domain:parrhesia.substack.com
SteveKirk
3m ago
Having so many different writers work on big projects is my least favorite parts of western comics, and that's stiff competition against all the other stuff they do wrong.
I read all the early Judge Dredd comics once, and important details got changed every single episode on the whim of some writer who couldn't even be bothered to coordinate with his coworkers.
CryptoWitch
Live From New Vegas
3m ago
INTJ is just Myers-Briggs for autist, I guess.
But seriously, another INTJ reporting in. If I recall correctly, it’s among the rarer MBTI types. I wonder if you’re right about your assessment of this place as having massive overrepresentation.
Have we ever done surveys or tried to get a handle on the demographics here? Given the amount of wrong think/number of witches, it might be interesting. Or people might not want to participate and we’d see skew as a result.
KMC
8m ago
I don't think I'll ever forgive him for Bostock, but he's easily the best Justice since Scalia, and as good a replacement as anyone could have hoped for.
However, I 100% agree that Marvel movies are stupidly written and don't make sense. The superheroes are weak in relative terms. A couple of Stryker brigades could demolish Thanos's army. Iron Man is worth maybe five to ten jet fighters. None of them could handle tactical nukes. All superhero movies seem to adore Bronze age tactics: mass charges and 1v1 duels.
The superheroes are weak, which is actually a double penalty because the armies/countries have to be weak for them to matter. So Asgard's army has to be useless outside of flashbacks, and let's not even get started on any battle in Wakanda. And the bad guys basically have to be incompetent hordes literal children can fight.
Say what you want about Snyder but you actually get why people with modern armies would actually keep his superheroes around.
dasfoo
13m ago
Is this fear of Ukranaian Nazis genuine, or just an attempt to sap anti-Russian energy in the West by associating Ukraine with one of the past century's great villains?
There seems to have been a very convenient transfer of exaggerated fear of Nazis from the progressive left to the far right which took place right around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Historically it echoes how the American Left went from impassioned pacifists in the 1930s to hawkish anti-Nazis coinciding with the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin pact.
My far-right friends mocked the "punch a Nazi" drumbeat up until it became a weapon in Putin's rhetoric, so I have trouble accepting it at face value.
But evidently most people don't care about this. So maybe the writers simply are illiterate when it comes to politics and geopolitics, but more likely seems to be that they aren't incentivized to try very hard given the paying audience doesn't appear to mind. The third, slightly tin-foil-hat possibility is that it's a very intentional propaganda--to all the teenagers watching superhero movies, it's better if 117 countries vote for a UN panel to be in charge of real power.
Yes, the audience doesn't care because the audience is no longer just American teenagers, it's people across the world . No one wants to write "realistic" geopolitics, because these huge movies need to sell overseas and you don't want to piss people off. (Remember the rise of China pandering as its box office started to matter more? Or the drop in sexuality in PG-13 movies? Same idea)
There's a reason most of these movies don't even have a pretense of real politics like Civil War . Everyone can sympathize with people fighting nondescript aliens or scifi Nazis. Arabs, Germans, Chinese people all get it with minimal fuss.
Civil War has to be more political, but I hardly doubt it'd play well across the world to have the mostly American protagonists laugh off the UN like they're Dick Cheney. Marvel wants their money too and some people still feel sore about that sort of thing. Might as well let them feel like they participated via the UN. Let's not even get into "complex issues". Just having gay people in Eternals caused a minor controversy.
but then you can't also ask me to emotionally buy into the idea that in such a world, I should genuinely fear the secretive Nazi organizations and ultracorrupt politicians and amoral killer CEOs. I mean, is this a utopia or not?!
