Tanista
1d ago
I saw propaganda around that recently, I didn't really take it that seriously - just thought it was part of the same desperation causing them to look for men. Because, if you're going to use women as combat troops, it seems deeply unwise to let half your manpower go.
Lewis and his society were simply closer to the reality of war.
Even to this day, this attitude is held when the rubber meets the road. Ukraine didn't put both men and women on the frontline and Ukraine did not stop women from leaving on the grounds that they had to fight and there was very little outrage about it.
People just don't want to be told they can't do X, even if they had no intention of actually doing that thing.
That was the recent Katt Williams episode, which was also unbearable.
Howard goes even further, because I don't think Williams questions basic math.
Tanista
2d ago
People enjoy the altered flow-like state created by reading a long narrative for hours at a stretch, their own consciousness and volition being overridden by the flow of the story.
Narrative-gooning.
Tanista
4d ago
There is no trap - as in "a problem that's unpredictable and becomes worse if one uses their better judgment". There's a problem that's very soluble to the actions of the selective sex.
I took f3zinker's point to be more that, in many cases, we just tell people to do the sensible thing to avoid certain problems. But in this particular case people try to contrive some explanation (and/or blame society/men/patriarchy) for why people can't just do the thing that makes it seem like they've been trapped rather than just misusing (allegedly - revealed preference and all that) their agency.
For a certain type of person this is indeed good advice though.
It might have been good advice for OP, if they'd gotten it at a different time.
Using your example, much more useful if you're headed into your first year of college compared to when you're 25-35 or whatever.
Race riots are a GREAT way to let someone know they aren't welcome and should make all effort to shape up, fight, or get out.
Race riots have to be pretty fucking bad for people to go back to Africa or Pakistan, especially the way things are going now in some of those countries. Frankly, I don't know that you can make it bad enough except on pain of death. And, of course, people will react to that.
Even worse, you run the risk of radicalizing the biggest - by mass - obstacle to this sort of thing: Good Whites who want to fight Nazis. It's not gonna be a stretch if you're actively ethnically cleansing via violence.
In which countries? The US? Seems laughable.
As for others, maybe I'm way too optimistic about human nature (pessimistic? wypipo's openness and low ingroup loyalty is to my benefit) but I think any situation that gets bad enough to enforce population transfers via gun is going to mean a significant change in the current attitude (which seems to be a mix of delusional complacency and arrogance that assumes that the only real threat is other, more reactionary Westerners.) that makes all of this seem like a fait accompli.
Tanista
5d ago
In the future, will black doctors magically have tons of open appointments while the cue to see Dr. Rosenblatt grows ever longer?
And there's the argument for a socialized/centralized healthcare system.
Women being fighters is to enjoy visceral revenge fantasies in a kinetic manner often unavailable to them
True. But, as someone said above, it's interesting that a lot of this stuff is aimed at men (or in male genres). I may not have been the target audience for Atomic Blonde but it was me and people like me in the theater.
I think that bit would vary by culture.
strongly suspect that hollywood/journalist/academic weaklings also fail to understand how much physical difference there is between men and women,
Oh, 100%.
The funny thing is, people think they've corrected against the pervasive social messaging. Except that same messaging - and their bubble - has ensured that they underestimate the gap. I hear a lot of caveated statements about "well, a really well-trained woman" or "maybe using speed". Um...this isn't a video game. There's no balancing...
That'd be my practical argument against this particular myth: apparently we can't just do kayfabe and leave it at that. But that doesn't mean it's more plausible than other, more recent "woke" myths.
Tanista
6d ago
and that you don't need to try.
Oh, that's too far. There are annoying people like that but they're oversold. I don't think the average person thinks men should literally do nothing. The people telling you to "just be yourself" are taking it for granted that you are doing other things (like maintaining a social life).
I mean that the banal advice people give that you always hear complaints about are usually just assuming that people possess the same amount of socialization and enough agency to work their way through it like they did. People for whom it doesn't work naturally get frustrated, but that doesn't make it wrong or, as more neurotic and paranoid sides of the internet claim, some sort of plot or acceptable lie like telling kids about Santa Claus. To use one example from this sub: this is not bad advice, even if someone is not well-adjusted enough to take it.
The little advice I got from my parents wasn't bad, even though they came from a totally different society. They assumed it'd work out. And, had I been a different person, it absolutely would have.
