Gonna post the comment thread from the previous post into a standalone post, to get a new ball rolling, and start some more aesthetics posting in the comments, putting the 50-year civil cohesion cycle on the back burner for a few days (although I have plenty more to say already).
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Well, if no one else is gonna spell out why the Ghibli-fied AI slop doesn't actually look like Ghibli, I guess I will. I already wrote a more expansive post about AI slop in general. This'll just be a couple comments since it's more focused and won't be wide-ranging.
I'll skip the typical midwit crap that no one cares about, but that generates all the buzz in the media -- no one cares about copyright, it's fake.
Employment for artists does not depend on how they perform vs. AI, it's solely a matter of the patrons' willingness to give up their money for something great, or cool. If they're unwilling, the artists don't get hired -- whether this is rationalized as "no one does good art anymore" or "AI does an equal or better job than human artists" or "artists are Democrats and I'm a Republican".
So AI is not going to eliminate jobs for artists that would have been there, if not for the AI. "AI" is just an excuse for slashing jobs that were going to be slashed no matter what.
The American Empire is collapsing, so there's less wealth to spread around, and the elites are greedier than ever. *That* is why there are hardly any jobs for artists, compared to the good ol' days.
At the heart of the matter is "does the Ghibli-fied AI slop even resemble Studio Ghibli works?" And the answer is -- no. It's just a re-skin of an image, usually a digital photo but perhaps another piece of AI slop.
And the aspects of the image that it re-skins are the most superficial -- mainly the facial features on human faces, giving them the standard in-house proportions, lines, and shapes, and as a result the expressions, of Ghibli characters.
It also re-skins the use of line / line art into a more illustrated look, and blocks in the color as in an illustration, with minor use of sculptural shading.
However, just cover up the facial expressions, and ask how Ghibli it looks -- it doesn't, it looks like any ol' Photoshop filter that makes a photo look like an illustration instead. E.g. the ubiquitous Photoshop rotoscoping of the 2000s, which detects the outlines of major shapes and gives them dark bold outlines, and then you can fill in the interior with whatever color block you want.
Someone went further to make an entire movie out of digitally rotoscoped film footage (i.e., the alterations were done by computer programs, not by a hand moving a pencil or pen over tracing paper on top of a lightbox with a film still being projected up through it).
That was the 2006 movie adaptation of Philip K. Dick's iconic novel A Scanner Darkly -- it was such a snooze that I literally fell asleep in the theater. I didn't go out to the movies much after the '90s, when they all started sucking. But I did venture out for that one, and I wrote it off as just boring.
After reading the novel some years later, it really struck me how terribly they butchered it in the movie, and the visuals were a key part of that. There was nothing in the novel to suggest visualizing it as taking place in a '90s virtual reality aesthetic. It looks so stupid.
So, the Ghibli AI slop is just a reheated Photoshop rotoscope filter. Depending on which illustration style you're telling it to emulate -- Ghibli, 1940s Disney, or whatever else -- it renders its rotoscoped trace-over lines in the intended line art style. And then it fills in the color blocks in the same style, with or without sculptural shading depending on the intended style.
It really is mind-blowing how technologically retarded, and aesthetically blind, everyone has become by now. It's just a Photoshop filter, belonging to an existing class (rotoscoping), that requires a full input image to operate on, then spits out the output. This slop is literally 20-25 years old, not cutting-edge at all. I don't mean that Studio Ghibli's signature style is old, which it is, I mean the tech used to "make my image look like Ghibli" is old.
It doesn't qualify as AI either -- no more than "Photoshop" counts as an AI image-generator. When AI generates images from verbal prompts alone, is where the real slop comes in, and I already covered that in the standalone post from a few months ago. When it's just transforming an existing fully rendered image file, it doesn't even count as "generating" the output -- it's just an alteration or re-skin or transformation, a la Photoshop.
