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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38170 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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[removed, overly emotional]

I think Trump has a point, that arguing the specifics seems irrelevant to me, when the larger issue is unfair treatment. Unfortunately, it's probably impossible to persuade anyone of this to people who consider Trump to be a singular threat.

I mean, Re: Hillary, destruction of evidence is a pretty automatic charge. Can you imagine Trump not being charged with it? Not to mention the 1001 charges (also apparently seen here, according to reporting), and the OIG report quoted FBI agents who were dumbstruck as to why such charges weren't brought against folks, because they were dead-to-rights. But nope; that stuff is reserved for the likes of Flynn and Trump... the folks who need to be removed.

Possibly more interesting for actual culture war analysis is just observing the public narrative shift. Back in the days before it was fashionable to prosecute Trump and anyone related to Trump, when the possible charges were against Hillary, it was a grave and serious thing to prosecute politicians, especially when they had possible elections in front of them. "That's the stuff of banana republics!" they said. "That's, like, what Putin does!" they said. It was "deeply dangerous for democracy". Whether or not our democracy was legitimate was supposedly hanging in the balance, depending upon whether their preferred candidate was charged with a crime. You don't hear that anymore. For good or for bad, fair and just or unfair and unjust, it's a change in the narrative. Whether this change can be easily flip-flopped on in another 5-10 years... or whether it will be persistent, possibly leading to endless tit-for-tat, I don't know.

Back in the days before it was fashionable to prosecute Trump and anyone related to Trump, when the possible charges were against Hillary, it was a grave and serious thing to prosecute politicians, especially when they had possible elections in front of them. "That's the stuff of banana republics!" they said. "That's, like, what Putin does!" they said. It was "deeply dangerous for democracy". Whether or not our democracy was legitimate was supposedly hanging in the balance, depending upon whether their preferred candidate was charged with a crime. You don't hear that anymore.

Do you have any theories for why this changed? Were there any chants at political rallies or something agitating for this shift in norms?

Ah yes, the gotcha. It's the right's fault, so your observation is invalid. Sorry, but I can acknowledge that the right certainly played a significant part in chipping away at the norm... while also acknowledging that the observation remains true. In the before days, one could at least sit back and say, "There are some crazy righties chanting 'lock her up', but we're a serious democracy which doesn't prosecute politicians on questionable charges, and there are serious people who will ensure that we stay that way." I am on record as one of those people, prior to Trump's election, prior to the reality become clear to everyone that he didn't try to force through some charges. (As an aside, has there ever been a single piece of reporting along the lines of, "We're giving an exclusive account of the breathtaking meetings in which Donald Trump applied consistent pressure to produce a prosecution, but was rebuffed by so-and-so"?)

At the same time, one can also sit back and say, "It turns out that many people who said they were serious people who would ensure that we're a serious democracy which doesn't prosecute politicians on questionable charges... are now cheering on efforts to prosecute politicians on questionable charges, so long as they're the politicians they don't like."

I agree that the public statements are a problem, even in the absence of substantial actions. One possible world we could have ended up in is a world where dems chant "lock him up" at rallies, but then dem politicians still refrain from pushing questionable charges once in office. It might have been a weird state of affairs; maybe the chants would continue to be tit-for-tat, but serious people would ensure that reality stays serious alongside it. In that world, do the chants eventually go away? Do they persist, like how in many other domains, the public chants and pushes both sides' politicians for things that those politicians continually reject actually doing? Man, I don't know. I wouldn't like it, but I don't know how it would go. Regardless, we are no longer in that possible timeline. We're in a different one.

I'm not denying your observation, I actually think it's probably true though there are too many variables to control for conclusively. I also agree with you that at least some of the current charges against Trump are questionable (Stormy Daniels hush-money payment is the prime example).

Regardless, I was curious about the progeny of this apparent shift that you describe. Would it be fair to characterize the "lock her up" and "because you'd be in jail" comments as just bloviating on Trump's part? The fact that there's no evidence that Trump tried to push for any prosecution against Clinton while he was in office supports this. Even so, the fact this bloviating was such irresistible ambrosia for his base indicates it was tapping on some deep-seated desire among at least some Americans to prosecute and jail politicians from the other side. Would you agree?

At that point it's an interesting question how much we can blame this on a sort of "lab leak", a meme that went unintentionally viral.

I already said that the right started the chanting. Please speak plainly.

Sorry, I don't know which part is confusing. You described a shift in norms about how seriously the prospect of prosecuting politicians used to be treated. I was asking about what you thought contributed to this shift, including asking what you thought the popularity of the "lock her up" chant indicated (e.g. did it contribute towards causing the shift or is it the symptom of something else? etc). Let me know if that makes sense.

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Even so, the fact this bloviating was such irresistible ambrosia for his base indicates it was tapping on some deep-seated desire among at least some Americans to prosecute and jail politicians from the other side. Would you agree?

Obviously. Also it's fun to say "Lock Her Up!" It's a good chant. But Trump did nothing to actually lock her up, so none of that justifies actual legal moves against Trump by Democrats in power.

none of that justifies actual legal moves against Trump by Democrats in power.

Sure, I never said otherwise. Assuming the shift @ControlsFreak describes is real, I was curious about how it came about. Would you agree that the frequency of the chant contributed something to moving the overton window?

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Why the assumption it was driven bottom up? The most obvious explanation seems to be that the establishment wanted to protect Clinton and now wants to go after Trump.

I'm not assuming anything, I'm asking about where this apparent shift came from.

But why suggest chants at rallies as the mechanism for change, or that the change in messaging implies a shift in values rather being an expression of current objectives?

That was one theory but I'm open to others, hence the question. Just because I don't mention other explanations doesn't mean I've already dismissed them as possibilities.

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I mean, it would lead to endless tit-for-tat only as long as supplies of crimes last. I mean, you could make it last a long time by changing laws, but you'd have to put a bunch of additional work in. Absent a new wave of ex-post-facto laws or blatant procedure prosecutions, honestly my first reaction is "yes, good." Let justice reign, etc.

The supply of crimes will never run out; there's enough laws you can find a crime for anyone who does anything significant if you're willing to stretch them enough. The idea is there won't be endless tit-for-tat because the current people doing the prosecution expect to remain in power permanently partially as a result of doing so. Full banana republic style.

Nah, we've got plenty of laws. Especially when people are pushing ideas like, "Campaign finance laws make it illegal to talk to foreigners," trying to resurrect the Logan Act, etc.

blatant procedure prosecutions

Can I introduce you to an indictment from New York County?

Through the last eight years or so, with the left-leaning friends I have in the real world, I've had discussions about this possible politician crime or that possible politician crime. There have been many such times where they were wound up about how you could totally plausibly read the law in a way that totally plausibly gets at so-and-so. Often, I just poke at the implications of their broad reading, especially given the reality of political life. When they start to see just how broadly this shit could be construed if we walk down that path, then I drop, "Is this something that you really value enough to 'let justice reign' equally on both sides' politicians?" And some issues might actually be. Most of them have not been. Most of the time, they realize, "Actually, that would probably have some pretty bad effects and barely bring any real benefit to society."

But Clinton was a much better strategist around it, and did not make absolutely insane decisions such as deceiving her lawyers about her conduct so as to rope-a-dope them into lying to the government in an easily proven manner.

Clinton famously destroyed evidence and lied about it. Any of her aides who could have been charged were turned into witnesses and given immunity for their participation. Besides: she wasn't just taking some documents home, she was running a private email server totally outside od normal process.

Yeah, I really have to second this. Even presuming Clinton's lawyers and strategy was better then Trump -- not exactly a given! -- that's still damning with incredibly faint praise. It's the sort of thing where a Trump defender could claim 'hey, he wasn't caught literally stuffing them into his pants'.

There's a pathway where everyone decides that, contra 2016's handwringing, "lock X up" is now acceptable discourse and the current President's arguments in favor of rolling back to normalcy don't cover this. But it's not like jeopardy attached for Clinton, or has attached yet for Biden or Bush or countless other oopsies.

But she was an effective legal operator who made it very difficult to pin a charge on her.

IIRC, she directly ordered her staff to set up an illegal server and piped large amounts of classified material through it, and then ordered her staff to destroy evidence of this when called on it. No charges were pinned on her because the FBI refused to attempt to pin any, not because of her legal operations or that of her lawyers. The FBI offered her staffers full immunity, not for incriminating evidence of their superiors, but simply for their statements. What part of that involves any particular skill on the part of Hillary or her lawyers?

You are presuming that she's more effective because she got away with it, and then retroactively identifying things she did as the critical maneuvers. But in fact, it does not seem to me that such maneuvers would have been effective if the FBI had wanted to actually make a case, and if it didn't want to make a case then failing to perform these maneuvers would not have changed the outcome either.

The basic situation here is that we can see what she did, and we can see what the FBI did, and what the FBI did was going to prevent an investigation no matter which action she took.

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I'm not really make the moral argument, here; I'm open to the possibility that Clinton's behavior was less morally bad, though I'm not convinced of it.

My objection is that a lot of the behavior in Clinton's case absolutely was the sort of thing that looked like an absolute clownshow. Not having the number of boxes of documents that they originally claimed is one of the more overt, but it wasn't exactly a one-off. Clinton had asked people to strip classification markings off messages and then send them on unsecured networks, responded to requests to turn over all her e-mails by giving tiny subsections and deleting others.

Some of that's not Clinton confessing to all the elements of a criminal offense on tape -- the Platte River Networks employee who told the FBI that he or she knew of a preservation order from the Benghazi Committee, and knew that it applied to materials he or she was deleting, at the time he or she actually did the deleting; Cheryl Mills testified to all the elements for an obstruction of justice charge if anyone no one considered that as relevant then -- but they weren't prosecuted, either.

That's not exactly unique, either. I've given my rants about absolute abominations of behavior across the political aisles that's been overlooked out of misplaced les majestie, but it's actually pretty common for them to be embarrassingly tedious in addition to also often being grotesque.

There's perhaps a fair argument that Trump is more clownshow, perhaps more clownshow than anyone else ever has been. I'm actually pretty willing to support that, with my only remaining reservations because I'm familiar with some very stupid political scandals. And this argument continues that either Clinton was above some arbitrary threshold of embarrassingly bad cover, or hit the magic level of distribution of clownshoery that no one person could be proven guilty or even indicted, even by standards that allow prosecutors to suborn perjury or indict a ham sandwich.

But then this argument further needs some reason to respect that particular distinction. And it's a pretty narrow band to dial in on.

So Clinton shouldn’t have been indicted/gone to jail because her lawyers were better and/or she trusted them more? These sorts of arguments, especially coming from one of our resident lawyers, do nothing to make the right’s opinions of our legal system any better.

Or no claims were brought because she was a friend of the regime and later it would be impolitic. You are assuming the conclusion.

Comey did not want to charge her, only reopened the case when operatives not under his control found additional evidence, and only gave an address about after whistleblowers had already informed Chuck Grassley and Senate Republicans about what had happened. If Comey had wanted to prosecute, he wouldn't have given immunity plea deals to all of Clinton's aides.

Clinton wasn't prosecuted because if they'd brought a case they would have lost. Comey wanted to charge her. He just couldn't put a case together because her lawyers were good at their jobs.

Well, that and no DC jury would ever convict her on those charges no matter what the evidence.

And Comey wanting to charge seems...speculative at best. If so, why not put it to a jury, even if the odds were low? Why not invent a novel legal theory that could be tried out? No, I think he thought it wouldn't be prudent, would make too many powerful enemies, would hurt the Agency. I don't believe the law had much, if anything, to do with it.

They are bad arguments as a matter of law. Huadpe is saying that if you commit additional crimes, then you are more likely to walk. In theory that is true if the government doesn’t find out you destroyed evidence. If they do, then you are more likely to go to jail and for longer.

Classified info was found on Anthony Weiner's laptop while he was sexting minors, Comey didn't indict. I don't get your point exactly, is it that Trump's handling was worse than Clinton's because he was more antagonistic to an investigation antagonistic to him? It's not hard to put a case together against Clinton, we all know the details, and they could have always made it up. (Like they did when they wanted to investigate Trump's 2016 campaign, indict his officials, open a special council on Russian collusion that didnt exist, jail his supporters, and on and on.)

God, I am so fucking tired of this argument. This isn't a sports game, you don't get a free throw because the other guy fouled you. Yeah, Clinton should be behind bars but the fact that she's walking free doesn't make Trump immune to prosecution. The fact that otherwise intelligent people are acting like it should is baffling to me.

So argue your point. Why should the rules be different for different politicians?

Oh for fuck's sake. I'm not saying the rule should be different. I am fully fucking aware Clinton broke the law and I'm not okay with her getting away with it either. Just because one thief walked does mean we should just let all thieves walk.

Edited for clarity and charity.

If you ask two people to change their behavior but you know in advance that one of them won't, that is equivalent to asking only one of them to change. If you think Clinton getting away with it was a one-off fluke, say that. If you think that it wasn't but now we're going to start getting prosecutions of prominent members in the current administration, say that. If you think the investigation into the server should be re-opened after 7 years have passed, say that. Otherwise, you're asking for rules which are going to be applied only to some politicians, which is equivalent to rules which are different for different politicians.

If you think the investigation into the server should be re-opened after 7 years have passed, say that.

Sure. Re-open the investigation into Clinton. Go after Pence and Biden while you're at it.

That enough throat-clearing for everyone?

No, it's not enough, because you and I both know that these cases will never be reopened so it costs you absolutely nothing to take that stance. Very principled and also very convenient.

As someone above posted, the only way to deescalate this sort of partisan spiral is for your side to willingly take an L. If the Dems showed that they had Trump dead to rights but then loudly proclaimed that they refused to stoop to politically motivated prosecution, I would be impressed. Or, if they prosecuted Trump and then also began looking into Hunter Biden, I would be impressed. But until then, if it looks/walks/smells like political partisanship then it probably is, and all the self-righteous throat clearing in the world isn't going to change anyone's mind.

So my denouncement of Clinton is just further evidence of my anti-Trump partisanship? Yeah, I know a Kafka trap when I see it. Run along.

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So what is to be done?

I don't believe the system is fair. Therefore, I don't believe the system should be respected, maintained, or cooperated with. Allowing Trump to break the law does not make the system worse, because selective rules enforcement is not better than no rules enforcement. If one thief walks, that doesn't mean all thieves should walk, but if you conclude that thieves walk or not based on their relationship to the cops, that can in fact be a deal-breaker.

In any case, I've said since the election in 2015 that I'm entirely happy to see Trump go to jail. Establishing the exact contours of the regime is a useful exercise! That doesn't mean there's the slightest reason to cooperate with the efforts to put him there, though; If they want to get rid of him, make them work for it, publicly and on the record. Make them commit.

"My rules enforced > your rules enforced fairly > your rules enforced unfairly"

This is basic game theory. In any iterated model, fairness matters, whether it's sports, trade negotiations, or political hardball.

One of the most relevant parts of that game theory, though, is how to re-establish trust and fairness given a history of defection. Given a historically bipartisan-ly corrupt system, how do you begin enforcing the rules without appearing to play favorites?

