Can new mascots help boost the recruitment decline?

Right so you agree with Ted Cruz that we should try to be more like the MASCULINE Russian army then? I'm sure that hot-take didn't age horribly.

I mean honestly I think beyond any left-right add campaign, they should just up soldiers pay and increase their benefits.

But good luck getting money to the military that actually benefits the soldiers.

I mean I'd love to hear what you think those are so long as it's not gonna turn into some rant about 'the israelites' or 'the wokeists'.

I think Disney is slightly special- in that they understand longterm investment. See Disney, as in Walt Disney himself went into cartoons, and specifically wanted to adapt all the big fairytale stories cause he wanted to pull of the long-con. If he makes Snow White and it's the version that every kid in America goes to see, then he's not just made those kids and their parents fans of Disney. He's made it so that when those kids grow up and have kids of their own, they make their kids watch his version of Snow White, and that's the version everyone remembers and Disney makes money each generation for the same movie.

And his strategy worked- there's a reason Disney is the media supergiant it is today, when it was one of the few independant studios in the 30's. The strategy is the same today except Disney took at look at the demographic projections. We'll be a minority-majority country in 2050 and when we get to 2050, Disney wants to be able to go 'hey guys, remember how we were on the ground floor of that whole thing, and how we made a black little mermaid and all the racists got real mad at us? Why don't you buy the anniversary edition of that movie to show to your kids?'

They want to tie their brand to the future so that they can reap profits in the future. It's a long-con. That's why no matter how much republicans get mad at them they're going through with the strategy. They've been doing it for about a decade in at this point. Hell- they've been doing it since the 90's- that's why they made a Mulan movie because Mulan kicks ass and they wanted to be on the top of that whole 'tough bad ass action princess' thing so they could sell more toys to girls.

It's capitalism. And in fact it's the same capitalism that was done in the 30's. Disney didn't change the future changed.

I'm talking about the 1990's. I consider myself 'socially conscious', I love it. Mulan's a very strong character in that movie, and it's also just a really good movie. Don't know about that new one, I didn't see it cause the pandemic hit and everything.

Also- define for me the 'boulder of progress'. How do you sir, define progress and how do you see it's effect on history?

See I believe in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. 'The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice'. Progress is what led to the rise of the enlightenment. The scientific and industrial revolutions. The rise of democracy over monarchy- and then again the rise of democracy over fascism and then communism. It was the ending of slavery, the end of segregation and the civil rights movement. Feminism, the LGBT movement.

I see progress as fundamentally good- I see socially conscious movements as following the long tradition laid out since as far back as the concept of humanism at the very least.

Now sure, I understand that liberals annoy you, and I'm not saying they shouldn't annoy you- nor am I saying you can't think they're wrong and you should oppose them. But you're phrasing of 'the boulder of progress moving downhill is very curious. I mean do you think that the american revolution was moving down hill? Do you think the abolition of slavery was moving downhill? Do you think the invention of vaccines, or the first man on the moon was going downhill?

See that's a better way to phrase it (I was worried you were going to say yes to a lot of those questions on the bottom).

But here's the thing- the boulder was pushed centuries ago. At least in the US it was pushed when the founders said 'men are fundamentally equal and should vote'. That lead to people pushing for the franchise- to make it so all men could vote, then all men regardless of race, then men and women and so on.

The boulder of progress is ongoing. I'm sure you have differing opinions about the state of race relations and what should be done, but I'm sure you can agree that the current slate of social issues we're contending with didn't arise out of nothing in the past five years.

I mean honestly I think that's the problem with a lot of conservatives. Actually I think it's a problem with people in general- just conservatives are the loudest about it. People act like everything that's going on today is happening for the first time in history. Which leads me to believe most people didn't pay attention to history class. Everyone going on about how the liberals are going to doom society hasn't paid attention to how the liberals are always dooming society.