Putting aside the datedness rather than cutting-edgy-ness of the tech being used, how good is it at emulating a certain coherent style, e.g. "Studio Ghibli" or whatever else you prompt it to emulate?
Not good at all. As mentioned, 95% of the dum-dums' "gee wowzers!" reaction is due to the human facial expressions alone, which does not count as an entire aesthetic or style.
Damningly, the AI gets the Ghibli *animal* expressions completely backwards. I image-searched "Ghibli AI cat" to see representative examples, and the cats all look very naturalistic in line, shape, proportion, and expression -- with some basic line art and color-blocking to make them look like drawings rather than photos.
But Ghibli never renders animals that way -- their signature, distinctive in-house style is to make animals look caricatured, from the mundane ones like Kiki's black cat or the fantastical Totoro. Their animals always look unusual, exaggerated, even surrealistic, compared to the human beings from the exact same movie, who look much more naturalistic -- just with a little line art and color-blocking. But the people are rarely caricatured visually.
As I said in the previous standalone post, AI slop is biased toward photorealism rather than stylization. Even when you specifically tell it to emulate an illustrated / animated style, and where the animals have a distinctly stylized and caricatured look, it can't help but portray them naturalistically, by illustration standards, rather than the caricatures that are truly and already present in the training set data.
So, even if you were as lenient as possible, "OK, let's just grade it on how Ghibli-esque the faces or bodies look," it fails. It does well with people's faces, although Ghibli doesn't have very distinctive human body shapes (unlike, say, The Simpsons, South Park, Peanuts, Garfield, etc.), so the fact that the AI slop matches the original on body shapes is no proof of its intelligence or accuracy.
But it fails completely for animals -- and in order to achieve a Studio Ghibli aesthetic, how the hell can you ignore animals? They're central to every single one of their works -- sometimes they're the main characters, like in Pom Poko! It's like with Disney, an imaginary world filled with animals who have more personality than ordinary persons.
The line art and color blocking and minor sculptural shading is the remaining 5% of the "gee wowzers!" reaction. It does all right, but that's cuz Ghibli doesn't have very distinctive line art and color blocking -- that's just a generic illustrated or animated look, not specifically Ghibli.
The programmers would get more credit if they tackled a more distinctive target, like Disney's Aladdin, which has very specific line art, itself derived / inspired by the illustrator Al Hirschfeld. *That* movie, hand-drawn from 1992, is impressive -- matching the line art to the original inspiration's style, and doing it throughout an animated movie rather than still illustrations.
So far we've only tackled aspects of (Florentine) disegno, not (Venetian) colorito. And as any art appreciator knows, disegno is basic or irrelevant, and colorito is where all the artful liveliness... well, comes alive!
The reheated Photoshop rotoscoping filter does fill in the interior of outlines with color blocks, but which colors does it choose? And which color combinations? And in what lighting conditions -- evenly lit bright, evenly lit dark, evenly lit hazy twilight, chiaroscuro?
It makes no decisions on these central facets of the image's aesthetic. It blindly copies them over from the input image. It flattens a range of colors into a color block, and likewise for lighting variations getting flattened into a "shaded color region," like animation.
But the range of colors it's choosing from, and brightness or darkness conditions it's choosing from, is what is already present in the image.
If a person is wearing a brown shirt in a photo, there are in fact a zillion different shades of brown present at the pixel level. The filter chooses from within that range of browns, and expands that one shade of brown throughout the entire region of the image.
But the filter didn't choose the person to be wearing a brown shirt, rather than a red, blue, yellow, or purple shirt.
Ditto for the lighting conditions -- copied over, and simplified, from the input image. Not over-writing them or second-guessing them, like making a relatively bright region dark, or making a high-contrast image into an evenly lit one, or whatever.
Therefore, the distinctive Ghibli-ness of the output image is entirely dependent upon the input image already possessing the distinctive colors, color combinations, and lighting conditions, of a Ghibli image. Whether deliberately or coincidentally -- but given that this filter showed up after the photos were taken, we can assume any resemblance of the input image to Ghibli is purely coincidental.
