SVU gets a pass for being AWESOME
I like the myth of the police, not actual cops, I like Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz, actual cops can suck a nard
For the greater good!
The greater good.
Stop saying that!
When’s your birthday?
Reno 911
‘00s pop culture fucking sucked
Calling it culture is an insult to the intelligence of the American people
They’re gonna do it more, now that you said that.
Well there is definitely no shortage of disrespect for the avg Americans’ intelligence.
Everything is propaganda if it changes your view of something
I knew it, glasses are propaganda
Pretty much spot on, though that is the exact point of these kinds of shows.
It was part of a wave of shows launched to counter the media perception of incompetence in law enforcement/prosecution. They pushed a bunch of dangerously misleading (or even outright fake) claims such as the reliability and accuracy of forensic evidence which has been later used in actual court cases to imprison innocent people.
As always, Citations needed has done a brilliant job on this kind of stuff that’s worth a listen.
If people are quoting tv as facts in the court room that’s a different level of anti science that I’m not prepared to accept.
How dumb can a society be that people with college degree and doing something for a living can’t sort out fact from fiction? And I’m not talking one lawyer, I’m talking both sides of the bench AND judge.
That’s too much of a generalization. Propaganda is far more specific.
Doesn’t even need to change your mind.
Moonie (Moon Channel) has a lovely 2h30 video on the topic of Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2VIKfaY0Y
It focuses mostly on the eastern part of things, but it applies to stuff we end up consuming, too. Also worth quoting one of the top comments in the video:
I think you get one thing wrong, and that is claiming Japan is the #1 at projecting soft power. I’m sorry but the US is #1 and it isn’t even a contest (coming from a non-American). The reason we don’t really get the impression that the US is this soft power behemoth is because the US has been so proficient in projecting soft power that it has been normalized and integrated everywhere.
forgot call of duty
Yes, master
Maybe once upon a time, but the current state it is in is definitely not military propaganda.
Why?
It has stupid ass anime skins, and bullshit scenarios, and in Cold War, you can have the communists win.
Captain America is a weird one to include. Not denying it’s propaganda, everything is, but throwing Cap in with copaganda is such a surface level take. He’s propaganda for American exceptionalism sure, but also embodies it in an old school New Deal way. The character has been consistently anti-facist over the years.
Imo Iron Man is the much more harmful propaganda. You can pretty much draw a direct line between the characters rise in popularity thanks to the MCU and the rise of Elon Musk.
He’s propaganda for American exceptionalism sure, but also embodies it in an old school New Deal way. The character has been consistently anti-facist over the years.
Pretending that America isn’t only already fascist, but inspired the fascists they are supposedly against is American exceptionalism, and you’re eating it right up.
deleted by creator
Bro went thermonuclear with this take
Found Red Skulls account
Works so well 💀
Any superhero movie is problematic. They all say that only a few special people can save the country and the world. The rest of the population just has to hold tight and let the important people do their thing. It’s just a small step by replacing powers with wealth to give the rich carte blanche to do as they please.
Not those scenes in Spider-Man where New York throws random objects at the villain until they relent. Hell yeah solidarity.
Ghostbusters II the Ghostbusters would have failed if it wasn’t for New Yorkers spreading positive vibes.
Your love, keeps lifting me higher!
Thanks for putting this into words. I’ve had a vague discontent and disgruntlement with superhero crap for a long time. While this isn’t the only reason I dislike superhero movies, this is a big part of it.
I do still like The Punisher movie with Jain, Dredd, The Crow, and a few others. Antiheros in general. They’re also more human and not as one dimensional.
It’s deeper than that. It’s about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.
Are ther shows and movies about regular people banding together to do good? Fiction or non-fiction
And much of the crime fighting is blue collar crime. On general the superheroes don’t touch white collar criminals.
I wonder if that’s a limit of storytelling. Grand social change is hard to film. Even team effort cohesion requires a lot of actors and writing to pull off.
No matter how sound the morals and story, if it’s not entertaining, it might fail as mass media.
A little bit of that, a little bit of plain ol power fantasy.
One of the hallmarks of early Spielberg was the ability to have a group all talking at once and it sounding natural. Like the City Council Meeting in Jaws is a great example of fictional social change in a film setting that includes a lot of townsfolk in the story.
Not to mention that a lot of those special people are born better
Oh I agree completely. There is a fascist aspect inherent to Superheroes. Cap is just one lf the less egregious ones.
He’s still playing world police.
I mean, I’ve definitely seen Cap used to represent the Ugly American in comics, especially during that period post-9/11.
