489
you pesky kids rule
(startrek.website)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
489 points (100.0% liked)
196
3156 readers
1458 users here now
Community Rules
You must post before you leave
Be nice. Assume others have good intent (within reason).
Block or ignore posts, comments, and users that irritate you in some way rather than engaging. Report if they are actually breaking community rules.
Use content warnings and/or mark as NSFW when appropriate. Most posts with content warnings likely need to be marked NSFW.
Most 196 posts are memes, shitposts, cute images, or even just recent things that happened, etc. There is no real theme, but try to avoid posts that are very inflammatory, offensive, very low quality, or very "off topic".
Bigotry is not allowed, this includes (but is not limited to): Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, Sexism, Abelism, Classism, or discrimination based on things like Ethnicity, Nationality, Language, or Religion.
Avoid shilling for corporations, posting advertisements, or promoting exploitation of workers.
Proselytization, support, or defense of authoritarianism is not welcome. This includes but is not limited to: imperialism, nationalism, genocide denial, ethnic or racial supremacy, fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc.
Avoid AI generated content.
Avoid misinformation.
Avoid incomprehensible posts.
No threats or personal attacks.
No spam.
Moderator Guidelines
Moderator Guidelines
- Don’t be mean to users. Be gentle or neutral.
- Most moderator actions which have a modlog message should include your username.
- When in doubt about whether or not a user is problematic, send them a DM.
- Don’t waste time debating/arguing with problematic users.
- Assume the best, but don’t tolerate sealioning/just asking questions/concern trolling.
- Ask another mod to take over cases you struggle with, if you get tired, or when things get personal.
- Ask the other mods for advice when things get complicated.
- Share everything you do in the mod matrix, both so several mods aren't unknowingly handling the same issues, but also so you can receive feedback on what you intend to do.
- Don't rush mod actions. If a case doesn't need to be handled right away, consider taking a short break before getting to it. This is to say, cool down and make room for feedback.
- Don’t perform too much moderation in the comments, except if you want a verdict to be public or to ask people to dial a convo down/stop. Single comment warnings are okay.
- Send users concise DMs about verdicts about them, such as bans etc, except in cases where it is clear we don’t want them at all, such as obvious transphobes. No need to notify someone they haven’t been banned of course.
- Explain to a user why their behavior is problematic and how it is distressing others rather than engage with whatever they are saying. Ask them to avoid this in the future and send them packing if they do not comply.
- First warn users, then temp ban them, then finally perma ban them when they break the rules or act inappropriately. Skip steps if necessary.
- Use neutral statements like “this statement can be considered transphobic” rather than “you are being transphobic”.
- No large decisions or actions without community input (polls or meta posts f.ex.).
- Large internal decisions (such as ousting a mod) might require a vote, needing more than 50% of the votes to pass. Also consider asking the community for feedback.
- Remember you are a voluntary moderator. You don’t get paid. Take a break when you need one. Perhaps ask another moderator to step in if necessary.
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
Everything you liked as a kid seems woke and politicized when you were a tiny kid because tiny kids are too dumb to think on purpose.
I'll say, though, I was old enough to be mad at the James Gunn-written Scooby adaptations because they couldn't resist doing actual supernatural stuff and lost this angle entirely.
And then those got reappraised as not being garbage when THOSE kids grew up and a lot of the newer stuff went with that angle as well.
You being too dumb to think on purpose doesn't mean you're not learning, for better and worse. I used to think that wasn't the case when I was a kid because I was too dumb.
The hex girls tho
That one's okay because it taught me to respect people with unusual spiritual beliefs.
Ironically I got the opposite, it makes sense in worlds where magic is actually real, not in our reality though.
But Thorn isn't actually a witch. She can't do spells. She does the rituals for her own mental health, she doesn't expect any magic to come out of them.
....the "kids" in question being Republicans.
It's fine, I also respond like this.
Well, you'd be surprised. Going through uni I definitely got to see a lot of left-of-centre young adults get through semiotics and discouse analysis courses and have an absolute fit at the realization that a bunch of the cool stuff they liked as kids had a clear right-wing bent.
