Well it was actually called the First World War before the war ended because people already knew there was going to be another one.
Anyway, only three characters survived Pitch Black and Chronicles features two of them prominently, only the priest didn’t have a big part. But it’s a priest, not too much they could do with a character like that in an action movie.
Incidentally, thousands of people were killed in Tiananmen Square. Even today, people are being oppressed for even talking about it.
Why am I now picturing a chain smoking Forrest Gump? “Life is like a pack of cigarettes, you never know what’s gonna blow up.”
Which is why the Prequels were the worst thing ever. It made kids think Anakin Skywalker was a good guy and it’s the Jedi Council’s fault they didn’t give him the respect he deserved because he was strong and powerful. Dude was a creepy weirdo when talking to Padme, told her fascism was cool, massacred a village, but because he’s so powerful and awesome, Padme (a Senator) instantly becomes a trad wife.
Then came a bunch of cartoons showing how awesome this guy is (biggest Mary Sue ever) while making it seem like being a storm trooper would be a cool and honourable thing. And now we’ve got a bunch of video games that showcase how awesome and bad ass Darth Vader is.
It’s not like a pro-fascist interpretation of the Prequels comes out of nowhere. An adult watching those movies sees these things and dsimiss it as George Lucas phoning it in while making those movies because he only cared about toy sales. But it’s easy to see how a kid watching these movies would identify with Anakin Skywalker and be influenced towards having fascist tendencies.
Also The Last Jedi is the most misogynistic movie in the franchise if you ignore the marketing and think about how a child would interpret it. But that’s a story for another time.
That makes it really easy to have the empire represent anything you want.
Isn’t that kind of the point? When you make villains too specific then it’s easy to differentiate the villains in a movie from the evil in real life. Donald Trump doesn’t resemble the villain from the movie so therefore I can hate the villain from the movie while still liking Donald Trump because they’re not the same person. The evil that happens in the movie is because of that particular bad guy, now that bad guy is dead and it’s all wrapped up in a nice little bow.
When a movie is about archetypes it’s a little more difficult to ignore the ideas. The Rebellion is a diverse group of people, even a fish guy can be an admiral. A little green weirdo could be the powerful Jedi. The imperials are not all that diverse, are they? It’s harder to rationalize that you’re on the good guy side because that means taking orders from Admiral Ackbar which is contradictory to your political views which would be about wanting Ackbar fired because he must be a DEI hire.
Also Lando making a deal with fascists and constantly getting screwed over because fascists don’t give a shit about doing as they promised seems a little relevant now. Lando was fine with some random guy called “Luke Skywalker” getting screwed over as long as he and his friends came out ok. Seems a lot like people voting for Trump knowing immigrants would get screwed but that’s fine because they would come out alright. There’s a lot of Landos on Wall Street right now. Trump altered the deal, pray he doesn’t alter it further.
The ones made by JJ Abrams are really great about showing all of the reasons for people getting sucked into fascist movements… indoctrination (Finn), wanting to eliminate freedom to have order (Hux), bad relationship with their father (Kylo Ren), nostalgia for past greatness (Pryde), and ancestry (Rey). With Hux we even get to see how fascists are really just spiteful assholes that don’t actually believe in anything, they just want power.
With Rey we see hesitation about being part of the movement against fascism because of her ancestry. Maybe she’s unworthy because of her ancestry? Nah that’s bullshit, you don’t need to identify with the shitty people in history because they’re your ancestors, it’s up to you how you identify yourself. The repeated message of “they [fascists] make us feel like we’re alone” seems particularly relevant given how social media divides us now.
And Palpatine… yeah fascism has come back to life again even though it’s been defeated before. But ok, I guess we gotta do this shit again. People get all butt hurt they didn’t explain the details of how Palpatine came back, but that’s the point. Fascism comes back and you gotta oppose it when it does. Somehow fascism returned, and it doesn’t matter how, because we have to oppose it no matter what. And if you really want to know how fascism returned, just look at the motivations of the fascist characters in the movies.
