What about the spray tan eccenric NY city real estate agent that shits on a golden toliet with an army of yall-qaeda terrorists
Too ludicrous even for a Bond film. Even a Roger Moore Bond film.
God that is so true. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so true.
Even an Austin Powers movie?
He might fit as an Austin Powers villain, especially if he had a bag of Cheetos in every scene.
Yuge bag. The biggest. No one has a bigger bag than me. Not even Chester. Great guy, Chester. Not as great as me but, who is?
It’s not gonna make his hands look any bigger though.
I heard the Bond movies got more serious after the Austin Powers movies came out.
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Not even for a Paw Patrol movie.
Lex Luther would call him a cliche.
Let’s be honest, even Lloyd Kaufman would’ve dismissed that as too on the nose for even him to direct that movie…
Biff?
Basically all billionaires are super villains
Paul McCartney is a billionaire.
True story. After the 2016 election, there was a panel discussion. They had all the creators of the top US political TV dramas; The West Wing: Scandal: Veep: House of Cards and others. Every writer and producer said the same thing. If they’d had a character who said that they ‘liked soldiers who didn’t get captured’ the advertisers and network bosses would have demanded that the character be hated by all Americans.
South Park And SNL both commented that our 2016 situation was too ridiculous to parody
Back in the 1960s, it was a common joke that ronald reagan would never be President because no one would vote for a guy who co-starred with a monkey.
Today’s GOP would ignore reagan and run the monkey
Heck dude at this point I’d run to vote for the monkey!
George Santos has entered the chat.
So…that story basically confirms all programming (I mean not cooking shows) is propaganda, doesn’t it?
By that logic, every single drama since the dawn of time is ‘propaganda.’
Propaganda implies that the message being pushed is for the sake of convincing the population of some doctrine. The network is trying to cater to an already held public belief for the sake of dollars.
Some is just entertainment, but yeah, most is trying to sell a message
Dyslexic ass universe we live in . The 2020’s were supposed to be ‘the future’, an advanced post-scarcity world. We got a post-satire world instead
This is what we get for over indulging on irony starting in the 90s.
Nothing has meaning anymore.
But maybe correlation isn’t causation…
I’ve become more and more aware of “Irony poisoning” in every facet of our culture, from movies to memes to every other human interaction.
Maybe because of social media influence, we’re so scared that holding any kind of sincerity will reveal a vulnerability that will be ruthlessly attacked…
We must be ready to say “No I don’t mean that seriously” and change our projection within a moment’s notice when the culture winds change again.
It’s so bad anymore that people now need to add “un-ironically” to explain that they genuinely feel anything at all…
… and sometimes that’s said ironically.
we’re so scared that holding any kind of sincerity will reveal a vulnerability that will be ruthlessly attacked…
Ian Bogost defines this sort of thing as ironoia in his book Play Anything. Holding the world at a distance through ironic engagement.
What you are pointing out is slightly different, but very much along the same lines.
I found the book helpful to illuminate how ironic culture was a bad force when growing up and going through vulnerable stages.
Yeah I’m trying to learn to be sincere and it’s hard. When all your culture has emphasized for your entire life is irony and exaggeration it’s hard to judge scale and to be sincere. But it’s important, how can we dealienate without being able to sincerely express ourselves
Thanks so much for the book share! I’m really interested in reading this! (I love studying games. Hope to make them someday!)
Especially if it highlights this particular issue, I’m really interested in reading what he’s got to say on the matter.
If you look at 70s SF you get closer to the real 2020s.
AI taking over the world: Colossus: The Forbin Project
An Infectious agent causing problems: The Andromeda Strain
Human pollution causing massive issues: Soylent Green
Oh shit Forbin mentioned in the wild
in science fiction the AI that takes over the world is sapient. usually as intelligent as a person if not more. reality is dumber. we’re just trying to surrender the world to a series of algorithms that can’t tell how many fingers there are in a hand or which way they bend, or what a fucking fire hydrant looks like.
That is in movies and books.
In the real world the turning test is not proof that an artificial system is sentient but only if/when a human thinks it is. It is not about the intelligence/sentience of the system but the intelligence of the human observing that means the test is passed.
Sadly, for large parts of humanity, text based LLMs have already passed the turning test…
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Have we forgotten about Trump, the Koch brothers, hmm who else.
The current movie appears to be a bond idiocracy crossover.
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However, people still had the best of intentions despite their limited brain capacity. They just didn’t know how to actually fix the world.