There's actually a reading that Nazis are why the world is so centralized, and not for any good reason. In Avengers the "World Council" could somehow launch a nuclear strike on New York (they warned you early about the bad geopolitics). In Winter Soldier we found out that the Nazis/Hydra have been actively making the world more chaotic to centralize power in a few powerful organizations like SHIELD they could use to take over the world. In Agents of SHIELD the very person who ordered SHIELD to perform the nuclear strike is...a member of Hydra.
somedude
34m ago
One might watch Civil War and ask why Tony Stark, aka Iron Man is on the side of the government despite being a tech entrepreneur who refused to share his suit tech with the government for years
Because he built an AI that killed people and almost destroyed the world.
and Captain America, an FDR Democrat (aka the closest thing we have had to a dictator since George Washington) is on the side of the libertarians.
Because the government agency he worked for turned out to be a front for a bunch of evildoers.
I've never even seen Civil War but if there's something stupid about it conceptually it's that Cap didn't say "Hey doctor Frankenstein I agree someone should be in charge of making sure you don't blow up the world again but I just club people over the head with a shield so maybe get outta my ass."
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
49m ago
It doesn't look like you've made any posts in the CW thread this week (top level or reply).
You are the forum. Any criticism of the forum is a criticism of yourself. If you don't like what's being posted in the CW thread, make the kinds of posts that you do want to read.
Great.
But not my point. I can filter my dates by going on them, even if the ratio of crazy/not crazy is unfavorable.
I'm asking for a quantification of how many women out there are actually likely to pass the filter.
And, to really drive the point home, are there enough of them for most guys who want marriage and kids to have them, or do we have to acknowledge that the pie is too small for them all to get a slice, and thus we're actually in a state of heavy competition for a limited resource?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1hr ago
At this point, subversive isn’t even really subversive because it’s almost a trope. If there’s a single set of heroes or archetypes that haven’t been “subverted” by now I’m not really aware. The subversive thing for the modern deconstructed media landscape is actually playing it straight, having a hero who’s actually a decent guy and a villain who’s actually bad and actually doesn’t have a point to make, and a plot that actually makes sense.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
1hr ago
where Tony Stark is guilted into supporting the Sokovia Accords
Also, Tony should have known better than to trust Accord oversight, considering the first thing they tried to do is nuke Metropolis [or wherever that was] to contain the Chitauri invasion. He ended up directly having to clean up that mess.
I get that Tony Stark very quickly became "Bay Area thought as a superhero", but that was not good judgment. Then again, because Tony really doesn't have good judgment, he'd naturally support the Accords, so maybe I'm more annoyed about it than I should be.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
Allowing a group of your citizens to cosplay as Nazis instead of drafting them into regular army units is handing Russia an easy propaganda victory.
But Russia also allows groups of its citizens, like this one, to cosplay as the Nazis. Of course one could argue that kolovrat is something else than a barely-plausible-deniality swastika (after all, it has barely plausible deniality!), but come on now.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
1hr ago
outside of DEI inclusion
This is a huge parenthetical. They're definitely alienating people with the way they're doing this, consciously. And it's not just about the inclusion, it's about the very intense way in which they're doing that inclusion and how communicating the right message flows through everything that gets made.
I think there's a lot of paint-by-numbers going on, but I'd remind you that the most controversial movie of the past decade was almost certainly The Last Jedi, which famously had an auteur who deliberately made unexpected, confusing, and ✨subversive✨ choices that alienated people and damaged the brand. There's a lot of both going on; the only constant is DEI.
urquan
The end desire of the system is Kubernetes for human beings
2hr ago
My problem with Civil War was that it wasn't a Captain America movie, it was an Avengers movie. I didn't even feel like Captain America was the main character, he just felt like one out of a cast of characters.
I'm sure this just comes from the comics, every time I speak up about my criticisms of the MCU I get told it's because they adapted something straight from the comics.
edmund-nelson
2hr ago
I run into this issue with plot holes, where I can see them if the show/movie is "thinky" or is trying to make you think, but when the show is just trying to be fun you can easily ignore the plot holes because the show isn't trying to do this. Books are typically the domain where you can have stories that have thinking and work well. Stuff like to Kill a mockingbird works because it's in book form. The television show Attack on Titan was like this, the first few seasons were a pure spectacle, there was no real deep plot going on and no need for one, but once they started having a major plot in the last 26 episodes+2 1.25 hour long television specials, the holes in the story started to show.
