This will be another reason for the traitors to piss and moan.

  • toppy@lemy.lol
    4·
    8 hours ago

    Lex luthor looks much healthy compared to real life criminals. Like trump and his friends are unhealthy compared to lex luthor. And lex luthor is smart and knows what he is doing. Unlike trump who does whatever he thinks, without consulting anyone regardless whether the decision taken will affect the economy, etc.

      • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16·
        1 day ago

        Americans today should watch these videos

        There is a vast, deep ocean of things Americans should be strapped into a chair and forced to watch. We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy.

        I am utterly baffled how we all grew up watching the same damn shit and took such vastly different messages from it. Were there kids booing every time the turtles beat Shredder? Were there kids getting pissed at Mr Rogers for saying everyone should respect each other?

        • Wolf@lemmy.today
          4·
          18 hours ago

          I mean, cartoons from when I was a kid were problematic in different ways.

          G.I. Joe taught me that the U.S. Military were the good guys and ‘Cobra’ were the bad guys. While I’m sure Cobra was probably bad, I’m not so sure about the first part. Also, guns are less dangerous than pepper spray and never lethal. On the other hand it also taught me that no matter how hard the GI’s fought against the bad guys, they would never stop them for long or truly defeat them, so I guess that it wasn’t wholly inaccurate.

          Ducktales taught me that miserly Billionaires that hoarded vast amounts of wealth were lovable good guys actually.

          I’m not even going to get into what Thundercats taught me.

          • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            15 hours ago

            I see this take all the time, I have a friend who always has to say “copaganda!” when I mention Zootopia (speaking of what Thundercats did to us) but I disagree with the whole impulsive need to call out “problematic” things in these iconic programs. They were problematic mostly in terms of being toy commercials, and the money we fed into toy companies for kids at the time probably contributed to a large portion of the algorithms that are doing far more damage to society than the very abstracted “message” that you can possibly be a lovable billionaire (if you’re a duck.)

            All that said, yes it’s hard to watch now as adults, but I am not going to preach about it or even bring it up. It’s cherished memories.

            There’s no faster way to get people to abandon everything you will ever have to say than by shitting on their cherished memories. We have to start learning to simplify our fights if we’re ever taking society back from the orcs. I am serious here. I’m really tired of losing because we can’t figure out what people actually need to hear to make the world better.

            • Wolf@lemmy.today
              2·
              12 hours ago

              Well I was half joking, but it seems to me like you are promoting a pretty big double standard here. You start off by saying “We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy.” So you are clearly criticizing something you find fault with (aka problematic) about modern cartoons (I’m not sure what, I don’t really watch cartoons anymore) but turn around and say I shouldn’t criticize “Problematic” things in “iconic” programs. Then you turn around once more and criticize them your own self in that they were glorified toy commercials, which is a good point. Things can be problematic in more than one way.

              I agree that we should teach kids right from wrong (who are the good guys and who are the bad guys), but if you then portray the U.S. Military as ‘The good guys’ I have a problem with that. I bet a lot of kids who grew up idolizing the Joes ended up joining the military themselves, only to be forced to help overthrow democratically elected leaders in Central and South America, or protecting the U.S.'s ability to buy oil or opium products for cheap by murdering brown folks in the middle east. In my view, the U.S. Military haven’t unambiguously been “the good guys” since 1945, and even then the way that war ended was problematic as hell, and I’m not joking about that.

              It’s irrelevant that Scrooge is a Duck, the message that some billionaires aren’t the scum of the Earth is a dangerous message to put out to impressionable young minds- no matter how cutesy you make it look. Look at how many of us who grew up in that era now idolize Elon Musk or Bill Gates.

              Yes, I understand that people have cherished memories of some of these shows (just like young people today will someday look back fondly on the shows you feel comfortable criticizing), but being able to look back at the past with the nostalgia Goggles off, and be honest about the things that shaped our values is a part of maturing and growing as people. If the only defense you have of such programs is that they are ‘cherished memories’- that seems weak af tbh.

              And btw, you friend is absolutely right. Zootopia is 100% copaganda. Just like 1000 other TV programs and movies in our culture. The fact that portraying cops as unambiguous ‘good guys’ is far and away the norm, but even the mildest of critiques such as Zootopia being copoganda sticks out as silly to you is the reason why it’s important to call stuff like this out when we see it.

              I’m really tired of losing because we can’t figure out what people actually need to hear to make the world better.

              People need to hear and wake up to reality. Coddling reactionary fragile egos isn’t going to accomplish that. Unflinchingly evaluating where we are and how we got here is the only way to do that- even if it makes people slightly uncomfortable for a moment.

              • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                3 hours ago

                People need to hear and wake up to reality.