That is, because the input photos were NOT made to look Ghibli-esque to begin with, regarding colors and lighting, the output of the Ghibli filter will look no more Ghibli-esque. It adds no value, passively copying over the original choices, simplifying them somewhat to look illustrated rather than photographed.
No wonder none of those Ghibli AI slop images look like they were taken from a Ghibli movie -- where are the rich blue skies, the verdant green grass or foliage, the pale buttery creamy yellows to contrast against the saturated blues and greens, billowy white clouds, and all the other fixtures of a characteristic Ghibli image?
Where are the brightly lit exteriors and landscapes? Where are the chiaroscuro interiors, or outdoor interiors like a clearing in a forest? Where is the connection to the ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which all iconic Japanese art afterward derives from? Something as basic as the background of Super Mario Bros looks more Ghibli-esque and ukiyo-e derived, regarding color and light, than the latest dud of a Photoshop filter that purports to be oh-so-much smarter and cutting edge. It looks dumb and dated.
Then there's composition, or the arrangement of the separate objects in relation to one another to yield a single coherent scene. Since Japanese animation is heavily influenced by photography, regarding composition, this implies things like "camera placement," "camera angle," and so on.
As with colors and lighting, the reheated Photoshop rotoscoping filter does not make any decisions about camera placement -- height off the ground, angle in any direction, proximity to subjects, blurry vs. sharp focus, and so on. Just blindly carried over from the input image.
Therefore, any resemblance to Ghibli images is coincidental, and due to the creator of the input image, not to the AI programmer.
And of course, very damn few of those photo-snappers were going for a Ghibli look, meaning they largely do NOT look Ghibli-esque. If Ghibli had totally naturalistic camera placement, angle, etc., then perhaps a fair share of ordinary candid photos would resemble it.
But they go for more stylized camera placement, like very high or very low angles (especially in those iconic landscapes, a low-angle camera somewhat close-up, showing the people or animals appearing to tower right up into those rich blue skies and billowy white clouds).
Most ordinary photo-snappers don't opt for off-center compositions, cropping, or really consider composition at all. That's why none of them looks like a still from an anime, where such concerns are central to every scene.
They look exactly like a typical candid photo shot by someone with no aesthetic concern while pressing the button -- cuz that wasn't the point, it was just to record a memory or event in visual form, not to be artistic, let alone to emulate a certain aesthetic like Ghibli or whoever else.
The fact that line art and color blocking is slapped on top of these totally ordinary compositions, ordinary colors, and ordinary lighting, does not change the fact that the original images -- and therefore, the superficially re-skinned outputs -- do not look like anime, of any studio's style (Ghibli or otherwise).
Final meta-observation, about the state of commentary or criticism in both art and technology. I see no evidence that anyone commenting on these topics majored in art history, or is self-taught in it.
Maybe some of the practicing artists, who all uniformly hate AI slop -- but then the dum-dums just write that off as professional jealousy against their computer program job market rivals, rather than taking their opinion more seriously since they have demonstrated some level of "having a good eye" through their art.
Otherwise the terms I used would be standard in tHe DiScOUrSe about this AI slop. Again, perhaps the practicing artists have, but I don't think so. They just say, "Wow, this looks like shit". Fair enough -- they're artists, not commentators or critics. But anyone else should have a basic toolkit of terms, and the visual and perceptual skills needed to analyze images, along with practice from studying art history.
As I said in the previous post, though, all the AI slop cheerleaders are wordcels, not visual people. Forget artist vs. critic -- the more important difference is wordcel vs. shape-rotator or color-perceiver.
Again, their choice of words and their arguments are never about the visual nature of what they're bla-bla-bla-ing about. It's too vibe-y or meta-, like does this represent the human spirit or not?
