Did the Chinese Military Use Top Gun Footage? 226
heidaro writes "'As part of its ongoing expansion, has the People's Liberation Army signed up Goose and Maverick? Chinese bloggers are accusing state broadcaster CCTV of using re-purposed footage from the 1986 film Top Gun for a story on a recent air force drill.' Is it just me or are communist nations very skilled at embarrassing themselves?"
WSJ report and comparison video (Score:5, Informative)
The Wall Street Journal has a report including a comparison video [wsj.com].
Re:"Commies skilled an(sic) embarrassing themselve (Score:5, Informative)
You post appears to be propaganda masquerading as sarcasm. So just in case, I'd like to make the following points:
CCTV stands for China Central Television which is a state run television network. It is communist.
CCTV is the main outlet of propaganda for the government. Western broadcasters may at times use film scenes or in-house produced animations to illustrate a story, but they disclose it as a animation or for illustration purposes only. They are a third-party entity reporting an event, not part of the government trying to fabricate the event.
Your example of Powell's UN presentation doesn't seem applicable, since Powell wasn't the media and that the slide was produced by analysts and not a scene from a movie.
Re:What does communist have to do with it? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah but communists are inherently retarded, so it's extra funny. Have you seen their baseball?
I think you forgot that Cuba is communist. They play great baseball.
Re:What does communist have to do with it? (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, I think you meant to cast the Author into a Troll, not the return value of Feed into a Troll.
((Troll*)(&comment.GetAuthor()))->Feed( false );
Second of all, that is an unnecessarily complicated way to cast it by dereferencing the item, and then using pointers. It probably would have made more sense if GetAuthor() returned a pointer (then it could possibly be null sometimes), but that is not the case. The easiest syntax, then, would be as follows:
((Troll)comment.GetAuthor()).Feed(false);
Re:What does communist have to do with it? (Score:4, Informative)
The difference being that most capitalist nations are democracies,
You're making a false distinction here. China is ruled by a nominally communist party and doesn't have open elections, but the actual form of the economy is quite capitalist. There's huge factories with workers getting paid $10/day to work 16 hours in horrible conditions with no union. The factory is owned not by the state or the workers, but by a billionaire living in Shanghai. For the peasant farmers living in the country, they have little access to electricity, running water, medicine, or education. The state provides them with nothing and sometimes even takes their land to hand directly to real estate developers.
Nothing communist about it.
Also, the various dictatorships of the Middle East and South America from the past and present century were/are nearly all capitalist. What's the king of Saudi Arabia? A communist? Franco? Pinochet? Qaddafi? The kleptocrat nepotist Mohammad Karzai? Just a democratic facade. I don't have time to prove you wrong about the majority of capitalist economies existing in democracies, but it's a huge and highly suspect assumption.