no racism
white af family is the only visible race
Yeahhhh no fucking thanks.
The helldiver’s two launch cutscene does show an interracial couple in a state propaganda video. Racism is one of the few ways the game doesn’t to my knowledge show the government being fucked up. Everything else is horrible though
I saw some blog call it woke because of that lamo
The helldivers also have randomized skin colour, so soldiers of all races can become elite troops.
“elite troops”? You haven’t met my teammates.
If there were only two humans left on Earth, they would find a reason to hate each other.
what? no we wouldn’t. fuck you for suggesting that.
[i meant that as a joke love you dude]
If there is only one race, racism can’t exist? 🤔
If everyone had the exact same skin tone, people would still find something else to use as fuel for discrimination.
reminds me of a skit a saw once where an old man explains after world war 3 everybody just turned grey.
…
Specifically light grey and dark grey.
I get the feeling that this anon would read A Brave New World and have an issue with it being labeled dystopian fiction.
To be fair, I always considered Brave New World a much less dire dystopy than 1984. I mean you have a really hard time arguing otherwise. People are not free in either but if you could choose, don’t tell me you’d choose 1984.
But this debate is moot anyway, what we are heading towards is a combination of the worst of 1984 and Brave New World combined.
I have always liked that 1984 and A Brave New World are sort of dystopian companion pieces because they explore opposite sides of the spectrum of societies where free will is being suppressed. It has been a minute since I read both, but to me it’s a mistake to compare them in terms of which version is worse to live in because yeah, 1984 would win that competition on the surface.
For me, when it comes to A Brave New World, the scary part is the idea of pleasure being used as a weapon to make people apathetic to the world around them and to thinking. There is something so incredibly sinister about this level of pleasure based compliance because there will be people who look at it on the surface and go: it’s not so bad. Could be worse.
And it could. It can always be worse. I’m pretty sure that everybody would agree that 1984 is a better world to live in than the world of The Road. It’s all relative.
But it’s the idea that someone could read A Brave New World or a similar dystopia that disguises itself as a utopia, and ignore the warning signs and think it’s fine. Because that, to me, means that such a world would be easier to implement. If people comply willingly, get lulled into that life and just let it happen because it feels good, is conventient and makes their dopamine go bzzt, then there is no need to use force. It’s also why several aspects of A Brave New World has become more real in today’s world than 1984 has. We have all walked right into it and we stay there because apathy and the nature of convenience and pleasure is something we don’t want to give up. In 1984, they want to change the system, but fail. In A Brave New World they behold the outsider who tries to scream sense into them like he’s an exotic animal and they do not care to understand his points because to do so would demand effort and hard work for the reward of a free life.
In my country we recently banned smart phones in all schools because the signs of longterm apathy towards learning has started to show in younger generations. Why should they put effort into their homework and assignments when they can get their dopamine hit on tiktok and snapchat with the snap of a finger? In adults in my country, the sense of community and togetherness has dwindled partially because we spend out free time on the phone and don’t get bored enough to get together with our neighbors. There’s a bit more to it than that, among other things that we outsourced child and eldercare to the state, so we don’t really need each other like we used to.
In the world we currently live in, I think it is very important that we keep in mind that if we make everything easy and we waste our time on distractions that doesn’t challenge or build us up, we will become apathetic and easier to control. I’m not talking about the state either. Those who control us are the tech giants and everyone who support them in order to steal our attention and time to waste it on additive, shallow nonsense all so companies can sell you stupid shit through ads.
Brave New World is sinister but it is more of a “hell is paved with good intentions” story, while 1984 is straight hell with no good good intentions anywhere, the only aim is to secure a regime, from which no one is even really benefitting a lot. I mean the elite does have a materialistically better life but hardly a lavish one while being actually the least free. It is not clear but I always liked to think that there is no real “big brother”, no real, guy at the top. The system is just kept up by some double thinkers at the top. Fully exchangeable, with as little freedom as anyone else.
