domain:nfinf.substack.com
Rude.
I'm not about to check whether the numerical market situation of Disney products in 90s Germany lines up with my memory of that time and place. You can have the win if you like. Here, if it please you: Disney is purely and entirely a girls' thing. Have a nice day.
Charlie’s (Underage) Angels
Why does everything in the UK seem to revolve around underage girls, if they aren't being trafficked to a crown prince by foreign intel agents, they are being gang groomed or assaulted by immigrants, or leading crusades, now they are wielding skyrim tier bladed weapons. Will the UK soon have a squad of teenage girls in uniforms battling in the streets for their country's freedoms?
Nobody’s being obtuse. The claim
Disney was always for chicks, some people fell for a marketing ploy when they decided to chickify a couple boys IPs.
is IMO ahistorical and incorrect, and you haven’t made any attempt to back it up. Several people including me have said so and provided receipts, and you’ve spammed snark at them.
McDonalds sells salad too. Mattel sells Ken dolls. Don't be obtuse.
I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment, if only because conservatives live in more of an inherently audio-visual culture compared to liberals.
Hard disagree. Left uses audio-visual tools to push their agenda all the time. This photo of a drowned toddler did more for triggering mass immigration acceptance back in 2015, than any other rational argument at the time. Sam Alinsky's Rules for Radicals explicitly calls for tactics like this - such as using small provoaction in order to garner "disproportionate" attention that can be then captured and used for propaganda. If anything, the right is way behind this tactics mostly because it is leftists who are now in power and who are to large degree prone to this sort of asymmetrical warfare. Although even that is questionable as long as the left can keep pretense of them being the underdogs.
And they would never obtain power because they cooperate in the face of defection.
He has a point though. Not sure what went on in America during that time, but when I grew up in the 90s, there were numerous disney products that were pretty obviously marketed towards boys. No idea what happened in the 2000s, though.
There’s a tendency to simplify choices - ‘unfortunately we couldn’t keep this once-great thing neutral and now we have to oppose it’ becomes ‘it never had any redeeming qualities, it’s getting what it always deserved and if you think otherwise you’re not really one of us’.
That's a lot of words for "I don't like the way poor people look and find them less sympathetic than cartoons".
Which is......a take.
It addresses everything, you just won't accept it.
I don't live in 1930, and neither do you.
The Dixie Chicks were not cancelled in any meaningful sense. What happened to them was:
- Their record label continued to sell their albums, and to fund the production of more albums
- Their concert tour continued as scheduled. Extra security was provided in response to potential threats by disgruntled randos.
- Some radio stations stopped playing their songs, others did not. At the time radio stations had very little concentrated ownership or control, apart from ClearChannel (which did not stop playing their songs).
- The mainstream media was happy to give them multiple opportunities to air their views, including letting them appear naked on the cover of entertainment weekly
- Some of their fellow artists supported them, others expressed disagreement and criticism
- Some of their customers got angry and stopped purchasing their CDs
- George Bush said they are and should be free to speak their mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_comments_on_George_W._Bush
Pretty much any cancelled conservative would have been extremely happy to receive this treatment. From what I can tell, George Bush is right - this is basically how freedom of expression should work. Say what you want but don't complain about a moderate decrease in sales.
For comparison, Milo was:
- Banned from all major social media (which didn't really exist at the time of the Dixie Chicks controversy)
- Had his books cancelled
- His speaking appearances were cancelled by institutional gatekeepers, with threats by disgruntled randos occasionally cited as a pretext
- Mainstream media did not give him high profile appearances where he could express his views or defend himself
Kanye suffered all this, in addition to having his bank accounts closed (retaliation for saying Jews control the banks, which they obviously don't).
A trivial example is "You should learn to repair your car" while ignoring that we don't live in the 90s anymore and most new cars cannot be repaired without special tools and software (sometimes even by third party professionals).
"Work harder" isn't bad advice so to speak but it's not that useful.
This gets into the core problem with much advice: It is rarely actionable and usually of the form "you should be like this" instead of "you should do this specific thing that you both know how to do and are capable of currently doing".
A classic example is "eat less to lose weight" which isn't actionable for most people (they'll just get hungry and fail to eat less) as opposed to for example "log every meal and snack you eat to make it easier to avoid pointless eating and try to eat these sorts of foods that keep you satiated longer".
