dasfoo
1yr ago
Let's start with the very first comment.
surprise hit
RRR was Rajmouli's (director) 3rd major film after his 2 Bahubali films. They were the 2 highest grossing Indian movies at their time of release. RRR was expected to be his magnum opus, and the last thing you can call it is a 'surprise hit'.
I should have qualified it thusly: "surprise hit in the U.S."
awful-looking
I find this to be grossly untrue, most people in both the west and India seem to disagree with me on this one.
But this bit is the subjective, so I won't contest you on it.
It looks like a video game cut scene, and every visual is both so overly processed digitally and full of CGI, that it's kind of hard to tell what is real and what is fake, because it all looks fake. And there's no visual art to it, it's all just bright and garish, like the master bathroom of a nouveau riche with no taste.
And, seriously, the CGI effects are fucking terrible. I wish I could post clips. It's mind-boggling how shitty some of the CGI scenes are, one in particular that is a long shot of Bheem sneaking into a compound, and it looks like a little video game character jumping from one digital surface to another.
absurdly stupid and awful-looking surprise hit movie of 2022, the Tollywood epic RRR. While slogging through this 3-hour parade of xenophobic melodrama, incoherent action, and kindergarten-level sentiment
I don't have a week to write an entire thesis on how wrong you are. But, RRR to me, is genius of the highest order. It is a layered movie with at least half a dozen meta levels behind it. While the base movie is entertaining at face value, most discerning viewers realize that it operates entirely in the realm of metaphor.
If all dozen meta-levels are written for an audience of six-year-olds, it doesn't matter how many levels there are. Yes, there is a lot going on in RRR -- not enough to fill a 3 hour movie, unfortunately -- but it's all simple-minded busywork performed by the most shallow of characters spouting remedial dialog. Compare it to the work of a master Indian filmmaker like Satyajit Ray, and RRR looks Paul Blart: Mall Cop in the spectrum of Indian cinema. Even compared to a legit masterful musical like Lagaan, everything in RRR is pedestrian and/or insulting.
Part of my issue with how the movie has been received in the U.S. is that it seems like an egregious example of the "soft bigotry of low expections." I've only seen a few Indian movies, but of extremely high quality, so this one seems like an exception in awfulness. I could see how someone who enjoys movies like Birdemic and The Room might find similar qualities here enjoyable, but not unironically.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I’m not a Disney fan, but there’s still a learned subtlety and visual sophistication to their recent work that is light years beyond RRR, which is like an early 2000s video game in both form and content.
I can enjoy unsophisticated or technically rough cinema as well, but not when it is so narratively and thematically shallow.
dasfoo
1yr ago
A key difference between these situations is that there's no corroborating evidence for Cassidy's claim.
Another key difference is simply "likelihood."
How likely is it that someone in the backseat of a large car might lunge for the steering wheel? It seems unlikely to me that someone in the backseat of a Volkswagen Rabbit would be able to make any serious play for a steering wheel, let along someone in a more spacious luxury SUV or limo or whatever. Even before you get into the political alliances, this sounds like a made-up story.
Again, removing political alliances, how likely is that a powerful politician is profiting in some way off of the connections he makes for his family members? Moderate to very likely?
Whether there is evidence of either, of course, weakens or strengthens the case. But purely in a "Could I see this happening?" model, one seems physically difficult, at best, while the other seems like the way things usually work.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Here's what I think is interesting about Musk's very public leadership of Twitter: It's like he's isolated a number of areas where he thinks the company was failing, and re-building those areas from scratch in public view. This is a very novel approach and a kind of public service.
Just about everyone agrees that content needs some moderation, but Twitter's moderation model was broken. So instead of patching what was already in place, he's going back to square one and learning what needs to be moderated, in the hope of avoiding the missteps where the same process broke in its previous incarnation. And then we can all see how it got from Point A to Point Z. At the very least, he isn't being opaque about it, like the previous regime was.
dasfoo
1yr ago
What errors has Musk made?
By taking a capricious approach to addressing content moderation. While I like that he has been transparent about the process, it does seem like he has never really thought deeply about this complex problem, and did not come into the position with a clear set of principles on the matter. He probably should not be as hands-on as he is, as he is a shit-stirrer, which is not reflecting well on the prospects of Twitter becoming a more open and fairly adjudicated service.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Republicans aren’t known for forcing speech codes around dubious notions of “harm”, so yea, they should vote R, I’m surprised people don’t realize they are the libertarian team. At worst they might draft a law that states school children shouldn’t be taught america is the worst country on earth that they should defile and shit on at every opportunity
There really is a wide gulf between (formerly) mainstream 1990s centrist Republicans and New Right-ier Trump Republicans on this, and (sadly, for me) it looks like the centrists are losing. I have no doubt that most Rightier Republicans would gleefully embrace the ability to ban language and behavior for "the greater good" with just as much zeal as the Progressives; whether or not the 1990s GOPers have enough sway to argue effectively for the principle of "free speech" is an open question, but not one for which I hold much hope.
dasfoo
1yr ago
University systems now screen out 80% of faculty hires on "diversity" scoring before even passing the remaining resumes on to the hiring committee to be judged on merit.
