BF2S Forums EE Chats 2142

Dilbert_X wrote:

Like Dune, its more fantasy than science fiction.

Last edited by War Man (2021-09-17 19:36:50)

Last edited by War Man (2021-09-18 18:44:50)

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Prime Video doesn't hide that it's dubbed. The DVD copy on amazon doesn't say, but comments point it out. Also says "country of origin: usa" lmao.

I did a brief check and original Russian with English sub turns out to not be an option on a bunch of services plus the DVD releases I've seen, so probably nothing to do with Amazon.

After finding the movie on Youtube, I've came across this comment irt one asking for Russian audio with English sub:

Jacob Green
5 months ago
It’s on 123 movies in Russian with English subtitles. Looked forever

Take from that what you will.

Also this comment:

Keith Whisman
4 months ago
Thank heavens they did an English version. This dude is a hero to so many who love his AK47 design. Best line from Samual L Jackson was an AK47 blurb.

I think a lot of viewers still don't like subtitles. So our preference might be an acquired taste. Watching Kung Fu Hustle with family, original language definitely preferable but dub audio gets selected anyway. Ugh. TBF, not the worst example I've seen, and there are some good dubs of stuff out there.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2021-09-18 22:37:49)

This​ bracing scepticism about the current payoff of the digital revolution is consistent with Thiel’s libertarianism. He is holding out for something altogether more disruptive. Another of his favourite books is The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob), first published in 1997 and reissued in 2020 with a preface by Thiel. It predicts the demise of the nation-state and the emergence of low or no tax libertarian communities in which the rich can finally emancipate themselves from ‘the exploitation of the capitalists by workers’. Thiel has long argued that blockchain and encryption technology – including cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, along with online payment systems first trialled by PayPal – has the potential to liberate citizens from the hold of the state by making it impossible for governments to expropriate wealth by means of inflation. He considers paper money to be a form of government control. He wants to see individuals free to choose where, when and how they pay tax – and to whom. He believes in creating monopolies through innovative technologies and then using those technologies to break up the unsustainable and outmoded monopoly power of the modern state, including its power to print money.

What’s harder to square with this philosophy is that Thiel has made most of his own money by exploiting the monopoly power of the state to secure lucrative defence contracts. How can a libertarian be comfortable cosying up to sovereign wealth funds, the military-industrial establishment and the security state? One possible answer is that Thiel is not a libertarian at all. The pretence is just a means of covering up his true business model, which is to rely on craven bureaucrats squandering taxpayers’ money on untested technologies. But the other possibility is that this is the essence of libertarianism. One book not discussed by Chafkin is Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, which has been widely influential in Silicon Valley since its publication in 1974. Nozick argues that the powers of the state can’t be justified for anything except the protection of private property. Tax-raising is only permitted to pay for security infrastructure. Everything else – social justice, welfare, redistribution – counts as the workers exploiting the capitalists. In a famous thought experiment, Nozick describes the way even an anarchic society will eventually produce a dominant ‘protective association’, which keeps its citizens safe by taking their money more effectively than its rivals. The state’s monopoly on violence is therefore simply a product of market forces, and the state little more than a protection racket. This isn’t politics as The West Wing. It’s politics as The Sopranos.

Thiel treats the state as though it were as described by Nozick. He rails against the use of public money for the betterment of people’s lives, especially the poor. Who are politicians to decide how we should live? The state only exists to protect the lives we build for ourselves, including the wealth we acquire along the way. But Thiel has noticed that even such a ‘minimal state’, as Nozick calls it, still has an awful lot of resources to throw around. It’s a monopoly after all. Any modern security infrastructure in the age of digital technology requires plenty of public money to fund it. That money must be spent somewhere – and Thiel is the one to oblige. Libertarians would have us believe that unregulated, free-market capitalism is somehow diametrically opposed to state capitalism. One encourages innovation; the other stifles it. What Thiel demonstrates is that unregulated, free-market capitalism is in fact closely aligned to state capitalism. Deregulation means that nothing constrains the monopoly power of the security state and nothing gets in the way of people selling it their bogus and corrupting wares. This alliance helps explain the weird anomaly of Thiel’s persona. He’s like a cross between Joe Pesci in Goodfellas – a man who will stab you in the eye with a ballpoint pen if you cross him – and Richard Branson, another so-called entrepreneur who makes most of his money by capturing state-controlled contracts (Virgin Rail, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Media). Branson, unlike Thiel, is a bit of a hippy and mouths most of the liberal pieties, including about climate change. But it doesn’t really matter what the philosophy is. The business model is the same: get as close as you can to the people who control the protection rackets. Unregulated markets aren’t opposed to state capitalism. They are the means by which capitalists make the most money out of the state. One more movie character I was reminded of when reading about Thiel is Keyser Söze, who says at the end of The Usual Suspects: ‘The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.’