The world of James Bond

I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Was Bert the Turtle a fellow traveler?

In ancient times people were so valuable that wars were postponed to harvesting, now we are not needed either in agriculture or in the battlefield. They only need us to vote and for sports, but if it's just about running after a ball... a dog does it better.

Anyway, it's weird that you would say this but not recognize some of the same sentiments in Alien. The crew aren't "the right stuff" astronauts because in Alien human space travel is normal. It's the province of working-class folks who get screwed over by a multinational megacorporation. They're not stupid versions of Mercury astronauts, they're disposable truck drivers. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the film presents this as a bad thing.
 
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Better than an SA80?


 
So Communist Hollywood teamed up with Ridley Scott (lol) and told him to basically remake The Vampire Planet and Night of the Blood Beast in order to kill the "space hero"...in 1979?

Do you think there might be a major flaw in that theory?
In the fifties there was a type of science fiction that tried to direct public opinion against (Western) technological superiority by criminalizing nuclear energy and astronautics. That benefited the Soviets. Alien was designed to destroy the image of the heroes that the media had previously built during the Mercury Project, to cut expenses. Different objectives, different funders.

I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.
That story has very old roots, it is based on Homer's "Odyssey" and Shakespeare's "The Tempest". For the adventure to be believable it is necessary to lose some crew members... like all those guys who wore red T-shirts in "Star Trek."
 
I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Was Bert the Turtle a fellow traveler?

In ancient times people were so valuable that wars were postponed to harvesting, now we are not needed either in agriculture or in the battlefield. They only need us to vote and for sports, but if it's just about running after a ball... a dog does it better.

Anyway, it's weird that you would say this but not recognize some of the same sentiments in Alien. The crew aren't "the right stuff" astronauts because in Alien human space travel is normal. It's the province of working-class folks who get screwed over by a multinational megacorporation. They're not stupid versions of Mercury astronauts, they're disposable truck drivers. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the film presents this as a bad thing.
A culture that has FTL technology and perfect robots does not need truck drivers with union claims, they are only meat for the monster.
 
Better than an SA80?


It is very well designed, in 1956 the physical principles of the laser were not known outside the scientific environment but the rifle has a spiral lamp.
 
I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Was Bert the Turtle a fellow traveler?

In ancient times people were so valuable that wars were postponed to harvesting, now we are not needed either in agriculture or in the battlefield. They only need us to vote and for sports, but if it's just about running after a ball... a dog does it better.

Anyway, it's weird that you would say this but not recognize some of the same sentiments in Alien. The crew aren't "the right stuff" astronauts because in Alien human space travel is normal. It's the province of working-class folks who get screwed over by a multinational megacorporation. They're not stupid versions of Mercury astronauts, they're disposable truck drivers. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the film presents this as a bad thing.
A culture that has FTL technology and perfect robots does not need truck drivers with union claims, they are only meat for the monster.

Marx said the same thing about cotton gins and waterwheels I think. I don't believe it turned out quite like he imagined.

There will always be working class people doing menial labor, simply because robots are bad at jobs that people are good at (like moving things and fixing machines), because it's a normal and natural complement to each other. Machines can't do everything, and even if they could, we really wouldn't want them to. Not because they'll outcompete us, but because, like Mengzi says, young people should live in "hardship" and "struggle" in order to build their moral, physical, and intellectual character. If you are too comfortable you become old, decrepit, and morally bankrupt, so it should be reserved for the elderly to live in comfort waited on hand and foot by the robotic peons.

IMO the only reasons people would think menial labor is bad or something and has to be eliminated is because they're afraid of being uncomfortable/having a crummy job and think people who work in these jobs are somehow going to be happy they won't have jobs, or just assume that labor relations are going to be smoothed over by giving bosses vastly more power than they already have over workers. There's inherently nothing wrong with being a truck driver, or a farmer, and the future will have farmers and truck drivers, because they're arguably far more important than roboticists and astronauts, though. You can't eat without truck drivers or farmers, but you can eat without robots or spaceships.