Who cares about what you think represents the human spirit? -- just tell me what you're looking at. You can't build an argument about art without first knowing what it is you're seeing. And these wordcels can't tell you what's staring them right in the face. They're just not visual-brained. They can analyze narratives and dialog and word choice, but they can't talk about visual art at all. It's beyond their ken.
Nor have they written a computer program of their own -- OK, that's forgivable, like not being a practicing artist. Do you at least know what programs do, have you used them before? Maybe you could be a decent critic of the tech, despite not being a practicing computer coder. How many hours did you spend Photoshopping digital photos during the 2000s?
These dumbos can't even recognize a Photoshop rotoscoping filter when it's staring them in the face -- and the output of that filter was ubiquitous, not a niche thing. How about the program itself -- Photoshop?
Their only awareness of that seminal piece of tech is in their verbal wordcel meme-world, where "haters will say it's photoshopped" was verbally altered into "haters will say it's AI". They view that as a mere verbal riff, updating an older and semi-outdated joke -- or so they think. What if this use of so-called AI is functionally identical to a Photoshop filter? Well then, there's no need to update the joke.
In fact, the datedness of the tech's functionality needs to be called out, and the pretense of it being cutting-edge / the future must be cut down to size. It's not progressing and cutting-edge when it's 20-25 years old -- eons, in computer tech lifespans.
As I said before, these AI slop-slurpers are just gadget-diddlers, they don't know any math or computer science. Jesus, they don't even remember what Photoshop already did 25 years ago! And they're not visual people either. They are the last people to ask about the matter of "AI art".
They just really get a dopamine rush from playing around with gadgets and devices, and the AI prompt is just another gadget for them to diddle and feel dopamine hits from.
Some of them are paid to hawk this slop, some are just really obsessive about their favorite gadgets and shill them for free.
Either way, it's a sign of our collapsing culture that the legacy and Millennial media outlets won't track down, let alone pay, someone who can do what is necessary to comment on these matters.
But then, that's why you keep returning to these ruins of the blogosphere, to ask the cliff-dwelling sage what he thinks about all this crap. ^_^
"This'll just be a couple comments since it's more focused and won't be wide-ranging."
Famous not-so-last words that I never, ever stick to... but you've probably picked up on this quirk of mine by now. I just can't help it, and I'm like that with in-person presentations too, not just online / in writing.
But it's worth it, you wouldn't want some crisp, terse, just-the-facts bullet-point slideshow, if you're trekking up the Cliffs of Wisdom. You can get that from any ol' talker. My meandering is always coherent, on a zoomed-out-enough perspective, not pointless. ^_^
All for now.
A recurring theme with the braindead AI cheerleaders' attempt at commentary, criticism, support, etc., is that none of them will ever say "you're wrong", let alone make arguments to the contrary.
ReplyDeleteWell, of course -- it's not up for discussion. The wannabe Ghibli slop looks nothing like a still from one of their movies, aside from very superficial stuff like facial expressions.
Notice how none of the cheerleading involves a landscape with no human faces, which Ghibli has made many many iconic examples of, but which would look totally ordinary and not-Ghibli-at-all if you fed some random landscape photo into the reheated Photoshop rotoscoping filter.
The colors, color combos, lighting, the entire composition -- none of it looks like Ghibli. So they can't, and won't say "you're wrong". And they certainly won't expound on that in argument form.
So they concede the major point, that AI slop is always slop, and doesn't even do what its cheerleaders claim it does -- e.g., "make your photos look like they're from a Ghibli movie". So the larger questions about, "Yes it does these wonderful things, but is the price worth it / think of the lost artists' jobs / etc.?"
That debate doesn't take off the ground, cuz there *is no* Faustian bargain of wonderful mind-blowing aesthetics, but at the price of having it done by an automated computer program instead of the human hand and handheld technology like paper, pens, lightboxes, etc.
