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Everyone posted:Nothing changed. I just think it's funny to recognize that the people talking about how funding STEM centers is useless and that Killmonger was right to send out weapons/attempt to start a race war will in reality do nothing toward any of those ends aside from yelling about it online. What do you think we should be doing about it? Is it insincere because we aren’t out there trying to foment black and brown folks to insurrection? Politics and culture aren’t distinct and shaping culture can also help shape politics. If discussions like this help some people better understand the ways that liberal ideology is propagandized in popular culture then maybe they can start to see past it and think more broadly than “ah, if we just had more black STEM majors racism would be solved.” And if enough people start to feel that way then collective action and real change become possible.
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May 8, 2021 03:50
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YOLOsubmarine posted:There is some truth to this but it also misses the point. Even when controlling for education level blacks have worse career outcomes and financial outcomes. The implication is that black people are much poorer, more likely to be killed by police, more likely to spend time in prison, more likely to be unemployed, more likely to die early because they don’t understand physics well enough.
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May 8, 2021 04:10
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Education is clearly an important element; the issue people are having is that Black Panther posits this as some enlightened synthesis of Killmonger’s goals with respect to T’Chaka’s isolationism. “Here’s the right way to do this.” Access to education is an extremely important component of racial justice, but focusing on that as “a solution” in and of itself is playing the establishment’s game. “Black people need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, learn to code, get a job.” It’s allocating resources to Black communities but mostly putting the onus of alleviating racism onto Black people themselves. They’ll fix inequality by becoming more marketable, etc. The reality is that Black people suffer in ways that “more education” won’t fix. Police can still brutalize people who studied STEM, racist institutions can still discriminate against Black people who possess wealth. The Tulsa massacre happened *because* Black people became middle class, not because they couldn’t. Obama didn’t suddenly gain respect from white America because he went to Harvard and studied law. A STEM academy in Oakland feels like a completely absurd band-aid to put on a gaping wound.
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May 8, 2021 07:36
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And it's all the more insidious because it's demonising liberation and radical action in favour of the most token possible concessions that rich people can choose to make.
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May 8, 2021 07:44
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Everyone posted:Nothing changed. I just think it's funny to recognize that the people talking about how funding STEM centers is useless and that Killmonger was right to send out weapons/attempt to start a race war will in reality do nothing toward any of those ends aside from yelling about it online. You're actually just making this up to make yourself feel better about doing nothing. You have no idea what real-life organizing critics of Disney's Black Panther are engaged in. The real problem with your analysis, though, is the phrase "start a race war." A race war was started centuries ago with the invention of race by capitalism. Killmonger proposes to decisively end the race war.
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May 8, 2021 08:07
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Everyone posted:Nothing changed. I just think it's funny to recognize that the people talking about how funding STEM centers is useless and that Killmonger was right to send out weapons/attempt to start a race war will in reality do nothing toward any of those ends aside from yelling about it online. This is some "You are not a vegan hermit living in a cave so shut up about climate change" bullshit. Do people need to document their revolutionary endeavors and reach a certain point score for you to accept their criticism of your precious movie? Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I originally had something a bit more histrionic and insulting here but I will just say that anyone who would post this horseshit isn't worth engaging. Their post about how it's impossible to say if everyone in the CIA is bad should have been a tip-off.
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May 8, 2021 08:42
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Grendels Dad posted:This is some "You are not a vegan hermit living in a cave so shut up about climate change" bullshit. Do people need to document their revolutionary endeavors and reach a certain point score for you to accept their criticism of your precious movie? He’s raising so many red flags, it’s ironically like a Soviet parade. But I do repeat: it’s absolutely fascinating how the existence of this angry black leftist superhero is causing people to suddenly become hypercritical of superheroes. Like, just a 180 flip to something almost like an ideological critique of everything the Avengers stand for: “Maybe vigilantism is bad”, “what if not everybody in the enemy army is pure evil?”, etc. But it’s applied only to this one character for some mysterious reason.
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May 8, 2021 12:13
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:He’s raising so many red flags, it’s ironically like a Soviet parade. I have started having BP-prequel Civil War on while putting my son to sleep, and they kind of try touching on this. They fail, unsurprisingly, but in the context of this conversation it is hilarious that Tony is painted as the emotionally unstable man-child because he wants some accountability for the Avengers.
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May 8, 2021 12:35
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YOLOsubmarine posted:What do you think we should be doing about it? Is it insincere because we aren’t out there trying to foment black and brown folks to insurrection? It's not like any one thing is going to fix it. STEM centers are part of it. So is equal pay/opportunity. And police reform/retraining. And hell, having black people take advantage of the second amendment so the next time some white rear end in a top hat decides to "stand his ground" he gets put in the ground. It's all of that together. Systemic racism requires a systemic solution.
