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2mo ago
I've heard only negative things about it from anywhere online that wasn't part of, or tangentially part of, the mainstream media. I'm actually surprised it's rated at 61% (though almost anything below 90% for a TV show on RT is abysmal). But it should be noted that reviews are just not worth anything anymore. Almost everything receives either universal acclaim on Rottentomatoes which translates to about 70-80 on metacritic, almost anything outside of this usually comes from a much lower amount of reviewers even bothering to review the media to begin with.
Night Country was interesting to me because I was kinda annoyed that they brought in new people but Pizzolato last two seasons were underwhelming (Though, to me, I'd put that on mostly not having Cary Fukunaga to direct every episode). I was waiting for it to finish but it was heavily advertised and I noticed it a lot. Basically it was on my tablet when opening an empty tab in Brave it puts paid news there if you scroll down and Night Country was there every week like clockwork. First, it was the rave reviews, then the huge viewership numbers, and then it was basically articles taunting people who disliked it by saying that despite a small number of online detractors it was the most successful True Detective season ever both critically and in viewership numbers. When the finale rolled around it literally used the Rolling Stone review that said it was the best ending the series has ever had.
Naturally, I went to reddit's television to see what they thought and they were aghast. Game of Thrones season 8 levels, and this was in normal non-fandom subreddit. The show's main subreddit was just memeing all over it. The best people could come up with was meek, "I didn't think it was that bad." being heavily downvoted at the bottom.
I half expected this because we're in a revival era, but nobody who actually made the original shows is participating in the revivals. They brought back Justified to make a show that was nonsensical and bad but worse was not really in any way the show that had come before. They didn't bring back any of the writers and didn't really bring back anyone but the main character, and Olyphant brought his daughter in real life to play his daughter in the show and it was just painful to watch. They brought back In Treatment but replaced Gabriel Byrne with Uzo Aduba and I just didn't even want to deal with it because aside from not bringing back the star they also didn't bring back the creative team. Frasier they brought back Kelsey only and it really shows. It's just a modern shitty/middling sitcom that happens to have the same character. Why are they not even bothering to try to make these good at all? The exception I'll give is Party Down which, funnily enough brought back everyone they could, including the creative team. Even when it was blatently political and culture warring it was still better than these lazy ersatz elevator-music cover songs of something people used to like.
Night Country is just an example of things that have come before and haven't been noticed because most of the time things can squeeze by with just the right amount of mediocrity. They put their leads and creative lead front and center and girl-bossed their way into being called a good show, after they stole another show's name for seemingly little reason other than marketing. But all these things compound the other way. The better your show is supposed to be the worse it seems when it's not and this goes similarly to taking another's show's name for no reason. The culture war only exists when these projects fail, you don't like it you're sexist/racist/etc, otherwise it's yaasss queen slay even if it's just barely clearing the bar of success.
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5mo ago
Elba as bond I think is an interesting point. Mainly because most of the race swapping doesn't seem to be for any reason other than race swapping.
Remember when Halle Berry was Catwoman? Aside from the movie being garbage I don't remember anyone caring that Catwoman had been race swapped and that was because they chose an A-list (maybe at the time) actor with talent to play the character. Or when Michael Clarke Duncan was Kingpin? How about Sam Jackson as Nick Fury? Will Smith as Jim West? Similar feelings I assume will resonate with an Elba Bond. How about Morgan Freeman as Red in Shawshank Redemption?
It just feels like regardless of acting ability fifteen years ago they'd race swap Bond to Elba, or Doctor Who to someone with the star power of like Chiwetal Ejiofor. But nowadays they'll race swap the doctor to a third lead on a Netflix comedy. I'm sure he's a good actor but it's just an easy trend to spot where the race swapping also ends up making things cheaper production-wise. The Little Mermaid's black, "who's playing her?" someone who's black. The doctor is black, "who's playing the doctor?" someone who's black, and gay, and wasn't born in the UK. I think it's obvious that it feels different now because they really do it different now and it has a lot to do with agenda pushing or the pretense of agenda pushing to get a cheaper actor.
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30d ago
I don't find that report very convincing at all. They don't even know the mechanism of what's happening. They just present a bunch of Russians that exist around these events and then say there's classified intel they have that makes it clear that it's Russians but they can't reveal what that is. It's possible sure, but this report basically has people saying they have had Havana Syndrome, there were Russians around when they got it, and there's classified intel that makes them sure it's Russians. It all seems like highly motivated reasoning.
