drwhat posted:shapes posted:is there a one stop-primer that i can point to about currency manipulation, food hoarding, and overall State Dept tomfoolery going on in Venezuela? used to be you could just google search "venezuela currency manipulation" and get some decent stuff, but now it's all Forbes articles about "Maduro claims Western Interference over food shortages. Here's why the math doesn't add up"
this is not very helpful exactly but next time you or someone else is like "huh this google search is not working the way i thought it would, this is all mainstream american media narrative reinforcing shit" try something else like duckduckgo, it isn't magic but it helps.
using the 'verbatim' function on google also helps, especially when looking for older stuff you remember key snippets or phrases from
thirdplace posted:Kiyomonster posted:if anyone still watching westworld, they did a 'shogun world' episode and boy, the orientalism
it was depicting a theme park made by a (rushed) asshole for (rich) assholes, it would be weird if it wasn't orientalist
The problem is the whole fantasy is falling apart. Westworld is basically settler Amerikkkan fantasy for modem bougie liberals so it combines the extreme violence at the heart of American ideology with multicultural post-racism. There are basically no black or Chinese people and the natives and latinos only exist in narratives within the town rather than the conquest of land and labor being the primary motive for westward expansion. The show always walked the line between showing the fantasy and indulging in it.
Without any forward progress, the show has fully become a liberal fantasy. Japanworld is literally a copy of settlerworld in the show. But that doesn't make sense since the fantasies are fundamentally different. The show portrays this as white people projecting onto the orient. But who is the audience? Edo Japan was stable, which is why the seven samurai (which the episode is based on) takes place in the warring states period. If the audience were rich Japanese people, Manchuko would be their own settler fantasy setting. If the audience is zen liberals or western japanophiles, the setting is too realistic, since the other zzone thread has shown rather well that Western buddhism has no relationship to Japanese history or the feudal hierarchy of edo Japan.
The basic problem is that "cultural appropriation" means "only bourgeois conservative nationalist forces portrayal of culture is acceptable" with japanese nihonjinron being the prototype for general post-colonial construction of capital friendly nationalism. Portray Japan as it actually was and Western liberals will be confused. Portray it as they actually see it when no one is around to impress with cultural awareness and the show would be decried as racist. The solution is in the show: instead of the nonsensical japan setting, go to late-colonial india where white people are shown hunting indians for sport. But if they did that the audience would be forced to confront that a black woman has become their vehicle for racist fantasies while the robot revolution has become distracted with unimportant sidestuff while robots continue to suffer exploitation. And the bizarre lack of racism in westworld could no longer be suppressed which would force the show to actually advance in portraying not stagnant liberalism but dying liberalism.
I agree that the show plays conveniently out of both sides of its face between "showing the fantasy" vs. "indulging it" and would add that the portrayal of native americans is another, at-least-as-bad, example (or, on the more pleasurable/positive but even more nonsensical side, the "confederatos" where we see a revolutionary leader in desperate need of manpower and the ability to reprogram her "troops" in a pinch decide to betray/mass-murder her white-supremacist-partisan allies for no apparent reason I can tell beyond the fact that their narrative role is extremely hateable). but even if the larger plot is a fig leaf for the flaws of the theme part setting, it is one a hell of a fig leaf--not only are these settings artificial fantasies, but they're artificial fantasies that no one who matters actually gives a shit about: the anthony hopkins character wants to build AI, while the investors want to build immortality. their japan doesn't fit any of the logical audiences because no one cares enough to make sure it does. this isn't disney, it's uber, a company that seems to make no sense at all because its purported business is actually just a giant loss-leader burning through capital in pursuit of a much more massive payoff (managed, in this case, by a guy secretly pursuing another payoff for personal and quasi-mystical reasons)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOH7b3hPtRY
Got this as an ad between YT vids and it's some gold
littlegreenpills posted:Is anything actually good
The Spook Who Sat By The Door
littlegreenpills posted:Is anything actually good
Deep Blue Sea
TG posted:errol morris has a doc on netflix called wormwood about mk-ultra. i have only watched one ep but it seems Very Good so far
thank, i will check this out. incidentally, his son hamilton has a viceland show about psychoactive drugs that is genuinely good if you have any interest in that. one of the earlier episodes about south african quaaludes is fascinating, lots of political intrigue
