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10 Best S/F Films That Never Existed
Jamie mentioned (via a Metafilter discussion) a great article entitled The 10 Best Sci-Fi Films that Never Existed. From the piece: "There was a movie that perfectly captured the Douglas Adams experience, the combination of bitter sarcasm and sharp imagination, the droll British wit and whale-exploding slapstick that infused his novels. And that movie was Shaun of the Dead. That movie was not, unfortunately, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a movie that floated around Hollywood for about 20 years before it finally appeared in theaters as a flat, lifeless, americanized lump that was mostly hated by people who liked the book and loathed by people who hated the book. "
Yes he is, he's a terrible actor. All he can do is play wooden and whiny, and possibly a gay prostitute. I'm just going to assume that 90% of this was tongue-in-cheek.
"Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with."
If that doesn't sum American foreign policy I don't know what does. Pinochet was not a benign dictator at all. He was as brutal a dictator to his enemies as any dictator of recent times, but because the USA "could do business with him" his crimes are forgivable.
What we see here is the truth behind the rhetoric. Democracy isn't an important consideration to the capitalists in Washington, compliance is. If it requires a dictator to keep the prolitariat working hard for the benefit of the rich, then so be it. Compare Washington's attitude to democratically elected presidents in, for example, Haiti or Venezuala, with their support for Pinochet and it becomes apparant that they consider the economic policy of a country to be of far greater importance than the people's freedom to choose their own political leader.