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Film
Matt: Don't go writing me songs like [Bruce Springsteen], J... Listen, I can't be dealing with all that you know, "Born in the USA," Stars and Stripes shit. Surprised you're into it, mate.
Javed: Actually, that song's about the desperate plight of Vietnam veterans who were treated really badly when they came home.
Javed: Actually, that song's about the desperate plight of Vietnam veterans who were treated really badly when they came home.
Literature
The irony is that a curious legend has grown up around this story, which precisely contradicts the message of the original. This legend holds that the gifts Death gives the brothers — an unbeatable wand, a stone that can bring back the dead, and an Invisibility Cloak that endures for ever — are genuine objects that exist in the real world. The legend goes further: if any person becomes the rightful owner of all three, then he or she will become "master of Death", which has usually been understood to mean that they will be invulnerable, even immortal.
We may smile, a little sadly, at what this tells us about human nature. The kindest interpretation would be: "Hope springs eternal". In spite of the fact that, according to Beedle, two of the three objects are highly dangerous, in spite of the clear message that Death comes for us all in the end, a tiny minority of the wizarding community persists in believing that Beedle was sending them a coded message, which is the exact reverse of the one set down in ink, and that they alone are clever enough to understand it.
[...]
What must strike any intelligent witch or wizard on studying the so-called history of the Elder Wand is that every man who claims to have owned it has insisted that it is "unbeatable", when the known facts of its passage through many owners’ hands demonstrate that not only has it been beaten hundreds of times, but that it also attracts trouble as Grumble the Grubby Goat attracted flies. Ultimately, the quest for the Elder Wand merely supports an observation I have had occasion to make many times over the course of my long life: that humans have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.
But which of us would have shown the wisdom of the third brother, if offered the pick of Death’s gifts? Wizards and Muggles alike are imbued with a lust for power; how many would resist "the Wand of Destiny"? Which human being, having lost someone they loved, could withstand the temptation of the Resurrection Stone? Even I, Albus Dumbledore, would find it easiest to refuse the Invisibility Cloak; which only goes to show that, clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else.
We may smile, a little sadly, at what this tells us about human nature. The kindest interpretation would be: "Hope springs eternal". In spite of the fact that, according to Beedle, two of the three objects are highly dangerous, in spite of the clear message that Death comes for us all in the end, a tiny minority of the wizarding community persists in believing that Beedle was sending them a coded message, which is the exact reverse of the one set down in ink, and that they alone are clever enough to understand it.
[...]
What must strike any intelligent witch or wizard on studying the so-called history of the Elder Wand is that every man who claims to have owned it has insisted that it is "unbeatable", when the known facts of its passage through many owners’ hands demonstrate that not only has it been beaten hundreds of times, but that it also attracts trouble as Grumble the Grubby Goat attracted flies. Ultimately, the quest for the Elder Wand merely supports an observation I have had occasion to make many times over the course of my long life: that humans have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them.
But which of us would have shown the wisdom of the third brother, if offered the pick of Death’s gifts? Wizards and Muggles alike are imbued with a lust for power; how many would resist "the Wand of Destiny"? Which human being, having lost someone they loved, could withstand the temptation of the Resurrection Stone? Even I, Albus Dumbledore, would find it easiest to refuse the Invisibility Cloak; which only goes to show that, clever as I am, I remain just as big a fool as anyone else.
—Albus Dumbledore's commentary on "The Tale of the Three Brothers" in The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Aphrodite: "Love conquers all. Look at Helen and Paris. Did they let anything come between them?"
Percy: "Didn't they start The Trojan War and get thousands of people killed?"
Aphrodite: "Pfft. That's not the point. Follow your heart."
—Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Titan's Curse
Live-Action TV
Barney: Hey, The Karate Kid is a great movie. It’s the story of a hopeful, young karate enthusiast whose dreams and moxie take him all the way to the All Valley Karate Championship. Of course, sadly he loses in the final round to that nerd kid. But, he learns an important lesson about gracefully accepting defeat.
Lily: Wait, when you watch The Karate Kid, you actually root for that mean blond boy?
Barney: No, I root for the scrawny loser from New Jersey who barely even knows karate. When I watch The Karate Kid, I root for the karate kid, Johnny Lawrence from the Cobra Kai dojo. Get your head out of your ass, Lily.
Lily: Wait, when you watch The Karate Kid, you actually root for that mean blond boy?
Barney: No, I root for the scrawny loser from New Jersey who barely even knows karate. When I watch The Karate Kid, I root for the karate kid, Johnny Lawrence from the Cobra Kai dojo. Get your head out of your ass, Lily.
Eric: Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power?
Mel B: Yes, of course!
