Post #4051785
2026-07-24 02:13 UTC
We have been marketed into a popular acceptance that there's something necessary and even noble about mob rule, as long as the mobster is charismatic and smart enough. It's chiefly in fiction where such things are possible, because real-life gang leaders tend not to be as stately and aristocratic as Coppola's gangsters, or as witty and intense as Scorsese's (even if Scorsese's trying for more social realism.)
There's other ways that the U.S. pop culture has been programmed into accepting strongman leadership as the standard, but ganglords are the really popular idols. Both liberals and conservatives love their memes cribbed from Scorsese or Coppola or "The Sopranos".
(cont'd)
Replies (1)
-
@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-24 02:17
The kill-or-be-killed world of U.S. #business and #tech encourages managers and executives to fancy themselves crimelords, although they have to be a bit clever about admitting that they are in fact usually criminals in some way, committing frauds and breaking laws and maltreating workers. They try to affect that it's all part of the game, or rather of the endless state of war they say exists. It's not like they're wrong. Has the United States ever not been assaulting someone, internally or externally? (cont'd)