What shows have you binge-watched?

[ghost55]

We live in the post X-Files reality. Government fearmongering has been a hip trend for more than 30 years now.

It kind of works against you to not trust the government just a little. This one, I mean, not the dystopian one in your head.

Don't you say any more bad things about Jack Ryan, either. You love that show, and I know it.

The show irks the fuck out of me because it contains almost none of what made the early novels (aka the only good ones) good. The writer's views on geopolitics are also a fucking joke.

[W. Rabbit]

The show irks the fuck out of me because it contains almost none of what made the early novels (aka the only good ones) good. The writer's views on geopolitics are also a fucking joke.

It's still decent MILPORN. It's just lower quality than The Hunt for Red October, because it wasn't made in the 1980's.

[ghost55]

It's still decent MILPORN. It's just lower quality than The Hunt for Red October, because it wasn't made in the 1980's.

The problem is it isn't set in the 1980s when you could at least someone pretend the CIA was the good guys if you plugged your ears and ignored the Iran-Contra incident. Setting it in modern day turns it into interventionist propaganda where the writers look for "woke" reasons to fuck up foreign countries. I have a hard time watching a show about the CIA playing fuck fuck games in Venezuela is a bit of a pill to swallow when they just sponsored a christofacist coup in Bolivia where the government is now genociding the local indigenous population. All so we can get access to their oil and lithium.

[submessenger]

Aquarius is pretty gripping, so far. Yeah, I know, I'm late to the party.

I have not yet started on Jack Ryan's Office, or is it Jim Halpert's CIA? I did blow through the US Office, over the summer, that was a fun revisit.

[Dung Beatles]

I don't remember the IRS destroying dozens of countries for corporate interests and not doing exactly what America wants them to.

Neither the CIA nor the FBI got off to a great start. They were born in a time of deep paranoia while America looked overseas at unimaginable horrors.

If you think these men set out to do evil, you are flatly wrong. Nothing the CIA has ever done is even remotely in the same wheelhouse as what enemy clandestine services were up to. Not even in the same ideological universe.

[Dung Beatles]

I have a hard time watching a show about the CIA playing fuck fuck games in Venezuela is a bit of a pill to swallow when they just sponsored a christofacist coup in Bolivia where the government is now genociding the local indigenous population. All so we can get access to their oil and lithium.

Total agitprop horseshit.


Edit: Seriously, you might as well be mainlining Kremlin talking points from the big red phone at RT.com if that's the kind of low effort anti-American propaganda you believe.

Just because you saw it on facebook doesn't make it true.

[BKR]

The problem is it isn't set in the 1980s when you could at least someone pretend the CIA was the good guys if you plugged your ears and ignored the Iran-Contra incident. Setting it in modern day turns it into interventionist propaganda where the writers look for "woke" reasons to fuck up foreign countries. I have a hard time watching a show about the CIA playing fuck fuck games in Venezuela is a bit of a pill to swallow when they just sponsored a christofacist coup in Bolivia where the government is now genociding the local indigenous population. All so we can get access to their oil and lithium.

I watched most of both seasons (all of 2, I think) with the Wife Unit.

It's an entertaining show, but like most shows, you have to suspend belief to really enjoy it. Season 1 was in general better than 2, for sure.

What bothers me the most is the ease with which they recruit guys to jump out of plane with a boat and drive miles up river in Venezuela. Not sure where they were getting the fuel for the hot-rod black boat of theirs. Those thing suck down fuel like a sink drain, especially when going against the current.

And how stupid Ryan can be for a combat-vet ex-Marine...

[BKR]

Watched "King" last night on Netflix.

Holy nitty-gritty grappling with weapons, in the mud, and the blood, guts, and the horse shit...

I thought they kind of shortened the whole battle of Agincourt thing to make it more exciting, though. I think there were a lot more arrow-showers involved...

[Dung Beatles]

And how stupid Ryan can be for a combat-vet ex-Marine...

I take it he's supposed to be a willfully naive POV character with liberal sensibilities so a broad audience at home can still emote for him.

[BKR]

I take it he's supposed to be a willfully naive POV character with liberal sensibilities so a broad audience at home can still emote for him.

Liberal sensibilities ? I don't think so.

You smoking that wacky weed again ?

[Dung Beatles]

Liberal sensibilities ? I don't think so.

You smoking that wacky weed again ?

We're talking about the Amazon Prime show Jack Ryan, right?

[ghost55]

Neither the CIA nor the FBI got off to a great start. They were born in a time of deep paranoia while America looked overseas at unimaginable horrors.

If you think these men set out to do evil, you are flatly wrong. Nothing the CIA has ever done is even remotely in the same wheelhouse as what enemy clandestine services were up to. Not even in the same ideological universe.

Tell that to Chile. Tell that to the entire Middle East where we funded and encouraged the rise of radical Islam to prevent the spread of "godless communism." Tell that to the people of Nicaragua killed by Contra death squads that the CIA funded by selling crack in the inner cities here. Tel that to the indigenous peoples of Boliva that are being slaughtered right now. Foreign governments don't talk about the GRU the way they talk about "La CIA" for a reason. The existence of the Soviet Union did not justify what the CIA did and continues to do to this very day. Fuck me sideways, current CIA director Gina Haspel personally oversaw the CIA's torture program against prisoners of war at GTMO. Stop trying to excuse this.

[ghost55]

Total agitprop horseshit.


Edit: Seriously, you might as well be mainlining Kremlin talking points from the big red phone at RT.com if that's the kind of low effort anti-American propaganda you believe.

Just because you saw it on facebook doesn't make it true.

Then why were thousands of twitter counts out of Langley, VA all posting the same copypasted message about there being no coup? And why did the first act of the interim government turn out to be opening Bolivia's gas and lithium reserves to foreign companies? Why did this come at a time where we are currently engaged in a trade war with our primary source of lithium? Open your fucking eyes already.

[Dung Beatles]

Then why were thousands of twitter counts out of Langley, VA all posting the same copypasted message about there being no coup? And why did the first act of the interim government turn out to be opening Bolivia's gas and lithium reserves to foreign companies? Why did this come at a time where we are currently engaged in a trade war with our primary source of lithium? Open your fucking eyes already.

Did you know that Virginia has a large Bolivian population?

[Dung Beatles]

You're making a serious mistake in how you aggregate this information. You're drawing your conclusions before seeing the evidence and you're allowing yourself to get overwrought with the romantic suggestion that there is a plot without any evidence of a plot being present.

I'm technologically ignorant but even I know you can pay a second party to start a botnet over a VPN and make it look like it's coming from anywhere in the world on social media. Shit, you don't even need a VPN, you can just say you're in Virginia. Just like Russians in St Petersburg can say they're black Bernie Bro turned Trump supporters from Detroit.

After that great big clusterfuck the last 3 years on twitter with bots, you're still letting yourself get mislead by suggestion sans evidence.

And yeah, we broke a lot of eggs when we were fighting the Soviets. We had to. If you don't stop them in Afghanistan, they'll just go to Pakistan and from Pakistan into India. They came pretty close to succeeding in India as it was.

The Soviets were never going to stop.

Look up how many countries the Soviets started coups in. Both failed and successful. Then look at a map of the Eastern Bloc.

And that doesn't even include all the failed communist coups.

Your mistake is that you blame America for having to fight a dirty war that we didn't want a part of but we had no choice but to fight it anyway.

If we were the bad guys we would have just nuked the Soviets and Red China when we had the chance.