We should be lauding Elon Musk for dispelling the notion that the wealthy have any inherent superiority to anyone else. He keeps proving it over and over and over.
Thank you Elon, for being yourself and proving, once and for all, that anyone can be a billionaire, all you have to do is benefit from the exploitation of apartheid.
Yep, Gates era billionaires had the good sense to maintain a vaneer of selfless philanthropic personality where each interaction with public was carefully crafted by PR experts. So the general public didn’t know who they really were as actual people.
But Musk landed on the scene and showed the world that billionaires are as stupid as—if not more because they are out of touch with the reality—as the regular person.
Gates after his PR rehab, that is. Society seems to be forgetting just how universally hated that guy was.
After the antitrust deposition where he came across as petty, arrogant, contemptuous — and clearly guilty — he disappeared for a while and returned with perhaps the greatest PR transformation of all time.
To be fair that’s just the nature of a deposition. Because it’s the other side grilling the defendant for hours trying to bait that person to make a slip up. You saw the same thing in the deposition tapes of Lil Wayne for example where they constantly asked him stupid questions until he got annoyed.
To be faaaaair!
A-to be faaaaair 🧐
The hilarious part is, he absolutely had the same PR team that the Gates and Jobs and Buffetts had.
And at some point in the Trump presidency, he just straight up threw them to the curb. Fired the lot of them, or at least stopped listening to a word of advice they gave. And he just started going on rants, tangents, and showing who he really was for all the world to see.
Nobody will ever know for sure, but best guess is his addiction to Twitter drove his need to be acknowledged and accepted by the general populace. He was a rockstar, and he got off on that feeling.
Wait what? How is Gates seen positively? Microsoft was the worst tech company under him and did so much awful stuff …
Why do you think I used words like “veneer” and “carefully crafted PR”?
Most people know 2 things about Bill Gates - he’s rich, and he donates a lot of money. They don’t think about it any more than that, and they certainly aren’t going to research anything about it, so they consider him “one of the good ones”
God that is so much not what Gates is about and has ever been about. Even the veneer isn’t selfless, I don’t mean people are fooled I mean they don’t even bother looking at the top level. Because even the pr doesn’t hide that it’s all about profit and handouts to corporations.
This reminds me of that guy who declared he wouldn’t be listening to Rage Against the Machine anymore because Tom Morello had become too political 😂😂😂
How about when a republican Tweeted:
"Bummed to learn that @deesnider, the man with the perfect song written decades ago about the attack on traditional, conservative American values… “We’re Not Gonna Take It” is riding the train in the wrong direction. How could it be that he sang for us but now fights for them?
And Dee Snider:
You think i wrote a song in support of “traditional American values”? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! You funny.
the man with the perfect song written decades ago about the attack on traditional, conservative American values
Ah yes, the famously conservative hair metal singer whose stage getup was just shy of a drag performers. How could one forget this pinnacle of conservative values.
I’ve seen drag performers with less makeup than Dee Snyder. He was approaching “circus clown” in that song’s video.
That’s the funny part, and why he destroyed tipper gore’s dumb parental advisory witch hunt; He doesn’t drink or smoke, and is a family man. He’s much closer to conservative family values than people expect. Here he is recounting that time he made a fool of Congress
You should also watch his full congress speech if you have time
They saw it was from Twisted Sister and probably thought they were into incest like them?
My favorite response the Morello tweet got was “what ‘Machine’ did you think he was raging against? The dishwasher?” Lol
Nah, definitely was a printer.
Well, in a way, raging against a printer usually is just raging against late stage capitalism with extra steps
It has to be a HP Printer.
Lol, yes. My dad worked for them and can attest, printer ink is peak late stage capitalism.
The only response I was hoping to see 🤣
Touché
I’ve definitely raged against printers… (I’ll see you in hell Epson ink refills!)
My favorite response the Morello tweet got was “what ‘Machine’ did you think he was raging against? The dishwasher?” Lol
Epson didn’t refill itself!
Pretty sure that’s canonically done to “Damn it feels good to be a gangster” and not RATM. Could have been an air conditioner though.
“Ms. Gore claimed that one of my songs, ‘Under the Blade,’ had lyrics encouraging sadomasochism, bondage and rape. The lyrics she quoted have absolutely nothing to do with these topics. On the contrary, the words in question are about surgery and the fear that it instills in people. … I can say categorically that the only sadomasochism, bondage and rape in this song is in the mind of Ms. Gore.”
