Testing123
12d ago
The podcast idea is great. It makes perfect sense for a Vice President given that their official responsibilities are quite light but they have a lot of authority. Take two hours per week to go on Rogan or NPR or wherever and give a general update on what the administration is planning to do. Vance would be perfect for that.
Testing123
14d ago
I'm still liking season 2 a lot, but it feels like a significant step down from season 1. I think the first season did a better job balancing the every day life of the severed workers against unfolding the plot mystery, whereas season 2 is a lot more focused on the mystery. Plus I find all the scenes with the bosses boring because the show won't reveal to us what their true motives/goals are, so it's always this cryptic emotionless stare-down with no context, and it gets old fast.
Testing123
20d ago
I read that recently Scott prefers to put a ton of cameras at lots of different angles around a scene, which ostensibly lets the actors have more freedom to move around and not worry about blocking, but also gets so much coverage that he can do far fewer takes and then edit everything together in post. This makes his filmmaking super fast for the scale, but also renders a lot of his shots and scenes less interesting and well-crafted.
Emilia Perez and “Sacredness” of Concepts
I follow the film industry pretty closely, but like most other film buffs, I had never heard of the movie, Emilia Perez, until a few weeks ago when it was nominated for 13 Oscars, the most of any movie this year. For comparison, the Godfather got 11 Oscar nominations. For that, and many other reasons, it’s easily the most culture war controversial film of the year, and IMO, for pretty interesting reasons. If you want a truly unexpected Culture War punch in the face, then go watch it on Netflix. Otherwise, full plot SPOILERS ahead.
Emilia Perez is about a Mexican drug lord who undergoes a MTF gender transition. She fakes her death, leaves her wife and two kids behind, lives as a woman alone for a few years, but then tries to get them back in a somewhat Mrs. Doubtfire manner. Also, the film is a musical. Most infamously, there’s a song about getting gender reassignment surgery - https://youtube.com/watch?v=VHyPL2fBTHs.
I watched it and thought it was bad. I don’t like musicals to begin with, but I thought the musical sections in particular were terrible, boring, and didn’t further the plot. I thought the characterization was confusing and the plot really wacky and dumb. But in its favor, I admire the film’s ambition, and I think it has some occasionally interesting visuals and character dynamics. It’s not mindless streaming slop, it’s stupid auteur bullshit. 3/10.
The interesting culture war aspect is that Emilia Perez perfectly wedges itself between two broad factions on the left. Left-leaning liberals seem to love this movie. The Academy Award voters are mostly very old Hollywood lefties, and their 13 Oscar nominations seem to indicate that Emilia Perez says something culturally important and meaningful. But left wing progressives hate Emilia Perez. Just search for it on Reddit and you’ll find a million hate threads highly upvoted about how terrible and offensive it is.
The best comparison I’ve seen is to the film, Crash, which one the best picture Oscar in 2006. The same left wing cultural split applied, with the moderates thinking it was a brilliant film about the complexity of race relations and the progressives thinking it was nothing more than racial stereotypes and white savior narratives.
In Emilia Perez’s case, progressives think the film’s portrayals of transness and Mexico are offensive. A lot of the blame is put on the writer/director Jacques Audiard, a cis-gender white Frenchman, who in an interview I haven’t seen, admitted that he did almost no research into transness or Mexico for the film. He seems to be interested in the setting and ideas of the film in a generalized and aesthetic manner, not in any deep “I have to say something important about society” way.
Having watched Emilia Perez, I genuinely don’t get the claims that it’s offensive toward trans people. If anything, the film is way too nice to trans people. The movie expects us to immediately sympathize with Emilia Perez after her gender transition even though she has lived a life of carnage and mayhem and is implied to have killed tons of people. It’s not impossible to make a sympathetic character there, but IMO the film really doesn’t sell it. Her personality basically transforms from “crazy murderous psycho” into “standard Western educated progressive” overnight without justification. The Mexico complaints have a little more justification and are more complicated:
- The movie gets a bunch of details about Mexico blatantly wrong. For instance, there’s a scene early on in a court room where a lawyer talks to a jury, but there are no juries in the Mexican criminal justice system.