Eric: Do you think she effectively utilized girl power by funneling money to illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland?
Mel B: Yes, of course!
Eric: Do you think she effectively utilized girl power by funneling money to illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland?
"You know what, guys? The point of Mad Men isn't to glorify those things. Great Americans have dedicated their lives so that our children and our children's children won't be discriminated against by their sex or the color of their skin. And you two wanna go back in time and live that way. Shame on you."
— Key, MADtv (1995)
Music
"You still think swastikas look cool
The real Nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen, and cops
In a real Fourth Reich, you'll be the first to go
Nazi punks, Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!"
The real Nazis run your schools
They're coaches, businessmen, and cops
In a real Fourth Reich, you'll be the first to go
Nazi punks, Nazi punks
Nazi punks, fuck off!"
— Dead Kennedys, "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"
Web Original
"Heaven's Gate
— America's most notorious Trekkies."
— America's most notorious Trekkies.""Billy Jack is a series of four movies released in the late '60s and the '70s, all featuring the title character Billy Jack, a half-Navajo martial artist and Vietnam veteran who stood up to The Man and protected Indians, hippies, and young people. Tom Laughlin starred, directed, wrote, etc. etc. etc....For all its left-wing counter-culture politics, Billy Jack is probably partly responsible for all the right-wing vigilante movies which since followed, thanks to blatant Billy Jack rip-offs starring the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal. The continuum goes roughly like this: Billy Jack → Walking Tall → Death Wish → First Blood → Rambo: First Blood Part II → On Deadly Ground ad nauseum."
—Rational Wiki
What the book understands that none of the movies or stage depictions ever have, is that we're not supposed to root for Carrie White in the end. Pity her, yes, but not cheer. Carrie isn't supposed to be some spatterfest revenge fantasy where those evil bullies get what they deserve. It's a tragedy, where adolescent cruelty based in thoughtlessness shapes a person into a time bomb, that goes off in the saddest and most horrific way imaginable.
—This review of Carrie
of Carrie"A farm animal ceases to be useful and is disposed of humanely. A valuable lesson for children. —Four stars."
—"Ayn Rand" on Old Yeller
on Old YellerFight Club ... isn't exactly subtle about the disdain with which [David] Fincher views the main characters in a story about charismatic blowhard Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) wooing disaffected/emasculated losers into his cathartic bareknuckle-boxing club and gradually focusing their impotent rage and entitled sense of the world owing them the patriarchal comforts of their father's generation into an anarchist-terrorist campaign. The film does a fine job of showing exactly how, historically, populations of disaffected directionless men have generated violent groupthink-subcultures and quasi-fascist "philosophers" looking to mold them into something more dangerous.
And even though nobody ever turns to the camera to lecture the audience (at least not without irony) I always felt we were left with a pretty clear sense that "Project Mayhem" were a pack of idiots, that Tyler's "Blow up the civilization so men can be real men again!" sermonizing was little more than re-purposed/generalized Hiterlian "reclaim the Ubermensch birthright" swill (by the end Mayhem's "space monkey" acolytes are literally skinheads!) and that while disaffection with the modern world was understandable anyone who'd actually swallow this crap was either stupid, weak, a monster or all three.
And yet... no sooner had Fight Club found its way to home video than you started to hear stories about fans of the film starting for-real "fight clubs" of their own, and (more commonly) started to see Tyler Durden's rambling testosterone-as-holy-water creeds adopted as yearbook mottos, tattoo fodder and block-text on the then-primitive versions of social media, always among young (usually angry) men and always without a hint of self-awareness. Film geeks and cinephiles had initially celebrated Fight Club — which had bombed spectacularly in theaters, becoming a pop-culture phenomenon on video and DVD. But soon a sad realization soon set in: A significant number (maybe even the majority) of those new numbers were coming from a vast army of real-life would-be "space monkeys" who had somehow managed to ravenously absorb Tyler Durden's message of men embracing their inner-neanderthal without also absorbing Fight Club's message that Tyler Durden is the projection of a pathetic loser that no one should actually follow or listen to.
And even though nobody ever turns to the camera to lecture the audience (at least not without irony) I always felt we were left with a pretty clear sense that "Project Mayhem" were a pack of idiots, that Tyler's "Blow up the civilization so men can be real men again!" sermonizing was little more than re-purposed/generalized Hiterlian "reclaim the Ubermensch birthright" swill (by the end Mayhem's "space monkey" acolytes are literally skinheads!) and that while disaffection with the modern world was understandable anyone who'd actually swallow this crap was either stupid, weak, a monster or all three.
