61–70 of 180 posts
What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy. I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through…
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Also: The Kulaks in the Ukraine. Various persons during various Maoist upheavals in China.
Everyone has the same illusions to different degrees: "Our side doesn't do these bad things." Then, when the facts come out, "It was justified!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.” Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy. Even the term “elite pa…
> The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Not all the time, though. For example, Bloomberg reported a few days ago that Nigeria's elite, which normally flies out of the country for healthcare, can't do it now due to the travel restrictions across countries [0]. > The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes awa…
And to drive the point home even more: many high-status politicians in Western countries have contracted COVID-19 and it's uncertain how many more will, and how many will die. Also: uncertainty creates a panic of its own.
> The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social…
His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.” Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy. Even the term “elite pa…
Zombie television presents violence as the only option and the enemy as an incurable and unsavable evil. If the only option shown is to kill and build walls, then that's what they are programmed to do.
In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other. The foundation for this has to be built in peacetime.
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> ... that society will devolve into this immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning into life or death conflict. To provide context, here is some data on that: "cases of road rage involving a firearm — where someone brandished a gun or fired one at a driver or passenger — more than doubled to 620 in 2016, from 247 in 2014." https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/road-rage-guns.html That doesn't amou…
How many of those were would-be fistfights that were de-escalated to nonviolence by brandishing (literally: holding a weapon) by a victim? A lot of casually violent people become a lot more polite when they realize they don’t get to punch or beat whomever they like. That’s a good outcome, to me, but that figure lumps it in with violence where people get shot, mixing good gun-related outcomes with bad ones, as if bran…
> The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social…
His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.” Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy. Even the term “elite pa…
And it's particularly amusing because he just mentioned Haiti. What happened in Haiti is precisely why the American plantation class was so terrified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
> The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic. Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social…
> It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite. This really hit home for me. It has always struck me as supremely odd, the civilization-breakdown fantasies that people have when I suggest that everyone in a society, not just the police, have easy and unrestrained access to arms, as advocated by many throughout history. Th…
Coronavirus has only just overtaken the US's normal firearms death toll.
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Zombie epidemics are over because the genre has been done to death (!), and is now simply boring. I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show.
It started out as a zombie show, in the very first scene you had a Nightswatch patrol being killed by Zombies. The reason the Wildlings massed and marched on the wall was because they were being savaged by zombies.
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