A Fistful of Tropes
antipope.org
antipope.org
Since he’s the Antipope, does this mean Elon Musk is the Pope? Loves kitsch Americana, manifest destiny space colonization, and generally bullish on all these tropes…
Nazism is a phenomenon of early 20th century Europe. Even if that political movement drew on some older prejudices, it mixed them with new contemporary concerns, and the total aggregate dates specifically to that era. 19th-century North American manifest destiny was racist, and perhaps for certain people its space-colonization echoes today are, but to apply the label Nazi feels very ahistorical, dishonestly so. One might conclude that the author is being provocative for the sake of profitable online outrage.
Labels are getting thrown around too carelessly. I’m reminded of an HN post I once saw where anti-LGBT attitudes in the Muslim world were called literally fascist, even though they often predate fascism (again, a distinct political phenomenon that appeared at a particular point in time and space) by centuries.
The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.
"Is having friends a conspiracy?" well... maybe, it depends on what you do with the friends. In cases like this you need to be at least a little specific about the implementation.
If this sort of straightforward rhetoric gets even a handful of people to notice that the concrete plan musk has is at least agnostic towards nazi bullshit then it was precisely useful.
In this case it makes sense to focus on europe, because european colonialism has recently & radically shaped the world we live in a way none other has. To the extent non-euro states are currently attempting or achieving empire, they are doing it based on the model and tools of european colonialism. Right now, as discussions of space colonization are taking shape, they are as well.
A joke I made elsewhere in this thread: when pacific islanders roll up trying to create indentured servitude on mars, we can expand & adjust the models and definition as needed. But for now there's no value in attempting to generalize, the narrow model fits the conditions we are presented with.
If you could travel to Mars in an open-air vehicle, and then land and survive on the surface wearing nothing more than ordinary clothing, and get your water from local streams and rivers, and grow crops on the surface with no special effort -- _and_ if Mars was already inhabited by human societies adapted to the land, whose food you could eat, with technology roughly equivalent or somewhat below yours, and political divisions you could exploit, and wealth and products you could extract -- well, then your European-colonialism analogies might have some relevance.
The reality is "the narrow model" (of European colonialism) doesn't remotely fit "the conditions we are presented with"... But we seem to be in the mode of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": when all you know is European history, European history is the only possible model.
(Really, something like the Maori colonization of New Zealand -- which had no pre-existing population, and required the settlers to bring their own crops and scout for resources for making tools -- is _marginally_ more relevant. Even more relevant are things like research stations in Antarctica, where -- again -- there's no pre-existing population, and where you simply _can't_ grow food locally or easily survive outdoors.)
As is Dyson Sphere Program, a game developed by Chinese studio Youthcat Studios?
Okay, enough about China, what about Japan? Legend of Galactic Heroes, Xenosaga, Crest of the Stars, Superdimension Fortress Macross, Space Battleship Yamato, Starship Operators, Bodacious Space Pirates, Star Ocean? White Supremacy seems awfully popular among these non-White creators.
> Antipope acquired its name due to a drunken mistake in 1991. ... "What sitename do you want?" ... "I said, "How about autopope.uucp?" ... "Okay." Hic. Burp. And the next day, I was the somewhat bemused owner of a site called antipope.uucp .. And of course, it seemed reasonable in 1996 to register antipope.org and hang it off my own server in 1997, when I finally got around to a colocation deal.
> So Antipope is not a significant name; it's just a communications error. You have been warned.
If Musk is the opposite of the autopope, what does that make him?
See also; St Peter's cross.
I dunno about that. Years ago, I was (very stupidly) wandering alone in a very bad part of town, and the only other people on the street were the homeless drug addicts, scattered here and there and shuffling about slowly, only dangerous if you let them get within biting range, and I thought, "is this where the zombies thing came from?"
Night of the Living Dead (1968) kicked off the modern zombie trope, and that was around when drug addiction epidemics entered the popular consciousness as well.
https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5390-night-of-the-li...
Shuffling drug addicts is one influence I have no recollection of Romero ever mentioning.
A fistful of tropes indeed :)
Whether intended by Romero or not, according to the documentary A Century of Black Cinema (and other related print works) the film had a profound impact on many African American viewers of the time .. because of the lead, because of the story, etc.
I'd like to put in a rec for https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053454/ "The World, the Flesh and the Devil", which is an apocalypse movie with a slightly different premise: what if the only survivors of an apocalypse in apartheit 1950s America were a black man and a white woman? Contains some great shots of deserted New York and some very intense performances.
The modern (21st C) vogue for zombie apocalypse movies pretty clearly stems from two sources: Japanese video games in the 1990s; and a pair of British films in the early 2000s: Resident Evil (based on one of the aforementioned Japanese video games) and 28 Days Later. (It's a bit hard to argue that both the Japanese and the British were acting out some deep-seated fear of a black slave uprising.)
You apparently missed the explicit references to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Detroit_riot and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots
both of which have been cited by Romero as events he watched while writing the film. I'm guessing that perhaps you skimmed over those and mentally bundled them in with the Kent State shootings as "obviously Vietnam war"?
It's... Almost an accurate description of a zombie story. The goal of a zombie story is usually to just say "Yeah, look at us humans. Even when the world falls apart around us, we'd rather still hurt and murder each other for selfish gain rather than surviving and sticking together." Which is an assumption that has been challenged very often, especially on the scale of humans that most zombie stories operate on (usually no larger than 4 or 5 families that the cast interacts with.)
It's also to the point where it becomes very predictable when a group that seemingly breaks the mold shows up, just to show they're much more morally evil than it first seems. Group is well off during the apocalypse -> they're cannibals. Odd friendly loner -> he's keeping a zombie (usually a loved one) in his basement and wants to feed the main characters to it. Safe bastion with surviving humans -> someone offs themselves and it falls apart infighting because of the added zombie. Every "good" group must be punished because it'd defy the logic of the genre.
Personally I don't really believe much of what zombie stories have to say is accurate - reality has shown us that when humans are put through events where the majority of other humans around them aren't available (ie. Natural disasters), that we tend to stick together and survive together.
In a way it's mindless consumption on the capitalist frame (Romeros film in shopping mall helps) but also represent a broken or wrong search for knowledge, or brains or direction, dysfunction.
Generally zombie movies are really about the non zombies, the humans and their dysfunction.
That certainly isn't correct.
The fear of marijuana addiction epidemics was part of the popular consciousness in the 1930s, pushed in part by Hearst's yellow journalism and Anslinger's propagandizing. We see echos of that fear in the movie "Reefer Madness."
The same for heroin.
There's even earlier moralizing against opium and opium dens, connected with "yellow peril" xenophobia as ensnaring white people into addiction.
(hardly anyone does a zombie movie from the POV of the zombies; most people treat it as given that they are dehumanized, the Other that it's safe - no, morally necessary - to kill)
Are we really at such a point where all thoughts on colonization are exclusively the realm of Western imperialism? There have been plenty of massive human empires where white people weren't involved, and reducing colonization to white supremacy feels more like erasure than anything.