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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31615 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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If lion-keeping had a small chance of gestating a cure for cancer, would this change your calculus?

Your lion is high risk for your neighbours, but also high reward.

Alec Baldwin wasn't hanging around with loaded guns for shits and giggles: he was trying to make ART. Fairly prolefeed-tier art, true, but do you want to live in a safetyist world where no-one dares pick up a paintbrush for fear the chemicals in their paint might flick into someone's mouth and cause freak allergy anaphylactic shock?

He violated onset safety rules. Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it. And armorers normally check every gun before every scene. Both of these normal safety precautions were skipped here, to my knowledge, so manslaughter/negligent homicide/depraved heart murder/whatever the case may be charges make a lot of sense.

That society is a safetyist mess does not mean that safety should be completely disregarded.

Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies

Well, yes it is... stochastically. For every time a man is close to a gun, some proportion of the time he will point it at another person, just as a probabilistic fact. You can decrease the amount of times this happens by detering said behaviour through punishment. But you may rapidly see that the side-effects of the deterrents become more pathological than the things they were meant to deter: namely, fewer movies will get made because movie sets need more safety commissars, which are both expensive and obstructive.

How many N movies are you willing to sacrifice to decrease "actor really does point gun at someone else" by M%?

For me the number is negative, because I prefer "watching movies" to "infinitesimal increases in teamster safety".

That society is a safetyist mess does not mean that safety should be completely disregarded.

Less strawmanning, please. I'm not saying COMPLETELY disregard, merely disregard much much more. And if you think society is a safetyist mess, you apparently agree with me, making it doubly odd that you would strawman me.

Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it.

This is simply not true.

And armorers normally check every gun before every scene.

Indeed, and this was supposed to have been done, and was claimed to have been done (but clearly was not, or not correctly)

Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it.

I can scarcely believe this to be true. I have seen probably hundreds of scenes where a gun was literally touching against someone’s head.

Fake guns and special effects go a long way. Even firing a blank in that position will kill someone.

Are you sure they were actually filmed using a gun and not a prop designed to look like one?

No, but if that is possible (not saying it isn't, it certainly sounds like a good idea) why are real guns ever used? Why would anyone expect a real gun to be used?

It literally doesn’t matter; that’s the whole point here. Baldwin was also sure that the item he is using is a perfectly safe prop. How is he more culpable than the other actors who held the prop guns to other people’s heads?

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