My point is that SJ is not a voice actor, and isn’t doing a specific “character” or something the way that Fran Drescher or Gilbert Gotfried are.
True.
She wasn’t being hired for her voice.
In general maybe, but I think she was specifically brought in on Her to replace Samantha Morton - herself a great actor - because the existing actor wasn't working. If she was there for promotional/greenlighting reasons (which I'm sure played a role in films like Ghost in the Shell, Lucy, etc.) you'd assume she'd get cast from the start because her profile is incomparable.
IME, almost every bit of "bad" advice I see people complain about is basically this - just assuming well-adjusted people will find their way. And it isn't (wasn't?) even usually wrong, which is what makes it worse. There's no easy solution in just stopping people from it.
Tanista
7d ago
Even after Sama made that tweet this still didn’t occur to me.
It occurred to everyone else on the internet (including me but I was primed). If a ton of people hear ScarJo and then it turns out they literally offered the job to Johansson, I'm inclined to believe she's reasonable in thinking there was something there.
No the company is not “deep faking” you, you just aren’t actually unique.
Almost no one is. Amber Heard had a body double do the sex scenes for a movie, I guess you could say that that makes her not unique - people could get their titillation from someone else with the same body.
But I don't think it's delusions of grandeur to think that part of the value (in this case the titillation) in such a scene is specifically that it's Heard. There's a reason they took the legal risk of doing this. Which is why stars negotiate for the right to control even fake nudity - it can have an impact on their image. Some people just are more important than others, or they wouldn't be speaking to Sam Altman and basically being offered an ambassador role in one of the hottest AI companies.
Johansson wouldn't be unreasonable imo in thinking the appeal has something to do with her. Whether or not she has a legal right is another thing.
Star Wars toy sales are the metric I use, and star wars nerds and normies aren't buying sequel trilogy shit.
Fair enough. Let's say they perceived nerds as reliable consoomers.
As for the rest: BSG didn't just change Starbuck and introduce Laura Roslin (so two female regulars), most of the prominent humanform Cylons were female. That's a big change.
It was noticeable. And was noticed. It was just that the writing was "woke" but not yet in the particularly oppositional sense that seems to characterize modern gender swaps where they a) cannot seem to have a counter-balance where male virtues were respected (BSG being a milscifi show helped here) and b) seem to actively want to insult the legacy audience. RDM was more likely to lecture you on imperialism and genocide than mediocre white men.
RDM was relatively deft in how he navigated things, both on and off-screen. The actors had the same initial reaction as modern stars to the backlash but the less connected internet (Katee Sackhoff talks about having to go to an internet cafe to pay to read the hate, which is funny) and the fact that studios didn't see attacking racist fans as part of the promotional strategy all helped.
most BSG2 fans are sci fi starved nerds who wanted anything after babylon 5 and star trek went off the air.
Another way to read BSG2's success is that it kept or neutralized the oBSG fans (sometimes literally buying them off like Richard Hatch) and brought in new fans who were driven either by wanting to see any scifi on screen or the contrast with existing works (I was a Stargate kid and BSG was...very different. Having both was great). In the end, it was likely a net gain (especially since BSG, with all due respect, was not really like SW at that point)
This is what studios are trying to do. Keep legacy fans that love SW/whatever and are starved for it, while bringing in new "diverse" fans - basically they just want to grow the pie, even if that means losing some more legacy fans . They fail at it, constantly, not because the idea is bad (a ton of people showed up for the Force Awakens, that was also its high point in "undecided" markets like China) but because the culture has polarized so much as to make the execution almost inevitably awful.
As for the "her" tweet, that could mean anything.
Yes, that's part of the game. I guess we're supposed to believe that the CEO that's part of a company dealing with AI, that recently had a kerfuffle involving an AI voice from a movie just coincidentally tweeted the one thing that perfectly touched on all of these things?
Thing is, this sort of plausible deniability Twitter baiting is fine for a pop star, but maybe not appropriate for actual grownups. This guy is building AI and beating off board attacks; he's as close as we come to comic book CEO-villains like Lex Luthor.
He doesn't get to act like Taylor Swift or Drake.
That's the 'women are wonderful' effect. Everybody loves women. Everybody of any race has some women they care about.
I highly doubt that this particular trope would play as well in traditionalists societies. I don't think you can pin this on the WAW phenomenon because it manifests in the exact opposite way in certain cultures: it'd be considered immoral to send women into combat if it wasn't laughable as a concept.
