Difference being the colonists of our world left perfectly habitable areas. In avatar the earth isn’t habitable to most and so the colonists are actually kind of sympathetic. The real bad guys never have to leave earth but because it’s Cameron it falls on the poors to play the bad guys
I saw the film in a theater with someone who wanted to impress upon me that someone pointed out to her how alike it was to what happened to indigenous peoples in the Americas (someone else had pointed that out to her, so she assumed I wouldn’t get it on my own). I was like, if you think that’s a novel observation, you really need to be hit in the face with concepts to understand things. It couldn’t have been more obvious.
But maybe that highlights how much some people just aren’t observant or introspective or whatever else. It would explain a lot.
It is also about settler colonialism. There are natural gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
Yeah man, we all understood that the first time around when it was called Fern Gully.
Like Avatar if you want but like… it is not a deep piece of media with hard-to-discern messaging. Shit is pretty clear.
One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because “they’re just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?”
Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?
Yes it definitely makes you weird. Turn the brain off and consume the media like a good little sheep (/s if it wasn’t obvious)
Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.
A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can’t do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.
I can’t decide if I should post the “wait, it’s all the failures of capitalism?” or “wait, it’s all systemic racism?” meme, cuz it’s wait it’s all both (always has been).
Satisfactory music starts playing
Paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
Explore, exploit, exterminate.
Literally Satisfactory
What do you mean? Communists didn’t mine minerals and didn’t exploit indigenous people? Lol…
That’s right. For example, Australian communists lived in balance with nature for 60,000 years. Then capitalists came and started breaking stuff.
Aboriginal Elders have told us we are a reflection of the Country: if the land is sick, so are we. If the land is healthy (or punyu), so are we. Wik First Nations scholar Tyson Yunkaporta says our collective wellbeing can only be sustained through a life of communication with a sentient landscape and all things on it.
You wanna go tell Tyson he’s being racist against his own people?
Are you Tyson?
The totem system from the Countries I am from allows for the person to be the knowledge holder of the animal or plant they are given or born into. Within your family group (also known as mob) you are the person that is responsible for its survival and use. For example, if you are given the Kangaroo, people in your mob or Country would come to you to gain permission to hunt the Kangaroo for food or clothing. If you had observed the Kangaroo having high population numbers you could allow them to be hunted to feed families, and on the flip side if population numbers were low, you would not allow this. This totem system was vital to survival of Indigenous people, but also ensured that biodiversity was sustained. It is considered the social responsibility of the community to preserve the environment. By having this relationship and responsibility with a totem creates lifelong physical, spiritual, and emotional connections to the environment. With my personal totem being a Koala, I have dedicated my research interests to understanding more about this animal and advocating for its conservation and preservation. I have focused my early career research on understanding the Koalas diet selection and its relationship to habitat selection.
https://oxsci.org/conservation-through-the-eyes-of-indigenous-australian-culture/
Go tell Teresa that her tribe’s environmental management strategies are fake and racist because they make aboriginals look too smart
Are you Teresa?
Are you? You’re the one claiming racism because drag listens to Aboriginal elders. Drag’s got sources for what drag says, and it seems like you don’t. So you’re just making stuff up.
Besides, the noble savage trope is about thinking indigenous societies were pure an untainted by evil. Aboriginal Australians knew what evil was. They had policies in place within their governments to prevent ecological devastation. That’s not innocence, it’s technology. Aboriginals aren’t savages and drag didn’t say they are. You’re the one denying their advanced environmental policies. Sounds like you’re the one calling them savages.
I guess those megafauna who vanished about 59,500 years ago were really messing with the balance.
Regardless of megafaunata, just by being in Australia, humans became an invasive species and did all sorts of damage that invasive species do.
Worse, indigenous Australians brought the dingo with them. Two very intelligent predators where two didn’t exist before did a lot of damage. Colonizing Europeans also did a lot of damage and nothing that the indigenous people in Australia did justifies what Europeans (basically just the British, let’s be fair) did, but pretending that indigenous humans aren’t as flawed as all other humans does them a disservice. It does not help indigenous people to put them up on pedestals and treat them as noble savages.
https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2020/may/mysteries-of-megafauna-extinction-unlocked
the team found that extreme environmental change was the most likely cause of extinction, not humans.
I dont get it either. This is not about capitalism, this is about human nature of mindless expansion and exploitation…
“It’s human nature,” okay bud and what about all the groups in history that prove otherwise? You’re just washing history with capitalist mindsets.
So… We manage to master space travel. We manage to master interstellar travel. We eventually find a planet with suitable for sustaining our species. And we just overlook it.
Can someone explain me the reasoning behind this?
Sci-fi to the side, there are more minerals available - readily - on asteroids and barren planets than anywhere else. Why go hopping around looking for habitable planets, to the reason of 1 out of who knows how many, to then strip mine it?
The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.
It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?
There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.
Sci-fi will be sci-fi but can we go back to the time it was at least well thought? Can’t hurt. If the objective of the movie was to make social criticism, it didn’t need to go to such lenghts.
And it was a boring movie; failed to captivate me.
isn’t wood a hard to find resource?
That depends. Although massive deforestation throughout the planet, tree farms are a thing. So…
But haul wood over who knows what expanses of space? It would be cheaper to build greenhouses on barren planets and moons. The biggest challenge would probably be to prevent the oxygen in those enclosed habitats to eat away the building materials.