- None of the three main actors are native-born Mexican speakers. Zoe Saldana is Dominican and speaks with a Dominican accent. Selena Gomez is ethnically Mexican but US-born and speaks with a really terrible fake Mexican accent. Carla Sofia Gascon was born in Spain. The movie briefly inserts plot reasons for some of this, but Mexicans and Spanish speakers say it’s really jarring.
- Furthermore, Mexicans and Spanish speakers say a lot of the dialogue is just terrible and completely un-Mexican. Nobody talks the way Mexicans actually do.
- A lot of critics complain about the movie using Mexican stereotypes and treating serious issues in a flippant way, like cartels and drug violence.
I think some of these complaints are legit and some are typical progressive culture warring. I think a huge does of the criticism of Emilia Perez is that a white guy made a movie about a “Brown” country without being excessively apologetic, and if the nationalities were reversed (ie. a Mexican made a movie about France), no one would care. The best counter-example is Moulin Rouge. It’s a 2001 musical about a real French landmark in the French capital that deals with French culture (burlesque, bohemian lifestyles, etc.), but it was written and directed by Aussies, all the actors are from the Anglosphere, and all the music is American or British. Yet no one gave a shit about misrepresentation of French culture or thought it was offensive to French people.
What I find more interesting is that much of the criticism of Emilia Perez seems to come down to what I would call the “sacredness” of topics in popular culture. The progressive left tends to hold non-white cultures to be more sacred than white cultures, therefore Emilia Perez is offensive and Moulin Rouge is not. Similarly, Emilia Perez (a goofy musical soap opera) is offensive for not portraying Mexican cartels in a super serious way, but that same criticism isn’t applied toward movies that portray the American Italian Mafia as cool or goofy, like Goodfellas, Analyze This, Mickey Blue Eyes, Corky Romano, that episode in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, etc.
The phrase I've seen a lot in the criticisms is that Emilia Perez "uses Mexico and its culture as an aesthetic," to which I think the the director would YESChad. He doesn't think Mexico and its culture are so incredibly important and sacred that they are above being an aesthetic. The director also made a weird movie that used the Wild West as an aesthetic (The Sisters Brothers). I believe the progressive critics are fine with using France and its culture as an aesthetic. It all comes down to what people consider sacred or not.
Likewise, transness is such an intense and sacred topic on the left that many consider it offensive to put it in any film that doesn’t treat it with the utmost seriousness and deference. I’m pretty sure that’s the basis of the anti-trans claims against Emilia Perez. It doesn’t actually say anything bad about transness or trans women, it’s just inherently offensive to make a goofy movie that doesn’t take transness serious enough.
Prompt: what is a rational approach to assigning sacredness in society, especially when it comes to comedy? Is it ok to joke about the holocaust? Is it ok to joke about 9/11? Is it ok to joke about Muslims? If my best friend’s son dies in a horrible freak accident, is it ok to make a joke about that the very next day? Where should the lines be drawn? How do we distinguish between personal lines and broader societal lines? My sense is that the progressive left has conquered this space in the popular culture, but I haven’t seen a coherent alternative beyond 4chan “make fun of everything” culture. Are there better models out there?
Testing123
1mo ago
Yes! That's it, thank you.
Testing123
1mo ago
I'm looking for an online essay, I think from a blog. It was a criticism of the high-speed train in California. It received a lot of pushback in the comments on Hacker News but made a lot of interesting points. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
Testing123
1mo ago
Are you me? Errant Signal and Super Bunnyhop are classics, I've watched a bunch of SBH's videos a million times. It's kinda sad that he stopped doing mainstream game review/analyses and did more passion project topics and then everyone stopped watching his videos.
Testing123
2mo ago
The hotly anticipated Civilization VII continues to unveil its leaders, and they’re raising a few eyebrows. Full list - https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Leaders_(Civ7)
There are some classic heavy hitters: Augustus, Charlamagne, Xerxes, Napoleon, Hatshepsut, Queen Isabelle of Spain.
Then there some fairly obscure figures that even most history buffs probably don’t recognize: Trung Trac, Pachacuti, Queen Amina.
Then there are some odd choices that seem to indicate the series is being a bit more abstract as to what constitutes a civilizational “leader,” like Confucious and Benjamin Franklin. They were never heads-of-state, but they were extremely influential figures on states and societies.