Tonight, we're reporting for the first time, an incident at last year's NATO summit in Lithuania—a meeting that focused largely on Russia's invasion of Ukraine and was attended by President Biden. Multiple sources tell us that a senior official of the Department of Defense was struck by the symptoms and sought medical treatment. We told Greg Edgreen what we'd learned.
Greg Edgreen: It tells me that there are no barriers on what Moscow will do, on who they will attack, and that if we don't face this head on, the problem is going to get worse.
I mean this was included, as near as I can tell it's nothing. It doesn't even say that they think it was actually Havana Syndrome it just says he had symptoms, then they turn to the talking head to confirm that Russia definitely did that. Why not target Ukrainians? I tried to ctrl-f looking Ukraine in the fairly long wikipedia article on it and got no results. What makes Americans and Canadians so special? I also don't know why the Office of National Intelligence would release a response saying that it's unlikely a foreign adversary is responsible after this report because, at least in my mind, it's favorable for the US to pretend its true even if it's not because bolstering Russia as a boogeyman is a valuable distraction against anything happening domestically. Especially when the FBI and the White House released statements that basically said nothing at all except acknowledging that Havana Syndrome exists. All that being said, I don't think it's super unlikely just that this isn't convincing.
She asked us to withhold her name for her safety. She's the wife of a Justice Department official who was with the embassy in Tbilisi. She's a nurse with a Ph.D. in anesthesiology. On Oct. 7, 2021, she says that she was in her laundry room when she was blindsided by a sound.
Anyway, this is actually what I wanted to post about about anyway. What, they couldn't list her height and weight and DOB?
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9mo ago
The extra click is crucial for participation and being exposed to ideas you would normally avoid. In threads the title so important and half the time that title seems either like clickbait or something I'm not interested in or indecipherable without clicking to clarify. Going in and out of threads I may be interested in seems just like a worse version of what's done now. As someone else said when this was brought up before you end up reading things you never would before because they're all in one thread as top level comments. And I also think it promotes participation because it ends up taking the heat off of a top-level comment rather than a top level thread there might not be any real distinction but being buried in a 1000 other comments when people tear your ideas apart is a lot more comfortable than that failure existing on its own. I think burying old ideas weekly helps everyone, the deeper comments go the more angry and snipey they get and forcing a new topic is a great cooling method for that, I think the weekend and switching off to the friday fun thread then small scale questions thread helps with that as well.
The idea also segregates all topics. Some people might see that as a good thing but it's just an exercise in people radicalizing themselves. I can see dissenters becoming fewer and fewer as each separate single-interest topic is dominated by those that have a lot of interest in something. People will start avoiding threads started by users they don't like and it'll become even more about people who just agree with each other. And you lose that "there's someone wrong on the internet! this won't stand." drive where you see something that you think or know is wrong and feel compelled to correct them. A top level thread usually presents no facts or real ideas in its title and you lose that possible drive. Every new topic about people's specific bugbears will just be dominated by those people and become a "HBD general" or "AI threat general" or "Immigration general" if people think that the majority opinion dominates and destroys minority opinions now then it would only get worse.
It also creates an idea of staying-on-topic that limits conversation. You can go into a top level comment about the economy and then have people start talking about AI safety two comments deep and it feels normal and fine to switch to that and even if it would be alright otherwise you limit how many people are going to participate in that topic-switch or even know its there.
I do agree that it sucks if you want to post and respond to serious topics on the weekend but that could be fixed by staggering the thread's replacement every few weeks or so but otherwise I think thread level topics will just end up in worse quality probably worse engagement and more personally it would "fuck my shit up" with regard to how I consume what's on this site with all the extra navigation and clicking that it would require.
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8mo ago
I suspect most people don't fully understand problems like this and don't follow through with the thought process that everyone lives if they take red. This could be because they're not really giving a lot of thought to the question itself and are just looking at a choice between two answers, one I live, the other I might live but I'm helping other people live. If the text of the choice for red included the part that everyone also lives if they all take red the answers might end up different.
Also, there's too much baggage around red, blue and specifically around a question that involves a red and blue pill. You're just asking for people to pick an ideological side without thinking for many people not wanting to be associated with the red pill when they're not thinking too hard about it and it appears to represent only naked self-interest.