>I see progress as fundamentally good
Why? The Industrial Revolution, and its consequences, have notoriously been a disaster for the human race. Democracy has almost as bad a track record as Communism—looks at all the countries that call themselves democratic, or republics, and see how many times you want to say "but that's not *real* democracy so it doesn't count"—even under ideal implementations, under monarchy one man is accountable for everything, while under democracy no one is accountable for anything. The democracy that rose over Fascism and National Socialism was a democracy of FDR fabricating Supreme Court justices until it was stacked enough that whatever he wanted to do was constitutional, and the democracy that rose over Communism was one dysfunctional system having more money to throw at its problems than another. Freed slaves were free only to starve, and the mostly-functional societies that blacks and whites had developed separately being integrated at gunpoint crushed once-thriving black communities and led directly to the urban poverty and crime we're still dealing with today. Feminism has accomplished nothing except tricking women into spending the best years of their lives toiling away for a series of men they hate instead of one man that they love. We're about to spend another June with every Fortune 500 corporation screaming from every available rooftop how awesome it is to be a legbutt, but trannies continue to 41% themselves because their existence is based on a laughably false sales pitch from Big Pharma and (relatively) normal homos continue to be one of the most aggressively dysfunctional demographics in the world.
All of this wonderful progress, and 25% of first worlders are on antidepressants and at any rate refuse to reproduces so anti-prodigiously that their governments feel forced to import the entire population of the third world to make up the difference—why?

>Democracy is good because if the president goes insane we can replace him.
>If the monarch goes insane we're stuck with him. Anyone who's a monarchist nostalgic never bothered reading about all the kings who got overthrown

Re-read your own post. Then go back and look at the several presidents who went insane in American history and were impossible to overthrow so their wives or bankers ruled from behind the scenes.

>"We" replaced Trump
Who's "we", and how is the replacement any better?

>Industrialization had some bad shit- like say child labor. But we made laws to fix that. We also got good shit- like cars, and cheap phones.
"We also got good shit, like cars that're destroying the environment—regardless of whether they're gas or electric—and cheap cellphones made by slave labor in factories with anti-suicide nets"

>If the monarch goes insane we're stuck with him. Anyone who's a monarchist nostalgic never bothered reading about all the kings who got overthrown
So which is it? Are you stuck with the insane monarch, or can you replace him with someone not-insane? In any case, an insane monarch is a clearly-identifiable problem with an obviousl solution, but a democracy where the decisions are nominally made by hundreds of elected representatives and actually made by an entrenched bureaucracy of like a million people is utterly intractable, especially when the only options the voters have are "the butthole causing all your problems" and "someone just as bad who isn't even willing to pretend to cater to your interests"

>Stacking courts is superior to ethnically cleansing israelites.
Funny you should say that in defense of the guy who literally rounded up Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps.
>Throwing money at problems is superior to sending people to the gulags.
Is spending infinity dollars on enough nukes to kill everyone in the world a hundred times over while black families starve and OD on crack *really* that much better?

>It's that college is expensive.
Why does everyone need to go to college? Most jobs that require a college degree—like mine—consist of sending emails all day to other people who send emails all day, and require none of the knowldege accrued at the institute of higher learning you attended. The degree's just proof you can show up on time and do busy work—like it's a stand-in for some other test of general intelligence and aptitude that you can't arbitrarily apply per Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

>And him putting japanese-americans in concentration camps was superior to ethnically cleansing the israelites. You know why?
NTA, yeah way fewer people are going to starve or die of typhus in the camps run by the country not credibly threatened by the war than in the ones run by a counrty with the entire world allied against it
man, that's crazy

>You're looking for a perfect world—advancement with no drawbacks. Which is why you'll be permanently dissapointed. It's looking at the world the way you want it to be not the way it is.
If you aren't seeking a perfected world, then what do you think you're progressing toward? If you think that progress will never make things strictly better, but merely solve one problem while creating a bunch of others that will have to be solved by progress that leaves more new problems in its wake, ad infinitum, then what's the point?

If you count abortion as infant mortality (but of course, you don't), we're no better off now than we were then—but back then, people were willing to screw to perpetuate their kind and now they aren't.