Honestly it's a hard problem of soft skills: if there were an easy answer, any number of longstanding grudges (Israel/Palestine, etc) could be settled. There are a few successful examples: Northern Ireland seems pretty peaceful these days.

For the record, I'd much prefer a non-corrupt system, but I think a partisanly corrupt system is probably even worse.

Given a historically bipartisan-ly corrupt system, how do you begin enforcing the rules without appearing to play favorites?

Easy - you do so in a way that disadvantages yourself voluntarily. If your counterparty continues to defect anyway, you take an L, but that's really the only way to break the cycle. I actually thought the Trump administration coming to power and then legally completely laying off both Hillary and everyone else in the previous administration was a significant de-escalation, given this represented a substantial political climbdown from the election. For better or worse, it wasn't reciprocated.

It isn’t just Clinton. It is that the deep state was against Trump and opened baseless investigations into him time and time again. That isn’t justice; not in the western style at least.

If the referees only ever target one side and the game is rigged, the crimes don't exist, they're just pretexts. You can argue for prosecuting both sides, the government will take your approval, say, "thank you for legitimizing what I was doing anyways," and then keep not presecuting their own guys. They'll make up process crimes to lawfare whoever they want, and you've already argued yourself into accepting their frame.

This isn't a sports game, you don't get a free throw because the other guy fouled you.

Consider, why is there an expectation in sports that if my opponents gets free throws for a foul that I should get the same call on the other end? Why does the discrepancy in the whistle between ends cause much more anger than a blown call isolation? It seems to me that this is not a product of something idiosyncratic to sports, but that the sports rules and expectations derive from a generalized human dislike for such blatant unfairness. I might dislike that James Harden engages in endless foul-baiting nonsense, but I can deal with it if I'm getting the same whistle when I use that stupid rip-through to draw a foul. If the call only goes one way, it becomes obvious that the system is rigged.

I don’t care if he’s guilty as charged. Everyone who’s done anything guilty of something.

I do think he broke some norms with regards to these documents. But are they breaking bigger norms by charging him? I’m reminded that Hillary probably broke some laws with document security and Biden held on to some classified documents.

Even if you assume he’s 100% guilty we all break laws all the time and prosecutorial discretion etc don’t get charged. How do I know this isn’t something ignored for ex-potus and not something that matters because “Trump is a really bad man”. Lawfare etc especially when Trump loves breaking norms himself and probably should have just returned the docs.

I’m still reminded of other prosecutorial norms not being followed like Flynn being attacked on a Logan Act violation which every new administration breaks and had never been prosecuted before. And his NYC cases all seem to be “novel legal theories” or things no one prosecutes but Trump.

So this is weird because Trump breaks norms so I don’t know if they are breaking norms prosecuting him on a lawfare way.

Ya that’s what I’m getting with “norms”. But if say Obama told them to fuck off im keeping the documents would they charge him? I’m guessing now. But then the thing is outside of norms because everyone just returns the documents.

Here’s my summary of your posts.

Things that don’t matter to a lot of us because Trump has been targeted by lawfare too much.

“GWB or Obama would have been charged if did same thing.” That’s actually what I think is the most important thing in this case. And to be honest I don’t know how to judge that comment. If that’s true then he should go to jail. If it’s not then he shouldn’t.

But of course Huadpe even acknowledged that Clinton got kid gloves not because her actions were more aligned with the law but because she lawfared better (I disagree with the lawfared better but that’s irrelevant).

So when it comes to norms there is in fact a difference. Clinton got more favorable treatment.

Ya I would agree you can’t prosecute Trump because he didn’t “lawfare” well. Otherwise then any non-establishment politician will get prosecuted.

He needs to do something categorically different. Which at the end of the day mostly means to me street crime. Which he won’t do.

The one thing you said below “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”. In the specifics of this case he isn’t getting prosecuted for something random he’s getting prosecuted because he chose to break norms. Which makes this more complicated to me. He chose to create the crime. Which is different than sat prosecuting Flynn by digging up a Logan Act violation.

Ya I would agree you can’t prosecute Trump because he didn’t “lawfare” well. Otherwise then any non-establishment politician will get prosecuted.

Any non-establishment politician that makes false statements to a court? Yeah?

The indictment cites notes from a May 23, 2022, conversation between Trump and his lawyer Evan Corcoran in which the former president questioned whether he had to fully comply with the subpoena, including making the statements, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes. I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and, “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”

Trump is charged with willful retention of national defense information; conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document in a federal investigation; scheming to conceal; and false statements and representations.

I suspect an establishment politician who did that would be prosecuted too.

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The question is would they ever had even gone after the documents if it wasn’t Trump.

Here’s my summary of your posts.

You know we have a rule where you're supposed to respond (at least, first) to the things other people have actually said, before trying to impute things to them.

Looking over your user history, I want to think that someone who has received warnings against low effort posting from Zorba, Amadan, and myself, then been banned by both Amadan and myself for continuing to make low effort posts, might stop making low effort posts.

If you can think of a way to encourage yourself to not make low effort posts, please share it with us when you return from your two week ban. Others should note that the length of this ban is a question of steady escalation for repeat behavior, not a comment on how bad this particular comment is in comparative terms.

Also what about Hunter? They’ve had the goods on him for a long ass time. He isn’t even a candidate. Why isn’t he charged?

Not quite the gotcha you think it is when there are multiple whistleblowers saying the DOJ is purposely slowing the process.

I do think obstruction is probably the most serious issue here, but once again is that any different compared to Clinton destroying evidence under subpoena?

I don’t think instructing your lawyers to do illegal acts gives you attorney client privilege. I think the fraud/crime exception applies.

Yes, if a party destroys evidence you can’t prove what was on it. But that is why the destruction itself is a crime and you can make inferences.

Clinton got away not because she acted in a more sophisticated legal way but because she is a friend of the regime.

Yep hence my “friend of the regime”

point. There is a compelling equal protection of the law issue here. Yes, prosecutorial discretion is a key thing and generally doesn’t violate equal protection. But there is sufficient animus within the DOj and FBI to make a colorable case.

Actually I think it is relatively easy to prove in that she basically decided what was and wasn’t relevant and destroyed the evidence to prove whether she was acting faithfully. If a defense to “destroying evidence” is “I didn’t think it was evidence and you can’t prove it because the evidence is gone” works, then you don’t have a viable legal system.

If they had wanted to be maximally aggressive, they would have done so 2 years ago, not given him so many chances to make the problem go away.

That completely ignores the political benefits of the timing. I just can't take seriously any strictly legal analysis that ignores the political impacts.

Because you can smear him in the press. Which is exactly what happened. He’s was supposed to have all sorts of “top secret” documents. Even at one point mentioning nuclear secrets. I doubt the documents were anything all that important as if they even thought he had military secrets they would not have waited a year to search.

The extremely long period of treating him with kid gloves and giving him every opportunity to return the documents

If he has returned the documents the way the government wanted, they would have invented some other theory to indict him. I feel quite comfortable saying this because: Donald Trump has never been treated with "kid gloves"; other politicians have done the same or worse and never been charged; and this is what happened with Crossfire Hurricane, Russiagate, Impeachment, etc. Unprecedented levels of scrutiny on vague, never-defined accusations, that turn into process crimes when you outrageously don't let yourself get framed.

That is also the elephant in the room. There is a bit of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” When you do countless and baseless investigations into someone eventually you’ll find something. That isn’t justice.

This is essentially what I believe. As long as he remains active in politics, and quite possibly even if he doesn't, the investigations will continue until they get him or he dies.

i held my tongue on this last night because i appreciate dissenters here but the discussion has gone too far without someone taking an appropriately hard stance in criticsm.

these are abject falsehoods originating in the same retarding hatred that has wholly taken the federal bureaucracy. trump achieved nothing in office and he was defeated as an incumbent in 2020 by the largest vote total a candidate has ever received. these indictments of a man whose only success is cultural fixture as the left's he-who-is-most-hated is transparent to everyone ungrasped by mass media as the latest attempt in most of a decade of baseless serial persecution.

if trump had special access materials on an unsecured server the place would have been raided at 3 AM by FBI's SWAT but i have to read shit like "he's getting the kid gloves treatment" and "clinton just did it right" yeah, she just did it right when she directed her team to destroy as much evidence as they could. you'd have been better off calling me a fucking moron, i'd feel less insulted than being presented serious consideration of the feds' position. no, no, this time, they really really really have something.

only grossest judgment would here assert preeminence of decorum yet i still give this circus a far fairer treatment than it deserves. many paragraphs of carefully worded lies corrupt the spirit more than one-sentence petulance.

Article II, Section 1. The President is incapable in any way, shape, or form, of mishandling information classified under his authority. Next topic please.

It is more ridiculous to assume that the president willfully did an act that was illegal when he could do the literally same act and make it legal. Hence the idea that the president cannot mishandle documents.

The only argument would be that Trump inadvertently brought the documents (ie didn’t willfully take the documents) and then while ex president upon learning of the documents kept them.

Presidential records act is questionable per se

I noted the obstruction charge is the most dangerous one for Trump and honestly I think probably dead to rights.

the DOJ does not have the authority to investigate the former executive over the handling of classified documents as such. it is not possible to obstruct an unlawful investigation.

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The law is indeed incredibly clear: the President is the sole adjudicator of whether his documents are personal or subject to 44 USC 22. Neither congress, the archives, nor the courts can make determinations on executive materials because in so doing they would effectively limit executive authority established by Article II Section 1. Those documents of a former executive are for constitutional purposes considered to have been handled at the prerogative of the executive while still in office. Thus the tidy precedented solution of implicit mass declassification.

You are flailing against the impenetrable wall of "ALL RELEVANT MATERIALS CONSIDERED DECLASSIFIED AT FORMAL TRANSFER OF POWER" because a body of individuals who have made their contempt of the United States' constitution and laws not so much clear as irrefutable fact are predictably disregarding that constitution and those laws along with prior administrative and case precedent as they attempt yet another attack on the uniquely vilified failure of a former president.

Only nuclear secrets (of which the nuclear capabilities of foreign states do not qualify) exist in classification separate from executive authority, and executive classification exists solely because the President says it does. Congress has no say, the sitting Executive has no say (and this includes the DOD and DOJ), and the Courts can do exactly one thing and it's knock this farce down on constitutionality. If it doesn't happen in the lower courts it will swiftly be heard in SCOTUS where Trump will be found in favor 9-0.

I think that is the only legal argument that survives (ie he didn’t realize he took classified documents until after his power to declassify pased)

It's a little ridiculous to suggest that if the president takes classified documents home and becomes an ex-president, that those documents are now declassified based on Article 2.

i'm not suggesting anything. this is exactly how the law works. materials of the leaving executive are considered declassified as a matter of law and precedent.

They also have him on tape showing a writer and book publisher a 'plan of attack' on 'Country A' and then bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify it while he was president.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't hid the documents and "corruptly concealed a document in a federal investigation, and made false statements and representations". I'm not even sure why he did those things, it doesn't seem to have helped him at all.

Reminder that around the same time, biden was found to have kept classified documents - but he (as far as we can tell) hasn't tried to hide them or lied about their existence!

all evidentiary priors support "they will perform lengthy investigations on trump for things that didn't happen." there is no evidence to assert this as unique. they would investigate him over nothing, because they have repeatedly investigated him over nothing. hyperrelevant example: a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.

there is no evidence to assert this as unique

If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.

a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.

It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!

If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.

that would be the former secretary of state who kept special access materials on a server she had wiped, who did who knows what with a dozen phones she had destroyed, and who is once again selling "but her emails" hats in a truly amazing flaunting of lawbreaking. the difference is where trump as executive could do whatever he wants with classified materials, clinton as secretary of state had no authority whatsoever to handle those materials as she did. yet she profits from a crime trump is being indicted for, a crime it is not possible for him to have committed.

It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!

it's not only a crime he didn't commit, it's a crime that doesn't exist for the executive. the DOJ is investigating him for an area of law they have no authority to act on and it is not illegal to obstruct an unlawful investigation.

Focusing on this single crime isn’t the right lens. The right lens is the Durham report. The right lens is the Ukraine impeachment. The right lens is the NY indictment. The right lens seems to the the Georgia investigation.

So perhaps after a bunch of phones investigations they finally found one that stuck. But no other prominent politician would be subject to this level of investigation.

The documents were moved at his order while President. By Executive authority under the constitution-as-written and implicit-as-extrapolated from established precedent, all materials discussed here were declassified upon formal transfer of power.

That would be news to Trump who is on tape on page 15 of the Indictment complaining that the plan to invade an unnamed country (probably Iran) he just 'found' is still classified so he can't use it to refute Mark Miley's claims that Trump wanted to Invade.

Interestingly this doesn't necessarily undermine the legal point -- it's very possible that Trump was wrong about this! He's wrong about lots of things!

It's bad for the easier defense in which he claims that he deliberately declassified this stuff verbally or similar prior to leaving office, though.

Hang on. You're saying he declassified them by accident?

Basically, by putting them in his possession when he became a person who did not have authority to see them, he implicitly declassified them because he was still president when he made the decision?

If yes, that's hilarious.

deleted

I stand by my previous sentiments:

One thing that really helps keep it this way is the illegibility of whether there's anything substantively relevant in the documents. My prior is that most classified documents are wildly overclassified and that nothing much would happen if they were handled carelessly and illegally. When I hear that Biden and Trump have handled them carelessly and illegally, my first instinct is to ask, "OK, but does anyone actually care and was there anything actually important there?". That the answer tends to be, "can't tell you, it's top secret" allows people to form more or less whatever ideas they'd like about how important the documents actually are.

...

Nonetheless, I still conclude that I would not like officious bureaucrats to have meaningful leverage over Presidents on the matter of classified documents (even if they tell me that they're actually DOCUMENTS rather than any mere documents). Additionally, I will see little or no legible difference between officious bureaucrats panicking and asserting such authority over Presidents and bad actors in the bureaucracy asserting such authority for the sole purpose of power.

Perhaps the claim that it's related to national defense will result in the prosecution attempting to actually establish that there was something there that anyone should actually care about, but I expect to be pretty disappointed.

I have similar sentiments.

There seem to be two consistent reasons for classification:

  1. Military secrets.

  2. Embarrassments.

The chance that Trump would want to take military secrets seems low to non-existent to me.

Waving them around as an example of a put-up against him by the Deep State, importantly -- this is quite different from faxing them to the Ayatollah.

It's nice that he just kept the war plans in his highly secure hotel bathroom and showed them to memoir writers rather than faxing them to our enemies but that's still obviously illegal.

How does it differ from the bathrooms of Democratic Secretaries of State?

To the best of my knowledge, Secretary Clinton didn't show anyone what she had.

Loose lips sink ships, but her lips were sealed tighter than a pickle jar.

I think it's pretty well uncontested that she had a server with a bunch of classified material literally in her bathroom? Her IT people obviously knew about it?

More comments

Is there anything that will convince you this isn't a Deep State frameup?

