Feck it, I'm starting to get interested in this dumb movie now. I've seen some clips of scenes on Youtube (the end fight) and the way Remmick is going after Sammie makes me think this is about cultural appropriation and exploitation; taking the products of black culture (songs, stories) and absorbing that into mainstream/white culture. Remmick literally tells Sammie he wants his songs and stories, and it seems that the memories of the thralls become part of Remmick's memories as well, so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there". White culture is vampiric on the culture of the minorities (black, Hispanic, what have you) and depends on 'fresh blood' to rejuvenate and perpetuate itself.
I think Coogler is slightly less hamfisted than this, or there'd be no point to having Remmick be Irish at all (and his first victims be white supremacists) or have the Rocky Road to Dublin scene.
Or, if he's hamfisted, it's in negatively contrasting mainstream society (which is apparently either racist if white or stiflingly Christian if black) to being eaten and turning into a thrall
Remmick is offering an alternative that theoretically has a place for everyone but strips them of their agency and rootedness. There's a lot of talk about equality and loving one another and yet everyone dances to his tune. At one point, he tries to get a woman to let him in using her husband's memories and he just disappears from the frame, not even an agent. Even after he's killed, you get agency but never get to go to your culture's heaven while Wunmi Mosaku's character - mocked for keeping up with her traditional beliefs/"Bayou bullshit"* - seems more or less correct about everything, including that dying normally lets you have an afterlife, as opposed to hanging around forever on Earth with a false solace and community, even if it is antiracist and cosmopolitan. Seems more like a criticism of assimilation and selling out.
Remmick is...Disney and Sammy is Coogler? How bad was the process on those Marvel movies? Is he trying to tell us something about Bob Iger?
* Hers are the only religious symbols that seem to offer any protection btw. Of course.
Academics did not adequately argue against the mass movement. It is not the case, for instance, that the experts in western history, literature, or philosophy were more likely to argue against the mass movement in any substantive way. This is problematic: if learning the best of western culture does not lead to protecting said culture in any genuine sense when it matters the most, then how great is the actual utility of such learning?
Probably shouldn't have let so many activists and grievance scholars critical of Western civ into the henhouse.
Maybe this is where being Western gets you into trouble. Others would accept that, while their beliefs are true, education is a matter of indoctrinating people into viewing those alleged facts through the right lens. Westerners think argument will lead to the correct conclusion so why does it matter? Some people allowed themselves to be anesthetized by claims of institutional neutrality.
Random people online were able to sense a threat that leading experts weren’t able to sense, and made arguments that leading academics did not make. Why?
People did sense it, the ones in spaces with the activists just had to be terrified. The "why not transracialism?" argument everyone uses online, for example, led to a huge shitstorm for Rebecca Tuvel. I think someone like Weinstein didn't know what he was getting into, and Peterson just has a personality type where he's prone to grandiosity about his positions and importance, and his ideology makes him very contemptuous of public shaming and struggle sessions (if you're charitable, his background in psychology makes him very suspicious of moral tyrants).
The other problem is that a lot of the more established people in institutions who could say something hate the enemies of the modern social justice movement more than they do the socjus types (agreeing with them on what they think are the important points and being baffled when it's not enough), and would rather be in denial than grant them an inch . Trace more or less summed up the dynamics when one set of consistent deniers ran into problems getting hired elsewhere (I suppose when you already have a job and seniority it doesn't seem worth it to rock the boat, instead of admitting you're a coward you cope by claiming it's no big deal)
What lesson can be taken from this? Don't fall asleep at the wheel while the pipeline for educating your kids and new elites is taken over by your enemies. That's about it.
Tanista
17hr ago
It's not so much that I have a definitive stance on the question (which I can grant with no issue is interesting) and more that I don't think all forms of art are or need be set up to deal with that challenge.
I think I'm grokking your point but let's see: would you say that black American LARPing is basically a more intense and encouraged version of Americans LARPing as Irish come St Paddy's day?
No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).
