If you think this is bad, wait till you find out about
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Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon
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Resistance: Fall of Man
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X-Com: Enemy Unknown
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Space Invaders
they enlisted while stating that movie as their inspiration
If a movie about space marines fighting bug monsters was the underlying impetus behind your entire career... idk, man. That sounds like there's another problem buried (shallowly) under the surface.
That, or someone is just jerking your chain.
About as plausible as the folks that claim Terminator movies got them into designing ChatGPT.
People can and do sometimes do stupid things because they got the idea or inspiration from their entertainment.
We're getting dangerously close up "DOOM caused Columbine" levels of discourse.
Star Trek drove some kids to try to develop hyposprays and communicators, citing the show as their inspiration in adulthood.
The proximate cause for a marginal improvement to jet sprays is not Star Trek, I'm sorry. No more than the proximate cause to a marginally improved welding torch is Star Wars.
This is pure clickbait
I’ve had coworkers in my past that liked that movie so much that they started “drifting” before parking their cars on the way to work
Power sliding in the parking garage is certainly dumb. But I'll note they didn't quit their jobs to become professional car thieves.
Again, proving a negative is a lot harder than my claim that there is some influence, intentional or not, that entertainment has on people.
Incredible claims require incredible evidence. The relationship between Verhovan films and military enlistment is casual at best
You’re willing to believe people power sliding into parking spaces but you’re not willing to believe impressionable young people don’t decide to enlist
Yes. Because one is an trivial impulse decision and the other is a career choice five years minimum.
I don’t think my claim is incredible
I watched Hairy and the Hendersons once and now I think Bigfoot is real.
You have seriously never met or been related to someone making bad impulsive decisions with minimal forethought to them that had years of consequences before?
There is an abundance of demographic data that predicts which kinds of people are most likely to enlist. Social and economic precarity. History of family enlistment. Access to higher education. Regional geopolitics (ie, 9/11).
I've yet to see a successful military recruitment drive that involved repeated screenings of Starship Troopers.
That isn’t the same thing
Its the same Culture War nonsense I've been seeing my entire life. Starship Troopers turned my daughter into a war criminal! Teletubbies made my son start wearing a purse! Showgirls turned me into a pole dancer!
apparently UKIP believes in Bigfoot
They are one of the worst-run parties in a country overflowing with dogshit politicians. It would not surprise me even slightly to find out half their leadership bought into some kind of Cryptid hoax.
the Department of Defense is really wasting its time and surely never has gotten a single recruit through coercive messaging
The coercive messaging over the last 20 years has only gone up while recruitment has only gone down. There's definitely some value in the Pentagon reminding people that a career in the military exists. But if I had to guess how many people signed up to join the Navy after walking out of the the latest Top Gun versus how many joined the Navy because a recruiter showed up at their school and directly propositioned them, I'd consider a 1:100 spread generous on the side of direct recruitment.
You’re hyperbolizing what I said into something I never claimed.
Starship Troopers -> provoked me into joining the military -> So now I'm participating in war crimes...
Which step did I hyperbolize?
I’m supposing Reese’s Pieces didn’t sell a single additional bag of candy after E.T. was a hit.
Selecting a particular brand of candy to eat is not comparable to dedicating the next five years of your life to indentured servitude.
But you're right. We've definitely hit :wall-talk:
I am certain that entertainment "does" have an impact on the people who consume it. However, the degree to which it impacts people varies and is probably pretty hard to gauge in most cases. I heavily doubt Starship Troopers turns people into Fascists by the droves but it might further enhance reactionary sentiments in people that already harbour them or that are responsive towards them. (Which I assume depends heavily on the individual and many other factors). What im saying is that while you have a point to some degree (I think) you basically have to look at every single case and I doubt that in "most" cases a single piece of propaganda (especially one of the quality of Starship Troopers) is the deciding factor that makes someone join the US Marine.
Like lets turn this around ...the reason I want to balkanize and demilitarize the USA is NOT "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" even if it might have nudged me towards thinking more critical of republicans. It was merely one step on a long road towards radicalization from a somewhat "centrist" person and I think its a process (most of the time)
Im sure there are instances in which one single piece of propaganda captures someones heart but I dont think they are "that" common. The problem isn't really the individual piece of propaganda, but rather the fact that the entire culture is steeped in it.
