An open thread to discuss Trump’s big rally/coronavirus giveaway in Tulsa. And whatever else you want to discuss.
No trolls!
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@Alan Robertshaw
Thank you!
@WWTH
Heâll say what he said about his inauguration: that the photos were edited by the media to show fewer people there.
Interestingly, the sparse number of people at the inauguration means that it probably would have been possible to social distance then, though the idea wouldnât have crossed anyoneâs mind back then.
It’s not because there were that many, it’s because lots of people who wanted to be there were scared away by mean radical protesters. Or at least so they’re saying. This, of course, allows him to flatter those who are there for having balls.
@Snowberry:
Trump?
@Moggie:
Well, it is a swamp …
From the Guardian’s live blog:
If this turns out to be the wettest squib of all rallies, I will probably cackle.
@Ohlmann
It only makes fascism look good to people who thought that anyway. “In the Grimdark future there is only war. That’s the premise, right there. Freedom and thought are anathema to the setting conceit, because that might lead to peace, and there is only war. Everything about the setting exists to ensure that there is only war, and only looks positive if you consider eternal war to be a positive thing. Which fascists do, but that’s because they’re fascists, not because of 40k. Before 40k, that kind of wargamer had other ways of expressing their fascism than apologia for the Empire of Man, often involving apologia for various Nazi generals and/or Crusades and/or the Reconquista. There’s always been an alarming current of fascism in wargames that’s historically been papered over by the nerd social fallacies, and is now starting to be actively called out.
Trump just called the coronavirus “Kung Flu.” Wow.
@Ohlmann,
So the advertisements that say “In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium there is only war” and the preface-of-every-novel that I quoted earlier that says over and over the the Imperium is “the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable” where “you will find little comfort or hope,” and where official introductions to the Imperium describe it as a “nightmare dystopia” that “is rotting from within” does not sell itself as a bad future?
Look, I get it, 40k’s misaimed fandom of fascism fanboys is awful. I’ve been a fan for 28 years, I’m very familiar with them. But stop claiming that GW presents the Imperium as a Good Thing, because they don’t. It really is quite the opposite.
Heck, one of the major themes of the recent return of Guilliman storyline has been his horror and despair at just how bad the Imperium has gotten during his millennia in stasis, and managing to find the resolve to do what he can.
Yes, the Imperium is presented as incredibly badass. EVERYBODY is presented as being incredibly badass, including daemon-worshipping traitors to humanity, omnicidal robots, and swarms of alien locusts. The Drukhari are presented as incredibly cool and badass, and are unquestionably the most evil group in the setting. There is a difference between “You want to play an army of these guys” and “You want to be like these guys.”
Depicting bad guys as cool does not equal endorsing them. Selling toy soldiers of bad guys does not equal endorsing the bad guys as good. This is like saying of G.I. Joe “sure, they say Cobra is a ruthless terrorist organization, but they have cool vehicles that they sell to kids, so Hasbro is glamorizing terrorism.”
Criticize 40k all you want, but try to be factual with your claims.
It’s even worse that he’s going to Arizona on the 23rd.
Does anyone know if/what Trump is planning for July 4th?
Re the Tulsa Trump rally, whoever is running the Lincoln Project Twitter account just called it “The Emptyburg Address.”
@Dalillama, @Allandrel
Let’s stop kidding ourselves, the “badass” framing was always, always part of the problem. We also see that same framing in the way US culture has always dealt with the original Nazis – that they were elite, powerful, literally superhuman ubermenschen, had the best engineers and the best equipment. If we’re going with a video game analogy, US culture sees the US military in WWII as Terrans, the Soviets as the Zerg, and the Nazis as the Protoss. No duh that’s going to appeal to people who already have some dangerous tendencies, and content creators at this point have zero excuse for not knowing, understanding, and fighting that.
“The characters are all supposed to be bad though! There are no good guys!” is basically just a declaration of irony, and we all fucking know where that goes.
And like to be clear I don’t begrudge you your fandoms, I hate 40K myself but gods know I have plenty of problematic faves. But maybe let’s stop acting like the constant framing of fascists as “badass” in entertainment hasn’t been part of the problem.
Edit: in before the edit timeout to also point out that the Terrans/Zerg/Protoss view of military forces in WWII is historically inaccurate as fuck, and people who see the Nazi regime as some kind of gleaming efficient machine of a society should read The Origins of Totalitarianism.
CW: horrifying (and 100% real) imagery
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Fascism IRL isn’t clockwork beehive people; it’s Waffen-SS officers jizzing their pants as they beat prisoners, and everyone in Hitler’s cabinet stabbing everyone else in the back at once. Maybe media depictions of it should show some of that hideously corrupt reality.
@Cyborgette
This depiction also stops us from recognizing fascism when it occurs IRL. When people don’t see it looking exactly like the movies, they ignore it until it’s too late.
I agree, there are way too many movies about Nazis that show them as 100% objective. And many an edgelord has harped about how they think “Hitler was a bad person but a good leader.” The idea of Hitler as a quality leader is 100% false from any meaningful perspective on how government and leadership should work. There’s a reason his “thousand year reich” lasted 12 years, and I have sweaters that have lasted longer than that.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1274500811486228482
Just outright saying he wants the pandemic to go underreported.
@Alan
Thanks!
@Lumipuna, Naglfar
RE: stocking of masks and them finding it insulting: The attendees threw them away as soon as they got them. Dreadful waste of supplies that could have gone to hospitals, which, as I know, are still struggling for masks.
