domain:npr.org
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18m 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?
Yeah, I'm pretty anti-Western as far as it goes, but this is one of the lamest arguments in circulation. Like, who do you expect to voluntarily show up to face bullets, artillery fire, and drones? It's going to be the same type of guy in practically every country.
crushedoranges
27m ago
I wrote an entire story based on a (well, not realistic) but more NrX/libertarian viewpoint on superheroes, right here.
https://fiction.live/stories/Molon-Labe/tykhbTXTZhJn3FHQ4/home
anon_
33m ago
To me, a much more satisfying conflict among good guys would be for good people to fight over complex issues and/or ideological divides, and do so rationally rather than emotionally.
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.
SteveKirk
35m 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
35m 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
39m 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
45m 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.
Jackson's starting to have her own windmills to tilt at: the anti-Munsingswear solo dissents and concurrences, and while they have obvious political ramifications (tactically mooting a case after receiving a favorable injunction in lower courts is mostly useful for current progressive goals, if only because SCOTUS demonstratably isn't going to wait before slapping down the 5th Circuit), it's at least a meaningful position with not-crazy-partisan political underpinning. She's not a Thomas or Gorsuch on that (yet!), but it took a few years for Thomas, at least, to grow into it.
I don't like the position, and maybe it's not enough to pull her from the 'reliably' partisan, but not an obvious thing either.
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