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1yr ago
In my recollection it's been discussed on the Motte before but not nearly as much as I've seen in it in /r/all. Literally any post with a penis or even mentioning foreskin would devolve into male circumcision debate and I remember it at least ten separate times in random threads. The people invested in caring about it care about it is so much that I would never want my kid to be circumcised. I remember watching a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode about circumcision and there was this guy who was so obsessed with getting his lost foreskin back that he attached weights around his penis to create new foreskin. If it is affecting people that much from the trauma or loss of potential sensation or just becoming obsessed with wanting that part of their body back I'd never do it to my kid because I would not want him on Reddit going into a /r/funny post showing two different mushrooms and comparing them to uncircumcised/circumcised penises and feeling the need to lay out seven paragraphs with ten citations about how evil circumcision is. Whatever health benefits the WHO gives or even the prevention of a future mentioned below is not worth my kid growing up to make a post like that on /r/funny.
But the best argument in favor that I have is this: I used to listen to Loveline and the amounts of calls they would get from men who had Phimosis or tearing during sex of their foreskin and had to have an adult circumcision were at least biweekly. I also remember the kid in Nip/Tuck who was uncircumcised and girls made fun of him and his parents wouldn't let him get circumcised, so he tried to circumcise himself in the bathroom with his dad's scalpel. Though that one probably is vanishingly rare in real life.
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1yr ago
That's what Netflix was doing. They were paying Cogent to take the traffic and it was being delivered to Verizon but because Cogent was handling Netflix it was using more bandwidth than Verizon felt was fair so they let their ports fill up with Cogent and it slowed all Netflix content to Verizon. Netflix subsequently entered paid peering agreements with Comcast and Verizon after this to make sure their interconnections weren't disrupted. That just seems like a scam to me and not just toward Netflix. If I'm paying Verizon to provide me with internet and they don't provide Netflix simply because they're unhappy with their peering agreement with Cogent then that seems like something that shouldn't affect the customer and if it does it seems like they're not providing the thing they're supposed to be selling.
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2mo ago
I really didn't like Knives Out because of how simplistic the plot felt to me. I never really thought about race in that movie. But I've heard someone say they liked that you could tell if someone is racist because they've disliked that movie. It broke my brain enough (and I was basically "outing" myself as a racist if I questioned this) that I didn't try to get any elaboration.
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6mo ago
The letter says that there was a lot of misinformation/disinformation about the referendum and the mainstream media was complicit in this by showing both sides. Is Australia's media really like this?
I mean I have no doubt that there's probably a lot of partisan media but I'm wondering how true this is because my exposure has usually left me thinking that media there is about as left-leaning as America's.
Anyway, it's probably a good thing they went for that invective though if you don't want the pending disinformation bill to pass. I'd bet if that letter was a lot softer they could convince a lot more people that "a 'false sense of balance' over facts." needs some agency to force the media to make rules to be policed.
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1yr ago
I'd bet it has something to do with the fact that small businesses and individuals aren't really a big enough fiscal presence on the internet to matter. Everything is big websites of big companies anyway. I remember reading/talking about how without Net Neutrality we'd just be a few giant websites and that's how it happened out anyway even with Net Neutrality in place.
Related to this, I was reading about Netflix peering deals because I was wondering how Net Neutrality dealt with that and apparently ISPs can effectively throttle large companies if they feel like it because refusing connections from another network and/or not delivering it in a timely fashion is not a violation of Net Neutrality. It only becomes about Net Neutrality when it's on their network. So, they can essentially extort money from Netflix to keep its connections to their network from being refused or connected slowly.
I think people just assumed Net Neutrality meant more than it actually does because to my tiny mind the above seems like just the kind of thing that Net Neutrality should protect against.
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1mo ago
I think you're right but it's not just a torch being passed on. Writing in general became about representation both from the author and in the writing. Look at the many amazing reviews of the writing for the new True Detective series because it was run by a woman and was about women. Or basically any of the many threads we've had about book awards even among those that people acquiesce is well written it also almost always is about something that has an ideological purpose/bent to it.
It's probably harder to identify the good when you have to include a bunch of other conditions on the writing for it to be considered worthy of praise/awards these days. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but even before this became a big part of identifying what is "good art" these days there was a glut of basically everything that no one has time or really care to dig through.
