#This is their narrative purpose and has been since fucking Plato.

[regallibellbright]

Bro’s playing Chrono Trigger, hopefully with intent to finish this time, I suspect.

I stalled out when playing DS during the final sidequests, but therefore functionally played the entire game and have been trying very hard not to spoil That Particular Plot Point. (If you have to ask you don’t know which it is.)

This led to me going “wait, how far in is he” after he got kicked out of Zeal the first time, which led me down the rabbit hole of the Chrono Compendium wiki, which does not just have theory pages but DISSERTATIONS on how time travel would have to work in these games. So now it’s 3:45 AM. I’m pleased with how I have spent this time.

[mst3kproject]

602: Invasion USA

 This is not the 1985 movie with Chuck Norris.  I suppose I should watch that one someday as an Episode that Never Was, but for now we have this.  Its basic purpose is the same as that of Rocket Attack USA, to scare the audience into patriotic loyalty, and it shockingly manages to be even worse at it.

A bunch of people are sitting around in a bar talking about the universal draft when an unnamed country suddenly declares war on the United States, and… well, that’s it, really.  Stock footage of anti-aircraft guns fires on stock footage of planes. Stock footage of atom bombs is dropped on stock footage of cities.  Stock footage of warships crosses stock footage of oceans.  All while the so-called characters watch it happening on television and remark on how they can’t believe this is real… no wonder, since none of it is happening in the same dimension they’re in.

I refuse to call Invasion USA a movie.  It doesn’t qualify.  It’s more like four newsreels in a trench coat and a fake beard, trying to pretend they’re a narrative.  Take, for example, the part where Boulder Dam is destroyed.  We see stock footage of the planes.  We see stock footage of the dam.  We see stock footage of a mushroom cloud.  And then stock footage of a flood.  The closest this comes to interacting with the characters fleeing from it is that we see the flood footage back-projected behind their car, and then the camera rolls over and we cut to some of their possessions which have been tossed into a river.  It’s all so obviously a juxtaposition rather than a series of events.  You can’t help but roll your eyes.

The nearest this comes to being interesting or exciting is some of the stuff we see in the military stock footage.  The audience doesn’t exactly feel involved in this – it’s just film of random Things Happening so it doesn’t tell a story, except in retrospect when the TV news anchor tells us what’s supposed to be going on, but there are some spectacular plane crashes and so forth.  Of course, then you remember that none of this is special effects.  You’re watching real human beings die gruesome deaths.  That sucks the fun out of it pretty fast.

It’s not until the last twelve minutes that we get anything that might be called a special effect.  The bad guys nuke New York, and while what we see looks nothing like the aftermath of an atomic bombing, there is an actual miniature building that falls apart, dumping Styrofoam boulders on our heroes.  This is followed by a mediocre matte paining, but one that still does the job its meant to do.  It’s actually kind of a shock, since up until now the war has seemed to go on all around this room but never to enter it.

That’s one halfway-effective moment out of an entire seventy-three minutes of film, however, and the rest is all garbage. Not only is there the endless stock footage, there’s also the bad guys.  They’re never identified as Soviets, though they speak with Russian accents, because the film-makers didn’t want Invasion USA to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (thus making them more sensible than the people who made The Interview).  Much is made of the fact that they’re wearing American uniforms, but the one time they try to make a plot point out of it, a guard sees through the ruse immediately. The real reason is once again to avoid mentioning a country, and so they can use the stock footage of American soldiers to represent both sides.

The baddies espouse ideals of equality, freedom, and peace, but the only ones we actually meet are a couple of bullying, alcoholic rapists. This serves its purpose but the writers apparently see no contradiction between portraying ‘bad’ characters as drunks and having the ‘good’ characters sitting around drinking for half the run time.  I guess whether alcohol is good or bad depends on how nicely you’re dressed and what shape of glass you’re drinking it from. Not to mention that the psychic who can be seen as a bully and a rapist based on what he does to the other characters’ minds, but I’ll get back to that.