Like lets be real Starship Troopers "might" influence some nerds but stuff like Fox News is a much bigger problem and rots the minds of entire generations on a nationwide scale.
I think it is a really interesting topic, and I don't consider myself above or free from the influence of propaganda. However, you would have to get people on board with the idea that everything is propaganda. While it is true that liberals may agree that "Mein Kampf" is propaganda, they perceive the New York Times or the BBC as unbiased, factual sources that serve the common good. Which sure it might be better than Fox News but come on.
It's not that people join the army because of CoD, it's that games like CoD or novels like Starship Troopers make the army a "cool" job. That way when the recruiter is at your high-school and you're picking between that and the meat packing plant, it's the one you go with.
games like CoD or novels like Starship Troopers make the army a “cool” job
I'll spot you CoD. But, again, I can't help notice a negative correlation between hours of CoD played as well as copies sold and per-capita recruitment. Media might be raising the public approval of the military, but it isn't encouraging any significant number of people to actually do military work as a career path.
when the recruiter is at your high-school and you’re picking between that and the meat packing plant
You're going where the pay is. And the meat packing plant pays much better.
And the meat packing plant pays much better.
The meat packing plant will pay my college?
The fact is both processing and military recruitment are concentrated in the American south. People have both options and are choosing the military.
You don't need a degree to pack meat. And, unless you're enrolled in a military college (highly competitive and officers-only) assistance is capped at $4500/year.
People have both options and are choosing the military.
Military recruitment has been falling continuously since 9/11 and its been nearly a decade since any branch has hit its recruitment targets.
there is no safety net beyond banning jokes that could catch someone so historically ignorant as to enlist in the actual army over fucking starship troopers. we cannot blueprint society from immaculately hilarious edgecases.
off-the-charts failure of society that level of ignorance and possibility for enlistment may be, lying that blame at the feet of the satirists is unfair. testimony in the thread alleges the game sticks to the film's themes so we shouldn't jump to the assumption this game is engaging in glorification & making people enlist.
you're contending all this but what's your prescription? should satire not be made or shown on the grounds that people it targets sometimes embrace it?
I think it would be cool if we had a tradition of absurd comedic mask-removal scenes at the end of satires, or even in the end credits. They just get gradually more and more explicit until at some point they run into the camera and the director comes around into frame and is like GUYS DONT DO THIS ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?
My main disappointment with XCOM 2 was you win, only to then become cops in XCOM chimera squad. :agony-shivering:
:astronaut-2: Wait, you're telling me we were cops the whole time?
Long War 2 is really quite excellent and does the Guerilla theme much better than vanilla. I think the stroke of genius behind it is that it does so both on the tactical layer, where the bulk of early game missions are hit and run evac missions that can also conceivably be completed from stealth, and the strategic layer where the ADVENT vigilance and force mechanics encourage hopping between regions, dodging areas where missions are hard. I also really appreciated the emphasis in both Long Wars in having deep rosters capable of withstanding shock instead of vanilla XCOM's roll the game with one group that has some substitutes if someone eats damage. And again, the devs could easily have just recycled the fatigue mechanic from the first LW but infiltration is really just such a good change. It's both refreshing to front-load the unavailability of troops and also something that just makes thematic sense.
Honestly I think vanilla Long War 2 is a more cohesive experience than LWOTC but changes in optimisation, graphics and assorted mechanics such as bonds mean I still play LWOTC instead. IDK, I really disliked the Chosen.
LW2 was great and I feel like LWOTC is also worth it because of the additions that WOTC added to the base game. Basically its all good and I enjoyed them all.
I like playing vanilla The Chosen but then I found myself getting to the late game too quickly so I install LWOTC to slow it back down
I'm tempted to boot that up. Haven't played X-Com in a while and it hits that sweet spot between RPG and RTS.
I have been playing BATTLETECH to scratch that itch but I may blow the dust off XCOM now
We're going to need to do a whole post to discuss this.
All those sourcebooks will not go to waste
I've already watched a lot of TTB but I don't agree with some of his conclusions. Unfortunately he also seems to have been influential in crafting some parts of the narrative about Nicholas Kerensky since I think his depictions ended up influencing the author of the Founding of The Clans trilogy.