And yet... no sooner had Fight Club found its way to home video than you started to hear stories about fans of the film starting for-real "fight clubs" of their own, and (more commonly) started to see Tyler Durden's rambling testosterone-as-holy-water creeds adopted as yearbook mottos, tattoo fodder and block-text on the then-primitive versions of social media, always among young (usually angry) men and always without a hint of self-awareness. Film geeks and cinephiles had initially celebrated Fight Club — which had bombed spectacularly in theaters, becoming a pop-culture phenomenon on video and DVD. But soon a sad realization soon set in: A significant number (maybe even the majority) of those new numbers were coming from a vast army of real-life would-be "space monkeys" who had somehow managed to ravenously absorb Tyler Durden's message of men embracing their inner-neanderthal without also absorbing Fight Club's message that Tyler Durden is the projection of a pathetic loser that no one should actually follow or listen to.
"Jack Thompson was a legendary Florida lawyer, infamous for his campaigns against video games and his attempts to whip up moral panic over those...His targets also encompassed rap music and Howard Stern, and his general outlook is probably well exemplified by his dismissal of a 2 Live Crew album by: “the ‘social commentary’ on this album is akin to a sociopath’s discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman’s views on politics.” Not quite, but Thompson argued that it was therefore not protected by the First Amendment. Not quite that either. Thompson also wrote to Bruce Springsteen’s manager about how 2 Live Crew misused a sample of Springsteen’s gloriously pro-American “Born In the USA” in their social criticism. No, Thompson didn’t understand what Springsteen’s song was about."
"Now, let me tell you about a dear, dear friend of mine: Russian President Vladimir Putin! Strong? YOU BET! Knows his pictures? YOU’D BE SURPRISED! Whenever Putin comes to America to kidnap teenagers and send them back over to Russia in a shipping container, he always pays a visit to Woodland. And I always make sure to set up a private screening for him! He loves all the great old directors: Hitchcock, Wilder, Ford, Curtiz, Riefenstahl … But do you what movie he loves the most? RED DAWN. Hand to my ticker, baby! He’s seen it at least 50 times! Knows the dialogue by heart! And whenever he watches it at Woodland, he strips down completely naked, has sex with at least three escorts or more, and curses at the screen for the full 90 minutes! IN ENGLISH! I came back from making an old fashioned at the wet bar and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t shouting, 'How you like this, Patrick Swayze? I am fucking American woman and you are dead. IS PUTIN TIME NOW.' Whole other way of experiencing that picture."
— "Robert Evans", Deadspin
", Deadspin"It is easy to catastrophically misread Watchmen and think that Alan Moore sympathizes with Rorschach…To make this misreading requires two related errors. First, one has to read Watchmen, maybe V for Vendetta, and preferably nothing else Alan Moore has ever written. Tragically, many people are all too willing to oblige on this front. Second, one has to ignore the fact that Moore repeatedly paints Rorschach as a dangerous sociopath with intensely fascist viewpoints. The fact that this proves a stumbling block for anyone reading the comic is a sad commentary on, basically, everything ever."
"What might be most fascinating to me about Trigun is how universally likeable it is. … In fact, the only people I've come across who avidly dislike the show are people who really can't stand Vash. Some of them just find him overbearing and preachy, which is understandable, I guess. But generally the people who hate Vash also tend to think Light Yagami was the hero/anti-hero of Death Note and a savior for humanity. You know. Sociopaths."
"If we had to list everyone who said they liked Atlas Shrugged but then did the opposite of what the book says, we'd be here all day. But we can certainly list the most ridiculous ones. Plenty of CEOs love Atlas Shrugged, for instance, which isn't too surprising, since most of the book's heroes are CEOs. Yet these fans seem to forget that the book's villains are also CEOs. So when AIG's stock shot up after the government bailed them out with $85 billion and CEO Bob Benmosche thought he deserved a pat on the back, he wrote: 'But as I learned in Atlas Shrugged, find your Thank Yous from within.' The villains in Atlas Shrugged were CEOs who ruined the economy but profited from government bailouts."
"I will note again that Judgy Bitch is an infamous professional misogynist whose usual output is shit like this article blaming child survivors of sexual assault for the entirety of their abuse (which totally wasn’t abuse in her eyes, because apparently there really are people stupid enough to think that Lolita was a true story with a reliable narrator)."
"All of the usual arguments come into play about whether or not it's cool to cheer heels when they're trying their best to be heels, but, well, it diminished this match, and the impact it could have had. It hurts the match and the performers, whether the fans have the best of intentions or not, especially in such an intimate setting...Now look, you paid your $80 and I paid mine. I can’t tell anyone in the crowd what to do. But if you’re cheering the heels because you love Melissa and you want her to know it? You’re probably ACTUALLY making her job harder than it needs to be. You want her to hold the belt for the rest of her life? Boo that shit. You’re cheering because you’re not into who she’s facing? Then don’t say anything. But don’t cheer the heel. It’s only hurting them."
