Tanista
11mo ago
It's fine if you just treat it as a melodrama.
But its reported budget is totally out of whack with its quality imo. As I said, Levinson is benefiting from a Zendaya premium (as well as the view that it's an insightful or trend-setting show, which I think has kind of died down after all of the criticism of S2)
But it’s not just special effects-laden period pieces shot in exotic locations that are hastening price increases. Even contemporary dramas with lesser-known stars aren’t always cheap: HBO’s “Euphoria” is said to have cost around $11 million per episode, for example
That's Game of Thrones money. Half of that sounds unbelievable.
I think they were harmed by the Marketing VP's comments which have a "woke' flavor:
She added further that she had a “super clear” mandate that “to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand.” She said that what she “brought” to the brand was a “belief” that to evolve and elevate means to incorporate “inclusivity, it means shifting the tone, it means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive, and feels lighter and brighter and different, and appeals to women and to men.”
...
“We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach,” she said.
The focus on "inclusivity", the criticism of the old (successful) brand as "fratty" and "out of touch", the claim that anything that caters to the old crowd is out of date and moribund...all of it pattern matches to "woke" (and yes, that includes her being a woman). If you're a conservative you've seen this play out more than a few times so, when they tell you they want to take away what you feel is yours, you believe them
IMO the choice of Mulvaney also screams "woke". Mulvaney is running around claiming to be not just a girl but the most obviously misogynist and appropriative vision of "girlhood" around. If anyone wrote him as a female character it'd rightly be seen as sexist.
It takes a lot of in-group loyalty imo to not see the issue with this guy and to choose to use them , even a bit, as a mascot for your brand aimed at a totally different market, instead of any other conceivable trans figure.
Tanista
11mo ago
As I see it, the military is probably the last place that would be under pressure to go woke
Didn't the military study integrating units change and have lower standards for female applicants? That seems like the sort of thing born of woke pressure?
Army recruiting is stunningly incompetent and literally has no idea what they are doing and why, they literally are desperate to try absolutely anything, on the tiny chance it may work, because they are completely out of ideas and can not think of anything that would attract the youth to join the military anymore
Perfectly adequate explanation. You can see a similar thing in churches that feel the need to go woke to appeal to their dwindling congregation (the Unitarians aren't the ones with great retention rates).
There might also be a ratchet effect. Maybe appealing to males' fascist impulses is the best way to sell the military. Is that as viable as going in the other direction?
major marketing pushes are not "jokes".
Was it major though? Isn't this the exact sort of low-effort campaign influencers do all the time? It's one step above having a random "Instathot" pose with a bottle of Bang. It wasn't like he was the face of Bud Light on billboards.
I mean, it's still an ad and they're still responsible - would handing a can to a "racist" Instagram influencer get a pass? - and it was deeply unwise but I also see how this didn't even seem like a potential brand/career ender.
The reaction seems like the perfect storm of building resentment and an easy target for a boycott. Hard to predict.
I don't know what sorts of constraints the execs at Disney and Lucasarts placed on the writers for Rise of Skywalker, but perhaps a more skilled writer could have written a script that was at least half-decent?
It was always doomed, for a few reasons.
-
Disney rushed Star Wars: The Force Awakens into production which meant no holistic plan for the trilogy. They also went all-in on pandering to existing fans with a derivative plot. It was already broken at this point.
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Last Jedi came out, rightly loathing TFA's derivative plot but erasing it (due to there being no plan) which just enraged fans of the first film invested in what it set up
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Disney insists on a pivot but also doesn't change the release date so someone had to redo the entire (non-existent) plan from scratch to mollify both TFA and TLJ fans under a time constraint.
Abrams is very often be called a hack, but it was always a cursed endeavor and he's a veteran who's shown he can do competent work.
A lot of the time what seems to happen is that the writer/director is chosen due to being pliable and helpful instead of experienced (see Abrams' proteges who ended up on Rings of Power) and then have to craft a good story between studio mandates. They're neither competent enough to do it nor do they have enough cachet to impose their will even if they had a better plan.
