UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

Posts

123

Comments

8,681

Joined

2 yr. ago

the world is rotten

The chef is rotten. The world is beautiful. You just can't see it from inside the steamer.

Trump: "I'm doing things my own way."

CIA Section Chief: "Show him that Zapruder film again and make sure he doesn't forget about it this time."

The goal post keeps moving. It's a chronic problem with fascism.

Elon naively trained his algorithm on generally available data, rather than constricting it entirely to Conservapedia and InfoWars. So now every time a news story drops that they haven't sandbagged with specific responses, they're forced to hear something they don't like.

You are well aware that those are retcon? None of this existed before “A New Hope”.

Lucas had reems of material he used to turn out multiple screenplays before he ended on New Hope.

That's a big part of where those changes in the re-releases came from.

An easy thing to say if you've never been shot at

What’s rent for a one bedroom apartment?

Pretty wide range depending on neighborhood and quality. I'm in Condesa, so it's in the $600-1200 USD range. You can definitely find cheaper.

I imagine border security into the country is easier than the other way around.

It's not really an issue in Mexico City.

You only have to pay them if you move back to the US

Specifically if you're a contractor simply working abroad. If you don't actually reside in the US and you earn foreign income /pay taxes for a year, you're not going to owe anything.

That said, if you travel overseas for three months on contract, earn a ton of money, and come home to spend it, you have to report that in the US minus taxes payed abroad.

Don’t leave. It solves nothing

It keeps you alive. Just ask all those Europeans who fled the bloodbath of the world wars.

In Mexico right now. It's beautiful, the people are friendly, cost of living is easily half that of the States, and the food is spectacular.

Even more so when you remember that the original "we need to get rid of all those immigrants" argument stemmed from migrants costing the country too much money.

Trillions for deportation. Not one penny for infrastructure or social services.

Too many Americans seriously believe failure to carry state documentation makes you legally a non-person. And being undocumented while brown flags you as part of an invading army.

He's no better than an Arab, a Russian, or one of the dreaded Chinese and deserves to die in misery as an example to others

Just like Netanyahu with the handling of Gaza. Lots of people approve. Some people think he's not going fascist enough.

More than 17% Those are just the ones who'll admit to it.

All those Dems clutching their pearls over "Defund ICE" posters are very happy to see Hispanics ethnically cleansed.

George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.

If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.

All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader's Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in "Hutt Space" - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. "The Clone Wars" wasn't just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope's Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was "Episode IV" should say it all.

One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director's notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.

It's an early YA novel and propaganda piece. Very good at what it set out to accomplish. Obviously, not good for a material understanding of the world.

Florida is well on its way

Well, I'm glad Mamdani won in NYC and zionist liberals can finally put to rest the need to vote straight ticket Democrat.

It’s a hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks.

The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn't all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.

In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment... fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn't feel like a thing that could really happen.

Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.

The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence... as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.

Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.

As a coming-of-age book, particularly for American teenagers, "Catcher in the Rye" resonates for a reason. It does an excellent job of capturing the moment from a sympathetic point of view. And then you read it ten years later, thinking to yourself "Holy shit was I really like this?" only to realize you absolutely were.

American businesses will spend millions of dollars to hold an event almost no one outside their little circle of friends will even hear about in order to tell the public to do a thing they have no real choice in.