Iron Tank was a cool game

I didn't mean to sound racist, but the theory that America's multi-racial nature is why socialism and labor politics is so weak is a fairly popular one. See the book "It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States." Historically the American South was very socialistic, more so than the Northeast and West parts of the country. The biggest supporters of FDR's New Deals were Southerners. Once the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed though, the South went Republican. People wanted wealth redistribution amongst whites, but not amongst whites and blacks.

If you take a look at where white liberals are most popular, they tend to be in areas where there are few native americans, blacks, or latinos. San Francisco, for example, has few blacks or latinos and is considered one of the most liberal cities in the US. Meanwhile, Oakland, just across the bay, is a black city but it seems most whites are conservative there. You put a significant number of blacks and whites together, and the two sides are going to move to polar opposites on the political spectrum. The economic and educational achievement rates are too different between the two groups, and thus sympathetic feelings towards equality and socialism drop.

I think the US could have socialism but it would probably have to bring back segregation or do mass deportations of non-whites. It seems like only homogenous nations can bring about the system and like it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/americas/8011077.stm
This story came out today:
US President Barack Obama has left open the possibility of prosecuting officials who wrote CIA memos allowing harsh interrogation techniques.

I would like to see Bush/Cheney hanged but hey it's somethin...

>> ^spoco2:
This doesn't get a WTF from me in the sense of 'Holy cow, are they really doing that?'
This gets a WTF from me in the sense of 'Really, people older than about 12 years old find this sort of stuff entertaining?'
Really, Anime fricken leaves me so cold. People wax on and on and on and on about how it's so damn superior to western animation, but really, so much of it is lazy (a LOT has an awful lot of static image in the frame with barely a mouth moving), outlets for the repression of the Japanese culture. The amount of violence and sexual abuse that is in these things is truly horrible. I found the violence funny when I was a kid, but after that, it just bores the pants off me.


How do you know this anime was made for people above the age of 12? Studio Ghibli films are usually for kids, I thought.

As for the rest of your post, I certainly spend more time enjoying animation that's "Made in Japan" than animation that's "Made in America", but I don't see why I should care either way. I'm an American. If I draw a shitty cartoon in my basement, am I automatically an example of shitty American animation? At what point is my failure my own and not my country's? Factor in multi-national corporations/ownership and the whole issue becomes even more muddled. Dreamworks and Pixar, to my knowledge, are the sole two animation companies in "The West" that are admired, and Dreamworks is owned by an Indian company based in Mumbai. Elsewhere, multiple anime titles have been and are being produced by Japanese studios specifically to appeal to "Western" audiences (read: white middle class youth), or at the very least significantly factor in their interests.

Anyway, the giant budget 3D animated movies cost dozens of millions of dollars to produce, and only offer up perhaps 90 minutes of entertainment after years of production time (The Incredibles cost $92 million, Wall-E: a whopping $180 million). Because of the massive budgets these movies require, the scripts of these films rarely take any risks. Everything's rated G and has a story that is very "lowest common denominator" in my eyes. I'm getting far too old to enjoy these films beyond their technical merits, since their target audience is primarily below the age of 14.

Meanwhile, partially due to smaller budget requirements in anime production, I can choose all sorts of anime that tries to cater to a slightly older crowd. Very little anime attempts to appeal to anyone above the age of 30, but even in the "age 13-18" type shows, there's interesting themes to chew on. One of my fav animes, Gundam, is basically Star Trek with robots. Its creators have described the show as a humanist show, and the shows take on imperialism, racism, and war really line up with what I saw in the humanist Star Trek shows (I loved TNG/DS9). Since Star Trek has been dead for a while, it's nice to have a place to go to (btw: the upcoming movie will abandon much of what the shows were about in favor of violence and sex). Most Gundam shows are about a teenage boy who hops into a war robot, gets traumatized by war, manipulated by corrupt politicians into fighting questionable wars, and deals with issues of imperialism. Not the most intellectually challenging stuff in the world, I know, but it sure beats what I've seen in stuff like 24 or Heroes and a lot of other dramas on the major networks. And those are aimed at considerably older demographics. I think the much smaller budget requirements of anime helps studios create things for niche demographics (such as sci-fi loving humanists) and that's good for me. Are they technically superior to something like Wall-E? Not by a long shot. But a 1,000 minute Gundam series didn't cost $180 million every 90 minutes either, and yet still left me more entertained.