I wonder what happened to ghost writers for movies though. Used to be you'd get people like Tom Stoppard rewriting almost all of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quentin Tarantino punching up Crimson Tide, Aaron Sorkin rewriting the Rock or even Tony Gilroy and Aaron Sorkin improving Enemy of the State, so even in these popcorn action movies we'd get some quality dialogue. Now, I guess they figured out that it didn't matter or don't care or the writer's that would be ghostwriting are just making indies? It's a mystery but I think it's why modern action movies often feel soulless compared to older ones because they don't ever bother to try to improve them. Or more likely people don't care about the difference, say what you want about Joss Whedon but there is a stark difference between his writing and someone aping his writing but I'm sure most people don't care to notice the difference. A large portion of people like Fallout 3 better than New Vegas and can't even understand how the writing is any different. And most people who are into "good" writing don't care about making things that are pulpy better they want Disco Elysium they don't want the next God of War to be written like that or even care if it's rewritten by a better writer just to make the dialogue better. I wonder if anyone who likes an action movie that was rewritten several times to get the script in a better state could ever identify that they liked that movie because of the writing, anyway?
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10mo ago
Your mod warning might be right, but this post is an example of being a bad mod. You mocked three users to various degrees of uncharitability and antagonism and then warned them when you could have just warned them. And I'm not saying you need to be a robot or in deference to other posters all the time, just you know, mod comment gooder.
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1yr ago
Ignoring the low-effort rule, we're casual here. "If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." It takes a lot of unnecessary effort to be very succinct sometimes and most people just can't do it naturally, so I'll forgive some bloviating because it's a post on a discussion board that I'm reading for free.
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1yr ago
Trope is a bad word for what's happening because it's too contaminated to really use to get any real meaning across, really, in any capacity. Everything is somehow a trope and its immediately negative. Tropes aren't really good or bad but woke tropes are almost invariably bad for several reasons. A black person instead of a white person isn't a subversion of expectations, it's a meta-subversion of expectations which should be meaningless to the plot but isn't. The reason it's a woke trope is the reason it's bad. The black person will not be the underdog. They will say they're the underdog, but nothing in the story usually holds that to be true. And almost always, conversely, when they make a genius woke character they will say they're a genius, but no actions or dialogue demonstrate this except that it is said to be so. "Sansa is the smartest woman I know." It's betraying the narrative for the sake of making these woke tropes true if only because the writers have written it to be so.
Also, the rules of the world are not the rules of a story. The underdog losing is a subversion of expectations because it's a story. The heroes are supposed to win and when it doesn't happen that's the subversion. Earning the subversion or making the trope not bad is about having it make sense once all is said and done. If they lose or win it needs to build to that in some way. A lot of stories don't bother to do this anymore. The subversion comes because the writers just write it to be so. It's stories written by people who kind of understand what goes into a story but don't understand what makes it good. Underdogs do not have to lose greater than 50% of the time, they should be, as set up in the story, worse than the antagonists, that's all. But this clashes innately with the meta-woke insertions. Black people and women need to be the heroes but they can't be portrayed as worse, so they just portray them as perfect. Perfect people are boring and also they're not subverting anything anymore when they do this. The audience expects them to be perfect, there's no subversion going on here except in the writer's and some critics' minds. What we expect of the world is not what we expect of a story. Anyone who watches sports and roots for one specific team knows this. But you rarely make a story out of a losing team's season, that'd be the subversion because the winning season is almost always the more interesting one.
It's just lazy. They want a black girl genius with no flaws and no interesting dialogue or actions and nothing done to even suggest they are a genius and they also expect that to be as engaging as a flawed, drunken white man who uses his genius to deflect and cover his weaknesses. Why is it the same in their eyes? Because she's black. Race, gender identity, sexuality, are a replacement for personality for many writers and uniquely stifling because no one really has the guts to give their characters flaws so they're all the same character which is not nearly as interesting. If you woke trope a story you will get a worse story almost invariably because its really hard for writers to not inject a new personality into a character that has been race/gender swapped and the personality of that character will suffer making the story worse. The idea of doing the woke trope swapping is pretty telling to begin with because it usually means a not healthy amount of presentism will be brought to bare on the story. Any british show that takes place hundreds of years ago will have a superbly able black person who acts as if its the current year and they will talk about their plight to others as if its the current year and a good portion of the story will include a woke sideplot that has nothing to do with the main plot.