Just so we're clear that this hypothetical is entirely theoretical and has no bearing on diversity hiring as practiced, since it started by defending a real world example.
In this particular case, then, wouldn't white man Sam Brinton fail at the first hurdle and never make it to the committee -- unless, he had some other identity trump card to see him through to the next phase? If so, then one could easily argue that his identity enabled him to get hired, even if he wasn't hired "only" because of his identity.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Said what from the start? There's quite a bit of nonsense in that category, most of which is still not backed up by these press releases.
This is a major part of why this matters: Normal sane questions about the official COVID / vaccination narrative were ALL lumped into the "5G towers" category in precisely this way. The intended effect of banning a doctor who says, "Maybe babies don't need vaccination" was to put them in the same "heretic" bucket as the "Bill Gates Depopulation" theorist.
This was an acceleration of the previous "stigmatize anti-vaxxers" paradigm that made any questioning about vaccine schedules or ingredients tantamount to "mass murder."
dasfoo
1yr ago
Presumably it’s a reference to the KKK’s demonstration in Skokie, IL in the 1970s. The ACLU defended the KKK’s right to peacefully march.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I've been quite disappointed by a lot of Musk's handling on Twitter.
Yeah, he didn't seem to come in with a clear plan for how to address the issues of uneven content moderation and how the tone of Twitter discourse is toxic. He's fumbled haphazardly with the first issue, and leaned into toxicity on the second.
dasfoo
1yr ago
It's one of those debates "Is making it easier to find publicly known info the same as doxing?"
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
My street address is not private. It's in the phone book. But if a journalist with 50k followers tweeted it with the implication that I'm a bad guy, that presents a hazard that didn't exist by my address merely being the in the phone book.
That is, Doxxing is a two-ingredient recipe: 1. The information, 2. The reason for calling attention to the information to a specific audience. Neither ingredient is necessarily a hazard on its own.
dasfoo
1yr ago
-the war is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs
-the war is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)
-continuing the war increases the chances of a world war
This phrasing of "the war" strikes me a bit like when people say, "COVID devastated the economy" as a way to avoid blaming the decision-makers whose reactions to COVID where what caused the economic damage and not the virus itself.
It looks a bit different if you rephrase these points as follows:
-Russia is severely impoverishing Europe due to high energy costs by continuing its war in Ukraine
-Russia is destroying Ukraine ( population + territory / infrastructures / institutions)
-Russia continuing the war increases the chances of a world war
If the first formulation leads one to the answer that it is for greater good to end the war, what does the second formulation suggest, and how are they different?
dasfoo
1yr ago
There've been reports of Russia using the Orthodox Church as a network for its spies:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/world/europe/orthodox-church-ukraine-russia.html
dasfoo
1yr ago
Because the larger government would be ppl who say the right things. and enough ppl would support them. Similar things are happening now.
The trend, though, in the opposite direction, with the pro-1WG crowd consisting of WHO+WEF+EU+UN types who are all vaccine booster boosters. It seems like all of the hesitants lean more toward local/national sovereignty. I don't see an infrastructure in place for anti-elite types to suddenly assume or even drift toward elite status.
dasfoo
1yr ago
That's a substantial majority of even the right-wing listeners getting it wrong, and OAN is even worse than the leftist networks.
That's a weird metric, though: "Got it wrong." What does that mean? Anyone who doesn't guess "Below 2%" (which is still wildly wrong where it matters).
If 75% of OANN viewers "get it wrong" by guessing 3-10%, that's still directionally far better than only half of CNN viewers thinking it's 50%.
Seems like a better metric would be an average of how wrong each cohort is.
dasfoo
1yr ago
A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?
The cynical answer is "nothing." The vaccine deaths would be categorized as "Long Covid" or something else and any respectable scientist or doctor who claims otherwise would risk their career.
dasfoo
1yr ago
It demonstrated that although Asians had higher rates of poverty in NYC, compared to even African Americans, their crime rate remained the lowest of the various ethnicities studied.
What's the argument for why Asians are such an outlier?
Is it possible that low-income Asians tend to live in insular mostly low-income Asian communities and that whatever crime does occur inside the insular ethnic community gets handled within that community and isn't reported to the data collectors?
dasfoo
1yr ago
These classes impress upon children the idealistic, shallow notion that individuals - not geopolitical trends and perpetual power imbalances - are responsible for shaping the course of history.
Of course they do. No society can survive when its children are taught from the outset that their society is not worth surviving. Children need to learn ideals toward which to strive, and be given a reason for participating positively as part of a larger society.