Getting screwed over by your boss because they want you to pickup a alien penis monster with a proclivity towards sloppy smooches is bad, but that's not really the same as being a truck driver, in general. That's just being a truck driver for a shitty company that doesn't care about its workers. Like a lot of companies do in the USA right now, and did back then, because Aliens is a movie as much about today as it was the 1970's. The Aliens guys just needed unions to keep from being seen as disposable parts for a machine that takes in people, grinds them up, and spits them out. We got there a good bit faster than Ridley Scott imagined I suppose.

Which is rather the point as it's the end-state of a lot of techno-fetishism: it's not concerned with improving work relations of truck drivers and farmers to their bosses. That's hard work because it requires not assuming a superiority complex alongside the invented, modernist hierarchy of "comfort is better than hardship" where the guy who has the less physically demanding job is in charge. It's concerned with putting truckers and farmers out on the street so they can't complain about increasingly bad working conditions. Marx's solution was to have workers seize the means of production through force of arms and form democratic councils of armed militias of workers. That didn't work, of course, not because it wasn't tried or because it was bludgeoned to death, but because workers had sufficient power to muscle through changes like 8-hour work days and minimum wages that appeased them in the late 19th century.

Now we're at a similar crossroads since the 1970's and the rise of financialization, and robots are promising to eliminate the worker issues like they were in the 1880s I suppose. More than likely there will be a re-evaluation of worker relations in the coming decades though.

We're getting to the point where entire groups of workers, who are probably not useful for tasks besides menial jobs, might be replaced by robots in the future, assuming (big if, really) that futuristic robots aren't all hot air. What happens to those people? Do they starve in the street? Are they going to be arrested for being homeless because they lost their job to a Tesla Truck? Are they going to be allowed to freeze to death in alleyways of exposure because shanty towns need to be swept out of sight? Are they going to be transitioned to a new job of similar task requirements, assuming any still exist?

FWIW it's also not clear if robots will actually be good enough to do all that since real life robots can barely open a door without toppling over.

Most factory jobs these days are moving parts between various mechanical work stations because machines are bad at this sort of rapid twisting, twirling movements that people are good at, or maintaining said mechanical work stations. So I don't think that it's a likely outcome that menial laborers will be destroyed by big bad robots (a local factory I worked at once recently got large welding robots and still uses people to load the robots with huge shells, for instance). I think the bigger issue is that poor labor relations and bad compensation for the workers will end up destroying the labor market instead, because people would rather pay relatively cushier office workers large amounts of money instead of menial laborers, for whatever reason.

Suffice to say, menial workers/space truckers/space farmers in space fiction is fine. It's a good way to expose the fact that menial workers in real life are treated like literal spare parts or human cogs, instead of, you know, people. It can also be good at entertaining people who are simply there for a spooky monster house mystery movie.

Also in ancient times people were worth much less than they are now, which is kind of a given. Not sure where you get the loonie idea that because a bunch of soldiers have to bring in the harvest they're "worth more". It isn't true in North Korea why would it be true in Ancient Rome? The only difference between then and now is that people were also less productive.

You had two issues: your boss still doesn't give a shit how much work you do, but you also can't do much work to begin with. You dying or being injured on the job is a lot less impactful to him and it's probably factored in that a smidge of the workforce will be crushed by 20 ton stone blocks or something and a lot more will get broken bones and go back to work in a few weeks. This was before workman's comp, remote site data backups, and state pensions though, so who knows what sort of calculations were used beyond implicit rules of thumb really, the Ancient Egyptians weren't great at keeping long surviving records of their basic accounting practices. We just know that a lot more people were injured in work sites back then than they are now.

Better than an SA80?



It's a good movie ye.
 
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My tip for the next Bond. Woody Allen:) of course.

It would have to be the young guy who played a Woody Allen type character in one of his recent movies. Or, I don't want a neurotic, bumbling, maladjusted person playing James Bond.
 
I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Was Bert the Turtle a fellow traveler?

In ancient times people were so valuable that wars were postponed to harvesting, now we are not needed either in agriculture or in the battlefield. They only need us to vote and for sports, but if it's just about running after a ball... a dog does it better.