Since there's no trade-off, AI slop is a dead-weight loss. It provides the rationalization / excuse for slashing tons of artists' jobs, while also looking like total slop. It's lose-lose! Not a win-lose trade-off!
The shills aren't so shameless as to straight up lie about what the images look like -- they're not reacting with, "Um, ackshually that sepia-toned hazy scene has a bright blue sky, verdant foliage and grass, and warm creamy yellows, with sunlight pouring onto the entire scene, just like in Ghibli landscapes. You just can't perceive it for some reason, skill issue."
ReplyDeleteSo rather than argue on aesthetic grounds, they fall back onto the non-defense of "just deal with it", as though it has a mind of its own, or as though the dumb tasteless ill-gotten wealthy elites are just going to keep putting the pedal to the metal on this AI slop, forever and ever, out of spite and/or clueless delusion.
This whole AI bubble was inflated as one special case of the mega-bubble that began with QE (Central Bank money-printing by the trillions, and handing it out to any dumbass who could razzle-dazzle the money-lenders, a la the Shark Tank TV show -- that was a documentary, not a fictional portrayal, of the QE scheme).
As the money deflates from that bubble, all this idiotic slop is going to go the way of the dodo. Or more to the point, the way of "entire meals in a single pill", "flying cars", "automated autonomous robo-agents", and so on and so forth. All failed and un-doable boondoggles. Not just out of our reach, simply un-doable.
In the meantime, as long as they try to shovel this slop into our trough, we (who are not shills for it) will keep ignoring or rejecting or mocking it for what it is. We're not dealing with or adapting to anything. Artists won't adopt it, audiences who aren't braindead won't pay for it, and critics who can see more than one color and get past level 1 on Tetris will keep panning it.
Another deflecting non-defense are the lazy irrelevant retarded "analogies" drawn to any ol' art movement or artist from the past, which are cherry-picked to be iconic yet thought to be bad at the time.
ReplyDeleteAI "art" just dropped yesterday, it has no iconic status whatsoever. So the only part of the analogy that can be substantiated is that everyone at the time it came out hated it, said it sucked as art, sucked on a technical level, boring, slop, geddit outta heah...
And most things that provoke that reaction from the audience and critics *are* worthless slop that will NEVER become iconic or sleeper hits or critically re-evaluated down the line.
Claiming that AI slop will be vindicated by critics or audiences of the distant future is 100% pure bullshit cope fanfic.
Because it cannot stand on its own aesthetically, the dum-dum supporters have to prop it up by broken analogies to some other canonical art movement.
Sorry -- only thing they have in common is being panned at their debut, which most bad art is!
The whole "my favorite slop will be vindicated" is just another variant on the seething impotent revenge fantasy genre, an ever popular genre with nerds.
ReplyDeleteAnd as usual, they project their own garbaggio onto their betters. They think Shakespeare was hated and panned in his own time, or that Bach was, or that Titian was, or any of these other iconic figures whose prolific output proves that they were wildly popular in their own time, not panned.
If they were hated in their own time, they wouldn't have gotten very many commissions, would they?
It's so easy to see through the BS claims about "contemporaneously hated, but later canonized" -- just another flavor of the "misunderstood genius" fantasy. Just about all geniuses are appreciated as treasures within their own lifetime, they get all sorts of support (material and reputational), and only a tiny number slip through the cracks.
"But I or my fave slop-server could be one of those tiny number that slips through the cracks!" Slim to none chance -- and the only similarity between you / your fave slop-server and the genius who was only recognized long after his death, is that nobody praises you while you're alive. Yeah, you and everyone else!
You're not special, stop seethingly revenge-fantasizing about postmortem vindication. Barely less immature than a 7 year-old fantasizing about how "I hope I die, it'll be worth it just for ghost-me to see the tears streaming down their faces when they realize how much they should've appreciated me while I was alive".
Intolerable in a 7 year-old, bully-worthy in a grown-up.