In my mind, the things don't make a story bad, but they're a hallmark of people who don't care if they've told a good story but just that their propaganda/fetish/social commentary is out there. The more annoying thing, to me, is that it's obvious when this is done even on a small scale. Anyone who says it's not done is a liar. But once it's done it has an aura of protection because people are only criticizing the story because of its woke agenda (it also doesn't help that the reviews that do criticize often only talk about the woke agenda as why it's bad but that's just another level of why this deflection is so annoying) and if you criticize it you're only doing it because you're a racist/misogynist/nazi. I'm not sure it makes normal people more likely to like it but they won't believe bad reviews and will slog through a whole season before they think something might not be right with it. I think that's reason enough for Amazon to go full hog into protecting properties by having them critic proof before they air just by diversifying the cast.
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26d ago
While you may be right, I'd quibble with considerably. Moving from Reddit is going to do that regardless because Reddit's rules make a place more left wing because they restrict what you can talk about to begin with. And you lose people that would prefer Reddit over other places and they'd probably be more left wing just going by the idea that: 1) someone using reddit at all is more likely to be left wing. 2) people leaving reddit for another site are more likely to be right wing. The entire idea that the motte leave reddit at all is explicitly right wing coded. Discussing HBD is right wing coded. Discussing trans issues is right wing coded (I say that because discussing means there's more than one view represented). In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded. Most of the people I know and most of the people I encounter are left wing and have no interest at all in talking about anything to do with actual issues, they have their stance they've taken and if you talk about it deeper you're a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, shitty person. Unless you're dedicated to proving right wing people wrong in every situation you're simply a bad person. I've heard this many times. And I suppose it's mostly a confluence of most people being left wing and most people really being unable to tolerate content they disagree with and being almost wholly uncurious. But all that being said, it's like IG-111, we're here because we're witches and they allow witches here. The 1000 witches problem is never really going to go away.
I do think that you're posting this in bad faith, however. Considering your examples of most upvoted comments are sitting at 7, 10, and 18 votes and your summary of each being both inaccurate and uncharitable. Why did no one respond to your HBD post about white suffering, because almost no one cares about HBD anymore. The idea that HBD has been talked about to death has been talked about to death, here. But you made it very clear in your post that you didn't believe what you wrote, it wasn't a trick like that post about one movie destroying a child's brain. Do you believe that no one read your disclaimer or that no one here respects steelmanning an argument they don't believe? Is that why you didn't bother to link to it? You brought up none of those rebuttals yourself but instead make a top level post calling people out who actually had the courage to make a post about something they believe and you're mad because they got a marginal amount of internet points and that nobody brought up your own points. It's hard enough to have the energy to argue your own thoughts, now you want us to argue yours as well.
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2mo ago
The critics had the whole season available to review. You can click on all the good reviews by critics here and see that. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/true-detective/season-4/
But you're right, it was poorly reviewed by a lot of outlets, it's just to come out looking good on aggregators you only have to have a few 100s/90s to balance that out and still look well reviewed.
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6mo ago
How well people perceive themselves is also not a direct answer to how they feel about the economy overall. I can be better off financially than I was and spend the exact same amount on groceries but feel like the economy is shit because I'm buying a carton of 4 eggs instead of a dozen. Is the economy how financially secure most people feel personally? Is it inflation? Is it the GDP? Whatever it actually is doesn't really matter if people don't use that as their own definition. Most people feel like the economy is bad if their rent goes up and eggs cost a hell of a lot more.
Also, I think it's quite an extraordinary claim to say that people scoff at "lived experiences". I don't recall that being the case here at all, in fact most people here tend to defer to them when there's no data and when the data is contradictory it's posted and nobody usually mentions or scoffs at the "lived experience." Unless you mean of people that aren't posting here which I think is entirely different but even then I'd say that number is really low. It's really only applies to "racism" where "lived experience" is used as a trump card. You'll notice that most of the people responding didn't say that his numbers were wrong but they disagreed with what they mean or that they're the wrong numbers to measure what they're trying to measure. This is not using a lived experience to trump someone's argument, it's fundamentally saying that they disagree with the foundation of the definition. They may be using anecdotes and not "rebutting" the data provided but that's not the same thing.