See but the whole thing about Nicholas Kerensky is a late development. Originally when the whole Clans were conceptualized in the 90s it was not nearly fleshed out.
It's only in the past couple of years that Battletech has become more "gritty" and there has been more emphasis on "everyone is bad, there are no good guys" which is a significant departure from the Clans, as depicted in the Blood of Kerensky trilogy, where Stackpole couldn't help himself (and frankly the Battletech line developers encouraged) but depict Clan Wolf as the "good guys" ( or an approximation of).
Smoke Jaguars obviously were bad as well as pretty much all the Crusader clans. The wardens were written to be the "good guy" clans that you could like without feeling bad about it
Let's just all admit that Clan Fire Mandrill is the true faction that all leftist battletech players must play as, for their spectacular factionalism and inscrutable disagreements with one another
Also Tex is anti clan because he is Fash, or Fash adjacent. The clans have too much socialism/collectivism in them for his taste
Yeah because it was BASED CHAD national-sovereignists xcom fighting against multicultural neon-purple nanny state duh
What's wrong with Resistance? Earth gets invaded by aliens. You kill the aliens who have destroyed your entire planet.
They did make four I believe. R1, R2 and R3, were all PS3. Then there was a PSP version. Don't remember if they did a PS4 version. They defo did for Killzone.
Sorry. The four games I listed share the theme of "Military People Fighting Bug Aliens".
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The game is fantastic though and the parody gets through. It's also 90% of the way to being a sim of the movie. On the non casual difficulty you have a 60 round magazine and can't even kill one run-of-the-mill arachnid with the entire thing, and they kill you in one hit. Try it if you know 15 other non chuds
It's very early access and needs a lot of work, but it's good stupid fun.
Also, the chipper voice of mission control telling you "good job!" After half your team gets slaughtered, the air force casually dropping bunkers on people, and the general ineffectiveness of your weapons against the warrior bugs are all very faithful to the movie and the general incompetence of fascism.
We had a thread about this game yesterday, I haven't played it but I appreciate that the gameplay makes it seem like the people in charge of the army are absolute incompetents.
It's never the japanese power armor ma.k version of starship troopers either, it's always the verhoeven version that morons don't understand.
Verhoven picked up the novel, read about five pages and threw it out of the window. He wasn't interested in the least in actual science fiction. And Starship Troopers the novel is definitely science fiction in the proper sense of the word. It is legit literature.
Instead, he made a "parody" movie that most people didn't get. But hey, at least we got the unforgettable image of Doogie Howser, SS. Yay?
It's a generic hero story to push pro-fascist speeches and politics. Defending it here is extremely sus for a 1 hour old account.
Instead, he made a “parody” movie that most people didn’t get. But hey, at least we got the unforgettable image of Doogie Howser, SS. Yay?
Satire is dead and ineffective everyone here already knows this. Anything you satire will always just be used unironically be the fash as aspirational and reinforce them. That doesn't change the fact that the original is a trashy generic pro-nazi book.
The book was tossed out for the satire of the movie because making the book as a movie would have been the production of fascist agitprop. Nobody really knew what we know now about satire not working.
Is Satire really pointless though? It reaches its intended audience very well.
Just because some chuds are too brain dead to realize they are being made fun of doesn’t change the fact that they are being made fun of.
The alternative is they rally around legit fascist agitprop like “day of the rope” or some nightmarish genocide fantasy - it’s not like they will waste away into dust.
In my opinion yes, it's pointless.
It serves as entertainment for the people who already agree with the message of the satire. It achieves nothing with the people who take media at face value. And worse yet it becomes completely unironic media that the subjects of the satire use to promote themselves and be aspirational about.
If we score this, nothing is gained for group 1, nothing is gained for group 2 (and sometimes they like it which is really bad), something is gained for group 3. The fascists gain something from it.
It is far better for us to produce completely unambiguous good guys and bad guys content, rather than satire of the fascists as the ""good guys"". While the latter is very entertaining for us it is a mistake and a trap.
That’s fucking bleak.
Can’t deny how crowded warhammer 40k has become with fascists though, so I’ve seen it in action.
