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Into the Spider-Verse was my favorite movie of 2018. I only found out this year that one of the film's directors was someone whose values are antithetical to everything I believe and as harmful to me as ideas can be. I knew he wasn't returning to direct the sequel, so I thought that meant I could go see it without feeling shame, but I just found out (again, surprisingly late) that he's an Executive Producer on it. This likely means he gets a share of the box office gross, though I don't know how big that share would be.
This presents an e̶t̶h̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ psychological dilemma that feels as though it's ethical for me. This is one of the few movies where seeing it in the theater is very important to me, and I do feel that I'd be missing out by seeing it on my tiny laptop screen several months after release. However, I would feel emasculated if I gave this person any more money than I already have. Is there a way I can have my cake and eat it too here?
I know it's unlikely that anyone here has a better idea "than stop giving a crap about what filmmakers believe," but I'm asking anyway, just in case. There's nobody else on the internet where I'd expect people to be sympathetic to my problem in a way that's more than superficial. Left-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "you should only care about political violence and life ruination if you're the kind of person we'd be using it against," and right-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "these tactics are actually good and we should use them against left-wingers when we're in power" after making fun of me for liking children's movies. I do not mean to imply all left-dominated or right-dominated spaces are like the ones I describe, but that's my expectation of them based on experience, and it's always demoralizing to get those kinds of reactions, so I don't want to go seek them out.
Right now a lot of leftists are hectoring people for buying or playing Hogwarts Legacy. Do you think they have a legitimate argument, just the wrong target, or do you think they are being silly for demanding ideological and ethical purity in their media consumption?
Realistically, if you are not on the left, most of your media is going to be produced by people who probably hold views you dislike. (Also, realistically, this true for everyone, just moreso for people who aren't leftists.) The only difference here is this guy has been more open and in-your-face about it than most. There are probably lots of people with credits and revenue-sharing on Into the Spider-Verse who are just as left as him or more so.
How much energy do you want to invest in trying not to give money to your political enemies?
I understand why people are bothered by JK Rowling's political views, but from my perspective, she is taking action that we consider welcome in a liberal society: speaking her mind and lobbying for politicians/policies she wants. I would be bothered if Peter Ramsey was donating money to people who want to create hate speech laws in the United States, but I wouldn't be nearly as upset as I am by his vocal support of mob violence and doxing. Mob violence is literally illegal for reasons that you'd think would be obvious to an educated black man. Doxing isn't illegal, but life ruination in response to legally protected speech still comes off as a violation of liberal principles.
I can easily say that I object to Ramsey's encouragement of political violence on meta-level grounds, but when I object to his support of doxing, am I objecting on a meta-level principle, or an object-level one? I don't know. What I do know is that I'm not objecting to boycotting as a strategy, I just don't think Rowling warrants it to the extent that someone who is opposed to liberalism and supportive of criminal violence does. Maybe she still does warrant it. But definitely not as much.
In response to the second paragraph, I mean, it's normal for people to support some kinds of violence in their heart of hearts, but we used to have strong norms against it that prevented people from saying it out loud. The idea that people can say it out loud with no repercussion frightens me.
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Actually, neither a lot of leftists nor a lot of transgender people are boycotting Hogwarts Legacy. A small cabal of extremely online transgender activists (is this redundant?) are applying pressure against the game. You might think they failed in their stated goal, but the stated goals of activists are always exaggerated in order to arrive at a better middle ground.
So what did these extremely limited in number activists accomplish? They made “you can support the game and not support Rowling” a popular opinion online, which presupposes the immorality of Rowling, reminding the public of her ill repute. They spooked the game developers, who may have specifically added a transgender character at an important location in the game. The game developers may have also amplified the diversity as a defense against activism against them.
So, for such a small sliver of the population — perhaps 0.1% engaging in anything approximating a boycott — they actually had some influence on popular sentiment.
I disagree. I think by making this their hill to die on and then no one caring they have lost influence on future commercial endeavors the trans movement would disapprove of. Future producers will be a lot less easily frightened by activist underlings when they cannot point to this having tanked the biggest game of the year.