How long the whole war takes to happen I have no idea.  A few days must have passed, since a guy drives from San Francisco to somewhere in Arizona, and somebody makes a reference to ‘months’, but the way we keep cutting back to the same people in the same bar gives the impression that the invasion of America happens in about twenty minutes.  Maybe this is intentional, since the story, of course, ends with the revelation that it was alllll a dreeeeeeam.  Or maybe everybody was just too incompetent to show us time passing.

The ending attempts to work on multiple levels and is shit on all of them.  First, there’s the ending to the narrative we’ve been watching.  This isn’t really a story, since there’s no plot as such, merely things happening that the characters cannot possibly do anything about. They’re powerless in the face of these overwhelming events, and once the factory owner is shot after refusing to build tanks for the invaders, it doesn’t take the audience long to realize that this fate will be pretty universal.  Sure enough! The rancher is drowned when the flood from the broken dam sweeps him away, along with his wife and kids to make it extra-tragic.  The politician is killed in the attack on Washington.  The reporter is shot for picking a fight with a bad guy, and his girlfriend leaps out the window to her death.

Then of course they wake up back in the bar, and learn that it was all a dream, or rather a vision, instilled in their minds by a psychic who hypnotized them with swirling whiskey!  I’m inclined to be slightly more forgiving of this than I normally would be, since it was sort of set up and at this point there’s really nowhere else to go.  It’s still an obnoxious way to end a story and there’s a reason your high school English teacher told you not to do it.  Some dialogue establishes they all had the same vision, and then the psychic informs them that this is what the future will be if they don’t take steps to avoid it.

Uh, excuse me, what?  Nothing we’ve just seen suggests that any of these five people were in a particular position to save the world.  They can do small things – the woman goes to get a job at the blood bank, the factory owner decides to make tank parts instead of tractors, and so on (are tractors not important?  Call me a commie but I’d rather my tax money be spent on feeding people than on blowing them up).  But none of this will prevent the invasion we saw and could only make the slightest of differences in its outcome.  Are the five of them somehow crucial in a way the narrative didn’t bother to make clear?

Of course, that’s not actually the point here.  The real moral of the story is that we all need to do what we can to grease the wheels of the war machine, or we’re gonna end up calling each other Comrade.  So… what was the psychic’s goal, here?  Did he just decide to scare the pants off these people because he was annoyed by their opinions about the draft?  Or is he going from bar to bar, instilling this vision of the future in every person he meets one at a time?  And of course we have only his word for it that it is the future. The bartender does call him a con man, and for all we know he made the whole thing up.

What about the woman and the reporter, who saw themselves falling in love and then being tragically separated?  They didn’t consent to that.  The illusion of the relationship, with all its emotional, psychological, and sexual consequences, was forced upon them by an outside influence.  They decide to use this second chance to pursue it in a situation where it might not end in tragedy, but who’s to say it’ll work without that background?  They would have every right to object to this violation of their minds… as would the others, who saw their families die and their homes destroyed.

The final shot gives us a quote from George Washington: to prepare for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.  I don’t know if Washington ever said that but if he did he stole it.  Si vis pacem, para bellum is a Latin adage, first attested in Vegetius, although versions also appear in Plato and Sima Qian.  It’s as old as humanity, and attributing it to Washington is just one more attempt to tug on the patriotic heartstrings.  Of course, if you consider the Romans, the Athenians, and the ancient Chinese… yep, this is something said by empire builders.

You know what movies like this have taught me?  That propaganda film-making is really hard.  If you want to deliver a message without annoying the audience then it has to emerge naturally from the story being told, rather than being imposed upon it like, say, the save-the-oceans message in Gamera vs Zigra. Then the story also has to make sense outside of that message, it has to feel like it would be worth telling even if the moral weren’t attached – Pacific Rim has a moral about working together, but it’s also just enjoyable to watch.  Invasion USA is not like that.  It exists only to shove its message down our throats and it isn’t even any good at it.  Fuck this stock footage montage pretending to be a movie.

