6 ms·
>Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message bu
by pydry 5y ago
>Agreed, and it's important to note that the message "evil corporations are greedy and use tech in soulless and alienating ways" used to be a radical message but it's not anymore.
"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis.
Tropes can be sort of like cultural T cells. I'd rather see more "nazis are bad" and cyberpunk stories and less disney shit for this reason alone.
It'll start getting old for me when the risk of it coming true goes away.
- the_af 5y agoWell, but evil evolves and the pitfalls of society do too. You cannot stick to representations of the past. Also, cyberpunk was supposed to be a vision of the future (used as an excuse to look at the then-present time)! More books and games about how evil the Nazis were, unless presented in an innovative way, feel derivative and boring to me. I don't think Gibson would object to a cyberpunk game that went beyond the aesthetics and merely replicating a message that has become a trope.
- pydry 5y agoMost books and games feel derivative and boring to me. That isnt about the use of well worn tropes thats just sturgeons law in action.
- brazzy 5y ago> "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis. ...or helps a dictator dehumanize the population of a country he wants to conquer for propaganda purposes.
- pydry 5y agoYeah, so creating a nazi military batallion out of a nazi paramilitary to fight an ethnic civil war against Russians may not have been the genius military move Poroshenko thought it was :(
- brazzy 5y agoYeah, so you're basically pushing Putin's narrative, which is bullshit. The invasion would have happened anyway because it's motivated by fascist imperialism, and the propaganda is mostly made up and would have been the same as well, minus some specifics.
- pydry 5y agoPutin's narrative? The Ukrainian government are entirely open about what Azov is. Putins narrative is that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis. Thats obviously false, but yeah, they absolutely used Nazi paramilitaries to cling on to Russian speaking territory and dont deny it. It sort of sounds like you're saying that this means Nazis arent the bad guys we thought they were and we should stop villifying them, which is an interesting hill to choose to die on.
- brazzy 5y agoNo, I'm saying that the use of Nazi paramilitaries is not in fact a cause of the Russian invasion. It has certainly been a welcome opener for Russian propagandists, but they're using the Nazi card so indiscriminately that they never really needed it. To the Russian propaganda, every Ukrainian who doesn't welcome the invaders enthusiastically (which nowadays includes the vast majority of Russian speaking Ukrainians) is a Nazi.
- blaser-waffle 5y ago> "The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis. Hows that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's doing much except creating painfully generic stock villains. People forgot how popular the Nazis were, both in the US and elsewhere. And no one can really articulate why they're popular now outside of "day racis", which is a thought terminating cliche.
- pydry 5y ago>How's that working out? Cuz it doesn't look like it's doing much except creating painfully generic stock villains Those tiki torch people arent exactly running the country now are they?
- smegger001 5y agothey were a couple of years ago
- VintageCool 5y agoand they might be again in a few years
- Jiro 5y ago>"The Nazis are evil" is also an overused trope and is hardly radical but by reusing it it helps protect us on a civilizational level from actual nazis. It's enabled people like Valdimir Putin, who managed to invade a country on the grounds that it's full of Nazis.