If it surrendered and wasn't tanked, that's not evidence against "failing to surrender gets you tanked".
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I don't look at these things in this light. I don't think it's about political enemies at all. I think it's more so, don't spent time/energy/money on people who think that you're a problem that needs to be solved. It's not because you're rewarding them/encouraging them/providing them ammo. It's because eventually they're going to pull the rug out from under you.
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The fact that the trans activists adopt a tactic is very good evidence that it's effective. I have plenty of criticisms of trans activists but ineffectiveness definitely isn't one of them. I also don't think it's an immoral tactic to use: it isn't fraudulent, violent or rude and nobody should be obligated to buy from anyone they don't want to.
I'll usually try to switch from businesses with more extreme leftist positions to less extreme versions when reasonably practical. For example, I switched from Amazon Prime to Walmart Plus and I switched from Gillette razors an electric razor when they ran their "men are trash" commercial a few years ago. I don't think my side has the numbers to make this an extremely effective tactic but it is something at least. I certainly wouldn't blame anyone who just wants to grill for seeing the Marvel movie though.
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Money is investment; attention is energy. Framing avoidance of an entirely opt-in loss of resources (and indeed, their transfer to your enemies) as an expenditure unto itself is nonsensical and confused.
So that's a yes to trans activists being tactically correct if directionally wrong?
I mean, I am not one for saying "No ethical consumption under capitalism" because I am not anti-capitalist, but it's basically true that you cannot completely avoid giving money to people and institutions and causes you oppose. Where each person is going to set their line is different, but personally "I won't consume any media made by people I hate" isn't a compelling proposition to me.
I honestly don't understand your argument.
Yes, trans activists are correct, I'd say strategically more than tactically; cancellations and boycotts work. They haven't succeeded with Rowling yet, but she's a uniquely hard target. In what sense are they directionally wrong? I do not care to lecture my enemies on morals and goals, it's a given that we disagree. In any case, the premise of voting with your wallet and denying the other party your capital is of course sound – and morally legitimate.
Strawman (or what's the term). Only God is perfect and complete; you totally can make sure of preferentially supporting people you want to support or at least not giving advantage to the opposite group. The point is not purity spiralling in the manner of religious hardliners with absolute dietary taboos, but changing the battleground in ways you deem preferable. Paying Ramsay is not the same as paying Mel Gibson, although the latter is presumably still a node in the same Hollywood economy. Additionally, boycott sends the message that certain attitudes can be financially detrimental; even if parties which are directly at war are fanatical and don't care much about profits, they depend on many mercantile agents.
Or not. I remember a few years ago some in CWR felt that movie industry might «go woke go broke». Well, this never happened, people keep consuming this trash. Wokes are more principled than conservatives – who, ultimately, would rather pay for their own demonization than be deprived of the experience of watching Marvel kung-fu on a big screen.
That's the thing though, it's not a given you disagree any more man, that sentence is couched in an entire paragraph of agreeing. Do we have to become them to beat them? Is there really no path to the future which leverages the flourishing of human thought instead of its suppression? If that's the only choice we get - whose jackboot is crushing whose throat? - then fuck the whole enterprise.
You can call it immature, I am definitely immature, but if this is the world we live in, if left vs right is highest order and there is no path to compromise, no path of embracing our better nature instead of our worst, then I don't care what you think. I don't care what anyone thinks, I AM, and I hate.
I don't really have a choice if this is the way of the world. I point blank refuse to be a part of any enterprise which judges my loyalty based on my entertainment preferences. I will be deemed a traitor eventually, because I won't stop to appease anyone. Instead I will reaasume my old labourer nickname - passionfingers - and I will fuck everything I touch until it all falls apart.
