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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.

Can't see any problem to follow the advice of Prof. Preobrazhensky from the old soviet movie "Heart of a dog":

—And never read soviet newspapers before dinner.

—Hmm… But there are no other newspapers.

—In that case don’t read any at all.

Worth noting that there isn't a contradiction here. It's actually a 1988 movie, thus deep into Perestroika, based on a 1925 book (I recommend it, Bulgakov is good in general, though M&M is overhyped by our equivalent of «art hoes»).

Its publication was initially prohibited in the Soviet Union, but it circulated in samizdat until it was officially released in the country in 1987. It was almost immediately adapted into a movie, which was aired in late 1988 on First Channel of Soviet Television, gained almost universal acclaim and attracted many readers to the original Bulgakov text.

Also worth noting i guess that the movie's main theme is heavily anti-blankslate. Which is kind of funny in the modern day as it gives a certain social layer of russians a cognitive dissonance. They tend to like the movie previously as it's heavily anti-soviet, but now it turns out it goes against certain modern western shibboleth's. A perfect redpilled movie from soviets, huh..

It all becomes even more funny when you learn that the director of the movie, Vladimir Bortko, is a hardcore member of a Russian Communist party for the last 15 years. Speaking about only american politics being complicated.