the sid meiers civilization series - the flow of world history as filtered through the mind of an apolitical 90s american nerd right at the 'end of history', with terminal western highschool textbook brain
and dont even get me started on sid meiers colonization...
and in the first one, a 50% chance that your declaration of war would be overruled by congress, to represent the peaceful nature of dEmOcRaCy
ive always kinda wanted to write a bit of an essay on the intense liberal ideology baked into almost every facet of the civ series (and not just its laughable 'government types'), but never quite got around to it. theres so much, down to how nomadic and non-urban peoples are 'barbarians' to be destroyed so their land can be properly tamed, to the linear flow of technological and social progress as represented by government-allocated beakers or whatever, to even just the conception of the city as the atomic unit of human societal organisation, etc etc etc. and of course the complete lack of any vision of the future or 'victory' beyond either military or soft-power conquest of the globe, or liberal democracy in space for no discernible reason, like it cant even conceive of any greater goal for humanity, like it might as well be francis fukuyamas civilization
I know the dogma for some people here is “politics always flows downstream to culture”
I think that's one thing that a lot of people really take too far, in the same way a disdain for "Great Man Thinking" can get taken too far to the point where people genuinely think that no individual leader can be important or have an outsized influence. Culture is shaped by politics and the ideological environment it's created in, but it also serves the same by spreading the ideas that made it. Like South Park didn't create edgy "the status quo is normal and good and completely apolitical and everything that seeks to change it is cringe politics and bad" chud thinking, but it certainly helped to teach that pre-existing ideological stance to a generation. Similarly, Civ didn't create its terminal lib-brain thinking, but it helped propagate it and teach it to a new generation of nerds.
I think its more likely that culture polishes a person who's shaoe us given by the material conditions of society. Like I don't think south park made anyone a reactionary, but it definitely made a bunch I'd people who were going to be reactionaries anyway into a specific brand of reactionary.
Oh no I am not saying it doesn't affect people's views and influence people. What I am saying is that reactionary media doesn't create reactionaries ex nilio, like if you see transphobic garbage and go "lol yeah that's right" you were already in a place where you find it acceptable to doubt the value of people to begin with. It's also all statistical in nature like the material conditions determine the likelihood distribution of ideological outcomes for a given population.
It is also definitely a reciprocal relationship where being materially more prone to reactionary ideology makes those cultural products more effective, which in turn leads ideologically radicalized people to reinforce the material structure. I just think the process starts at the material.
It's super funny how in Civ V whenever literally any civilization gets a culture victory all the other leaders start complaining about their citizens wearing that civ's blue jeans and listening to their pop music.
Also how in Civ V the science "victory" is just you building a space ship and fucking off into space forever.
Oh almost forgot about Civ V's ideology options. The options aren't Communism, Liberalism, or Fascism. No, the options instead are Order, Freedom, or Autocracy. Too much ideology is baked into that naming scheme to unpack
yeah the science victory bugs me possibly more than anything, like the greatest possible use of science is to be able to use your entire countrys productive capacity to build a big rocket for a pointless space colony impossibly distant from actual earth, fundamentally indistinguishable in both mechanics and intent to just building the pyramids in space to say 'look on my works ye mighty and despair'
and not to use science to build a true post-scarcity society, to eradicate disease and hunger and suffering and want and establish falgsc or anything equivalent because the creators and the game cant even conceive of any societal progress beyond modern neoliberalism but with a bit more shiny shit
and its so american that if someone else is progressing further with their performative space rocket, you need to stop them by going and burning their capital down because its all zero sum and nobody is allowed to have more progress than you
pointless space colony impossibly distant from actual earth
That's the part that really gets me. It's even worse than building a colony on Mars or the moon like Musk wants to do. If by some miracle we ever solve climate change and do falgsc then maybe having outposts and infrastructure throughout the solar system would be useful.
But the rocket in the Civ V science victory is a colony ship headed four light-years away to Alpha Centauri. Most people who left on that ship will be either elderly or dead when it arrives and it'll take 8 years to send a message back to Earth and receive a message back. No significant resources will ever make their way back to Earth from Alpha Centauri and no significant resources will ever reach Alpha Centauri from Earth. In a matter of maybe one or two generations the colony becomes culturally alien to Earth due to lack of meaningful contact.