History is like a mystery book that you’ve read the last chapters first and know how it’s going to turn out. The colonialism done by European powers hadn’t yet happened at the time of Crusades. In fact had the various warring factions in Europe hadn’t found common cause, their religion and culture would’ve been wiped out by Muslim colonialism. Yup, the Caliphate was conquering the Christian lands in Iberia and Anatolia and colonizing them. This is what triggered the Crusades.
The Crusades were an anti-colonialism movement, and if they hadn’t found something to unite over, then their cultures, languages, and religion would’ve been wiped out and the whole thing would’ve been a minor footnote in history. They had managed
In the end, the Muslim colonization of Iberia was defeated (with the Spanish and Portuguese becoming brutal colonizers afterwards) while the Byzantine Empire ultimately fell to Muslim conquest and colonization. Today, there’s only a few hundred thousand Christians left in Anatolia because of assimilation and genocide. Some of that has been relatively recent… you ever hear of the Armenian genocide?
So yeah, not exactly a clear cut good guys vs. bad guys kind of thing as popular narratives suggest. The crusades were triggered by Muslim aggression into Christian lands. While that doesn’t excuse the atrocities committed by the Crusaders, the Crusades also don’t excuse the atrocities committed by Muslim empires either. History is complex, and reductive bias towards europe=bad or religion=bad just results in not actually learning anything from history.
Yeah it’s a movie that nails “then suddenly… all hell breaks loose.”
Very strong collaborator vibes from this one.
Yup. Trump said he’d only deport criminals and we see how that’s going. PP said he’d only use notwithstanding to take away the rights of criminals… wonder where that’s heading.
The polls were good in the last federal election. It’s just that the Liberals took the question of “who would you vote for if there were an election today?” a little too literally and called a snap election. People didn’t like that and they dropped in the polls immediately because of that bonehead decision. The election result wasn’t a surprise for anyone following the polls.
You’d rather have a guy notwithstanding your rights away just so that your little hobby can be a little more easier for you. And if that makes it easier for someone to massacre school children, you’re cool with that too as long as you have a little less paperwork for a fucking hobby.
Single issue voters are the death of freedom.
Proportional representation sucks (see Israel for an example of how that can go wrong) and it will never happen because nobody can promote it without also indicating they like it because it will give their preferred political party an advantage. So it all sounds like “I want to change the democratic system so that my party will win” which puts you on the same level as people that want to rig elections.
Ranked choice voting would be a better thing to promote for people that find it difficult to accept democracy is about making compromises. In the end you’ll never have a system where millions of people will get exactly what they want, but if the goal is to give immature people warm and fuzzy vibes when they vote for a party that doesn’t have chance of winning, then ranked choice is a way to do that without giving political parties even more power than they already have.
What are you doing here then? If you don’t care enough to take an hour to go vote then you shouldn’t be spending any time discussing politics. If voting doesn’t matter, then discussing politics on lemmy definitely doesn’t matter.
So you prefer to have PP to notwithstanding your rights away?
Hell I’d be open to an EU style organization between Canada, California, and any other state that secedes because they prefer democracy over fascism.
It’s funny that Trump says Canada isn’t a viable country because he’s making the USA into non-viable country. The hatred in the red states towards states like California was kinda there already, but he’s just fanning those flames. It seems various regions of the US are forming into distinct cultures with very different values. Maybe the US is just too big to be sustainable.
Tankies are permanently stuck in backwards day. Left is right and right is left. They do this because they’re just fascists that don’t like to be associated with other fascists. So they call their fascist group “leftist”, but they hate democracy, liberalism, the jews, etc just as much as any other fascist.
I’ve heard a carwash will take them out.
Yeah this is more of a situation where because more applications are built for windows you’re more likely to encounter poor quality application level software on windows than on Linux. Especially if you stay within the walled garden that most distros provide.
People see a pattern with having a lot more problems with applications on windows than they do on linux and wrongly assume it’s because of the OS.
It’s really silly since there’s plenty of real bullshit going on with windows people could meme about. There’s no need to make up shit about windows being bad at something it actually does ok with.
That show wouldn’t work anymore, Colbert got out of that at the exact right time. No matter how ridiculous of a parody of the right wing he could come up with, the real life idiots would be saying and doing things even more ridiculous the next day.