It’s not not cyberpunk.

It’s close enough and shares enough of the same things to be analyzed as part of the genre.

I do think that to a large extent the big evil bowling ball of doom is supposed to abstractly represent capital or something adjacent.

Things like the depiction of the indigenous resistance movement as unsophisticated dupes and terrorists merits analysis; why did the French director depict them this way? How can this be a reflection of French colonial history? Same with the depiction of the white Archeologists and the presumably middle easter kid subjected to colonialism in the beggining though I think there’s less there.

Leelu can be analyzed through the “born sexy yesterday” trope and there’s a lot of questions to ask from a Feminist slant.

The movie actually acknowledges some of the harms and contradictions of capitalism, while underplaying others. Showing the relationship between Corben as a cabby working for Zorg and ultimately being one of the people who thwarts Zorg is nice.

The decision to never have the protagonists and the antagonists directly interact is a neat one and opens up some very good questions about narrative norms - turns out the hero doesn’t actually need to confront the villain!

It does have a lot of cyberpunk themes; mighty and powerful corporations and governments can’t save themselves so they need a working class guy and his weird buddies to save the world. The upper classes are depicted as a gaggle of decadent idiots who have no idea what’s happening, while the corporate leader is a hyper-competent bastard who completely understands all the harm his sytem causes and loves it.

And it’s also just a silly adventure film with lots of style and cool visuals and a sappy power of love resolution.

Yeah, Gandhi is a shithead propped up because the liberal view if passive submission to state violence is politically useful for maintaining control. The British really gave up in India because Gandhi said he was no longer going to tell the armed factions not to fight, and the Brits decided they couldn’t afford to fight a real rebellion.

Big oof. Eco-fascism ahoy!

You’d think “people can’t afford to fuck” would be some kind of wake up call for capital.

“M*ngoloid” is an old eugencist :skull: phrenologist bullshit term from when psuedo-scientists tried to classify “The races”. It was used to disparage people with Downs syndrome by asserting they resembled Asian people.

But that just sparks off a war with Taiwan. As far as I know the ROC still claims to own Mongolia for some bizarre reason.

Social engineering works. Like really, really, shockingly well. The easiest way to get classified information out of people is to ask politely.

This isn’t accurate at all. The fighting happened when would-be insurgents ambushed pla troops. The pla had unarmed soldiers in the square for a long time. And i mean really unarmed. No helmets, no shields, no batons, no tear gas. When things finally touched off with the cia-backed "pro democracy) faction that was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the people involved the pla ordered everyone out of the square and everyone left. That was it. When the cia backed wannabe insurgents started attacking the pla everyone was ordered to leave and they left. They didn’t do any brutal state repression. The cpc was in an extremely awkward position bc the vast majority of people involved in the June 4th incident were protesting against Dengist market liberalization, asking for a return to a more socialist economy. Others were protesting the restrictive social norms of contemporary China, arguing that the restrictive social norms were anti-communsit and that people should have more freedom to do simple stuff like publicly date and be publicly affectionate.

Ultimately a big part of the reason there was little reprisal is bc the cpc couldn’t crack down on pro-socialist protestors, and because in the end the whole thing ended mostly peacefully. The narrative around it is so utterly twisted and distorted. And if you ask people in China about it they don’t understand why westerners think it’s important. It’s just a minor incident in history from a long time ago.

From what i understand the vast, overwhelming majority of students were protesting against the Dengist reforms.

About 300 people died, including PLA soldiers, in street fighting blocks away from the square, which started when unarmed pla soldiers were attacked with firebombs in their trucks and apcs and burned alive.

The students in the square left when ordered with little if any violence. The whole narrative around the June 4th incident is unalloyed propaganda and revisionist history.

And the color revolt was only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the people there. The revisionism is disgusting.

Artemis is fun. Get a bunch of nerds in a room, do star strek stuff. There’s a bunch of Artemis knock offs but I don’t know that any have really beat the OG.

That’s nice.

Statists using tribunals to try other statists is the use of state authority and the use of the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If “Authoritarian” means anything at all then using the power of the state to prosecute people who are doing state stuff in ways you don’t like is authoritarian.

Sankara was murdered 31 years after the revolt in Hungary was put down. He supported the USSR. He was, by definition, a tankie.

I didin’t justify anything. I just told you what happened.

Presumably the young men of Ukraine will realize that throwing themselves on to the enemy guns is a losing proposition at some point before that but who knows?

How does that saying go?

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

I keep telling everyone to read Sun Tzu because he’s very specific, numerous times, about not doing this specific thing. : p

There are a finite number of 18-35 year old men.

Open circulatory system gang stay wining.

Good to know. Thank you for the information.