What do you mean? I'm well convinced that the documents are not a frameup, in the sense that Trump took them and won't give them back -- that doesn't mean the charges against him are justified.

If you read the affidavit, you'll see that Trump is claiming that the plans were drawn by some general who expressed concern that Trump was crazy and would take the US to war with this unnamed nation -- prior to meeting with Trump, but after drawing up the plans for invading the nation himself.

That sounds like a put-up to me -- and may be why Trump was so eager to hang on to that particular document. The rest, IDK -- we don't seem to have the details. But I find it unlikely that Trump was engaged in espionage.

Color me surprised.

It is actually against the law (22 CFR 17.22) to classify information to conceal embarrassment (also to conceal violations of law). That said, I'm sure it happens, and many embarrassing facts may also be relevant to national security.

Its not so much personal embarrassments as it is National embarrassments. Anything embarrassing is also a national security concern when you have a reputation to uphold among allies. When a single manager fucks up, you fire them and throw them under the bus. When a whole organization fucks up? For years on end? You bury that shit deep.

(p.16) A plan of attack on a foreign country (from press reports Iran)

(p. 17) A classified map related to an ongoing military operation

(p. 28) A Top Secret//SI document concerning the military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States, with handwritten annotation in black marker.~~ disclose in any manner at will

(p. 29) A top secret document from June 2020 concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.

(p. 29) A top secret document concerning military attacks by a foreign country

(p. 30) A top secret document from November 2017 concerning military capabilities of a foreign country.

(p. 33) A top secret document from Oct 15 2019 concerning military activity in a foreign country.

every single one of these is information the executive is free to disclose in any manner at will

On page 15 they have him on tape bemoaning the fact that he didn't declassify the plan of attack on a foreign country.

If the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, and he doesn't know it's classified, I think it still becomes declassified in doing so. At least, that seems to be the argument. So in effect, by taking them home and keeping them past the end of his presidency, Trump declassified the materials without realizing he did so.

I mostly just find that argument amazing and I hope it wins for its own sake as an argument.

If the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, and he doesn't know it's classified, I think it still becomes declassified in doing so.

I don't think this is actually the case, in part because the rules of classification don't have to actually make sense. For example, a currently held legal position of the USG is that even if classified information is leaked in public (like, for instance, the Snowden materials or others like that), so that it is plastered on every journalistic outlet in the world, it is still "classified". I've heard stories of people seeing things marked classified a month or two after the exact thing was on the front page of NYT. The USG literally believes that, for example, if a person with a security clearance who works for the gov't, but doesn't have a need to know (or doesn't have the right level clearance or whatever), goes to a public website of a journalistic outlet and downloads classified documents, it is "spillage", and is probably theoretically intentionally mishandling classified information. Now, I think it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone is actually going to get prosecuted for downloading a copy of the Snowden documents (even folks with security clearances who signed documents essentially saying they wouldn't do this). But that's, like, the "official" view.

So, I think that if the president calls some other country and tells them something that's classified, it would be considered "spillage". Of course, the (sitting) president wouldn't be guilty of mishandling classified information, but the information would still be considered classified, and every member of the executive branch is supposed to treat that information with the same rules. (Of course, certain people's jobs is to analyze the effect of such spillage and what changes need to be made, but that's still within the regular rules concerning handling classified materials.)

Once we realize that we're sort of in this world where the rules are a bit made up and don't have to make so much sense, we're in a bit of a pickle and have some unfortunate choices to make. Let me actually proceed by merging these examples... suppose that Trump was being prosecuted for downloading a copy of the Snowden documents after leaving office. We have a broad statute. That broad statute sure as hell can be interpreted as making that action illegal. Yet, we sort of have good other reasons to not prosecute him (or anyone else who downloads them). Is the information still "classified"? Yeah, kinda. Is it treated sorta differently? Yeah, kinda. It's weird.

Back to the "president tells some other country something that's classified" case. Is that information still classified? I think so, and I think much more clearly so. Is it treated sorta differently? Yeah, kinda. Here, it might be a bit easier, because often, classification markings will indicate whether it's releasable to specific countries. So, for example, if the president up and told a delegation from the UK some classified information that wasn't previously classified as releasable to the UK, should the executive worker bees then proceed to mark any instance of that exact information as releasable to the UK moving forward? Hell, I don't know. It would make sense to me to do that, but the rules really are kind of made up at this point. It's not like we're going to get a statute that is on point with this level of granularity. The authority for this level of granularity likely flows from the president's power, and rules for exactly how you should handle this may be contained in executive branch documents outlining best practices... but honestly, probably isn't even there. I think this sort of situation just isn't formalized in any process document, and would probably just be a matter of norms and how various actually people in the gov't socialize the issue and feel like they should do. It probably gets to be extra tough, because if the president doesn't explicitly tell his people what his intent is, it's entirely possible that he actually desires there to be some ambiguity. Rather than having his worker bees suddenly all simultaneously start telling the UK, "Yes, this is actually true," perhaps he wants the UK to think that it might be true, but not know for sure. Then what? Sorta makes you almost lean in the other direction? But there sure as shootin' ain't gonna be an explicit statute that lays all this out in gory detail. Just the regular, broad, overarching one.

So now, the instant case. If a president takes stuff home, I doubt he's implicitly entirely declassifying it. Is he, like, implicitly marking it "releasable to former presidents"? "Releasable to former presidents, and the folks they want to share it with"? I mean, weird. I would tend toward probably not really. But the president has always been in a unique position WRT classified stuff. We're already, as shown above, in a world where the president can just sort of do shit with it, and then we're stuck trying to retcon in some set of sort of consistent rules for the worker bees to follow. And that leads us to the final insane part of the whole story. It's always been about retconning a set of rules for the worker bees. I don't know that we've ever had to even try coming up with a set of consistent rules for former presidents. At least, not to my knowledge; maybe as this drags on, we'll get some incredible historical research about how informally secret info was treated by a former president in 1840, or how Eisenhower did such-and-such after leaving office. But my sense is that most presidents tend to be happy to drift off into the distance and sort of disappear. They're fine with playing nice and giving stuff back. And the folks still in gov't aren't out to get them. So, it all just sort of works relatively smoothly, behind the scenes, informally, and no one needs to come up with their Super Consistent Set of Rules That are Still Totally Made Up for former presidents and classified info. In any event, basically all those factors are opposite here (Trump is not happy to drift off into the distance and disappear; he's not fine with playing nice and giving stuff back; the folks still in the gov't are out to get him).

That brings me to what I think is becoming my conclusion, more and more. The core conflict here is simply an incredibly vague area where there are no real rules plus a violent disagreement between Trump and the bureaucracy. This wouldn't be the first time. Hell, I came around to the idea that his entire first impeachment stood solely on the pillar that Trump disagreed with the bureaucracy about what is "in the interest of the United States", and the bureaucracy didn't take kindly to being disagreed with. Similarly, here, Trump is like, "Fuck you, there are no real rules as to what I can do with this stuff. I make the rules, even implicitly (and as such, they have implications for how things work after I leave office); your job is to figure out what you worker bees are going to do around the edges of what I do," and the bureaucracy violently disagrees.

But by those rules as you described it, wouldn't then the president taking stuff home be considered spillage in the same logic? Ie. from himself to himself? Then because - because - the president doesn't have clearance to own it anymore, he might actually paradoxically be in the clear to pass it on to journalists?

Like, he now has classified information, but he's not "forwarding classified information" because he's not in a position where he has special authority over classified information to begin with. It's just like a journalist passing a leak to another journalist. And when he had the authority to possess it, he spilled it, but that can't be a crime because, well, he had the authority to do that then. So in the journalist analogy, the president basically acts as both leaker and releaser at different points in time.

ROFL! That's a hilarious take. But I have no idea. The rules are made up, and the points don't matter.

A shame he isn't the executive anymore.

he was, and that makes all the difference. it's what makes the list, especially its framing, meaningless bullshit. "in any manner" includes "sending it to maralago and forgetting about it until biden was sworn in, at which point the materials automatically became declassified"

Perhaps the claim that it's related to national defense will result in the prosecution attempting to actually establish that there was something there that anyone should actually care about, but I expect to be pretty disappointed.

That comment was a response to skepticism that the documents were important. Your comment is a non sequitur to that conversation. Not every argument whose valence is against your side demands an argument whose valence is for your side.

my side? what side? i'll answer: it's certainly not trump's. my side is the United States' Constitution and her people. so that in mind, let me say what "does not follow" is those who participate in discussing a matter of pure constitutionality when they lack the understanding of the constitution to contribute. the only way the documents would matter is if they contained state nuclear secrets. that's how to build nukes, the nuclear capabilities of foreign states are not nuclear secrets. since that's not what the documents contained, their contents don't matter.

Better than I was expecting anyway! I'm obviously not looking for a full rehash of the details, my objection was primarily that we had absolutely no idea whether there was anything that even remotely matters. I would say that this looks like a list of things that one really shouldn't be careless with.

The issue around classification is effectively whether Trump could have by his power as President deemed any of the documents he took to not be information relating to the national defense, and also whether or not his claims to have done so are in fact true, or just something he made up after the fact of him leaving office.

Part of the problem with this is legal case is that with a few (largely nuclear-related) exceptions, all classification guidance exists in the form of Executive Orders. The current guidance is EO 13526 from 2010, but that revoked and replaced a whole list of orders from previous administrations dating back to Harry Truman. So if the question is "could Trump have declassified this?", he could have declassified (almost) everything by mere a executive order revoking 13526 without replacement. In addition, the EO 13526 explicitly designates the President (and Vice President) as a "classification authority" able to determine classification.

But what constitutes an executive order? In general, the separate powers of the US federal government are given broad leeway to determine their own rules and procedures (see Noel Canning, which found that the Senate is in recess only when it declares itself as such). I can't see any reasonable court deciding that failing to write on official White House stationary invalidates an executive order. There might be an argument that the President wasn't faithfully executing the laws as passed by Congress, but the Legislature has its own means (impeachment) for enforcing that.

If the contention is that the illegal acts happened after he was president, that's a potential case, but I think it still faces a fairly high bar to show that keeping the documents wasn't justified by actions taken as president: that would require a court to take significant leeway in interpreting how the executive ran its operations. A precedent of "just because a President [claims to have] issued verbal instructions to do things that are lawful except for violating prior executive orders doesn't prevent your prosecution for violating those prior orders" would be terrible.

Does an elected President (in particular, one with no prior service) even have to sign SF 312? That NDA is the vehicle through which most criminal charges for mishandling classified information flow, and without it it's unclear that any charges could stick to a non-signatory. That's why the powers that be can't charge the journalists at The Washington Post who published the Snowden leaks.

Now, the fact that classification is almost entirely due to Executive fiat is, I would agree, a terrible arrangement, and it would make quite a bit of sense to codify (much of) the existing ruleset through an act of Congress. But, in its great wisdom, Congress hasn't decided that doing so is worth its effort. Ultimately, I'm not a fan of Trump, but this really seems like a politicized effort to bring historically unprecedented charges.

This presupposes that there is in fact a single method by which the President declassifies information.

As argued way back when, the theory of this case is that Trump (1) willfully decided to remove classified information in violation of the law but (2) Trump could have cured the violation by declassifying the documentation (3) yet by not using a specific incantation he failed to declassify.

I think the appropriate response is that since in fact there is no special incantation the President must follow when it comes to declassifying documents AND people don’t purposefully break crimes when they have the unilateral power to make it not a crime, Trump’s action of taking the documents de facto made them not classified.

The fact that Trump later allegedly referred to the documents as classified doesn’t contradict the above; he could be saying it colloquially that the information is sensitive and he didn’t want to share it with a reporter.

Seems special pleading: why are we requiring no special incantation when declassifying, but are requiring a special incantation ("these are classified" is not enough!) when classifying?

That said, has Trump spoken any incantation for declassifying?

does he have to? He is not bound by his executive orders and I am not sure on this issue he can be bound by congress.

Because classifying documents make it a crime for how other people handle them so there needs to be a process as a matter of due process for people who don’t have the unilateral ability to declassify.

Stated differently, the president can reveal classified info to Allies or even enemies on a phone call (as this may be necessary to achieve a certain strategic goal). That means the President effectively declassified the material without any special incantation.

I’m suggesting a similar argument here. Or stated differently, the president as regards to classification per se cannot mishandle classification. He of course can be liable for what he does with the documents (eg sell the documents to a third party for money which is a bribe). But since the sole source of classification and de classification is the president the president cannot willing break classification laws.

Separate and apart from that issue, the Espionage Act does not reference "classified" information. It references information "relating to the national defense," as it predates the modern system of classification by several decades. It's not clear that information being classified or declassified changes whether it is objectively information "relating to the national defense."

This is true, but I'm unaware of any (successful) instance of bringing charges against someone without a prior position of trust (see the SF 312 question). Nobody charged the editors of The Washington Post for possessing the Snowden documents, which were presumably "relating to the national defense," nor can I think of anyone other than the leakers charged for possessing leaked documents in the cases of Manning, Winner, and Teixeira. The Assange case is still outstanding and raises a lot of relevant questions.

Of course, I suppose that would be moot if someone produced a SF 312 signed by Trump himself.

But you have a reasonable argument that could be made, I just think this treads on lots of areas of novel law that will (given reasonable legal strategy, which is hardly a given for the parties in question) presumably raise lots of opportunities for challenges and appeals.

This is an elegant explanation of this issue

My brief interactions with the government bureaucracy surrounding classified documents has made think of the classification process as infectious. I might have some details wrong, but I feel like I understand the broad strokes.

Anything and anyone around big secrets tend to become secret as well. And eventually things must either end in everything being secret or nothing being secret.

Lets illustrate the process:

There is a nuclear missile silo out in the middle of Kansas. It is secret. It needs to stay secret in case of a nuclear exchange. But you need soldiers (who need to be cleared) to man the silo. Their purpose for being out in Kansas now must be made secret. You need technicians who might need to occasionally check up on the silo. These people need to be cleared to make sure they can handle the secrets, also their reason for visiting Kansas needs to be made secret. The construction of the silo, secret. The replacement parts bought for it, secret. The logistics officer that makes sure people and parts are sent out there, he needs to be cleared, and what he works on needs to be secret so no one can target him to figure out the silo locations. Every piece of the supply chain that touches this missile silo needs to be secret, and to be handled by people who are cleared for that secret information.

There is of course not one missile silo, or one single thing that needs to be kept secret. There are many things that justifiably need to be kept secret. But the process of keeping those secrets involves closing down all the avenues for figuring out the secret from second hand sources. And maybe even third hand sources. Or accidentally 4th, 5th, and 6th hand sources. Because access to classified documents is a "need to know basis" no one in the chain is necessarily certain where they are in the chain.

This is why secrecy and classification is infectious. Right now if you work at all with certain government agencies, like any branch of the military, the CIA, FBI, etc then you will almost certainly have to get a top secret clearance. And all you might ever do is touch the most boring and mundane documents and projects. The system of secrets is illegible even to itself.