(The lore of 40k has been retconned so that there is literal “tiers” of humanity with each tier being smarter, fitter, and taller than the last. And it’s unironically embraced.)
Satire is one of my favorite forms of media, but it eventually gets hollowed out with an unironic form over time.
Can’t deny how crowded warhammer 40k has become with fascists though, so I’ve seen it in action.
Exactly, you see the problem here right?
It either achieves nothing, or it actively converts the media illiterate into seeing the fascists as "cool". And any further iterations on a successful piece of satire may or may not be satire or completely unironic lionisation of fascism written by people who totally didn't get the message originally.
Satire is hugely entertaining because it's clever and it aligns with our politics. The problem however is that we have a mountain of evidence to show that it is not particularly beneficial. Entertainment is fun, but at the expense of helping the fascists we should be pushing against it. We would be better off if satire died entirely.
I haven't seen any solid defence of satire so far. At best it is neutral by not harming but not really helping us. At worst it actively harms us.
Has The Onion really been a net negative for the world? :powercry-1:
They did offer a public apology for making Biden seem like a harmless but well meaning old man.
You're steering in to "i live in a tank and am the only true communist" territory. It's okay for entertainment to be entertaining. One sci fi movie that no one got isn't going to make things worse. The reason no one got it is bc the society was already so saturated with fascism to begin with.
Being joyless monks who never have anything to laugh at because humor supports fascism is not good for morale.
A defense of satire? Sneaking satire in to mass media is a dogwhistle for leftists and proto-leftists that says "you're not insane. Other people see it too. You're not alone. This isn't normal or acceptable and you are correct to oppose it."
Not everything can or should be come and see. The people who are already fascists in their hearts and wake up because they saw some movie and have 0 media literacy aren't a net loss. They were never ours to begin with and seeing your neighbors miss the point entirely and cheer for Dougie Howser, SS is wonderfully clarifying about the nature of the society you live in.
This movie was released in to a society that was already packed with fascists even if it didn't technically meet all the requirements to be called fascist in it's totality. Bush didn't launch the homicidal war in Iraq and the nightmarish global war on terror bc idiots thought Johnny Rico was aspirational, and nothing would be different if the movie hadn't been made except that leftists wouldn't have it as an example of the incoherence and stupidity of fascists.
America didn't need Mel Brooks or Verhoeven or Lucas or Tarentino or Chaplin to make them sympathetic to fascism. They already had John Wayne and Patton and untold other extremely famous and influential fascists to do that. Satire might not being a great weapon in the war on fascism, but it's not making things worse, either, and it provides rare moments of joy in the otherwise bleak nightmare we live in.
Humans like telling stories and having entertainment that entertains is good for morale. Regardless of what the fash are doing (which we have no control over) we do need to laugh at them, because the alternative is viewing them as inevitable and unstoppable, and just giving in to despair.
It's not a criticism of entertainment though, it's a criticism of satire that masquerades as doing something useful when it is in fact achieving the opposite.
One sci fi movie that no one got isn’t going to make things worse.
It objectively has though, because it functions to normalise the ultra nationalism depicted as somehow laudable and heroic. Because it creates fascist larpers out of people who have no idea they're larping fascism, and some of whom who do go on to discover this end up unironically becoming fascists.
A defense of satire? Sneaking satire in to mass media is a dogwhistle for leftists and proto-leftists that says “you’re not insane. Other people see it too. You’re not alone. This isn’t normal or acceptable and you are correct to oppose it.”
Why do you think satire is required to do this?
They were never ours to begin with and seeing your neighbors miss the point entirely and cheer for Dougie Howser, SS is wonderfully clarifying about the nature of the society you live in.
I completely disagree. This is just how propaganda functions, and you would never dismiss any other form of propaganda as "oh they were never ours to begin with therefore the propaganda affecting them doesn't matter".
it provides rare moments of joy in the otherwise bleak nightmare we live in.
The only thing here I agree with.
Humans like telling stories and having entertainment that entertains is good for morale. Regardless of what the fash are doing (which we have no control over) we do need to laugh at them, because the alternative is viewing them as inevitable and unstoppable, and just giving in to despair.
