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Plenty of people thought that Don Draper and Walter White were heroes.
Walter White was an antihero. The US healthcare system was the villain.
The healthcare system was just a catalyst for his transformation into Heisenberg. He had multiple opportunities to stop during the first seasons. His greed and pride wouldn't allow him to do so.
I'm pretty sure the rush of it was his addiction.
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No. Regardless of the healthcare system, White had the option of going to the people at Grey Matters and asking for help. There were plenty of times he could have just walked away with a boatload of cash. He was a cold blooded killer.
They dropped the whole cancer plotline by season 2.
Plenty of people thought that Don Draper and Walter White were heroes.
In our defense, I'd like to say that we have been living in a society that has been teaching us from birth to worship - no, fetishize is a more accurate term - the Don Drapers and Walter Whites of this world for hundreds of years now.
It's not an excuse... more just a mitigating factor that should be taken into account.
Walter White was a classic anti-hero. He started out with a just cause, and was ultimately corrupted by the power brought on by his own self righteousness.
I disagree. White had a simple choice; he could go to his old partners at Grey Matters and ask for help or he could get involved with murders. He never had a just cause, just the desire to prove he was smarter than everyone in the world.
There's important context about his old partners though: Walter was in love with one of them when she betrayed him, got with the other guy and then they cut Walter out of the same company that Walter's research turned into a mega success.
Was Walter prideful about their offer to pay for his cancer treatments? You bet. I probably would have been as well in the same situation.
Was he prideful there because he wanted to be a drug kingpin? I don't think that was his primary motivation.
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Go back and rewatch. He knows exactly what he's doing from the very beginning. He has chance after chance to get out. Each time he makes the choice to double down, knowing that what he's doing will hurt somebody, and he does it all for his own self aggrandizement.
Draper wasn't as much a villain as White. Draper was just a fraud.
I've seen people unironically and without self-awareness admire Draper and want to “be like him”. I don't get it.
They never did figure it out. They had to be told. Conservatives are really bad at seeing the obvious much less any level of nuance.
Conservatives love pastiche. So they can just take shit at face value and have a great time.
No introspection, because that would ruin the fun.
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Reminds me of my stepfather who is deeply conservative and an huge supporter of the military but his favorite movie is full metal jacket. I’ve tried to discuss what he thinks the point of the movie is and it seems like he never got past the “it looks cool” part.
You can't have a good war movie that's also a parody, because people just take the cool/funny parts as approval of the atrocities.
And nothing is safe. You'll have sitting American Congressmen putting out hacked up Attack on Titan videos with zero context, because David v Goliath is just a cool image and you want to make teenager shock troops fighting hideous (((monsters))) on top of a big wall look Based.
Your enemy is always an existential threat and doing war crimes is incredibly cool. So yay fascism!
A huge portion of American men are only as tough as the things they own.
In Texas they call it "all hat no cattle" Skaters just call them "posers"
It’s like Paul Ryan (Republican politician) being a Rage Against the Machine fan. Even the band members were like dude, you don’t get it.
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Pick up a US or World Hstory book as an adult and two things will dispel the illusions you may have about Americans and the human race: First, the rest the world hates us for very good reasons, and the things we did on a smaller scale in previous centuries are now much more widespread. Second, our species is infinitely more capable of evil than you were made to understand.
The US wasn't even close to the worst offender when it came to imperialism or colonialism though. In fact we were quite bad at it, and actively stood against it for much of our history. The US actually played a big role in getting the European powers to give up their colonial claims after WW2.
This is just a quick list I can think off the top of my head: the trail of tears, slavery, Jim Crow laws, fighting Mexico to gain the west coast, fighting Spain to gain the Philippines, Florida, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, deposing democratically elected governments in Central and South America for cheaper bananas, isolating Cuba from the rest of the world when it turned communist but still keeping possession of Guantanamo Bay, putting down the Boxer Rebellion in China, invading Middle Eastern countries for their oil, fighting the communists in Korea and Vietnam, deposing the Hawaiian government and then annexing it for cheaper pineapples, and leveraging its position at the end of WWII to solidify its hegemony throughout the world via the petrodollar. I'm sure there are plenty of other things I've forgotten. The only other imperial power that would compare is England up until WWII.