Anything and anyone around big secrets tend to become secret as well. And eventually things must either end in everything being secret or nothing being secret.

It sometimes works this way, but there are certainly cases where specific facts can remain classified in isolation on systems that are acknowledged. The DoD likes to claim top speeds "in excess of" a public value, while the actual numbers are much more closely guarded, and they presumably avoid exceeding the claimed value outside of controlled conditions. Your missile silos in North Dakota are part of Minot Air Force Base, which even has a public web site, but I doubt the silo coordinates are on it. I can only assume that completely secret programs are particularly expensive and avoided when possible.

Although I'll agree that your concern is reasonable and there are plenty of folks worried about overclassification, even within the government.

This is why secrecy and classification is infectious. Right now if you work at all with certain government agencies, like any branch of the military, the CIA, FBI, etc then you will almost certainly have to get a top secret clearance.

The need to hold the clearance doesn't imply constantly working with such material. I've talked to folks with TS clearances who have offices with windows: sometimes it's a small fraction of the job in a separate space. But having a standing clearance makes it easier to have certain discussions on short notice (and, as someone once told me, "prevents paperwork when people make mistakes").

I would like to note that blanket revocation is the worst possible outcome. For every American except Trump, of course.

It was almost certainly legal for Trump to pen a numbered EO fucking up the entire classification scheme. That would have caused an absolute crisis among the executive branch, possibly extending to Congress and the defense industry. He shows no signs of having done this in office. If he comes forward with such an order, or even a memo to that intent, he might well dodge any of the classification charges. But that would also make any intelligence, technical, or strategic information public. I’m not sure if it would be subject to FOIA, but anyone bound by SF-312 suddenly has written authorization to disclose it.

Oh, shit.

I didn’t think they were going to do it. That once they had their signed Kennedy memorabilia, NARA was going to quietly drop the issue. I still expect them to do that for Pence, Biden, and everyone whose name doesn’t start with Trump. But now that’s going to be taken as evidence for the deep state, either way. Sigh.

But now that’s going to be taken as evidence for the deep state, either way.

Is the problem that it's going to be taken as evidence for the deep state, or that it IS evidence for the deep state?

(personally I don't think it is; I think this is a political prosecution being directed by politicians, not on the initiative of bureaucrats)

The former.

Though, depending on who you ask, there may not be much distinction. The DoJ is Alvin Bragg is Hillary Clinton is Obama. I just had a rather frustrating conversation along those lines with my grandfather. Now I’ve got an urge to map the exact route by which he moved the goalposts, but I’m trying to cool down a bit before posting.

Now I’ve got an urge to map the exact route by which he moved the goalposts, but I’m trying to cool down a bit before posting.

I'd be interested in reading this as I'm often baffled and fascinated at my boomer relatives' logic.

Look, I can buy arguments for prosecuting former politicians over relatively minor crimes. I can even buy arguments for prosecuting trump but not more cooperative former officials.

But, uh, prosecuting your main general election rival for something that you also did is real banana republic vibes.

This is the real problem. I don't know or really care if Trump is guilty of mishandling documents, but I do care about setting a precedent for using the bureaucracy to endlessly hound and destroy a political rival. I thought his "lock her up" rhetoric was stupid and irresponsible in 2016, and I think this much more serious escalation is stupid now.

Trump was over after 2020, the Dems could have just taken the high road, ignored Trump, and watched as the GOP tore itself apart three ways between the Trump fanatics, the Nevertrumpers, and the demoralized group in-between (including me). Instead there's a faction determined to make an example of him in order to... what? Certainly it's not because they love justice or else they would've been prosecuting the legions of other corrupt American politicians who do worse things. Presumably this is ideologically motivated but again -- to what strategic end? Letting Trump beclown himself on social media as he and his partisans slip into irrelevance would have much more effectively destroyed his movement than giving him a bunch of attention and riling up his fans. It seems then to be motivated by short sighted vengeance, or is there a steelman I'm not seeing?

Trump was over after 2020, the Dems could have just taken the high road, ignored Trump, and watched as the GOP tore itself apart three ways between the Trump fanatics, the Nevertrumpers, and the demoralized group in-between (including me).

They're afraid DeSantis could pull together the first and last group (the remaining Nevertrumpers are essentially Democrats), so they think a better strategy is to prop up Trump in the primary and then imprison him, depending on the trust of normies for authority to win them the general.

Page 15 of the indictment is worth a quick read. Trump is recorded with his knowledge and consent by an unnamed writer and a publisher working an upcoming book, at the time (July 2021) he was being critiqued in the press by a "Senior Military Official" (probably Mark Miley) who claimed he was concerned Trump was going to order him to attack [Country A] (probably Iran ) and he dissuaded Trump. Trump wants to convince the writer and publisher that this criticism is unwarranted, so he opens this recorded meeting by saying "Look What I found, this was [the Senior Military Official's] plan of attack, read it and just show... it's interesting". Later in the meeting, Trump says:

Trump: I just found, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. (*Here I am assuming he means the public disagreement not a legal case) *

Staffer: mm-hmm.

Trump: Except it is like, highly confidential.

Staffer: Yeah [Laughter]

Trump: Secret. This is Secret Information, Look, Look at this. You attack, and--

Further in the conversation

Trump: This was done by the military and given to me, Uh, I think we can probably right?

Staffer: I don't know, we'll, we'll have to seem Yeah, we'll have to try to--

Trump: Declassify it.

Staffer: Figure out a -- yeah.

TRUMP: See as president I could have declassified it.

Staffer: Yeah [laughter]

Trump: Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret

Overclassification is definitely a problem, and every administration seems to have some sort of classified documents mishandling scandal, from Colin Powell, to Petraeus, to Clinton, to Nikki Haley and now Trump. That said, recording yourself showing some random writer a 'plan of attack' for a potential invasion of "Country A" while bemoaning that you forgot to declassify them while you were president is an astounding own goal. I just have trouble buying this is 'the Deep State' cleverly ensnaring Trump when he could have just returned the documents or not done ridiculous things like this. It can be true that they are out to get him, and that also he lied to his lawyers and blundered into putting himself in legal jeopardy over an easily resolvable document handling issue.

I'm sure it's a 10,000ft overview rather than a plan with all the details and specifics, but that'd still probably be of interest to foreign intelligence. I'm also not sure how seriously to take Trump's claim that he just 'found' this document and it wasn't something he intentionally took from the White House. The fact that there was some sensitive intelligence in them suggests he didn't just mix them in with his mementos, but I also highly doubt he had some plan to sell this stuff to foreign countries. Why he took on serious legal jeopardy to hold on to these things seems pretty inexplicable other than the belief that he is personally immune to document retention laws or something.

In more "get woke, go broke?" news, the entertaining if incredible rumours circulating about Disney.

Disney, like all the other companies with streaming services, is facing the sharp decline since the days of the pandemic and having many subscribers cancel so they are losing revenue. It's not necessarily "get woke go broke" at work here, but Disney have been shooting themselves in the foot with the forced diversity remakes and mishandling the Star Wars franchise which should have been a reliable cash cow. Meanwhile, Universal Studios is coining it with the Super Mario movie and theme parks rides.

They're also, apparently, in a bind with Comcast, their co-owners of Hulu, who are gearing up to demand Disney buy them out. Comcast is valuing it at around $70 billion, Disney values it way lower (around $20 billion by one report).

The Little Mermaid is not earning the overseas profits it needed to do, and seemingly on the second domestic weekend it also fell back (this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!). The fifth Indiana Jones movie is being re-cut, re-shot, scrapbooked and everything including the kitchen sink thrown at it because of the bad reception at Cannes and the vital need for it to make at least a billion when finally released.

Now the rumours begin:

(1) Disney only has $200 million in liquidity. Comcast is looking for way more, so they're looking at more layoffs, cancellation of projects, and even selling off IP and - rumoured - some of the parks?

(2) George Lucas rumoured to want to buy back Lucas Films?

It is all rumour and insider gossip at the moment and who knows how much is true at all, if any of it, but it's fun to watch in the context of Disney's fight with DeSantis and all the progressive chatter online about how DeathSantis is an idiot for taking on a company with such high-class expensive lawyers and deep pockets to fight court cases.

Looks like those pockets may not be so deep after all!

Was hard for me to find explicit before/after online, so I'll paste the diff I stitched together here:

"Kiss the Girl" changes:

Yes, you want her.

Look at her, you know you do.

Possible she wants you, too.

There is one way to ask her.

Use your words, boy, and ask her

It don’t take a word. Not a single word.

If the time is right and the time is tonight

Go on and kiss the girl

In "Poor Unfortunate Souls" they simply remove the dialog about men liking women who don't talk:

Ursula: That's right! But, you'll have, your man. Life's full of tough choices, isn't it? Oh! And there is, one...more...thing! We haven't discussed the subject of payment...

You'll have your looks! Your pretty face!

And don't underestimate the importance of body language!

...

The men up there don't like a lot of blabber

They think a girl who gossips is a bore

...

It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man.

The "Poor Unfortunate Souls" change is odd. Ursula is a villain, and it doesn't take any leaps of insight to realize that she's not someone to be emulated. If anything, it'd be a more effective feminist message if her anti-feminist advice was shown to be a counterproductive part of her cynical ploy.

It's a weird thing noticed in a lot of newer fiction. Villains, even of the no redeeming qualities and reveling in their villainy variety, are not allowed to violate certain modern social taboos. To depict the bad thing, even as a negative example, is usually not allowed or contemplated (sometimes out of a "don't cause emotional harm to audience who can be affected by this" desire). In the Disney case it's probably more complicated given that lots of people like the villains as characters, identify with them (often bundled up in reading Queer coding into many villains) and the whole genre of essentially fanfiction retellings of villains weren't the bad guy books/plays/movies (Grendel, Wicked, Maleficent) from very simple classic stories with black and white morality.

A fundamentalist Christian film is unlikely to portray a lot of casual sex and drug use.

If nothing else, pretending to be unwoke/sinful is bad for the actors' moral fibre.

Fundamentalist Christian works are not always well written, but they don’t generally shy away from portraying villains as or heavily implying them to be LGBT. Not portraying casual sex or drug use is more because it’s foreign to the writers. Probably the better example is the fundamentalist Christian reluctance to portray blasphemy or (certain kinds of)profanity even from villains, because they believe portraying it to be sinful.

Not portraying casual sex or drug use is more because it’s foreign to the writers.

Not sure what you mean here.

Fundamentalist Writers don’t have casual sex, don’t do drugs, so they don’t write about it because it doesn’t occur to them as things people do. Just like how few sitcoms portray characters going to the range for male bonding, even with red coded protagonists, that’s because it doesn’t occur to the writers to portray.

If they read the Bible, they'll be aware of casual sex as things that sinners do.

More comments

MPAA R ratings are not going to be a winning move for that target demo. Very heavily implied alcohol abuse is not uncommon for certain stock character types.

True, it's interesting how some sins (excessive alcohol use, violence as long as it's not too graphic) are more acceptable to many people than sex or drug use.

To many people, drug use and certain categories of sex are unacceptable at all. Alcohol and violence are unacceptable in excess.

Makes sense.

It's a weird thing noticed in a lot of newer fiction. Villains, even of the no redeeming qualities and reveling in their villainy variety, are not allowed to violate certain modern social taboos. To depict the bad thing, even as a negative example, is usually not allowed or contemplated (sometimes out of a "don't cause emotional harm to audience who can be affected by this" desire).

I don’t think that’s difficult to understand. Putting it out there and arguing against it (implicitly by associating with villainy) shows that the perspective can be contested. Better to remove the logical syntax from the zeitgeist so that it can’t even be thought.

Of course, I don’t think it’s particularly effective in this case…

Precisely. If you try to associate an idea with villainy, you run the risk that the audience keeps the idea and rejects the attempted association. If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawmanHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InformedWrongness

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RootingForTheEmpire

If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

This has a lot of the same energy as the stereotype (rooted in truth? Everyone says it is, but I have my doubts) about sheltered Catholic schoolgirls discovering sex in the outside world and becoming absolute freaks, presumably due in large part due to their lack of exposure to it in their upbringing. If you can count on having absolute totalitarian control over a child's life, the sheltered approach can work, but you have to be just about perfect, and the lack of preparation makes a single miscue potentially disastrous. In the context of these disapproved ideas, one would need close to totalitarian control over things people say to each other in public discourse which certainly seems to be the goal, though the odds of it actually succeeding seems rather low at this point.

Yes, it has to be near-hegemonic to work. It can, though, I think. All the stories I’ve heard indicate that people really were much more sexually sheltered in the 30s, or even the 60s, compared to now. It wasn’t until the Sexual Revolution spread through society in the late 60s that knowing a lot about sex became the default rather than the exception.

I am reminded of Stormfront from The Boys. In a show that revels in trashy awfulness, and really wishes to impress on you the irredeemable bigotry of her character, its remarkable which areas the creators refuse to go. When we have the flashback to her horrific murder of an innocent black man, they can't even muster the bravery to have the N word (or anything similar) leave her mouth. Instead you get childlike utterances like "you black piece of shit" and whatnot. As if her lines were written by a teenager that really really wants an uber-racist villainess, but is mindful to not cross the line and get scolded by his teachers.

I suddenly realized that this show - despite all its outward appearances - does not have any balls.

I'm sure Amazon wouldn't let them use the N-word or anything similar.

My default assumption, but I can also see current-day writers avoiding it because "I feel icky just even writing the word". Part and parcel of modern writing being unble to write anything outside of its own perspective, and coming up with ridiculous (yet strangely gimped) caricatures when it attempts to.

Well, murder may be a little excessive, but profane language? Never in this house shall such utterance cross our lips! 🤣

Ursula's character is also deliberately modeled on a drag queen and very interested in corrupting young Ariel. I am surprised that I haven't seen anti-groomer culture warriors run with this.

Oh, the fun part there is that McCarthy got eaten for that - by the wokie side! Yes, if you're gonna boast that you're basing your character on drag queen (and original Ursula was based on Divine as well) then that is appropriation of drag culture and the makeup artist, at the bare minimum and very least, should be LGBT themselves! And the character should have been played by a drag queen anyway!

I have to say, I enjoyed that backlash (but of course, the media don't call it "backlash" when the progressives do it).

I didn't know new Ursula was based on a different one, I only know about the "Divine" connection.

Yeah but, by that logic it's a double reversal here. Not over-talking and refraining from gossip actually are admirable traits in anyone: women and men. So Ursela was actually giving good advice in the first movie - and explicitly worked out for Ariel. Her quiet shyness did endear her to Eric. And so removing that advice actually makes Ursula a worse person.

At the same time, under-talking can also be a thing. If you don't manage to convey your personality at all, it can be hard to get some sense of what you're like, which makes it less likely that people will take interest in you, I think. Bringing that up of course doesn't work in this context, though, and you are correct.

The hypothesis that Hollywood types believe in the "mere exposure" effect causes a lot of scripting oddness to suddenly resolve into comprehensiblity. If you think that simply seeing/hearing a thing on a screen will stochastically cause some number of impressionable audience members to believe and/or copy it, then the total excision of taboo positions from even villains' mouths makes sense, as does cramming a massive overabundance of LGBTQ characters into every show.