Added a "Civil Discord Cycle" category tag, so you can find posts on this theme easily going forward. See the "Category Index" sidebar. I'll be doing a lot on this theme, so might as well have a tag for it.
ReplyDeleteFewer deportations than Biden, getting embarrassingly cucked by Iran in the Mid-East while wasting shitloads of "blood and treasure", AI slop aesthetics -- glad I didn't vote Trump or GOP this time around. Def won't be voting in the future either, unless there's an anti-woke left candidate, the only source of realignment in America coming up.
ReplyDeleteAll pro-Trump media talking heads (podcasters, posters on Twitter with over 10K followers, etc.), should be the first drafted by the Hegseth Pentagon to embed in Iran or Persian Gulf region, so they can get what they're cheerleading for, or deflecting away from / mildly grumbling about to support with plausible deniability.
Time to put some skin in the game! Time to prove your allegiance to your patrons and repay them *for real*, not just cheap lip / meme service on Twitter.
*Someone* has to be there to livestream Trump, Vance, Musk, Prince, or whoever getting Julian the Apostate'd by the Persians!
The strikes against the Houthis... "You mean, are they stopping the Houthis? No. Will they continue? Yes." Now Trump and MAGA-tards are the ones eating shit in Yemen, with the exact same impotent defeated complaining as Biden.
ReplyDeleteSure, we're still getting cucked in the Red Sea by the Houthis, cannot repel the Hezbollah expansion into Northern Israel, nor the Turkish expansion toward and confrontation with Israel via Syria, nor is even a minor foe like Hamas eliminated.
And sure, we just got cucked out of Afghanistan by the Taliban, leaving shitloads of expensive equipment there, bringing home no loot.
And sure, we just got our asses handed to us in the Ukraine by Russia.
But hey, why not go for broke and add war against Iran to the list of multi-theatre cucking embarrassment?
Some retards are just addicted. Ending the addiction would uhm ackshually be a sign of weakness, so we just have to keep proving how tough we are by losing to every single enemy, even weak stateless ones like Hamas, until we drop dead from imperial overdose.
Then cue the standard wimpy loser revenge fantasy about, "B-b-but THENNNNNN, as my body lies brutally eviscerated, unjustly persecuted, the rest of the world is going to look upon me and tears will be streaming down their cheeks, realizing only TOO LATE that I was the best thing they ever had, they didn't express their love and appreciation for me enough while I was alive, and now it's too late, they'll just have to stew in their tear-streaked misery and regret for the rest of all time, while my ghost just shrugs its shoulders up in Heaven, looking down on their peabrain little sOcIeTiES, heh..."
ReplyDeleteSorry, faggot -- nobody in the Middle East is going to miss us when we're gone. Places that you conquer and administer and incorporate, maybe. I could see Japan longing for the good ol' days of post-WWII American occupation, which allowed Japan to turbo-industrialize and get super-wealthy, since they didn't have to pay for their national defense. And all the great culture they imported and made their own variations on, like jazz and rock and Dungeons & Dragons and the rest of it.
But we never conquered a single MENA / Mainland Asian country, let alone administer and incorporate it as we did with Japan or the Southwestern U.S. after the Mexican War, or Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War. Even Cuba didn't want us there after we won the island in the Sp-Am War, kicked us out in the late '50s, and we failed to ever take it back. Ditto the Philippines, also won in the Sp-Am War, leaving in the late '40s, and never coming back.
However, we haven't tried to wipe out the Philippines in the meantime, unlike our failed conquests of the Middle East. They're *really* not going to miss us when we're gone, and may not even bother pissing on our graves, just being glad to finally be rid of us and move on with their own lives.
The most sad and pathetic part of this Millennial evolution of Reaganite neo-con slop is that they've given up on the Boomer muscular triumphalism, and fully adopted the "truth and beauty" aesthetics of retarded and ugly Tumblr angsty teens from the woketard 2010s.