Anyway, it's weird that you would say this but not recognize some of the same sentiments in Alien. The crew aren't "the right stuff" astronauts because in Alien human space travel is normal. It's the province of working-class folks who get screwed over by a multinational megacorporation. They're not stupid versions of Mercury astronauts, they're disposable truck drivers. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the film presents this as a bad thing.
A culture that has FTL technology and perfect robots does not need truck drivers with union claims, they are only meat for the monster.

Marx said the same thing about cotton gins and waterwheels I think.

There will always be working class people doing menial labor, simply because robots are bad at jobs that people are good at (like moving things and fixing machines), because it's a normal and natural job. Machines can't do everything, and even if they could, we really wouldn't want them to. But then the whole "existential robot outcompetes humans" took off right after Alien.

Not sure what that has to do with the 1950's when pretty much every Hollywood movie had nuclear stuff in it, good and bad.
Marx had a Malthusian mentality that ignored the influence of technical progress on social behavior. Antibiotics, contraceptives, atomic weapons, TV, Internet... By the way, the guy who invented cotton gins was a hero who freed slaves and made Obama president.
 
So Communist Hollywood teamed up with Ridley Scott (lol) and told him to basically remake The Vampire Planet and Night of the Blood Beast in order to kill the "space hero"...in 1979?

Do you think there might be a major flaw in that theory?
In the fifties there was a type of science fiction that tried to direct public opinion against (Western) technological superiority by criminalizing nuclear energy and astronautics. That benefited the Soviets. Alien was designed to destroy the image of the heroes that the media had previously built during the Mercury Project, to cut expenses. Different objectives, different funders.

I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Those were not "atomic" rifles but laser pulse beam. Get your SF rifles straight :)
 
My tip for the next Bond. Woody Allen:) of course.

It would have to be the young guy who played a Woody Allen type character in one of his recent movies. Or, I don't want a neurotic, bumbling, maladjusted person playing James Bond.
Well, if instead of being interested in women he does it for girls... it could give an interesting twist to the series….best seller?
 
So Communist Hollywood teamed up with Ridley Scott (lol) and told him to basically remake The Vampire Planet and Night of the Blood Beast in order to kill the "space hero"...in 1979?

Do you think there might be a major flaw in that theory?
In the fifties there was a type of science fiction that tried to direct public opinion against (Western) technological superiority by criminalizing nuclear energy and astronautics. That benefited the Soviets. Alien was designed to destroy the image of the heroes that the media had previously built during the Mercury Project, to cut expenses. Different objectives, different funders.

I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Those were not "atomic" rifles but laser pulse beam. Get your SF rifles straight :)

They might have been, I just know that the big atomic radar cannons are called "batteries" by Leslie Niels
Marx had a Malthusian mentality that ignored the influence of technical progress on social behavior. Antibiotics, contraceptives, atomic weapons, TV, Internet... By the way, the guy who invented cotton gins was a hero who freed slaves and made Obama president.

People were still required to operate cotton gins.

Not sure why a space trucker is such a big problem though. It's a good way of showing that people in the future are still going to be considered replaceable by their bosses, which seems to be quite true in general since it takes a very special boss to not succumb to this. Most bosses are kind of bad in some way, and the bigger they get the worse they are, all the way to the very tip top. It helps explain why a lot of CEOs want to automate away jobs like truck driving instead of just taking fewer bonuses or cutting their own multi-million dollar salaries to pay for higher wages for their workers.

I prefer Outland to Alien myself because a boss forcing his workers into taking illicit drugs with awful side-effects to meet unreasonably harsh workplace demands is more relatable to me than a sex fiend penis monster stalking some space truckers. But they're basically the same movie in that regard.

Menial laborers in a crummy job get fucked over by the big boss due to unreasonably stupid demands from out of touch loons a few dozen lightyears away. Laborers fight back, almost lose, but win at the end, but at what cost? Except Outland was a closed story and didn't have the sequel hook.

Alien doesn't have lever action shotguns in space though. So it's kinda lame.

You can of course still have space heroes, but space heroes of the modern day will probably be guys who secure higher wages through negotiation with management from the inside a GEO nuclear missile satellite, get good pensions, or reduce housing prices by building O'Neill Cylinders with the help of some government public works initiative.

