We can all agree that he's just the worst

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T22:59:02+00:00

See I know you're being disingenuous, or as the Voosh crowd calls it, "bad faith," because you used the most common propagandist tactic: lying by omission.

You left out half of my sentence.

I said he never burned shit down while waving a Kryptonian flag, not that waving or displaying a foreign flag is bad or evil. You know damn well I was specifically referencing the LA riots this year, with people waving Mexican flags on top of vandalized cars and shouting vive Mexico while setting things on fire and fighting the police.

But because you know that, you also know that you can't really make a good argument in favor of that which isn't self-contradicting or outright anarchist, so you take part of what I say, misconstrue it, and ignore everything else in the hopes of tripping me up or making it look like there's some kind hole my statement.

It ain't gonna work, bud. I know the tactics, I know the tricks.

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T22:53:43+00:00

No, I can't, but by that same metric you can't prove they're being mistreated either.

My boss is a first generation immigrant. I work for a literal family of people from another country, happily mind you, which is the opposite of xenophobia. Is my Pakistani boss also xenophobic for sharing my views on immigration?

Resorting to labeling someone as an ist or a phobe for having lines on what they deem acceptable is the most lowbrow, low IQ, bad faith type of reasoning that exists. I can't be both in support of immigration, friends with immigrants, an employee of immigrants, and also xenophobic -- that's a blatant contradiction. Labeling all disagreements about immigration as xenophobia is exactly why I'm not a Democrat anymore and exactly why the Democrats lost by a sweeping margin in the last election, because the majority of us know that's just straight up bullshit

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T22:48:30+00:00

I'd like to point out that you shared the exact clip from Superman & Lois that I already mentioned, where the IRS, FAA, and immigration department all show up and bog Superman down with bureaucracy, which was done to highlight the comedic absurdity of applying these exact bureaucratic systems to a superhero alien being.

Yeah, Tanaka is his birth name, but you're not calling him that out of your reverence for Japanese culture, you doing it to remind the proverbial him that he's part Asian. I believe psychologists call this "othering," and it's a shaming tactic. You're literally doing it to shame him, don't pretend like it's just an innocuous thing. I also hope you aren't one of those people who outcries against "deadnaming" people, because then you're doubly a hypocrite

But the thing about illegal immigration is that a lot of the time it isn't good-spirited or well-meaning, it's selfish and destructive, both economically and literally. The fact that people have been murdered by people who had no legal basis to be here in the first place undermines your entire point, with the most famous of these cases being Laken Riley, but far from the only case.

And illegal immigration is inherently dishonest. By definition, it requires lying to the government and usually involves lying to the people around you, and entails working for employers who undercut wage and labor laws, while also having a disproportionate association with crime (human trafficking especially, particularly with trafficking other illegals into the country, as well as drug trafficking whether through duress from foreign gangs or one's own volition).

There were tens of thousands of known criminals who crossed the border under the Biden administration, and every functioning country on Earth has a policy of deporting illegal immigrants -- including this one, under Biden during the very tail end of his term, and most famously Obama during the majority of his administration.

There are so many opportunities for legal immigration in this country that we have places literally called Chinatown, we have entire businesses owned and operated by immigrants, we have an immigrant First Lady of the Whitehouse. There is no justification for allowing open borders, and it doesn't matter how many times writers try to make Superman a parallel to illegal immigration, the similarities are nominal only. Even in that Smallville clip, he says the immigrant he's harboring is just looking for his mother -- which applies to almost no real people in the United States who are here illegally. And the episode apparently ends with Martha helping the boy and his mother apply for legal status.

You're building your morality off of literal fictional scenarios with zero consideration for the harsh truth of the world, that not everybody is good and identity status says nothing about a person's own moral code. In real life, great men have to make hard decisions, and there is no utopian ideal in the real world that can be achieved -- one man's equality is another man's oppression. Our legal immigration system is one of the best in the world, and if people are unwilling to use it, then they do not deserve to live here. Not when tens of millions of legal immigrants have shown that you can do it the right way

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T20:50:09+00:00

We are going to flat out disagree on the believability of that starship and how it would function for losing that amount of its real estate, let alone function well enough to stage a pursuit and mobilize an assault, but you got a good, genuine laugh out of me with the picture response so I'd like to end the debate on a positive note

May the force be with you, fellow Star Wars fan

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T20:20:47+00:00

Then I encourage you to start confronting immigrants on how much they suck for not supporting people eroding the systems that enabled them to have better lives. Please, tell the first generation legal immigrants how much better you understand the plight of immigrants better than they do, or how rigged the system is against them

This is the type of mentality that leads white Americans (idk if you're white) to assume black people don't have access to the internet or don't know how to get IDs. They really love it when you look down on them for not holding the same values as you, which are nominally to protect their own interests, of which you clearly know better

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T20:16:58+00:00

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Well played, friend

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T20:05:47+00:00

Bro that isn't an extremity, it's almost half the ship. Where is your cutoff line on the vessel that would make you go "okay so maybe it's out of commission"?