We can laugh at them without producing masturbatory satire that unintentionally functions as recruitment material.
There's more to entertainment than satire and you don't need satire to shit on fascists. Satire is completely impotent because the people being satirized just need to say, "This but unironically." In many ways, satire is the ultimate lib genre, a completely impotent genre that has absolutely no persuasive power. When was the last time you say someone on the fence get convinced by a satire because almost every single fence-sitter I've encountered always characterize that satire as "too preachy and smug." It's a genre for people who already buy into the belief/argument/ideology circlejerking about how smart they are for getting the satire and how their opponents are too stoopid for not getting the satire while their "stoopid" opponents use the aesthetics and selected parts of the satire to further push their agenda unironically. Who's the stupid one, the ones who don't get the satire or the ones who think not getting the satire actually matter?
Satire is so powerful, which is why brilliant satire Full Metal Jacket gets shown at Marines boot camp. When Asian women get annoyed by lone men shouting "me so horny me love you long time" at them, you see, it's actually Asian women who are stoopid for not getting that the men are just referencing a brilliant satire and totally not sexually harassing them.
GW has the problem with a lot of long-term media that the kids who grew up not getting the references ended up writing the story. I had some teenager jawing on about how the Imperium is socialism, totally talking over my attempts to explain that it's a parody of the Nazis, UK politics, the brainworms version of the Soviets, American fundies, etc.
Partially because it's not any more. The people writing genuinely think the space marines are cool good guys instead os psychopathic genocidal fanatics. Which sucks bc unhinged cranked up to 11 old school 40k was a lot of fun with it's vision of 20th century ideologies stretched out to their full illogical conclusions.
Also, they named Gazkul Mag Uruk Thracka after Thatcher and that will never not amuse me.
There's an internet term for when people who get the joke are gradually replaced with true believers who don't get the joke.
(The lore of 40k has been retconned so that there is literal “tiers” of humanity with each tier being smarter, fitter, and taller than the last. And it’s unironically embraced.)
R u referring to the primaries marines?
Humans > Space Marines > Custodes > Primarchs > Emperor
Back in the day all these “tiers” were just humans, with no weird biological supremacy stuff going on.
Like, Primarchs were just basic (if famous) human generals back in the original lore.
No way, in the past everyone was a baseline human?? What the fuck... When did the ubermenschen retcon happen it's been like this for at least 20 years now. Legit erasure of history lol
This feels like "dirty ushanka" territory. Is there really no value in galvanizing support among the left by creating art depicting fascist ideologies, in giving people without lived experiences with fascism an emotional understanding of what it is and why is must be fought? Is there no value in creating a shared cultural language of antifascist symbols? Would the masses be willing to seek out and consume endless dry, polemic works? Would leftists even be allowed to create and disseminate unambiguous morality plays which cast their capitalist patrons as the enemies of humanity?
I think this dialog falls foul of a common fault in analysis on the left, where we ignore the sheer scale of our opposition's power and nitpick our own, convincing ourselves that if we just create the perfect work we'd sweep aside generations of propaganda and that anything less than perfect may as well be a tool of our enemies in the way that everything created under capitalism reenforces it. You could write "Fuck Fascism" on a piece of paper and a lib would say "oh yes, I too hate Stalin".
Do we as leftists give up on creating art that speaks to leftists on anything other than a surface level because a fascist might see it and be convinced we support them instead, when they are primed by a lifetime of propaganda to see that in every shadow?
Is this not a "my treeeeeats" argument?
If the treats are recruiting tools for fascists, the treats are bad. We can make treats that depict fascist ideologies without those treats also functioning in a positive way for them. That's the point.
No, and I resent the aggressive reductionism. If you aren't interested in engaging with my argument, don't.
There is no emotionally honest depiction of fascism which will not appeal to a fascist - that is what makes them a fascist. They like the things we hate.
The benefits being presented are "it makes leftists feel good".
The negatives being presented are "when this content is successful it clearly functions to grow fascist numbers".
There is no emotionally honest depiction of fascism which will not appeal to a fascist - that is what makes them a fascist. They like the things we hate.
Satire like Warhammer 40k and Starship Troopers is NOT an emotionally honest depiction of fascism. It presents the enemy as monsters. It justifies the foundational root of fascism being that there are monsters that must be destroyed.
