summer since what else can you expect growing up surrounded by that family?
I admire his dedication to his wife. I’ve never cared about anybody that much.
Season 7 spoilers
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I really liked that after uncle slows death, they had this scene from his wife that shows the value in moving on. Not that she didn’t care and love him - in fact you still see his picture at the end. It’s such a good foil to how Rick approached things. They’re happy too.
In hindsight, it makes sense that an edgy series like Rick and Morty was originally written by a serial harasser. And people insist on separating the art from the artist, now THAT is a red flag for me
I am interested in survivalism but it seems like most survivalists are a bunch of god-fearing crazy racist motherfuckers.
History is kind of the opposite. When someone says they like history I’ll get excited and ask what period is their favorite. If they say “Romans” without any qualifiers like Early Republic or Late Eastern Empire, I get a bad feeling and they usually follow up with “and WWII”
my answer is “mesopotamian” because I like their goofy little sculptures
archeology is cool, humans are just little goblins that really like to live on hills for some reasonThem dudes is wild though! They achieved so many recorded firsts and shaped so much of our culture that we often don’t even recognize how huge they were!
I still yearn for the day we can move to a sexagesimal nubering system.
When you can dig cave homes on the hills, like in the case of Petra and early people in current day Turkey, growing a beard becomes mandatory. 🪨 ⛏
Curious what is says about me that my answer has always been “the Cold War.”
… Other than the fact that history feels far too present these days.
you grew up during The Cold War? That’s about it unless you get more specific for example Im interested in the decline of the USSR and the rise of the CIS.
I was actually born at the “end” of it. I generally am interested in US-Soviet relations and how the Cold War/Communism became a major factor in political campaigns after WWII, specifically the Dewey-Truman upset.
It’s funny, all through college I had either older people looking askance at me about why I’d be interested in “ancient” history or peers teasing me about being a Russian asset just for the interest… I just never thought the Cold War actually ended, and when I was in college in the late 2000s, that was a wild take to have lmao
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Idk, no matter what happens to America, it’s still not Russian, and that will always be a win.
My professor for a class on Soviet intelligence was ex-KGB stationed in East Germany who was a spy for MI-5. He pointed out in 1998 that all his colleagues were still very angry about the decline and that most former Soviet citizens were not doing well and would want revenge. I believe this is it.
When you look at the immediate aftermath post USSR collapse, nearly every ex-soviet country got into really fucking deep economic trouble. There was also the little fact that pretty much every position of power was achieved by being friends with powerful people, so corruption and incompetence were rampant. Combine the two and it’s no wonder most people would rather go back to the old system, especially in the first 10 years.
I recommend anyone interested in the topic checking out how the German reunification worked out. It was quite a mess that they plowed through.
The truth is that every soviet country was already in deep economic trouble, that’s what caused the collapse. There was also a ton of corruption before the fall of the USSR. The only difference was that during the cold war, the USSR wanted to pretend that their way of life was as good or better than the capitalist west. That meant that there was a ton of propaganda making things seem better than they were, and a ton of censorship about how it was in the west. It meant that the corruption was kept relatively quiet so that it didn’t embarrass the government so that it looked weak compared to the west.
As soon as the USSR collapsed, they stopped putting all the effort in to censor the west and make the USSR seem great through propaganda. That resulted in people thinking that the economy had collapsed after the USSR, when the truth is that the actual economy was simply finally revealed to them.
how the German reunification worked out. It was quite a mess that they plowed through.
Well, I’m not sure if you can really say that reunification was ever properly completed.
“When you look at the immediate aftermath post USSR collapse, nearly every ex-soviet country got into really fucking deep economic trouble.”
An economic collapse of your system will do that.
“There was also the little fact that pretty much every position of power was achieved by being friends with powerful people, so corruption and incompetence were rampant. Combine the two and it’s no wonder most people would rather go back to the old system, especially in the first 10 years.”
This was true for the nomenklatura in the USSR. The Soviet nations weren’t any less corrupt or any more competent than anyone else has been.
interesting. I’m most interested in the Khruschev era, during de-Stalinization and when the USSR was at its peak, and the satellite countries (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.) the collapse just makes me sad.
I graduated high school in 1993. The fall was happening while I was in school. I was interested in how an empire falls apart as I believed it could happen to the USA as well. I wouldn’t have predicted it would be in my lifetime though
Cold War spy stories are the best. It was a rare period of superpower vs. superpower and with enough technology to make it interesting. (I might be wrong, but I don’t think a spy story where you had to communicate using carrier pigeons and spy by simply listening over walls would be as interesting.)