I've made it very clear that I don't believe in "progress" or the narrative of America in particular or the forces of managerial liberalism and technological-industrial society in general being the unambiguous "good guys" of history. I think I've made it clear, but it's possible that I haven't, that I find that life is fundamentally unsatisfactory and that efforts to improve it are futile at best and counterproductive at worst.
By all means, call me a doomer or a pseud or whatever makes you feel better about all of this progress not being able to free your drinking water of harmful contaminants or base your lifestyle on anything but coerced human toil.

I disagree with conservatives because their idea of "conservatism" is digging trenches in defense of yesterday's revolutions, and has been for hundreds of years.
I deny the possibility of improving the human condition because no matter how much you "improve" or "worsen" it, people will adjust their expectations accordingly and be just as happy or unhappy as they were before, not to mention the issue of baseline issues like availability of potable water, food insecurity, the necessity of coerced labor, etc. being unchanged but for new coats of paint in spite of everything.
Neither of us believe that a world free of suffering is possible; you just seem to think that modern suffering is better than past suffering, even though modernity makes us more aware of how bad things are and how much worse they're going to get while simultaneously offering fewer credible palliatives.

White people expect their kids to go to college. So they have fewer kids. Same as every other first world country- see Japan, China is having this happen too. Country's aren't 'forced' to import people. Japan's not. They wanna replace everyone with robots. Most countries are just okay with letting in enough brown people to keep the population growing. Why? Well because capitalism is built on constant growth. The less people there are the less they consume, and the economy contracts which capitalism doesn't know what to do with and the system tumbles.

Now if you want solutions to this 'problem', you could-
-replace everyone with robots like Japan
-become a communist and say that the government should control every aspect of the economy
-become an anarcho-primitivist and force everyone to farm as a living so people produce more children for cheap farm labor
-try to actively force the white population into economic decline so they stop sending their kids to college and expect high standards of living
-stop caring about 'demographic collapse' cause it's not at thing.

https://i.imgur.com/keElNrq.jpg

>Everyone going on about how the liberals are going to doom society hasn't paid attention to how the liberals are always dooming society.
I agree, but probably not for the same reasons you do.

Point being if liberals were gonna doom society, they did it when they said that people should have the right to vote.

Not him but that's the remake you're thinking of. Most chinese like the 90s Mulan movie, especially young girls.

thou

>that image
pure gold holy shit

No it's more that they genuinely are kinda apathetic. It doesn't help that the LDP is effectively unbeatable in elections. Not because the people like the LDP, god no they've had terrible approval ratings since the 1960s. It's because the opposition sucks that much more and can't form a coalition to save their lives.
It also helps that Japan doesn't have the right to information in its law, so you legally don't have the right to know what the government is doing, and the government likes it that way.

slippery little bastard

The military wasn’t specifically ordered to do anything. The military unilaterally decided to go frick up China’s shit, civilian government be damned.

What problems would be solved, exactly, by people pretending (more than they already do) not to notice, e.g., what the people who commit 60% of murders in the US all have in common?

So in that case, the Japanese decide, if the Americans are going to declare war on us anyway, let's knock them out in one go first- if they don't surrender immediately they'll be so far on the backfoot that they could NEVER reorganize in the Pacific to threaten us. From there it'll just be mopping up the disorganized British.

Now of course this calculus on the part of the Japanese was OBVIOUSLY WRONG. But it's worth noting that when they did Pearl Harbor, they considered it an unimaginable success. So remember- the Pacific Theater started on the best possible terms according to the Japanese.

Yeah, but it turns out that 'name' also includes wiping out the Japanese fleet, reducing several major Japanese cities to rubble reversing all their gains in the Pacific and in south-east asia, and nuking them twice.

Turns out that a formal declaration of war actually means a frickton.

What problems would be solved, exactly, by people pretending (more than they already do) not to notice, e.g., what the people who commit 60% of murders in the US all have in common?

Well you'd understand the benefits if you stopped being racist. But I have a feeling you're not going to: hence the problem perpetuates itself.

What theater? The Pacific theater?

