Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - What is Going on in OBSOLETE?
|
Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
meiam
Posts: 3450 |
|
|||
|
That sounds pretty promising (although I'm getting really tired of the whole "military industrial complex control the world" things when you consider that in the context of international trade the amount of money involved is paltry) but ouch, that CG...
Also the idea that this would render the previous military infrastructure OBSOLETE is laughable, unless the robot can teleport around the world, multiply to hold town/region, float on water and fly/go in space, you'll still need a whole lot of hardware in any armed conflict. At most robot could maybe fully replace tank (like tanks replace cavalry, which BTW the evil military industrial complex would freaking love cause that means a bunch of new order for part related to the mech would need to be brought) but the rest would still be necessary. |
||||
|
||||
|
Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
|
|||
|
There's always this weird undercurrent in Japanese attacks on American military interventionism due to their own unwillingness to confront their own history, creating the impression that they're really saying things would be so much better if we'd just left them alone to do what they wanted in the South Pacific and Manchuria. It's like if there was a constant Hollywood output of movies attacking China's trade, monetary, and economic development policy (maybe focusing on river pollution for that last one).
There's also something a little puerile about a country that's disallowed from having a military talking up isolationist pacifism and casting all military conflict as really about money, basically going "yeah, well, I didn't want one anyway, baka!" To the actual talk about motives for war, it's interesting to actually look at the inspiration for a lot of the sentiment, the Pentagon Papers. For all the popular discourse about how the government was lying about the war, looking at what people were writing and saying quickly reveals how, for all the lies about how the war was going, everyone was guzzling the Flavor Aid on why the war had to be fought (they really did think that losing Hanoi would lead to the whole continent going red, with all the Kulak murders and Lysenkoist agriculture that implies) and often on the possibility of winning. We really do need more parables about war where the leadership actually is a bunch of true believers and is just trying to stop all those pesky facts from "complicating" the matter, particularly one where there are very separate questions of why to fight, if fighting can actually do that, and what it will cost and a large part of the issue being that people will try to shut down one of those questions when it hurts their position on the other. |
||||
|
||||
MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5506 |
|
|||
|
Interesting cutscenes, they look like a bit like a HD re-release of a 6th gen game. Are they in-game or pre-rendered i can't quite tell. I will have to look up some gameplay videos next.
|
||||
|
||||
|
partially
Posts: 702 Location: Oz |
|
|||
|
Honestly not a great fan of Gen Urobuchi. His works always have great ideas, but he loves putting in ideology with bludgeon like efficiency. Add to that his writing has a Hollywood like bent that favours spectacle over sense or practicality. May give this a go at some point though.
I always find this argument bizarre. Not only are the Japanese not confronting history, but you're not confronting theirs! In this sense Japan has every right to attack American military interventionism because it was exactly that which caused Japan's Tokugawa Era to come crashing to an end. People seem to love to forget that Japan actually minded its own business and domestic affairs until the US decided their need for greed and trade outweighed other countries interests. This was the mid 1800s, well before WW2. Could Japan have had a reason not to like the military interventionist US well before WW2, particularly with Japan's military revival prior to WW2? Noooo wayyyyy! Second and not least why the argument is bizarre is that individuals like Gen Urobuchi weren't around during WW2. They have grown up in an era of pacifist and non-intervention ideology (forced on them by the US) that has continued up until this day. The statements they are making is not necessarily them trying to say "you should have left us alone during WW2" but a reflection of the world THEY have grown up in. As a nation that only has a limited defence force and non-intervention policy. Judge people by the merit of what they say and how they live, not by the actions of other people. Your argument is exactly the same as if someone said, "the undercurrent of that American's argument is so weird, and doesn't confront their history. They keep saying we should be environmentally friendly and yet just look at what American companies have done to rainforests and fossil fuels around the world." The two obviously don't equate. If Gen Urobuchi actually says "[you should have left us] alone to do what [we] wanted in the South Pacific and Manchuria", then that is obviously one thing. But otherwise, you are just conflating an argument with your own beliefs and ego, putting words in their mouth that may or may not belong. |
||||
|
||||
|
Chrono1000
|
|
|||
On one hand that is a little true since some of the anti-American military stuff is related to WW2. On the other hand if you look at a map of the Middle East and highlight which countries the American military has fought in it is hard not to sigh wearily and there is a reason that President Trump ran on a more isolationist foreign policy. A huge problem with a representative government is that foreign governments can donate to politicians which has basically turned the American military into a mercenary force that fights wars that have nothing to do with protecting the nation.
