Israel heroically lets the Palestinians in while fighting off terrorist Hasidic ultra-zionists.
When the US Army marches back across the country and uses tanks to crush the independent city-states that formed after it left most of it's citizens to die the narrator just kind of shrugs and says "alas".
Putin somehow becomes the head of a hyper-religious greek orthodox death cult straight out of Warhammer 40k.
China bad is the source of the entire virus because they try to keep it all secret instead of employing effective public health measures (Aged like milk)
I like aspects of the book but politically it's trash. Like, the hikkikomori swordsman and the blind gardening monk teaming up to survive in the mountains of Japan? That was cool. There are lots of neat details. But overall... oh god what an ideological trash fire.
Putin somehow becomes the head of a hyper-religious greek orthodox death cult straight out of Warhammer 40k.
If only.
I think it wasn't one specific Palestinian person, but rather the combined rabble of their entire groups' presence, which feels not great thematically.
Sort of but they're very careful to show that it's Jews and Muslims reading prayers, singing etc together. It's people plugging into big speakers that does it
For whatever reason that book is kind of a guilty pleasure for me but I agree, a lot of it is super cringe. I especially like that he says there are more neo-nazis in former East Germany than the West not because of workers there getting exploited to shit by neoliberalism after the reunification but because the Communist government told them all that they were good Communists during the war and couldn't be Nazis even though none of Germany was Communist until after WW2? Baffling.
Yeah, he also seems to get really misty eyed about idealised, liberal versions of institutions. The British Royal Family are super courageous and guide the people into creating some weird kind of woke neo feudalism where everyone goes around with two handed swords and live in castles and shit when in real life they'd all retreat to some British government Epstein Island to wait the whole thing out.
The bit where the reality TV house/compound full of rich people gets stormed by the public is a satisfying read though, haha.
I remember that part. Don't Bill Mahr and Ann Coulter get minecrafted while they're fucking in a broom closet or something?
Yeah that's right, that book has some powerful Bush years energy lmao
For me it's up there with stuff like 24 and Children of Men as iconic Bush era pop culture
Ahh yeah, also great examples. Halo is like that for me in terms of video games (even if they kept making them into the Obama years), played the remastered one and totally forgot how much the humans are neocons in space.
TBH I think the original Halo preceded 9/11
Yeah it only dropped in November 2001. It was written long before 9/11.
yeah, in the OG Halo there's none of the "Covenant are genociding humanity" and "They're unstoppable and we can't win without a macguffin" shit. Cortana aces seven Covenant ships before making the jump to the Halo. The first game is mostly apolitical military space adventures. Then in the later installments we find out that the UNSC is a fascist military junta, the Spartans are fucking slave jannisaries kidnapped and experimented on as children, the Covenant are murdering all of humanity and simply cannot be stopped, oh and the flood can talk for some stupid reason.
Halo got intensely stupid and CHUDy after the 9/11 happened.
Oh, did I mention that hte purpose of hte Spartan program was the make slave super-soldiers to crush pro-democracy movements on human colonies? Because that's a thing, Master Chief was designed to slaughter Million Women's Marches on other planets and shit.
you can say theyd try to keep that shit under wraps because of various levels of malfunction. it's what their initial reaction to covid19 was
but you can't call them fucking anti-science. once it's undeniable that there's a problem that would fuck them, they will do SOMETHING. unlike some other governments.
Russia also sends human waves in moth eaten Soviet uniforms armed with beaten up old Mosin-Nagants who get slaughtered in droves because muh asiatic hordes.
In the book they also imply that North Korea ripped the teeth out of all their citizens so that, when they inevitably turned, they couldn't bite people.
IIRC that's from the movie, in the book it's implied that the North Koreans turn into literal CHUDS.
I was a total lib when I read it, but even then I thought the depiction of Israel welcoming in Palestinians was laughable, ditto for the South Africa and DPRK stuff.
Israel can't even beat Hezbollah and Hamas with the backing of the world's greatest superpower, what hope do they have against fucking zombies? I'm genuinely fascinated by this utopian version of Israel that Hollywood Jews think exists (And no I'm not being anti-semitic, the guy who wrote this is Mel Brooks' kid).
It's total libshit but it's a really fun book, my favorite zombie fiction personally
The thing about WWZ is that it is one of the few zombie fiction that actually attempts to consider the grand scale logistics a zombie apocalypse would entail. There was very little zombie fiction at the time that considered this, and very little since. Reading chapters like the one with the Air Force pilot discussing her E&E training, or the Army veteran describing the radical changes in US military tactics and doctrine, or the Sinclair grandson describing the US war economy in the safe zone were a fucking blast considering most zombie fiction restricted and still restricts itself to "oh look the dumb selfish asshole wants to lock the twelve-year-olds outside to get eaten alive for no reason again".
A couple other banger chapters off the top of my head are the Big Pharma exec who made billions selling a fake vaccine (O_O) and the Chinese submariners who go nomad and briefly a boat society at Fiji selling their electricity
A similarly good examination of what it would actually mean to rebuild society that has slightly better politics is the later volumes of The Walking Dead graphic novel series. Late in that series after a major time skip the Alexandria alliance essentially do communism without saying as much.
How about if your parents are famous you automatically don’t get to be famous
The audiobook is so goddamn good I don't even give a shit about the weird teenage-bro fantasy shit, it just sells me completely.
All I remember from that movie is I watched it on a flight once, and there was a rather abrupt edit where one minute some people were on a plane and the next they were walking around Wales
Someone should tell him about Hilde Benjamin
Edit: oof just checked Hilde's English wikipedia page:
presided over a series of show trials against those identified as political undesirables, such as Johann Burianek and Wolfgang Kaiser
Is it really show trial when they were actual reactionary/ex-nazi CIA-backed insurgents?
In his book Divided Memory, the American historian Jeffrey Herf argued that, while public memory of the Holocaust and sympathy for the concerns of Jewish survivors found a home in West Germany, in East Germany this was not the case. Herf’s book portrays the anti-Semitic purges in the GDR of the 1950s, the relegation of Jewish survivors in East Germany to the status of second-class victims, and the GDR’s hostility towards Israel — which it regarded as an imperialist and capitalist country, and to which it flatly refused to pay restitution. Herf also describes the SED’s shameless use of the Holocaust as an instrument in the Cold War against West Germany, some of whose official representatives became the subject of SED smear campaigns based on their roles or alleged roles during the Third Reich. According to Herf, ‘while some East German novelists and filmmakers addressed anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, these issues remained on the margins of East Germany’s official anti-fascist political culture.’ Herf sees evidence that marginalization, indeed even exclusion of reference to Jews was characteristic of commemorative practices in the GDR generally, and particularly in the opening ceremonies of the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen memorial sites: ‘solidarity with the Jews had no part in these ceremonies of remembrance’, which foregrounded rather antifascist resistance. Claudia Koonz is equally damning in her assessment of the GDR’s museum and memorial landscape at Buchenwald, which, focused as it was on the effects of ‘international fascist capitalism’, left no room for a memory of the Holocaust.
I mean he's a rich trust fund guy from a Hollywood celebrity family who studied international affairs at West Point so it's not surprising his geopolitics is dogshit.