It's like Moonraker but Hugo Drax is a angry middle manager who is confronting the radiological, skeletal, and DNA damaged workforce of the space shipyard by threatening management with surreptitiously assembled nuclear missile satellites until they start hiring more astronauts and rotating workers out of orbit sooner, so they don't get weird cancers or bone diseases or whatever. Or they replace the workers with robots and give them long-term benefits to compensate for work-related injuries.

Seems pretty heroic to me IDK. He's out there helping the little man and everyone likes underdogs coming out on top.

It would make Elon Musk steamed and have people start asking questions about what sort of protections need to be in place for the (assumingly) inevitable period when space truckers are flying around from Alpha Centauri hyperlane stops to pick up a space burger. Do they need workman's comp? Should they pay for their own antimatter fuel? How would credit and currency work in a society needing to span across multiple light-years where it takes literal decades to cash your paystub? Does getting crushed by tribbles in their sleeper cab space shuttles count as a work-related injury?

But I'm a big fan of peasant/mundane fictions in general like Utvandrarna and the old Sagas. So I lean towards that in science fiction as well.

If you're more about the escapism aspects then I guess having everything be grimy, greasy, and gross, with people still working shitty jobs might be a bit too real, then I can see the dislike there. OTOH I don't think aesthetic preference difference is a result of deliberate actions by shadowy cabals or anything, it's just generations growing up in different times and being exposed to more or less cynical eras, which is normal.

Since even peoples 500 or 1000 years ago were into both fantastical fictions like flying steeds taking crossdressing knights to the Moon, raising armies of stone Golem-riding Nubian Christians, fighting harpies from Hell, titanic cannibals like Luke Skywalker versus the Wumpus (or whatever), and 20 foot tall Russian giants using tree sized axes; and more down-to-Earth (literally), mundane fictions about farmers, lawyers, and mayors solving the problems of everyday people relating to questions of law, honor in friendship, and blood feuds...

Well, I don't think the aesthetic preference gap has anything to do with the modern era.
 
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Marx had a Malthusian mentality that ignored the influence of technical progress on social behavior. Antibiotics, contraceptives, atomic weapons, TV, Internet... By the way, the guy who invented cotton gins was a hero who freed slaves and made Obama president.

People were still required to operate cotton gins.

The cotton gin increased the demand for menial labor. The machines and defoliants (which I'm smelling strongly right now) needed for mechanized cotton picking weren't around until the late 30s when share-cropping went out.

I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Those were not "atomic" rifles but laser pulse beam. Get your SF rifles straight :)

They might have been, I just know that the big atomic radar cannons are called "batteries" by Leslie Niels

In the movie they're just called blasters, and they cause fission in the targets. Colt-Vickers comes from the book.

Speaking of beams the Moonraker laser is really goofy but it was always fun in Goldeneye games.

kvE3uEY.jpg
 
The real problem with Bond is.....it would all work believably before WWII.
Frankly it belongs in that pre-war era, when real life characters did get up to some pretty amazing feats of daring and things like giant battleships really were built in secret. The Second World War was the last time such things happened in bulk.

The Smiley series hits the Cold War notes correctly. Though the IPCRESS File bridges the two styles.
I rather though Harry Palmer was a much mote believable character.

Craig Thomas hit the more dramatic Cold War themes. Though Firefox was hilariously wrong and would work better if it was reversed. With a flawed Soviet agent stealing an American stealth fighter. "ty dolzhen dumat' po-angliyski, tovarishch!"
 
The real problem with Bond is.....it would all work believably before WWII.
Frankly it belongs in that pre-war era, when real life characters did get up to some pretty amazing feats of daring and things like giant battleships really were built in secret. The Second World War was the last time such things happened in bulk.

Yeah, there were superspies a lot like James Bond in the 30s.

The superspy identified by a number dates back to silent film with Agent 326 in Spione.

The concepts in Bond weren't exactly new:

jXx8Swh.jpg
 
I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

According to the novel, written at the same time the movie was being made (not unlike "2001"), the crew of the C-57D are armed with "D-R pistols" and "manually operated" "Colt-Vickers disintegrators."
 
I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

According to the novel, written at the same time the movie was being made (not unlike "2001"), the crew of the C-57D are armed with "D-R pistols" and "manually operated" "Colt-Vickers disintegrators."

