I guess because people still use it. It might be obvious, but it isn’t common knowledge. All people are ignorant about most things. There’s just too much to know and not enough time to learn it unless you’re forced.

As someone who grew up with the goofy Toho movies, I felt like the Americans used that formula more than the Avengers formula.

The human characters have little control over the monsters, relying on Godzilla or Kong to win fights and only being able to help them do what they already wanted to do. That’s fairly in line with what the Japanese movies did.

Marvel movies have more quipy heroes with emotional backstories who rise to the occasion and save the world. There are some comedic human characters, but they’re sidekicks to the monsters and aren’t self aware like in Marvel movies. The monsters sometimes do silly things, but they don’t quip and aren’t sarcastic because they can’t talk. There’s tragedy in them being the last of their kind, but that’s never the focus.

I really think the Monsterverse has carried on the legacy of Japanese monster mashes fairly well. They’ve actually been on the better end of the spectrum.

Not a fan of saying people only like something because they’re delusional. You can dislike something by your own personal criteria, but other people have their own.

Star Wars and superhero movies are often liked because people enjoy the characters, the world, or simply the action and artistry.

Not understanding that other people care about different things than you do is immature.

Most movies have always sucked. We remember the good and forget the trash, so the past seems better than it was. Social media and other forms of entertainment have changed things, but never underestimate survivorship bias and nostalgia.

Damn. This comment is more insulting than the first one.

That’s what most Japanese Godzilla movies are like if we’re being honest. If you’ve only seen the original, I get why you might think Godzilla is usually a villain, but even the direct sequel had him fight another, more evil monster. Let’s be real, the human characters in most of those sequels were awful and boring. Those movies exist mostly for the monster fights.

If you’re unaware, just look up Godzilla’s dropkick to understand what I’m talking about. That scene might be the pinnacle of the silliness, but it was by no means an outlier.

Compared to the goofy trash that encompasses 90% of Godzilla movies, the 2019 Godzilla movie where Godzilla goes super saiyan was one of the best Godzilla films ever made. Big fights, badass moments, and human characters that exist to compliment the monsters. The original Gojira, Godzilla Minus One, and even Shin Godzilla aren’t comparable to or representative of most Godzilla movies.

Linux users are the homeowners who build and fix everything they can, but look down on people that don’t find craftsmanship fun, claiming that they’re saving money by doing the work themselves. Good on you for having that hobby, but if you don’t enjoy it, spending time to learn those skills costs time that could be spent earning more money than you’d save. Paying an expert to do things you don’t enjoy is usually the cheaper option. They can be found almost anywhere, similar to how Linux users use Apple or windows products from time to time.

Mac users are suburb dwellers who view their way of life as what everyone should aspire to, ignorant to the downsides of sprawl and reliance on cars to go anywhere. Commute times suck, while walkable neighborhoods with public transit make most people healthier and happier. There’s an important classist component, often bundled with racism, that underscores this ideal.

Windows users are people that live in urban areas for work, trying to find reasonable rent or home prices as unchecked capitalism makes everything worse, but unaware why things suck. They get annoyed when people share their passion for handiwork, and dislike suburban folks for thinking they’re superior rather than the downsides to suburban life. However, because most people live this way, and live this way for work, they usually don’t have strong identities like suburbanites or handy homeowners.

Homeless people are those who can’t afford computers, overlapping with actual homeless people, and rural people are those that don’t use computers more than they need to, socializing face to face and literally touching grass.

Leftists famously don’t have uniform views and bitterly disagree on important topics. Some leftists aren’t reasonable in my opinion, with many non leftists having better reasoning behind their beliefs. Too many leftists are purity testing assholes, treating leftism with the same elitism that people on Lemmy treat using Linux. I hate elitism, even if you want to limit how big a community is. It’s just an unpleasant attitude.

Having a mentality of sovereignty won’t change much, if only because it doesn’t fix many of the inherent problems with a global human society. A big downside to capitalism and free markets are mortal limitations. We can’t predict the future or understand the full effects of our actions. We estimate based what information we have, but we can often be wrong even if we have good intentions. The externalities of our actions are basically impossible to calculate, and even when we discover them, we possess the ability to suspend our empathy and ignore potential harms.

I’m also not a fan of the assumption that we can’t tell others what to do until we put our own lives in order. Sometimes getting others to do things is essential to changing your own life and improving your own situation. On a personal level, you can set boundaries with toxic people in your life or convince others to leave you alone. On a large scale, you can overthrow an oppressive system or change laws that prevent you from living well. Telling others what they should do is not mutually exclusive to making changes in your own life.

Sovereignty is great and all, but even if widely respected by most, some will not, and those that do must step in to protect it. The way I view it, laws don’t exist for ethically behaving people, they exist because there will always be unethical people, and there’s no way to ensure that any ethical person will always be ethical.

The fundamental reality is that someone who wants to do good can participate in an evil system. Unregulated global capitalism uses child slaves and keeps people in poverty, all while pumping substances into the environment that harm everyone. You might respect the sovereignty of everyone you meet, but anything you buy can be made by manufacturers who don’t respect the sovereignty of people you’ll never meet.

Capitalism is too big for its problems to be solved by individual behaviors without changing our current system. We must change it to actually make a system that respect everyone’s anything, be it sovereignty, human rights, or the ability to live.

The problems start before Stalin. I also don’t know what you mean by capitulation or how the USSR worked less by it than capitalism.