But some of the leaders are real stretches: Machiavelli? Ibn Batutta? And most controversially of all… Harriet Tubman? She did great stuff, but she was nowhere close to being a national leader or a major cultural force. If they wanted a black American, why not go with MLK? Or at least Frederick Douglas?
It’s hard not to see woke forces at play. Back in the CIV 4 days, the vast majority of leaders were men and disproportionately white or Asian, and the game was politically insensitive enough to let you play as Stalin. Since then, the leader options have become far more diverse, especially in Civ VI. For instance, if you were to try to think of French leaders who embody the nation, who would come to mind? Probably Napoleon, Charles De Gaulle, Louis XIV, maybe Henri IV, Napoleon III, or if you wanted to stretch what “France” is, you could say Vercingetorix or one of the Merovingians. Instead, Civ 6’s French leaders were… Catherine De Medici and Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Who are some leaders that should be included in Civ VII that haven’t been in any previous games?
Testing123
3mo ago
One of the theories is that seed oils are more calorically dense and cheaper than traditional alternatives, so they encourage more eating.
Testing123
4mo ago
Can we see the answers without being a subscriber?
Testing123
4mo ago
Maybe this is a better fit for the Friday Fun Thread but IMO it’s culture war-y enough for here.
Here’s a thought experiment based on a thread that has popped up in /r/whowouldwin:
Imagine that every single person in Liberia gained a 180 IQ overnight. Also, they were imbued with an extraordinarily strong sense of patriotism such that they never wanted to move away from Liberia for more than a few years for school or special training. Could Liberia reach a GDP of $1 trillion by 2040?
Relevant stats: Liberia has a population of 5.3 million, a GDP of $4 billion, and a GDP per capita of $750.
Testing123
4mo ago
I absolutely loved it. IMO, the main culture war angle was that left-leaning critics desperately wanted it to be anti-Trump but the narrative is stubbornly a-political (or rather, the narrative and the characters treat politics as a meaningless game they indulge in for the sake of adrenaline rushes).
Testing123
6mo ago
Thanks for this, one of the best Motte posts I've read in awhile, and not just because I read Who's Your Caddy a million years ago and always wanted to go back to it during the Trump era. IIRC, Trump is the first chapter.
Testing123
7mo ago
https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
Wow... Gavin Newsom is up 12 cents TO BECOME PRESIDENT.
Testing123
8mo ago
I think one of the strangest instances of a woke injection into a film/story just occurred and it seems to be flying under the radar. FULL SPOILERS AHEAD for Under the Bridge, a Hulu murder mystery show that’s based on a non-fiction book of the same name. For what it’s worth, I thought the show was pretty good despite what I’m writing here.
In real life, Rebecca Godfrey wrote the Under the Bridge non-fiction book. In the Hulu show, Rebecca Godfrey is a character portrayed by Riley Keough. Godfrey (speaking about her character henceforth) was born in Vancouver Island in Canada, moved to New York to start a writing career, and then at the start of the show, she moved back to Vancouver Island temporarily in the late 1990s to write a new book on her hometown.
But soon after moving back, 14 year old Reena Virk is murdered seemingly by a group of her friends. The story is so shocking and intriguing that Godfrey begins investigating the crime independently to write about it. In addition to talking to a bunch of the kids involved, Godfrey reconnects with Cam Bentland, a local police officer investigating the murder. Cam is a Native American who was adopted by white parents, and Cam is also implied to be Godfrey’s ex girlfriend. They soon rekindle their romantic relationship and begin using each other to get different informational angles on the case.
Most of the show consists of uncovering what happened with the murders, and for the sake of this post, I don’t need to go into it. Basically, a group of very troubled girls (aged 14-16) got pissed off at one of their own and decided to beat the shit out of her. Then one girl and another guy took it way too far and murdered her.
Godfrey becomes a key media player in the very high-profile case. She works both with and against the police to push the kids in different ways, and at one point, she passionately argues for the innocence of one of the main accused kids. Meanwhile, Cam eventually discovers that she was adopted by her white parents through the Adopt Indian Métis, in which the government encouraged white parents to adopt Native American orphans. Cam feels disgusted by the revelation, disgusted with her parents for being involved and never telling her, and disgusted with herself for being a cop, so she leaves the police force and decides to try to connect with her real family.