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May 8, 2021 13:07
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Yes it requires overthrowing the current system. Killmonger agrees. The movie rather suggests black people getting more marketable skills for their capitalist overlords or having access to magic metal instead.
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May 8, 2021 13:31
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Have to be honest the focus on Black Panther's politics always struck me as strange, considering the type of movies I grew up on as a child. Rambo 2 hoo boy.
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May 8, 2021 13:33
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Shageletic posted:Have to be honest the focus on Black Panther's politics always struck me as strange, considering the type of movies I grew up on as a child. I remember Rambo 2's physics being whack as well. In the real world, Rambo kills all the POWs he just rescued when he fires off the the rocket at that HIND.
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May 8, 2021 13:37
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Everyone posted:I remember Rambo 2's physics being whack as well. In the real world, Rambo kills all the POWs he just rescued when he fires off the the rocket at that HIND. Lol. Is there an action movie outside of Blade that was a) widely popular, b) didnt have noxious conservative politics, and c) minorities as villains or dickless assistants or best friends high fiving the real white hero...like ever? Honestly want to know because I'd like to show my future kids that kind of poo poo.
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May 8, 2021 13:48
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Grendels Dad posted:I have started having BP-prequel Civil War on while putting my son to sleep, and they kind of try touching on this. They fail, unsurprisingly, but in the context of this conversation it is hilarious that Tony is painted as the emotionally unstable man-child because he wants some accountability for the Avengers. Of course by the end it's revealed he doesn't actually want accountability, he just wants whatever will make him feel good about himself- he doesn't want Bucky to have a fair trial and be held accountable, he just wants to kill him with his bare hands. Another example of an MCU villain with a relatable motive that you can disregard because he's actually just dumb and so goddammit crazy!
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May 8, 2021 14:09
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Shageletic posted:Lol. Elysium has a white hero but good politics, I guess. There’s not many!
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May 8, 2021 14:26
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Shageletic posted:Lol. Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, maybe? And those went way out of their way to specifically be minority revenge porn, and still have their issues.
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May 8, 2021 14:32
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Shageletic posted:Lol. I can't really speak to B but John Woo's Hard-boiled and The Killer?
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May 8, 2021 15:08
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Alexander Hamilton posted:Elysium has a white hero but good politics, I guess. There’s not many! I would have liked that movie a whole lot better if the latino best friend was the hero.
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May 8, 2021 15:11
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2house2fly posted:Of course by the end it's revealed he doesn't actually want accountability, he just wants whatever will make him feel good about himself- he doesn't want Bucky to have a fair trial and be held accountable, he just wants to kill him with his bare hands. Another example of an MCU villain with a relatable motive that you can disregard because he's actually just dumb and so goddammit crazy! That’s not an example of that. Tony’s motive was pretty horrible from the very beginning. Even taken at face value, the “accountability” he wants is to turn them into an official wet work team for the deep state. The endgame of his position is putting them right back where Cap was at the beginning of Winter Soldier, something Cap immediately recognizes because ironically somehow the MCU managed to make Captain America the only Avenger with good politics (thank god they’ve replaced him with a human Predator drone). Tony concedes from the beginning that refusal to do this will mean his friends will end up in a black site prison, a prison it turns out he’s already built for the deep state. And lest we forget, all of this was kicked off after Tony accidentally blew up a whole rear end country when the drone network he designed in his previous attempt to systemize policing the world went rogue. Then the political pressure was accelerated after some people got killed in the collateral damage of an explosion set off by now-disgraced deep state Nazi soldier Rumlow, a guy apparently only Cap and friends were interested in stopping from getting hold of a chemical weapon or whatever the gently caress. The fallout from this is then pinned on Wanda by the very same people who trained, employed, and enabled Rumlow in the first loving place. Tony’s politics are pretty consistent throughout, he’s absolutely wrong from minute 1, he’s wrong about basically every position he takes in every movie. It’s hard for me to imagine watching Civil War and thinking “ah yes, Tony has a point, they should hand over responsibility to the US intelligence state, that’s the right thing to do”
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May 8, 2021 15:20
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Mandrel posted:Tony’s politics are pretty consistent throughout, he’s absolutely wrong from minute 1, he’s wrong about basically every position he takes in every movie. It’s hard for me to imagine watching Civil War and thinking “ah yes, Tony has a point, they should hand over responsibility to the US intelligence state, that’s the right thing to do” Pretty much true from word 1. Though I will say that apparently the idea wasn't that the Avengers would be sent in directly by U.S. Intelligence, but by the UN. Of course since the UN is a feckless clown show of competing interests, they'd never get sent in - at least not before it was too late to do anything.