I just don't think it's possible to draw a line and go no further. Take this place for example. How is it ok to chat with the enemy - sometimes very jovially even - if it's not ok to consume their media? You say the point is not purity spiralling, but have you ever actually seen anyone perform a purity quarter turn? They're called purity spirals because the spiralling is inevitable once you start. The start is the same as the end, it is someone losing their patience and crossing the line - by starting it you endorse the race to the bottom or revel in hypocrisy.
That said, one last caveat - nobody should be paying for media ever unless it is specifically to thank the creator for a job well done after the fact, or if it's something you have watched being independently built from the ground up. If it was made by a studio or network in the last ten years, it has been designed maliciously to extract value from you with product placement, advertising, propaganda and so on, and paying for that is for simps. Even if you want to see it on the big screen there are a dozen ways to do it without paying for it.
Yes, fine, I agree with them. Theirs are beliefs befitting actors, not consumerist NPCs who fancy themselves connoisseurs of «entertainment».
You insist on missing the point. Purity is entirely irrelevant. Intent is what matters. The Author isn't dead except when s/he physically is; this postmodernist theory about freedom of interpretation is not an excuse to delude oneself about content, but a utilitarian justification for marauding on the culture war battlefront. It matters who holds the picked up weapon.
You and @Conservautism here both seem to underestimate our inferential distance. From here it looks like I'm not «more right-wing» than him nor less principled and appreciative of Enlightenment values than you. It's just that I am taking essences of things more seriously, and on account of this I have become less enamored with their forms and inessential parts.
In this case, the essence is Ramsay's racial grievance and hatred (the Antifa thing is an isolated puny consequence), and political intention implemented as an indoctrination project delivered via flashy movies about Spiderman; the content that you consume is entirely vacuous in the absence of that core. It's as if you had asked me to marvel as the elegant shape and immaculate engineering of a syringe used to spread
AIDSHIV. I will take a gander – sure, industrial design is cool. But I can't get its purpose out of my mind, and unlike Cypher from Matrix, am unwilling to; consequently, this purpose takes almost all the aesthetic charm out of the thing by providing a more authentic frame for perceiving it. Meanwhile, your willingness to suspend the awareness of its intent just to enjoy the shine of its edges a bit longer strikes me as infantile. Like a child playing with a firearm. Moreover: I'd have at least respected it if you were simply more magnanimous and capable of decoupling; but you limit yourself to appreciating the thing outside of its proper context. You only agree to notice noises, shapes, color blots, literally taken plots – the surface, the most trivial, childish part of the art.To be clear: not all art is political simply because artists have political beliefs. For example, Demoscene is, far as I can tell, overwhelmingly about showing off one's technical chops, good taste and intelligence (because compression is comprehension). A great deal of music is apolitical. Even the most fanatical woke artist can occasionally succumb to the pure childlike creative impulse. And one's politics may have nothing to do with hot topics of the culture war – whatever Rowling «wanted to say with» Harry Potter, it had zero relation to transgenderism; Brandon Sanderson's Mormonism is not substantially informing the magic of his novels. It can be argued that their enemies are trespassing some norm by vilifying their «civilian» work. Okay.
But those AAA movies with conspicuously cast racial archetypes are means to a political end, made by people at least as serious as myself; thus, they are political art. Their features that captivate you are as utilitarian as Ozy's eloquence when she implores of people to not prioritise their kin over other tribes. Just weapons. Or while we're at it: Ozy argues that Serrano's Piss Christ is aesthetically beautiful. But, even if true, that's the incidental part; the essential part is normalizing pissing on Christianity. Any intricate shape in a jar of orange liquid would be equally pretty; the specific choice of a theme tells us that beauty was not the point, and focusing on appearances is missing the point. Likewise with narratives, character casts and moral lessons of high production value Western slop that you defend as your «preference»: the point of that content is who-whom, whose boot goes on whose face. You are lashing out at me, but I'm a mere messenger.