The fact that a magic trick falls apart if you look at it too closely doesn't mean that wanting to see a magic trick is immature. Sometimes the point of an experience is the visceral immediacy of it.
Thinking that wanting to be immersed in a fiction is the same thing as that fiction being real is how a lot of media gets ruined by people who now feel they have to manage your perceptions.
I recently watched F1. The movie, like Top Gun before it, is bullshit in its specifics. And there's probably an interesting critical take to be written about what it says about the generational conflict in the West right now (both movies represent a rejection of the need to pass the torch, which is itself a backlash against "woke" reboots which also functioned as forced retirement for the Boomer celebrities and their IPs)
But I don't give a fuck about any of that, because I wanted to see fast cars and improbably skilled and handsome people in an IMAX theater. I wanted to be so engrossed I didn't care. And I was. Mission accomplished.
I believed Dr Dre … I don’t believe Kendrick Lamar.
This is actually funny (and I think a case in point), because there's no reason to think Dr Dre is any more credible about his subject matter than Kendrick. Dr. Dre grew up in a similar environment as Kendrick but he wasn't a gangster. He was just a musical talent. Ice Cube also wasn't a thug. Eazy E was probably the closest to living what he rapped, because he actually was a Crip.
In essence, Dr Dre and co. faked it till they made it: it was the money that brought in people like Suge and his affiliated Bloods.
As for Kendrick himself, at best he's about the same as Dre. Maybe, depending on how deep you dig into his old catalogue or random signs and hints he throws out, he was also affiliated. He's certainly cool with the gangs today, but he is massively famous.
Dre is not any more "real" than Kendrick, he's just not (publicly) woke and endlessly praised for it. But even Kendrick is just the latest in a long line of conscious rappers who've always been contrasted with the other strains of hip hop that are seen as hedonistic, anesthetizing and assimilationist (this tension is essentially why the hip hop community has basically contrasted him with Drake forever). What he says may not be true, but it resonates with people who already believe it to be true. That's why he's popular
I’ve always felt black Americans are Americans, just black. More recently I feel like they’re trying to be in some way more so.
A fraught relationship with the American identity isn't new. Artists like Coogler being suspicious about being assimilated or "selling out" isn't new. People pandering isn't new. The final act is pure pandering, but it's no different from the movies Tarantino is parodying when Leo DiCaprio's character roasts a bunch of Nazis in his 60s films.
I would sympathize if this was about playing the "black national anthem" or trying to move the founding date of America to revolve around slavery but what's the actual specific beef here? Was it the voodoo shit ? The Asians as middle-man minority? Characters pontificating on not being free in the 30s?
Because I have to wonder if, like @Skulldrinker, people are just fatigued with certain subject matter given everything that's happened since 2020 (I would also not trust movie reviews from people who sound like they'd wear a Notorious RBG shirt btw). The last thing was notable to me, but only because everyone still complains like that in movies made today. It's not that I don't expect people of the past to make certain noises (though my model for black southerners isn't particularly deep), it's that I hear it too much today when it clearly doesn't apply to not twinge in annoyance.
I'll give my own beef: I don't get Remmick. The movie tries to draw parallels between Remmick/the Irish and African-Americans and their relationship to Christianity but Remmick is implied and explicitly said to be very old, predating racial categories. If he was there during Ireland's original conversion it wasn't exactly like what happened to blacks. Or are we supposed to take him lamenting being forced to learn the Lord's Prayer to be about learning the English version?
Tanista
2d ago
don’t have or bring over children
I don't see how this is possible when you can't even stop birth tourism from people flying in. Are they only going to work for four months or so?
Tanista
4d ago
I don't think ICE officers lack a pension like legionnaires so it's a non-issue.
I just don’t know what’s happened since 2022 that would make such a big shift make sense!
Elon bought Twitter?
It feels like a pat explanation but now I'm honestly wondering why. Maybe an instinctive dislike of Great Man theory on my part?