If I were a conspiracists an elite cabal of families were attempting to turn every other male as incapable of attracting a female so there asshole trust fund sons could have unlimited choices.

It’s almost the complete opposite of every romance story I got growing up where the man should be turned down a few hundred times before she finally accepts he can’t resist her and it’s true love.

the man should be turned down a few hundred times before she finally accepts he can’t resist her and it’s true love.

In fairness, this is almost equally bad and unrealistic advice. Simping your way through the friendzone is not a much more effective strategy.

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but on the topic of The Little Mermaid, I am extremely confused by the Rotten Tomatoes score. The "audience score" has been fixed at 95% since launch, which is insanely high. The critics score is a more-believable 67%. Note that the original 1989 cartoon - one of my favorite movies growing up, a gorgeous movie that kickstarted an era of Disney masterpieces - only has an 88% audience score. Also, Peter Pan & Wendy, another woke remake coming out at almost the same time, has an audience score of 11%. And recall that the first time Rotten Tomatoes changed their aggregation algorithm was actually in response to Captain Marvel's "review bombing", another important and controversial Disney movie.

If you click through to the "all audiences" score, it's in the 50% range. And metacritic's audience score is 2.2 out of 10. The justification I've heard in leftist spaces is that the movie's getting review bombed by people who haven't seen it. And there certainly is a wave of hatred for this movie (including from me, because the woke plot changes sound dreadful). How plausible is this? I haven't seen the movie myself, so it's possible that it actually is decent enough for the not-terminally-online normies to enjoy. But even using that explanation, how is 95% possible?

Right now I only see two possibilities:

  • Rotten Tomatoes has stopped caring about their long-term credibility, and they're happy to put their finger on the scale in a RIDICULOUSLY obvious way for movies that are important to the Hollywood machine. I should stop trusting them completely and go to Metacritic.

  • People like me who have become super sensitive to wokeness already knew they'd hate the movie and didn't see it; for the "verified" audience, TLM is actually VERY enjoyable, and the 95% rating is real.

But, to be honest, I would have put a low prior on BOTH of these possibilities before TLM came out. Is there a third that I'm missing?

I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics. It seems to happen a lot for sequels and remakes, where dedicated fans will go out and watch it even though critics pan the sequel for not being sufficiently innovative.

For example, The Black Stallion Returns, the very unnecessary 1983 sequel to the beloved 1979 original, holds a 20% critic score but a 73% audience score. Why the discrepancy? Critics correctly pointed out that this film followed basically the same storyline as the previous movie yet it didn't improve upon it in any way, so there was no reason for this movie to be made. Audiences seemed to like it for exactly the same reason: they loved the original and this is more of the same so why shouldn't they like it too?

You can also see this effect in the ratings for The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, the sequel to the Disney classic, which practically copies the storyline and cast of characters from the original. It has 17% critic and 45% audience approval, and although both scores are low, again the audience seems to be way more forgiving than the critics.

The same applies to the live action remake of Beauty and the Beast which is more popular with audiences (80%) than critics (71%), despite starring notable feminist Emma Watson. (This movie was only mildly controversial because they'd made LeFou explicitly gay, which probably boosted critic reviews, and lowered audience scores.)

I can totally believe that for the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, the verified audience (i.e., the people who paid money to go see the movie) are more positive about it than the critics. It seems to follow the same pattern as other Disney remakes: not a lot of innovation, but the fans seem to eat it up anyway.

So I think your second possibility is closer to the truth: the people most upset about the race-swapping probably didn't even watch the movie.

In addition, I suspect there is some selection effect going on: I suspect the woke are more likely to be verified Rotten Tomato users, since it seems to involve sharing your personal data to Rotten Tomatoes or something (I honestly don't know how it works), which would probably exclude older (i.e., less woke) people and people critical of big tech (i.e. less woke). So the “verified” population probably skews heavily woke, and is not representative of the overall audience.

Also, Peter Pan & Wendy, another woke remake coming out at almost the same time, has an audience score of 11%.

Note that in this case, Rotten Tomatoes shows you the all audience score, not a verified score. That movie was also the subject of woke controversy due to race and gender swapping a bunch of characters, so a lot of the negative scores probably come from people who were unhappy about those changes. This isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Speaking of apples to oranges comparisons.

Rottentomatoes critic scores before a certain era and for certain products are absolutely not useful because they have so few reviews compared to anything recent and until streaming there were very few serious about making reviews for direct-to-dvd movies. Black Stallion Returns has 5 critic reviews. The Little Mermaid II has 6 critic reviews (and one of them is a duplicate). I don't see how you can take the comparison between thousands of user reviews seriously with that discrepancy.

Not to mention the fact that reviews for older movies are almost never going to draw review-bombing, and almost always going to have people leaving a less critical review of something older because it was older, because their nostalgia, because if they thought it was middling they wouldn't care to make a review for it. Hype, marketing, cultural issues (warring or not) probably skew reviews for modern things in ways that I have a hard time believing are going to reflect accurately back when examining 40 year old movies or direct-to-dvd sequels that came out in 2000.

A better comparison would be to take a movie without controversy, to my knowledge that fits in a similar mold. Look at The Lion King(2019) 52% critic and 85% audience and Aladdin (2019) with a 48% critic and 95% audience which would seem to suggest along with Beauty and the Beast that verified audience percentages make disney movies review proof for audiences. Then again there's Dumbo (2019) 46% critic and 48% audience, Mulan (2020) 78% critic and 46% audience, Lady and the Tramp (2019) 66% critic, 50% audience and finally, Pinnochio (2022) 29% critic and 27% audience. If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe. Not impossible taking into account something like Aladdin, but still hard to believe.

If IMDB has admitted they had to weight the score of The Little Mermaid to combat review bombing and rottentomatoes is releasing a 95% with no comment, I find it hard to believe.

Again, it's not “with no comment”, RT explicitly tells you they are only including verified viewers, so that cuts out the review bombers just like on IMDB, and probably limits votes to American audiences (which are probably more supportive of race-swapping and other woke nonsense).

What I typically do when looking up ratings on IMDB is check out the distribution of votes (which I believe is not censored), ignore the highest and lowest scores, and then look at where the bulk of the histogram is. This doesn't work for movies that are extremely good or extremely bad (e.g., The Godfather, or The Room) but those are exceptions. It works great for controversial films, e.g. Cuties has an average rating of 3.6/10, and 70% of voters gave it 1/10, but the bulk is around 7/10 which I think is a fair grade.

Using the same metric, take a look at The Little Mermaid and the other remakes you mentioned:

You can see that audiences legitimately rated this one higher than all those other remakes (the bulk of the histogram is at 7/10 but 8/10 is really close with 6000 vs 5600 votes). Aladdin comes closest but cannot exactly match it. And yes, the score on IMDB is lower than on RT but that's partially because IMDB tends to be more critical overall, and because the calculation is different. Again, Aladdin has 94% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 6.9/10 on IMDB. Unless you believe RT fixed Aladdin's score too, it's fair to say that IMDB voting patterns support the fact that audiences liked The Little Mermaid at least as much as Aladdin.

Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you. But I was suggesting that they were secretly weighting the score which may seem conspiracy nutty but that's the entire point of looking at it and thinking "this seems strange, I don't buy it." I'm not going to say nobody believes that the score matches what the website shows but I believe most people who think things might be being manipulated think that a portion of negative reviews are being excluded outside of their own verification system because it's socially/politically in their interest to do so for any number of reasons. There's been so many instances of things being protected from false reviews in the past few years that I find it hard to believe without any hint of doubt that the 95% reflects reality.

Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days. In the same way that allowing people to talk about certain risque things or have certain opinions isn't allowed, saying "I didn't like this product because I don't like its political message" is only allowed in one direction and if it's the wrong direction (right slanted) then that is deemed bad and cracked down on in some way by changing how the reviews work (netflix), limiting reviews affecting scores when a lot of reviews happen at once (steam), verifying reviews in some way (rottentomatoes), all these things only exist because of review-bombing for political/culture war reasons. It's clear that review-bombing does happen by people who haven't consumed the media but even in cases where money is confirmed to have changed hands (steam) they still have protections for review-bombing because there are reasons for reviews that are deemed invalid. It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something even if it's been "verified" (I put a quotes because I don't know how their verification works). It's relatively conspiratorial and I don't necessarily believe it 100% but it doesn't strike me as crazy outlandish to do.

I also would find it easy to believe that a pr company would manufacture bad user reviews for something like metacritic to take a 5.0 down to a 2.0 and flood it with reviews specifically targeting the woke angle of something to completely erase the perceived value of user reviews that are bad or middling. I said in another post that I just don't trust rottentomatoes in the same way I don't trust wikipedia for anything political. Manipulation is just too easy even discounting RT doing it themselves. There are plenty of people that would give a 5/10 a 6/10 purely for culture war reasons and vice versa. But given the critic reviews, genre-fatigue (I guess live action remakes are maybe a genre), the baked-in culture war angle from both sides(I've seen three articles on deadline about how it sets a bad example for women, erases black slavery, and appropriates drag culture) I still find it hard to believe that it sits at 95%. I didn't say impossible, just hard to believe.

Of course, if you assume that Rottentomatoes is not manipulating any data than the data comes back to show exactly what they're telling you.

I don't assume that; I tried to investigate the possibility by corroborating the RT figures with more transparant sources like IMDB, and I think it's plausible that the RT verified audience score is real.

It sounds like you've predetermined that RT is explicitly manipulating the data (beyond the biased selection mechanisms which we've already discussed) and you are not willing to consider evidence to the contrary.

I get that if you're an old conservative curmudgeon on a forum of likeminded people it's hard to imagine that 95% of the audience could like this movie, but you should at least be able to realize you're not the target audience, and consider the possibility that the actual audience doesn't have the same preferences as you do.

What percentage of Mottizens do you think are fans of Cardi B's music? And what percentage of people who attended a Cardi B concert do you think would say they enjoyed the show?

It seems easy for a website like Rottentomatoes to just turn off commentless zero star reviews for something

Okay, but this is a testable hypothesis at least. I don't see any reviews with less than ½ star or with no text. Is it even possible to give a zero-star rating or leave a rating without any comment? Or maybe comment-less ratings don't show up on the site but are still included in the score?

Protecting TV shows/videogames/movies from review-bombing for political reasons is considered just what a good/respectable company does these days.

Again, you assume that measures against review bombing are taken only for political reasons. Even witout politics, you need to do something to prevent review-bombing, otherwise scores reflect nothing but which group was able to drum up a larger army of trolls. That's obviously not what movie ratings should be about, regardless of political views.

I don't blame review sites for trying to combat that; I would probably do the same thing if I ran such a site, and I'm not left-wing and definitely not woke.

I have no idea why you've gone into multi-quote argument failure mode. I mostly agree with you and just think it's still not unlikely that they manipulated data because I'm biased that way and I've explained why.

I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics.

unless the critics are giving it extra points because it is woke. Then the people's score is usually a lot lower.

I think it's quite common for audiences to rate movies higher than critics. It seems to happen a lot for sequels and remakes, where dedicated fans will go out and watch it even though critics pan the sequel for not being sufficiently innovative.

This could certainly explain some of the discrepancy, but 94% (that's the score I see right now on the site, with 100,000+ verified users) is a ridiculously high score that beggars belief. As the comment to which you're replying states, that's significantly higher than the score of the original which is almost universally considered a masterpiece and a classic.

In addition, I suspect there is some selection effect going on: I suspect the woke are more likely to be verified Rotten Tomato users, since it seems to involve sharing your personal data to Rotten Tomatoes or something (I honestly don't know how it works), which would probably exclude older (i.e., less woke) people and people critical of big tech (i.e. less woke). So the “verified” population probably skews heavily woke, and is not representative of the overall audience.

I'm guessing this also plays a big factor, though I doubt it explains all of it. By all accounts, this film was bad even while ignoring all woke factors, and I doubt such an overwhelming majority of verified users are people that are sufficiently woke as to give a film good scores just to send a political message.

Note that in this case, Rotten Tomatoes shows you the all audience score, not a verified score. That movie was also the subject of woke controversy due to race and gender swapping a bunch of characters, so a lot of the negative scores probably come from people who were unhappy about those changes. This isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Oh, good catch! I didn't even notice that (showing how insidious that "verified audience" marker is). For some reason I thought Peter Pan & Wendy was another theatrical release, but apparently it went straight to Disney+, so there are no verified reviews. So it's a lot less comparable to TLM than I thought.

I think the steelman is this:

  1. We (the review site) know that audience trolls attempt to manipulate ratings in various ways. (Review bombing, stanning, reviewing without seeing the film).

  2. Either we let this stand, and users see audience-manipulated scores, or we attempt to correct for this and give a good idea of the real sentiment of good-faith reviewers.

  3. Time passes.

  4. We're already filtering out trolls who are review bombing because Luke Skywalker's lightsaber is the wrong shade of green, why not also filter out people who give bad reviews because the mermaid is the wrong colour?

  5. Some of the trolls have got wise to this, and give bad reviews for plausible reasons, even though actually they're racists who hate the film for having a black lead.

  6. People who criticise films with a black lead should be filtered out, even if (especially if!) they have legitimate points.

This is the same logic that has played out in every part of social media over the last 15 years.

This is coming close to being a quokka. You shouldn't be steelmanning to the point where attacks and bad faith actions can't be recognized as such. "Maybe my mother really is a whore, or at least, she could be dressing like one and speaking crudely, so it gives people the justified misimpression that my mother is a whore."

I thought the "steelman" turning to rust was @Corvos's point.

Indeed so :)

Oh, sure. But this is how Twitter / Facebook / Rotten Tomatoes and all the other ones talked themselves into their current policies, or got pushed into them, or justified them to skeptics. If I remember correctly, one of the big turning points was when social media companies realised that they were the linchpin of Isis recruitment efforts, complete with execution videos.

If you’re serious about building something which supports free speech, you therefore have to recognise that a fraction of your users are going to be trolls and bad actors. Another fraction will use the existence of the first faction to push their agenda, and you have to have countermeasures for both.

As countermeasures go, this site’s rules do pretty well, I think, with the caveat that it relies on the good will and restraint of a handful of mods to function.

You're not the first to notice. It seems like IMDB already weighted scores because of review-bombing. On IMDB, even weighted, it's at 7.2. And metacritic's score of 2.2 seems more reflective of what review-bombing might look like, so I'd bet Rottentomatoes put in some extra protections against review-bombing, above and beyond just weighting the score like IMDB. It seems like Rottentomatoes user scores are like Wikipedia articles, if it's political I wouldn't trust it implicitly.

The problem then is, what is review-bombing versus this movie/show really does suck?

Yup, that's my dilemma. The whole point of these aggregation sites was to try to get a more objective measure of how good a movie actually is. But there's no paper trail for any of these sites' scores (it's not just RT), and it's become common practice to fudge the numbers with a special "algorithm". I guess I mostly just accepted this before, but TLM is such a ridiculous outlier that I'm starting to doubt whether there's any useful signal left.