The oil embargo. The Japanese claim this was a 'declaration of war', of course nobody bought it.

See we should remember that Japan was at war with China since 1937. China is in anarchy right now, and basically has been since they kicked out the Emperor. They're in active civil war, incompetent, corrupt, and have almost no guns (and no tanks and planes- they had an airforce that did well but they didn't last too long). And STILL the Japanese can't penetrate deeply into the interior to take them out for a number of reasons. The ONLY advantage the Japanese have is mechanization, their tanks planes and boats. All of which need OIL. Oil thy were primarily getting from the USA.

When the embargo came down, it was estimated the Japanese had about three months left of reserves and the war machine would break down. And the Chinese would then overwhelm the Japanese with human wave tactics (google 'Chinese Knife Batallions' it's exactly what it sounds like). The intent from the US was to force the Japanese into peace-talks with the Chinese. Now in this scenario Japan probably still owns a large chunk of China, as well as their colonial holdings in Korea and the Pacific. BUT: the japanese high command believes anything but total victory over china would be suicide to their regime- they sunk in so many resources that to walk away with less than nothing they thought would completely deligitimize them. So what's the solution?

Well the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) has a ton of oil. And the Dutch government conveniently no longer exists thanks to the Nazi's. Taking their oil would work. Now the Dutch-in-exile are allied to the British, so that would drag the Japanese into WW2. And we all know how much America LOVES european colonies and maintaining euroepan world order and getting involved in foriegn distant wars for the sake of the British.
(cont.)

>sanctions intended to dictate another country's foreign policy, when that foreign policy doesn't affect you, aren't an act of aggression

We're neutral, remember? It's not our concern whether we believe in it or not; all that matters to us is that Japan is paying us, and the longer their war drags on the more money we'll make.

>even if we were psychopaths, it's good business sense to kill millions of people and burn multiple countries to the ground so we can go back to trading with Europe and China
checks out

Or if we kept selling them oil and teamed up with them and Germany to crush the USSR and proto-Communist China before they grew into more serious problems.

Yeah, and it'd have worked about as well for them as it did the last time—but at least they wouldn't be communists.

>why would terminally contrarian people on an anime website defend Imperial Japan

Sanctions aren't why Japan lost, moron.
Japan lost because it got bogged down fighting two enemies at once - the Chinese and Soviets.
The Japanese made the same mistake as Germany.
You have to pick your battles.

>So you think the world is static. So why try to discourage people from changing anything? You don't think anything will be accomplished, but nor do you think anything will be lost. So why interject other than to stroke your ego for being a misanthrope?
Because if fools and jokesters are tolerated to go into the public square and shout "The sky is green! The Sun rises in the West! Two and two make five!" without any contrary voices, then other fools will join them.
>Being more aware of suffering is itself an improvement. It gives us more ability to improve our conditions. To think otherwise is to be like an ostrich- to stick your head in the sand.
If my head's in the sand, yours is in the clouds. To see the world as it is and believe in the myth of Progress is ludicrous; if things were as bad back then as they'd have to have been for this to be an improvement, everyone would've killed themselves and none of us would've been born.

I have to pay a third of my income to stay out of prison and in return the government, among other things, builds roads that are of poor quality, are ill-maintained, and by their nature work best when almost no one is using them—at full capacity they are almost as slow as walking. I, like most people, mainly use them to get to and from a job I hate but I do anyway so that I can use the money the government doesn't take by threat of force to feed, shelter, and clothe myself. Things are so much better now than hundreds of years ago when medieval serfs had a portion of their crops taken by their lord in exchange for nothing of value and sold or bartered the remainder to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves.
You seem to think I'm miserable—I'm not. I see the world as it is, and I accept it as it is. I don't expect it to be better, and I'm unsurprised when it gets worse. Sisyphus's happiness can't come from the false belief that he'll ever reach the top of the hill and stay there, or the fleeting staisfaction of pushing the boulder uphill; it can only arise from not wanting to not be pushing the boulder, from acceptance that this is his life, and that he can choose to want more and be miserable, or he can take it for what it is.