Yeah, people have been accidentally knocked out by blood chokes. It's fast.
In the spirit of the thread…isn’t this kind of bad?
I guess I see it the way certain people see riots: it's not a good use of time and a total waste of legitimate grievance, but there's a reason it's gotten to this point.
The boycott is the language of the "not unheard but definitely feel like certain people want them to be".
Yes, it's waging the culture war. And people do bad things in war. Usually because losing is considered so much worse.
Tanista
11mo ago
I think OP's point is that their actions are to broadcast the image having a good heart, not necessarily actually having one.
Tanista
11mo ago
I always get amused, darkly, when these people happily place benefit of the doubt on the person demonstrating their disregard for other people's interests and safety. The guy asking for $100 is assumed to have a nigh-angelic nature, while the other person must be either greedy or murderous to refuse?
The Rittenhouse case was particularly silly.
Rittenhouse shot people who did exactly as he did - bring a gun to a volatile situation - but he had far more evidence of acting in good faith and non-aggressively (honestly, the fact that he was really walking around cleaning up graffiti seems like the sort of thing a conservative hack writer would add to make him more sympathetic).
But somehow he's damned.
Tanista
11mo ago
The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.
The Left's position in isolation isn't the biggest issue. Although I can argue that it's vastly underestimating how messy actual violence is to think you can easily damn someone for imperfect defense.
The issue is that position as part of a package of other positions that make self-defense more necessary - like weakening the ability to contain segments of the population that disproportionately create these safety concerns by trying to make the prison system "fairer" (i.e. less punitive).
Tanista
11mo ago
IMHO it's a participation trophy award mentality
I think it's their general condescending attitude towards black people and criminals and all the other "oppressed" and shunned and weak things whose agency is ignored in favor of blaming Vast Impersonal Forces - as Michael Brooks used to say "be kind to people, ruthless to systems".
Well VIFs don't threaten to stab you in the subway, crazy people do. So people defending themselves will sometimes fall afoul of that suggestion.
Tanista
11mo ago
Effective policing is an important public service the state needs to provide.
I think the Left has worked itself into a shoot - to use wrestling lingo - on cops being if not useless or outright harmful, at least vastly overdeployed as a solution to problems.
I suppose I can see that argument for a high trust, low crime society. I just don't know how it maps to the US.
That's cause they think they can ride out this current storm but being "transphobic" is forever.
We'll see. When this started there was an incredibly smug tone that the boycott wouldn't amount to anything (either cause cons had ADHD and couldn't commit or cause they would just buy other AB brands.)
Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.
Drag queens aren't a political ideology. They're a cultural particularity tied to an ideology. Like how afros can be associated with "woke" people (in the original sense of "progressive black person"). Would be odd if progressive Germans were sporting it.
Importing the basic idea of socialism and adapting it to local conditions is one thing. This is the equivalent of importing Chinese classical music and having culture wars over it.
The two can go together (Islam and Arabism overlap to say the least) but there are reasons to be suspicious of how certain ideologies manifest in different countries. There's nothing wrong with an anti-racism movement in the UK in theory, but why does it involve things like kneeling down which are tied to anti-black racism and police violence which should be lesser factors in the UK? Blacks aren't - or shouldn't be - the totemic minority in the UK. So it's suspicious.
Complaining about a few books in a library when you've already bought them a smartphone is trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The internet is a bit like the Wild West - partly because a lot of it is actually distant in terms of producers, even if it feels close. We expect actual physical locations near us managed by supposedly accountable adults (allegedly) of our culture paid for that task to behave differently.
Obviously what an "Instathot" can do on Tiktok is different from what we want to see at a McDonald's or in a classroom.
Part of the problem is precisely that those lines are ever blurrier.
Tanista
11mo ago
Tanista
11mo ago
Shit. That accords very well with the Atlantic review I saw that claims it's confused itself for prestige TV.