Marx had a Malthusian mentality that ignored the influence of technical progress on social behavior. Antibiotics, contraceptives, atomic weapons, TV, Internet... By the way, the guy who invented cotton gins was a hero who freed slaves and made Obama president.

People were still required to operate cotton gins.

The cotton gin increased the demand for menial labor. The machines and defoliants (which I'm smelling strongly right now) needed for mechanized cotton picking weren't around until the late 30s when share-cropping went out.

I thought the astronauts in Forbidden Planet had "Colt Vickers Atomic Rifles" or am I wrong? Sounds pretty rad[iological] to me.

Those were not "atomic" rifles but laser pulse beam. Get your SF rifles straight :)

They might have been, I just know that the big atomic radar cannons are called "batteries" by Leslie Niels

In the movie they're just called blasters, and they cause fission in the targets. Colt-Vickers comes from the book.

Speaking of beams the Moonraker laser is really goofy but it was always fun in Goldeneye games.

kvE3uEY.jpg

Thanks for the correction.

I guess I should go watch it again. :v
 
I suppose the more modern franchise is best represented by the Jason Bourne films.
These feature the locations and car chases of the Bond films with the grittier/cynical Palmer/Leamas lead character.
 
The concepts in Bond weren't exactly new:

jXx8Swh.jpg
For some reason this photo reminds me of the super-villain on a pearl-fishing island in the finale of the British Danger Man series (episode Shinda Shima), who had a concealed pop-up MG34 in his desk...

Danger Man played by Patrick McGoohan was very much a James Bond-type character, though he often eschewed glamourous women outside of work and driving a Mini around London wasn't super cool - well not until Michael Caine made it cool.
 
Does anybody just... you know.... watch the movies?

The Man with the Golden Gun is on TV here later today. It's probably my least favourite of all the Bonds but I'll be moderately entertained for a couple of hours which I think was all that was intended of it and all that I require of it.
 
I nominate Rowan Atkinson for the next James Bond. If he can play Commissaire Maigret, 007 should be a doddle.
So,in other words basically Johnny English without so much humor.Sort of like a throwback to the 70s roger moore bond,only less good looking,but with more humor.
I wasn't thinking so much about Johnny English - I had forgotten entirely about him - but more about some actors not meshing with my feeling which roles they should take on. Rowan Atkinson is a fine actor, but I can't get my head around him playing Maigret. Wrong language. Wrong physical presence. He's entirely convincing as a 50s policeman. Just not Maigret. To me, it's the same with Kenneth Branagh playing Wallander.
I've always thought Roger Moore was wrong for Bond, enjoyable as the 2CV car chase was. In my view, Daniel Craig is just fine as Bond.
I completely agree with Rhinocrates regarding Bond vs Smiley.

One more point:
Does anybody just... you know.... watch the movies?
It's entertainment, after all.
 
My favourite Maigret. We're currently half-way viewing all 54 episodes (again).
 
I ended up watching Ice Station Zebra and The Man with the Golden Gun back-to-back and I enjoyed the former much more than the latter. Patrick McGoohan's ice-cold "Dosvedanya" to the Soviet Colonel at the end had a definite sinister "I'll see you soon, Comrade" vibe. His part was stymied somewhat by the cards so close to his chest, he swallowed them role but there was enough there to make me think he might have made quite an interesting Bond.
 
McGoohan of course had already been Danger Man and was well into The Prisoner when he filmed Ice Station Zebra (which led to some poorer filler episodes for the latter half of the series while he was away filming) so was well versed in the role of a spy.
He had been considered as Bond for Dr. No but he turned down the role on moral grounds, and was later considered for Live and Let Die, but again turned it down. McGoohan I think would have felt that Bond was a rather one-dimensional character (besides the moral aspects he disagreed with). I think had Bond been portrayed as he is now, McGoohan would have done a great job. I wonder how James Bond would have fared in The Village?
 
Never watched The Prisoner. I can never forgive that white blob for what it did to Moleman.
 
White blob? You mean the weather balloon? At any rate, McGoohan would have been a bad choice. He never came off as a ladies' man.
 

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