OP pretending like he is the master of knowing exactly what the economy means, especially to other people without even defining it, and then throwing shade over nearly anyone who disagrees is not only petty but exceedingly arrogant. He asked people to provide data but then apparently when half the posts do he cites them personally as being unacceptable because it wasn't acceptable data. Food cost apparently does not matter at all to him, and using that as a reason automatically means it's "lived experience" and most of those reasons he cited were culled down to a headline to make them look as bad as possible. This just not the way we should communicate here and reads as someone who has only empathy for people who agree with him.
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10mo ago
I think Kanye West summed it up pretty well for me, "Money isn't everything, not having it is."
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1yr ago
This hit home for me. The kindle fire volume slider/buttons go like this 0->30%->45%->60%->75%->90%->100%. Apparently you have to root it to get access to changing the volume in steps that don't skip the first 30 and don't go 15 at a time.
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1yr ago
At least in the very recent era of these IPs you can look at it like this: The people making Dune were trying to adapt the book of Dune. The people making the new Lord of the Rings show were trying to write their own prequel they made up and couldn't include anything from the Silmarillion.
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1yr ago
I don't see any of that in the modhat reply. I think you should separate a person from their posting patterns outside of when they make mod decisions because it's not fair otherwise. You seem to be making an assumption about what they mean when they say groomers and then ignoring the clarification and saying they're lying. That's just wildly uncharitable. If you will just say that someone's opinion is not what they say it is and it's only what you think they actually mean then there's nothing to be done about meeting a level of discourse you apparently want which I guess is not meeting expectations and definitions that you've made up that they don't agree with.
I mean sometimes it's clearly apparent to me that the rules are not enforced equally, especially to those who are mods but in general it's mostly people who are known. I'd prefer the rules to be far more laissez faire. The post you linked to I wouldn't ban you for but I do think it makes a particularly uncharitable argument that's clearly done in bad faith and with a style that's teetering toward unhinged. nara said you might be suicide by modding there and this post certainly doesn't help that case. Especially when your responses to people asking you questions about that post is simply to do that extremely obvious bad faith argument dance where you just ask an extended series of questions in multiquotes and then disregard or ignore the responses. And it all seems to come back to you making an assumption about what another person is actually saying. I mean if you're going to approach every response or criticism as someone doing a dogwhistle that they say they're not doing then you may as well get banned and only talk in a forum with yourself because clearly that's the only person that can wade through that expectation with clarity.
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1yr ago
It was actually interesting to me how Rings of Power is doing poorly relative to what I had expected its marketing to push. Nielson's minutes watched for the first two episodes came out last week and it was the top but not by what I expected. I think House of the Dragon had four episodes by then so that could confound a 1:1 comparison but I recall it only beating House of the Dragon by a kinda large margin (which should be expected for a premiere and one this heavily promoted) but House of the Dragon was still winning technically because the Nielson numbers for minutes watched didn't include live numbers for people who have cable/satellite for House of the Dragon. Though I wouldn't take into account people who talk about declining viewership, everything declines in viewership throughout a season, it might pick up near a finale but usually only up to the level of the premiere. Shows can increase viewers from season to season (this is very rare but usually happens when shows actually become hits like Game of Thrones or Stranger Things) but it never really happens while a show's running during a season.
The development path for Rings of Power started with Amazon buying the rights. I think that's the real problem. Well, the real problem is they bought the rights to something that they intended to use to make fanfiction about. It's like Amazon thought Lord of the Rings was a big IP because of its world and was something akin to Marvel or Star Wars where they were buying some broad spectrum IP they could make a bunch of stories out.
I just don't think Lord of the Rings works that way. In the same way it doesn't work for A Song of Ice and Fire. The minute Game of Thrones ran out of dialogue written by Martin it was apparent and depressing. They bought the rights to the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and they're not even using them. They just wanted a name for a show and some of the characters. I don't understand Bezos. He loves The Expanse, revives it from cancellation, and then just lets it die. By the end it was just heads talking in black rooms with obviously half a season of content missing. And, he loves Lord of the Rings and wants to buy the rights for a massive amount of money with no plan other than to not make Lord of the Rings. Maybe it's not even about the prestige of making a good show, or celebrity clout, but just that he just wanted the prestige of owning those stories.