There's an entire criticism going around right now from people who would know like Ezra Klein that Twitter was especially bad for progressives in that it made the links between journalists, activists and politicians way too tight and allowed very easy coordination (this is how you get people providing arguments that rioting is bad getting fired during the Summer of Floyd because ??) . This allowed liberal cancel culture to reach a fever pitch but also led to overplaying their hand on culture issues and it naturally backfired when someone else took it over.
It was the regime's coordination center and the rebels got it. Of course it should go badly.
In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around.
What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)
If you can only own a few you pick movies that are either classics, have good special features or really "popped" on screen.
Nowadays you can cycle through terabytes of movies at will (hell, even if you had no internet 6-in-1 DVDs are common in any random street market in Africa) and I don't know that anyone cares about the BTS stuff. You can't sit with a movie for months to years.
As for gays, they've adopted a strict "no compromise" policy that I don't think is popular IRL
It's getting more popular amongst Republicans but I think that's wholly because the gays have either abandoned their movement or refused to Sistah Soulja the trans side.
If they totally surrendered today and treated trans like NAMBLA...maybe Republicans would give up and rebound. But that's impossible (the best they can manage is just silence) so who knows when the backlash will bottom out?
Tanista
9d ago
I've seen some guides for getting cheap Ozempic but they seem specific to the US. Is anyone here in Canada? Have you gone through the process to get some and how did you find it?
Tanista
10d ago
pay scouts money like actual sports and remove weight cuts.
I don't think the UFC can compete with things like wrestling for lower weight classes or NFL on the high end. It'll never be as prestigious or profitable. And it simply doesn't have the number of fights to absorb all of the combat sports.
The best part of its model is that it leeches off other, more entrenched sports' scouting and training practices. What it should do is try to attract more athletes who want to cross over (like UFC fighters do with boxing) but the UFC is now in the WWE position and has no reason to innovate.
Has anyone ever described the motivation for watching fights, or what people get out of it ?
It's the motivation for watching any sporting event + a few additional benefits:
- It appeals to the apparently ineradicable male urge to debate Star Destroyers vs the Enterprise/Lebron vs Kobe/whatever. It's basically a simulation to find the best styles/fighters and to see how they match up. You can have the hypothetical discussion in a barbershop about how good a karate guy matches up against a Muay Thai guy or how useful aikido is or you can watch UFC.
- It's all of the benefits of watching any competition except fighting is the competition, the last argument. There's just a sort of additional, primal oomph. As Rogan says, you lose a basketball game you say "I'd kick your ass". You lose the ensuing fight and you just lost. An MMA fight is the last stop, not just fighting but fighting with the smallest set of constraints America can stand.
Like, you ask me, the entire point of UFC is to set up the most interesting fights/matchups possible and encourage the top contenders to fight as hard as possible for a win, and generally avoid safe, riskless approaches. Big purses and other monetary incentives are a good method. Bring in the best talent from across the globe and get them to give their best performance.
This was the line when the UFC was growing and needed to compare itself positively to boxing. It's quite clear that, after the sale and the ESPN deal, the UFC simply doesn't care as much about this. It's nothing new: the strict USADA testing was implemented to clean up its image for a sale (GSP begged for it and was ignored until it was to the UFC's benefit) and then they eventually did away with it because why risk stars popping constantly? It's actually perversely rational: the UFC looks worse than sports that don't test so why bother?
And you can understand why. This isn't the WWE where you can script and the public often doesn't reward you at all for good fights. Mighty Mouse did incredible things in the ring but nobody ever cared. People would rather watch Sean O'Malley or whoever fight.
Making competitive fights is how a champ like GSP who brought along Montreal/Canada (one of the few countries that'll pay for PPVs) get knocked out by Matt Serra. Or 1m+ PPV seller Ronda Rousey ended up getting beaten to within an inch of her life by a Brazilian lesbian with a thick accent. She's probably not going to charm the audience on Colbert or get put in many films. The division - which was attracting normies who wanted a role model for young girls - never got as big again.
Now that they have no credible competition they've settled for squeezing money from their existing base and resting on their laurels.