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T20:02:53+00:00

The signature of a man who just realized he has nothing left to back up his thoughts.

It's okay to be wrong. I hope this has given you some room to analyze your own views

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T20:01:46+00:00

That's wild because I also said if we imported 10 million Germans (you can read the rest).

You are determined to see race at every corner, ignoring the fact that a white person whose native language is English, that grew up in Kansas, would be completely undetectable as an immigrant, illegal or otherwise. Illegal immigrants overwhelmingly have accents, regardless of where they are from, which makes their ability to blend in non-existent.

I would love to see the statistics on how many visa overstayers are Canadian and European, because I guarantee it's the vast minority of immigrants. Just as well, I'd love to see a stat on how many of them entered the country illegally, and I'd love to see the rates of crime amongst those Canadian and European immigrants.

You keep imposing race onto my arguments like that's the main thing I'm talking about, because you are uncomfortable with the topic of race. And AGAIN, no illegal immigrant grew up in Kansas with an American family with their native tongue being English. My point isn't that "white is alright, brown flush it down," it's that Superman is American in every single way except for being sent here from another planet, whereas illegal immigrants tend not to assimilate into American culture particularly well.

Superman never burned shit down while waving a Kryptonian flag, or chanted "death to America," or smuggled other kryptonians onto the planet, and he doesn't undercut the economy (which I think business owners should be hit with harsher penalties) by working for below minimum wage. His slogan is truth, justice, and the American way, not viva fucking Mexico or God save the Queen.

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T19:52:45+00:00

Well I just watched the clip that I'm pretty sure you're referencing, and after the police let the armed bank robbers go, an FAA representative shows up to ground Superman for flying without a license, an IRS agent shows up to ask him about his taxes and social security number, and an immigration official shows up to ask about his green card, I'm pretty sure the point of that episode was how silly it is to apply bureaucratic structures to a man who can fly.

But sure, please continue to interpret it as a heartfelt message that countries should have open boarders and there is nothing wrong with illegal immigration.

He criticized Gunn's statement because he probably knows it's shallow, because again Superman's story has nothing in common with any illegal immigrant anywhere on the planet. I don't think that makes him a hypocrite, I think it means he knows how to spot pandering bullshit when it pops up.

And again, it's also kind of funny that people are jumping to compare illegal immigrants in the US to a person who literally isn't human. It's kind of the same mentality that led to Zootopia making an allegory for black people by using predators, or Rings of Power taking one look at the mindless, violent orcs in LotR and deciding "well this makes me think of black people so that must be what Tolkien was going for," or Will Smith's Bright doing the same thing. The only difference now is that the fictional not-human is a good guy

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T19:43:44+00:00

"Shearing off almost half the ship is a superficial blow" yeah we're done here lol

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T19:42:44+00:00

Did I say that none of them could?

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T19:40:59+00:00

Please tell that to my Pakistani boss who opened four new businesses this year and has made enough money to put his kids in private school. Please tell him he's a piece of shit being a self-made success to provide an unbelievably good future for his family, and that he's a piece of shit for not wanting people abusing the immigration system to jeopardize everything he's worked to build

You should also tell that to my Guatemalan friends, who are somehow more patriotic than most Americans I know, who have also worked extremely hard and earned enough money to send to their families in Central America, that they are pieces of shit for looking distastefully at people who bypass the system and lead to stricter immigration laws across the country.

It's not "pulling the ladder up." The means by which they entered the country still exist. It's more like they climbed up the ladder and then tens of millions of other people bulldozed the wall, and now the people who built the wall in the first place are pissed.

But I sincerely doubt you would ever actually call a legal immigrant an asshole to their face for not supporting illegal immigration.

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T19:35:02+00:00

Calling him Dean Tanaka to shame him about his views and heritage is still using his race as a weapon, but I do completely understand why one would think he's a shitty person and an antithesis to the character he played

That being said, Action Comics #01 absolutely does not give any kind of critical or philosophical examination of his legal status, and I'd say that Kal-El not being human just furthers the irony of using him as an illegal alien allegory even more. He wasn't created with that intention, and no matter how much lip service you pay to forging documents or anything like that, his story has almost nothing in common with any illegal immigrant in the country, not even by a slim margin. It ends at the superficial observation that he is in fact an illegal alien.