I remember following the advances on an experiment, during the 90’s, where a team of scientists designed and built a fully self contained habitat, with only plants inside. I think the objective was to measure if the plants could/would survive in very limited resources conditions. Well, the plants survived. After an initial shock, the plants self regulated and the habitat stabilized into a fully enclosed ecosystem. Things became weird when the oxygen levels rose to a point where the ciment of the walls started to come apart. They had to hastily coat the walls with very thick rubber paint to prevent more damage.
You know the point I’m making though: there are indeed precious resources that can’t be mined from asteroids. It is not inconceivable that there are organic compounds out there with unique properties that can’t simply be made in a lab (e.g. ancient wood properties compared to new forest) and exist in a state that is economical for easy extraction.
You’re intelligent. Or at least, well read/educated.
I didn’t say it was a good plot-device. The entire movie was hamfisted from the world building through the dialog, the character development, and those hamfists evolved into bulldozers to bring the moral home.
The only thing it had going for it was the CGI… which was obsequious.
Regardless, it’s their fictional world. They designed it to be stupid and boring so they could make some sort of moral superiority bullshit statement about capitalism while grossing 2+ billion.
Also, I’m just gonna say it. It wasn’t even sci fi. sure, sure. it had ships and stuff. but that’s not what makes sci fi sci fi.
Usually, at this point, I would say even a broken clock is right twice a day, but I’m trying to get accostumed to receive a compliment, so I’ll instead say thank you for those kind words. And that we agree.
There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.
Crystallised urea
Nice to cross paths with you again!
I’ll grant that but what use for crystalized urea is there? Urea I know a few. And if we already know how to cultivate diamonds and other artificial gems, why bother mining for that?
Drag was making an allegorical point. Perhaps Unobtanium results from an organic process. In the second movie, the capitalists are killing whales for a substance in their brains that makes people immortal. Can’t find that on an asteroid.
We can save mental effort and just go for the Dune series at this point. What is the point in that? In considering the advances in modern chemistry, there are ever few organic compounds that can not be synthesized.
I fall back to my original thought: is well thought sci-fi so hard to achieve nowadays? If seems there is a fixation about misery and destruction nowadays.
Dune is a universe where computers are severely limited. The ability to synthesize organic chemicals may be limited by that alone.
IIRC, the Tleilaxu do figure out how to produce spice artificially in their Axlotl tanks, but those are another example of Dune getting weirder and more disturbing as it goes.
I fall back to my original thought: is well thought sci-fi so hard to achieve nowadays? If seems there is a fixation about misery and destruction nowadays.
considering that mass media will slap a space ship into anything and call it “Science Fiction”… yes, actually. Because they’re idiots who will only copy what’s already been done because it’s a reliable way to make money.
Avatar does have some good science fiction like the idea of a planetary hivemind being worshipped as a god. The Na’vi religion is literally true, it just seems false to humans who don’t know anything. That’s very different to Dune, where the Fremen religion is true because people like Paul’s mum make it true.
You realized I just opted for having a divergent view on the subject, right?
It seems more like intentionally missing the main point of the comic.
Holy shit! Avatar is about capitalism? How did u miss that?!
Wait until you learn about its subtle ecological message!
Oh! The bit where they fire dozens of rockets at a giant tree was also an allegory?!
Avatr is about capitalism
That wasn’t glaringly obvious to everyone?
There’s someone arguing otherwise in this very thread
Like, to absolutely everyone? This ranks up there with “breathing is good.”
you forget the kind of people who complain that wolfenstein games or the x-men animated series “became” political
Some people are dense enough that “the point” is the name of a baseball bat you have to go get to get it across.
It was also about the poor soldiers getting used to further capitalism.
Honestly, though…. That military wasn’t very credible. Half their aircraft you could disable by dumping buckets of pebbles into the fans.
Does this imply communism wouldn’t extract resources?
That’s what I was wondering. Capitalists didn’t invent exploitation of nature, it just so happened that its worldwide adoption coincided with unprecedented technological advances. There’s quite a few examples of historical societies that exploited nature as much as they could and suffered for it.
Businesses under capitalism aren’t required to pay for the externalities of their decisions. In a democratic economy, the people affected by corporate decisions would have a say in those decisions. It’s reasonable to assume that people want to breathe clean air and continue to have food and water, so they’d support policies that do that.
Sure, but none of the economies we actually have (or recently had) work like that.
Someone had better have a communist revolution so we do have one like that, then.
Judging by the communist revolutions we had so far, I’m not holding my breath for that.
I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.
- Jack Handey
Me landing on Gleba.
I’m torn, because there’s an idea that industrial capital only knows how to consume and destroy what it touches. And there’s ample evidence to that effect.
But there’s this other more naive notion that life never changes, species don’t compete for habitat, and doing anything to alter the local ecology is this unforgivable sin. This, despite the fact that everything in the area is itself a product of eons of speciation and evolution and carnivorization.
The impulse to preserve has to be balanced with the expectation for change. The goal should be symbiosis, not stasis.
The idea that nature is precious and must be preserved is human-centric.
Trees caused an extinction event when they appeared by absorbing all the carbon dioxyde and radically changing the atmosphere. But we feel bad when we’re the ones doing it
The issue is that you’re changing the ecosystems and environments so much that all those eons of evolution are simply lost. The only other times this happens is during natural catastrophes. Sure, in the long run this allows new life forms to take the old ones places, but it’s still a massive loss of diversity and evolutionary knowledge - and unnecessary suffering for millions of living beings.
When species compete for a habitat, they rarely destroy it - and those species that do either don’t survive for long, or they wipe out large swaths. We’re actively killing almost anything in our habitats, and destroying them for almost all previous species.
