As a kid, I saw the episode of The Simpsons about a rigged spelling bee. At one point, one of the children is eliminated by a word with an ambiguous spelling (whether/weather) where the host, when asked, delivers the unhelpful example sentence "I don't know whether the weather will improve."

This is a clip of the scene. In my recollection of it, the host was much more openly menacing than he actually is. I remember a musical sting, the camera zooming in on his narrowed eyes, and his delivery of the line being sharper.

I assume my mind manufactured that memory because I remembered the plot point about the spelling bee being blatantly rigged and filled in the gaps with imagery of the host being openly contemptuous of the kids it was rigged against.

"I'm fine with even my escapist fictional world revolving around profit, exploitation, and alienation but don't you DARE put a nonbinary person in it!"

This randomly popped into my head from my childhood, I searched for it online, and apparently it's not even that uncommon of a Christian take today.

Toxic masculinity is a fuck, the standard of fearlessness and dominance that patriarchy demands you uphold is unattainable, accept and embrace your fear as part of yourself.

• Weapons that keep killing long after the war they were used for is over (the Space Jockey isn't just dead, they're mummified, and there's no indication that there are any others of their kind around)
• Lay hidden and dormant, leading to innocent people stumbling on them by accident and getting killed (Nostromo crew finds the eggs and doesn't know what the fuck 'til it's too late, colony LV-426 gets wiped out because it was unknowingly built on top of a nest)
• They render entire areas unsafe to inhabit
• Aliens has often been considered an allegory for the Vietnam War, and that left enormous amounts of UXO across Southeast Asia that still persists today.
• The Weyland-Yutani and corporate profiteering aspect is a bit fuzzier, but I think there's a case to be made that their attempts to weaponize xenomorphs and the catastrophes this causes mirror the real-world military-industrial complex.

I recognize that it's speaking to an underlying emotional truth - something I've known on a gut level for a while now but can't quite put my finger on. I know it's not, as I've seen liberals argue, that it's an excuse to legitimize violence against them (their own violence is all the justification one needs) or some kind of "No True Scotsman" argument. There's something deeper and more fundamental, something to do with how the nature of their class position causes them to set themselves apart from and above the vast majority of humanity. Anyone who can help me put this into words?

Link

Incidentally, I stumbled on this while looking for a Marx quote about how representatives of the old feudal order falsely positioned themselves as allies to the lower classes by attacking the excesses of industrial capitalism. If anyone has that quote, please let me know.