Britain (which you mentioned), France, and Spain all have pretty awful imperial histories too. Not saying that to diminish the atrocities of the US by any means, but let's not pretend the rest of Europe didn't get up to some bullshit.
And the Dutch! Don't forget about the Dutch
Kek
You thought that was a joke in Austin Powers?
No. Nigel Powers saw what they did in the Congo.
It's why he was so happy to aid in the Boer War-
Wait
Nigel Powers saw what they did in the Congo.
That was Belgium - which TBF is just a bunch of French-speaking dutch people.
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The reason that London has such great museums lol
We got screwed over, didn’t even get good museums out of the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by own government.
We got an entire beautiful, resource rich country from some of our horrors and atrocities so that's something.
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A lot of this firehose is pretty marginal. The Boxer rebellion for example, the US was a minor player. Puerto Rico won self rule via the US fighting the Spanish so it's kind of weird to quote both. Also Spain is in NATO. Korea was a UN action. Hawaiians voted to become a state to escape the plantation owners from imposing new feudalism. Nobody is saying the US is without sins but these pale in comparison to things the major European powers did.
fighting the communists in Korea and Vietnam
I would add dropping most of the bombs left over from WWII (literally!) on Vietnam's neighbors because reasons.
The only other imperial power that would compare is England up until WWII.
This is underselling Spain which wreaked havoc in the Americas (and elsewhere - like the Philipines) for centuries before they got supplanted by us in the havoc-wreaking department.
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The US wasn't even close to the worst offender when it came to imperialism or colonialism
LOL, what a super apologist argument.
Seriously. Here's a map of US military installations across the world, plus the US has a stranglehold on large portions of South America. They may not treat everyone as poorly as the British did, but they sure love to kill brown people to get their natural resources.
Its a map with red spots. I didn't know we controlled the UK or Australia? You are really stretching the idea of imperialism or colonialism to include where the US has bases. Ironically counter to your statement the map has very little of south america in red. Also or a another point of humor your map doesn't include Liberia. A country the US took over and dumped as many former slaves as they could there. One of main proponents of this action was Abraham Lincoln. Who preferred shipping former slaves back there rather than they remain in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia
Truth is the UK is responsible for more independence days around the world than any other nation. There is a meme about it
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Not going to defend America. We've done a lot of terrible things.
But when it comes to our military bases? Just imagine the world if we weren't there.
It wouldn't be a utopia. I guarantee that the regional power in that area would be grinding those people under their heels.
Especially the Emu. They faught a war against them. The Emu won.
Do you really want to live in a world with Emu hegimony!?
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So I haven't watched after season 2. What did Homelander have to do for conservatives to realize he's not the good guy?
Did he become an environmentalist or something? Because sociopathic narcissism, kidnapping, mass murdering innocents and being an allround asshole didn't do that, not even mentioning his literal nazi girlfriend.
I don't think it's Homelander's actions so much as Kripke saying in interviews that he and the writers are trying to be as obvious as possible that Homelander is the bad guy and based on Trump. And following up by saying if people think Homelander and his followers are role models then those people are not the fans they want.
The fact that he had to spell it out loud because media literacy is dead and most people are incapable of reading nuanced subtext is appalling. Some people actually believed that it was nothing more than a gory satire of Marvel and DC comics.
It stopped being nuanced after season one. Each season since has been an exercise in how far they have to go for some people to figure it out.
It's more that this season they have abandoned almost all the nuance and are really rubbing their face in it. There was a whole episode about how Homelander supporters are big into all the conspiracy shit that modern conservatives are
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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