—Cewsh Reviews on SHIMMER vol. 63
on SHIMMER vol. 63"Rick is an aspirational character because it gives people an excuse to stay where they are. To be alone, and to feel superior. If they just had a bit more ... something, they could fix it. But being smarter or better looking wouldn’t fix the thing that made them this alone to begin with. That attitude lives inside them, and could likely be fixed without any external changes. They just have to turn inward and start acknowledging that other people do matter, and changing may not be be a sign of weakness or capitulation."
"But that’s too hard to think about. Which is why Rick is a really cool guy".
The playright(sic) and screenwriter David Mamet, before he went all Dennis Miller on us and denounced his liberalism, wrote a wonderful little play called Glengarry Glen Ross. The film adaptation of this play contained a scene that Mamet intended as grotesque satire. In the scene, Alec Baldwin proceeds to slowly bleed the life out of a group of mostly ne'er do well real estate agents with a rocket balls lecture about success. Unfortunately, Mamet did such a wonderful job at writing this scene, and Baldwin such a marvelous job at playing it, that it ceased to be what it was intended to be. No longer was it a denunciation of the values espoused by Baldwin's character, but a celebration of those values. It took on a life of its own.
— "The Truth about '6 Harsh Truths'", in response to David Wong citing the above speech as inspirational.
", in response to David Wong citing the above speech as inspirational.IGN DVD: One of the things I liked was Bob's frustration, when he talked about celebrating mediocrity, and Syndrome's comment that if everyone is super, then no one is. Do you think people picked up on that point?
Brad Bird: I think so. I think it got misinterpreted a few times. Some people said it was Ayn Rand or something like that, which is ridiculous. other people threw Nietzsche around, which I also find ridiculous. But I think the vast majority of people took it the way I intended. Some people said it was sort of a right-wing feeling, but I think that's as silly of an analysis as saying The Iron Giant was left-wing. I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.
IGN DVD: How in the world can you see The Iron Giant as left-wing?
Brad Bird: It was one New York paper, not the Times, I don't remember which one, but a reviewer said the Iron Giant represented Russia and that my standpoint was that Russia was just a cuddly friend and we never should have had nuclear missiles against Russia, and he said that was a ridiculous thing, that Russia was dangerous. And I'm sitting here thinking "You think the Iron Giant is Russia? Where the hell did you get that?" But you can't control how people interpret your stuff. Have you ever met someone and you say something nice to them and they make a face and are deeply offended? You just don't know how people are going to take things. Ninty-eight percent of the people got that stuff the way I intended and two percent thought I was doing The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.
Brad Bird: I think so. I think it got misinterpreted a few times. Some people said it was Ayn Rand or something like that, which is ridiculous. other people threw Nietzsche around, which I also find ridiculous. But I think the vast majority of people took it the way I intended. Some people said it was sort of a right-wing feeling, but I think that's as silly of an analysis as saying The Iron Giant was left-wing. I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.
IGN DVD: How in the world can you see The Iron Giant as left-wing?
Brad Bird: It was one New York paper, not the Times, I don't remember which one, but a reviewer said
the Iron Giant represented Russia and that my standpoint was that Russia was just a cuddly friend and we never should have had nuclear missiles against Russia, and he said that was a ridiculous thing, that Russia was dangerous. And I'm sitting here thinking "You think the Iron Giant is Russia? Where the hell did you get that?" But you can't control how people interpret your stuff. Have you ever met someone and you say something nice to them and they make a face and are deeply offended? You just don't know how people are going to take things. Ninty-eight percent of the people got that stuff the way I intended and two percent thought I was doing The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.— "An Interview with Brad Bird", done by IGN following the original theatrical debut of The Incredibles
, done by IGN following the original theatrical debut of The IncrediblesPeople have it all wrong as well because Steven did not go and talk to White Diamond because he thought it was the right thing. He did it because they fought against the two other Diamonds and were absolutely OBLITERATED. He got knocked out. It was just a matter of time for everyone to be killed. Only because Steven wasn't just knocked out cold but instead entered this other realm, he could give his mates the morale to keep fighting. Then he could make the Diamonds FEEL the presence of Pink Diamond in him, so they CHOSE to stop fighting. They did not even win.