And real life we have people actively denying climate change despite the obvious effects not out of idiocy, but because they are literally being paid to, and because it makes a decent wedge issue for political gain.
I mean I guess the paid shills are part of it, but there is also a large group of useful but ultimately well-meaning idiots repeating their propaganda. And even disregarding that nobody really knows how to fix climate change once you start adding stipulations like not crashing the bejesus out of the holy economy, so not that far off I would say.
An idiocracy, they actively want to fix the climate problems, they are just literally too stupid to use water instead of Gatorade for plants. Because everyone is taking a slogan more literally than actual evidence.
We want to fix climate change too, but we are Not Sure about how to handle the Brawndo stock crashing and how long it takes the nitrate levels in the soil to normalise once we switch back to water. See CO² emissions still not decreasing but rather increasing for decades now despite everybody knowing it’s the major cause of global warming, never mind that we would have to pull CO² back out of the atmosphere to stop the damage it will cause in the future from happening.
Camacho was fully aware there was a problem, acknowledge the people who were suffering and the Direct effects of the problem, and put the smartest man in the world in charge of fixing the problem.
My man Camacho also nearly killed Not Sure in a monster truck arena because of the unforeseen stock crash resulting in like half the population being unemployed and the soil nitrate level delay hiding that the solution worked, the latter being revealed Just In Time™ for dramatic effect.
It is not an app comparison, because Society is not the way it is because it is stupid, but because it is actively being manipulated by malefactors and bad faith agents.
Meh, it’s both stupidity and malice IMHO. When in doubt refer to Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Sometimes nobody having THE solution to a problem is a bitter part of reality that we have to face, and I fear the issue of climate change in particular is one of those problems. Existing malice notwithstanding.
Can we start talking about those who told the truth more than those who lie? Here’s a short starting list:
Gary Webb
Milton William Cooper
Bill Hicks
Julian Assange
Edward Snowden
Anyone else?
Gary Webb killed himself, Milton Cooper was a quack, and Julian Assange is a far-right wing tool.
If he had released everything he had rather than just what he had on his enemies I would respect him a bit more.
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Did his wife leave him after watching spend too much time with Epstein or was that Bill Gates?
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Apparently not.
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Gary Webb killed himself,
So did Hunter S. Thompson. Van Gogh too.
Good point. I totally forgot about them.
Snowden was also a right wing tool. Which is why he suddenly developed a conscience when the wrong guy got elected.
Yeah, You mean all that cocaine he had?
There’s a jewish fascist
Netanyahu, Shapiro, prager, or someone else?
Yes!
to be fair, what do you expect from a guy who is part of the liberal NATIONALISTS
Wonder who the liberation concerns with that oxymoron
My gen x friends complained about the villains in Captain Planet, but the we got Trump.
Also, Tomorrow Never Dies was loosely based on Rupert Murdoch.
Rich Biff in Back to the Future 2 was supposedly based on Trump.
And alternate-1985 Lorraine was based on Ginger Lynn Allen?
My dad complained that Captain Planet was “libtard environmentalist propaganda” 30 years ago. Some things never change. Now it’s just Trump instead of Limbaugh.
These aren’t even people who publicity identify as conservative. Publicly…
They basically just stood still long enough and became conservatives that watch Daily Show.
Ope, yeah that’s a fate I dread and actively work to avoid.
Britain is not holding up its end here, producing the mega-shagger we need to save us all.
Groovy baby.
Well they tried with Boris Johnson, but he just couldn’t quite make the cut.
He was more like that Bond parody with Rowan Atkinson. Bumbling and fumbling while bragging and shagging.
Johnny English
Hopefully not Richard Branson.
Bezos also seems pretty villain-y.
Yes, but instead of a Bond villain he’s more of an Austin Powers villain
“Tear down that bridge so my yacht can pass”
More like Lex Luthor
Bezos wins in the looks department, but all billionaires are various degrees of Lex Luthor. My pick is Elon Musk because he’s more overtly evil and he kind of has the mad scientist backstory.
I wouldn’t put Musk and scientist in the same sentence.
https://electrek.co/2023/08/23/elon-musk-lego-cybertruck-quality-leaked-tesla-email/
If he knew anything about science then he’d know about termal expansion…
I wasn’t trying to accuse him of being an actual scientist or engineer. But he paid good money for the backstory!
Hey, there’s also a New York businessman obsessed with gold and status who has political influence and ties to the ex KGB agent with goals of overturning democracy
Is he though? More like an incompetent businessman aligns himself with evil baddie to stave off company bankruptcy. In exchange he pawns off state secrets and tries to destabilize the world’s largest economy. Eventually incompetent business man either meets his end shanked in a jail shower or evil baddie will conveniently dispose of him out a 10 storey window once he is no longer worth the trouble.