For sure! I love the whole gadgetry aspect, especially how it bled into pop culture with things like Get Smart and Spy vs Spy.
And, of course, the whole Bond franchise.
That just means you grew up in the 90s with the History Channel
What if they said WW1?
Outside of modern history I think my interest is more into technology and way of living than about governments and cultures though. Like what tools did they use, what did they eat, what sort of alcohol did they drink. How did they make it, can I have a recipe.
WWI is super interesting since it set the stage for so much of the current geopolitical landscape. My main issue with “I watched History Channel as a kid” types is that they really just think guns and swords are cool (which they are) and don’t care much about the story of how people ended up in a war.
Also, I know what you mean about how interesting the day to day things from the past can be. I got really into preindustrial economies and how we used to make everything by hand. It’s fun to go into old buildings and seeing the tool marks on the wood and guessing how they made it
The trench warfare of WWI is super boring / horrifying. But, the world just before WWI is so interesting. So many places that no longer exist: the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, etc. Also, everything being an empire or a kingdom.
I also like the weird technological quirks, like how the very early WWI tanks had a little hole so the tankers could release a pigeon to communicate.
I stayed somewhere build around the 1400s before, restored using the same methods used at the time. Though not likely an accurate depiction of how a normal person would have lived as the normal people houses are all gone and we just keep the impressive ones.
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In college I was drawn towards feminist takes on historical periods I was familiar with as they rarely engaged in great man theories of history and focused more on the day to day lives of people.
“Yes.” Regarding historical periods is my answer. Particularly, a series of history books called “The Cartoon History of the Universe”. Each volume has at least 300 pages, and they are quite large. There is about five books in the mainline series, plus another dedicated to American history.
They were what taught me to enjoy history in general. Humorous, lewd, bloody, with interesting trivia. The only downside is that scientific facts tend to be dated, on account of the series being started in the late 80’s or early 90’s.
What about ancient Egypt without qualifying Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom or New Kingdom? (I just think they’re all neat.)
Idk. You’re not trying to establish a divine monarchy characterized by inbreeding and a shadow government of priests, are you?
Well, no… I’m more trying to use those methods to destroy extant governments… is that not okay?
I would just say medieval because castles.
I like ww2 but not Romans (that whole period is overrated and mid), how racist do I have to be now?
I don’t think I have a “favorite period” anymore, but the classical period is super interesting to me mostly with regards to the “losers” like Bactria (current day Afghanistan, conquered by Alexander the Great), Phoenicia/Carthage, Persia (several empires that “annoyed” the yuropeeans).
Out of curiosity are any of mine red flags. Early bronze age steppe peoples, the Late Bronze age collapse, the " Viking age" my interests are namely to do with Charlemagne and his influence on it, and pre-columbian European trade in the Americas namely the Greenland colony and the possibility that the Irish and Scots may have been fishing around Newfoundland.
Mainly the viking age, except for the fact that you know who Charlemagne is.
Fair enough also I put it into qoutes for a reason, while the raids and shit are interesting I’m far more fascinated by the expansion of trade networks from Scandinavia to the Near East via the Rus. Though my favorite historical figures are Harald Hadrada and Erik the Red, mostly because of their stories as individuals. Also like I said how Charlemagne put pressure on the Danes during his genocide of the Saxons causing the creation of the Danevirke and possibly riling up the Norse as a whole eventually leading to Lindisfarne and the Viking age. Though this seems to just be a thing Scandinavians do, kinda like hordes invading from the Steppe.
But yeah the Viking age has a lot of Nazis obsessed with it, I just happen to have Norman and Gaelo-Norse ancestors so I became interested in how they came to be.
I’m a white, Christian, male firearms enthusiast from Texas.
That’s a tough combination when I’m also extremely leftist.
I’ve had so many conversations come to a grinding halt while doing RC stuff, because I realize the person is not only veering the conversation to intentionally toward certain topics, they’re expressing right-wing opinions or shoving religion in my face. I’ve left RC events because they opened with a prayer, or because I’ve seen too many red hats in the crowd.
I’m sure it’s also because of the state I live in, but it’s a little disheartening to see so many people in my hobby who would gladly stone me to death in the street once the government allows it.
Also weirdly mountain biking has me fucking confused. So many magats on my trails, and it was my impression that cycling in general wasn’t as popular amongst the “anti-woke” crowd. Along with other things they view as a threat to their big metal death boxes that run on dead Dino and plant juices.
