There was an episode of Parks and Rec I saw one time where a diplomat from Venezuela offers them money and trashes George Bush and the show acts like that's a bad thing and Hugo Chavez was a bad guy lmao.
I really enjoy that episode. I see it as a massive dunk on the US, whether it's supposed to be or not.
Harry Potter is the neoliberal fantasy
Feels strange and ironic to hear Vox call out neoliberalism.
Every era has some cringe endemic to it. Bush era gave us a million portrayal of Islamic terroists shouting nonsensically, and a heightened nationalism across the entire mainstream political spectrum
I kinda find depictions of stability under neoliberalism in 90s media kinda cringe too. I mean I have the benefit of hindsight but there’s a bit of that “end of history” hubris in 90s media. Started to wear thin by the end in some media but there was still an undue sense of capitalist conquering pretty much right up to the twin towers falling.
Oh god yea. “The internet will usher in a new enlightened age of knowledge”
25 years later
“Hue hue vaccine is kill us.” :fedposting:
I was around for a lot of that but was relatively young. Not old enough to really think about it too deep. I don’t remember them talking about that specifically but I do remember the sentiment that knowledge would lead us all to being renaissance people.
Personally I was just hyped about the cheat codes for sonic 3 and looking at cool dbz concept art for stuff that hadn’t come out over here yet.
Yeah, what I remember most is people telling me over and over that "there are no good jobs without a degree, if you don't get a degree you will be a failure and live in a ditch for the rest of your short life, take our as many loans as you need to get a degree."
LoL "lazy young people take out loans pay it back lol!"
On the flip side, being apart of the net gen made me a communist :lenin-cat: so they were right in a way
See my trick was to fall down the reactionary rabbit hole long before Peterson was popular. I went from New Atheist to Anti-SJW the good old fashioned way; with angry rantsona YouTubers. It was much easier to figure out they were just losers because they didn’t have the status Peterson has, so I left them pretty quick. Then I found the primordial soup of what would eventually become Breadtube, and here we are today.
when were you when vaccine is kill
i was sat at home drinking brain fluid
Internet bad if corps and psyops are going on. We could have nice internet (but not with techbros designing it).
I thought this Jacobin article the author linked was interesting. It dovetails pretty nicely with the Guy Debord megathread. The author's thesis is that the fundamental breakdown of the ability to effect change in reality has given rise to a form of magical thinking - folks go to protests and wave signs or smash their Keurig coffee makers because it provides the illusion of having an impact on their external realities. As the political/social/ecological situation becomes increasingly intractable, so grows the appeal of modern forms of ritual and superstition.
I agree, I think the :so-true: shibboleth of "We must become an interplanetary/stellar species" is strong evidence to that effect.
Just skimmed it for now, but it seemed to have some very astute observations. Thanks for the link.
who the fuck cares who the president was when your shitty pop-whatever came out
shut the fuck up vox
I feel like the end of the article failed to connect the dots- when Trump is elected in 2024, Ted Lasso is going to feel even more cringe than it does now.
The original skits were pretty funny way back when, might not hit right if you don't watch sports/football though
https://youtu.be/6KeG_i8CWE8
I don't really see the connection to Ted Lasso, which is a show about sports and human connection? Where's the link to politics there? feels like it was just the first buzzy show you could think of lmao
Ya I may be wrong but I can't recall a single political joke in the entire show.
So it wasn't just me, the author mentions it in the final stretch of the article. And while it's not an explicitly political show, I do agree with the author that it is one of the "important" shows of the Biden "era". And my guess is that 2022 and 2024 are going to be spent in part saying that Democrats (and "good" Republicans like Romney and Cheney) are the good and nice friends from shows like Ted Lasso, and we just need to show extreme kindness to each other and :vote:
How Hamilton, Parks and Recreation, and Harry Potter lost cultural cachet.
pretty sad to see nick offerman keep insisting that the only way to be a man is to do woodworking, cook bacon, and be born with a penis, tbqh.
sure.
just to clarify, though the ron swonson performative masculinity is definitely worth an eye-roll, i just thought it would be funny to imagine if the decrease in interest in parks and rec was analogous to the decrease in interest in harry potter (which i think turns a lot on rowlings anti-trans comments); and so, if offerman, who developed this sort of self-conscious, winking masculinity (which, again, though worth an eye-roll, is, to my mind, very open to trans identity (anyone can do wood working, anyone can like bacon, regardless of biological sex)), suddenly married this to a very reactionary and bigoted insistence that all men had to be biological masculine.
if i can't be a joyless scold at every opportunity, and not follow anyone's line of thought except my own, i don't want to be part of your revolution
~your reading of a famous emma goldman quote
isn't offerman actually reasonably good irl? not an expert on this, but that's just what I sort of remember.