ReplyDelete"Sure, I'm about to get my ass handed to us, but history will eventually vindicate me as being on the side of truth rather than lies, intelligence rather than low-IQ, and elite beauty rather than normie mediocre ugliness..."
Keep coping and write better fan-fic, dorkwads. I would also add "draw better fan-art," but they don't even draw it themselves, it's just cyber-puke.
So intelligent that you know nothing, such champions of the truth that you rely on lying and deceiving as defense mechanisms for your own mental state (not only for propaganda directed at others), so beautiful that you're plain / ugly freaks with AI slop aesthetics and tryhard chuuni emo Tumblr badass LARP symbols and slogans.
Mild-mannered normies with kawaii cartoon characters painted on their aircraft noses scored the last W for America in warfare. Boomer muscular triumphalism failed in Southeast Asia, and later in the Middle East.
Now it's the revenge fantasy-obsessing Millennial whine-fest about how we're complete losers in the Darwinian struggle for survival against our competitors, but on a higher plane of truth and beauty, we'll be VINDICATED for fighting the good fight against the Muslims, browns, low-IQ's, etc.
LOL, no you won't, dork, your grave is going to be pissed on for being ugly, dumb, and cringe (and callous / evil, but putting aside the moralistic angle, you'll be pissed on for the aesthetic crimes alone).
"Good optics are SO BACK" -- upcoming presidential candidate is an overweight closet-case emo-llennial, no different from his McCain or Graham predecessors in the gay neocon camp.
ReplyDeleteHis wife is attractive enough, but being Indian, she's not very American. Not in the sense of "not of Euro genes" -- Indians just got here yesterday, including her parents (both immigrants arriving in the '80s).
We never conquered India, even partially, so that's not part of formalizing a political union through kinship and cultural union as well. It's just foreign strivers trying to squeeze what they can out of our society while there's still some juice left. Opportunistic, one-night-stand -- not a long-term monogamous commitment to our society.
Maybe if one of her ancestors married into British royalty during the Raj, that would be a ceremonial formalizing of their incorporation into the British Empire. Like Spaniards inter-marrying with Aztecs, to formalize the union of their two polities after one conquered the other, and isn't going to be cruel winners, but just winners, and making a place for the losers in the new landscape -- politically, culturally, and genetically.
Same goes for Trump -- his wife is attractive, but she's a foreigner, and not from anywhere that America conquered. We didn't defeat the Austrian Empire, which Slovenia belonged to, we didn't defeat Yugoslavia which it later belonged to, and we didn't defeat it as a standalone nation in post-Yugoslav Balkan history. They're just strivers trying to squeeze whatever they can out of America while there's still some juice left.
Marrying a Cuban hottie after the Spanish-American War, marrying a Japanese hottie after WWII, *those* are the wedding, so to speak, of good optics with good politics. Total propaganda victory.
Presenting babes from undefeated nations doesn't provide the political punch to the propaganda -- and even less so when the husband is an overweight homo, rather than Clark Gable with a South Seas warbride during Golden Age Hollywood.
Unironically, AOC would make a better First or Second Lady, whether it was to a fellow Democrat or a post-partisan / unity-ticket Republican.
ReplyDeleteShe's also a babe, same birth decade as Usha Vance, and just as exotic -- but her exotitude is tied into America's political and cultural destiny, coming from Puerto Rico, which we won after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and one of the few territories from that war that we still control.
Unlike Puerto Rico, India's fate is not intertwined with America's. And we've hardly incorporated any Indian culture into our own, whereas most "Latin" music in America is Caribbean, stemming from our occupation of that region during much of our nation-defining 20th century.
For that matter, Tulsi Gabbard would make a better First or Second Lady than Melania Trump or Usha Vance (again, regardless of who she was married to). Also a babe, also born in the '80s like Usha and AOC, and also exotic -- but from a white American mother and partly Polynesian-American father, growing up in Hawaii.