I feel like it's a lost cause at this point. Review-bombing is probably real, fake, and irrelevant all at the same time. I say irrelevant because once a review-bombing has been deemed to happen all reviews become tainted because let's assume it's all natural both ways, people will still counter-review bomb to say something is great for culture war reasons or pretend to be the enemy and strawman their position. I'm beginning to believe the latter is very likely, if not predestined, to happen in once a review-bomb starts.

This is just a problem for aggregation and numbers. There are still usually reviews by people who have valid criticisms and praise. The review bomb basically just renders the number meaningless and anything with too much negativity or praise becomes much harder to believe as real. So, maybe people just read reviewers whose opinions they already trust to not be contaminated by playing a culture war game with review scores. I'm sure some exist.

Is there a third that I'm missing?

It's more of a variation of your first possibility, but RT could also be acting out of principal-agent problems, not at the behest of Hollywood executives. The explanations probably overlap. There's also the possibility that they care about their credibility every bit as much as they did in the past, but it's their credibility among tastemakers that's important, not the rabble.

I'm not sure why you'd put a low prior on the first, though. Particularly for high visibility productions, "everyone" knows to take politics into account when reading reviews. Positively weighting aligned reviews doesn't seem like an incredible step beyond that.

It's more of a variation of your first possibility, but RT could also be acting out of principal-agent problems, not at the behest of Hollywood executives. The explanations probably overlap. There's also the possibility that they care about their credibility every bit as much as they did in the past, but it's their credibility among tastemakers that's important, not the rabble.

Yeah, I'd be surprised if RT's review aggregation takes "marching orders" from any executives. In fact, I think RT is owned indirectly by Warner Bros., so if anything you'd expect they'd be "adjusting" Disney movies unfavorably. I like your explanation that RT's just sincerely trying to appease the Hollywood elite, rather than provide a useful signal to the masses. It fits.

I'm not sure why you'd put a low prior on the first, though. Particularly for high visibility productions, "everyone" knows to take politics into account when reading reviews. Positively weighting aligned reviews doesn't seem like an incredible step beyond that.

I knew to take that into account with the critics score, which I would usually ignore for the "woke" crap. But in the past I've generally found the audience score trustworthy. Maybe I was just naive, and it took a ridiculous outlier for me to finally notice that they have their fingers on every scale.

We've had this discussion before and my personal take on it is that RT has decided that providing the right audience rating is more important than providing the actual audience rating. Woman King gets a 99% audience score? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it. Same thing is happening here. It is more important that the plebs be informed about what a good (diverse, tells a cathedral approved story) movie is than it is that the plebs be able to decide what a good movie is.

Ah, perfect, thanks for the link. That looks like exactly the same thing; I completely missed it because I didn't care about Woman King in the slightest. 99% is as hilariously unbelievable as El Presidente winning an election with 105% of the votes. So, it really does look like RT is willing to just blatantly lie about certain - ahem - "culturally relevant" movies, and that casts doubt even on other scores that aren't obviously fake. Maybe I can keep clicking through to the "all audiences" score, but who knows how long they'll allow that? Looks like it's time to drop RT for good and go to Metacritic ... which also uses an opaque aggregation algorithm, but at least I haven't caught them in an obvious lie yet!

Rotten Tomatoes turned off reviewing unreleased movies just before Captain Marvel came out, but claim that they "definitely" didn't change the site to protect Captain Marvel. Given how much fudging of everything has happened in the world since then, I wouldn't be surprised if they are now willing to make up review scores to protect favored films.

It's been at 95% since before the film was released. I think that's a rating from a hand picked test audience.

In general I'd expect any prominent review site (not just ones for movies) to be affected by Goodhart's Law. When millions of dollars (not to mention reputation) are potentially on the line, companies will try to game the scores, and whether or not they do it with the cooperation of the review site will depend on how principled the site's management is.

The go woke get broke thing.

I’ve noticed for probably 5 years now I rarely enjoy something new. I don’t have much interest in going to the movies. I usually like watching things from hbo 20 years ago.

Maybe I’m just old and old people always just watch things from their prime. Or perhaps despite there being 10x as much media production it all sucks and I am not watching because they went woke and got broke and get unwatchable media.

Harrison Ford is 80 years old, who on earth thought he should star in an action movie? He was already too old in Crystal Skull in 2008. Couldn't believe it when I saw the trailer yesterday.

It's funny since Crystal Skull was clearly set up to have Shia LeBoeuf take over for a continuation series (that you could even have completely different writers and directors since it should be somewhat tonally shifted) but for various reasons it just didn't work out. So they're doing another Indy is old, should be able to retire and there's a young one to take the reins movie but this time with modern sensibilities.

It's probably taken this long for audiences to forget how bad Crystal Skull was.

I think it had plenty of good ideas with an on-paper plot/beat structure that could have worked but with some serious execution issues especially in terms of directing actors, dialog writing and CGI (very similar to StarWars prequels). The whole Aliens thing was apparently a George Lucas idea he really wanted to put in and there's no accounting for taste.

I watched the entire series for the first time a few years back and without the nostalgia or leaning on the cultural context of Sean Connery, I found each movie dramatically worse that the previous one, and about evenly. I thought the difference between 3 and 4 was about equal to the distance between 3 and 2, and then 2 and 1, quality wise.

Interesting, the 1 > 2 > 3 is a ranking that I've never encountered from anyone. Most people place 2 below 1 and 3, with a surprisingly high amount of people ranking 3 above 1. 4 seems to be universally far below any of the 1st 3 for most.

I'm one of the few people who loves 2 and thinks it's easily on par with 1 and 3, and I honestly can't rank-order them; they're all masterpieces in their own way, and I lack the ability to judge one as being better than another (I haven't seen 4 so can't comment on that one).

It's certainly a rare view, but I was quite disappointed with and bored by 3. A good deal of what makes it work is the subversion of Connery from his usual expectations, and that is very cultural moment in time referential that degrades the further away you are. I also generally don't like the 'old-timer' tagging along or the adult man reconnects with distanced dad plots so, the whole team up weighed it down for me, and the Holy Grail bit with associated deadly magic was just derivative at this point.

2 was quite surprising at the quality and tone downgrade from 1, but once you accepted and adjusted I thought it was a fine and unique movie that really only suffered from following up on 1. It being more of a bottle made it comparatively worse than 1's globe-trotting but better than being a shallow derivative, which 3 and 4 and likely 5 all are.

  1. Almost brilliant, only weighed down by the fact that Indy doesn't actually have any agency over the plot. IIRC, Nazis get the arc and die from opening it in a timeline where he didn't exist. (9/10)

  2. A fun romp. (7/10)

  3. Boring, derivative action movie with a few timeless visuals, but overall better left in the 80s (5/10)

  4. Bad reboot with a has-been protagonist, with some watchable bits and some cringe bits in equal parts. (3/10)

  5. ... Flaming Garbage? (1/10)?

IIRC, Nazis get the arc and die from opening it in a timeline where he didn't exist.

I think the difference he makes is that without him, the Nazis would keep possession of the Ark after the first group opened it and died. Instead, Jones was able to get it to the Americans somehow, who turned it over to their Top Men.

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I have a slightly different view, but pretty similar: 1 is brilliant, 2 is bad, 3 is good, 4 was almost unwatchable. I think I would quite like 3 even without Sean Connery, though it would be only "average". 2 was saved from being terrible for me only by some memorable action scenes (like the bridge stuff at the end) and some great set design.

I didn't need to forget it. Didn't watch it in the first place.

I'm pretty sure that Ford and Le Boeuf were never filmed together, probably at Ford's insistence. I haven't watched the whole thing, but every scene I watched had negative chemistry and gave of vibes of independent performances composited together.

Harrison Ford is 80 years old, who on earth thought he should star in an action movie?

The audiences, apparently. Most of what Hollywood produces these days are either remakes or sequels. There's something to be said here about lack of cultural vitality. I suspect the movie will be a hit simply on account of nostalgia and sentimental buying.

The only real action franchise worth anything that has emerged in the last decade was probably John Wick. I also like the Taken series but the main protagonist is quite old now. Frankly, so is Reeves.

Yeah, Keanu Reeves (John Wick) is 58, Vin Diesel (Fast X) is 55 and Tom Cruise (MI) is 60. These are fun action franchises, but where are the fun action franchises with up-and-comers who are 20-30? I sure hope Ezra Miller isn't representative of the future of Hollywood "stars"...

Kind of a shower thought, but could it be that it's just really hard to write an interesting, unique badass hero nowadays without being excoriated for toxic masculinity and being retrograde? Indiana Jones and Han Solo get grandfathered in as endearing classics of a bygone age, so you get a pass if you recycle them (although you probably have to pay some tribute to wokeness in the form of retcons and script changes).

Perhaps also there's also a suspension of disbelief problem. Millennials and zoomers are permanently on seven layers of irony and have grown up on endless trope subversion. How could you write a straight action hero who would appeal to such an audience?

That's something I noticed too. It seems like the answer is Die Hard. Your action star is completely self effacing about his remarkable skills, he gets forced into saving the day by the bad guys, and he perserveres through great hardship to do so. John Wick, Nobody, Olympus has Fallen, White House Down, Taken, The Nice Guys, probably others I've forgotten, they've all been pretty popular doing this.

TBH you could distill Keanu Reeves in liquid form and I'd be lining up every day for my dose straight to the veins.

Tom Holland has done some non-marvel action/action-adjacent work. The kind of schlocky things that wouldn't be that out of place for an 80s action star.

The best part of the Flash trailer was Michael Keaton as Batman. I imagine they've sunk too much money into it to scrap the movie, but surely Ezra Miller hasn't much of a future career, given their, um, colourful recent activities? We probably are stuck in a trough where the action leads are getting too old, but the new stars aren't there yet or are in different genres.

who on earth thought he should star in an action movie?

Probably Harrison Ford? By all accounts he actually loves the character, as opposed to Han Solo where he required a dump truck of money to do an obligatory film and then close the book forever by being killed off.

When I last saw pictures of him promoting the movie he looked as if he regretted not managing to kill himself in his last plane accident.

Outside of the obvious problems with it (Harrison Ford's age and following up on a train wreck of a movie that bifurcated the lore in a detrimental direction), Indiana Jones can't be remade or followed up on succesfully because Indiana Jones is a throwback to pulp adventure stories/comic books almost no one remembers now. I think the last thing to succesfully tap into nostagia for that that was The Mummy in... 1999. Now, Indiana Jones IS the reference. There's only so much you can achieve by referencing two/three beloved movies (opinions are mixed on #2).

This is a broader problem with remake/sequel culture, succesful pop culture franchises were built by drawing heavily from preceding pop culture but in a new way; a remix. Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back built a franchise through heavy inspiration from pulp sci-fi and samurai(/western) movies; mix them together, you get Star Wars. Return of the Jedi and more strongly the sequel trilogy's inspiration is... Star Wars. No significant additional inspiration was added to it, they just remixed a remix. Nothing new is created, they're just diluting the original signal. Of course, the fans would probably be disappointed if they did anything else; the prequel trilogy was mostly rejected because it was different. (Rejecting it because it wasn't very good is fine; rejecting it because it doesn't feel like Star Wars is a case of "careful what you wish for" that we can all appreciate in hindsight with the sequel trilogy).

So anyway, sorry for the meandering post to come to the shocking conclusion that remake and belated sequels are creatively bankrupt, but I just had to take the opportunity reflecting on the new Indiana Jones movie to work through why it is creatively bankrupt.

Again, it's all rumours, but this was apparently meant to be - at the start anyway - as a "handing over the baton" movie; Indy sits back in his rocking-chair and hands it all over to his goddaugher (the character played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and one of the original versions seems to really have dragged Indy's character down, even rumoured to have the time travel McGuffin used to go back in time and wipe him out of the timeline completely so the only Indy would be new girlboss Indy. As you can imagine, that went down swell at test screenings 🙄

The version at Cannes seems to have gone down like a lead balloon with the critics, even when Disney scrubbed a ton of the indignities heaped on Indy, and some critics were pretty savage about it.

Even on Rotten Tomatoes, where there are critics saying it's good, the score stands (so far) at 50%:

The good news is that it’s not as poor as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The bad news is that it’s not much better.

Mostly, it's to wrap up the series (presumably while Ford is still alive and can still act the part). There's sort of on-off talk about maybe doing a TV show, who knows, but that's down the line. Even in the movie, they seem to have used CGI to de-age Indy for the opening bits set in the past, so perhaps that's the future, if AI gets off the ground: Number XIX in the Indiana Jones franchise with all (or mostly) AI-generated actors! Even if your star has been dead for thirty years, we can make them look eternally 35 years old for a limitless number of features!

I doubt Lucas has the money to buy back Star Wars. IP line that is worth way more today than the prices back then.

Agree on his fight with Disney. Too many places are assuming he’s f$cked and bound to lose which dominates most message boards. Personally I think he has a strong case and this is going the way of every Trump prosecution where the “bad” guy wins.

I doubt Lucas has the money to buy back Star Wars. IP line that is worth way more today than the prices back then.

I donno. Disney spent $4.1B on it, and the viewership has consistently shrunk since they bought it. A strong argument could be made they have enormously devalued the IP. First by scrapping the entire EU, second by deciding Star Wars is now for girls, third by having different directors retconning back and forth on the movies, fourth by flooding the IP with garbage on Disney+. They're already shutting down the Star Wars Hotel they spent fabulous sums constructing. It was only open from March 2022 to Sept 2023.

In my perfect world, Lucas would offer to buy it back for $2B when they need the cash.

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The price was too high, but more significant than that was the fact that there was no presence of the actual characters I care about, like Han and Luke and Leia. Or that guy. I’ll take goddamn that guy, just give me someone I know.

The fact that Kennedy or anyone even suggested this and wasn't fired immediately explains everything about where Disney Star Wars is.

An enemy company could not have come up with a more malicious suggestion to slip into the box.

And for what? It's not like the Sequel Trilogy has its own unique character. They could have had both OT characters and newer stuff.

Is it really just a "I want my thing to be the Thing?"

As fast as they pivoted I wonder if there's a rights issue around the old characters.

Oh yeah, definitely - Lucas gets a cut of anything with the old casts on it, and Disney didn't want to have to pay him anything. So they cooked the golden goose.

I heard that given as a reason they wiped the old EU but then they did bring back Thrawn and co.

Plus according some reddit trip reports it was poorly executed. The service was bad, the little game rooms they send you through kept breaking and the actors weren't into it. Sounds out of character for Disney really. For $2000/night in Florida I would expect top quality everything.

They're already shutting down the Star Wars Hotel they spent fabulous sums constructing. It was only open from March 2022 to Sept 2023.

Just looked this up. They themed it off of the SEQUEL trilogy. Are they retarded? The sequel trilogy ended with Rise of Skywalker in December 2019. Nobody cares about Rey or Kylo or The First Order anymore. I know Disney is all about marketing synergy, but that only goes so far. You can use banked-up nostalgia to sell subpar movie tickets for $15 each, but you can't then use those subpar movies to sell $6,000 themed vacations.