The show has no time slot to worry about, and none of the formal or thematic constraints of network television. Perhaps that’s why its episodes have settled into such supersize lengths, with “Sunflowers” running an ungodly 63 minutes.
I can't fathom how anyone thought that was a good idea.
Tanista
11mo ago
Perhaps. Exceedingly silly idea to take something that makes sense for Game of Thrones and apply it to a comedy.
And the women are happy to oblige. Hence why female indoor volleyball players wear skin tight booty shorts to spend much of their time bent over in the ready position, women’s MMA has a well-trodden MMA -> e-thot -> OnlyFans pipeline
Meh. I watch MMA and the actual contests aren't beauty competitions. See this. Obviously tastes may vary, but I don't try to get my titillation from any place that might lead me to seeing a woman like that. Women's dress is also not that different from men's (women get a rash guard) so it's not like a volleyball thing.
A few women (Paige VanZant) who are atypically attractive (by sport standards) go into Onlyfans but then you might as well say that being a lawyer, KFC employee and random internet sensations famous for totally different reasons are beauty contestant winners.
Prominent successes like Amanda Nunes and even Valentina Shevchenko aren't really in that niche.
The simple take is that Onlyfans, by virtue of "Uberizing" sex work, allows any attractive woman to translate even a minor platform more directly into simp-provided income. A sport like MMA which pays less will simply have more people joining the game.
My answer: Human already pretty much have the technology to kill all humans, between nuclear and biological weapons. Even if we can perfectly align superhuman AIs, they will end up working for governments and militaries and enhancing those killing capacities even further. Killing all humans is pretty close to being a solved problem, and all that's missing is a malignant AI (or a malignant human controlling an aligned AI) to pull the trigger.
Yeah, I'm not sure why the Skynet-like totally autonomous murder AI eats up so much of the discussion.
IIRC the original "Butlerian Jihad" concept was fear of how humans would use AI against other humans (the Star War against Omnius and an independent machine polity seems to be a Brian Herbert thing).
The idea of a Chinese-controlled AI incrementally improving murder capacities while working with the government seems like a much better tactical position from which to plant the seeds of AI fear from than using another speculative technology and what's widely considered a scifi trope to make the case.
China is already pretty far down the road of "can kill humanity" and people are already primed to be concerned about their tech. Much more grounded issue than nanomachines.
Tanista
11mo ago
Being good at media appearances is a tough deal, some people spend a lot of money on media training, and still aren't very good at it.
Is there any evidence he's spent money on it?
I recall EY being in the public eye for at least a decade now - I first saw him due to Methods of Rationality. There's no way he should be that bad at it. People here were complaining about him blowing weirdness points on fedoras and things like that. I don't think he can't learn not to do that over a decade.
I think, like a lot of nerds, he simply didn't care (helps that AI wasn't a big normie topic). Of course, he claims to be a "rationalist" so it's damning but it is what it is.
I suspect he hasn't, if the hat was passed around, are you putting money into it?
No, but I wasn't of the tribe anyway . Plenty of people were onboard with EY intellectually and would have given him money at the time.
(Isn't he also an autodidact? There's always that...)
The people who can expose themselves to it, keep coming back for more, but stay open to improvement.
That's actually a pretty rare psychological skill set.
Absolutely. But then, so is rationality in general. I'd hope there'd be more of an overlap between claiming to be a rationalist and applying that logic to things that are relatively low cost but likely to have an impact on what you claim is an existential issue.
Id question if the number of decent shows is actually low these days.
We may be past Peak TV but there's still plenty of stuff to watch on cable.
There have always been hacks and pandering but TV is actually very competitive and, unlike the films, it isn't all cookie cutter PG stuff like Marvel or cookie cutter PG stuff aspiring to be Marvel (why not make a Universal Horror franchise instead of an action-horror abomination? The money was right there...)
Euphoria probably doesn't deserve its budget (Sam Levinson should be kissing Zendayas feet) but that show as a film would be relegated to the $10 million indie ghetto.
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