UKANSASCITYKANSAS 1989

2. The Federal Reserve, for inflating the currency at exponential rates

1. The President, for leading the nation to war with Iraq and also tough guy talk about Iran.

Recall too that in Pinochio a fox named Gideon and his sidekick Foulfellow the cat are villains and the fate of the wicked is to become an animal. a jackass. Shere Kahn in Jungle Tales is hardly an innocent animal. The jackals in Lion King are the main villains. Neither Disney or Ghibli indicates that all humans are corrupt or that all animals are virtuous. Of couse, Disney dealt with a story like Bambi, one expected to find the anti-human sentiments in the original story to appear.

“So the story goes” raises the question of where this story comes from. It sounds to me like what might be implied in a lot of pro-Disney writing, but it is balanced by dismissive anti-Disney writing. Remember, “Mickey Mouse” is a common term meaning “cheap” and “second-rate”. The watered-down Disneyfied versions of classic tales that the Disney studios have produced don’t support your “story”. Or were you being ironic?

Why does Disney support Ghibli? Why not?

Increasingly the Disney conglomeration works with many other studios on joint products.

And there is at least an enormous amount of respect for the talents associated with Ghibli, especially the talent of Hayao Miyazaki. Most animators know this is very good stuff. If there is also money to be made off it, from a business point of view, why not get in on it? So now Disney makes money off its own films, and also makes money off any success by a major competitor. Yes, Disney is that self-centered.

But see http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/disney/ :

“Disney can not cut even one second from the films, according to the contract. Ghibli has officially stated that “With Disney’s commitment to maintain the quality of the original titles, there will be no changes to music and sequences in foreign language versions.” According to Mr. Suzuki, the producer of Ghibli, other companies such as Fox and Time-Warner contacted Tokuma, but Disney was the only company willing to agree to this condition, and that was the main reason why Tokuma chose Disney as a partner.”

“Miyazaki stated that he didn’t like the movies by Toho or Toei either (they are the Japanese movie companies which have been distributing the Ghibli films). He distinguishes between film production and film distribution. He also stated that he had agreed to the deal mainly to help Tokuma, which had backed him when he was starting out.”

And Ghibli on the whole has not been merely a Japanese version of Disney. Miyazaki’s own concerns and talents have focused on his own particular artistic visions and his way of putting forth his visions are very un-Disney. His focus is narrower than Disney’s but more visionary.

I can’t think of a single Disney film that I could imagine coming out of Ghibli, or a single Ghibli film that I can imagine coming out of the Disney studio.

In general there is a lack of class in much Disney output, a lack of soul and heart. I feel that also applies in general to Japanese animation, with its fixation on giant robots. But Sturgeon’s law says that 90% of everything is crap. So this should be expected, and it should be expected that American Disney crap and Japanese anime crap should be crap of a different kind, but still crap. Any American Disney excellence should be of a different kind then Japanese Ghibli excellence, and both of a different kind from animated films like “Watership Down” or Nick Park’s clay animation films, or Robert Zemiki’s CGI animation.

If the Disney studios and Ghibli do draw from a common playbook, then that playbook is very broad in its motifs and styles. But I shudder to imagine what a Disney (or Pixar) adaptation of the Earthsea stories would have been like, compared to Ghibli’s Tales of Earthsea.

cheers, Willis.

You remind me of a typical secularist, who believes that everyone has their opinion, which is equally valid, and truth is essentially nonexistent. This might be called fundamentalist secularism, which I utterly oppose as just another fundamentalist religion.

This is the Age of Orwell and truth itself is under siege, as the Neocons understand all too well with their project to “remake truth in our image”. This concept of the permanent control over truth by power will annihilate the world if it is allowed to continue.

I want to set truth free. When truth is set free the Age of Orwell will be over.

What is left versus what is right is based on the distribution of power and wealth. Right-wing systems set up a small rich elite and leave the masses impoverished. Left-wing systems have a minimal or nonexistant elite and a broad and very distributed power-base. States, by definition, are a centralized organization of power, and hence *cannot* be left-wing. One of the great myths of the modern age is that some states are left-wing (Soviet Union) and some are right-wing (United States). A mere glance at the Soviet Union tells you that isn’t true - there was a ruling class operating out of Moscow and there were poor masses with little power or wealth. The political system of Indigenous Americans was left-wing, yet I’ve never heard it called that.

Fascism is the classic right-wing system. Anarchism is the classic left-wing system. Capitalism is extremely close to fascism which accounts for the natural move from one to the other. Communism is close to capitalism. Communism is not left-wing - it’s called left-wing out of a combination of ignorance and capitalist desire to propagandize.

Anarchism is *decentralized power*. That’s what all left-wing systems have in common. Moscow controlled the entire Soviet Union. That’s centralized power (and wealth), hence right-wing.

Anarchism has many branches, some of which are more centralized than others. All are left-wing however since all are more or less decentralized. I promote the branch of anarchism I call “global socialism”, which means that wealth and power are distributed fairly equally among all people in the world and a classless global community is created. All states are abolished. Like all other forms of anarchism this is a bottom-up power structure where local communities serve their own needs and link up with other communities in a kind of web.

The reason the American government and the government of the Soviet Union were in conflict during the Cold War was not that one was capitalist and one communist, but that one wanted global domination of workers and the other refused to expose their workers to the global economy. What it means to have “free capital markets” is that those countries with large capital reserves (such as the United States) can enter other countries and exploit workers, such as occurs in vast form in Asia, Africa, and just about everywhere else today. The Soviet Union threatened that system, since it closed off it’s workers to foreign capital. The fear of the US government was that this “closing off of workers” would spread to other countries, thus reducing the amount of exploitable workers in the world. This is what is meant by “the defeat of communism” - the Soviet Union with it’s vast markets were opened up to capitalist domination.

The statement stands in opposition to truth purists, who might say instead that truth should be established without regard to life, and thus if truth is such that causes human extinction (on either the individual or collective level) then that is just the way it goes.

Or said another way, truth should serve life, rather than life serving truth.

This goes against my philosophy for most of my life.

way one:
“i refuse to believe in a world” meaning that one refuses to actively support this world, or condone any of its actions

way two:
“i refuse to believe in a world” meaning that one simply denies the existence of said world.

Aha, young truth glimpses a mirror and feels its presence more real.