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The TV show is the Culture guys, come on. The Star Trek stories that we love exist as the novels of a slightly odd ball Scottish author, respected, but politically conservative.
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Mar 5, 2015 02:42
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:21 |
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Man, I have the gayest of Boners for Miéville and that pitch is fantastic. Every time I was dragged to an Iron Man movie I was sorta stunned you were supposed to side with the arms-dealing drunkard and not the villains, who were more often than not totally in the right. I mean, he gets shot with his own equipment and realizes he needs to mend his ways within the first few scenes, and that drives him to fight his first villain, Evil McDoubleDown ArmsDealer. And the next two movies also feature ebil corporate arms dealers, one, again, as the main villain and one as a secondary villain. I mean, he still lives the high life, but we're not rooting for the arms-dealing drunkard, we're rooting for the recovering alcoholic attempting to atone for his arms dealing past.* *Admittedly, with explosions, but it's an action movie.
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Mar 17, 2015 21:48
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Hah, I missed the first movie actually, where I'm told he's humanized a lot and the other two are coloured by the fact that to me, Iron Man will always pretty much be "80's Capitalism is great, viva Neoliberalism" the super'hero'. I love how America has this 'gubmint bad' right wing when it's, as our syndy brethren show us, really a pretty lefty position. Saying 'no gently caress you, I the laborer* get to use this, not you fascist pigs, I shall use this for the good of humanity in a way that transcends national borders' is pretty left. I mean, his alter ego the CEO is not what you'd call proletarian, but the man in the suit even has that Iron/Industrial vibe. Ala, you know, Stalin. And IM III's villain I thought could really be seen as an almost too on the nose way. The evil vaguely Middle Eastern terrorist is really this British fellow playing at evil (e.g., much of the fuckery in the ME being a result of British imperialism- you could even go into Ben Kingsley as a person/the roles he's played before if you really want to dive deep on that...) but behind the suicide bombing curtain is... *gasp* an ostensibly altruistic but too slick American corporate dude! IM III overcomes this not by relying on his fancy tech but by overcoming his own paralyzing fear in the wake of 'New York' but by... well, shooting people. And letting powerful women into the workforce? Something something he destroys his drone army in the end. It's a mess, sure, but it hangs to better than 'grump capitalist class grump the real villain grump' *And he is the laborer. In a cave. With a box of scraps.
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Mar 19, 2015 02:12
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Jaramin posted:Yeah, that's a fairly stupid metric to judge a state by. Cultures aren't remembered for the sheer number of people they ruled, but rather than the cultural and sociological novelties they left behind that persisted to the nations that followed them. Roman poo poo pervades western society so fully they you can't spit without running into one of their legal principles, descendant languages, alphabet, calender, etc. I'd argued their sole equal in that respect is Han China who essentially left behind a long-lasting legacy in the East like Rome did in the West. Even then, Han Chinese legal/lingo/alpha/cala is a much bigger deal for as many if not more people, and on top of that you've got the Sanskrit thing going on. (Also stop using 'the East' and 'the West' it's giving me hives.)
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Apr 1, 2015 00:56
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A White Guy posted:The problem, I feel, is that most Posters on SA are Westerners and don't really care about Chinese impact on East Asia/India. If you're gonna compare sheer geographical size and population, China throughout its various iterations wins almost every time, but if you're gonna compare cultural impact, I'd say that its a toss-up between the Chinese, the Romans, and the Mongols. I think that leaves out India rather unfairly, given the size of India itself as well as the general influence of Buddhism to points eastward and other branches of mystical ascetisism to points west. You'd also get a lot of mileage out of combining the Mongols with the general Hunno-Turkic-Mongol thing, from the Ottomans to the Tang there's been a lot of dynasties coming out of that general area. Dibujante posted:It's really hard to say. To make him the inheritor of Rome's legacy, he would have to adopt Rome's institutions to some extent. Did he? Or is successors? At that point, Rome was an ecclesiastically-endorsed semi-dynastic dictatorship, but not monarchy. Mehmed II most definitely intended to rule as a monarch, and the structure of the Ottoman Empire seems like it was strictly monarchical. That said, some of its power struggles seem fairly Roman (there's nothing the Romans excelled at more than power struggles), although rather than assassinating and overthrowing their leaders, the Ottomans would generally assassinate one and trot out someone else from the dynasty. I mean, the Ottomans sure as hell weren't running a Turkish tribal structure... I'd say the Ottomans were more using and iterating the model they found in Anatolia before they got to Constantinople and went all Kaizar, but that model was one very heavily influenced by the Persian and Byzantine structures that the early post-Muhammad Arab empires fell into. I think all the 'blah' about what broad 'cultures' or 'civilizations' had more influence is kind of silly, and overgeneralizing, where history should really be specific. That said, they are interesting as a thought exercise, and I think there's a model of the world that lumps the West, Arabia, and Iran into one big monotheist Irano-Hellenic-Romantic mode. E: Also also, Polynesian, Bantu, various pre-epidemic American groups, etc. etc. The world is far bigger than Eurasia. the JJ fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Apr 2, 2015 |
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Apr 2, 2015 14:24
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blood simple posted:farmers have never been workers greatly affected by industrialization and the structure of the worldwide economy ... 
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May 1, 2015 04:39
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So how are supply line drawn in these games? Like obviously forming a pocket is nice but sometimes in grog games certain places will be 'sources' in which supplies magically appear so can never be starved out. Yet cutting them off can lead to the whole rest of a country becoming one big 'pocket' despite, presumably, containing a huge chunk of a nation's hypothetical industry. Other times provinces can be connected to supply by the most convoluted chain so there's no point in partial encirclements or anything. Do you need to stockpile or make depots near potential fronts or is that represented by the 'org.' or whatever stats the units have?
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May 20, 2015 14:47
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 11:21 |
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Good read, especially since I did my undergrad thesis partly on reports from the British Cairo Office dealing with Libya around this time OTL
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Oct 10, 2015 08:27
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