As far as a system that everyone buys into out of their own free will, it’s probably not possible. Even in a system that perfectly ensures equality for all people, a couple of assholes will not like the system because they want to dominate others. Even anarchy would require a mechanism to uphold anarchy through violence. The best we can do is to create a system where everyone is equal and it is most prudent to uphold it from a rational point of view.

In order to own anything at all, you need a mechanism to protect that property with violence. When you have to protect your own property with violence through hired guards, it’s feudalism. A necessary quality of capitalism is that the government protects your property with violence. Capitalism cannot exist without governments that defend property with violence or the threat of it.

All modern states are the final arbiters of decisions, just like the USSR and similar governments. If business contracts are signed in America, it’s the governments that force people to follow them. If you have a property dispute, the government decides who wins through laws. The government ensures that individual rights are protected through violence, from basic rights like the right to life, to the right to have private property. Laws are backed up by violence, as laws only matter when enforced.

The issue with attempts to establish communism in the past is that their democratic mechanism either failed, or never existed to begin with. When democratic workers councils disagreed with what Stalin wanted, he just ignored them. What could they do about it? When member states of the Soviet Union got upset with federal decisions, tanks were sent in to silence any dissent. These states enforced systems that centralized power and allowed small groups, or even a single person to make unilateral decisions and never have their power challenged.

Sorry, but the protection of rights requires that governments limit freedom. All societies and nations on earth do this. If given absolute freedom, some would kill and brutalize to gain power, forcing everyone who wants to avoid this to band together and enforce rules that prevent that behavior. This is the biggest reason to rationally want a government. Even if you believe rights aren’t social constructs themselves, everyone knows they must be fought for.

Some tankies use the fact that governments inherently limit freedom to claim all governments are authoritarian, and therefore states like the PRC and the USSR are no better than liberal democracies. Your definition of authoritarianism supports the bullshit arguments tankies make.

Authoritarianism is a sliding scale, and not every limit on freedom is equivalent in contributing to a country being more authoritarian. Not having the freedom to kill others without consequence doesn’t make a country very authoritarian. Not having the freedom to publicly disagree with the government is a large factor in a state being authoritarian.

Communism and socialism do not necessitate having no freedom of speech or bodily autonomy. Communism, as defined by Marx, was the final stage socialism and anarchistic in nature.

The idea that communism is always authoritarian uses the idea of communism popularized by Marxist-Leninist movements, where dissent is highly controlled and limited. In reality, these regimes were socialist at best, calling themselves communists to claim that only their version of socialism would deliver Marx’s communism. Even to the authoritarian communists themselves, their states never achieved communism at any point.

When it comes to indie stuff or blockbusters that were huge risks for the studios like Dune, you should pay for it if you have the ability. Pirating doesn’t directly hurt most of the people who worked on the film, as they usually get payment upfront. It does hurt them in the future, as studios won’t finance similar future projects or projects with those creators. This is why you should pay for risky movies that are of higher quality.

If Dune didn’t make the money it did, the franchise would have ended there. I was surprised it did as well as it did, as while I never doubted that it would be a good movie considering the people that made it, I was convinced it wasn’t something most people would appreciate. The director’s last film, Blade Runner 2049, was better than the first movie, but not enough people saw it in theaters. I was blindsided by Dune even getting made, let alone being a financial success.

Bottom line, pay for movies you want people to make more of if possible. Pirate shit you don’t care about. If you can’t pay for media because of financial hardship, pirate away. Investors have made streaming services suck for consumers while squeezing workers into having little disposable income or time. They deserve piracy, as it’s the harvest they have sown. Property is a social contract, and by not letting workers see the benefits of ownership, they have every right to not respect it.

I don’t know, I’ve met plenty of American tankies, anarchists, socialists, and communists. This is some real “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” level shit. I can’t twist reality into enough of a pretzel to make this viewpoint have any validity. It’s laughable.

I don’t know, claiming parts of other counties as their own on official maps seems pretty imperialist to me. I also don’t know what your definition of totalitarian is if you believe the US is totalitarian. I’ve heard claims of authoritarianism before, but claims of totalitarianism make even less sense. It seems like an effort to render a word meaningless by misusing it.

America is imperialist, as is China, Russia, and every other major world power. It’s just what large states tend to do. I suspect MLs view imperialism only through the lens of capitalism, when imperialism far predates capitalism. Capitalist imperialism is only one form of an empire projecting its power.

I mean, people in their 20s have done some pretty amazing things.

Better question might be when did non Christians get involved. Before recently, it was basically all Christians of different flavors who even got to play a role in politics. Secularism was more about not valuing one version of Christianity over others, at least that’s the sense I have. The role might have changed but it’s always been a major force.

Free will is a bullshit term

I’m going to attempt to understand this. Tell me where I’m wrong.

No idea what A or B theory means, but relativity kind of blows a hole in simultaneity, so I assume that B theory has other implications like determinism or something. Something about relationships defining everything.

Chairs only exist in our brains I guess. Brains also invented themselves. Spooky

Plato is silly?

This might have some implications about there not being underlying rules to reality, or that we can never really get anything more than a shadow of them.

Not sure about this one. It might be more epistemological than metaphysical.

The creation and end of existence aren’t as important as the rules and the observable state of things?

I could google these things, but I had fun doing it this way.

That really is a controversial one. I don’t believe this will ever happen on purpose and could never be achieved without forcing other people to comply through violence. I get believing people suck and that the universe would be better off without us, but it is nearly impossible for extinction to be willingly realized. I just don’t like the idea of forcing people like that.