Okay, so, you've probably heard of rabies. It's an incurable disease (at the very least it used to be, and it still is once symptoms appear) spread by biting that makes people bite others and be violent and semi-mindless in general.
Ahem. Ravies doesn't do that.
It can make people confused or aggressive but even confused or aggressive humans don't go around biting others (at least any more than people who are confused or aggressive because of dementia or drugs do). Human to human spread of rabies basically doesn't happen.
I mean, sure? Got any suggestions for how to do that? I don't think, "Do everything you can to make sure patients never get prices," is particularly helpful for that problem.
That's Motorola Mobility (subsidiary of Lenovo, smartphones and stuff) or Motorola Solutions (safety and security products). Neither have anything to do with IC manufacturing.
Laziest, sloppiest, slowest and least thorough genocide ever. I suspect the Gazans breed faster than the Israelis manage to kill them.
Huh? I could swear they're still making shortwave radios.
Respectfully, isn't this just a refusal to employ conflict theory? I might be missing your point entirely because you don't really specify what you mean by "revenge narratives".
It seems entirely obvious to me that in an outright conflict between opposed groups, principle (i.e., mistake theory) doesn't need to enter the picture at all for "revenge" to make perfect sense. Revenge, as in a direct attack on the opponent's ability to wage the culture war, either by demonstrating that they cannot follow through on their promises, or that they are too weak to protect their confederates, or by eliminating their actors directly. But maybe I'm missing your point - direct culture warfare needn't be "revenge" for prior slights; one may also strike with initative.
I absolutely believe that in politics, the merits of a given idea are almost perfectly irrelevant. Especially in a representative democracy with elections every few years, where voters are memoriless idiots and politicans are necessarily sociopathic opportunists. The entire system selects for media impact, not merit. There is no mechanism for determining merit. Yes it looks good and virtuous when a principled individual takes the stage and makes his case, and we can nod along sagely, but when the chips are down and it comes to casting ballots, 9 out of 10 people will monkey-brain it and vote for whomever stuck in their memory as being on their tribal side.
I'm not saying that this is good or desirable, or that there is a better way, or that either side is wrong or right. Just...please acknowledge that there is an ongoing conflict, not just mistakes being made.
maybe Motorola if you squint
Motorola hasn't existed for 17 years and spun off their cpu / microcontroller business back in 2004 to Freescale which was since acquired by NXP in 2015.
I'm the worst potential audience in the world for "romantasy" (and believe me, Tonstant Weader Fwowed up when I learned this neologism) so I can't speak for the mass audience of women readers of such stuff.
But I think it's more about soft porn (as per the devolution of the Anita Blake series) than romantic attention, as having two or more supernatural beings lusting after your PI/Wiccan/half-Fae heroine means you can stuff in the adult scenes that publishers crave for page-turning appeal; you can describe the ravaging by the werewolf tech executive founder of the billion-dollar startup on pages sixteen to twenty, then go for the seduction by the vampire biker gang leader on pages thirty to thirty four, and maybe throw in some will they-won't they UST between your hard-boiled heroine and her on-again/off-again boyfriend who's a half-demon sorceror running his own rival paranormal detective agency sprinkled all through the novel (volume six of the fifteen - and growing! - volume Susie Superb, Witch Attorney series, on sale in every good bookstore now!)
See Laurell Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, where she completely lost the plot, as the main focus is "I gotta get pregnant so I need to bang every single hot guy I encounter". All this is for ostensibly magical purposes, so that's why she has to have sex with fairies, humans, every other supernatural being, etc., but that's only the figleaf for "and now here's sexual encounter number fifty-six".
EDIT: I think the main difference between men and women readers of erotica (shall we say) is that the guys will go straight for the Hawt Action without much need for justifying it, but women need a lead in (hence the establishing of the love-hate relationship between Hot Guy Numbers One Through Four and the heroine before they bang, or the Merry Gentry "The Goddess said we have to bang so we can get our old magic powers back. Yeah, it's a divine command, so strip now").
I agree with your general point, but Milo's problem in particular was that he alienated his base with his comments about homosexuality age-gap
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