An emotionally honest depiction of fascism would have the enemies fascism seeks to destroy be actually marginalised people that are the weakest in society being actively destroyed and brutalised. This of course would not be very fun to watch or play though would it? And thus would be less successful, both with leftists and with the wider audience, it would in fact stop being satirical altogether if you did this. Satire inherently has emotional dishonesty embedded in it for the sake of making it fun entertainment and audience reach.
The benefits go beyond making leftists feel good, it makes them feel like part of a larger group within society that can and should effect change. It gives them a structure around which to understand what they oppose and why. It literally grows the number of active leftists in exactly the same way as it grows the number of fascists - by giving them a nucleus around which to form a coherent ideology distinct from the background radiation of disaffected liberalism. The difference is that the fascist gets this anyway, from the news, from every blockbuster film, from every war game.
I would also argue that there is emotional honesty there, because fascism sees itself as fighting monsters, part of inoculating against fascism is understanding that no perceived enemy justifies it's existence. However I do agree that it is a serious weakness of both 40k and Starship Troopers that this idea, that fascism creates it's monsters, is never explored. If it was I think it would be harder, but still not impossible, to co-opt them. I'm not arguing that these pieces of media cannot be criticized though, I am arguing that satire should not be declared tainted and abandoned to the right. It's is a tool in the belt of leftist artists and is no more vulnerable to co-opting than any other media dealing with the subject of fascism.
Fascists are also quite capable of taking media that explicitly shows them attacking humanized, marginalized, non-threatening people and understanding it as aspirational.
I am arguing that satire should not be declared tainted and abandoned to the right
I can't think of any popular right wing satire of the left. The closest thing I can come up with is Monty Python's occasional jab leftwards with extremely accurate criticisms that leftists would make themselves. That's not to say that right wing comedy doesn't exist. But that's not the same as satire is it?
Satire is by nature less compatible with the right, but off the top of my head I'd say South Park and Team America are popular right wing satire. Idiocracy too. I'd even say modern WH40K lore contains explicitly right wing satire, the Tau for example. Satire is extremely popular with liberals as well, and liberals can certainly be considered "right-wing".
Monty Python are leftists criticizing the left. That's why their criticisms are spot-on. The whole "People's Front of Judea" vs. "Judean People's Front" was formed from their experiences in orgs in the 60s and 70s.
I hate to say it but only Graham Chapman had credentials as a potential leftist "armchair socialist" some of the other members called him. The rest of them were hardcore liberals. Cleese was a Liberal Democrat member and did many ads for them at their peak.
This feels like “dirty ushanka” territory. Is there really no value in galvanizing support among the left by creating art depicting fascist ideologies, in giving people without lived experiences with fascism an emotional understanding of what it is and why is must be fought? Is there no value in creating a shared cultural language of antifascist symbols? Would the masses be willing to seek out and consume endless dry, polemic works? Would leftists even be allowed to create and disseminate unambiguous morality plays which cast their capitalist patrons as the enemies of humanity?
Awoo's point is that it doesn't have to be through satire. What's wrong with something like Wolfenstein 3d? Fascists are scum and the universal truth of fascists being the scum of society holding humanity back is expressed through the mechanics and lore of the FPS. What's wrong with something like Come and See, where fascist scum is portrayed as they really are, a bunch of drunk, incompetent, genocidal monsters who gets got at the end. And before you wave your "not every movie needs to be as heavy as Come and See" objection, even the Indiana Jones series treated Nazis better than virtually all useless satirical depictions of fascists. In the films involving Nazis, they are either depicted as incompetent or completely creepy and unhinged, nameless mooks that gets owned by the protagonists. The climax of the first film is basically Yahweh smiting a bunch of Nazis for being Nazis.
But all that Starship Trooper/WH40k "uh ignore how we made the fascists look cool it's acktually satire stoopid" satire is complete bullshit.
Safire is the highest form of posting. As posters that appeals to us. It however is not effective. There is something g called there mere exposure effect. It is a marketing term. Just being exposed to a thing increases people's tendency to like it. Satire devote brain wrinkles to the bad stuff, and they are happy brain wrinkles. Without specific work your brain tends to like things it has more wrinkles for. So in agregste it creates more harm that good.