-Dee Snider at the PMRC Congressional hearings.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dee-snider-on-pmrc-hearing-i-was-a-public-enemy-71205/
Art is subjective, it’s funny how often it says more about the viewer than the person who made it.
Heck I always intrepreted the song Dream Thieves by Sonata Artica to be about betrayal at the hands of an oppressive authority figure…
It’s actually about music piracy, how it negatively effected the band’s income, with the implication that a fan who pirates music is disloyal as a true fan would want to contribute to the livelihood of a musician they like…
I don’t really agree with the intended message and I still like the song because of MY interpretation, but damn that does make the line “Download new lies on your scythe” make more sense in context
Personally I feel like “Piracy is always morally correct” and “Support Indie Creators whenever possible.” are not contradictory viewpoints. (Admittedly the song was written when digital media was a new concept)
The most stereotypical drag band aren’t conservative? What a shocker
Did they not see the music video for that song where a rebellious kid using the power of rock rebels against his authoritarian father? Turning into the effeminate-looking singer of the song in the process, a song by a band named twisted SISTER? Said father who is heavily implied to be a former US Marine?
Yeah that’s about as “Traditional American Values” and “Pro-Conservative” as a black lesbian burning down a Chic-Fila-A on June 1st with a molotov cocktail made from a bottle of Bud Light (It’s not very Left Wing, but the brand triggers the fuck out of Righties) while making out with her transgender undocumented immigrant girlfriend, who had a perfect 15 inch girl-cock boner the whole time, because she is non-op and does not desire Bottom Surgery nor feel she should get a procedure that would be more effective on someone who actually does have dysphoria down there… She does however hope to have implants some day, and will look into it after gaining citizenship via marrying her black lesbian lover… However said Black Lesbian Lover gets SSI on account of being epileptic and cannot marry anyone without it harshly affecting her benefits and jeopardize her already vicarous living situation, so the wedding is off until they can find a lawyer to show them the right loopholes.
Oh dear God help me this is becoming a short story…
(Not a threat or call to arms, please do not burn down any establishments chicken or otherwise, voting for Biden will be enough, thank you)
My wife’s theory was they only caught the first 20 seconds of the video and assumed the father was the protagonist.
That kind of requires an astounding ignorance of the tropes of what was considered “Cool” at the time… Meaning for a Republican that’s pretty damn plausible
Get this in front of AMC to get picked up for 5 seasons with 3 or 4 good ones
smh Tom Morello talks so much about politics these days you’d think he has a degree in it
I love when I learn things from sarcasm.
He attended Harvard University and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Morello
Back when I used to watch Bill Maher’s show before I couldn’t take him any longer, Morello was on, and some right-wing guest said something like, “white guys like you and me” to Tom Morello and he just slowly and calmly told the guy that he’s black in such a disarming way that the guy had absolutely nothing to say in response and it was awesome.
Any more assumptions you idiots want to make about Morello and his band?
I’m facing a dilemma here.
On the one hand, I believe Ivanka and Elmo are both devious enough to take the message of someone they despise and use it for themselves.
On the other hand, both are probably too stupid to understand the message in the first place. The old malintent vs. incompetence problem.
To be fair, I also never interpreted the message of these movies in this way; but on the other hand, I was about 13 when the movie released here, and I can’t remember referring to any of the movie’s elements since then, less so to use them as allegories. While impressive in a technical way back then, they never had such a lasting impact on me.
Considering that taking the red pill causes you to awaken to the realities of the world around you, and you could describe that as being woke, I’d say they’re idiots.
If any political ideology other than, you know, being trans, gets to claim the red pill it’s soulists, who argue consensus reality is fake and bad.
I think people tend to forget what Morpheus mentioned to Neo about freeing minds past a certain age. So awakened and presented with reality, but not being able to let go of engrained notions and probably not very helpful in the fight against the machines.
Ivanka is not stupid at all, this is a dangerous thought process that because someone is attached to ineptitude they themselves most too be inept. She’s manipulative and often plays the dumb pretty girl because people buy it and it is at times very very advantageous.
Disgusting
This is the same guy who loves Iain Banks’ Culture novels while somehow remaining oblivious to their strongly leftist and anti-capitalist stance, and just sees “cool spaceships go pew pew”. He’s a complete moron.
