Remember to drink plenty of water!

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking, but...

Alex Garland has made multiple films with A24. Warfare, Civil War, Men, Annihilation, & Ex Machina (in order of newest to oldest).

This comment thread was talking about how poor Civil War was.

I was also pointing out that he'd previously made a far superior film with similar themes and structure when he made Annihilation, which really demonstrates just how poor Civil War is even by comparison to his own work on similar ideas.

(Also, in regard to your other comment, I have no idea what it is exactly that you "called")

Used to be a proper country.

No problem.

Arguably it had something to do with Britain's class system being so heavily dominated by the aristocratic class. That created space for even some reasonably wealthy, middle-class and beyond people (particularly scholars, writers, educators, doctors, occassionally clergy etc rather than industrialists for example) to recognise a top down society that they also viewed as repressive to them at some level. Similar overlapping interests helped it gain solidarity with the suffragette movement for example, which included committed communists and anarchists, but nonetheless also had its fair share of liberals and even fascists.

It's also probably worth keeping in mind that the early and argueably most directly influential years of the Fabian society and movement predated even the October revolution in 1917, never mind the Chinese communist revolution in '27, so there was a lot of 'socialism in theory' going on. By the '30s Fabians were leaving (or being pushed out) right and left for their support of Stalin in particular, but also AES states in general.

It began as basically an Edwardian 'socialist but anti-revolutionary' group of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois thinkers. They were overwhelmingly middle class or above.

The key difference (and sticking point with other socialists) was that they believed in 'gradualism', not revolution. They believed that socialism would only be achieved by participation in the current political and electoral system, in order to spread socialist ideas through government, education, media etc. Their first issue and aim was arguably a reasonable one - there was no left wing never mind socialist party in British politics, just the Tories and Liberals.

Even some high profile members who were original believers left the Fabian society and grew skeptical of it pretty quickly though. H.G. Wells left after disillusionment with what he saw as a middle-class party not sufficiently different from other bourgeois parties.

And things got worse from there.

They supported the Boer war, and not just out of some fear of being branded traitors. They made their position clear by arguing that empowerment of the working classes in Britain would create a 'new imperial race' that would fight Britain's imperial wars and expand its empire around the globe. It was at that point that Bertrand Russell left in disgust, citing it becoming an imperial project as the reason.

They were admittedly a major part of the creation of the Labour Party at the turn of the century, but they were just one third of it, and plenty of people have argued the most problematic third for the advancement of socialism over the other two founders - the Independent Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress (not that they're without criticism either). And their reformism did gain some degree of popularity and results, especially around the building of social welfare and introducing ideas of social justice into the political mainstream and national identity.

It always lacked real solidarity though, fracturing over it being a nationalist, imperialist project. Fracturing further over the need the be anti-Stalinist. Then over more militant trade unions and wildcat strikes. And so on. Lots of people would point to the Fabian element in the Labour party as the wedge in the door that kept it open for the wholesale neoliberal takeover in the 1990s onwards.

Well algae damned!

Yeah it's this, and the hyperfixation combined with repetition. Considerable patience is required when you genuinely cannot segue to a related topic or different activity.

I feel like Disney is such an enormous content mill of a machine that it might actually sometimes be easier to get the broader leftist messaging through, so long as you don't say that your project is explicitly about actual politics.

That movie The Creator springs to mind. That might be the most most intensely anti-American-war-machine agitprop movie since Verhoven was killing it in the 80s and the whole thing is basically a Maoist global revolution fantasy.

Good fucking post with a great source too.

There's still time for the world to learn from the past...

Didn't Hakim Jeffries already do the "We will repsond in a manner and at a time of our choosing" non-defence, non-defiance thing on the news? Or was that to a different red line that the Admin has crossed with little to zero pushback?