40% Hollywood Lib, 40% Midwest Democrat, 20% Broseph. For example, he will say: everyone should learn how to woodwork. Why? Because then you feel like a man and you don't have to shop at Ikea. Which he admits is a good company. So, if every dude learned how to woodwork then you wouldn't spend so much money on cheap shit from Ikea, which is a very good company, and be super manly by proxy.
Statements like this make a lot of Libs :liberalism: because they think this will breakthrough to their shithead chud relatives.
In reality we know he should be saying the most correct thing which is: everyone should learn how to woodwork so we can make batons and beat the managers at Ikea until they give us the keys to the warehouse.
i'm sure he's fine. i was just goofing as if he took a rowling-esque transphobicheel turn
First it was :hillary:
Then it was :hillary-disgust:
And now it's :hillgasm:
-
Knope literally calls herself a capitalist and loves Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren
-
I feel like Venezuelans literally showed up as straw men villains one time, and were refuted not via arguments but via something something small town murica
For point 2, yep, that was an episode, and here's the plot synopsis. The end resolution is that the venezuelans offer them $35k (which they fear is "dirty money") for some public works, but Leslie has to say Viva Venezuela, Viva Chavez in front of a camera. She does so, but then it turns out that the dastardly venezuelans were actually just there to embarass the americans the whole time, so Leslie tears up the novelty check and shouts Viva America, like a true patriot! What will they do without the $35k in funding for filling in a hole, you ask? Well it turns out that they've tipped Tom $35k during their stay, having assumed he was a servant, and all is well. No, that money's not dirty, fuck you.
Some other highlights:
- Leslie is super racist, and before meeting the venezuelans assumes they are so poor they won't know what toilet paper is
- The entire venezuelan parks department is super wealthy, misogynist, and racist
- There's like a 3-minute bit about how venezuelans just imprison everyone to make their society function
Honestly, looking back on it now, it comes across as unintentional self-parody of US libs.
I remember that vile episode. They fucking have a town hall to be like "oh look we actually listen to people" like hey liberals, Venezuela's at the time still living president literally had a tv show every day in which his constituents across the entire nation could call in.
No but you see that's just proof that Chavez didn't take governing seriously! The government isn't supposed to listen to normal people's concerns because the normal people are a bunch of cranks! :hillary:
-
Eh, i still really like Parks, I just understand what it is. Cameos by ghouls make sense for idealistic lib media and I know that's what it is whenever I sit down and watch it.
basically same here. handwringing over media consumption is the 12th form of liberalism. Harry Potter is a very special case because it goes so, so far beyond mere media consumption.
Agreed on all counts, especially with HP — engaging with HP in this day and age means you're an accessory to transphobia since JKR has said herself that the continued popularity of the property is a tacit endorsement of her terf rhetoric by her fans
Parks and Rec had so many cameos of so many political ghouls. Hard to enjoy it now.
I like some of the social dynamics at play still :(
The fact they made the most powerful political players in a small town a dentist and a soulless corporation which pretends to be a small family business were nice touches.
The fact they made the most powerful political players in a small town a dentist and a soulless corporation which pretends to be a small family business were nice touches.
It would have been nice if they hadn't reflexively Both Sides'd every episode.
Was rewatching 30 rock and it's still funny until they decide to do a multi episode arc about fucking North Korea. Just skip em and it's alright.
Community holds up though tbh. Still mad Netflix dropped my favorite episode because of chang's drow costume. What's worse is there's a literal depiction of brown face via Chevy Chase in a later episode and they didn't get rid of that one.
Got the dean's best intro still though : https://youtu.be/qvzE64A28NI
Got the dean’s best intro still though : https://youtu.be/qvzE64A28NI
God damn, I loved that show for the first 3.5 seasons.
I think P&R was a legitimately good show early on. The whole premise was that government is dysfunctional because of the contradictions in capitalism. A department dedicated to removing blight and creating parks cannot do the thing it is designed to do thanks to all the economic headwinds, the ideological poison, and the upper class apathy dragging it down. And the first season functionally concluded with a call to popular direct action.
Had they run with that, rather than turning it into a big pile of tropes, maybe it also could have made it a full 3.5 season before going sour.
That raps actually a season 5 bit, which holds up. 4 and 6 kinda blow though
Yeah they dropped that one for the drow costume and then kept the Chevy Chase in brown face episode from like one season later.
When i came across this article i half expected it was coopting our cultural leanings and divorce it from how we see the world