Her father is partly Samoan, from American Samoa, which we invaded and occupied in the late 1800s -- not part of our victory over Spain in 1898 (as with nearby Guam and the Philippines), but the same time-frame. We occupied it and partitioned Samoa with the German and British Empires. We still control it as a territory to this day.
And talk about incoporating exotic cultures into our own -- Polynesian / South Pacific has been as American as apple pie since the late '20s, and remains a standard influence with Hawaiian shirts, rattan furniture, and the rest of it.
All the elements are already there, not in some abstract brainstorming conceptual stage, but embodied by specific already well-known individuals. And yet, American elites still can't pack the political punch to their increasingly clueless losing-the-plot propaganda, which has largely become an end unto itself, and then the reasons for its existence are rationalized after the fact, rather than starting from a list of reasons or intuitions to make it, and then realizing those goals in the execution.
Not to take away from their good and exotic looks, but Melania and Usha are far less optimal than AOC or Tulsi as propagandizing Leading Ladies.
Not to yuri-bait, but AOC and Tulsi would make a great governing and married couple. They both give off vibes that are Sapphic (Tulsi) or bi (AOC, whose bf is an obvious flamer decoy / eunuch), so it wouldn't be mindless yuri-baiting.
ReplyDeleteOriginally from the same party, but now on opposite sides of the aisle, but therefore perhaps able to reconcile the two factions -- or at least get the ball moving in that direction. And also getting the ball rolling on purging all the fags and trannies from elite positions, while still acknowledging LGBT representation and female representation.
They'd not only make a unity ticket of Democrat and Republican, they'd both double as Leading Ladies. One would be First President / Second Lady, and the other would be Second President / First Lady. Ha!
Maybe America is not yet ready for this level of post-polarized political healing, but at least they could co-host a TV show or podcast or livestream, to help move along the depolarization of the society after its peak of chaos in 2020. Yuri innuendo and body language not required, although welcome as dramatic tension if they were both so inclined.
AOC and Tulsi would also make a great complimentary, yin-yang, odd couple pairing, phenotypically -- the taller, thicker, mellow butt-woman, and the shorter, skinnier, neurotic boob-woman. Something to vote for, for all voters.
ReplyDeleteSouth Asian opportunistic infiltration via relationships is not limited to the GOP side, of course. Kamala Harris' claim to multicultural fame was having an Indian mother -- from a culture and society that we have basically no connection to. No propaganda value there, and no offense, but not much hottie value there either (although she's plain or a little above-average for her age).
ReplyDeleteAnd if rug-munching Hillary Clinton had won, the de facto First Lady would have been exotic hottie Huma Abedin, of both Indian and Pakistani recent immigrant background, who she first seduced when she was just her 19 year-old assistant. But again, from cultures with whom we have no "the dye is cast" intertwined co-fates.
Seriously, enough of South Asian opportunists in the American elite stratum. You know I'll be voting against Ramaswamy in the GOP primary for Ohio governor coming up, he's the last thing we need. I'll straight-up vote for the Dumbocrap in the general if he squeaks through the primary due to the Orange Retard's endorsement -- Ramaswamy is a biotech / finance scammer libtard of foreign parents from a culture that America has no long-term links with. He might as well be a Democrat.
The Ohio Democrats will nominate an African-American / descendant of slaves libtard, or a moderate white heritage-American. Either way, they're equal with Ramaswamy on policy, but would be a bulwark against further South Asian opportunism in American affairs.
Even easier vote if the Democrat is former US Senator Sherrod Brown -- one of the last dinosaurs in the party, who's white heritage-American, straight, male, populist. I already voted for him as Senator, easy to vote for Governor, if the Republican is a fanatically neoliberal crypto-foreigner.
Till then, here's to dreaming about that AOC-Tulsi unity ticket in 2028, defeating the overweight closeted homo and his rootless in-laws.