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May 8, 2021 15:32
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Shageletic posted:Lol. Big Trouble in Little China?
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May 8, 2021 15:33
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Mandrel posted:That’s not an example of that. Tony’s motive was pretty horrible from the very beginning. Even taken at face value, the “accountability” he wants is to turn them into an official wet work team for the deep state. The endgame of his position is putting them right back where Cap was at the beginning of Winter Soldier, something Cap immediately recognizes because ironically somehow the MCU managed to make Captain America the only Avenger with good politics (thank god they’ve replaced him with a human Predator drone). Tony concedes from the beginning that refusal to do this will mean his friends will end up in a black site prison, a prison it turns out he’s already built for the deep state. This is a good post and I wasn't fully paying attention, maybe that's why Tony seemed a little more sensible than in previous viewings. edit: sensible is the wrong word.
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May 8, 2021 15:34
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Chairman Capone posted:Big Trouble in Little China? gently caress yeah thats a good one. Theres a good making of doc on ytube about the asian cast being so grateful about the movie and how impactful its been for their community.
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May 8, 2021 15:41
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Even saying T'Challa should pay "reparations" is disgusting as hell. Just as having Wakandan build STEM centers, or moving black people to Liberia. This is a problem created by white man, and declaring this problem solved via black magic is neither restorative nor justice. VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE fucked around with this message at 16:40 on May 8, 2021 |
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May 8, 2021 16:36
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Shageletic posted:Lol. Maybe try looking outside the US cinema industry?
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May 8, 2021 17:27
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Shageletic posted:Have to be honest the focus on Black Panther's politics always struck me as strange, considering the type of movies I grew up on as a child. Part of the media push behind the movie was about how important it was for black representation in film and how it addressed social justice issues so it’s sort of inescapable that it was going to be dissected politically.
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May 8, 2021 17:40
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Mandrel posted:That’s not an example of that. Tony’s motive was pretty horrible from the very beginning. Even taken at face value, the “accountability” he wants is to turn them into an official wet work team for the deep state. The endgame of his position is putting them right back where Cap was at the beginning of Winter Soldier, something Cap immediately recognizes because ironically somehow the MCU managed to make Captain America the only Avenger with good politics (thank god they’ve replaced him with a human Predator drone). Tony concedes from the beginning that refusal to do this will mean his friends will end up in a black site prison, a prison it turns out he’s already built for the deep state. I mean, you're not exactly wrong about Tony here, but Captain America rejects any and all notions of accountability full stop, he doesn't want him or his friends (and that includes Tony) to be accountable when they wipe a nation of the maps. "The safest hands are still our own".
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May 8, 2021 17:58
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McCloud posted:I mean, you're not exactly wrong about Tony here, but Captain America rejects any and all notions of accountability full stop, he doesn't want him or his friends (and that includes Tony) to be accountable when they wipe a nation of the maps. "The safest hands are still our own". I don’t see that accountability or restorative justice for anybody was ever actually on the table though. I don’t remember if it was the same scene or not, but IIRC, when they’re arguing Cap concedes some ground and says something to the effect of his cooperation not being impossible, but there’d have to be safeguards, and to the plan that Bucky be kept in psychiatric care rather than extradited to a foreign prison (for a crime he didn’t commit), which doesn’t seem like something somebody who rejects any and all notions of accountability would do. Of course, Tony then immediately reveals that he’s already had Wanda interned (Tony justifies it by talking about how nice her accommodations are), prompting Cap to balk completely. Even Tony is basically like “look this isn’t even a big deal just sign the thing and nobody will face any consequences,” or something to that effect. Nothing has happened that can’t be undone, or whatever. Tony basically affirms in his consolation that nothing, for them, will effectively change consequence-wise. It’s clear that what’s being discussed or sought isn’t some sort of justice for people who’ve been hurt, it’s just the intelligence state using a moment of public horror to try and seize use of the Avengers for their own ends. An intelligence state that is in itself unaccountable, evil, and destructive, and has absolutely no moral or ethical claim to be holding them to account anyway. All that said, I do agree that Cap’s biggest failing is also where he’s not exempt from the franchise’s overall poisonous ideology; Like everybody else, he never makes the leap to really call out or do anything about Tony himself, who should rightly be identified as a villain by his own standards just for Ultron alone. Cap’s no Blade, unfortunately.
