And then Facebook took down tons of posts people made about it, because it violated their decency rules as well.

Remember, the only time it’s acceptable to display the female body is when a man wants a boner! Under any other circumstances it’s too graphic, disgusting, and disturbing for general distribution, despite being inhabited by roughly 50% of humanity. /snark

That ad is very eye-opening. My mother and a lot of the women I know had C-sections so I’m actually not very familiar with what women go through after a vaginal birth. It looks like it’s very tough. I remember my mother’s recovery from her C-sections as being tough, too, a lot of trouble walking and gas pains etc. And…

OMFG!

"There's always some group of people we're being told to fear and the solution is always to destroy them."

Well, the Soviets had a lot of problems. World War I, the revolution, the Russian Civil War, Stalin and collective farms, and then of course Armageddon in the shape of World War II. They didn't have time to hate us, and as noted in the article above they had real live villains for their entertainment in the shape of…

A basic tenet of Communism (of the Marx/Engels variety, at least) was that it would develop naturally out of any currently-capitalistic society once The People realized how unfair and corrupt their present way of life was. So, yeah, there's something to be said for the idea that at least some Soviets might have looked…

Is it possible that they didn't hate us as much as we hated them?

I remember watching a bit of that John Wayne Movie, and thinking it was a
comedy, because it was so over-the-top: John Wayne is hugely overweight
and talking about weapons to the limp-dicked journalist. Just nuts.

A look at Chinese cinema would reveal that the only real enemies are the Japanese, but China is going to take them down kung fu style!

It takes a long time before story telling trends to die. Russians were obvious targets during the Cold War, but we've still got generations of movie goers who have grown up with Russians as the defacto bad guys in a bunch of their movies.

That seems to be something several nations do. Like I remember hearing the Ayatollah sent a gorgeous copy of the Qur'an to some Cherokee kids because American Indians are oppressed by the evil Americans. Bobby Fischer, granted American, did a bizarre rant about the Jews that said something like "Kill New York City and…

Considering that Japanese and Koreans, for instance, don't really see each other as 'kin', I find it unlikely that anyone in Asia could ever bring themselves to give a shit about Native Americans.

While Gorbachev wasn't the "authoritarian robot" that, say, Andropov had (briefly) been, it should be noted that he wasn't really looking to fundamentally transform the Soviet Union. His intent seems to have been to use "openness" to fight corruption and attempt to reenergize the Soviet economy. As with so many other…

Not really on the latter—my impression of Soviet policy towards ethnic minorities was some mixture of Russification (but you keep your native outfits and dances because they look good in ceremonies and on postage stamps) and, if you were remote or small enough, being ignored.

I think the podcast We Hate Movies made a great point with ROCKY IV.

I don't think that there's really any large organisation that actually knows what they're doing.

There were no such drills here (Canada), but I do recall - and I'm only a year younger than you, apparently - that by the time I was observant of global politics on more than a pop-culture level, things were clearly winding down.

The 1980s for me are the years 8-18, so it's when I "grew up". I'm sure my memory is colored by hindsight, but:

Speaking of the Soviets being right but for propaganda reasons, I also remember the USSR coming out in support of Native Americans. Likely because they were interested in discrediting America's whole deal about freedom and democracy, and probably because its own Asian population probably saw Native Americans as kin.