The first time through you don’t quite know where the film is going, and it’s an incredibly gorgeous, technically precise journey with a good enough payoff to leave your heart beating at the end of the movie.
The second time through the narrative just doesn’t have the same impact, and you notice that it’s kind of pretentious and self indulgent and drones on a bit.
And they will continue to become stuck in the dictatorship phase until you acknowledge that you cannot create political agency via mass murder of innocents.
Honestly the whole “eat the rich” thing is pretty offensive if you know your Chinese history, considering ritualistic torture cannibalism actually happened during the cultural revolution and is pretty well documented from actual CCP sources. In this case “the rich” were actually teachers and scientists.
Fantasy football is literally a 20 year plan to create a childhood gambling pipeline, which they finally pulled off with the recent rounds of regulatory capture.
It’s honestly insane. I have been watching sports with the same group of people for almost 30 years now, and the past few years it’s gotten fucking insufferable. These people genuinely believe that they’ve got a system going, doing bet arbitrage against their six different apps and seventeen different accounts. They don’t even watch the fucking game. They are just watching phones and laptops. I hate it.
So what ends up is that I’m watching our team win, and happy about it, but half the room is punching holes in the wall because thirteen different stats across six different games didn’t magically align to give them a 100:1 payout. Two of the original group have literally taken on major debt to fund their addiction and still think it’s perfectly fine to keep betting.
The fantasy games are just how they get kids hooked. It’s very obvious to me as someone who has always kind of felt like fantasy takes some purity out of the fandom, that this has been a long term plan to normalize this kind of “skill” game so they can create exactly that pipeline.
But I mean, its probably just a crazy conspiracy theory that the NFL already had branded endorsement deals ready to go with a dozen different gambling houses immediately when the Supreme Court cleared the way for all this shit.
Sweden has blackjack tables outside the bathroom in lots of bars so you can play while standing in line. Or at least they did the last time I was there.
I have personally seen gambling fuck up way more lives than drugs, and this was before it was being shoved down our throats. It’s honestly disgusting how shameless the advertising has been, getting people to gamble like degenerates in “garbage time.” Or poking fun at people “losing their shirt” in Buffalo. And don’t even get me started at how they are using fantasy sports to get kids hooked early.
Fuck this so much. I know entire families - children, parents, grandparents - who’ve been put through hell over this.