To reiterate, this is based on a true story. Reena Virk really was brutally murdered by her friends, and Rebecca Godfrey really did write a book about the murder. So it might surprise you to learn that in real life:
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Rebecca Godfrey had no direct involvement in the murder investigations. She wrote her book after everything occurred.
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Cam Bentland, the Native America cop, was entirely invented by the show.
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By extension, Godfrey’s lesbian romance with Cam was entirely invented.
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I have no in depth knowledge of Godfrey, but she was married to a man, and I haven’t seen any evidence that she was a lesbian or bisexual.
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While there really were some heinous laws regarding Natives in Canada, none of that stuff had anything to do with the murder of Reena Virk or the Under the Bridge book.
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Godfrey presumably approved of televised adaptation of the show, but she died at the beginning of its production, so it’s unclear if she approved of any of these additions to the real story
Discussion points:
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If Godfrey wasn’t aware of these changes, then Hulu’s writers portrayed a presumable straight woman as a lesbian/bi woman in a fictionalized account of her. Is that a step too far in wokeness for the average media consumer?
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Can someone clue me in on what actually happened with the Adopt Indian Métis program and programs like it? In the show, it’s implied (I think) to be literal kidnapping of Native American children by the Canadian government, but I have a hard time believing that’s true.
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Maybe this is too broad or vague, but is it disrespectful in some sense to take a real tragic story in which most of the participants are still alive and use it to prop up unrelated woke narratives? I’m not meaning this in an obviously baity or culture war-y way. I mean, does calling that “disrespectful” make any sense? Is the concept of respecting true stories in this sense valid?
Testing123
8mo ago
I don't know about "most" serial killers, but IIRC, a lot of the most high-profile ones were big in the 1970s and early 80s, and then serial killing went into decline. Like school shootings, it seemed to be partially driven by social contagion.
Testing123
8mo ago
My understanding as an outsider aligns with yours. The vast majority of murders are either really easy to solve ("he was probably shot by that guy who stole his girl who he's been beefing with for the last three months") or almost impossible to solve ("he could have been shot be any one of 100 gang bangers in the neighborhood"). The genuine who-dun-its are more fun and interesting, but far rarer, and there's probably no systematic way to solve them. At best, you can throw some smart people at these cases and maybe they'll be lucky enough to identify and pursue the right thread. But ultimately, these cases have a terrible cost-to-success ratio for police forces and probably shouldn't be prioritized as a high-level objective. Maybe there's room for private investigators here?
EDIT - Thinking more about it, it makes sense for the FBI to have a system in place for dealing with complex, especially dangerous criminals, like serial killers or Ted Kaczynski types. From a law-and-order perspective, it's probably worth it to spend a lot of money and resources to take these guys out because they set bad precedents and spread social contagions.
Testing123
8mo ago
Related - I think someone posted on the SSC subreddit that the the vast majority of the most popular celebrities (as measured by social media followers) were musicians, as opposed to actors, athletes, or any other entertainers. People generally seem to like music more than any other entertainment.
Testing123
10mo ago
I'm not sure how to get a group of specialists, but as a backup, go on Reddit or Twitter some other forum and post a bounty for whomever gives you the best advice.
Testing123
10mo ago
I think that (monogamous) couples have an obligation to maintain their attractiveness, within reason***. When you entered the relationship, you gave up the ability to have sex with anyone else on the pretense that that you will get your sexual satisfaction from your partner, and part of that satisfaction comes from their physical attractiveness. If they choose to erode their attractiveness, they are hurting you and violating their relationship obligations. IMO, like sexual fidelity, this should be made explicit at the start of relationships, but should otherwise be considered implicit unless the obligation is explicitly waved,
***"Within reason" = within the ordinary bounds of aging, illness, and unexpected events. Obviously people are not going to be as hot at 50 as at 25, and obviously we can't completely control the course of our aging.
Which is to say that I think you should consider yourself in the moral right here. You have a moral right to be dismayed by your wife's fading attractiveness. This doesn't make your wife a horrible person or anything, but you shouldn't feel bad for wanting to nudge her back in your preferred direction.
Testing123
10mo ago
I recently watched the Paraguay episode of Parts Unknown, and he said that he was (IIRC) 57, and that he was already the longest living male member of his family in many generations.
