InsaneJournal

Tremors...

In one straight from the Didn't-See-That-One-Coming Department, Francis Fukuyama renounces neoconservatism.

For those of you not down with modern political ideologues (which is probably most of you), Fukuyama is renouned for being the author of the contentious 'End of History' doctrine. Essentially, it states that liberal democracy (which we can also interpret as 'neo-liberal republicanism' which is realistically what it is) is the 'end' of human socio-political evolution. To Fukuyama, the fall of the great Stalinist states in the 1980s marked the 'failure' of communism as a competing ideology to liberal democracy; liberal democracy had 'won' and there was no logical progression past it. It represented the pinnacle of human thinking. The other way of describing End of History is by the following catchphrase; MacDonald's states don't make war on each other.

I know this, incidentally, because Fukuyama was the first political theorist I ever remember consciously listening to. It's one of those totally inappropriate memories; one very, very young Dee in her Granny's loungeroom, playing imaginary games around the legs of the squeaky old leather chairs. Lateline was on – I've never gone to bed early – and so was Fukuyama, talking about his MacNations and the End of History. This was before that whole messy incident with Kosovo and NATO, incidentally; a MacWar that pointed to the glaring over-simplicity of the End of History. One's first political theory is always one's most cherished, so for many years I went through holding onto MacNations for grim death. It was bolstered by my Year 12 English course in Postmodernism, and was only smashed in third year PolSci when I finally got the other side of the PoMo coin; the Marxist analysis that hopes to expose postmodern theory as the thin veneer of cultural apathy that serves to bolster capitalism. It's okay what you think, so long as you keep consuming… and wouldn't you rather buy some new sneakers – you know, the ones you saw on The OC last week, and I know you pretend to hate it but you watch it after all – wouldn't you rather some of those than to actually think at all? Thinking is for liberals/the femmenazi thought police/elites/insert-scapegoat-group-here. (This, incidentally, is the tradition of 'safe' radicalism that most current American pop-culture – from Transmetropolitan to Buffy to South Park – subscribes to.)

And now Fukuyama is renouncing his greatest advocates; the neocons. He's not renouncing the End of History, only it's politically expedient adoption. This is kind of like those people who say that they support communism… in theory. Could this be the first death-knell for Western liberal democracy? Well, probably not. Liberal democracy isn't going anywhere anytime soon, being as it is the current least-worst of all political theories; but to then extrapolate this out as meaning that it's the final least-worst theory? And then to use this as a justification for forcing it on the rest of the world, as opposed to letting them come to it naturally (which, if it really were the End of History one would logically assume that people would)…

These times they are a'changin'.

I had the misfortune of deciding to sit through Stripperella last night. This is the lastest pile of rubbish served up to us by that master of rubbish, Stan Lee (who you may remember from practically every Marvel comic book ever). Somewhere between millitant enforcement of the Code (the no-tits no-violence set of guidelines that allegedly 'saved' the comic book industry by dumbing the pre-fifties horror and thriller pulps down to that lowest of lowest common denominators; the all-American family-friendly superhero) and the last fifteen or so years in which comic book artists have finally started to thumb their noses at it, apparently all of Lee's post-pubescent simultaneous fear of and lust for women has finally seeped out. Watching Lee try and do T&A is kind of like watching MacDonald's try and do healthy food. It looks good on the outside… but if you really, really think about it, you know it's still bad for you.

Stripperella plays with that most painful of paniful comic book cliches; the one that unambiguously says, "Look at me, I'm written by that greasy little nerd you hated at school and wouldn't talk to; the one who, now he's rich, you still wouldn't talk to, unless you were reasonably sure that he was going to die in the next six months, if you know what I'm saying…" The warrior-slut. Warrior-slut has been with us for a very, very long time, but probably not quite in the way she currently is. Warrior-slut is devious; she pretends to teach women to be 'tough' and 'independant', a veneer which she uses to hide the fact that she is still a passive victim of male lust and control (Buffy is the classic example; controlled by men and longing to be a 'real girl'). Stripperella is the ultimate victim of one man; Stan Lee. It's by no means uncommon, but it's still teetering somewhere between sad, infuriating and pathetic.

Incientally, I've seen the warrior-slut done 'well' roughly three times. The first is in Silent Hill 2, which essentially has a whole character devoted to (perhaps not consciously) pointing out where warrior-slut comes from and who she's beholden to. The second is Julie Winters from The Maxx. The third is Kerrigan from Blizzard's StarCraft (who, ironically, has the same VA as Julie).

Anyway, Stripperella is a bad cartoon that never quite manages to convince its viewers than it's the parody it's pretending to be. I'm sure a bunch of you would love it, really.

Onyxia's dead; first time, fourth attempt, 26 people. So and Luciferon and Magmadarr; first time, something like third and fourth attempts respectivley, 30ish people.

I missed both of them; sadface.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.