Now we have people out there living a harsh existence on an alien world just so people back on Earth in whatever nation got the science victory can point to Alpha Centauri and use it to brag to other nations.
the most based Civ game is the one that only lets you build mount rushmore if you are a fascist. uh not because being fascist is cool but because the games like yeah america is fascist
I'm aware it's super problematic etc so I just imagine the game as Imperialism: the video game! I need to accumulate and exponentially grow my production gold etc etc so I can do more and outcompete other civilizations and get access to more strat luxury resources etc etc Keep going until there's no unsettled land in the way and its time for war with neighboring empires Still doesn't make it not a wrong view of history but it makes it more internally consistent to me
funnily enough, the imperialism games, especially imperialism 2, are very fun and much more honest about what they are
but yeah the civ games certainly work as ruling class sims and i do still love them, especially when they embrace their board-gamey origins and dont try too hard for rEaLiSm
Does reddit count? The default front page (I don't bother creating accts anymore) is largely just hate porn and/or propaganda
The banning of the cth subreddit was really depressing, drama aside a lot of those memes were really fucking funny.
Yeah, I agree. Outside of a few niche interest boards, I never go there anymore now that cth is gone.
Cop shows. I like a good investigation, but it's very uncritical of the power structures involved and the nature of "crime"
I think it's a little similar to twin peaks, in that the plot is very much secondary to the atmosphere, themes, and the spiritual elements of the show. It's barely a cop show at that point, there's just cop stuff sort of happening while you vibe to the rest of the good stuff.
there's this trope of cops, coroners, PIs etc. as forces of rationality who shine the light of reason and enlightenment into the darkness and True Detective breaks that down completely by showing that these forces of rationality can do nothing but unearth
spoiler
lovecraftian and epsteinian horror through their investigations. They crack the case and it solves nothing.
I did watch some detective show (or a critical interpretation of what those shows are) that was the final project of film/art students in Berlin a couple of years back. Was "only" three short episodes but it was so good and fun and politically neat that I would've wished it to get funding for more. Also had a great afterparty so that was nice, too.
Really should've kept in touch with them.
A lot of Disney cartoons, but especially Lion King. It feels weird watching it again and seeing the three hyenas voiced by poc, as well as the "bad" characters all being a shade of dark.
John Oliver, "History" type Youtube channels because their audience is almost always crypto-fash or "le rational thinker" types, Parks and Recreation is still pretty decent but the later seasons suck.
aren't they both supposed to be fairly insufferable people who are completely not self-aware / oblivious?
What you say is true I just can't remember if the audience is supposed to like the Cranes or not.
P.s. - I enjoy your username
Used to like a lot of 80s comedy movies as a kid, and a lot of them make jokes out of like literal sexual assault. Not at all an original observation, but seriously what the fuck.
James Bond. I loved it as a kid. Realized as an adult that it's super problematic in many ways.
believe it or not, casino royale is arguably the least problematic of them, since the newer bond films are, well... newer.
The misogyny in the newer films pales in comparison to the older ones. Plus, of course, racism, toxic masculinity, imperialism....
That's not to say they don't have anything going for them. The tech ideas were cool, the villains were usually well done, the actors were good (Andre the Giant is always great in everything)... but it's just too hard for me to enjoy the good stuff when it's set again the backdrop of, say, Bond assaulting women.
I feel like a lot of Bond films have always had this strange tension where Bond as a character is really reactionary, but a lot of the plots and especially the villainous schemes are actually quite good reads of capitalism, geo-politics etc.
This is particularly true of the newer ones (Brosnan, Craig). This was also around the same time that the writing started trying to actually deal with the idea of Bond as something of a flawed or anti-hero to mixed degrees and results.
OK, this is probably more effort than I should put in and perhaps it's a bit simplistic, but look at the plots of the following (spoilers obviously) :
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GoldenEye: After the collapse of the Soviet Union a general betrays his country for profit by looting a WMD with the help of an MI6 turncoat who is looking to settle old scores as his family were Cossacks who betrayed the USSR only to then be betrayed themselves by the West.
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Tomorrow Never Dies:
Rupert MurdochElliot Carver runs an international criminal operation disguised as a sensationalist right-wing media empire and tries to start WW3 for profit and ratings, in part by using an experiential mining technology. -
The World Is Not Enough: Oil billionaires leverage everything from the British state to their own daughters as kidnap and torture bait to try and gain control of important pipelines over several decades. It culminates in a plan to use a nuclear weapon to destroy a rival pipeline as well as make billions more from the resulting skyrocketing oil prices.
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Die Another Day: errr... we don't really talk about this one because it's total nonsense... DNA restructuring so anyone can look like anyone and be younger, Madonna fencing on a plane, a big mirror???
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Casino Royale: An arrogant and gambling obsessed banker for intelligence agencies, warlords, and terrorist organisations plans to use a terrorist attack to make him and his clients richer by shorting stock in the company being attacked. When it fails he creates an incredibly high stakes poker game to recoup the lost €100,000,000 investment while terror groups, criminal syndicates, and intelligence agencies all kill each other (and plenty of their own people and innocents) over the money, with those in charge largely seeing it as a game.