Independent students may later dig into the more complicated realities, but it's societal suicide to breed cynicism and self-loathing in kids, as we are possibly seeing now in the U.S., where kids have been taught eco doomerism and self-hating history since the 1990s.
dasfoo
1yr ago
A few months ago, my mother-in-law (mid-70s, and not the most reliable source), suffered a mild heart attack hours after receiving both her Covid booster and a flu shot. She said the ER nurse asked her if she had been boosted recently and followed with "We see this all the time." Coincidentally, my dad (late 70s, fully boosted) also suffered a mild heart attack around this time last year while in the hospital for a colonoscopy, and the doctors told him it was probably stress-related.
I do look skeptically at the anti-vaxxers who act like no one ever had heart or health issues prior to the Covid vaccine, but there does seem to be a lot more noticing going on, and no trust that anyone in power would admit if any of that noticing was of something real.
dasfoo
1yr ago
Given the relative simplicity of it's product, does Facebook really need tens of thousands of software engineers?
Facebook isn't simple, and if you get caught in one of its circular bugs, there is no human support person who can help you out. I've had three clients in the past year get locked out of some Facebook for Business service or seemingly simple feature due to miscommunication between complex related services or a seemingly easily solvable security issue -- if there were any human beings capable of looking into them. There aren't. It's all completely impersonal and complicated and extremely frustrating when you're the one trying to get some kind of relief.
dasfoo
1yr ago
I forgot all about the Awan Brothers! I am guessing nothing ever happened with that, even though it had the stank of suspicious incompetence all over it.
dasfoo
1yr ago
The Hillary scandal is an order of magnitude worse than Trump/Biden because of the intent behind what she was doing. The purpose was to evade oversight both from the public and congress. And she systematically compromised national security for that purpose (and most likely corruption/graft).
Yes. She can't plead ignorance, because she took willful action to subvert the default way of doing things, when the easy ignorant path is to just accept the standard government email accounts which are already set-up for compliance with discovery regulations. Sort of like how putting classified documents in an envelope marked "Personal" (or stuffed in your socks, like Sandy Berger) shows intent to subvert.
dasfoo
1yr ago
If his team had cooperated—and I still don’t understand why they didn’t
It supports my prior that Trump is a reflection of the same mix of corruption/ignorance/incompetence as other politicians of his standing, but is far far worse at (or has no interest in) playing the game. He has no veneer of respectability that acts as a buffer for others. He exposes himself, even if the others are just the same underneath.
Last night I watched the absurdly stupid and awful-looking surprise hit movie of 2022, the Tollywood epic RRR. While slogging through this 3-hour parade of xenophobic melodrama, incoherent action, and kindergarten-level sentiment was a struggle, it did make me wonder about two ideas that I’ve always thought should be in direct conflict with each other but aren’t treated as such: “Anti-Colonialism” and “Open Borders.”
As I understand it, the principle behind “Anti-Colonialism” is that Group A is never entitled to move into Group B’s space and take it over, replacing Group B’s preferred culture and/or method of governance with Group A’s preferred culture and/or method of governance, thereby subjugating Group B as second class in their own space. However, this school of thought seems to be most popular among the same political/intellectual cohort that also champions very loose immigration controls, commonly referred to as “Open Borders” (even though that phrase suggests no control whatsoever, whereas the reality is probably something closer liberal immigration controls). With an “Open Borders” mindset, there is no stopping Groups B-Z from moving into Group A’s space and altering its culture or assuming control of its institutions if any of those Groups does so with enough numbers or organization. “Open Borders,” on principle, refutes the very notion of any group’s ownership of any space, which more or less dismantles the paradigm of “Anti-Colonialism.” How do these two ideas co-exist in the same mind without producing uncomfortable cognitive dissonance?
It seems uncharitable to suggest that the salve for this cognitive dissonance is simply racism; or, to put it how I suppose the “Open Borders Anti Colonialist” would think of it, “intersectionality.” That is, the principle behind “Anti-Colonialism” is not really the wrongness of generic groups subjugating each other but rather the wrongness of one static “Bad Group” (that happens to be largely defined by skin color/geographical origin) subjugating other Groups (of other skin colors), who by the nature of their subjugation and opposition to “Bad Group” are thereby “Good Groups.” “Open Borders,” too, is a policy only sought after when the same “Good Groups” are immigrating into the space of the same “Bad Group,” rather than vice versa. These are intended as strictly one-way ideological roads, and not as equal-use roadmaps for Groups A-Z.
I don’t get the impression that this intersectional solution to the “Open Borders Anti Colonialism” knot is oft-contemplated by the typical “Open Borders Anti Colonialist,” who rather thinks of both notions as having sprung from the same well of humanist good intentions. Is the racial/intersectional question actually essential to this paradigm, or is there some other less invidious key that unlocks the conflict between “Open Borders” and “Anti Colonialism?” in the progressive mindset?
I’ll hand this to RRR: It aptly confounds Western culture-warring by presenting its own set of ideas that may be difficult for some Western progressives to reconcile: It pits noble indigenous revolutionaries against the cartooniest of all racist villains and does so with a strident rallying cry against gun control. One of the protagonists has the stated goal of “putting a rifle in the hand” of every colonial subject, and suggests that a bullet only attains its true value when it kills an immigrant (or, in this exact case, any white person).
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