He also says he loves the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is extremely anti-corporate and portrays every AI as flawed, an asshole, or both.
Except the doors; they were perfect.
sighs with the satisfaction of a job well done 😮💨
I started reading that series recently. I was aware that Elon is a fan and named multiple SpaceX modules after Culture ships. Absolutely blew my mind and made me realize how dumb he is, since The Culture seems like the opposite of everything he stands for. Plus some very pro trans messages IMHO.
The Culture is Fully Automated Luxury Gary Space Communism, and all he saw was AI ships have funny names.
Set course… for Gary Space.
He’s Veppers.
MAGA fools needed 4 seasons to understand that The Boys is making fun of them.
Didn’t a lot of republicans also get mad after season 3‽
It’s very easy to read Billy Butcher as a right wing reactionary vigilante, because he’s written as a caricature of an 80s/90s action hero.
It’s easy to read Homelander as a Woke, Soy, Cucked establishment liberal because - early on - that’s exactly the role he fills.
The show has gone downhill as the (relatively thin) subtlety in the narrative has worn away. By season 4, they were all but branding “Good Guy” and “Bad Guy” on people’s heads, in a show that originally did at least pretend to struggle with morality in what amounts to a guerrilla war.
That’s before you get into the compulsive need to make gross out humor the Cruz of every episode.
It kinda does start off with a member of the Seven killing the main characters girlfriend, so good/bad should be well established for anyone who’s awake
Starlight’s main function in season 1
- Is a contrast to how evil every single member of the 7 and Vought are.
- Vehicle for of women problems. Ya know, like rape, objectification, position in male dominated environment.
- Love interest for Hughie. Where down the line they form a relationship of a powerful woman and a bit lost and freaked out boy becoming a man way too late.
This is all, oh so thinly veiled and conveyed that I am sure it went over most peoples heads.
Oh, by season 3 Homelander fucks a nazi that is a member of the 7. For people that still do not get it. If you align with a nazi state, like say russia, it makes you a nazi.
Like how the fuck do you need a talk of concentration camps to finally catch on?
It kinda does start off with a member of the Seven killing the main characters girlfriend
This is pitched as tragic, but it isn’t reactionary. A-Train is a pro-athlete-turned-media-celebrity who goes out of his way to stay out of politics and simply collect a paycheck. And the fact that he’s a poc, a drug user, and a Hollyweird Celebrity all scratch certain itches in the conservative brain pan. Rush Limbaugh would have all the same vile shit to say about A-Train as he had to say about Donavan McNabb.
good/bad should be well established for anyone who’s awake
Jack Quaid’s character arc - particularly in that first season - is in his struggle over the best response to the loss of his girlfriend. What makes him “good” is his ability to move beyond the petty impulse for immediate vengeance, stay clear of the knee-jerk anti-Super bigotry that Butcher falls into, and work towards a revolutionary struggle that challenges the underlying social system. That’s what makes him “left coded” in the end, and its not quite so heavy handed inside those first two seasons. Its also easy to lose track of that arc when you’re wading through fountains of blood and rivers of poop-jokes.
The show really feels itself in Season 3, as you get into a larger cast of characters with more complex relationships to the Supers and to one another. But it falls off in Season 4 and 5 as everything becomes excessively black-and-white, in an effort to discourage misreadings of the material by piling on cheap fetishistic tropes. Its not enough for Homelander to be a guy who commits massacres of civilians on a whim. He’s got to be a creep and a pervert. All the bad guys have to carry out some kind of sexual fetish, while the good guys need to be in these normal-ish largely cis-het relationships.
As the showrunners increasingly lean on sexuality to code for good/evil, the moral statement of the show stops being about peaceful coexistence or egalitarian economic reform or de-militarization and ends up asserting the need for good guys to have vanilla sex lives.
It is very easy to miss that Butcher is ping-ponging between:
- Tough guy that uses people.
- Guy with high morals that values friendships.
- A father in a fundamentally broken relationship that is out of reach.
People might easily miss these when he says oi cunt as a distraction.
Also, it might be easily missed but all his using of establishment and grinding against it, while championing people might get lost on people. Butcher does his oi cunt I shoot ya gobba off with a shooty-shoty, it is bong o’clock way too much so the fact that he is closer to a redfash might get lost on people. Also because actual redfash historical figures are rarely portrayed as anything but a dumb baddie.