[ramrodd]

Plot In Biblical Narrative

COMMENTARY:

I endorse this particular ministry and video. At some point, I will probably put a little money into it because I see it as a shrewed investment in the quality of my life, moving forwarad, in an enlightened self-interest kind of way.  

Christianity is an exercise in Enlightened Self- Interest. Anyone who has read Ayn Rand will recognize her formulation in this, that being "rational self-interest". As a sound bite, I stipulate to it's facial qualities. How that plays out ethically is at the core of philosophy as an inquiry into what we know, ethics being an element of philosophy, philosophy being the "infinite game" and ethics being a "finite game" subset to philosophy.  This is the moral context of "rational self-interest". This context contains "Trust" as a finite dimension.

Rand's system of thought, such as it is, represents itself as a creature of philosophy as the infinite game. In Rand's mind, her world view is perfectly coincident with "Eternal Truth" in what I would characterize as Platonic in nature, but she wouldn't agree. I have no way of knowing how she would construct this same relationship with grammer that coincides with any reality beyond it's dictionary meaning and Rand's ecology of the mind.  However, I think she would stipulate to the proposition that her thinking represented "Eternal Truth" in an unalienable kind of way. Whatever that means. In any event, that is the market place of ideas and the ethical arena she proposes to dominate with rational self-interest as she defines it, "rational" being the necessary common denominator. This is true of practically any alleged philosopher who appeals to "Reason" as their abiding muse.

As a Christian, I can stipulate to Philosophy as an infinite game as defined by James Carse in "Finite and Infintie Games". Epistemologically, Plato's theory of the Forms is a useful way to understand the Mind of The One, Or Mind. Or The One.  If you see what I mean. Socrates is all about "rational self-interest" as a way to guide personal behavior if you are Iago and you want to be able to fuck up the system to your advatage and/or amusement.  Of course, Iago was as perfectly self-aware as Jesus was in a Satanic doppleganger kind of way. Socrates was teaching insurrection, purposefully, in much the same way Newt Gingrich has been doing it since before he got into politics. One of the things you do in Counter-Intelligence and Counter-Insurgency is to spot the people doing this kind of thing, how Gingrich and Bannon accumulate power.  It's what Cornelius is describing in the Gospel of Mark: how does Jesus do the things He does and to what purpose?  In the case of Jesus, the Romans considered him to be pretty benign and to Herod, He was sort of a Cat Steven's kind of dog and pony show.  Jews didn't generally practice magic, it being a stoning offense and all, but here was this guru with more women around Him than you could shake a stick at, doing magic tricks.  And he, Herod, had steady reports from Levi, a very successful tax franchiser, with brilliant ethical discourse.  And Cornelius's spy network spotted Him coming out of the water as something special and that's how the Gospel of Mark was conceived before the facts. In Co-Intel and Co-In, you look for people like Jesus and Iago.

And Newt Gingrich and Steve Bannon, who err on the side of Iago. Politically, Mike Pence and Betsy DeVos are aligned with Gingrich and Bannon, but Pence is just too fucking dumb to know when someone besides his wife is pulling him around by his pecker while Betsy DeVos is what Jesus means by "The Love of Money is the Root of all Evil".  The Evangelical "spiritual warrior" business model that is disrupting the US Air Force Academy is based squarely on the Love of Money, in a Norman Vincent Peale "Prosperity Gospel" kind of way. Her whole fortune is bubbles up from an infinite number of up-lines in the AwWay net-work marketing community and it about as fundementalist as you can get and not be a female Muslim under Sharia law. And she's in control of Education. From my perspective, they are fully engagaed in the finite political game of the crypto-Nazi Bob Ewell-Bull Conner white supremacist dominant wing of the GOP.  During Lincoln's time, they were the Radical Republicans. Today, they run the GOP.  