Look at The Producer's. Alot of people have very fond memories of Hitler now. Around the edges your brain will start to forget why it has fond memories of Hitler and it might soften your negative associations. Across a population effects like that can produce shifts that are big enough people make marketing careers off them.
I’m sorry but Springtime for Hitler did not rehabilitate Hitler’s image, 5 decades of Cold War propaganda and conspiracy theory nonsense did that.
No, not specifically. For sure that is part of of that five decade mission of rounding the sharp edges off the nazis. You simply wouldn't have made a cute Hitler dance number if you weren't in that stream already.
I have serious objections to the idea that Mel Brooks, and other Jewish artists, making the fash look like a pack of deranged buffoons is somehow contributing to the acceptance of fascism.
Skewering fascism by making it's adherents look like complete idiots is one of the few ways in media that you can fight them. Any other depiction just makes them look cool to people already primed to like them.
That does not seem to actually be true. It feels true. However it seems the best way is simply to not talk about them. Say they were bad and move on to talking about good things that deserve attention. Positivity is the way forward.
And how has that worked out in the real world?
How does the influence of the occasional leftist satire hold up against the vast sea of excrement constantly being churned out by the mass media?
This whole argument that satire is too dangerous to produce vastly, vastly over estimates our power to influence society. To whit; we don't have any. Sorry to bother you and the producers and inglorious basterds are such rare points in a vast sea of neoliberalism and overt fascism that worrying about them is pointless hand wringing. There's a very good reason why we're talking about one specific 30 year old piece of anti-fascist propaganda; there have only been a handful of similarly impactful anti-fascist films since then, out of untold thousands of entirely sincere fash or fash adjacent or turbolib action movies. For every dork who joined the marines because they saw the movie, we've got people who realized heinlein was a shitty incoherent :libertarian-approaching: chud because Verhoeven's movie got them to reexamine their beliefs.
Being worried that once in a decade anti-fascist movies are somehow instrumental to the march of fascism when we've got like thirty Transformers movies, that American Sniper trash, all the dark gritty batman capeshit, and endless cop dramas is self indulgent. They don't matter. Nothing would have changed if they hadn't been made. Laugh, enjoy that brief moment of levity and humor in the sea of nightmares that is our lives, and move on.
P good as far as I can tell. Like star trek, showing people what a good world could be inspires more people towards our side than watching liberals make fun of other liberals. There is a reason we don't see more solar punk stuff. That is actually upsetting to the project butterfly types. I am not saying to banish the producer's. I am just saying don't pin your artistic hopes on it.
Satire is dead and ineffective everyone here already knows this.
I think satire for any broader audience needs to clearly include and demonstrate the contradiction of what it's seeking to satirize: simply showing something that's absurd and awful and trusting people to realize it's mocking it is bad practice, especially when its mockery is only a little exaggerated from reality. Starship Troopers is bad satire because it doesn't refute the system it is satirizing, and it just comes across as generic corny military sci-fi with a similar fascistic tone to normal American slop if someone isn't already aware of its goals. All the nationalism and bloodlust in it is just a clearer statement of what most American theater-goers already expected from media.
To be effective it would have had to be more overt and actively spell out what it's implying: include a scene establishing the meteor was a natural phenomenon and the government knew it, hell establish that they decided against having asteroid-defense-systems because it would have meant raising taxes or diverting half a percent of military funding or something, and so clearly establish that the ridiculous casus belli is explicitly a lie; establish that the pointless invasion of the bug worlds is failing and the war is going poorly overall so that it doesn't look like they're just winning a hard fought victory against a monstrous foe; hell establish the bugs as individually smarter and more concerned with their own lives with something like a direct attack on a nest being met with a holding action from worker forms who fall back when actual soldier forms arrive and repel the attack; etc.
It basically needed to make it clear that the humans were in the wrong and the villain was the Fascist regime behind the war in the first place, and that they're losing because they're disorganized and launching a genocidal war against an entrenched foe over literally nothing but sheer stupid bloodlust.
The problem here is the intellectual trap.