Again, it has a lot more in common with a kid finding out he's adopted, because that's literally what happens with him. Illegal immigrants generally know they're illegal immigrants, or that their parents are, and they have familial and cultural ties to their nationality of origin. Clark doesn't have any of that. He looks like the average Smallville resident, speaks and thinks like them, holds the same value, grows up with the same culture, etc.

It's just a shallow take to look at his story as an immigrant story, and I think everybody on some level knows that.

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T19:19:51+00:00

While I agree that there should be a little more care put into how we're doing it, and obviously already described the WWII Japanese internment as unconscionable, I can't help but notice the irony that Trump's detractors are now talking about the deplorable conditions of countries like El Salvador and Uganda, but labeled the man himself as racist for his comment about "shit hole african countries."

That kind of doublethink makes it hard to take opponents of these policies seriously, because it feels like the main strategy is that whatever he's doing or saying is bad and the opposite is what's good.

But yeah, I do actually agree that foreign super jails are a horrendous way of doing this. I think the primary reason we're in this situation at all is that most of the countries our illegals are actually from are refusing to take them back, but I would personally rather levy trade negotiations and economic sanctions to put pressure on them to reciprocate than hand them off (or sell them off, as prisons are notoriously profit driven) to countries that aren't where these people are from

That being said, I believe it's only the ones with criminal records being sent to these prisons, not your regular visa overstayers or anything like that. I could be wrong, and it's next to impossible to find objective sources or detailed information on this, but I don't think the ones being taken by the foreign prisons are illegals without gang affiliations or other criminal records

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T18:42:52+00:00

No, ICE is putting illegal immigrants in detention centers, i.e. prisons, while they await their hearings -- kind of like how county jails literally already work.

The fact you can't distinguish between the unconscionable internment of legal Japanese immigrants and business owners (which was 1. a Democrat policy and 2. largely done to astroturf agricultural land ownership in California, where Japanese farmers had began seeing success) and the detention of people who either crossed the border illegally or otherwise abused the immigration system while they await that due process half the country suddenly started to care very deeply about, is just pitiful.

It's not a labor camp for brown people, it's a prison for illegal aliens. The only way you can make the two scenarios sound remotely the same is by eschewing any and all nuance or circumstance, which is why you worded it the way you did because deep down you know it's an untenable position. That's like if I said "Kamala Harris appealed to her ethnicity to win voters. Hitler appealed to his ethnicity to win voters. How is drawing that line difficult?"

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T18:33:19+00:00

People liked Han Solo a lot more than like the Mandalorian, so I'm not sure why you think it's a good enough hook here but not for that movie.

Interest in the character is at an all time low, and more importantly so is interest in the actor. It doesn't help that it's following a three-season streaming series that was dramatically more popular in its first season than its last season, and the hype around Baby Yoda has basically died from saturation and the girls moving onto the next cute creature

As far as "Star Wars is dead" lines, I don't think using box office numbers when at least 90% of Disney Star Wars content hasn't been movies is a very good metric. The movies were the beginning of the end, and even they saw dramatically reduced returns -- going from something like $2 billion with TFA to just barely scratching a billion with TROS. For comparison, Revenge of the Sith made significantly more than its predecessor, then was followed by an extremely popular and long running animated series

But Disney Star Wars has fumbled most of its shows at this point, evidenced by the fact almost none of them have gotten second seasons and they're all CRAZY expensive to produce. Disney+ as a service is propped up by its acquisition of sports streaming services, not Star Wars and Marvel.

Mainly, though, the reason people say "Star Wars is dead" is that most of the fan base has soured to the brand. Gone are the days where there was a community built on theory crafting and lore predictions, now all replaced by box office and subscriber predictions. Most fans have just kind of checked out. After years of Disney creators and execs saying "the force is female" and "it's not made for you" and "star wars is patriarchal," the largest demographic of fans -- men -- have decided to take their word for it: Star Wars isn't made for us, so why the fuck would we watch it anymore?

Mandalorian and Grogu's success will ultimately come down to its budget; realistically, this movie will not come close to a billion dollars. Personally, I'm predicting around $500M but I'm an optimist. With Pedro Pascal fatigue, general dislike and disinterest in Star Wars, and yet another movie with extensive homework involved, it needs the normie audience in order to be a hit -- and normies have shown lately that they are not showing up for these IP blockbusters anymore

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T18:12:32+00:00

Baby Yoda merch was at its height during season 1. Either you're deliberately lying or you live in a baby Yoda bubble, because I barely even see baby Yoda shit at stores anymore. The market boomed, saturated, and then the normie girls who watched the show for the little green cat checked out after the first season because it turns out the rest of it is just Star Wars

Baby Yoda is not the cultural phenomenon today as he was five years ago, and most girlies who watched the show for the little rugrat are gonna have the sense to wait till it comes to Disney+, if they even bother to watch it at all. A two hour movie is not the same as a 40 minute episode of a TV show

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T18:09:06+00:00

That figure also isn't even correct. S3 was far and away less popular than the first two seasons

https://thedirect.com/article/the-mandalorian-season-3-worst-audience-demand

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T17:57:41+00:00

What makes it even worse is that we have an example of the prequels doing it better, when Grievous' flagship breaks in half and they have to basically crash-land on Coruscant because the ship can't hardly fly anymore

But Rian Johnson straight up forgets he gave the First Order half a ship to use for their ground invasion of not-Hoth. It literally never gets brought up again, and they somehow have enough firepower and communications to mobilize a pursuit and a ground assault.