Now, as a Christian, I stipulate to "rational self-interest" as a sound bite, but I am not constrained by its boundaries. Rational self-interest is, necessarily, a finite game. It's the one we aspire to in the public arena. That's the larger point to Socrates' tutelage: as you become aware of rhetoric, you become aware of your own thinking and how it is influenced. And, knowing that, you can begin to acquire what is called in cognitive science "controlling variety", which is a huge advantage in a society where most people barely sustain "requisite variety". But Socrates true purpose was to demonstrate the dimensions of citizenship as a function of "enlightened self-Interest", which he did by chugging hemlock to make his point. Without this element, anything that purports to be "enlightened self-interest" (such as the Evangelical "spiritual warrior" conceit) is actually rational self-interest, which is a way of saying your Pucker Factor is not engaged. It's like being a passionate anti-abortion Pro-Life male determined to destroy Planned Parenthood because, basically, you can't get pregnant.

Which brings me back to the theme of the video, learning how to read different types of literature, in particular, the Bible, but universally apllicable. If you have an AB in Literature, this will be part of your academic vocabulary.

Now, in terms of the pedantic elements of this video, I stipulate entirely with them. They represent a skillful demonstration of the arts and sciences of literary criticism. I wish this had been available to me in high school to say nothing of college, when it took me about 3 years to get to the point where I could write the screen play, if you see what I mean. This good poop.

It is also an example of the difference between rational self-interest and and enlightened self-interest.

Their interpretation of Gideon is from the perspective of The Rich Young Ruler in Mark.  This is exactly where the "spiritual warriors" metaphor fails. These young men, Tim Mackie and all of them, have had other priorities than military service.  Not that there is anything wrong with that. But there perspective of what is going on between The One and Gideon is informed by the League of Justice Super Heroes and not by actually being shot at. Their perspective, formed experientially, is basically the same as Ken Burns' perspective which informs the editorial position of Vietnam.  It's honest, it's rational, it reflects moral clarity, but their Pucker Factors are not engaged. So, it is rational self-interest and not enlightened self-interest.

Like Christ's path to the Cross, Gideon is given a mission by The One that can get him pretty permanently killed in a number of violent ways and he, Gideon, if being very careful in establishing the bona fides of whoever it is whiispering in his ear. Remember, Satan whispered in the ear of Judas Iscariot and tempted Mohammad in a similar manner.  Gideon didn't take the bait and Mohammad did.

Now, I have a working relationship with the Holy Spirit and I depend upon these sort of tests to move forward, the doubling of the fleece being the primary test. I have never demanded a tests in the manner of Gideon, but my relationship was more mature than Gideon's at a similar moment of decision: I left the Army and Gideon started one. And Gideon is demonstated enlightened self-interest because his Pucker Factor was engaged. The difference between me and Gideon at this particular moment of decision, my Pucker Factor was already calibrated in a Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom Be All You Can Be kind of way and his wasn't. His Pucker Factor very quicly became calibrated and the Bible demonstrates that process.  

Everything after that describes how Gideon creates a Special Operations unit to take out an opposing army in a way very similar to the way the Green Berets routed the Taliban beginning in October 2001.  The Green Berets are the Gideon's 300 of the US Army and Gideon's 300 are the Jedi Knights of the Old Testament.

From the perspective of Christianity, Philosophy is a finite game which is based on rational self-intest and is an inquiry into enlightened self-interest as a gateway to the Mind of The One.  In this respects, Epistemology is an infinite process, a verb, so to speak, providing the link, the Vulcan Mind Weld,  The purpose of the Bible is epistemological and it is full of similar case studies like Gideon's and his 300 on how that has worked in the past.  

For example, the difference between rational self-interest and enlightened self-interest is the difference between Peter's understanding of Jesus before the second crow of the cock and Peter's understanding on Pentacost. And, if you are calibrating your pucker factor, this is the difference between trust and faith.

This is why it is important to learn how to read different kinds of literature, in particular, the literature of the Bible.

Just for the record, females begin to calibrate their Pucker Factors with menarche and I infer that they establish a relationship with Yaweh during childbirth that they share with men who have met the elephant. although neither may realize it. Yaweh is a feminine aspect of God and She is Queen of Battle and the Midwife of Travail