MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
That’s definitely a part of it, but it was also rare at the time. Like any other trope, you can only put it out there so many times before it becomes tiresome. I’m finding myself so bored with the trope that it no longer lands at all. Even the “save the world” trope of action movies seems a bit played out because it’s all that’s out there and eventually you no longer care about the world.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
One thing I’ve always appreciated about Asian dramas in general is that they aren’t afraid to be themselves and tell a story without feeling the need to insert ironic humor or social or political fashions. It’s a story, and the needs of the story rule everything else going on. Thus the heroes can be really heroic, the love interests can be love interests, and so on. Western media has a harder time doing this because they have to insert corny ironic humor in the movie so it doesn’t seem super serious. They have to make sure the women in the show are badasses, feminist and not too feminine. Men cannot be too masculine, too competent, or if they happen to start that way, they must “learn their lesson” by the start of the third act.
Add in the insular world of movies and TV in which everyone has the same background, the same training, and are expected to follow “Save The Cat” to the letter, and I think it’s just a mess. Nobody can create an honest account of redneck masculinity because nobody in Hollywood comes from that background. If you’re going to film school and have the funds in hand to be effectively unemployed for 3-5 years, you’re not from anything like a working class background and more than likely have never had a ten minute conversation with someone from a working class background. It’s PMC class second sons all around and all they can do is ape media portrayals of things they’re generations away from first hand knowledge of. Here Be There Dragons.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Of course nothing in a conflict of this type is simple, but what I’m pointing out is that there are a lot of thing that go in favor of the rural areas and make the kind of fighting that the military would do a bit more complicated. Yes you could field a very large army in rural areas, but if you don’t know who’s fighting and who’s not, or where the IED is or drone strike or attack on infrastructure will come from. And trying to be everywhere isn’t easy, even the biggest military in the world is still finite and can’t control everything.
In a war that’s more a guerrilla conflict with unexpected attacks by small groups who blend in with the locals and have lots of wilderness areas to hide in, it’s going to be really hard for a conventional military to gain and maintain control over the territory and to protect the supply lines to several large cities at the same time. The Blues would have the major disadvantage of having to protect itself and its political leadership in the theater of war. We haven’t had to do so since 1865. And even then, the South was too genteel to try things like starving a city (Maryland surrounds DC and thus cutting off DC would have been possible even back then had they tried to invade). The problem for the military will be fighting an insurgent conflict with most of its tools prevented by the fact that the people doing it are Americans and thus you can’t do things like bomb the strongholds of the insurgents or go house to house collecting weapons.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I would argue otherwise at least in red tribe areas. Most red states are pretty rural often with few roads, and substantial wilderness in between small towns. The ideal strategy in that area would look a lot like what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan. You strike with a small group and slink off into the wilds. Or you plant bombs along the roadside. Or you take out the power grid. And so on. Tanks and drones don’t work well without defined targets. Air strikes can’t be called on people who aren’t there.
And big cities have a huge problem with supply chains— almost everything that a city needs comes from or through rural areas. If the trucks don’t come to DC for long enough, there’s not much that can be done from the government end.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
I’m pro 2A mostly because of crime. The problem with being unarmed in America is that any criminal who wants a gun can get one so easily that it’s a safe assumption that anyone committing a crime would have one. Police are effectively corralled into coming several minutes later to write and file reports that — even if the do somehow find the criminal, that criminal won’t be prosecuted or if they are, it’s a very light sentence, and thus don’t matter— don’t help except in getting insurance to pay for repairs to the damage. This makes disarming the law-abiding effectively a unilateral disarmament in the face of rising criminality when no other help is available.
Most of the actual solutions to crime would be so long term as to be non solutions. Re-empowering the police to deal with crime as it happens would be good, and probably the only one that would help within the decade. Recriminalizing drugs would help by reducing crime associated with drug use and give cops a good way to get rid of known criminals. Beyond that, it’s things that need to change in the culture— stopping the glorification of guns, crime, and drug use, creating a culture of achievement, politeness, and regard for others — would be changes on the order of decades, assuming it’s even possible. Basically you’d have to turn American city culture into something at least like Europe or East Asia to get there, and I’m not sure you can do that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Wouldn’t separating by education level (verified by testing) work better? If the problem is skill level, then measure the skills. Money might be a sort of proxy, but it can be gamed simply by borrowing or stealing from other family or friends or whoever.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11mo ago
Well i mean true, but the political outsiders have often tried to harness such people to get power for themselves. A speaker who can capture the imagination of young incels can use them quite effectively to destroy the old system. This has happened before, more than once. And it will eventually happen again.
The past as another country or even a fantasy world as another country is something that IMO Asians do better than westerners. The western world has little experience of true culture shock simply because we’ve been dominating the culture wars for so long that by the time a westerner can easily get to a place, most of the big cities have become westernized with mostly western attitudes towards life and business. You can find western culture everywhere so it becomes harder to imagine a universe in which people don’t aspire to modern western neo-liberal ideals. Asians have the opposite experience—. They inhabit a world that doesn’t adapt itself to their own culture, their folkways, their tastes. So I think that makes them a bit more able to imagine worlds that aren’t like ours or theirs.
I found this most jarring with medieval stuff. I like to read about that world and the history of that world, and they are not like us at all. They were not secular in the least, they believed in God and Fate and Devine Rights. They didn’t worry much about anyone who wasn’t upper class except in the sense that they wanted productive lands and didn’t want revolts. Their lives were dominated by personal politics and looking to get more power for themselves. Even our most power hungry politicians are weaklings compared to what the actual medieval rulers were like.
I think it hurts us culturally because it means we have a hard time understanding people who aren’t culturally WEIRD. The aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were made much worse by the cultural ignorance of American elites who just assumed that traditional Muslims would immediately become Enlightenment minded Jeffersonian Republicans as soon as Saddam or the Taliban were gone. We expected Russia to think like us about Eastern Europe after the Cold War and to value the Western ideal of popular sovereignty over what they wanted which is a secure border between themselves and NATO. It hurts our ability to figure out Israel Palestine because we’re a fairly secular democracy and both Israel and Palestine are religious countries for whom control of The Land is not just about territory but about religion.
There’s a big failure of imagination when the producers of culture have no understanding or close contact with people who don’t think like they do. Producers in America have only themselves and other Narrative-loving liberals to references.
More options
Context Copy link