And then he convinced them with his Pink Diamond charme [sic] not that genocide isn't good, but that genocide doesn't MAKE THEM HAPPY. Like he had the luck that they were miserable, didn't even talk about genocide. Now mind you they didn't defeat the other two Diamonds, but when they went to confront White Diamond, she fucking defeated the other two Diamonds in like two seconds. THAT'S how powerful she is. He tried to talk to her, again, because it was his only option, and it did not work. Only when his diamond/gem got removed and resisted her, she started realizing stuff. So he did literally fight and defeat her, not talk her out of it. He did not sit her down and give a lesson on fascism.
There was lotsa fighting involved, and he would've absolutely done more damage if he was powerful enough. But the truth is that the other Diamonds and especially White Diamond are just way too powerful. They are gods. Hitler was not a god and would not have been treated the same way by Steven.
— Tumblr user Singingice on the "Steven Universe forgives Hitler" meme (quote tweaked from the original)
on the "Steven Universe forgives Hitler" meme (quote tweaked from the original) Web Video
"As a communist, it must really hurt
That your face has been cheapened, weakened, besmirched,
Being plastered on posters, coasters, and shirts,
Making capitalists rich off of you on merch!"
That your face has been cheapened, weakened, besmirched,
Being plastered on posters, coasters, and shirts,
Making capitalists rich off of you on merch!"
"The story behind that was: Alberto Del Rio had turned babyface doing this horrible, HORRIBLE "I came from Mexico but I was made in America"—y'know, I made a new life in America, and this why I'm successful U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.!—gimmick. And it was terrible. Because to Americans, it came off as pandering bullshit, and to Mexicans, it came off as, "Yeah, I left that toilet Mexico, and America's way better—b-but Mexico's cool, too! U.S.A.~!"
So, Mexicans were like, "FUCK you!", and Americans were like, "TOOK URR JERBS!"
So, like, nobody likes Del Rio. And it did more to turn Jack Swagger babyface than anything. So it was really weird to have Jack Swagger, the racist heel, be the babyface in that."
So, Mexicans were like, "FUCK you!", and Americans were like, "TOOK URR JERBS!"
So, like, nobody likes Del Rio. And it did more to turn Jack Swagger babyface than anything. So it was really weird to have Jack Swagger, the racist heel, be the babyface in that."
Yahtzee: Fox News, with absolutely zero irony, used something that looked exactly like the Bioshock Infinite logo for their — I dunno even what it is…
Gabriel: They wanna create a hype train for racism, basically. So they used the logo of a game about a flying racist fortress.
Yahtzee: Maybe they explained the plot, and Fox News didn't understand which party was supposed to be the unsympathetic one in the description. "Hey, those guys sound like they're really on top of things!"
Gabriel: Glenn Beck's actually attempting to build one right now.
Gabriel: They wanna create a hype train for racism, basically. So they used the logo of a game about a flying racist fortress.
Yahtzee: Maybe they explained the plot, and Fox News didn't understand which party was supposed to be the unsympathetic one in the description. "Hey, those guys sound like they're really on top of things!"
Gabriel: Glenn Beck's actually attempting to build one right now.
"It's clear as day that the film isn't meant as an instructional video on becoming a stock market raider, but it's also clear that — to a pretty substantial chunk of the audience — a lot of what Belfort and company get up to looks like a lot of fun. Immoral fun, maybe. Fun you pay for later, definitely — but fun all the same. Which means that the movie is probably destined to join Scarface and Fight Club in the pantheon of what I sometimes call 'Douchebag Classics', films that draw fiercely devoted fanbases that worship the message and/or lifestyle of a central character while somehow missing that the film in question is meant to be cautionary, not aspirational."
Raiden: Your dream dies with you.
Ironicus: [As Armstrong] I don't know, Jack, there are people on the internet who think I'm the good guy.
Ironicus: [As Armstrong] I don't know, Jack, there are people on the internet who think I'm the good guy.
Oldboy is one the best revenge movies ever made. Spike Lee's 2013 Oldboy, however, is a monumentally cancerous embarrassment. Apparently there's plenty of people who think that this remake is not that bad, and it leaves me to wonder what they even got out of the original. Apparently to some people the entire experience of watching a film is nothing more than a summary of basic plot points, because aside from that, everything about the original that made it special was either butchered or stripped away — which kind of defeats the point of remaking something. If every choice that made the original work was not important enough for you to include in the remake, then what about the original did you want to share to a new audience? What movie did you even watch?!
A: "This is a villain's lecture."
B: "Noooo, I get so pumped up watching that."
A: "You know this is a cautionary tale, right? They're- They're being depicted as the bad guys."
B: "Eh, I don't think so."
Villain in Video: "We are the bad guys. And you have to be proud of that. You wanna know what it takes to be in sales? It takes a mean, lying, sick son of a bitch."
B: So cool. "Sick son of a bitch."