I know that weapons have a way of being beautiful (for that matter, boots too). You see, I've always liked MLRS launchers, this staple of Soviet war doctrine, and Soviet war songs e.g. 1 2 – not favorites, just germane to the topic. One of the most iconic weapons of the war is BM series MLRS nicknamed Katyusha, associated with the war song of the same name; recently I've heard it played by a dude with an accordion on the street and literally teared up. My love for MLRS is not out of any appreciation for their effect on intended targets, mind you; it's just such glorious fireworks, and such elevating music. People who don't speak Russian like it all too sometimes – just check the comments.
But consider such lyrics:
How do you figure this Russian song would sound in Ukraine today? Say, in Mariupol? And yet this kind of outcome is the song's intent, the cultivation of unthinking rah-rah patriotism and obedience to the Great Leader. I may keep listening to it - but I won't pay for the ticket to Red Army Choir's concert, if a chance comes by.
Still. It'd be less self-abasing of me to pay for a Red Army concert than it is for white Americans to pay for their black supremacist Hollywood stuff. I am of the same tribe as those Russians, and they're calling to commit murder in my name too – in a certain twisted and misguided sense; in the name of the glory of the Empire that stubbornly sings in my blood. Leonard Cohen sang: «I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons» (obligatory Scott) and I see where he was coming from.
But most people who bought Cohen's tickets were hypnotized by the beauty of the other party's weapons, which is a far lower mark. And people who go to Spiderverse to, essentially, finance Ramsey's team that intends to do what it preaches are not more enlightened than myself. They are just in denial about the nature of what they consume.
...A song I like even more is this. I'd rather it were about Whites, not Reds. Admittedly ROA songs are, artistically, not as cool.
Hate hate to be that guy.
But AIDS is the condition one develops if the HIV virus (yes I know virus twice) is left untreated for long enough. So you would be spreading HIV with a needle not AIDS.
It's also not that easy to spread HIV with a needle, it dies within minutes exposed to air.
I admire the technicality but are you sure it is ungrammatical to say that one is spreading the condition? After all, infections per se, with modern treatment, are almost meaningless if the intent is to debilitate people.
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Pls differentiate between the glory of having your (probably vicariously) Empire step on the faces of lesser surrounding nations as a terminal goal, and the aesthetics of deadly weapons, high morale, all that.
Why would I? The Warhammer-like (actually clearly superior) aesthetics is just sugarcoating for the terminal goal of the Empire, and a yet another vehicle for justifying it in minds of the target audience. I'm the target audience for Russian imperialism; Russian imperial aesthetics is the sugar coat, the vehicle, the high-grade anaesthetic for the doctrine that sends my less lucky brethren into the trenches near Bachmut, or wherever the frontline of this hell currently is. Sure, they're also pushed by conformism and material interests, but every marginal point of persuasion and dissuasion of dissidents counts. Ramsay aesthetics, likewise, send people into Antifa. A lesser evil, perhaps, but in a higher-impact locale.
My argument is that once you learn to recognize patterns of thought of authors and terminal goals of essentially political art, you lose almost all interest in «compartmentalized» and «differentiated» readings and justification of their topics on grounds of «free speech» or «artistic expression» or «preference» or whatever, because you see all those grounds and frames as being ultimately false and or myopic and or beside the point; you start relating to the given piece of political art on the basis of its instrumental essence as informed by terminal goals of its manufactures, not patterns of its sugar coat.
I can still appreciate the technique and the quale evoked conditional on abstracting away from the essence of the art piece, if I so choose and no part is too intrinsically grating (like I imagine Piss Christ is for devout Christians). That's easy enough. But that's a more or less academic discussion, not in any way a valid justification for material support of authors and distributors.
@Fruck fair enough that this was not mainly addressed to you. But. I suggest you work on your self-esteem. Many people, not you alone (e.g. the obviously smart @f3zinker) say I'm hard to parse, which does not make me smart at all. The apparent obscurantism is on me, not on them. I try to be as clear as the pragmatics of my message allows, but seems like that's not good enough. If you don't see how my response relates to your defense of preferred entertainment, I shall do better to explain myself whenever I get back to this issue. Some day when I'm less drunk.