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Quantum of Solace: Dominic Greene, a green-washing capitalist is helping an exiled fascist Bolivian general to coup the current leader and install himself in power as a dictator in exchange for a deal that would hand over the underground aquafir to Greene, who is using his environmental advocacy charade to buy up global water rights for profit and geopolitical power in the coming water wars due to global warming. Also, the CIA are actively supporting Greene and the Bolivian fash coup to the degree of trying to kill Bond if he interferes.
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Skyfall: Fuelled by vengeance for being used and betrayed (as Bond is and will likely one day be) by the intelligence services Raoul Silva takes revenge by turning MI6s own surveillance and cyberwarfare tech against them as well as the fact that they compile and kept a list of global agents of other countries and then lost it. Home alone style hijinks ensue.
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Spectre: This one's a little messier, but basically there's government pressure to join the Nine Eyes surveillance program, a co-operative international espionage and surveillance pact with private backing for global reach. It's later revealed that Spectre, am explicitly capitalist illuminati type organisation is behind Nine Eyes and has been staging terror attacks all over the world to get various nations to sign onto it, this giving them total control and finally being rid of the pesky annoyances created by the occasional self interest of nation states and their democratic shifts.
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No Time To Die: Nano machines, son! This one's a bit of a mess too due to several rewrites as Covid kind of fucked the central plot but it's clearly supposed to be a virus, so I'm going with that. Basically, MI6 secretly created a bio-weapon that can target specific DNA supposedly as a targeted poison against impossible to reach targets but that also just happens to be able to be used as an efficient method of genocide, à la British involvement in South Africa's Project Coast. This is stolen by Spectre, the capitalist illuminati, then turned against them and stolen again by a mysterious bio-tech billionaire with a personal vendetta who creates a factory to mass produce it and is about to sell it as the ultimate bio-weapon to a selection of buyers from the world's elite.
I appreciate the effort. yeah, the bond villains have largely been interesting.
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Ever listen to “Kill James Bond”? It’s an excellent podcast which focuses on reviewing every single James Bond film.
I feel bad about considering the NCR the good guys the first time I played
To be fair I think New Vegas does a good job at the very least at showing that the NCR isn't necessarily the "good guys" per se, I mean they literally had them commit a blatant war crime lol
tbf at least Vegas also has the Elon Musk option, the anarchism with Skynet characteristics option, and the DLC human extinctionist option
Not sure if this fits the question but one that really doesn’t hold up is Good Morning Vietnam. The Robin Williams character is sexist and somewhat misogynist. And it’s not part of the plot if you know what I mean. He is the hero protagonist. And if I remember there’s some white savior stuff too.
I still want my TV show that focuses on the Vietnam war (war of US imperialist aggression) - and the Vietnamese perspective that is.
Nearly everything.
I know you primarily mean a newfound disgust for liberal narratives but I also just view most entertainment as liberal backed mass hypnosis whether it is peddling their ideology or not. For clarity, I see a ton of fictional entertainment that allows people to explore and LARP non-liberal politics and I have to cynically view the uptick as a concerted understanding that "well if we trap them in these synthetic worlds they have significantly less impact on reality".
Yeah - fair. I guess I just hope for entertainment to continue to trend towards the indie developer level. I also have a lot of hope for "pirate" private server communities for games.
Lower key than that, the Indiana Jones movies are much harder to watch with all of the “all the girls in the professor’s class want to bang him and also he is a lowkey child molester and it’s just a quirky plot point.”
There's an Edward Norton movie, Leaves of Grass that has a scene in the beginning where one of his students is basically trying to rape him in his office before the secretary walks in. https://youtu.be/RMY8kRK1Wps
“Every movie made before 2012 has a subplot about whether or not to bang the world’s hottest teenager.”
Methods of Rationality was good though
spoilers
The Sorcerer's stone is capable of restoring anyone to perfect health. The only limitations are that the person being healed needs to still be alive and the stone needs to recharge for a few minutes between uses. After acquiring it, Harry denounces its previous holders as more evil than Voldemort because they hoarded magical healthcare for themselves instead of sharing it. He then immediately sets up a free hospital and sends his allies out to gather the sick and elderly so they can be healed.
Did you read far enough ahead to that “Hermione is basically brain-dead but she can obey and provide sexy times as a sex toy with a heartbeat so everything is good” part?
Can you remind me what are you talking about? I do not remember anything like this.
I was peak demographic lmao, thankfully the movies didn't match my headcanon from the books and the curse was dispelled