—The Sales Speech, Phil Jamesson
, Phil JamessonYou see, I'm unaware of the fact that this hat is actually making fun of people like me.
If you misunderstood Yukiko as a spineless, indecisive girl who threw away her future, then I don't completely blame you. Persona games are special because we view them through our own cultural lens and life experiences. But the problem of having this cultural lens means we start framing the story and characters with our own expectations, and find ourselves trying to outsmart the story because it doesn't fit into a mold we forced onto it.
"Without question, the biggest and most persistent misconception about Death Note is what exactly it's about. Most sources, YouTube reviewers, geek culture news sites and just random people on social media present that it's about the idea of justice, and how the series is reliant on the question on if Light's crusade is "right".
"Light is a mass murderer, yet in killing criminals he is arguably doing the "right thing" by punishing evil. As Light himself states, in being presented with a god which punishes all evil, people are made to become kinder and war, premeditated murder and organized crime are all but eradicated. Crucially, what these arguments do is press forward a single straightforward claim that the series provides no true answer to the core dilemma: if Light was truly right to perform his crusade, or if L and Near were right to have him stopped. What is justice is up for the reader to ultimately decide.
"Only problem, though: there is an answer. And it's pretty plainly that Light is wrong.
"From the very start of the manga, Light's murder spree as Kira is never shown as anything other than a negative. Never once in the series are we ever shown positive results from his murders— indeed, it's explicitly noted that crime goes past the rate it was before Kira became a thing after the murders temporarily go away. Besides Misa, who is not meant to be seen as sympathetic in the slightest, no one is ever shown being benefited from Light's crimes, and the only one who suggests such— Matsuda— is repeatedly called out for it by other characters.
"Moreover, the idea that Light is anything but a villain is laughable. Even though Light sincerely does believe he is doing the right thing, his characterization is shown to be petty, unhinged, and remorseless insofar as the innocent lives he takes, and he displays an extraordinary absence of sympathetic and humanizing traits. Never once does the manga or creator ever portray him as a fallen hero, all it does is refer to him as childish, and quote, "pure" (this is important). And indeed, he can't be, as everything he does by the end is stuff he was planning to do from the start. Even when he dies, the reader isn't invited to mourn him, but just think about the sort of person he was.
"This is all clinched in the most thematically crucial moment of the entire series, when after an extended six-page rant expressing all of his motives and worldview, Light's entire ideology is destroyed when Near bluntly tells him that, as he cannot dictate what is objectively right or wrong, Kira is therefore nothing more than a murderer. Seeing as L and Near openly state they are not fighting Kira for the reason of justice, but respectively personal interest and pride as the world's greatest detectives (and regarding Near, a desire to finish what L started), this actually gives a different message entirely: that justice does not exist as an objective concept, but only what one perceives in their own mind. Hence, forcing that justice onto the world as a god is wrong, not because of ethics, but due to that very contradiction itself."
"Light is a mass murderer, yet in killing criminals he is arguably doing the "right thing" by punishing evil. As Light himself states, in being presented with a god which punishes all evil, people are made to become kinder and war, premeditated murder and organized crime are all but eradicated. Crucially, what these arguments do is press forward a single straightforward claim that the series provides no true answer to the core dilemma: if Light was truly right to perform his crusade, or if L and Near were right to have him stopped. What is justice is up for the reader to ultimately decide.
"Only problem, though: there is an answer. And it's pretty plainly that Light is wrong.
"From the very start of the manga, Light's murder spree as Kira is never shown as anything other than a negative. Never once in the series are we ever shown positive results from his murders— indeed, it's explicitly noted that crime goes past the rate it was before Kira became a thing after the murders temporarily go away. Besides Misa, who is not meant to be seen as sympathetic in the slightest, no one is ever shown being benefited from Light's crimes, and the only one who suggests such— Matsuda— is repeatedly called out for it by other characters.
"Moreover, the idea that Light is anything but a villain is laughable. Even though Light sincerely does believe he is doing the right thing, his characterization is shown to be petty, unhinged, and remorseless insofar as the innocent lives he takes, and he displays an extraordinary absence of sympathetic and humanizing traits. Never once does the manga or creator ever portray him as a fallen hero, all it does is refer to him as childish, and quote, "pure" (this is important). And indeed, he can't be, as everything he does by the end is stuff he was planning to do from the start. Even when he dies, the reader isn't invited to mourn him, but just think about the sort of person he was.