The thing in Brave New World is, that those rejecting the regime are actually free to go. I always found that the world outside was portrayed in a pretty exaggerated way, but one can also believe that this was possible mainly propaganda by the regime itself. Either way, people could leave if they wanted forsake the comfy life and experience struggle and freedom. Even then, when choosing that, their lives would have been materially probably still better than those in 1984.
Like I said, I believe we are heading towards a combination of Brave New World and 1984. The latter was too harsh, there is a benefit in letting people enjoy some things, give them something they can use to forget things. The Third Reich for example figured out along the way. That indoctrination movies were counter productive and rejected by the population. However, harmless entertainment movies, with no or maybe only a mild propagandistic twist helped them much more. People rejected the former but welcomed the latter, so that they don’t have to think about the unpleasant stuff. In our modern world, 1984 type surveillance and the death of democracy will be sold by Brave New World style convenience.
We are heading towards a future that will see marks of both dystopias but we would wish to be in a pure Brave New World instead.
Even the author of BNW wasn’t sure of the world really was a dystopia or not. A lot of people do seem to have a lot of freedom, and most seem happy (or at least, not unhappy). Sure, a lot of questionable things have been done to achieve that goal, but if 99% is happy with their life; can it really be a dystopia?
A lot of Westerners look at dictatorships and authoritarian states and cannot comprehend why the citizens would accept such a fate. The answer is: food, safety, housing, and cultural and religious homogeneity. People don’t really care that much what the people in charge are doing as long as their life is good.
There’s also the idea that since the system “works” it shouldn’t be changed. IIRC Le Guin did some stories on a place called Omelas that explored a similar idea: there’s this utopian city, but they chuck a child down a hole to suffer there, which for some arcane reasons is deemed as necessary. Once people learn of this, they either accept it as indeed necessary or (rarely) leave.
A utopia only works if everyone thinks of the same thing as being a utopian society, which people generally just don’t.
They started an unprovoked three front war, prioritize citizens differently based on a state defined class system, got the earth blown up on at least one occasion, use their soldiers as disposable cannon fodder, and send everyone who disagree with them to reeducation camps. Other than that its a swell place.
Its tiring how bad general media literacy is that I can’t tell if the 4chan post above is a joke.
People forget that r/thedonald started out as a meme space. And then eventually people started taking it seriously.
Because people are stupid.
The 4chan post probably is a joke.
The problem is, with a lot of their jokes, other users can’t tell, so it becomes reality. See also, basically everything wrong with the US and MAGA idiots today.
Voting Trump for President started as a joke on 4chan, and later on Reddit with r/The_Donald. And look where it got us, the butterfly effect in full force.
I’ve seen one Lemmy bigbrain recently argue that even when artists are showing mafia or army to be terrible for people in them, they romanticize the mafia and army nonetheless, and that in general media glorifies its subject matter regardless of the author’s intent. This schmuck would probably say with a straight face that ‘Helldivers’, or whatever this post is about, actually advocates for its model of utopia even if it pretends not to.
The idea of there being no anti-war films is older than Lemmy. The problem is Poe’s Law related. You can make a movie or a game that shows the horror of war or the tyranny of distopian totalitarian regimes, but regardless of the intended message, your creation is filtered through your audience’s lenses of perception, and some of that audience has been raised to be white supremacists, some have been through schooling that acts more as indoctrination than education, and some of that audience are just seriously fucking stupid.
Why are you talking as if their argument is completely nonsensical or novel? It’s kind of a known thing that even if you portray something as “bad” as possible, there will be a number of people that look past/ don’t see the criticism of the subject and take the creation of work as a sign that the subject is to be praised. Look at the music industry with gang violence, misogyny and drug use; lots of more modern artists make music that shows how these things harm society, yet casual listeners will put on a song about alcohol abuse to get drunk at a party.
It isn’t necessarily that the artist is advocating for it, so much as they’ve produced a work that can be misinterpreted (unintentionally or otherwise) to do so.
Why are you talking as if this argument doesn’t generalize an interpretation by some section of the audience to general treatment of any and all such media wholesale? Did you miss the part where it says that the media in question romanticizes the depicted practices regardless of any intent of the author, or interpretation by the generally intelligent audience? You’re saying that the stupidest possible understanding of the media is what all media should aim for, otherwise by that commenter’s argument it shouldn’t exist. I don’t think you seriously realize how deranged this take is. It’s straight up advocating for the ‘Idiocracy’ society.