Are they retarded?

No comment, but it seems (according to the rumours on such reviewer channels) that Kathleen Kennedy insisted the sequel characters be the ones used. Even a fool like me knows people want to cosplay/see actors dressed up as Luke and Vader and Chewie etc. not Rey and Kylo (maybe Finn and Poe get a pass). Even Darth Maul has probably dropped off in popularity since the first set of sequel movies. When people think of Star Wars, the original three movies are the ones they think of.

I know that to make the property continually profitable, you need to have successor characters for new movies, but Rey ain't it.

Disney seems to have this odd idea they can make people are about the new movies as much as the original trilogy through sheer force of will.

What mechanism, other than perhaps sheer monetary inflation, is supposed to make the Star Wars IP value go up since Disney bought it?

  1. They have invested in the franchise. There’s a lot more IP now. Maybe nothing as valuable as the initial.

  2. I just think assets that can’t be replaced - which I put Star Wars in that bucket - have appreciated. Things like sports teams rights have surged. Truly unique content of id call it Americana has done well.

They have invested in the franchise. There’s a lot more IP now. Maybe nothing as valuable as the initial.

There is a lot less ip now. The extended universe was huge.

It's not like the new owner couldn't reverse the decision, and throw the Disney content into the trash instead.

They can kick off the next trilogy by having Luke wake up and realise it was all a bad dream. And then he spends the rest of the movie bitching about it to his padawans - "and then she called herself Skywalker and tried to lay claim to my uncle Owen's farm, it was truly a nightmare."

Movies and shows made

All of which is still owned by Lucasfilm, and some of it is still getting published.

  1. Spamming content does not make line go up. If anyone wanted too see the sequel to the Rey Skywalker saga you'd have a point, but they don't. Anyone buying the franchise would probably be better off doing to the Disney content what Disney did to the EU.

  2. Uhhh... maybe? Seems hard to prove one way or the other.

Maybe. Think my main reason is platforms trade at much higher valuations today than platforms traded when Stars Wars was bought.

Activision Blizzard traded for $68.7 billion. I don’t think any of there assets are as iconic as Star Wars or Indiana Jones but perhaps video game studies are more valuable that individual IP.

Assuming he got a decent valuation for it initially, I don't really see how the IP could have appreciated faster than him just parking it in a standard investment portfolio. TBH, Disney would have done better buying T-Bills compared to what they've done with Star Wars.

I propose a simpler explanation for the underperformance of The Little Mermaid: It's a live action remake of a beloved animated show. Consider Dragonball Evolution, or The Last Airbender, or the Cowboy Bebop TV series, or Aladdin. I could do this all day! Has taking a beloved animated property and turning it into a live action remake ever worked? At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...

Well this was the next in the line of huge-budget remakes of their mega classics on the level of these, which had actually been insanely successful for disney (including Aladdin's 1 billion which I'm surprised you describe as not working):

  • (2014) Maleficent - $750M, budget $180M

  • (2016) The Jungle Book - $970M, budget $175M

  • (2017) Beauty and the Beast - $1.26B, budget $160M

  • (2019) Dumbo - $350M, budget $170M

  • (2019) Aladdin - $1.05B, budget $183M

  • (2019) The Lion King - $1.66B, budget $260M

 

  • (2023) The Little Mermaid - ~$400-550M (expected end result), budget $250M

There are also some smaller ones, and a maleficent sequel, but The Little Mermaid was expected to be on the Aladdin/Lion King/BatB level.

So it was definitely expected to be doing far better, and not at all the case that 'nobody wants' these. One argument is that peoples' appetite for these remakes has finally dried up, and that this movie's box office is paying for the lion king's sins of being weird looking. And that this was the first of these without major star power. But the negative/international feedback does seem to heavily center on the race-swap ('she doesn't look like ariel from my childhood') and on the creepy realistic animal friends.

There are also some smaller ones

I was going to complain that you omitted Mulan, but then I realized I'd forgotten about Dumbo ... and apparently also Lady and the Tramp, and Pinocchio, and Cinderella, and Christopher Robin (though this one seems to be a new take more than a remake?), and Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan ...

Is the "insanely successful for disney" list just selection bias?

the creepy realistic animal friends.

Is it that bad this time around? They didn't keep all the animal friends in other movies (reviewers talked about how awful it was to replace Mulan's honor and cleverness with midichlorians or whatever, but my kids just didn't care to see it because they wanted Mushu), but the new Aladdin had its parrot and tiger and a slightly-homunculus-vibed CGI Abu and it still made a billion dollars.

cinderella made $542 million, alice in wonderland made over a billion. were those considered unsuccessful?

lady and the tramp and pinocchio were disney+ exclusives. disney+ has kind of been a flop, so fair enough there.

the christopher robin movie was one of those 'kid character turns into jaded adult' movies like hook.

Is it that bad this time around? They didn't keep all the animal friends in other movies (reviewers talked about how awful it was to replace Mulan's honor and cleverness with midichlorians or whatever, but my kids just didn't care to see it because they wanted Mushu), but the new Aladdin had its parrot and tiger and a slightly-homunculus-vibed CGI Abu and it still made a billion dollars.

I haven't watched either remake, but IIRC Iago and Abu in the original Aladdin weren't as heavily stylized as Sebastian and Flounder in the original The Little Mermaid, and so a semi-realistic CGI version of them wouldn't be too jarring. On the other hand, the Sebastian in the live-action remake looked like a real crab with somewhat expressive eyes.

Here was the list I was using, pulling the comparable big-budget entries (although missed Alice in Wonderland from 2010 which I guess actually was the success that caused them to lean into this approach).

Mulan is a weird one that just can't be compared box-office-wise, because it was scheduled for March 2020 and went through a number of postponements until the theatrical release was simply scrapped and it was dumped on streaming.

The point is that for many people who haven't been paying as much attention, one might think that TLM is comparable to Cowboy Bebop or Dragonball and maybe people just don't like these. But we're a decade into this being one major pillar of disney's huge blockbuster release strategy (right up there with marvel & star wars) which had led to their box office domination high-point by 2019. The whole 'Walt Disney Pictures' division basically transformed into just making these, and up until the pandemic I don't think it could be described as anything other than an insane success. So now if it's starting to falter like star wars, marvel, pixar, and walt disney animation all are, that's definitely a possible culture-war hot spot.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322204733/http://deadline.com/2017/03/beauty-and-the-beast-sean-bailey-disney-emma-watson-1202047710/

Disney’s live-action division, which once struggled through an identity crisis and pricey flops like John Carter and The Lone Ranger, has found its sweet spot. The musical casts a light on an unsung part of the Disney moviemaking machine that has learned to lean in heavily on the live-action adaptations of beloved Disney-branded animated films. The label, which had two Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels in the billion-dollar club, notched its third with the Tim Burton-directed Johnny Depp-starrer Alice In Wonderland. It now seems a matter of time before Beauty And The Beast becomes its fourth. While a sequel to Alice failed — it was made even when Burton said no — The Jungle Book nearly cracked the billion-dollar mark with $966 million in global ticket sales.

Beauty And The Beast is just the latest example of a philosophical change within Disney’s most overshadowed silo. The baseball equivalent of Bailey’s mission statement is basically, be disciplined enough not to swing at bad pitches outside the strike zone. That wheelhouse has increasingly become about recapturing the animation library magic with live-action films, ideally supplying one or more of the three tentpole-sized annual films the division generates (supplemented by one or two films whose under $100 million budgets are far lower than the big pictures carry).

...

In a conversation Monday, Bailey credited the division’s escalating success rate to the silo system instituted by Disney chairman Bob Iger and managed by Alan Horn, the former longtime Warner Bros chief who stabilized a static operation and infused his own moral sensibilities on the slate. It is a program where each division stays in its own lane and isn’t pressured to make more movies than its marketing machine can handle, while maintaining quality controls. This differs from some studios that seem to be bent on filling a high number of films on a slate. Disney’s annual collective output usually doesn’t exceed a dozen. But eight of those Disney films are global blockbusters that suck all the oxygen out of the box office when they are released.

The collective results have turned Disney into the most consistently dominant studio Hollywood has seen in the modern era, to the point where it now dictates the release calendar, at least the most desirable summer and holiday corridors. Date a Pixar, Marvel superhero, Star Wars sequel/spinoff, Disney Animation or live-action animated film remake, and it is likely that other studios will then have to work around it.

Personally I think the only one of any of these I've seen is the Jungle Book, just because it was that strange situation where two different studios put out new jungle book adaptations at the same time.

Mulan was a big flop, taking in $70 million on a $200 million budget.

There was no race swapping, but most people I know were turned off by the titular character gaining magical powers on top of being a girlboss.

Mulan was also the released at the height of the COVID pandemic, which probably had a larger impact on its revenue than the contents.

No, Aladdin made back the money, which is what they were expecting The Little Mermaid to do as well, but it hasn't done it overseas (yet) and it doesn't seem to be doing it domestically either.

We'll have to wait until all the money - including tie-in merchandise and the rest of it - is counted, but it's not doing as well as they had hoped. Even Forbes, with its "virulent racist campaign!" messaging, is aware of the performance it needs to turn in to be that blockbuster hit.

There's also Peter Pan & Wendy, another live-action remake, if it can be called a remake, which goes way further - the Lost Boys are now girls as well as boys but still called the Lost Boys not the Lost Children so shut up! Released on Disney+ instead of getting a theatrical release, on Rotten Tomatoes the critics give it 62% but the audience 11%.

Speaking of Rotten Tomatoes reviews, for The Little Mermaid, you can see "verified" or "all" reviews:

All Critics - 67%

Top Critics - 50%

I don't know what the difference is with a Top Critic, but you can see that they like it much less.

Audience opinion?

Verified Audience - 94%

All Audience - 57%

So if you just look at the ratings as Rotten Tomatoes presents them, you'll think "oh, it's a hit, audiences love it!" with 94% but that's not the whole story. Amazon did much the same for Rings of Power, getting IMDb to hide or ignore reviews that were less than 3 stars and shutting down reviews on Prime altogether.

The point is that Disney needs big hits because of the financial situation right now, so if it doesn't make Aladdin-type money then it's a flop for all intents and purposes, even if it makes a profit.

Oh yeah I think it's certainly going to end up being considered a massive flop, likely losing them upwards of a hundred million+. I put those production budget figures in for comparison's sake between the various movies, but making $450M on a $250M production budget would be a catastrophic loss, not a profit. Because there's also a huge marketing budget on top of that, and the box office revenue gets cut down by ~50% for the studio's share (the theaters get the other half).

Can I point that all those remakes were not that good and maybe little mermaid is just chickens coming home to roost. If a horse dies while running it still has some inertia behind it to move forward while beating it.

Maleficent was original film. Beauty and the beast was mostly cashing on Emma Watson post HP, Aladdin had Will Smith, the lion king had - was Mufasa's death really that sad as I remember it (yes it was).

What is the point in watching the new little mermaid instead of the old one. That is the question that all of those remakes find really hard to answer since they are at best slightly inferior in any way.

I am not sure I count the Lion King, given its CGI, but you're correct that the outcomes are much more mixed than I thought they were.

At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...

It's a symptom of a broader failure to be creative in entertainment nowadays. Studios are too scared to take risks with a new IP that might fail, so they (mistakenly) believe that the best course of action is to remake what already exists because "it should be a safe bet".

Is it fear, or is it just business sense? Toy Story was a hit in part because it used a setting and characters familiar to an American audience (suburban childhood life, old fashioned cowboy toy, newfangled spaceman toy, slinky, green army men, Mr potato head). Ghibli movies are universally loved it Japan because of all the very-Japanese details and cultural references woven into them (likely both intentionally and unintentionally) -- see Totoro, Pom Poko, Spirited Away, or My Neighbors The Yamadas. I think the term "love letter" is trite when describing a movie, but these films are love letters to the childhoods and shared experiences of their respective audiences. They target a specific culture and a specific slice of space and time.

Modern family films don't really seem to do that anymore. Everything is either engineered to appeal to the widest possible audience (gotta appeal to the East Asian market) or, when they do try to set a film in a specific culture, it's a theme park version created by outsiders (Coco, Moana, new Mulan) that is still designed to be widely palatable. In both cases the end product is sometimes entertaining but never beloved as it doesn't connect with our own memories or experiences on more than a superficial level.

If you're not convinced, try this -- imagine a 2024 Disney remake of Totoro, complete with the newfangled 3D animation, the gender roles updated, the clothing modernized, interiors of the homes genericized, still vaguely Japanese (in the way a Japanese-American from California might imagine "Japanese") but mostly just anodyne and inoffensive, Totoro's wood has been expanded to cover a huge expanse of land and Catbus has a new origin story, and now Mei has a cute comic relief Makurokurosuke sidekick that hangs out on her shoulder (merchandising!). It would probably make a good trailer or two and I bet it would make some money at the box office, but a lot of the themes, images, and dare I say SOVL would have been lost in the quest to broaden appeal.

Is this mistaken? Sure, the success rate with uncreative existing IP-parasitism may be low, but what about the success rate with creative films?

The problem seems to be (1) it's a remake (2) it's longer than the original (3) they've messed around with the plot and the songs (4) the CGI real animals fall into the uncanny valley of looking almost exactly like real animals, just a bit off, which means they're nowhere near as expressive as the cartoon versions (5) my own view, but going to the movies is very expensive and people are belt-tightening right now, so why not stick on the original cartoon version instead of spending however much to take the kids plus parents to the cinema?

They're trying to go for the "racist backlash" reason as to why it's not doing well, but unfortunately that then means calling China and Korea racists - which is a racist thing to do!

I'm way too old for either movie so I don't much care either way, but I do think if you're going to do "The Little Mermaid but black", why not have everyone in it black? Or at least an original design for Ariel instead of keeping the red hair and blue costume? Best of all would be creating a new movie and character based on African or Caribbean folklore but Disney want to eat the cake and have it, and instead they look like they've dropped the cake all over the floor.

As it is, we have black Ariel with a white (or Latino) father and multi-cultural sisters, white Ursula her aunt, white prince Eric with a black mother/grandmother as queen (I'm not sure what relation she is to him) so it's confusion all round.

They're trying to go for the "racist backlash" reason as to why it's not doing well, but unfortunately that then means calling China and Korea racists - which is a racist thing to do!

cnn's one step ahead of you - they got three asian lady writers to call chinese and korean audiences racist.

Has taking a beloved animated property and turning it into a live action remake ever worked?

Detective Pikachu (if that counts, since it was actually based on a game, and it also included a lot of CG animation). Also the first Transformers live film, and maybe a couple of others in the series.

‘Go woke, go broke’ doesn’t seem true. More like ‘push out a lot of bad product and people stop buying your new ones’.