"This is all clinched in the most thematically crucial moment of the entire series, when after an extended six-page rant expressing all of his motives and worldview, Light's entire ideology is destroyed when Near bluntly tells him that, as he cannot dictate what is objectively right or wrong, Kira is therefore nothing more than a murderer. Seeing as L and Near openly state they are not fighting Kira for the reason of justice, but respectively personal interest and pride as the world's greatest detectives (and regarding Near, a desire to finish what L started), this actually gives a different message entirely: that justice does not exist as an objective concept, but only what one perceives in their own mind. Hence, forcing that justice onto the world as a god is wrong, not because of ethics, but due to that very contradiction itself."
Western Animation
"What the hell is wrong with you people? Every famous nigga that gets arrested is not Nelson Mandela. Yes, the government conspires to put a lot of innocent men in jail off of fallacious charges, but R. Kelly is not one of those men. We all know the nigga can sing, but what happened to standards? What happened to bare minimums? You a fan of R. Kelly? You wanna help R. Kelly? Then get some counseling for R. Kelly! Introduce him to some older women! Hide his camcorder, but don't pretend like the man is a hero!"
—Huey Freeman, The Boondocks ("The Trial of R. Kelly")
Wait! NO! You're not supposed to LIKE that!
"I don't buy [women] a copy of Catcher in the Rye and then lecture them with some seventh-grade interpretation of how Holden Caulfield was some profound intellectual! He wasn't! He was a spoiled brat! And that's why you like him so much: he's you!"
—Quagmire to Brian, Family Guy, "Jerome is the New Black"
Real Life
No objective evidence Empire was "evil." A liberal regime w meritocracy, upward mobility. Neocon/reformicon in spirit.
—William Kristol tweet
Keep in mind that this man helped push America into two separate wars this century. Good to know my nation’s foreign policy was in the hands of a Palpatine fanboy. THOSE REBELS WERE JUST LOOKING FOR A HANDOUT.
—Drew Magary on the above tweet by Kristol
on the above tweet by Kristol"It all began with me and Bruce Lee on TV. If anyone tells you you’re a nobody, don’t listen. You can become a somebody. Just put your mind to it. Never say never."
—Serial felon, mentalist, confidence man, and one-time cult leader James Hydrick
"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
—Upton Sinclair on the response to his best-known novel, The Jungle
"The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole."
"He sang a Randy Newman song called 'Sail Away', which is about slavery. But he misreads the lyrics. I mean, he sings the lyrics as written, but he sings it without a trace of irony. There was a lyric about 'sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake.' He sings it like it's a lyric about good food when, in actuality, it is a song about slave food and slave treatment. You've got to hear Randy Newman's version of 'Sail Away' and Sammy's version and you can compare the two and you realize how he has misread the lyrics and misread all the irony contained therein."
"Last year, a girl was raped by two wastes of sperm and eggs while they sang the lyrics to our song 'Polly'. I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience."
—Kurt Cobain, liner notes of Insecticide
"What I hoped would have been a higher art thing became a frat house, strip club anthem. Sad."
— Trent Reznor on "Closer"
"One aspect of the response does, however, from time to time dismay me. Monitoring conversations, particularly among the book’s enthusiasts, I have sometimes found it hard to believe that all parties to the discussion had been engaged with the same volume."
— Thomas Kuhn, "Second Thoughts on Paradigms"
"What I find strange and oddly disturbing is that Gordon Gekko has been mythologized and elevated from the role of villain to that of hero. After so many encounters with Gekko admirers or wannabes, I wish I could go back and rewrite the greed line to this: 'Greed is good, but I've never seen a Brinks truck pull up to a cemetery.'"
— Stanley Weiser, co-scriptwriter of Wall Street
"People have been waxing lyrical about Draco Malfoy, and I think that's the only time when it stopped amusing me and started almost worrying me."
"What I didn't expect was the people who half-listen. If you half-listen to the story, it seems like it's reinforcing tropes that I disagree with."
—Jeffrey Yohalem, writer of Far Cry 3
To make damn sure that even the historically naive and entirely unselfaware reader got the point, I appended a phony critical analysis of Lord of the Swastika, in which the psychopathology of Hitler's saga was spelled out by a tendentious pedant in words of one syllable. Almost everyone got the point... And yet one review appeared in a fanzine that really gave me pause. "This is a rousing adventure story and I really enjoyed it," the gist of it went. "Why did Spinrad have to spoil the fun with all this muck about Hitler?"
—Norman Spinrad, describing a reviewer's response to The Iron Dream
"This song is not a rebel song."
—Bono, on "Sunday Bloody Sunday"
I consider it a small victory that so many Trump supporters are now sharing a video that refers to their hero as a "pussy-grabbing, wall-building, climate-change-denying, healthcare-abolishing, tax-dodging, shit-spewing demagogue". Surely that has to count for something.
