Notch’s predilection for fedoras was a giant red flag from the get-go...

I was here pre-regristration, but not before they added threading. Y’all remember titling your comments though? That was fun. A lot of good joke opportunities lost in the switch to disqus.

OMG a fellow orange box rememberer?

Back in the old old times, in the long long ago, there was that beautiful gimmick poster that would respond to himself with call signs from this dumb series. How many of us have died in the commenting platform change wars? How many more of us will? WHEN WILL THE VIOLENCE END?!

Those were the days that they aired Missing in Action

Yeah, when I was a kid I used to rank action films by the actual amount of total action scenes in them—Top Gun really only had one actual battle at the end where they down a couple MIGs, the rest was just training or flying around. Iron Eagle cut to the chase and gave the people what they wanted, fighter jets blowing…

When I was 9, It was better than Top Gun because it didn’t have all that goopy romance stuff Top Gun had. It just had awesome dogfights and explosions! And also Goose didn’t die in this one! (Yes, that’s how my 9-year-old logic worked)

[whispering to cat while watching Iron Eagle when Louis Gossett Jr first appears on the screen]
That’s Chappy.

I somehow saw the first one as a six-year-old media-hungry child. I also somehow claimed it was better than “Top Gun” to any kid at my daycare who would listen. I had hard opinions.

Iron Eagle was the movie that made me want to be a fighter pilot ... I am not a fighter pilot.

As a kid, we had the first one on videotape. I would wake up early every Sunday morning and watch it by myself. I can’t imagine how many times I have seen it. I can’t bring myself to rewatch it because of how awful I’m sure it is now.

These movies were difficult to get through even on cable. yuck. they span my 17-26 years and they do capture the “patriotism” of the time. Even Tom Clancy novels and Bond movies suffered after the Soviet Union Fell.

And if any team has experience with that kind of thing...

Valid points that, unfortunately, do nothing to change gun nut’s minds. Because, when you come down to it, they are all occupying the same shared fantasy where they and others like them are the heroes that society simply won’t allow to exist. They’re the X-Men, and we’re all the anti-mutant politicians who are…

I think the paranoid fantasy of a military take over of the country with only armed guerilla fighters left to fight back (like Red Dawn but it’s not the USSR but the American government that takes over small towns) runs strong thanks to constant claims of an impending “government takeover” on conservative media.

I think it is established at this point that the group most likely to elect authoritarians is the group most vocally worried about authoritarians.

Counterpoint: an educated, trained, citizenry actually can be effective to counter oppression:

The 2nd only exists because the then-new government of the USA was worried that England would try and invade again.

But the technological discrepancy is comically large at this point. John Q. Public’s assault rifle is going to do a lot of damage to a predator drone

Disagree. There is one fundamental and irrefutable argument for everyone to own a gun. The secret werewolf army that is amassing underground. I propose a mandatory revolver and bandolier of silver bullets funded by the government be provided for every household.