I mean you can certainly argue that Disney’s wokeness makes it hard for them to produce good products. I definitely think that’s part of the story. But they also seem to have not even tried to make a lot of their productions actually good, which I don’t think is because of wokeness. Sure, woke makes it hard to, say, write a classic princess story. But it seems like Disney just didn’t even try, they assumed that mouse ears or a lightsaber was a license to print money with any old Drek. As it turns out, they were too cynical.

I think you are radically underrating the "wokeness makes it hard for them to produce good products" angle. Making a good woke movie for kids or teens seems nearly impossible. It imposes too many restraints on you that are restraints against good storytelling.

I mean, Brave was kinda woke and generally well received. So were a few marvel films.

I agree with you that woke probably makes it harder to make a good story- and makes certain categories of story effectively off limits as actually good and coherent- but I think you’re underrating the fact that a lot of these woke flops are using wokeness to polish a turd to begin with.

“Woke” is about intersectionality or power-critical narratives or character arcs, usually pedantically or with a lecturing tone, not just progressive / feminist heroic viewpoints. Brave was about a Scottish princess beloved by her kingdom and family who used her existing but unrealized privilege to make choices in her romantic life; that’s standard modernist feminism.

Moana, on the other hand, was marketed as woke: “here’s a brave, strong Brown woman, isn’t she brave and strong for being Brown and a woman?” I didn’t see it until it hit the second-run theater for that reason alone; when I did, I was surprised it was just a fun, well-made, coming-of-age Disney film. She saw a problem, had an adventure, fixed the problem, and was rewarded for her leadership with more leadership. Sure, she had no romantic co-star, but that’s not woke, just feminist. It had a flamboyant-coded treasure-grubbing giant crab, which edged into wokeness, but it was a minuscule part of the film, and it fit the story. Again, modernist progressive, not woke.

Lightyear was woke because it was power-critical: the white man protagonist was constantly wrong, not heroic, throughout the film. At the end, his heroism consisted of being an ally to the family he accidentally helped, against Zurg, another white man who wanted to turn back the clock to when things were good for him and hide his mistakes from the people who determine his societal status. Postmodern “power was wrong” narrative plus fecund Black lesbian equals the triumph of queer family over the success of a highly privileged white man’s career ambitions

“It’s not a small or throwaway part of the movie. The climax hinges on Buzz deciding Alisha meeting her wife is more important than his primary objective for the entire movie, the lost years of his life, any possible better alternative path. He sacrifices everything for their love story and for the multi-generational positive impact of their love story. I was gobsmacked at how hard it swings not just for gay people being tolerable in “family-friendly” settings, but for gay people creating amazing families themselves.” - Autostraddle article

The article then goes on to point out how Pixar’s meta-narrative made queer acceptance itself travel back in time to make the Toy Story universe retroactively gayer, and thus better, then ours. Lightyear is woke, it’s a political point masquerading as a story, and it’s not satisfying entertainment.

It had a flamboyant-coded treasure-grubbing giant crab, which edged into wokeness

If anything this was edging into anti-woke, it was a simple play on stereotypes for laughs.

Never seen Brave, but all the successful Marvel movies traverse a similar hero story path. Black Panther, for all its magic black people stuff, is pretty much a classic heroes journey with a shit ton of masculinity thrown in your face.

It's akin to the restrictions created by Christianity: to some degree, they can make for a better story, but not when they become too tight. So C. S. Lewis could, operating within a fairly but not entirely stuffy kind of Christian ethos and worldview, produce great children's stories that appeal even to the unconverted, but hardcore fundamentalists are infamously bad story tellers.

This trend goes back about as far as human culture: Aristophanes was conservative in contrast to Socrates and Plato, but not entirely pious. He wouldn't mock Zeus, but he did mock Dionysus. Constraints, to some degree, are good for creativity - that's one of the secrets of good poetry - provided those constraints stay within constraints. Even great conservative films like Ben Hur or The Dark Knight have a pinch of deviancy in them, perhaps because it's hard for profoundly creative people to stay within orthodoxy in all respects. Also, even great children's stories make one think, and the compatibility of orthodoxy (whether conservative or progressive) with thinking is a matter of degree.

I think there’s a lot to that. Makes me think of Brandon Sanderson. The Mormonism gives him somewhere to stand and serious (now also vaguely countercultural) principles to conjure with, but aren’t so restrictive that they force him to be dour and po-faced.

Yep.

I've adopted a rule of thumb regarding new media products: if the creators are heavily emphasizing the diversity, inclusion, and equality progressive bonafides of the product, they almost certainly are not prioritizing any factors that would lead to a high quality product. If quality were the goal, they'd emphasize other things.

If quality isn't a priority then they probably won't achieve high quality.

This rule has been at least 90% accurate since I implemented it.

Disney is by far the worst offender but it pops up just about everywhere else too.

Can You Guess Why The Little Mermaid Is a Huge Hit But Not In China?

The backlash is due to Halle Bailey being chosen to portray main character Ariel.

...

According to Box Office Mojo, Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid has only grossed $3.6 million in mainland China since it opened there on May 26. The Chinese box office tracker Endata confirmed that the film made 19.5 million yuan ($2.7 million) in its first five days. In comparison, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse made 142 million yuan (nearly $20 million) in the first five days after its release.

Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that Spider-Verse also featured a black main character. Seems like an odd comparison to make, given their narrative.

Now I may be a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that Spider-Verse also featured a black main character. Seems like an odd comparison to make, given their narrative.

Spider-Verse's black protagonist is a character who has always been black starting with his original incarnation, AFAIK. Ariel in the original adaptation in 1989 was a ginger, and in the remake is black. So possibly Chinese audiences are rejecting the race-swapping of existing non-black characters to be black, rather than rejecting black characters in themselves. This rejection of such race-swapping is considered anti-black racism just as much as rejection of black characters in themselves by the "woke" ideology.

Spider-Verse's black protagonist is a character who has always been black starting with his original incarnation, AFAIK.

This is disingenuous. Miles Morales is a race-swapped Spider Man, exactly like Ariel. The paper-thin excuse of "Umm ackshually we've not retconned him, he's, err, an alternate universe version" is obviously just that: a paper-thin excuse, to remove white heroes from their stories.

Miles Morales was developed by writer Brian Michael Bendis. No prizes for guessing what I found oh his Early Life section of Wikipedia.

This is disingenuous. Miles Morales is a race-swapped Spider Man, exactly like Ariel. The paper-thin excuse of "Umm ackshually we've not retconned him, he's, err, an alternate universe version" is obviously just that: a paper-thin excuse, to remove white heroes from their stories.

It's a lot more acceptable when Spiderman's comics history is absolutely littered with clones and alternate-universe spider-men.

I'm not all that familiar with the Spider-Man lore, but given how common alternate universes are in comic books, I would think it'd be normal to consider an alternate universe version who's black as a separate character unto himself. IIRC from the Into the Spider-Verse film from a few years back, the white Peter Parker was there as a character, along with many other versions of Spider-Man including a female one and a cartoon pig one. This is in contrast to The Little Mermaid remake which is presented as a straight-up remake showing a reimagined version of the characters from Disney's original adaptation. Halle Bailey's Ariel running into the original ginger one from the 1989 animated film while being separate characters like in Into the Spider-Verse isn't something that'd be within the realm of possibility in The Little Mermaid universe, I think.

Yeah, I think Miles Morales was definitely an early example of wokewashing, although not quite as blatant as in recent years. But when we're talking about movies there is one, rather important, distinction: Into The Spider-Verse was really, really, really, REALLY, REALLY good. (I haven't seen Across yet, but I have high hopes.) Frankly, if all these woke race swaps and girlboss Mary Sues and deconstructions of white male privilege were accompanied by movies that were even close to the quality of Into The Spider-Verse, I don't think I'd have such a problem with them!

A quick peek confirmed my suspicious: Chinese movie posters (and probably much of the advertsing) show Miles prominently mostly while masked.

https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51%2Bu6z6asFL.SL500_AC_SS350.jpg

The film also has a big cast, including some Asian spider-people iirc.

the image link is broken, copypasting the whole thing works

Chinese Little Mermaid posters don't prominently feature Halle Bailey's ethnicity, though (which some on Twitter and elsewhere complained about).

this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!

I also recall that the Last Jedi did poorly in China because the actors weren't attractive.

I heard that about Shang-Chi too (couldn't be that the Chinese - who, unlike black Americans, have their own whole industry - don't really care about a "groundbreaking" Chinese-American superhero?)

It's amazing, we've never been more connected yet the weirdest stories come out of China and just proliferate as if they're urban legends about Japan in the 80s or something.

It's amazing, we've never been more connected yet the weirdest stories come out of China and just proliferate as if they're urban legends about Japan in the 80s or something.

I mean... it goes both ways.

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I had tremendous fun using Pepe as a racist shibboleth and then when anyone called me out on my racist shibbolething, I show them that he's the mascot of Hong Kong democracy.

Hell, in the murky waters of philosophical semiotics, I'm not even sure my bad-faith arguments were even wrong.

True. Real time AI translation can't come fast enough I guess.

Watching Midnight's Edge, Nerdrotic and Doomcock bag on Disney is what I do when I'm not reading this forum. Nice to see I'm not the only one.

I stumbled onto their channels when I was suffering with Rings of Power and needed to find reviewers who weren't "this show is amazing and the only reason you might dislike it is because you're a sexist racist homophobe transphobe white supremacist fascist!" This also brought me to Critical Drinker and The Little Platoon and others.

I even got into Eric Kain because he came around after his first, way too sunnily optimistic take on the show and is now down here in the Pit of Despair with the rest of us trolls and undesirables that it's a steaming godawful mess. Though he likes the new Little Mermaid!

Anyway, if we get Season Two Rings of Power, it will be much more bearable to know that there will be other people watching and reviewing it to shreds. At this stage, I only expect to watch it to see how bad they can get, and how they're going to mess up canon this time round.

Stop consooming.

If you reward them with your attention, of course they will make more. Just read the books again. Or buy a used copy of the Peter Jackson films and watch those.

Yeah, I was in a group of 10+ people watching the first season which was a lot of fun just to talk about how bad it was, and only contributes 1 view to their stats, which made it worth it to us. I wouldn't have watched it alone.

Is there any source for indiana jones reshoots beyond just this guy? The movie comes out on June 30 - They premiered it at Cannes on May 18. I have no idea how this would possibly work - the Writers Strike (ongoing since May 2) means you can't actually rewrite anything AFAIK, organizing actors, travelling, shooting, and doing post-production in that short amount of time? I can't find anything in the trades about it either, surely someone would have spotted Harrison Ford or Phoebe Waller Bridge or someone on a plane or out and about.

The reshoots were earlier this year.

Right, the way OP phrased it suggested the reshoots were because of the reception at Cannes which struck me as impossible. I figured there were probably standard post production reshoots last year as with a lot of these types of movies

Yeah, sorry. It does seem that they showed a cleaned-up version (much less scornful of Indy) at Cannes and that didn't wow the audience as expected, so there is still talk about what changes, if any, will be made before it gets into theatres near you.

Things that are true:

  • They stretched their balance sheet to by 20th Century Fox, raising their debt to $45 billion to close the transaction. They have quite a bit of breathing room on the maturity and they obtained it under quite low rates, but that's a lot of debt.

  • They have to buy out Comcast from Hulu, making the payment in 2024, but the price is subject to debate. Still this is likely to be a substantial cost in the $15-20 billion range.

  • The Little Mermaid is posting dissapointing numbers especially internationally. Compare the box office to date to the Lion King at similar points which grossed $1 billion outside the US.

  • Nelson Peltz is an activist investor whose position is strengthened by these struggles and should he succeed will get more cash for shareholders from the company.

Now onto judgment calls:

  • Net working capital (the source of the $200 million) isn't the best tool for judging liquidity.

  • Acid test ratio (the ratio of just cash and liquid current assets over liabilities) isn't great, at 0.3 but most big businesses use current liabilities to fund a lot more than intended. This isn't as solid a measure as it once was.

  • More concerning is Altman's Z score which is a loose prdictor of bankruptcy at 1.94 that's pretty poor for a major company (compare Tesla, Alphabet, and Meta in the double digits where over 3 is good). It's not the worst in their industry (AT&T which bought TimeWarner recently is much worse at about 0.4).

  • All of these do indicate that Disney is going to have some very tight belts for a while especially if their tentpoles underperform (especially given the expectations that the new Indy film is unlikely to outperfrom).

Hearing Peltz health is in serious decline. So probably eases up on them a lot.

The Little Mermaid is not earning the overseas profits it needed to do, and seemingly on the second domestic weekend it also fell back (this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!)

Of course they'd prefer the tale to be about racism. I've seen some articles from alleged news sites that might as well have been penned by Disney. Which seems to have contributed to the impression amongst normies that the movie actually opened well.

But the truth is that these movies are bankrupt. The race lift is just one attempt to make them distinct from the still-classic originals. The other being the CGI which is generally worse and less expressive and "fun" than the original animation. Then there's the added length for a kid's movie...

All these factors taken together, the movie's failure seems over-determined. The question is why did equally bad adaptations like Lion King succeed?

Lion King did better because it came first. Little Mermaid is doing worse because people are catching on. That's one possible explanation, at least.

Tell me: why should I believe a single rumour from a guy who has been predicting Kathleen Kennedy's ouster every year for the past 5 (at least)? In fact, I've never heard of him being right about anything.

It's all just rumours, if you know better tell me!

I'll believe it when I see it.

But it does tickle my pickle watching Disney increasingly flounder in the global market. Allegedly. While sure, there are nonsensical BLM protest in the UK and elsewhere, and an argument can be made that our identity politics are being exported globally, it may perhaps just be Western Europe. Russia doesn't care, China doesn't care, India doesn't care, South America doesn't care, the Middle East doesn't care. I'm not even sure Africa cares. You might be able to extract money out of the PMC types who want to be Party members in good standing. But most everywhere else in the world looks at you like you have 3 heads when you shove a black Ariel in their face and the songs have been rewritten to be about respecting waman instead of romance.

I'm reminded of Tucker's debut twitter monologue, where he talks about how Americans are profoundly ignorant about what the world thinks of us, or what it's even like at all, because our information diet is so rigorously controlled. And while it's marginally difficult to believe a massive global corporation like Disney is as blind as the rest of us rubes, maybe they do believe their own bullshit a bit more than I thought. Editing black people out of their Chinese releases not withstanding.

I have to admit, when I look at domestic box office numbers I mostly just see noise (a big factor imo is competing films entering the market), but to give some reference:

Disney's previous two big movies were Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3.

Ant-Man started at $106M its first week, then dropped to $32M (70% drop) and $13M in the next two weeks.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 went from $118M to $62M (47% drop) to $32M.

The Little Mermaid went from $96M to $41M (57% drop) (also this week isn't finished yet)

I think it is just that theaters are dead, and we can blame the covid restrictions for killing theaters.

I went and saw The Machine a week ago. I looked through multiple times for the show. All the seats were empty. The movie is in no way "woke", its about a white male comedian / party animal. The action was good, the comedy was funny, and it had a bit of heart. The critics gave it 29% on rotten tomatoes, the audience gave it 87%.


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