Lastly, blacksmithing. I do mostly bladesmithing, but like to try all aspects of it. This hobby is rampant with right-wing nut jobs and I’ve stopped watching MANY content creators over the years because they started making personal vlog style videos when Biden got elected bitching about how awful and hard it is to be a straight white male in America.
also target shooting but that’s a hot topic no matter which way you look, but here’s a reminder that armed minorities are harder to oppress
never partake of inebriating substances no matter what type while handling a firearm in any capacity. I’ve seen too many people at an outdoor range with a beer can beside them. This should get you banned from the premesis.
Alcohol at a range? Id never go back. Stone cold sober people are stupid enough handling weapons.
I don’t go back, and I have no more outdoor ranges to go to that aren’t too far away.
I used to go to a childhood friends house but after I moved we kinda drifted apart so it’s weird to ask to use their backyard range.
I would love to have the property to put in at least a 100m lane and a large back stop to stop ricochets and the like. Then I don’t have to go somewhere people will whinge when I shoot more than twice a minute, and I’m not at risk of an ND coming my way.
ND
North Dakota?
In my area (Utah), BLM land is everywhere, and there’s plenty of unused state land an hour or so away. So we can just drive a bit and a flattish area with a natural backstop, and set up some comes or something so people can see the range.
Is that not an option in your area?
Negligent Discharge
that’s such a hilarious misunderstanding 😭
Apologies.
As deegeese said, Negligent Discharge.
My bad, I tend to think people have more knowledge of obscure things than is normal, I guess.
And I’m in Ohio, so while I technically could find some bit of land to shoot on, there’s forests, fields, and cities. Anything in between is private property.
I’m exaggerating a bit, but that’s more or less how it feels.
Thanks. :) I’m not too familiar with the legal terms here. Everyone is pretty gun-positive (we have Constitutional carry here), so the chance that anyone would call the cops is pretty low if you’re outside city limits, and the chance the cops would do anything is pretty low.
Just be like my neighbor, his backdrop is a state park with hiking trails. He got his guns taken years ago when he flipped out and had a domestic incident but he got em back. Murica! Fuck yeah !
Was visiting some family in central Illinois and went to a range where they allow drinks. They were quite proud of it.
That’s crazy to me. Why would anyone want to be consuming alcohol while shooting?
I know how I am when I smoke, and there’s no chance I’d trust handling a firearm. Not because I’m violent or anything when bake (lol who is) but because my reasoning and decision making skills are impaired, maybe I mistake something for something else in a tense moment and something bad happens. Nope. Safe stays locked, and the door to their room gets locked and the key given to someone responsible, or put in the coffee tin. (I don’t like coffee and baked me steers clear of it, so I figure it’s better to be in there behind several obstructions)
Alcohol makes your aim more steady (in small to smoderate amounts.) It’s considered a PED in shooting competitions.
I believe it. The first hit of my thc pen makes my hands stop shaking, any relaxant is bound to make your aim steadier in just the right amount.
Still won’t ever see me shooting when alcohol is present.
That’s completely fair hahaha
I can only imagine how much shit would hit the fan if their insurance company heard about that lol.
so many magats on my trails
Does this really surprise you? “Country folks” are much more likely to be regularly out in nature, more likely to be into fishing/hunting/camping, and more likely to run Conservative than the more Liberal urban folks.
At least in my experience. Which is something that has me super confused about the national parks thing, cause conservative people routinely poll higher for usage of public lands. But then again I guess it shouldn’t surprise me to see them shocked when they invite the leopard into their house.
that’s an interesting explanation, didn’t think of it that way 🤔
I have a Peloton at home and at the rare cases when I open the leader board, I am surprised how many people have some MAGA or Trump related tags. Ah well, even the OG Nazis were all about fitness.
Also weirdly mountain biking has me fucking confused. So many magats on my trails, and it was my impression that cycling in general wasn’t as popular amongst the “anti-woke” crowd.
(MX Enduro and Mtn biker of many years here and I’ve observed the same thing)
It has nothing to do with liking/disliking bikes and everything to do with the toxic masculinity culture of “conquering” a hill, or trail, or just in general being more in the “bro” culture that does tend to attract more magats than other hobbies I’ve picked up.
There’s a nontrivial number of mtn bikers that are in the maga crowd, and the only link I can find is that this tends to attract a lot of people similar to the Andrew Tates of the world.