I’m not sure how anyone can read Homelander as anything but a right winger. The name pretty much gives it away, and even if it didn’t the fact that he has an American Flag costume and surrounds himself in American Flag stuff should be a dead giveaway.
I’m not sure how anyone can read Homelander as anything but a right winger.
Its not that he’s right-wing so much as his the Good Guy.
His early-show character arc is one of a feckless image-obsessed corporate prop. As the show progresses, he breaks out of the “cucked” liberal mindset and asserts himself as an ultra-nationalist for the benefit of an insecure and gullible media audience. So a right-winger can read Homelander’s arc as a kind of Hero’s Journey, from captive tool of the (((globalists))) into a fully realized superhero.
So, using a JBP-inspired reading of the material, he starts out as a liberal in season 1 and self-actualizes as a fascist by season 3. And this makes him the show’s protagonist, as a result.
the fact that he has an American Flag costume and surrounds himself in American Flag stuff should be a dead giveaway.
He’d hardly be the first liberal to wrap himself in an American flag.
This is like the video of Trump folks blaring Rage Against The Machine screaming “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”, and not seeing the irony.
Or the people bashing Tom Morello for “getting political”.
Former Republican speaker of the house Paul Ryan said he was a RATM fan. The same guy who gave people Ayn Rand novels as Christmas gifts.
Tom Morello’s perfect response: “Paul Ryan Is the embodiment of the machine our music rages against.”
Conservatives telling you to escape the matrix and join them is always the funniest shit, because like grandpa, have you thought about how few people basically shape your entire worldview right now?
The part in Matrix 4 where theyre like “do I really have to spell it out for you? We have to do this again?”
I guess I’m going to have to watch the whole series again.
🤌
What if I told you…
… that the Wachowskis first contacted Will Smith to be Neo, but he turned it down as he was working on Wild Wild West at the time?
But uh yeah, it is absurd and infuriating that ‘red pill’ now means “become a misogynist douchebag scam artist bullshit guru to maximize profits” in a movie series that is entirely about defying the world as constructed by orientation around the profit motive.
I still use red pill to mean estrogen and if a misogynist tells me he took the red pill, I congratulate her on starting her transition.
Wow that’s a bombshell piece of trivia, can you imagine if Smith said yes? Thank god it turned out this way.
To prove I am not making this up:
https://people.com/movies/why-will-smith-turned-down-the-matrix/
The term “Agent Smith” within the movies would become very confusing.
Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?
Also the Red Pill in the movie is literally estrogen. The Wachowskis based it off perscribed estrogen pills for trans women in the 90s.
So Maga idiots saying “take the red pill” today are literally saying they want to be women.
The Red Pill was literally Estrogen, it comes in green now, but came in red then
I always thought the two pills looked like DayQuil and NyQuil.
This was my head (cold) canon as well.
Give me the fish oil pill and I will get back to you…
Imagine ‘escaping the matrix’ only to end up supporting capitalism and the overall status quo.
So basically Cypher.
“You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
They really should have made Switch change gender when they were in the Matrix. As it was, they being the only one to wear white in the Matrix, it was a good other option but it would have made for a better story if it was able to be the way the writing suggested
I don’t normally advocate for such things, but I would not complain if a “special edition” version came out where Switch was digitally altered to be a different gender in either the Matrix or reality.
What if I told you that breaking down your entire worldview and building it back up from the ground up can still result in shitty beliefs because you refused to look inward and work on yourself and you’re still a shitty person?
True, but Musk never broke down his worldview. He was a shitty apartheid kid, he is a shitty bigot adult
The Matrix being predicated on a climate disaster is also entirely lost, along with nonconformity in general.
Also AI is evil although that was like the main plot point
I don’t agree with this take at all. Agent Smith was definitely evil, the machines were victims of capitalist exploitation, which they just turned right around on humanity once they took charge.
I suppose that point is mostly explored in the sequels though.
Animatrix goes into this concept pretty in depth. Don’t know if that is considered fanfiction or correct Matrix lore.
He’s too dumb to understand that his politics suggest he should hate it.
But if he was smarter, he might have better politics, and therefore not hate it.
He’s like conservative the Star Trek fans who chime in any time someone (even here on Lemmy) talks about Star Trek promoting diversity. They don’t even notice that literally every Star Trek cast has been diverse, let alone the fact that they live in a socialist utopia with a progressive moral code, because all they care about is pew pew space battles.