You see him dancing along with Mr Tesla on a Tesla cruise ship
We still have Murdoch media empire. The secretive media mogul pulling the strings from the shadows at the behest of the rich and powerful
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Let me FTFY:
Penchant for poisoning, and having comrades mysteriously fall from very high places
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Real estate baron that desperately wants to be dictator is pretty stupid too.
Baron is a bit generous no?
I’m using it as a slur.
Probably talking about the son
Not many peerages lower. Baronet? Knight?
Stick in the mud.
The real fiction is that government agencies would be trying to rein them in. If Musk came up with a ray that turned people into eldrich-style horrors, those agencies would be lined up as buyers.
Austin Powers at least got phallic shaped rockets right though
Look I get it’s a joke but calling Elon and Putin “our two main antagonists” is mind numbingly stupid and doesn’t seem to be the punchline.
The only group who I can think of that would be true for would be college freshman from upper middle class backgrounds that get their news exclusively from social media and do not have any attention span as a result of the Adderall shortage.
Putin has started the largest land war in Europe since WW2. Elon does shit that wouldn’t even put him in the top 5 of evil billionaires. He’s just super active on social media so anyone who puts in the slightest amount of effort can see what he’s up to.
Elon is a bit worse than that: he also pollutes our night sky with thousands of satellites for a service that is a capitalist initial landgrab of space (he does it quickly too so he can skip regulation), and then based on a whim and his ill informed political views use said satellite service to meddle in global politics because again, no regulation. So of course still nowhere near the ex kgb agent, but yeah, a pretty big dick too.
He also spent a bucket load darkening those satellites (with moderate success) when astronomers complained
Also he’s not the only one wanting a massive satellite data constellation, and he is the only one working hard on making space access cheaper
Elon is not just super active in social media. He destroyed Twitter for fun. I didn’t use Twitter before, but for someone that used Twitter (which is most young people) I see how he can seem a villain. Sure, not at the scale of Putin, but way more than “super active”.
For fun? He did it because he thought he could do better. Turns out he couldn’t though
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I’d say hyperloop was a scam, and scammers are bad people.
Hyperloop was a napkin sketch that he gave to the world, it wasn’t a product of any of his companies just an idea he thought might be good, but which he was unwilling to try
The boring company was created by Musk for this, you are not removing his responsibility.
Beats me how you came to this conclusion. Me and my coworkers shit talk this guy all day whilst barely making more than minimum wage- Billionaires shouldn’t exist period, much less ones that don’t pay taxes and who buy entire social media platforms just to flood them with hate speech and ban critics…
I guess it sucks that he broke one of the more damaging internet services
On his good side he made electric cars cool, he made space access cheaper and is working on making it cheaper still
I wouldn’t call anything Tesla does cool. The cybertruck? That’s a bootleg delorean and a death trap too. Space? You’re joking. In my opinion, that’s the last thing that should be privatized. Elon specifically is responsible for a lot of space junk already. And don’t even get me started on how unethical and inane neuralink is…
The way he ruined Twitter, the whole Hyperloop scheme, his spreading of conspiracies… what was the last positive he brought to society? Starlink? And he managed to be an ass about that too.
I could’ve agreed with you maybe 2/3 years ago, but he’s gone full mask off recently. I wouldn’t label him as a “main” antagonist but he definitely is one.
Let’s not forget his recent lawsuit against Media Matters for accurately reporting on the hate speech on xitter.
He managed to be an ass about it in a way that helped Russia’s invasion and got Ukrainian soldiers killed.
No no, you got everything wrong, he just wants the war to stop, it only casually happened that that particular action was detrimental to Ukraine. He definitely doesn’t have ties to Russia, so it could also happen the other way around. Just wait. Any minute now.
Virtually all the good things Musk has supposedly done were done by other people. He’s just an asshole with enough money to buy a whole lot of name recognition.
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You cant calculate net positive based on actuals, but also include opportunity cost, and regardless, simple utilitarianism is morally reprehensible imho. Someone invents the cure for all cancers, and only commits the occasional rape or murder. Net positive? Hero/villain?
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I’d say 50/50 as much bad as good. But it’s turning in to 60/40 fast (in a bad way)
Agreed, he might be a bit far fetched with his paedophile jokes but for the most part he’s just a bit spontaneous and shortsighted