Yeah, it’s really annoying being involved in target shooting when everyone thinks you’re a MAGAt as well
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I really do, and I would love to move to a different country.
However, I have no college degree, and no work experience beyond retail/food/3rd-party-labor, and about $200 to my name. Maybe $3000 if I sold all my big stuff, including vehicle.
So the chances of me moving without being a political refugee are low, sadly.
I’m going to decide RC is Roman Catholic.
I’ve left [Roman Catholic] events because they opened with a prayer
Remote control as in cars, planes, drones etc
Nah, that’s less fun, I’m sticking with Roman Catholic.
I think there are just more of them these days. Young men are an especially growing segment of Trump supporters. And the ones that used to hide themselves are open about it more and more every time Trump wins.
I see them in woodworking, pottery, gaming, hiking. And I live in a blue city in a blue state. I think we just have to accept that most Americans support conservative ideals.
That’s maybe partly true, but pretty much everyone I’ve talked to in my very conservative area (Utah) doesn’t like Trump. In fact, I saw more Ukraine flags in the first year of the war than Trump flags.
I’m no progressive (consider myself libertarian), though I probably align with the OP in all the ways they seem to care about. I want more legal immigration (my SO immigrated), more acceptance of LGBT people, less pollution, more separation of church and state (happen to be deeply religious too), etc. My main difference is that I don’t believe those goals justify using government to restrict rights to effect cultural and social change.
So just be careful about how you tune your Nazi filter. I strongly oppose Trump, but I may get caught in the filter depending on the question.
I’m a road biker who occasionally dabbles in gravel and mountain biking.
I think the right wing hatred of cyclists comes down to two primary things:
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They have road rage over being behind bikes on the road, so they “hate cyclists.”
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They equate lycra/spandex as being feminine or at least “non masculine” if not outright “gay.”
They are usually cool with mountain bikers because they aren’t “in their way” on the road, and usually are wearing baggy “manly” clothing.
Ah, insecurity and overcompensation, what would we do without you…
Fellas, is it gay to be comfortable while cycling? My wife will be devastated.
For real. Riding in 100F temps in anything but lycra is out of the question for me. The only time I don’t wear my cycling clothes on a bike is when I am pulling my kid in the trailer and we will be stopping at all the playgrounds.
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Blacksmithing is sick. I would absolutely love to start doing it again (tbf I never really got into it), but I’m not at my parents that often (which is where the equipment is) and if I am I usually dont really have the time.
What’s funny is that while Vikings are mostly remembered for their warrior culture, their success as a diaspora came more from their merchant and sailing culture. THEY were the ‘immigrants.’
I own guns. I love my guns. But I’m not weird about it, I’m all about responsible gun ownership, I don’t have an entire armory, and I ESPECIALLY don’t open carry.
Ammosexuals give the rest of gun enthusiasts a very bad name.
I do home canning and a fair deal of baking. There’s a lot of trad bullshit around this that makes me just go “I’m canning cause I love me some candied jalapeños, not because my husband demands I do”
This is a big problem as a leftist who likes to shoot guns.
It’s the worst trying to interact with the community.
So much this.
I found pure sports shooting a bit better, because people either are there for the sport or feel bound by fair play, at least most of the time
There is a comm for that here !socialistra@midwest.social
Does programming count as a hobby? I waste my free time on it… There’s this funny stereotype, of a queer programmer with long, quirky socks, and maybe even a fursona. Despite being a small percentage, such types are often overrepresented online. It used to bother me a little.
Nowadays I’m so, so glad when someone I’m talking to is part of that group. It usually means I don’t need to worry about them being weirdly sexist, like women don’t suffer enough in STEM already, or insisting that we need to keep politics out of tech (i.e. they want their politics to rule, unquestioned).
(Need something more tangible? Look no further than uncle bob (skip to the bottom). I’ve seen his books in classrooms, in the office, and let’s not speak of online mentions. This is a relatively well-known, respected name in the industry. If you get to know people, you will meet many, many uncle bobs out there.)
Silly feelings on my part? Perhaps. One less thing to worry about, though.
Warhammer 40K entered the chat
Me with my koi pond, before I discovered that most other pond owners are elderly right wing conspiracy theorists who don’t believe in crazy stuff like the nitrogen cycle or that mailing invasive plants like water hyacinth or water spangled is illegal.
Nazi punks fuck off. This is not a good example. Every metal enjoyer I know is progressive. It’s one of the few communities that is still mostly sane and decent.
