Comment by tokai
5 hours ago
The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.
edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.
Paradoxically, it's also a good example of the kind of soft power the US still has: we're all watching their movies.
"Their movies"
Meanwhile a huge portion of them are filmed in other countries, edited by brits, staring europeans, etc.
There's a good reason major studios have spent billions on film studios in the UK instead of the US.
Take something like Andor. Filmed in the UK and Spain, with a team of staff almost exclusively from the UK and EU. With a Mexican lead actor, 1 American co-lead, and then tons of British Actors, a few Australians, Swedish, German, Irish, etc.
Very few big movies or tv shows can be classed as "American" these days. They require people and facilities from all over the place.
You can always ruin your advantages. People seem to currently like a lot of US culture and dislike the US (or, it's government at least).
Are we though?
People I know watch less and less each year. I don't think it's because they're getting older, as the reasons they cite usually revolves around how the source material has been butchered.
And if subscriber numbers were still going up, I sincerely doubt that the producers kept increasing the subscription cost over the last few years.
Honestly, I think that soft power has been massively damaged too, with people looking for less virtue signalling and less asinine gender swaps along with contrived homosexuality in their media
U.S. population pyramid graph is sobering enough.
Speak for yourself.
You've not seen Dune?
2 replies →
Anecdotally, the people I talk to outside the U.S. see the film industry there as stuck in a Disney/Marvel pattern for the most part. Sure, there are good films, but there's a lot of cynical slop being turned out too and it's become so prevalent that it's a bit of a joke at this point. I blame the stagnation on the extreme consolidation of media companies.
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American troops have been granted full immunity against Swedish law when they are in Sweden, according to the most recent military treaties. I don't know if you consider such a deal to be soft power or hard power. But it is a lot more than any server room raid.
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Yes! thank fuck!