>> ^xxovercastxx:
>> ^xxovercastxx:
I hope you're kidding. After watching this I'm upset that we only dropped 2 nukes.
Too soon?


Too white

I liked the Gundam SEED music

ohhh this must be the inspiration for the dancing large-testicled squirrel animated GIF I saw..

o_O

ymm i love shark fin soup

I thought the race war stuff was pretty nutty, but a BBC article I read reported that the drug cartels in Mexico are so heavily armed that they could probably overthrow the Mexican government if they wanted to.

Arghhhhh

BreakstheEarth, ironically the very words "China" and "Chinese", along with hundreds of other words English has come up with, are ways of calling people things they don't call themselves. In the popular languages of China, the country is not called "China" or anything remotely resembling that word. Every language has a billion names for other places and people that aren't used by those people to refer to themselves. Personally I think this system is pretty inefficient. Imagine if Barack Obama was had ten thousand different names, when the world could just use the one he used himself: Barack Obama!

RhesusMonk, I think a LOT of Chinese people do in fact want to be more like white people, or at least be more marketable to white business interests (not "Western", as that would include blacks, Latinos, etc. too). We don't adopt black or Latino names, we adopt white ones. If black Americans had most of the world's wealth, we'd adopt black names. It's nice of you to think that there's no self-inflicted racism going on here, but there really is.

Ooh, story time!! I was born in Texas into a family that came from China. Most of my friends growing up were either white or Latino, so I wasn't very Chinese except in the eyes of non-Chinese people. I moved to San Francisco about 5 years ago and took some Cantonese classes in the hopes that I could learn to speak to my grandma finally. Because of this, and the fact that my Mandarin-speaking dad was far away in China, for one semester or two, I decided to stop using my "white" name of Jerry and use my Mandarin Chinese name of Shih-Chieh. The results were interesting. Many whites and others reacted positively to the name, saying "hey that's a cool name", especially when they found out that it basically means "the world's hero." Other whites seemed to get upset that I wasn't using "Jerry". I asked one of my teachers to call me Shih-Chieh and she got upset, refused and called me Jerry for the rest of the semester. A couple other white students seemed to support that decision. But the second teacher of that class was also white and was like "hey, that's a cool name!"

Speech class was cooler.. we had to introduce ourselves in the beginning of class, and so everyone was forced to say everyone's name until they knew it. I didn't get any probs there. Anyway, what was interesting is that it seemed like other Chinese Americans were less happy about my using my Chinese name, than non-Chinese. Lotsa Chinese Americans (US born ones anyway) seemed reluctant to call me by my Chinese name. I think it brought up issues of assimilation. Are you supposed to be proud of your culture, or seek to destroy it and assimilate into white culture? How far can that take you? Will you have an easier life if you mimic whites? Most Chinese Americans will answer yes to that last one with little doubt. There's also a lot of issues about "self-hate". Some data suggests that the average Chinese person has 1/20th the wealth the average white American has. Living in one of the most capitalist nations on earth, where the wealth of someone is very much an indicator of status, it's hard to be proud of one's Chinese-ness if "Chinese" is synonymous with extremely poor.

Another story..My mom also told me how when she was working minimum wage in Texas, blacks and Latino coworkers would sometimes ask her for her Chinese name, so they could call her by that. For them it was an issue of pride, and her white name was probably seen as selling out.

In the end, I reverted back to "Jerry", but still have some friends who call me Shih-Chieh. Am I selling out for using Jerry again? Probably. But I was never really a part of Chinese culture to begin with, and I've been unemployed for so long that even if there's only a 5% chance of an employer somehow discriminating against my name when they see my resume, I'd rather not take that chance. I gotta eat, dammit.

yea i was gonna guess Seattle. That one place looked like the convention center i worked at for a bit