Seems to me that it's just a very Western trope. Cultures have their fictions, this is the West's. As it is with the race swap stuff, so it is with the gender stuff.
The problem these days is that Western content creators have a tendency to pair a 'realistic, gritty' aesthetic with feminist fantasies. So the male fantasy of a scantily-clad (it's magic armor ok) Amazonian goddess turns into a rough-looking, middle-aged, square-shouldered she-man.
Well, yes. They listened to the people who (rightly) said that those characters were meant to titillate men. I don't even think it was a confluence of two factors, it was straight up hostility to "objectification".
I guess nobody bothered to argue that attracting men in media men were likely to pay for was hardly a great sin, cause here we are.
Exclusivity is still a widely accepted marketing and branding decision. Media networks love to brag about exclusive events, where only they get to show something. Hollywood in general loves exclusive events where only the biggest stars can attend. Clubs brag about their exclusive requirements. High end brands love to use cost as a way to exclude the riff raff and readily imply that only the rich and discerning can afford to choose their brand.
This depends on you taking "inclusion" at face value, instead of it assuming that it specifically meant racial and sexual inclusion like anyone who's ever seen the term used.
There's no contradiction in that view for events to both be inclusive and exclusive. In fact, being inclusive removes the moral argument against being exclusive: if you have some minorities and women it's considered more legitimate to keep out the poor.
Tanista
8d ago
Christ, they can't even commit to doing something when a black man doing cool shit really happened. What the fuck happened to adaptations of Alexandre Dumas dad, or the awesome life of Haile Selassi
The answer is always, always, always the same. And it's not even just minorities. It's why there's a girlboss in your old thing.
It's expensive to do something novel, and most people don't care about African history. A studio is likely not taking a $100 million gamble just to find out how much they don't. They want to pander but not that much.
However, this other thing has a built-in audience already. They tend to just buy shit (nerds being such reliable consoomer has its downsides) and they've already accepted some female/race-swaps (e.g. growing up BSG was already doing it) with minimal or ultimately meaningless grumbling. Why not more?
(I think the writing is worse now and everything is far more offputtingly oppositional but that's me)
Compare to, for example, feminism in Western media.
Yasuke was probably not a samurai, that's a historical question. Many times the women described in these stories - where they function like men in the plot and mechanics - are anatomically impossible.
Yet, almost every single bit of Western media I watch allows this fantasy. I watch something about war or violence and ScarJo or whoever is doing acrobat-jiu-jitsu and throwing around 200lb men. I play a game and the female characters play just like the men even in places where it just doesn't make sense. I watch The Rookie and the 5'4 Latina captain and the 6'0 Nathan Fillion have the same record in fights.
I could complain about this being inaccurate , but I'd be the one swimming against the tide. And looking a bit weird the more insistent I got about it. Even other woke-critical people would be unsympathetic or walk away.
Tanista
11d ago
I think you're right that it's natural but I don't think Elon Musk is Elon Musk because he took "boutique contrarian opinions" to stand out. He is an asshole but, AFAICT, his crazy stances are driven by passion, an apparently justified belief in a hole in the market and a concern for outsized (even by his standards) rewards.
After he got one success like Paypal he no longer needed to make himself notable.
The sort of guy who takes a stance purely to distinguish themselves (to the point where they risk a real failure) seems like a more desperate thing, same with other such bold and risky moves (like the Hock)
I think this is why bare contrarianism is considered off-putting.
Tanista
11d ago
Or they're sticking their head out because they're failures (or on the verge).
I stopped watching a while ago so I don't know how it's going, but the person who seems to have found the most success building a platform for conservative/outsider film-making is Dallas Jenkins. But I don't know that you can generate that sort of grassroots enthusiasm for most stories, even Christian ones. I think people are specifically willing to pay for his (pretty fun) take on the Gospels in a way they wouldn't for other products.
The Daily Wire is trying, but it's not looking good when the very critic you cite (who they actively courted) was lukewarm on their last movie (Ladyballers). Maybe Snow White will be good because they'll stick to the source material but we'll see.
I just don't think they can play at the sort of scale that does certain movies/properties justice (The first Narnia cost $180 million...a couple of decades ago). There's a reason Hollywood has a chokehold on blockbusters. Luc Besson got $200 million for Valerian after a surprise hit in Lucy, in an attempt to have his own franchise. It bombed, he will never see that sort of money again. Very few entities can absorb those losses.
More options
Context Copy link