Luckily a Chinese friend at a university shipped me some for free for the hospital where my parents work. Not that I’m going to make any comments about Trump giving away all of America’s soft power to China, including with his own country’s residents, but… oh no wait, I already did that multiple times, to anyone who would listen.
@The Warhammer 40k conversation
Having been told, “No, really, read THIS one, it’ll be the one, for sure!” multiple times and knowing all the major races and how, yep, that guy turned out to be a fucker too, surprise, surprise, too many times to count, I can confidently say I fall on the side of “glorifying fascism” here.
That’s ok. I’m not judging you, my favorite animated show as a child, which continues to be my second favorite animated show as an adult, is Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, and let’s all give Heinlein a couple pats on the head for glorifying fascism. But it’s probably best to recognize the background of it.
I do grant you 40k probably started out a lot more satirical, a la Starship Troopers the movie. It’s just not, now; it’s more aspirational now.
I was actually playing Warhammer when the first edition of 40K came out and honestly it played second fiddle to the Fantasy Battle series for years and having checked my rule book, there’s barely what you would call lore satirical or otherwise. It basically boils down to, “here are the Fantasy Battle races (Orks and Humans, even the Chaos stuff came later and started in FB first) but they have guns, pewpewpew enjoy”.
I didn’t stick with it past starting university in ’93 so my more recent touchpoints have been via the videogames which all have humans as playable characters and actually are pretty critical of the fashy nature the series seems to have evolved into. The one I am currently playing, “Inquisitor: Martyr” actually allows you to make what you or I would call the correct “moral” choices and labels them “Radical” because you’re going against everything your character has been trained to believe in. Or you can be a “Puritan” and so be a monstrous asshole. Your choice.
OT: the Allegra I take suddenly and magically became ineffective at about midnight, around four hours ago. Constant sniffling and itchy/tickliness in my nose since then, exactly as if I hadn’t been taking it.
What would have caused this and how do I make it work again? I can’t have it remaining ineffective later, when I try to get some sleep.
We’re not doctor’s nor are we therapists. Find someone else to bother with your constant mithering Surplus.
I saw an article on Facebook claiming that the Trump rally got trolled, which is where they got their 1 Million attendees number from. Apparently they actually did have that many people sign up to attend, but most of them were Zoomers taking the piss đ
@Cyborgette:
Whatever atrocity pictures you attempted to post failed to come through, with only minute purple dots to mark their intended positions; perhaps linking to themâand thank you for the warningâmight work?
@Allandrel : exactly, the grimdark trappings are only trappings. They do not sell the imperium as needlessly cold and cruel anymore. They sell it as a place where they don’t embarass themselves with kindness and are stronger for it.
I mean, the space marine win, all the time. It’s not pyrrhic victories ; it’s just straight up them going somewhere, succeeding, and saying the civilian deads are perfectly fine. They don’t show the imperium as morally corrupt anymore, and for all his “horror” Guilliman is still basically showing to continue the current ways because it work. If anything, what seem to horrify him is much more that the empire is besieged than the empire is obscurantist.
And the fact the imperium have advanced technologically by leap and bound despite that obscurantism is insidiously another way to depict it as an authoritarian state that win. They still imprison anyone not sanctified that try to be scientifically curious (and/or thoses same get demonically possessed) ; they still brand as heretic anyone that devy from the orthodoxy ; it’s just that the mythified leaders are allowed to do science, while the others are litteraly a detriment if they even try.
In no small part, it’s because the worm is in the apple, and the chaos is quite litteraly something that force people to be either slavish sheep or chaos cultists. But GW really pander to fascists. It’s not that there is a following of fascists, it’s that the editorial direction favor putting fascism in a good light.
It’s not the same as saying that all W40K fan are fascists, but you need blinders to not see W40K selling itself as a fanfiction of Italy in the 40′.
@Varalys : I didn’t play that game, so maybe I should look to it. Historically, radical inquisitors are a mix of litteral traitors, people too stupid to see they use power beyond their controls, and people that try to do the right thing.
@Surplus
Did you look up your problem to see if anyone else has had the same problem or if there are solutions online?
@Cborgette: Seconding that image did not show up. If you donât want to repost, could you let us know what it was? Thanks.
(Incidentally, itâs always appreciated if thereâs a description; helpful for those whose eyesight isnât up to interpreting images on the small screen, a category I find myself falling into more as I age, but also helpful if the image disappears. Reading old classic threads is a favorite useless pastime of mine.)
If I had a time machine, and tried to explain to 2015 me how K-Pop fans would become an important part of the fight against fascism… well, I don’t think I could do it convincingly. This is the weirdest timeline.
@Ohlmann,
Ah, so as with the Warcraft debate, you’re going with straight-up lying about the material.
I especially like the “technology is advancing by leaps and bounds” one, since the Imperium’s technological stagnation is a major element of the setting and story, caused by its fascist worship of the past making their “advances” consist entirely of rediscovering lost technology, and the only new technology they do develop is by heretical adepts who develop it in secret and then manage to convince their order “this is old tech that I rediscovered, no really” which can take centuries if not millennia.
Since you have stopped arguing in anything resembling good faith, I’m not going to bother engaging further.
@Ledasmom, Full Metal Ox
I think by âimageryâ she meant a description, which she gave after the dots and content warning. Anyway, I could be wrong, but thatâs how I interpreted it.
@IAmMarauder
I actually know people who did that and registered seats for their cats to overinflate the seating counts. I wonder if leaving so many empty seats slowed the spread of COVID. Probably not, since I bet people spent a lot of time congregating and talking before and after.