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May 8, 2021 21:46
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YOLOsubmarine posted:Part of the media push behind the movie was about how important it was for black representation in film and how it addressed social justice issues so it’s sort of inescapable that it was going to be dissected politically. Speaking as a white dude, I absolutely agree that BP was vital for black representation. Disney saw the value of a movie with a mostly black cast, black director and black writers in actual dollar amounts - which is the only way they can see value. As far as social justice goes, I didn't really see a lot of that. The story of Wakanda for most of its history seems to be "We got ours, gently caress everyone else." I mean, a big-rear end magic rock lands where they end up living. They exploit the magic rock to raise their tech and standard of living. They also hide and let all the other black people take it in the neck in the meantime. Call T'challa building STEM centers and doing outreach liberal if you want, but it seems a step up from the conservative-libertarian "This is ours alone" concept they were practicing.
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May 8, 2021 22:14
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There were also alt-righters who at least initially also praised Black Panther because Wakanda was an isolationist ethnostate and it let them say that they were fine with the concept if it meant the US could then kick non-whites out as well. But I think those kind of statements faded pretty quickly as the movie became subsumed into the regular cultural war.
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May 8, 2021 22:19
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After Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers decides that he doesn't trust The Government and becomes an anarcho libertarian. Tony's goal in Civil War is to give his private army a fig leaf of oversight, and Steve rejects it on principle.
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May 8, 2021 22:33
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Nick Fury took the remaining SHIELD team and built his own Outer Heaven. He's become a Metal Gear villain.
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May 8, 2021 23:02
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I'll gladly take 2 tired old men punching themselves on top of a submarine while the AI overlords are dying over any Marvel fight scene
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May 8, 2021 23:06
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Grendels Dad posted:I have started having BP-prequel Civil War on while putting my son to sleep, and they kind of try touching on this. They fail, unsurprisingly, but in the context of this conversation it is hilarious that Tony is painted as the emotionally unstable man-child because he wants some accountability for the Avengers. i mean, that's also the end point of the plot: tony is an unstable momma's boy. It's why I hate Civil War so much: there is no ideological conflict at all, it's just a series of people reacting to present circumstances. The only one with an ideology is the villain.
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May 9, 2021 00:17
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iirc the villain just wants revenge because his kid died
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May 9, 2021 00:23
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Everyone posted:Speaking as a white dude, I absolutely agree that BP was vital for black representation. Disney saw the value of a movie with a mostly black cast, black director and black writers in actual dollar amounts - which is the only way they can see value. As far as social justice goes, I didn't really see a lot of that. The story of Wakanda for most of its history seems to be "We got ours, gently caress everyone else." I mean, a big-rear end magic rock lands where they end up living. They exploit the magic rock to raise their tech and standard of living. They also hide and let all the other black people take it in the neck in the meantime. You're evaluating Black Panther's moral substance like it's a historical document, whereas this polemical argument presented by the film according to its own internal standards is precisely why people find it so repulsive. In summary: the neo-con protectionist racket pushed forth by the fantasy of Wakanda is confronted by the radical and dangerous black liberation project of the sociopathic Killmonger; and then in between we have the proposal of the beautiful & non-violent 'Third way'-ism of Nakia. This is a very old-hat trick in superhero fiction morality: have the villain posit an absurd reactionary position, and then have the hero fight for a position slightly to the left of that to win the maximal amount of the audience over. Everyone posted:It's not like any one thing is going to fix it. STEM centers are part of it. So is equal pay/opportunity. And police reform/retraining. And hell, having black people take advantage of the second amendment so the next time some white rear end in a top hat decides to "stand his ground" he gets put in the ground. It's all of that together. Systemic racism requires a systemic solution. Those policies you've referenced aren't systemic solutions to systemic racism because they're not substantially anti-racist, but liberal-tolerant policies, in the sense that it doesn't meaningfully address racism in the gestation of social hierarchical rifts. Like I'm all for wealth redistribution, but I'm under no illusion that it would be nothing but a short-term alleviation of pain, as this would not address how that wealth was accumulated in the first place via the ownership of the means of production. Other posters have written about why a STEM solution is not a sufficient goal to strive for, in that the market under which people would be selling their labor would be left entirely unchanged. Equal pay/opportunity doesn't address that the underclass is underpaid as a whole (And by extension, the inevitable reactionary rise of the politically potent white resentment exemplified by the backlash to affirmative action), police reformation doesn't work (See all the body-cam footage of police murdering black people anyway), and California has one of the strictest gun laws in the U.S. not because it's some kind of liberal bastion, but because leftist black radicals armed themselves while shoving the second amendment down our lawmakers throats (Of course, the liberal majority law-makers unified with Republicans and the NRA to pass the Mulford Act). So without addressing why the very conception of race exists and persists in the U.S. as an integral part of the smooth functioning of the U.S.'s economic system, lawmakers will simply either reinterpret the existing rules, or straight-up change them. KVeezy3 fucked around with this message at 02:02 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 00:45