Refusing to mistake the volume of thing for its surface and acting accordingly is not censorship.
There are hundreds of lifetimes worth of prime knowledge that Michael Bay is obscuring from you. I suggest (only half in jest) that you try some Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko – I've listened to his «The River Sparkles» (1892) today and it was good and enlightening. You've grown up in an environment where knowledge is dwarfed by content that apes the shape of living words and human lives as grotesquely and adequately in the low-order technical sense as Stable Diffusion apes human imagery. Same for me.
We can and indeed must do better than that, if those values you profess are genuine.
That's a good start. I am saying that there is a genuine reason not to give him any. It's not just that he's a tribal political enemy. It's that he is a political artist – which is very different from an artist who also has opinions about politics. Understanding this difference is useful strategically. But if you don't care about winning, how about that: it's crucial to developing taste for art as such.
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Well that stings. Did you read my top level reply to the op?
My estimate of our inferential gap is based on four things - you are here on the motte, you are very smart, you appreciate the truth, and you are Russian. Thats pretty much the extent of what I know about you. And I'm still missing your point I think, because this post almost reads like it was meant for someone else. I'm not doing it on purpose, I am just not smart enough to get it I'm afraid. Maybe I should try to explain my perspective better?
In my perspective, purity spirals are sequential games of moral one-upmanship. People rarely try to start them, they start on their own when someone feels the need to justify actions they took or plan to take, usually actions they feel guilty about but deem necessary. We are trapped in one now. I wish we weren't, I really tried to avoid it. I tried to frame my post as worried and scared but friendly, because that's how I felt, and I am dismayed it read to you like lashing out.
My preference is not for marvel movies, or black supremacist Hollywood stuff, or shiny edges - I don't know where in my post you got any of that. My preference is no censorship. I appreciate media because I believe stories have power. Every story is the amalgam of the feelings, thoughts and ideas the author wanted to promote, and all can provide value, even if it's as a warning or a cautionary tale. I will consume anything for its story - I will consume a Michael Bay film, a silent film, a comic, a song, an eroge, an advertisement. I will pay for it afterwards if I believe it was worth it. To butcher the old saying, to me knowledge is a virtue, and censorship is a sin.
You appear to be making your way down the road to censorship, and I think you should stop, because I like you. I think you were angry when you wrote that and I think you are angry at the moment, and while I don't know why, I am sure your anger is justified. But I also know that most smart people regret acting in anger when they have cooled down, and I know all too well how hard it can be to remember that while you are angry. Perhaps that is the inferential distance, perhaps I think that because I have the privilege. But when I read the second half of your post the distance appears diminished.
After all, you like big guns and may keep listening to kick ass war music but won't buy a ticket. I have paid to go to the cinema twice in my life. It wasn't to a spider man either time, but on one of those occasions it was to a bat man. Aside from intellect, what makes us different? I never said "give this Ramsey dude all your money, what's the worst that could happen?" I said if the right is going to start cancelling people and censoring shit too then fuck this planet.
what happens if the right is, as demonstrable so far, unable to cancel anyone not on the right?
they lose even more than they already have and the other side which has no qualms with censorship will censor more
the reason people agree to détentes like anti-censorship is because they could lose or at the very least suffer significant harm
if they don't think they could lose, they're going to censor or exercise power in some other way
if the right explains to their opposition that they're harmless because they just so darn-tooting believe in principles or whatever, then their opposition takes away that they're harmless and they march forward
"fuck this planet" is an understandable emotion, but it also means you lose and the people you don't like shape the world in their image
we cannot escape this, no one is coming to save us
until one side sheds the mindvirus which renders them harmless, then the other side has no reason to stop and they won't
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The defense of beauty and truth is in and of itself superior to the defense of depravity. Your ?enemies? want a world in which the normalized castration of children is celebrated as the highest virtue. They are not even content with waiting for 'trans' children to reveal themselves to a doctor, but actively work to fill every medium with messages telling subsceptible girls that they might actually be boys. You could crucify every single one of them above an iq cutoff of 115; and it would still not be morally comparable.