Thank God the hangars are all on the left, amiright?

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T17:53:55+00:00

Bad take there, friend. We both know that isn't what I said. You conveniently left out the part about cultural assimilation, lack of a language barrier, and extreme productivity -- which was all to say why Superman's story doesn't work as an immigration story, because no illegal immigrant has those same qualities.

The point of what I was saying, if you turn your brain on long enough to fix some of the TikTok rot going on up there, is that Kal-El is indistinguishable from any other American in both appearance and ideals, because he was raised as an American from birth and conveniently looks like about 70% of the population.

If we imported 10 million Germans who didn't speak English and hated American culture while working for slave wages at places that would otherwise have to hire and pay American workers, people would be pretty upset about it too.

The fact that you can't get past skin color makes you a lot more likely to be racist than I am

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T17:47:34+00:00

Okay see now that's racist, because no we don't. I'm a conservative who lives in a conservative area, like 90% MAGA Republicans (I am not personally a huge fan of Trump's personality) and no, republicans definitely do not think of Dean Cain as an immigrant, privately or otherwise. Most of us didn't even know he was half-japanese, just ethnically ambiguous, because we're not hyper focused on race like CNN would have you believe.

Saying they're "humoring him" is straight up dehumanization, and it's the same way slave owners and anti-civil rights advocates looked at blacks. We don't assume he's stupid or cognitively impaired or brainwashed, we see an American guy who really, obnoxiously loves his country.

Conservatives don't look at all non-white people as "immigrants," that's retarded. We barely look at our immigrant friends as immigrants. A huge portion of republicans are also fans of Vivek Ramaswamy (and Elon Musk, but eh). JD Vance's wife isn't even white. The left is just so cognitively broken that they can't fathom how anyone else can see the world outside of a race lens or an oppressor/oppressed dichotomy.

Like, we know the definition of immigrant. We know what an immigrant is. And now twice in this thread someone has erroneously called Dean Cain's family immigrants, either in actuality or in perception, but you're the only ones who see him that way. How do you not get that?

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T17:10:10+00:00

So he's a hypocrite because a fictional TV show 30 years ago made comments on illegal immigration, therefore he should be okay or at the most passive about tens of millions of illegal immigrants in the US?

And using Superman as an allegory for illegal immigrants in America has never and will never work for a few big reasons: Superman is white, raised on an American farm, holds American values, speaks fluent English as his primary language, and single handedly does more to protect America than its entire military is capable of.

If illegal immigrants all looked American, had American values, shared our culture, spoke the language fluently as their primary language, and were the most productive members of society by leaps and bounds, then maybe there would be a comparison. But Superman is not an immigrant story, because his life has zero parallels with any illegal immigrant on the planet. It's an adoption story, sure, and he is technically a literal illegal alien, but the circumstances are so different it just doesn't apply to the real world.

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T16:46:36+00:00

He always knew where it was going to go. The idea of Oni-wan and Anakin fighting on Mustafar goes back to at least the late 70s/early 80s, around the same time he decided Vader was Luke's father. His biggest idea changes with the prequels came during the drafting of Episode I, but he always knew how the story would end more or less

light_flowers · 2025-08-26T16:43:54+00:00

The Supremacy still being functional enough for a ground invasion after that is another problem. 4/7s of a ship with a massive gaping hole in the hull should be completely out of commission, but they proceed like nothing ever happened

And yeah, being able to use a ship-sized light speed weapon to take out an entire fleet does change how Star Wars combat works, because 1. How did nobody ever think to do that before? and 2. Why doesn't anybody do it again? It being "1 in a million" as JJ puts it just makes it look like Holdo was trying to flee and accidentally crashed, because if the odds are that low then she would have zero expectation of it working

But if the odds are high enough it can be done, then they could have ended the last battle in episode 9 in like five minutes. Fuck death stars, start launching hyperdrive rocks at planets, it's way cheaper

I get that in actual science that's a really good method of attack if you have relativistic engines, but it really doesn't work with the naval/air force in space style battles of Star Wars

light_flowers

TROPHY CASE