Good art doesn’t pander to the common denominator, it lifts the audience above it.
I genuinely have zero idea how you came to any of the conclusions you did based on what I said. Maybe there’s more context to the comment you were originally talking about, but nowhere did I ever even imply that artists should “aim for” or pander to the common denominator. I’m saying that, no matter the artists intentions, no matter how obvious or on the nose the messaging is, there are going to be cops with Punisher tattoos, and teenagers with stolen cars and guns listening to Kendrick Lamar. If you make a movie about how the Nazis were psychopathic fascists who eventually get destroyed, there will be people who can’t get over how cool their aesthetic was. None of this is to say that this art should not exist, I’m not detracting from the artists. I’m pointing out a flaw in society. Messaging in art, no matter how well crafted, will never say the same thing to everyone, for better or worse.
Is this helldivers? The game where half of a planet’s population is forcibly turned into bug fuel every few years?
Theres a reoccuring problem with bigly brained thinkers where they omit all the terrible shit and look at only what the propaganda wants them to. Even in a game this remains true.
Most clips from Starship Troopers on YouTube have filled comments’ sections with people waxing about how based the society is and it’s actually a utopia (to your point).
Well the movie elimanted the entire opening sequence of the book where they are just being terrorists in their super space suits (which the movie also did not include). I think that was necessary to drive the point home.
I’ve heard that the book was sincere jingoism, which the director of the movie didn’t like one bit and turned it into clever satire of fascism instead? Haven’t read it, but the movie is great, even if there’s a bunch if idiots on both sides (fascist and antifascists) thinking that it’s sincere.
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings related to the book because, while there is a lot of garbage in it, the core thesis spelled out at one point in the last third I think is very worthwhile and came at a time in my life (just turned 21 when I first read it) that it helped shape my political views. As another commenter said Heinlein was never very consistent in the politics portrayed in his stories, which I’ve understood as him exploring various views more than wholeheartedly endorsing any one of them.
First, the garbage. It’s pretty clearly pro military, as the in-book government was established by veterans seizing power and the primary path to having political power (being a voting citizen as opposed to a civilian) is through military service. There’s lip service paid that it’s any kind of civil service (Neil Patrick Harris’s character goes off to a research lab for experimenting in the book), but it’s only a sentence or two. No source on this, but my gut says Heinlein probably wanted to explore the idea more but was hampered by the fact he was writing a space military adventure and needed to focus on that. There’s also a lot of 50’s values espoused for separating genders into different groups and that spanking your kids is good no matter what the “bleeding hearts” might say.
The biggest difference that bothers me between the book and movie is how soldier lives are valued, best displayed through the tactics humanity uses. In the movie humanity uses almost the same strategy as the bugs. Get a lot of troops, equip them about as cheaply as possible, then send swarms of them to deal with bugs. Mass casualties are a given. The book is one of if not the first example of power armor turning a soldier into almost a one man army. It’s stated at one point that a single soldier is about as effective as 1000 bug drones in combat. This, along with statements from multiple officers throughout the book, shows me that individual soldier lives are actually valued in the book, and that while they are spent they are not wasted the way they are in the movie.
But for me, the most important takeaway from the book is a lecture given to Johnny Rico during officer school where the instructor lays out why service is required for citizenship. Essentially the goal is to ensure that the only people making decisions on behalf of society (ie politicians and the people that vote them in) are putting the good of that society over their own personal wellbeing. The service citizens go through is meant to weed out selfish people by putting them through difficult experiences where it would be in their best interest to quit rather than continue. While I doubt the book’s system would actually achieve that, I do think that the value of society-serving rather than self-serving voters and politicians is correct and probably the most important thing that a society could achieve (not that I know how to achieve that). It’s the first thing I ask myself when deciding who to vote for now, “does this person actually care about the people they’ll be representing or are they just interested in having power?”