But also the actual fighting is getting to a point where the 'optimal' style is somewhat predetermined. Unless you're a talented kickbox-wrestle-jitsu practitioner, you're going to get stomped by someone who is more well rounded than you, no matter how good you are at your particular niche. Maybe that's how it should be, but its just a fact now that "MMA" is not literally "mixed martial arts" but really it is a style unto itself, it isn't really about pitting different styles against each other anymore.
I don't think this is the case. People have been saying for years that MMA is destined to be dominated by "true" mixed martial artists like Rory MacDonald who've trained in blended styles from the start. But Rory never became champion and there's still a ton of people with a specific specialty they build on when they get to MMA
It may be that this should have happened but the very problem we're discussing prevents it: if you're a very athletic youth and you have options why would you want to focus specifically on MMA to make 10/10? There's a reason a lot of the top people are former wrestlers who've hit their ceiling and HW is so bad a division athletically (an athletic HW is probably going to gain more in other sports)
Tanista
11d ago
People think Hasan is like Rogan which is so telling. He's hot and fit and popular so it's the same thing apparently.
If you know anything about either creator's character and biography it's insane to think people who admire Rogan would look kindly on Hasan.
I'm not yet convinced.
But, even if we grant it, there's also a motte-and-bailey here. Fat people are not just actively shamed, they're ashamed because they know being fat means they lack of some virtue or competence.
It may be that actively shaming them is not that useful, but it never stops there. The next demand is to dismantle or obscure anything that rightfully makes fat people notice their position on the grounds that society, and not their own understanding of reality, is shaming them. Then we start actively lying or excusing bad behavior which is probably even less effective.
The somehow both feminist and red pill take is an important element of this was that independent female status-seeking was much more constrained so the benefits of half of Europe being exploded flowed disproportionately to men.
Lots of parents deputize the one kid they think is reliable. The wisdom can be debated but it doesn't really contradict the playground cop thesis. The US also bribes countries like Egypt on the other end which fits as well.
As for letting them squabble... this'd work if a)everyone didn't already agree that the use of nukes is a taboo to be maintained and b) there was no chance of it spreading to the exact sort of groups that got Iran into this mess and c) one of these nations didn't continually insist it was in a religious war with the rest. That gives people reason to deny you a nuke.
People were protesting and demanding ceasefires almost immediately after October 7. I assume this was because they expected destruction.
At least on the left some personalities like Cenk Uygur - whose geopolitical acumen I don't value particularly highly - were explicitly condemning Hamas because they thought Israel would just absolutely wreck Gaza in response. (This bit faded as Oct. 7 became more distant and now it's mostly Israel criticism)
A lot of these people overestimated the damage (they assumed much heavier starvation much earlier on) they didn't downplay it.
Maybe the most moralistic version. But even the most detached and amoral babysitter has reason to keep their most deranged wards away from the knives.
In MMA News: Jon Jones finally retired, now that his attempts to hold on to the belt without fighting the interim champ Aspinall failed. Apparently he asked for a ridiculous payday, got it (which is a miracle in and of itself) and then promptly changed his mind. In the perfect capper for anyone who knows anything about Jon Jones, he had another hit and run right before announcing retirement. In terms of objectively successful prospects who nevertheless blew it by being incapable of staying out of trouble he's up there.
Good news: the division can finally move and Aspinall can actually have a career as champ. Bad news: the UFC is now functionally boxing with its own Joshua/Wilder HW mess despite not having any rival promotions and apparently Jon Jones is trapped in a time loop.
Hope they book Aspinall's next fight ASAP.
The US claims to have an interest in non-proliferation and international order. If Iran gets one, Saudi Arabia gets one. Israel already has one.
So now, instead of one independent-minded nuclear power, you have three in a region of the world a huge amount of oil and trade passes through. Lots of chances for drama. (Also, harder for the US to threaten a nuclear nation)
Maybe nothing happens. But it'd just be better to not deal with this.
Or he was inspired by From Dusk Till Dawn, which had a similar genre shift with a similar subject matter.
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