Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
User ID: 137
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
16hr ago
Yeah, but it manages to say fairly little about photography, either, and certainly nothing that needed the fictional second US civil war backdrop to say.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
17hr ago
If it somehow turned out to be true, the most embarrassed party would probably be Fidel Castro, in afterlife. A son that hides from the right wing instead of doing this?
I went to see Civil War to a small local movie theater with friends yesterday. It was mostly a confusing experience.
Spoilers:
I knew that the movie would try to present an "second American civil war" without trying to get too political - a befuddling decision itself - but the movie doesn't really commit to any narrative.
Is the WF justified in rebelling against the authoritarian president? Maybe? They vaguely indicate that the president is bad (he's on a third term!), but the loyalist forces are not shown doing anything particularly bad (unless you count that fed riot cops are tetchy in a situation where a suicide bomber might strike at any moment), and all the war crimes are committed by WF or the presumably WF-affliated Hawaiian shirt irregulars who execute surrendered uniformed troops. But since there's no weight to either side it's not really a "war is hell, both sides are bad" thing either.
Are they trying to portray Wagner Moura's character as someone who is doing a toxic masculinity? Maybe? Is it bad that the one community has decided to go on conducting life as normal expect with snipers on roofs? Maybe? The clearest narrative ark is the Kirsten Dunst character being on a suicide run after "losing her faith in journalism" (lol) and, in the end, willing her photography mojo to Cailee Spaeny figuratively through the lens of a camera, but since we've established that photojournalism is basically useless for anything besides taking cool photos and seeking thrills, we should we care?
The only scene with actual tension is the one with Jesse Plemons and his racist militia, and that's partly because Jesse Plemons is a great actor (some said during Breaking Bad that Jesse Plemons is a dollar store Matt Damon, I argue that eventually we'll see Matt Damon properly as a dollar store Jesse Plemons), but also in large part because these guys at least seem to hold an actual ideology and be actually doing things that happen in actual civil wars, ie. running a death squad on ethnic/religious basis. I've seen some indicate that the whole rest of the movie is basically a long intro and outro to the Jesse Plemons scene.
It was probably a good idea for them to make a war movie about reporters. Since many journalists are a obsessed with the idea of their social relevance, getting 5 stars in magazines doesn't seem particularly hard, especially since I don't think the movie was advertised as concentrating as heavily on journalism as it was.
2.5/5, 2 for some cool shots and for not being too long (though you could have easily cropped out half a hour by cutting back on some early stuff and the unnecessarily long DC fight scene) and 0.5 extra for the Jesse Plemons scene.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1d ago
When I started lifting I got a PT who gave me a good routine, and when I ran the program he gave me through ChatGPT it said it’s a good programme with nothing much to add.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Well, the Tories are hardly in a position to propose a solution to expensive real estate, as (as far as I've understood) their chief constituency still continues to be the sort of middle-class types who have owned their home for decades (perhaps specifically because of Thatcher and right-to-buy). If you're in such a situation, housing prices skyrocketing are a feature, not a bug. I don't know much about the Reform Party, but my impression is Tories but even more Brexit-y, and the Brexit, in addition to doing nothing about the housing problem (especially now that we know that the reduction in EU immigrants just led to replacement with non-EU immigrants with dividends), is generally massively unpopular with the youth, perhaps making a certain generation gone for good (or gone without massive efforts) for the Tories.
Also, even more speculatively, housing is an issue that can be exploited both by the left and the right, and I'd guess that the left-wing housing voters would be the ones who have managed to snag a place for rent in a major city and now want rent control to keep the rent from skyrocketing out of their reach, and the right-wing ones would be the ones who are living in a remote suburb or a dying rural region, want to move to a city, and want less immigrants so that the waiting list would eventually reach their number. Maybe the green belts mean there are less such suburban housing voters? Are the green belts even a thing any more?
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Hell, Bernie Sanders came out swinging this week:
Should be noted here that while Bernie has rather tendentiously called for a ceasefire (while saying the same letter that the war against Hamas in itself was justified), saying that Netanyahu is bad is not the same as saying that the war is bad. Presumably something like a half of Israelis would simultaneously say that Netanyahu is bad while the war is good.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
At least the Finns Party has an interesting demographic regarding religious views: at least a while back, they're the most popular among "no religion" types but also the most popular among the "strongly religious" types, particularly those who belong to Protestant churces outside the Lutheran quasi-state-chuch. The party itself has MPs ranging from precisely such committed Pentecostals etc. to atheists: in one of the larger cities, they even have a council member who (probably mostly for reasons of edginess) has defined himself as a Satanist.
All of these cooperate rather easily, though, since they all share the same focus on immigration, and the party itself is mostly rather secular in both its policies and its communications.
While youth tend to be mostly secular, the ones who are strongly religious will tend to mostly congregate to non-Lutheran movements (there have been several stories in media, like this one, about a new trend of young men joining charismatic groups or Orthodoxy, for instance, the latter of which I can anecdotally confirm noticing myself).