Intellectual people LIKE media that trusts its audience to understand it is satire without the overt spelling out of it. Without the explanation. The intellectual audience that satire targets prefers not to have it so they can have they're "i'm clever for getting it" feeling.
This is the trap of satire. The trap of intellectual entertainment. It is masturbation and because it feels good it is so easy to make the mistake of helping the fascists while making the content feel as good as possible for its intended target audience. This isn't helped by the fact that doing so not only nets you more viewers from the intellectuals but also more viewers from the fash.
This is why all good communists in history just slam bullshit out of the air and mock anyone who disagrees with them relentlessly.
Just read any of the stuff Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Castro, etc. said when talking to heads of state. There's never any sarcasm or couching of ideas, only blatantly stating the consequences of the other person's ideological position and following up with clarity of their ideological position.
There were absolutely Soviet satirists, and the USSR produced satirical media alongside its other entertainment productions. While I argue constantly that satire shouldn't be subtle and should instead be a polemic utilizing satire, one really can't compare theorists and leaders making direct statements or writing on a topic with artists producing entertainment media.
Reminds me of how many people, then and now, got extremely mad at "a Modest Proposal" for... it's endorsement of cannibalism.
Agreed, satire has its place, but it's not a revolutionary way to communicate. It's a way to filter out people who are in the "in" crowd. Stuff like Soviet satire wasn't convincing people to become communists, it was playing on the fact that they were already communist or had delt with the Soviet system at some point.
The heavy handed propagandist satire, like this was less to convince American's that America was bad, and more to entertain Soviet citizens who understood the context and message that the satire was presenting.
Basically, satire is fine, but you can't fight fascism with satire. You also can't lead a revolutionary movement with satire and satirical propaganda only works when the satirist is coming from the position of the dominant political ideology of the time and re-enforcing the "in group" mentality that satire re-enforces.
Wow, reactionaries were able to recuperate They Live and Starship Trooper and Full Metal Jacket and American History X and Fight Club and American Psycho and Judge Dredd and WH40k to serve reactionary ends, but surely, surely this time it'll be different.
The 'value in satire' is that it makes leftist criticisms accessible for children of politically illiterate parents
I wasn't 'in the know' when I saw (like three of) those movies. I was an impressionable child whose father liked them unironically. They all helped me me to establish different opinions from him.
Wasn’t the original legit full of unironic fascist admiration, though?
It was kinda piloitically incoherent libertarianism. So yeah, it is close enough to fascist to get work done.
piloitically incoherent libertarianism.
Pretty much all of heinlein is this with a healthy dose of eugenics, a lot of mysogyny and being overall horny, including about questionably young characters.
People shouldn't be subjected to Heinlein's writing unless out of academic interest on why he sucked so much.
I remember one story where the main character went back in time to ww2 to have sex with his mom while his dad was deployed. I honestly think his work is simply just way more fucked than we give him credit for.
went back in time to ww2
It was WW1, and that book was even weirder than that: it was about Heinlein's direct author-insert character doing settler colonialism in space, grooming his adopted daughter, forcing cattle to inbreed to show what inbreeding does over multiple generations to preemptively discourage his kids (that he had with his adopted daughter) from banging each other, and making female clones of himself that he then groomed too. It fucking ends with him enlisting to fight in WW1 out of some incoherent blend of toxic masculinity and nationalism for a country he knows that he personally outlived, nearly dying, and being saved by his harem in a time traveling spaceship.
Huh, my brain must have tried to delete that to save itself cause wow.
Heinlein really, really wanted to fuck his mom. Also I think the harem anime genre may be his fault.
Verhoeven's movie, like all good sci fi, is a commentary on the present disguised as a story about futury stuff.
That American's (including me but also I was twelve) were too dense to get it isn't Verhoeven's fault. If anything it just demonstrates the point he's hammering on in so many of his movies. Look at how many people unironically like Robocop, while disdaining Showgirls!
counterpoint, the literal dumbest guy i know gets that it's satire. not like a chud per se, but just in terms of intellect. (this anecdote doesn't mean satire isn't dead)
I'm all for the abolition of IP law, but I wouldn't mind if these people got a stern worded letter telling them they can't just blatantly use starship troopers to make :freeze-gamer: live out one of their foundational genocide fantasies