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26d ago
You're assuming I'm right wing because I have that opinion. Call me self-deluded if you want but most of my opinions are far left of anyone here. Though I read your union and abortion til birth opinions sound pretty normal left wing to me but I admit I live in a bubble. Most people I know are all or nothing and don't really care about nuance about things, if they believe in unions they believe in every aspect of unions if they think abortion should be legal they make no distinctions on it about how it should be practiced at all. I know it's because they mostly don't care about meting or puzzling out complexity but I also think even if you sat them down and made them think about it there's only a small proportion of people who would be moved to make specific lines about how much of their belief should be used in government mandates/laws. But I live in southern California, maybe that paints my life different.
But I didn't mean to suggest that right wing people are the only ones that will talk, I mean to suggest that it's right coded right now, because they're not in power, because they're the minority, because they will let the discussion touch ends they don't like or want possibly or probably because of those reasons.
Left wing people, in my experience, limited as it may be, will shut down conversations with insults or insults by proxy the moment it becomes even close to being about something they don't like. I've had right wing people talk to me about deep state stuff and it starts off with "I know you think I'm crazy but this is what I believe..." and when I question it they get excited that I'm interested and tell me more like the more they say the more I'll believe. And when I questioned the Steele Dossier's accuracy I had someone switch their tone of voice to the way you talk to a very small child and question my mental fitness and this was just a mild like "I don't know it seems kinda far-fetched..." And that's from people I know, people I don't will just respond with things like "oh so you're a shitty person" or more likely use the originator of a claim or opinion or the biggest name espousing it and then call them a piece of shit so they don't have to call you one. I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy and cordial to talk about a discussion where I was in full agreement with them, but I don't know that I'd consider that a discussion.
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28d ago
Allen's accusers are celebrities themselves, I think it makes a massive difference given that the investigators dismissed them at the time. If Mia Farrow was nobody and her kids were nobodies too this would be a weird fact that nobody knows about Woody Allen. Though, I think his marriage makes it not just easy to believe it about him it's weird enough that he basically has to prove a negative to make himself look right. I mean, he was investigated twice for months at a time and both investigations concluded that abuse did not take place. Maybe he's good at hiding it but it's always seemed to me to be that Mia found out Woody was sleeping with Soon-Yi and either invented the abuse in her head or just lied about it for revenge. But I don't really know, that's just the reading I get from the wikipedia article about it.
Either way, Woody's a joke because he married his daughter. That's the biggest reason he's a soft target, and the reason, even if he didn't do what he's accused of, most people will believe it regardless of if there's even evidence presented.
So, there was a recent movie that came out on Paramount plus called Honor Society. It's about a girl in high school who is obsessed with academic success to the point where she is plotting to derail the academic careers of her competition. She manipulates several people into getting academically distracted and then her real competition is a schlubby nerd that she decides to distract/derail by getting him to fall in love with her because he only cares about schoolwork, has no friends and is ugly. So, basic plot so far (apart from the ugly). She actually falls for him instead, who could see it coming. But she basically gives away the special recommendation letter they were all struggling to get to him because he's apparently poor.
But it's all revealed to be a lie. He was manipulating her in the same way. I'm not sure how effective this would be since he's the "ugly one" from the Stranger Things cast but okay. So, he pretended to be poor and fall for her so he could get that recommendation by getting her to give it to him.
Of course, that climactic reveal is shown to not matter once she stops moping for the allotted five minutes because she blackmails the guy writing the recommendation to give it to a more deserving minority because that counselor tried to proposition her earlier. Everyone forgives her because even though she reveals what she did she did it in a nice way by distracting them with love or a hobby they liked or something. Everyone lives happily ever after. Except the schlubby nerd boy who had no real emotions except wanting to personally succeed and has to stew in his failure and friendlessness at the end. It could basically be lifted out of any high school romcom from the past thirty years except there is no lesson for the villain, there's no redemption, there's nothing.
So, no, I don't think the movie was trying to make a point but I do think it's reflective of the times. The secret villain is a friendless, rich, and ugly nerd. And there is no path for redemption. They don't have the moment where it's revealed he cared back or at all. There's not even a moment of consideration by the main character that it was possible that he could have cared at all but was hiding it. They don't show him to have a tragic backstory or even being generally a bad person overall. He was just this weird schlubby benignly evil "genius" that was capable of manipulating literally everyone around them into doing what he wanted through means that after the fact seem inexplicable.
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