People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
The problem is that people can map fictional resistance movements onto opposite real life parties. In my college poli Sci class, both I (a known lefty) and the most conservative guy in class excitedly supported the idea of showing V for Vendetta. I guarantee the January 6 guys thought they were in an underdog resistance movement.
A witch cursed Alan Moore to have fash mouthbreathers relate to his work.
Considering what I know about Alan Moore I’m 50/50 on thinking this literally happened or is just a useful metaphor.
I think it really shows just how vast the different realities people live in truly are, and how often those individual or collective realities don't really align with actual reality. The human mind is great at convincing an individual that their biases are the truth, when they can be extremely far from it.
Which poses a fun philosophical question: if 90% of a given population perceive something to be true, does that make it reality?
One reason for this is these shows don't tend to show the morally questionable things a resistance has to do to be able to win. So it's a lot easier to side with the resistance in Star Wars when they're just fighting conventionally against the empire. I think a much better depiction of resistance can be seen in Star Trek Deep Space Nine with the Bajorans. They fought the Cardasians in a guerilla war which often led to civilians on both sides being killed. It's a lot more murky but the Bajorans are still unequivocally viewed as the good guys since it was the only way to resist and get rid of the Cardasians and stop them from killing their people.
They blew up the death star! That was full of people. Thousands and thousands of soldiers and engineers, pilots etc. We all cheered. Id say it was pretty morally questionable.
Isn't the death star specifically a military spaceship? You can't just choose not to fire at a battleship just because there are engineers who won't personally shoot at you in it.
I've had this argument with people before. It was a military installation so a viable target by the rules of war, you don't need to be a combatant to be in the military. Even when they upgraded to an entire planet as a weapon they still only ever show military personnel being located there. Meanwhile the empire demonstrably killed civilians when they blew up entire planets.
Of course it's all a bit arbitrary because people have just decided for themselves that it wasn't purely a military installation, and that it had civilians and children onboard, even though they never showed that.
They blew up an enemy military ship that had already destroyed a peaceful planet and was in the process of killing them.
Nice try
The Palestinian struggle is one source of inspiration for the Bajorans. It boggles my mind when I read comments that 'Bajoran' episodes are boring.
They identify with protagonists.
Also, Divergent should not be on the same list as the others.
More seriously though, it is frustrating.
I have never seen Divergent or read the books. The Pitch Meeting episodes on YT were more than enough
Counterpoint: I did not watch Divergent.
It was derivative. You missed out on nothing. Hunger games did it way better.
Complicated problems do not have simple solutions.
Because this is fiction, where there is good and evil, right and wrong, the good people are rewarded and the bad people punished, successful people earned it and the poor deserve it, and complex problems have simple answers. Where every argument only has a pro and a contra.
But we are living in reality, where most things are in shades of grey, and everything is more complex than it appears. People have to make decisions based on partial knowledge, to not get stuck in indecisiveness. Where even the middle ground solution might be wrong. And with so many distractions and propaganda.
Just be kind and understanding to other people with different ideas, the real world is a complex one, and easy to get lost. Sometimes people like to flee into their simple worlds of populism, maybe through talking and listening we can help them find their way again.
You watched starship troopers and sided with the humans... Oh wait...
You watched die hard and sided with the terrorists. Join the resistance bois
Turns out siding with the resistance in a movie doesn't cost anything. It doesn't have the potential to have your family tracked and killed by the state. It doesn't have the potential for you to end up even worse off than you already are.
A lot of people side with their own resistances in the real world, but there's a reason all of the resistance fighters in the movies are beaten-down, destitute people. They've got nothing to lose. We've still got our bread and circuses, so we don't have the fight.
It's often even simpler than that. Most people are really, really bad at predicting consequences and rarely even worry about known potential consequences if their emotions are in play. People will jeopardize their whole family routinely to scream their political passions, and this is for one reason only: they have connected with the storyline.
People who watch movies and go out and wave flags and go to protests often have one thing in common, which is they have emotionally connected with the struggle. The conservative right in America is very, very good at publishing a super-simple and well-integrated storyline into politics so that's why we have the same people who dressed up to watch Wrestlemania and denied that it was scripted, now running around the US countryside in new costumes, waving new flags.