He’s definitely not fully anti-fascist coded, because he represents the US, and the US while ostensibly being democratic, is in many ways deeply fascist and always has been. Hitler was inspired by our Jim Crow laws.
There’s some smart people who understand that America never actually stood for any of that stuff and they write Cap to be the same.
Is that Ultimate Cap or 616 Cap? Ultimate Cap was an asshole – even that universe’s Aunt May called him out on his BS after Peter died.
I’m not a big Marvel fan, I just know I’ve seen lots of examples. Makes sense that they would be alternate universe Caps, tho. That’s a great way to be able to write the character and show the dark side of US politics without necessarily marring the original character himself. However, to outsiders, there’s not really a difference between the two, because they’re not deep in nerd lore.
People kept calling Musk – Stark because they thought he was a scientist/genius. Like the MCU fake tech was gonna be birthed out of this immature edge lord that steals people’s idea with stolen money.
Yeah I kinda disagree with Cap as well. He also explicitly refutes the government to stand up what he believes is right in Civil War too.
I think part of it’s that not all propaganda is bad.
There’s probably a term for it, but I’d draw a distinction between “opinion” propaganda and “aspirational” propaganda.
One tries to change your opinion of something, like “cops are good noble and always do the right thing”.
The other encourages the viewer to live up to some ideal. It’s entirely possible for that ideal to also not be great, but even then “I should be” is better than “they are”.A lot of PSAs and things from the ad council fall in the later category. Like the billboards that basically say “real men are present and emotionally available fathers to their children” or "good parents teach their kids healthy diet and exercise by example”.
They’re openly cases of the government trying to change public opinions or attitudes (which arguably makes them better examples of propaganda than a lot of commercial television), but they don’t feel as objectionable.“This honest and kind man who always tries to do good and help those around him to the point that it overshadows him being a physically perfect human is the embodiment of the emblematic American man” is more in that aspirational category.
“Propaganda” comes from “propagate”, so the word inherently isn’t bad. The suffix “anda” basically means “thing of”, so in a literal sense, “propaganda” is any “object of propagation”, although this reading of etymology isn’t widely circulated.
Propaganda is thus inherently a very all-encompassing term. Any poster, flyer or brochure is propaganda, whether it advertizes a product, service, lost cat, or wants you to join the army. Anything “mass media” is propaganda. Anything spreading “a message” that is meant for wider propagation, regardless of the message content is propaganda.
At least that’s according to my rudimentary knowledge of high school latin. There’s the more “mainstream”, “official” etymology on Wiktionary: the word was first used in the name of an old Catholic Church department from Latin times for “spreading the faith”, so that’s where the more loaded use and connotation comes from. However, I doubt that this department name is the first ever use of the ablative feminine gerund form of the verb propagate. That’s like saying the first use of the term “World health” is in the name World Health Orgsnization. If anything, someone had to discuss the name beforehand.
So, there’s this Overton window-esque aspect to the word.
Wikipedia has a good overview of propaganda, although it is itself loaded onto the “must be loaded (i.e. what you called ‘bad’ propaganda)” definition of propaganda. And they like usibn the word “loaded” a lot.
Kind of what the whole thing in civil war was. Tony was looking to absolve his guilt over the people they failed to save while looking for more and more authoritarian methods of keeping the world “safe”.
Cap was much more for freedom and while the idea that the avengers should have absolutely no oversight is absurd, the question of who should be the oversight was important and much of what the avengers did could not wait on a committee to decide to act (also, the last time a committee did act they decided to nuke New York)
Yep. If cops had the ethics / morals of cap we’d have zero issues with the police.
Elon was literally in 2 at the Grand Prix
But Captain America is a good movie. I mean, he kills Nazis.
should have replaced CSI NY with Blue Bloods, same message, same city.
Back the blue and buy a reverse mortgage
“But they’re just TV shows” “it’s not that deep” etc. I would implore you to listen to this excellent episode of Citations Needed..
It covers how modern cop shows were invented directly to counter shows that portrayed defence lawyers as the protagonists, along with a general push to lionize the police state despite its inability to prevent crime or deliver real justice.
Hey guess what? I don’t actually give a fuck. I want to enjoy my shows without all this political nonsense thank you
Is grammar police also ACAB? Lol
Didn’t captain America literally become a fugitive of the state
He threw a tantrum because he didn’t want public oversight over his and his friend’s superpowers.
It was basically a “You’re a loose canon, McBain” cop storyline.
You mean the solider who saw what happens when a list of everyone who is considered “other” is ordered and maintained by a government? All because, Tony “I am a gift to God” Stark and Bruce “Couldn’t Say No” Banner created a nigh unstoppable police force with no oversight?
