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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4056 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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IDK if this is too CW for FFT. I sometimes find myself thinking that all memes and social movements are the partial result of influence by intelligence agencies. However, I realized there’s a fun and easy disproof of this: the existence of anti-military sentiment. Memes and so on which discourage people from joining the military have been common and popular for a while, sometimes getting to the front page of Reddit. You’ll see something like “you’re only fighting for oil companies”. This is strong proof that intelligence agencies aren’t manipulating public opinion all too much, because one of their priorities should be to get more applicants into the military. So the fact that we have very little propaganda about joining the military is actually a good proof that there’s not a significant amount of government propaganda effectively targeting the populace.

With that said, I have actually noticed less anti-military sentiment memes, so maybe this is changing, who knows.

Or maybe it's beneficial to inoculate people with leftist anti war memes against the stronger right wing/isolationist/coup d'etat anti establishment memes? You can always push the conspiracy one step further!

For example, take the argument that all war films are inherently pro war. Guys who join the Marines today quote Full Metal Jacket and Zero Dark Thirty to each other like those movies don't portray the USA as morally disgusting. If you can make people think the US military it's awful and amoral and ACCEPT IT; isn't that more convenient than pretending it's all shiny John Wayne good guys riding over the hill? Get people cynical enough and you won't even need to pretend an intervention is justified, people will just accept that we've always been at war with EastAsia. So what you perceive as anti military memes might serve the purposes of the intelligence agencies.

No war for oil, which I made t shirts for in shop class in middle school, was wildly ineffective as a meme. I was early, for a brief second when American Idiot topped the charts I gave a bunch to friends, by 2007 no one gave a shit, by 2009 we forgot all about it as Obama/Gates started the no end in sight drone policy. Maybe bad anti war memes are worse than nothing?

I would put out Mobile Suit Gundam as evidence that maybe anti-war memes in general have a hard time taking root. The entire franchise generally shows war as bad, and yet, you still got this meme decades after the original TV series aired in 1979. There was even an OVA from 1989, War in the Pocket, poking fun/pointing some criticism at both the anime fans who were there for the cool robot fights as well as the Gunpla fanatics--but then, the franchise has continued because it's basically owned by a gigantic toy company, and to further confound this, Japan itself has been comparably quite pacifistic (what other country has protests against the removal of a constitutional limit on military capability?).

Is gundam strictly anti-war? I'm not all that familiar with it, but the bits I caught looked like the traditional Japanese "war is the worst thing in the world except all the things that are worse... Like foreigners in your country" moral

I would definitely say that it's not that kind of moral. Rather, in Gundam, war is generally depicted negatively, warts and all, but there is the undertone that, when war is already all around you, it is still necessary to fight to live and to bring forth a better tomorrow.

The deeper message of many Gundam stories, in addition, is "we must learn how to truly and honestly communicate with one another, regardless of if it brings conflict or peace."

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