The people who are protesting genocide and authoritarianism and discrimination are the people who have a personal connection with the story, they have followed this from the beginning and know what's at stake. The people on the other side have no connection and are letting a more entertaining noise guide their feelings. It's our sad human nature, that to mobilize we need a selfish motivation to get anything done and all 8-billion of us will just sit on our fucking hands doing fuck-all while the world literally burns around us before we will make a stand, the whole while looking at everyone around us for a cue how to act and what to do.
You watched Batman and sided with a billionaire
I think there's nuance here. Most of us side with Batman because we side with ideals and a desire for good. Batman represents, in a broken way, what good can be, and the cracks in his character let us relate more with him. This happens out in the real world too. Those with money, who take that money and the time/effort to help others, are less hated. Ever deepening shades and shadows, humans rarely truly operate on black and white.
I actually have met a concerning number of people who idolize The Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy. The one who was always loudest about it willingly moved to Florida recently and is turning sadly right wing. He used to be a super smart punk rocker, too.
That's strange since the movies don't really try to give The Empire any redeeming values. It's pretty literally and figuratively black and white.
But The Empire has a better costume department. ...Man I guess I'm in.
The fucked up part is that the right wingers think they are the resistance. And that the liberals are the evil empire trying to take over everything.
I've seen some of my left wing friends and right wing friends post this meme, thinking that, of course, they are the one who sees the obvious.
None of those who have posted it are particularly smart.
You watched "Ender's Game" and sided with the humans (almost) annihilating an intelligent species.
It depends a lot on how the story is told.
Imagine a movie where some random guys and a scientist need to find a cure to a zombie outbreak or some chemical attack. They did it, we saved the world, now people just have to take our medicine. Uhm, seems kinda rushed. Are zombies even real? My cousin said he knows a guy who worked with a guy who took it and now he's blind from birth.
I legit have no idea what side he's advocating for. I'm inclined to say Palatine, since that's the side that's completely out classed and is getting eradicated by the opposition. But I know Israel views them selves like this too, because it is surrounded by people that want it gone. What a conundrum, almost as if fucking star wars, a space fairy tale about literal good and evil clashing isn't a good analogy to real life.
I think Palatine was only outclassed at the very end of ep VI and maybe IX but they make it very clear he's the bad one
People side with the version of events they are told
Why is it so hard to grasp? Do you think people are siding with the resistance in the works if they’re presented as the bad guys? Did you side with Scar in Lion King?
Most if not all of these have one side that is clearly in the wrong. Real life is more complicated. Conflicts are usually gray vs. grey, with both sides having identifiable faults and justifications. But even then, if you spent all your time seeing the world from the perspective of certain designated protagonists you'll likely sympathize with them anyway.
And people do exactly what they did for those movies. Sit on the side and watch and hope...
So...
Movies are a couple hours long.
In reality we don’t have a plot line. We have millions of plot lines on repetition.
Real life morality means thinking about the really long term. And in the really long term the resistance fighters of the past are now the authoritarians you want to be a resistance fighter against.
This is why people are skeptical of resistance fighters, and demand more of them than merely being in that position on the board. They have to be the right people, fighting for the right thing. And those people aren’t always the ones who look most romantic.
So stupid.
You watched X and sided with the resistance, but continued to set on your butt doing nothing. Your siding took no effort, carried no risks, and made no difference.
Real change takes work.
In real life the "badies" think of themselves as "goodies", so what some see as "goodies" vs "badies" others will see as "badies" vs "goodies".
I mean, it would be really nice if the "badies" were going around openly admitting they're hurting other people because of the pain of others makes them feel good or that they simply want to take their shit and not to have to worry about payback "because we killed the fuckers", but that's not what they do: they give justifications like "they attacked us, we're just defending ourselves", "they're the ones who want to hurt/genocide us", or even "we have Western (i.e. good) values whilst they're human animals" (if this sounds a lot like Zionists propaganda points, that's because they are, though it's really a more general "Fascist etnostate"-speak genre).
And which side in the real world is the "resistance"? The one that is portrayed by state sponsored media? The one that has a president in the White House? The one that dominates modern culture? If you're a Democrat or a Republican, all of these statements apply to you, and you're not part of the resistance, you're part of the institution.
The problem is that both sides see themselves as the resistance.
Obligatory Independent contractors working on the uncompleted death star...
This meme is CLEAR illustration of how these people don’t understand that in reality, there’s a thing called “nuance.” And that everything in the universe exists within the grey area in between their illusory everything is either black or white ideology.
In short: THE REAL WORLD ISN’T A TV SHOW.