I really don't get how people seemingly on the other side can find themselves uncertain about these things. I'm left to conclude that they must be missing some seemingly basic human experiences, like color blind people vs the rest of us*, except for beauty. I look at red and green and see this infinite chasm; you look at it and see slightly different shades of gray (or whatever), while the woke say they are the same or invert them. You are honest so you can point out the tiny difference between shades and I imagine you must be like me; but we might as well be of different species.
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My argument is that boycotting things is stupid except in rare cases where your boycott actually has the leverage to pressure the people you are trying to influence. Otherwise, it's just performative. It might make you feel better to say you're not giving money to people you hate, but it has no other impact.
From whence do the rare effective boycotts emerge? Do the ineffective boycotts help build support for the effective ones, for example by "raising awareness"? Progressives have long believed so, proceeded from that belief, and have achieved overwhelming success. What is your evidence to argue that they are wrong?
Class consciousness is useful in an environment of class conflict. Remove the class conflict, and it can be safely left on the shelf. Fail to remove the class consciousness, and it will inevitably proliferate.
The canonical example, the civil rights bus boycotts, worked because the boycotters, being a substantial portion of the bus company's customers, had enough leverage to cause them financial harm.
How many examples do you know of successful boycotts arising from moral outrage?
Arguably the end of apartheid was in part brought about by social pressure on South Africa, but I don't know the history well enough to say that's definitely the case.
Most boycotts, it seems to me, especially the modern form which consists of digital culture warriors screaming about things you shouldn't buy, attract some media attention depending on the issues, but rarely actually have much impact. Conservatives love to say "Go woke, go broke," but where is there any evidence of this? I think this is as much copium as the trans activists I've seen insisting that Hogwarts Legacy is a terrible, low-rated, buggy game, even as it breaks sales records.
Sure, but why did they choose to do so? Was it an idea they developed entirely independently, or was it the end-point of a long influence campaign?
Are we counting only boycotts that actually have to be carried out and materially impact the target's finances? I can't think of a single one offhand. On the other hand, examples abound of shows, games, books, films, shows, websites, podcasts, etc cancelled or censored on threat of bad publicity, either directly or by threatening their partners or providers. These seem to me to be successful boycotts, no?
What evidence there was came from before the 2014-2015 inflection point. Since then, no, I think "get woke go broke" is entirely cope. It's rather the opposite these days, it seems to me. And of course, Hogwarts Legacy is making a mint, it's true! And I have tasks stacking up about art I need to rework for my company's game, because my boss worried that it's too close to the criticisms being leveled at Hogwarts.
The Woke don't always get their way, but they get their way much, much more often than anybody else does. One misses 100% of the shots one does not take; they certainly miss a lot, but given the sheer volume of the shots they fire, they can afford to. They are, observably, winning. That win doesn't look like them tanking a flagpole triple-A harry potter vidya release. It looks like them decisively shaping the entire ecosystem that actually creates such games, the artists, the coders, the designers, the press, and the public as well, such that things that get made conform more and more to their preferences, while things that don't conform tend, on average, to perform less well or to not get made at all regardless of how well they'd perform. And no matter the result of any individual struggle, their faction gains strength and influence for the next fight, always and without fail.
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Strong prexistent organization (like, for example, pre V2 Catholic Church), and dedication to the cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Legion_of_Decency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_condemned_by_the_Legion_of_Decency
How many people today would sign such pledge and take it seriously? Few, and if you replaced "indecent and immoral" with "anti-white" even fewer.
Do people sign pledges like that for anti-racism? It seems to me the modern equivalents are somewhat more informal and reliant on creating a vibe, a "room" for people to "read".
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I'd flip this to "directionally correct, tactically wrong," especially given the whole "website for targeting streamers playing the stupid wizard game" thing.
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Most people who give a shit set their line as ‘whatever is particularly in my face about it’. A point I try to explain to the people boycotting Girl Scout cookies over ties to planned parenthood every year.
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