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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3104 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 16, 2024

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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Before the valentine's day post massacre (never forget) I was having a conversation about Fight Club which made me want to watch it again, so two nights ago I watched it with my brother and his teenage son. My brother and I discussed if it was appropriate for my nephew to watch, given its mature content and themes, some of which would go straight over the head of teens, but I convinced him by pointing out that I watched fight club as a teen.

But I must have been arguing about it with myself in my sleep last night, because I woke up this morning with a burning conviction that I had convinced my brother to fuck up his son - does he want him to turn out to be a ridiculous nihilist misanthrope like me?!

So here's my question - can anyone think of movies with the opposite philosophy and message to fight club? I think I'll need a few of them - I imagine if there was a movie like that that did as good a job presenting its philosophy as fight club did I'd have heard of it already, but maybe we could brute force him back into sanity by inundating him with them.

Your nephew is probably too old, but honestly, the best and most effective positive propaganda I ever consumed was Duck Tales. It's a whole show about how hard work, thrift, entrepreneurship, and relentless curiosity are the path to success. The protagonist is an absurdly wealthy capitalist who never apologizes for his wealth and spends his days going on awesome adventures, sometimes hunting for treasure and sometimes just because he can. He's an immigrant who worked his way up from nothing in an emblematic example of the American Dream, and is almost always portrayed sympathetically.

Scrooge McDuck is a combination of Dale Carnegie and Alan Quartermain (and also a cartoon duck), and I will never understand why this feathered Ayn Rand protagonist doesn't get both more love and more hate.

There's actually a long tradition of leftist/anticolonialist academic readings of Duck Tales and related works.

Should be added to Kulak's index of actually banned books, it never got a proper publishing run in the USA because of Disney's perceived litigiousness.

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