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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
A still from the movie Demolition Man in which some police officers prepare to confront a character played by Wesley Snipes.
Top Text: Demolition Man: A movie which depicts a horrifying dystopia...
Bottom Text:...in which food is too healthy, bidets are common, and cops literally don't know how to assault a black man.
Remember how there's also a giant second city underground that's barely scraping by, and the people running the utopian city are trying to eradicate them? Yeah, not a very bright take on the movie.
Reminds me of the TTRPG Shadowrun. Sometimes its hard to sell the corporate dystopia when you're describing eating & drinking soy products because meat is prohibitively expensive and they can sell the effect of dubious cash crops like coffee and chocolate with a soy based alternative.
The shadowrun 5e rulebook actually allows someone to live in a small one bedroom appartment on a part time job, we are so far past what used to be considered dystopia.
**EDIT: The movie is 'The Invasion' (2007)
There was a sci-fi movie 20 years ago about an alien intelligence taking over world governments, replicating itself into human hosts via inoculations for a 'virus', and as the movie progresses world peace is achieved, but the protagonists fight against it over fears of losing free will.
And I'm over here like... the aliens are the bad guys?
That's basically the plot of Pluribus
Just started that one, Carol sucks. Enjoying it so far.
one thing I remember about that movie. walmart grew so big it bought everything else. all stores are now Walmart. and all restaurants are taco bell.
Taco Bell won the fast food wars.
And fuck the movie The Fan starring Wesley Snipes. Demolition Man's the only Snipes movie I like.
Blade was alright
Only the first one.
I didn't know they made another one
It's only a utopia for wealthy vegans that love Taco Bell (or Pizza Hut if European). All the poor meat eating people are forced into the sewers and eat rat burgers.
Also what bidets? They had a shelf with 3 fucking seashells. They never mention bidets.
Oh and we can't forget that every radio station exclusively plays nothing but ad jingles.
Also what bidets? They had a shelf with 3 fucking seashells. They never mention bidets.
Guess what this guy doesn't know.
Attempts to explain the joke have thoroughly ruined the joke.
But if you flush the Seashells then there wouldn't be any more??
You would not ask about the 3(very specific number) Toilet Paper pieces if there was a roll of hundreds.
The supposed utopia is modeled after the ideal of suburban USA. That's pretty fucking dystopic. Add to that tge prohibition of kissing, sex, Rock music, etc...
I think someone didn't watch or utterly misunderstood the movie.
Comrade, I rented that movie from a locally-owned VHS rental shop that used physical membership cards.
Sure it's a dystopia, but it's a dystopia where they solved too many problems. John Spartan gets into a high speed car crash and his car instantly fills up with safety foam and he's completely unharmed. The police force is ethnically and gender diverse. Guns are museum pieces. The cops don't know HOW to assault somebody.
Sure they've killed a large amount of choice, and the guy in charge of it all seems to be determined to secure even more power for himself because of course he's a sociopath with Mr. Rogers' speech patterns, but all told I'd much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.
but all told I’d much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.
What Pluribus is.
but all told I'd much rather live in the Demolition Man future than Judge Dredd or Death Race 2000.
But all the dystopian elements is not necessarily the price for the improvements. The message of the movie (to me) was "don't get fooled by some shiny surface when the core is rotten."
And your choice is not between "bad" and "worse". We can imagine even better futures (Star Trek Federation citizenship seems to be pretty neat (if you're not trying to settle some fringe worlds at the cardassian border) for example), so we can work on these.
the guy in charge of it all seems to be determined to secure even more power for himself because of course he’s a sociopath with Mr. Rogers’ speech patterns
If the right people don't have power do you know what happens? The wrong people get it!
Holy shit, I had no idea Raymond Cocteau was this before he was Raymond Cocteau. That's total genius casting.
I rather we have all our basic needs met and be advocating for rock music. It's not like the people enforcing the laws there are at all dangerous or violent, the whole world there is just a clash of ideology that apparently enough people are fine with that there's no mass marches or protests.
At risk of diving into theory here, If I had to choose between the two, I rather be in a dystopian system that preserves its dystopia with calm, naive civility rather than armed death squads.
If I had to choose between the two, I rather be in a dystopian system that preserves its dystopia with calm, naive civility rather than armed death squads.
In a similar regard to OP's answer: why do you think that would be your only two choices, between "bad" and "worse"? Why not go another route that's more akin to "good"?
Also I think this is less about specific aspects of dystopia and more about "Don't let the shiny surface blind you towards the rotten core".
Ngl, digital tantric neural sex link seems pretty fuckin' rad.
I guess they left out the part where it implants Taco Bell ads, mines your subconscious for thought crimes, and sells the data so people can have virtual sex with your likeness. Less rad.
Bidets?!
This guy doesn’t know about the three shells!
If the three sea shells discourse isn't a stand-in for 90s Americans' anxiety about bidets then I don't know what is.
3 mysterious sea shells... you think 3 dry sea shells (which most people understand logistically would be impossible to clean yourself properly with) was a stand in for bidets?
I was also around when the movie came out and not a single human i interacted with imagined they were a bidet. In fact bidets were so uncommon in the US at the time that most Americans experience with them was from the movie Crocodile Dundee.
Everyone's problem with the sea shells was that you wouldn't be able to clean yourself properly when you imagine physically using them. But people in the future they imagined have extremely small and limited diets, they probably don't produce an huge amount of waste. There's only 1 fat guy in the whole movie, and you wonder how Otho from Beetlejuice got that way on taco bell protein pellets.
IF they had introduced the concept of a bidet system, it would have immediately removed the mystery from the sea shells and made them far less intimidating.
Everyone’s problem with the sea shells was that you wouldn’t be able to clean yourself properly when you imagine physically using them.
That's... not the joke. Holy shit have people over-thought the three shells. It's not supposed to make sense or have a physical utility that you can imagine. THAT IS THE JOKE.
User above was kind of right that it reflected an anxiety about change to personal habits for "environmentalism" and other things that were happening at the time like people pushing for saving water in the bathroom.
The joke is mystery, like duh, the conversations about how to use it were relevant. No human in the US had anxiety over bidets. When conversations about the sea shells were had, they involved the physical use of them specifically.
Bidets weren't in the zeitgeist. When people engage with the sea shells (the literal and exact intention of the sea shells was to wonder how you use them), they thought about how they would physically replace toilet paper. The scene literally shows you the main character generating paper to use.
Like it's crazy I even have to note this, when you hear hoofbeats in Wyoming, you don't wonder if zebra are making them.
Demolition Man is what Europe will look like. USA will look like The Running Man (1987 version, not the remake). It already looks like Idiocracy.