I don't know what to call this it isn't "suspension of disbelief" it's more like "suspension of thinking rationally about the plot". Like the issue is that these stories have 1 writer only and you have to write both a plot and the characters. Most people actually care more about #2 than the plot and most plots kinda blow. The spectacle of most shows is more important than the actual story for good reasons, (Books typically are a much better medium for pure storytelling, but a lot of the best books tend to fall in the "books you read in high school" category, which if you really pay attention the grand narrative of them is mostly trash). The only exception was this tiny weird niche space opera called Legend of the Galatic heroes which I swear is like if star wars was written by a Neoreactionary.
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
2hr ago
Does anyone feel that the motte is becoming more soapboxy?
Scrolling the CW thread, I feel like the #parent:#child ratio is much lower than it used to be. During the reddit times, there were threads that that had 50+ responses. That seems to be a relic of the past.
It feels off now. I scroll through the main thread, see yet another >1000 word post with barely any engagement, scroll past it, same thing again, and again.
I think the lurker and casual poster counts are decreasing, we are left with more and more soap boxers who do feel the need to produce endless walls of text, but not engage with other peoples walls of texts..
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
A war is fought not only on the battlefield, but also in the realm of propaganda.
As you point out, the size of Azov is trivial compared to the size of the army, and wearing swastikas does not actually grant combat superpowers.
But this should also mean that the possible battlefield gains from arming them with US weapons would be small.
On the propaganda front, it does not matter that they are only a small group. The USSR fought one big war, in which some 13% of its citizens were killed. In the end, they won, and it is a victory celebrated to this day in Russia. Their enemies in that war were flying the swastika.
Allowing a group of your citizens to cosplay as Nazis instead of drafting them into regular army units is handing Russia an easy propaganda victory. One would be better off supporting a brigade of child rapists and cannibals.
Also, the threat model is not that Azov declares its own state and sets out to conquer Ukraine by force of arms -- which is indeed silly given the power balance. There is a huge difference between having two thousand guys with military gear outside your borders and having them freely move within your country. It takes a lot more than 2000 men with guns to defend against 2000 determined terrorists.
One of the scarier phrases from Weimar Germany is "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- uttered when the German army refused to engage paramilitary putschists because they recognized them as comrades in arms. Every army seems to have some fraction of crypto-fascists, and the Ukraine army is likely no exception.
At the moment, Azov are suffering the Jewish president Zelenskyy to live because his interests and their interests align -- both want to stop Russian aggression by military means. I find it highly likely that Ukrainian mainstream -- and their president -- will tire of this war before Asov does. From the situation on the ground, it looks like any peace deal would involve some concessions to Russia, Crimea if nothing else. At that point, Azov could turn against Zelenskyy.
JulianRota
2hr ago
On the one hand, it could be seen as a knee-jerk over-reaction based on the cultural prominence of this overall viewpoint.
On the other, the thread OP did say "scares the shit out of me" about it, and did not elaborate on exactly what was so scary about a thousand-ish men being given some weapons in the middle of a huge war involving many hundreds of thousands on both sides.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
It is the biggest possible nothingburger or the smallest possible real world impacting event. Nothing will change drastically, but it is a sign that the US ability to control the whole world is slipping further. The real world consequences will be meh.
johnfabian
2hr ago
Party Down is an all-time great comedy show that very few people have seen. Strongly strongly encourage everyone to give it a shot
haroldbkny
3hr ago
The dumbest thing for me about Civil War started in the beginning: where Tony Stark is guilted into supporting the Sokovia Accords because the mother of someone killed in the battle blames him. The Avengers were literally saving the world from a genocidal robot, and unfortunately, there were civilian casualties.
I don't think that's dumb. If there's anyone to blame, it's Stark. It was his idea to build the robot. I do think it's stupid for the rest of the avengers to feel guilty, but Stark should totally feel guilty.
This would be more satisfying, but it would make a totally crappy movie. We don't go to the talkies for reason, we go to have our adrenals stimulated.
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