Testing123
11mo ago
IMO, Javier Bardem "passes," but now that he mentions it, it is weird that there are no obviously Middle Eastern cast members. The Fremen are all either black, Mediterranean, or mixed race (like Zendaya).
Inspired by a few Reddit threads: why is there less sex and nudity in movies and television today than in the past?
I don’t have any raw data to back up the claim that there is less sex and nudity these days, but that’s my sentiment and it’s shared by many others. The best concrete example I can think of is Game of Thrones. The early seasons were (in)famous for the amount of gratuitous nudity; Saturday Night Live did a sketch mocking the “guy has sex while another guy getting a blow job watches him through a peephole while another guy watches him through a peephole” scene. Yet, the final two seasons, when it became this massive international phenomenon that everyone on earth watched, had (IIRC) no nudity at all and very little sex.
The second best concrete example I can think of is Marvel movies. There have been 30ish of them and (IIRC) there are no sex scenes at all, and maybe even no make out scenes (I think there’s one in the first Captain America). Sure, they’re PG-13, but so is 007, and they still have sex scenes.
Compare this to the 80s and 90s when every action-oriented movie ever had sex scenes, if not also completely gratuitous nudity. For instance, in Commando, Arnold Schwarzenegger throws a bad guy through a motel wall, and just happens to reveal a naked lady with giant boobs having sex. Or if there was any romance, it would inevitably result in a sex scene, even a clothes-on PG-13 sex scene. These seem to be nearly dead in the modern day.
So why do modern movies have so little sex and nudity? My guesses:
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Internet porn has lowered the value of movie sex and nudity. In the 1980s, getting porn was expensive and annoying, so getting to see boobs in an action movie was a legitimate draw. These days, everyone has infinite internet porn, so who cares? (Counterpoint – celebrity nudity still has a special appeal over porn nudity, ie. the Fappening, or people going to see No Hard Feelings to see Jennifer Lawrence naked)
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MeToo, combined with the backdrop of Jonathan Haidt’s thesis in Coddling of the American Mind, have made (young) people very squeamish about sex. We are in a new low-tier puritan age where men are terrified of being accused of sexual assault and women are terrified of being sexually assaulted, so sex is now a much heavier subject and gratuitous nudity has lost its appeal
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here seems to be a new stratification in culture where everything is either hardcore sexual or has no sex at all. Everything is porn or innocent. People are either kinky a f or extremely shy around sex. Tv shows either show no nudity or they’re Euphoria with tons of sex and nudity. Movies are either porn or puritan.
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lockbusters are now designed to appeal to overseas audiences more than ever, particularly to China. Non-Western audiences (particularly China) are more sexually conservative than Western audiences, so film studios are reducing sex and nudity. In some cases (like China), literal censors might intervene against a movie if there is too much sexuality. Any other ideas?
Testing123
11mo ago
The game works best in unexpected moments of chaos. Like, you and the squad will be running to the next objective when suddenly an enemy horde side swipes you out of nowhere, so you start sprinting away with lazers flying over head, and you dive into cover, and you start fumbling with stratagems to get an eagle cluster out there but the fucking arrows are weird, and then a robot gets around your cover and you have to switch back to your weapons and you start shooting wildly and then your idiot friend died and he's calling for a reinforce but fuck fuck fuck youre barely surviving. Stuff like that.
I'm starting to think this is an unfortunate reality of the nature of games. Any game, no matter how complex, can be quantified and refined strategically to squeeze the margins as much as possible to get a potential win. This seems to, by its nature, result inevitably in boring strategies. Examples:
Chess: The game has evolved tremendously over the last 50 years. We now have extremely long memorized set-ups, mechanical endgames, and tons of ties.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate: The Meta has converged on Steve and Sonic, objectively the two best characters, who both have extremely boring (albeit very different) play styles. Steve is an ultra-camper, Sonic just runs away until sudden death.
Basketball: Either move fast to get a dunk/lay up or just shoot 3s. Set-ups and plays for mid-range shots are a waste of time.
Debate: College and high school debate seems to be nothing but rules-lawyering gimmicks like talking extremely quickly or "spreading" among so many topics that your opponent cannot possibly defend against all of them
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