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Yeah, this is probably a large factor. One of the main splits in Continental Europe is less that "young are right, olds are left", but rather that the olds vote for traditional boomer parties (social democrats and Christian democrats, and equivalents) and youngs vote for new "challenger" parties (right-wing populists and greens/new left parties, often split by gender). As dissatisfaction with the pensioner-focused boomer parties that wish to stay the course even while Europe is mired in 15 years of no growth and little development grows, the right-wing populist parties derive particular benefits due to several reasons (center-right parties have generally tended to be a bit more popular than center-left ones, right-wing populists are better at appearing to center-left voters than challenger left parties to center-right ones, the Greens in particular have become quite "pro-system" in recent decades etc.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
Opinions on The Shogun? We just finished it, and I quite liked it all around. Solid plot, good visuals, great characters like Toranaga and Yabushige and Mariko (and acting performances), the Anjin grated me a bit at first but I got used to it. Probably the best miniseries of such kind in a long time...
...and yet, I don't think there's been an inlength discussion on it here. I suppose that's what happens when something is good; it's not as notable as when something can be complained about, especially since there's precious little of anything that might be seen as wokeness here. I haven't read the book (I tried some time ago but got sidetracked pretty quickly), but I haven't seen complaints about major deviations or deviations from (lightly fictionalized) actual history.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
The point isn't the specific flags or the number of protestors, the point is that, unless someone proves otherwise, the resist libs and the pro-Palestine protestors would most naturally seem to be two specific constituencies, with one of them being prone to thinking that Biden is the only chance against fascism in the USA and the other thinking that Biden is a fascist, for example.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3d ago
I would expect those who are "waving the flag of Hezbollah" (I'm sure someone at the campus protests has done this but I'm not sure what the specific example is) to be the sort of radicals who make even other pro-Palestinians uncomfortable and those who ranted about "Trump disrespecting the troops!" to be normie libs who support the police clearing the campuses of protestors.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Old soc.history.what-if newsgroup had a rather notorious poster who believed that we should reinstate feudalism and was also perfectly OK with the idea that under feudalism he'd be an equivalent of a peasant.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
Also the problem is that almost all modern paganism is a LARP. Since there are no unbroken continuities of pagan faith in Europe (apart from the Mari native religion within the Mari Republic in Russia - though Mari pagan organizations have cooperated with the Muslims in Tatarstan), any "revivalist" efforts are basically based on imagining what such a group surviving to modern age might look like.
Of course if you have a racist Asatru group or whatever, formed by people who have explicitly left the Christian tradition because they think Christianity is Semitic and cucked, you're going to have a group that's more racist than Christians on average, but that's also obviously pretty circular. Other pagan groups think otherwise - most pagans that I've met tend to be far left. It doesn't really explain in any way whether a hypothetical pagan Europe without Christianity would be more "based", or whether a hypothetical future one where Christianity has gone away would be.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
4d ago
I think this belief is, for many, simply downstream from the idea that Ukrainians are just funny-speaking Russians, that the natural course of action for them would have just been to join the Motherland at a drop of a hat and the fact that this didn't happen is an aberration that needs an external explanation, ie. the evil West brainwashing them to fight. The references to videos of stragglers etc. are just marshalled to provide evidence for this preaccepted thesis.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
There are certainly hundreds if not thousands of Russians and pro-Russians on social media talking continously about how Russia will any day now take Odes(s)a (I don't fully understand why Russians are so obsessed with this particular city), which would put them within a striking distance of the Moldovan border.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Okay, I shouldn't have used the word 'huge', but the point was the comment about how EU states did not "accept men fleeing the draft from Russia", which was not correct.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
The EU states have tightened their general asylum policies since 2015 precisely because of that crisis. They were already doing pushbacks in Greece in 2020 as a response to asylum seeker entry wave at that time, it was big news before the Covid hit.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5d ago
Like said below, a huge amount of Russians were accepted. At least here, the eventual reason to close the door mostly had to do with the fears there would be infiltrators sent alongside the rest.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
One of the particularities of Finnish protest culture is that most activist-led protests, probably due to anarchist influence, will announce that political party signs and flags should not be brought in the protest, presumably to combat potential protest takeovers like that. Also there's no major Trotskyist groups to speak of, and the closest equivalent as a communist group that's experienced in organizing protests, the Communist Party of Finland, tends to have a subdued profile in the protest themselves.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6d ago
In my experience it could be best stated as there's a subculture of anarchists/communists who basically participate in every left-aligned protest, but many of the protests (particularly bigger ones on popular subjects like anti-austerity or LGBTQ+ rights) will also attract a changing crowd of other, more normie types, which means the anarchist/communist contigent is less notable.
Also the folks who bring Palestine flags to every protest tend to be Middle-Easterners, often actual Palestinians, themselves.
Should be noted this isn't just a woke pasttime. Every culture warrior enjoys attacking the other side's guys. Sometimes (many times) same figures will get flack from the both sides. I've read countless right-wing articles and posts about how FDR was a commie symphatizer or JFK and LBJ and MLK were cheaters or (getting into Christian conservatives) how Darwin and Margaret Sanger were racists or (getting to more commie side of things) how Marx was personally filthy or Lenin continously said and did psycho things. I mean, I had thought of using the almost obsessive focus on Che Guevara, a figure more for the past generations (I have seen many more "revisions" of Che's history online than actual Che shirts) as an example, but you did it yourself! And during the War on Terror, of course, talking about it online, one couldn't avoid hearing about Mohammed and Aisha. One gets the idea.
Of course the conservatives would not think in the terms of progress and a "right side of history" as much, the point here is tearing down the other side's totemic figures with a gusto is a fairly natural part of the culture war.
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