IMO, you’re not wrong, but Magneto is the better portrayal.
Magneto was right all along about the persecution of mutants. Tony Stark and Captain America disagreed on a “who watches the Watchmen” level in the movies.
Stark thought that heroes had too much power to act without the approval of some higher authority, and the Captain believed that they should be able to act when and where they could without needing permission in order to do the most good. Magneto looked at the number he had tattooed on his wrist as a child in the camps and said, “Never again.”
Tony also had the issue that he felt guilty over his failed plan to protect the world that was pretty authoritarian.
I don’t think cap would have been against all oversight, but the one presented was very narrow minded and slow to act until more drastic decisions had to be made, like nuking New York.
But super hero movies have no subtlety!!!
Magneto looked at the number he had tattooed on his wrist as a child in the camps and said, “Never again.”
Magneto is one of the posterboys of the swerve.
TIL cops are the same thing as jews in the holocaust because their departments have a payroll
.world
I don’t understand your comment.
Captain America was alive for WWII
Germany created a registry for certain people and it didn’t end well for said people
Wow… is that your full understanding of Nazi Germany?
The so-called US also created “a registry” for certain people, which inspired Germany for their Nurenberg race-laws.
Captain America was fighting for the US while Jim Crow was active. He probably went to school with people who found Hitler’s ideas great.
It’s far from my only understanding of it, it’s just the first thing that comes to mind for what might make him averse to a list of “others” being created
He probably would have also seen what happened with the US’s registry of Japanese people, which didn’t go great for them either
I think you’re confusing the avengers with the x men storylines.
In civil war, Cap refused to have an accountability program for the avengers because he had the hots for Bucky.
Copaganda
Crazy how much of this stuff is subsidized by or directly financed by the national security state. The most infamous, in my memory anyway, was the Transformers Franchise which got enormous access to US military staff and equipment during the shooting. The end result was a movie that felt more like one of those hookey 80s “Join the Marines” ads than a piece of action cinema.
At least the newer Transformers films are better in that regard, with the latest film not having anything to do with it. Then again I heard they are doing a Transformers x GI Joe film.
Double Woof.
But yes, a lot of this just comes down to who will pay to finance the film. If Raytheon or the US Marines is willing to pick up a big chunk of the production costs, you’re going to keep seeing them in the producer credits and “Special Thanks To” sections.
I kinda get it though…it’s not like these armed forces are producing the movie themselves.
The studio wants to make a movie about/involving these entities. They want it to be as realistic as possible and the entity itself has the authority to give them access that it could also deny.
If you’re in charge of, say, the Marines PR department, you’re constantly trying to make the Corps look good and boost recruitment. If you can do this for next to nothing against your budget by granting access to a studio making a film that will give you essentially free PR, that’s a great move. The bigger the movies potential, the more the entity in question is motivated to support it.
On the other hand, if the film is going to make your organization look bad, no PR person with a functioning brain is going to help that project in any way.
Idunno, I feel like these organizations do enough actually bad things, that I don’t feel the urge to crucify them for cultivating image and working to generate positive PR.
Legally, access to government resources shouldn’t depend on how you portray the government
Legally it’s totally okay, actually.
I know this is all very unpopular opinion here on Lemmy, but it’s fact.
The studio wants to make a movie about/involving these entities.
Studios want cheap special effects budgets and the MIC wants cheap labor. So you get what amounts to a promotional video for branches of the service, paid for out of the operating budgets of these agencies.
Idunno, I feel like these organizations do enough actually bad things, that I don’t feel the urge to crucify them for cultivating image and working to generate positive PR.
I think a big part of the “doing bad things” process is facilitated by whitewashing our activities in Kandahar or Fallujah with “We’re just cool dudes fighting big monsters” action movie propaganda. Is Transformers as egregious as Rambo II or American Sniper? Not strictly. But its geared towards a younger audience, so it can’t do the same kind of blood-drenched jingoism in that way.
I would consider gulling 12-year-olds into aspiring to become conscript killers for the oil & gas industry overseas pretty fucking bad, though.
I would say we peaked copaganda when Sonic 3 had the GUN general guy be a good guy. GUN was never Sonic’s friend. They didnt even play City Escape in that movie. 5/10.
Weird but not that out of the ordinary. Watched the previous two movies before seeing 3 and that general is one odd fellow.
True, but GUN in general is just shown as a really incompetent group. The weird general could have been the only one preventing them from going full antagonist against sonic.
That dude was incompetent himself as evidenced by the previous movies. Highly doubt.
They fucked up by not just dropping the beginning to SA2:B in there. But the government can’t be the bad guy right now or you face Oranginum’s Dementia Wrath.
