A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
Could be worse OP, could be a movie about the North Koreans successfully invading America, you know, North Korea, a country that barely has a navy and who's Air Force is mostly old Migs from several decades ago, a country who starts threatening their neighbors whenever their food supply runs low because their chubby leader eats too much while the rest of the country is at famine levels of hunger.
At least the original version of the movie was against the Russians while they were a super power.
The remake was originally going to feature a Chinese invasion, but they wanted it to still release and sell in China, so they made North Korea the bad guy instead.
It never did release in China.
a country that barely has a navy
North Korea has the largest submarine fleet of any nation. Of course most of those are old diesel subs, but the point still stands.
We've seen what the Russian military has been like in Ukraine, if you think most of those subs aren't rusting piles of garbage then you're probably drinking that tankie Kool aid. They've probably had to cannibalize the majority of them just to keep what few they have running, because it's not like they just idly make parts for 1950's era subs, especially not for a country that barely has enough money to feed themselves and spends most of that on their nuclear program.
Also they're loud ass diesel subs, every modern navy will know exactly where they are and how many they have easily, and it's not like 1950's weaponry is going to make up the difference.
There's also the video game series, Homefront, where a unified Korea under northern rule invaded the US and occupies it.
I get your point, I really do, but Homefront was also about the economic collapse of the American system caused by its own corruption.
I always got the idea that Korea wasn't incredibly overpowered united, but America was already broken and a step away from being conquered already and the first army to invade happened to be Korea. The rest of the world just wanted to see what would happen.
Kind of like having Russia invade Ukraine only to have it's nose beaten in and globally embarrassed. Doesn't mean Ukraine is going to invade and conquer, just that a global super power can be defeated by a smaller united nation after decades of corruption.
At least that's the idea that got me through the game. It was honestly just a COD reskin of a game and wasn't actually that good in retrospect
At least the original version of the movie was against the Russians
You're forgetting the real beef behind that invasion: Nicaragua.
Rewatching Stargate and international cooperation feels so strange and bereft somehow. A kinder path.
I often times wonder if an extraterrestrial threat would be a unifying factor or if people would still be selfish unless it affected them. The pandemic was the closest we've seen to a world level threat recently and it just increased selfishness IMO (at least in the US)
I thought Marvel's Secret Invasion had an interesting quote on this that I'll paraphrase: nothing makes humans stronger than uniting against a common enemy, but as soon as that enemy is gone, they always devolve into tribal bickering again. It'll be a miracle if we ever reach Star Trek levels of global unification and peace.
Don't forget that Star Trek universe went through an apocalyptic phase before reaching their post scarcity society. I'm quite optimistic that we'll reach Star Trek levels of peace, but reaching that state without having 90% of the population annihilated in some kind of a World War or some other catastrophe? That's what I'm kinda pessimistic about.
Never mind Star Trek, at the rate we're going we'll be lucky to get The Expanse.
The aliens would just hack the internet and flood it with bots more advanced than ChatGPT faking support to surrender to the alien overlord, then sit their asses watching humanity fought among themselves.
It's also surreal (for a different reason), to hear lines like
Why attack Russia? Aren't they our friends now?
from Terminator 2.
On the other hand, the Simpsons did a not-so-funny-now with this:
Still pretty funny.
Modern Warfare 2/3 where Russia not only manages to successfully invade the US, but brings it to it's knees.
Even if you set aside the fact that the US has the world's most powerful military and a heavily armed civilian population, geographically it would be virtually impossible to invade from another continent.
But fiction is fiction. And the Modern warfare trilogy was outstanding.
Stargate thinks the Russians could get a gate up and running lmao
They did screw it up completely and needed to be saved though so that part was accurate.
Well how else do you justify maintaining defense spending at 5x the next biggest military? You need a boogeyman to keep the nation spending like WW2 never ended.
Now I'm hearing there isn't enough money for Medicare or social security...
I was just thinking that as I was reading this post. Yeah, so they're not "right behind the US" in overall ability and preparedness, and NOW they're drained financially and their populations morale is at a low point with the drafts and the prisoner-units, who else do we have all these guns for then? Who will be the next boogeyman, and have we already laid the groundwork to say it's China?
The next boogeyman is definitely going to be China. But with their looming demography crisis, it'll be quite unpredictable how's the world geopolitical state going to be in 20-30 years. For all we know some country like India or Indonesia managed to solve their internal corruption and be a superpower.
Y'all seem to be forgetting the "axis of evil" — the justification conservatives used to double military industrial complex spending, the last time they faced cost cutting...
Only a fool would disregard the formidable economic powerhouses of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea!
TL;DR they have successfully manufactured boogeymen as needed. Realistic adversaries are unnecessary.
I watched Red Dawn the other day.
Y'all were some paranoid mfs in the 80s.
The "they want to invade us" aspect feels more real than ever. The "they credibly threatened our independence" aspect feels less real than ever.
Russia under Putin is somehow both a worse neighbor and a less credible threat on the world stage.
Agreed, russia has proven themselves more dangerous, and more laughable at the same time. Their ability to underhandedly destroy us from within is far stronger than we ever were allowed to believe. Their ability to mount an actual attack, is far more laughable than we thought.
Though I do suppose the real scary part of it is. The potential death throws kind of attack. Putin's immaturity, narcissism etc... is far scarier than we have ever understood. Russia quite frankly is the superpower that I could easily see hit the point of "If I can't run the world, I'll destroy it so you can't have it", and quite simply we've never seen or understood the potential of Nuke vs Anti-Nuke warfare.
I was in the Air Force in the late 70s. Worked in the flight surgeon's office, so if anything went down on the flight line, we were there.
If you wanna see Kegels In Action, watch what happens when many many gallons of JP-4 gets spilled on nukes inside a B-52D on the alert pad.
Fun times!
It's important to have a powerful enemy, otherwise why would the US pay for an $800 billion per year military?
I recently saw the Rambo movies for the first time, and yeah I laughed about how they portrayed the russians.
Really goes to show that perception management is an effective strategy as long as thats all you do.
Yeah, but isn't that American propaganda?
We needed a bbg to justify our actions. I'm not saying it was out of nowhere, but the scale of the thing certainly played well for certain politicians.
I'm old enough to remember when movies like 'Firefox' and 'The Hunt For Red October' first came out.
The US was always miles ahead of the Soviets. It was so bad that during the Reagan Era the Right had to come up with a new metric that let the Reds look tougher than they were. "Throw weight" was the measure of how big a load an ICBM could carry. Because the Russians had inferior tech, they had to build bigger missiles. Kind of how a 1700's musket had a higher caliber than an M-16. It was actually a symbol of soviet inferiority, but you'll hear people talking about it to this day.
And here come all the angry tankies
Just how powerful was soviet Russia in its heyday compared to today? Without allies, was it ever a true threat?
Yes. Yes it was. The USSR has very little in common with kleptocracy Russia. My wife was raised under their educational system and she was studying organic chemistry in the eight grade. Today she is one of the top people in her field (easily top ten) and she says that most of her career she's mostly leaned on her early education. Especially math and science.
It is wild to see this. It's amazing how quickly things change.
Yeah, Russia was incredibly powerful in its heyday, both in global influence and military power. Think about how people are worried about climate change now, then double it. That was the threat of nuclear war that kept people awake at night for decades.
After the time of the collapse we found out how empty a lot of their power was. How much of their achievements were less an unstoppable train and more of a rocket that couldn't be refueled. They had power but they never figured out how to make it sustainable.