                This entire spiel was another attempt at justifying making people wake up to a reality they don’t want to see or hear. I can’t understand how the current trendline doesn’t make every progressive or leftist back up and rethink everything we’re trying to do. We are seeing nazis marching with jackboots and we’re complaining about the jackboot industry. It’s fucking absurd.

                I don’t have a double-standard, I have awareness that two conflicting things exist at the same time. There’s a huge difference. One is a condemnation of a way of unfair thinking, the other is nuance.

                We are going to fucking LOSE EVERYTHING if we keep wokescolding people about the things they enjoy. It might already be too late.

                It feels great when someone recognizes your points, and I do, but it’s like any weapon or tool, how you use it is going to have a major impact on our world. Stop trying to fix symptoms, it’s gotten us absolutely nowhere. Fix causes and seek outcomes, policing the minutia is literally killing us.

        • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
          14·
          1 day ago

          I first noticed this a few years back when I started to see “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” on bumper stickers. Sure it seemed like a joke at the time but I was confused that so many people thought this was a statement worth putting on their vehicle. I mean, pretty early on in the OT, Darth Vader uses the Death Star to murder an entire planet so surely no one was serious, right?

          Whoooo boy have I learned a lot about my neighbors’ values since then.

          • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
            13·
            1 day ago

            Let us remember that the entire “The Donald” meme subreddit was entirely satirical when it was made back in the early days of his first campaign. It was people posting memes of Trump as the Emperor from the fascist human empire in Warhammer 40k. (Which is also an entire related topic on its own)

            What happened pretty fast is people who didn’t get it was satire started coming in absolutely LOVING the worship of the golden clown and started posting unironic memes of Trump riding tanks and carrying eagles and shit. They eventually drove out the people who were there for laughs and it became one of the largest subreddits and a huge chunk of his online support came from that subreddit before it was eventually banned for all the reasons you would expect.

            I think we have vastly overestimated people’s capability to discern media, we have vastly overestimated our population’s capability to rationalize and reason things out. We have a massive segment of the population that has cognitive dissonance baked-in to their very being.

            Seriously, I had a whole ass mental breakdown when I started realizing just how bad it is. Most people are on autopilot and just react to stimuli. No brain use. They’re fucking CLAMS.

            • Krauerking@lemy.lol
              5·
              23 hours ago

              Yeah, being able to plan and do more than just react is apparently a shockingly low percentage of our population.

              They have a couple “truths” they tell themselves and hope everything else just falls into like or will complain to someone else to do something about it so that it does. Listen to the hymns in a church some time and listen to how people talk about God. Its very lazy

              • ameancow@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                22 hours ago

                Religion has been a thought-stopping tool for literal millenia.

                The digital age and age of mass media does the same thing but with limitless reach and focused power to rob people of their most precious ability, the ability to make judgements and comparisons and use mental language to make abstractions to better understand topics more complicated than where the next meal will come from.

          • tmyakal@infosec.pub
            5·
            21 hours ago

            When I found out about the 501st Legion, I was absolutely baffled. George Lucas dressed the bad guys to look like Nazis, and now fans were dressing up as the bad guys because they love the movies so much? What the fuck is wrong with these people?

            Then Captain America came out and people started dressing as Hydra agents, and I was like, “Oh, they’re just straight-up okay with Nazis. Got it.”

            • 5too@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              19 hours ago

              I had the impression the 501st was a different beast from “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” types. I thought the point of them being stormtroopers was so everyone else had someone to heroically oppose? Their charity events seem to focus on things like kids shooting them with dart guns.

              I’m not saying they haven’t been co-opted since I learned about them several years ago; but last I knew, they were happy playing bad guys to let other people be good guys.

          • Spice Hoarder@lemmy.zip
            6·
            24 hours ago

            “We can learn a lot about people’s intentions just by how they interact with fictional media.” A statement I would have ridiculed people for a few years ago. But it’s true and it’s sad that we even have to now.

        • outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          21 hours ago

          They’re strictly literal; less than zero humanities education. These are the people who see a ‘warning: car may hit pedestrian!’ Sign and speed up and steer into the pedestrian.

  • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
    229·
    1 day ago

    On one hand, I’m very pleased with what seems to be a good and relevant message in mainstream media. I haven’t watched the film and I doubt I will, but I support it wholeheartedly if it is about what people online say it is.

    On the other hand, it’s kinda sad that the best and most digestible recent Western production displaying prosocial values is a comic book film. 😓

      • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
        72·
        1 day ago

        I think, if we are taking the message at face value (which might not be the best idea with a religious dude, but whatevs), it’s not sad that it is being shared through narrative and myth, but that this is the best we can find with values we care about.

        • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
          31·
          1 day ago

          I mean, what else could I be saying here? Lol. I honestly wonder if people are THIS thick or they’re just pretending, so I give people the benefit of the doubt. But, damn, it’s frustrating at times. 😔

          I SWIM IN THE SEA OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 🎶

      • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
        23·
        1 day ago

        It’s the lack of depth behind it and the evidenced collective arrested development, but it’s better than nothing for those who have no knowledge of philosophy and/or Scripture (or the maturity and intellectual competence to process it). 🤷

        It’s like having to teach an adult to boil an egg when, by then, they should understand the basics of cooking at the very least, but even worse cause we’re not talking about something as easily replaced, this is ideology and attitude which are foundational for people and society at large. But, like I said, I’m glad someone is teaching folks to boil eggs!

    • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
      9·
      1 day ago

      Comic books, more often than not, have always been pro-social values, and largely pretty progressive. The movies water some of that down sometimes, but it’s always been there at the core.

      • tmyakal@infosec.pub
        6·
        21 hours ago

        One of my favorite moments in comics comes from the 1970 Green Lantern / Green Arrow run. Green Arrow rescues a kid from getting run over by a train, and rather than celebrate the victory, he laments that the city didn’t have a park where this kid could play safely. He considers running for mayor, and the rest of the Justice League talk him out of it.

        As a kid, it was the first time I saw a comic look at the reader and say, “Yeah, these capes really are just fantasy. If you want the world to be better, you can’t leave it to other people.”

        • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
          5·
          21 hours ago

          The Green Arrow was always a leftist activist analog. The problem with a serialized shared universe that parallels the real world is that you can never actually fix the problems that exist in the real world or else you lose that connection to it, but that also generates frustration too.

          Like “cool” you can punch all the bad guys in Gotham, but why aren’t you eliminating poverty? Why aren’t you reforming corrupt the local government and police force? You fight alien invasions, but what have you done about ethnic cleansing and genocide? What about nuclear proliferation?

          It was kind of nice in Superman (2025) that they actually had Superman dip a toe into addressing large scale real world issues with the invasion he stops and then deal with the aftermath of it. But that was about as complicated as we’re likely to see that real world parallel get unless they just turn the new DCU into a wholly different sort of world, a near utopia but police by the whims of a handful of ultra-powerful metahumans.

    • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
      9·
      22 hours ago

      Funnily enough, the “American Way” bit that the average non-comic book reader thinks has always been a part of Superman’s motto, and that conservatives whinge about when it’s not in there, is not only not a part of the original motto (which which was just “Truth and Justice”), but has actually rarely been a part of it, and almost never in the actual comics.

      The first use of it came about in 1942 during WWII in the Superman radio show. This is after the US finally entered the war and basically all media became hyper patriotic. It should be noted, though, that there was a comic strip titled “How Superman Would Stop the War” in Look magazine from Feb. 1940 in which Superman carried Hitler and Stalin to the League of Nations HQ to be sentenced for war crimes. This comic earned Superman’s creators hate mail and death threats for suggesting we should be involved in the war at all. So, American hypocrisy was, of course, alive and well.

      Similar to that wartime patriotism, during the height of the Red Scare in the 1950’s, the Superman TV show starring George Reeves reused the tagline to play up the American-ness of Superman.

      It wasn’t used again until 1978 with the Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve. This is probably where the tagline really cemented itself into the general consciousness of the country due to the movie’s popularity with a wide audience. But even then, it wasn’t used again until 1988 in the Ruby Spear’s Superman animated series (not to be confused with Superman: The Animated Series from 1996) and one line of dialogue in the Superboy TV show.

      And even after all of that, it had not appeared A SINGLE TIME in the comics books until it appeared on a patriotic cover in 1991, 53 years after its first usage. And even in that issue, Superman is not an America-centric character, but both demonstrates and verbalizes his commitment to helping and representing the entire world, not just the US. He rescues a foreign president and says, "I believe in everything this flag stands for. But as Superman I have to be a citizen of the world. I value all life, regardless of political borders.” 20 years later, he actually formally renounced his American citizenship, saying, “‘Truth, justice and the American way’––it’s not enough anymore.” This received much controversy, as you’d expect.

      But there are many other variants on the tagline and those variants, collectively, are far more common than the “American Way” variant. “Truth and justice" (Fleischer animated shorts, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) “truth, tolerance and justice” (Superman serial, starring Kirk Alyn) "truth, justice and freedom” (The New Adventures of Superman) “truth, justice and peace for all mankind” (Super Friends), “truth, justice and a better tomorrow” (Superman: Son of Kal-El), etc. Even some tongue-in-cheek references to the controversy like “Truth, Justice… and other stuff” (Smallville), and “Truth, Justice… and all that stuff”(Superman Returns).

      And none of it was ever meant to be anti-American. Several writers have chosen to use the the American Way tagline in recent years in the comics, and there has been zero pushback from DC for it. But it is not the standard and should not be treated like an expectation.