I mean, they all had a lot of time to get attached to Back to the Future and Die Hard before they were forced to think about it too hard. Learning! Twice!
Interested in hearing about the right wing bent of Bttf and die hard
I would lie if I said I wasn't baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.
Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.
Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find he's now upper class and has a 4x4. It's a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. I'd take that it's accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think it's just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this "fifteighties" imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.
That's maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.
Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. That's a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.
Dare I ask you to go further?
What’s an extreme example of a crypto-rightwing-coded-80s-flick?
I don't know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.
The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.
Dirty Harry tracks, but that's back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.
I've heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I don't think I've watched that in one sitting.
I don't know it's often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as "crypto"? Those are pretty overt.
If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over people's heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe it's Roger Rabbit that was the accident.
Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. There's the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.
The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minority's culture without understanding what it means. If you're an indigenous minority you've been through that.
There's a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures they've been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.
There's a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.
Don't forget any movie that includes a fleet of Chevrolet Suburbans being driven as a government vehicle!
Oh, man, way too new for the conversation.
But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bay's oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.
Ahh Deathwish I haven’t thought about that in years but yeah it does have white flight, brown gangs, and one NYC architect-cum-vigilante savior.
Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but I’m autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so it’s a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.
In fairness, Zootopia is... kinda muddy on that front.
The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist "if everybody is special the nobody is" and how the supes are better because they were born better but the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff. And how the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.
But not the guy who isn't born into it. That's evil.
I mean, I'm pushing it, but it's not really a secret. And man, does it set people off. Not just on the Internet. There are full on thinkpieces that have been printed on paper about how he's subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.
The villain says that. When Thanos said half the population should be randomly killed, did you think that was the message of that movie? The Incredibles is about Bob navigating his relationship with his own biases. Syndrome is Bob's dark foil; a villain made of all the worst parts of Bob. Bob can only defeat Syndrome after learning to fight for something more than himself. He can only defeat Syndrome with help from other people who he loves. He has to stop believing that superheroism is about being better than everyone else.
Because he's not trying to help people! Superheroism is meaningless without empathy. That's the thesis of the movie
The government banning people who are different from freely expressing themself is bad... Wonder whether that's a left or right opinion.
The villain saying "I want to make everyone Super, so that it's not just natural Supers that get to have powers" is absolutely an objectivist-adjacent plot. The fact that Syndrome also wants to murder (genocide?) Supers with his droids and "spend his life getting all his kicks from being the only (artificial) Super until he gets bored and then shares the tech with the public" is a classic example of attaching blatant evil to the ideology you want to villainize.
It's not the movie saying "if everyone's super, no one is", it's the movie saying "the dude who wants everyone to be super instead of only the genetic lottery winners is evil bad murder villain, look, we wrote him doing so much evil bad murder!"
Like, let's say you want to have themes of anti-environmentalism in your movie. What's your villain? Eco-terrorist that bombs coal power plants to stop them from polluting the earth. It's the oldest framing technique in the book, especially for all-ages media: just have the character that expresses the ideology you want to defeat also be a mean bad murder villain. Bonus points if you can somehow make the murder bad villain evil plan relate to the ideology in some superficial way.
Syndrome doesn't want to give everyone powers so he can help people. He wants to give everyone powers to spite his enemy and make money. He's Elon Musk. The idea of helping people is just a marketing line and an ego trip. He's not actually making anyone's lives better. He's doing the opposite; selling advanced weapons to world governments under the table. Arms dealing isn't equality! You think things will be more equal when rich people can buy flight and super strength? Syndrome does. Because he's a capitalist villain who doesn't understand any of the leftist rhetoric he's co-opting.
You fell for a billionaire's self-aggrandising lies.
I still can't tell if the original response thought I was actually calling Scooby Doo woke 😭
What's so right wing about those? Honestly, it's been a while but I don't really remember any clear examples.
Somebody else just asked, so see above.
BTTF I can get, but Die Hard flying under people's radar is always surprising.
Thanks! Today I learned I don't really remember any details about die hard...
Hah! It happens. That's when the shock comes.
I'll say that it's still a great movie. I love it. That's something modern culture warriors just won't acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. It's fine.