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Zemo in Civil War is still my favorite MCU villain tbh. Knowing nothing about the character going in, and since the movie doesn’t really deal with him being some sort of Eastern European Bruce Wayne, the arc is a just basically a regular guy having his life completely destroyed by stupid American bullshit and setting out on a personal quest to destroy them from the inside out by attacking their ideological and personal insecurities. And he basically succeeds and is completely validated. He rocks. Of course now he’s like a jet setting playboy and international operative himself with business and politics connections at the highest levels, a private jet, butler, and his own Deathstroke mask that he wears when he does gun kata in his big leather trench coat so that kind of undermines the dynamic but I still enjoy his performance
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May 9, 2021 00:54
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KVeezy3 posted:You're evaluating the film's moral substance like it's a historical document, whereas this polemical argument presented by Black Panther according to its own internal standards is precisely why people find it so repulsive. In summary: the neo-con protectionist racket pushed forth by the fantasy of Wakanda is confronted by the radical and dangerous black liberation project of Killmonger; and then we have the beautiful & non-violent 'Third way'-ism of Nakia. This is a very old-hat trick in superhero fiction morality: posit an absurd reactionary position, and then have the hero fight for a position slightly to the left of that to win the maximal amount of the audience over. Forget superhero fiction morality, that hat trick's been done plenty of times in real-world politics. KVeezy3 posted:Those policies you've referenced aren't systemic solutions to systemic racism because they're not substantially anti-racist, but liberal-tolerant policies; in the sense that it doesn't meaningfully address racism in the gestation of social hierarchical rifts. From my own (admittedly white, privileged) position, the thing that gives racism teeth is class - the fact that one race, by virtue of a generally higher position within societies, has power over another race. Are there black people who are racist against white people? Sure, but for the most part, so what? Excepting some fairly uncommon circumstances, a black person isn't going to be in a position to deny a loan or job to a white person or call the cops on them. It's possible, but the default situation is going to be the white person using/abusing their position over a black person. The key to defanging racism is delinking class from race. Making so that the question of white or black is as generally irrelevant to one's life as Yankees or Red Sox fan? The trick will be to get enough white people to go along with that. And one nasty truth that Trump revealed is that there a whole lot more white people that really want to say the quiet parts out loud than we thought.
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May 9, 2021 02:02
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Everyone posted:Forget superhero fiction morality, that hat trick's been done plenty of times in real-world politics. I wholeheartedly agree with what you've written here, and please correct me if I'm wrong as to your intent, but I would posit that the caveat of the U.S.'s conception of race cannot be removed from class in an analytic perspective, because of how hopelessly & historically intertwined they are. The idea of reaching a point where race is nothing more dangerous than sports rivalry is admittedly tempting and, I realize that your analogy is not literal, but it's still useful to convey how the notion of race itself would remain as a potential threat for the hypothetical future, because of the atrocious way private sports teams in the U.S. worth billions leverage cities against each other to fund their stadiums at the cost of publicly funded infrastructure or the IOC's Olympic competitions that champion the pride of the nation-state presenting it on the global stage at the cost of the unwashed masses of whatever current city it happens to occur. You can call me an absurd idealist, but I would aim for the eradication race as substance completely, excepting the acknowledgement of its historical shaping as a concept. You're correct that Trump exposed how much a section of white people are willing to out themselves as explicitly racist in service of their own interests, but what the usual media narrative elides about his rise to power is how necessary the other members of the populous were. This includes getting the votes of the bourgeois middle to upper class white people who would protest how they are definitionally not racist, just 'fiscally conservative'; as well as the gaining of the highest percentage of support of non-whites a Republican presidential candidate was able in the last 60 years. So in other words, we must address those who weren't fooled by Trump's rhetoric: the diverse demographic of voters who were willing to 'hold their nose' and put into power a truly vile and overtly white-supremacist candidate for their own self-interests. EDIT: Sorry for all the edits, as I'm having trouble getting my thoughts into coherent posts. KVeezy3 fucked around with this message at 06:19 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 02:33
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I’m rewatching Civil War now and I never noticed at the beginning when Rumlow takes off his gas mask mask he was literally just wearing it on top of his ballistic mask. Amazing
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May 9, 2021 03:14
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