—Andrew Doyle, co-author of Jonathan Pie
, co-author of Jonathan PieThey Live! is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.
Chernobyl was a failure of humans whose loyalty to (or fear of) a broken governing party overruled their sense of decency and rationality.
You're the old man with the cane. You just worship a different man's portrait.
You're the old man with the cane. You just worship a different man's portrait.
—Craig Mazin, in response to a conservative pundit misinterpreting Chernobyl as specifically anti-Communist (and therefore anti-vaguely-leftish) rather than anti-authoritarian, Twitter
A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.
(...)
The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of 'good leadership'; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators — fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) — the answer is always leadership, 'decency', paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values...
or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune. (...)
The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of 'good leadership'; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators — fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) — the answer is always leadership, 'decency', paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values...
How do you tell a communist? It's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an anti-communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
"The only thing that upsets me is that we might have reinforced certain values of some people in our audience when our own values were actually totally different. There were tons of guys singing along to 'Fight for Your Right' who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them."
"Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved The Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine. Ryan claims that he likes Rage’s sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don’t care for Paul Ryan’s sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage. I wonder what Ryan’s favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of “Fuck the Police”? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!"
—Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, on Republican vice-presidential candidate and ex-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul Ryan
Republican vice-presidential candidate and ex-Speaker of the US House of Representatives Paul RyanIn another of history's leaden ironies [alongside the mass sale of books by Josef Stalin for profit], Mein Kampf is perhaps most popular today in countries populated by peoples Hitler regarded as Untermenschen. The Nazis first distributed copies in the Middle East during the war—Mein Kampf can be translated into Arabic as My Jihad—and it has since spread throughout the Islamic world, selling at bookstalls alongside the likes of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Journalists found editions on sale in the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Iran, India and Bangladesh, while in 2005 the Guardian reported that Mein Kampf was doing a roaring trade in the bookstores of U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey, where one hundred thousand copies were sold in two months.
Such is the book's power that its readers overlook the obvious implications for their races and extract from it what they want: an explanation for their own resentments found in a modern articulation of the ancient hatred of the Jew, that diabolical master of conspiracies, the source of all miseries, the eternal scapegoat.
Such is the book's power that its readers overlook the obvious implications for their races and extract from it what they want: an explanation for their own resentments found in a modern articulation of the ancient hatred of the Jew, that diabolical master of conspiracies, the source of all miseries, the eternal scapegoat.
—Daniel Kalder, The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy
The key to the distinction between the Japanese and the European form of antisemitism seems to lie in the long Christian tradition of identifying the Jew with the Devil, the Antichrist or someone otherwise beyond redemption... The Japanese lacked this Christian image of the Jew and brought to their reading of the Protocols a totally different perspective. The Christian tried to solve the problem of the Jew by eliminating him; the Japanese tried to harness his alleged immense wealth and power to Japan's advantage.
—David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis & Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community in Shanghai, 1938-1945
Another speaker, Amanda Milius, is the daughter of John Milius, who was the screenwriter for the first two Dirty Harry films and Apocalypse Now. She grew up in L.A. and wound up in the Trump administration. She argued that America needs to get back to making self-confident movies like The Searchers, the 1956 John Ford Western. This was an unapologetic movie, she asserted, about how Americans tamed the West and how Christian values got brought to "savage, undeveloped land."
This is about as dumb a reading of The Searchers as it’s possible to imagine. The movie is actually the modern analogue to The Oresteia, by Aeschylus. The complex lead figure, played by John Wayne, is rendered barbaric and racist while fighting on behalf of westward pioneers. By the end, he is unfit to live in civilized society.
But we don’t exactly live in an age that acknowledges nuance. Milius distorts the movie into a brave manifesto of anti-woke truths - and that sort of distortion has a lot of buyers among this crowd.
This is about as dumb a reading of The Searchers as it’s possible to imagine. The movie is actually the modern analogue to The Oresteia, by Aeschylus. The complex lead figure, played by John Wayne, is rendered barbaric and racist while fighting on behalf of westward pioneers. By the end, he is unfit to live in civilized society.
But we don’t exactly live in an age that acknowledges nuance. Milius distorts the movie into a brave manifesto of anti-woke truths - and that sort of distortion has a lot of buyers among this crowd.
— The Atlantic, "The Scary Future of the American Right"
"Sci-Fi Author: In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
— Alex Blechman on Twitter
"Yes, there's unanswered questions. But they're unanswered for a reason. Life doesn't always work out the way you need to, but that doesn't mean that life's a bad thing. That's just the way you learn sometimes. If we did a season six? Literally, that lesson means nothing. Means absolutely nothing. And apparently it meant nothing anyway, cause nobody got it!"