Most of Tokyo was burned to the ground and two of their cities were nuked during WW2. I think pacifism as a national policy is naive but there is some cause for these anti-war anime shows even if they are unrealistic. |
||||
BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3019 |
|
|||
Yeah, although on the other end of the spectrum, it's also a country that gives us hyper-pro-military shows like Gate. 
|
||||
|
||||
|
nargun
Posts: 930 |
|
|||
Most of the country. https://www.digital.archives.go.jp/DAS/pickup/view/category/categoryArchivesEn/0200000000/0203000000/00 [maps prepared by the repatriation authorities to inform returning servicepeople whether or not their home neighborhood was still standing. Worth having a look if you've spent any time wandering around the backstreets of a japanese city.] |
||||
|
||||
|
Fred Lougee
Posts: 127 |
|
|||
|
Something nobody seems to be mentioning, probably because it's a mere McGuffin in the show, is the limestone. Why would aliens want a bunch of rock? It's common enough, right?
Well, no, it probably isn't. I have done some time hanging around space and astronomy forums, science fiction forums, and in places like those one thing which constantly gets dissected is the lame reasons given in pop culture sci-fi movies for aliens to come to Earth. Water? Hardly. Hydrogen and Oxygen are two of the most common elements in the Universe and they combine readily. If some alien species were to come to our Solar System looking for water they could easily obtain a thousand times more than is available on Earth in the outer system, beyond the orbit of Jupiter, without us even knowing they were there. Slaves? Please. Any species advanced enough to travel between the stars would also be advanced enough to have eliminated the need for physical labor. Food? Again, ridiculous. Some alien species would be much more likely to want to eliminate us so they can use our planet to grow their own food than to find any part of our bodies palatable. When looked at rationally, the two most likely reasons that any alien species would ever come to Earth are a bad outcome for us. The first is that they are completely xenophobic and want to eradicate us just for not being them. The second is that they study us long enough to figure out that we are too dangerous to ever be allowed off the planet and decide to take preventative measures. So then, back to limestone and why aliens might want it. WARNING: SCIENCE CONTENT AHEAD Limestone is calcium carbonate, for the most part. Some occasional bits of silicates mixed in. Calcium and Carbon are not so friendly as all that. It takes a lot of energy, a proper catalyst, and some free Oxygen to shove them together into a stable form. That form will release a lot of energy when it's broken up. This property make calcium carbonate a very useful material. Here on Earth we mostly use it for mortar and concrete, plus a few other industrial applications. "Mostly", ignoring that we also use it for energy storage in our bodies and as the framework which hold us together, because in fact our bones are made of calcium carbonate, It was a huge leap during the Cambrian Era for early multi-cellular animals to begin creating calcium carbonate for energy storage within their bodies. Eventually some of the calcium carbonate deposits became large enough for animals to begin attaching muscle tissue to, the first marine life with shells started to develop. These shell were all laid down in layers on the sea floor when the animals died and compressed from above into the limestone which we have today. So how rare might limestone be in the Cosmos? I have already shown how it's a product of biological activity, specifically carbon-based biology. We have to look to Professor Drake's infamous equation of unknowable variables and start at the beginning. Number of stars = A whole lot and we are not even going to bother with it. Divided by the number of stars with planets, but recently we are figuring out that most stars do have planets, for what that's worth. Divided by the number of planets with life, and there we are going to stop and make a specification. carbon-based life. So far we have confirmed the existence of well over 100 planets outside of our own solar system and in all but a small few we can conclusively state that they do not have any chance of sustaining life "as we know it", meaning carbon-based in abundant water. |
||||
|
||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group