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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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So Georgia Meloni, the supposed far-right firebrand of Italy, is now planning to radically open up visa access for non-EU migrants. PiS in Poland are planning similar measures, even as they've let in record number of workers from moslem-majority countries since they've took power. Of course, the rhetoric from both the Italian and the Poles are all about asylum seekers and illegal migration. Sort of reminds me of GOP rhetoric about stopping people at the border even as they get jawboned by business lobbies to liberalise legal avenues for work visas.

It's the same thing here and it deserves to be pointed out that these fake populists in Europe are ultimately in thrall to the same power system as the old parties are. What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism. Both of those individuals may be colorful but ultimately the driving force is structural.

Of course, my explanation is boring, perhaps even banal, which is why it will never take off. Not enough drama. As for these developments, I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Incidentally, when reading about Max Weber's life in recent days, I found out that he was quite nationalistic as a young man and even campaigned against cheap foreign labour (principally from Eastern Europe). Quite ironic for someone who later became a liberal intellectual, but also amusing in that it shows that this thing has been going on for a lot longer than people realise and it likely won't end soon either.

Painting Meloni as “far right” was always weird. Another contradiction - she’s an unmarried mother living ‘in sin’ and yet claims to be a good Catholic.

In general there is a sizable portion of the Italian right that runs vague apologetics for Mussolini and is semi-descended from postwar fascists the US tolerated in case of an Operation Gladio type situation where they’d be needed to keep the country from falling to communism. But these shouldn’t necessarily be considered “far right” by euro political standards, often they’ve been part of mainstream parties previously. It’s just that unlike Germany and France there wasn’t the same clear historical dividing line between what counted as ‘center’ and what counted as ‘far’ right that was as vigorously policed as it was in much of Northern Europe.

Lastly, I’m skeptical of the Polish Muslim immigration chart. Not because I don’t think PiS would do it, but because I can’t find any sources online that suggest those kinds of visa counts to citizens of Muslim majority countries are being granted. Which countries are they?

Painting Meloni as “far right” was always weird. Another contradiction - she’s an unmarried mother living ‘in sin’ and yet claims to be a good Catholic.

Mussolini did not lead a very conservative lifestyle yet I don't think anyone disputes that he was, well, a fascist. Admittedly, being a conservative and a fascist aren't the same things. But the "far-right" epithet contains multitudes, as it were. Someone's personal habits isn't always indicative of their political beliefs, at least stated ones.

I can’t find any sources online that suggest those kinds of visa counts to citizens of Muslim majority countries are being granted. Which countries are they?

These are being collated by a Polish-American who lives in Krakow. The source is the ministry of labour and the PiS government isn't even disputing them as far as I am aware. After all, why would they? It's their own ministry. These numbers are quite recent and haven't filtered in the wider Anglophone press, probably because of the language barrier. The dataset is in Polish, hence the translation. I've looked at Eurostat data and seen supporting evidence, though their methodology slightly differs and as such probably underestimates the number. Eurostat also hasn't released their 2022 numbers yet, that will only happen this autumn.

As for countries, it's places like Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Turkey etc. Lots of Uzbek cab drivers in Warsaw these days.

Admittedly, being a conservative and a fascist aren't the same things.

...admittedly?

Fascism proclaimed itself revolutionary and was opposed to conservatism. That people conflate them is just absurd.

Yeah, anything I searched on Polish immigration from Muslim countries was an order of magnitude lower than the numbers in that guy’s chart. Immigration is hard to stop, that’s the reality. Malaysia now has a large Nigerian population, a bunch of the Grab (Uber) drivers I had there last year were Africans, usually overstaying student visas. They almost all bring dependants obviously. In the end any government that isn’t explicitly opposed to mass immigration and takes big steps (like Denmark’s slowly developing ethnic preferences system that will largely limit migration to ‘Western’ countries) in that direction will see mass immigration.

Still, if you do find a source for the Polish figures, let me know - I’m curious.

What interests me most about the whole immigration rigmarole is what I can only describe a lack of will to power on the part of these right wing parties. Surely they don't expect these immigrants (or, more to the point, their kids) to actually vote for them, right?

This to me is the most baffling part of the Reagan-Romney era GOP, their seeming total lack of concern for preserving their power base. Reagan '84 lost the Hispanic vote by 28 points, he signs an amnesty in '86, and the GOP is rewarded by Hispanics voting for Dukakis by a 40 point margin. At this point the GOP was freshly sniffing power (never mind that they couldn't win the House) after having been wiped off the map by the Ellis Islanders for half a century. '92? Same story, 36 point loss. '96 was outright comical, a 52 point loss. Goodbye California! I bet Pete Wilson was regretting his vote for the '86 IRCA at that point. W in 2000? Another over 30 point loss. W '04, the best a Republican has ever fared with the Hispanic vote? A 9 point loss if you're optimistic, more like 20 points if you're not. Meanwhile, as refugees from Communism have become less represented in the Asian-American vote they've done nothing but trend left and now vote Democratic almost as strongly as Hispanics. From McCain onward, the story has been the same, 33-36 point losses in the ever-growing Asian and Hispanic vote. At no point in this time did the GOP above the House level see a problem with this.

Worse yet, the economic winners of Reagan/present-era neoliberalism and free trade have been blue cities while Republican-leaning interests constitute an ever-shrinking portion of the American economy. The Republicans conserved next to nothing (They did relatively well with gun rights, but IMO this is massive cope relative to everything else they lost.) and their voter base is now outnumbered and relatively poorer than their opponents. What was the point of it? They've converted precisely zero leftists and shit on their own voters so long that they are now hated and lose their own primaries to whatever populist loon rolls into town. I get that big business thinks they're winning and can just cozy up to the Democrats, but what happens when they no longer have credible opposition? Surely a half-century of being taxed and bullied by the FDR coalition wasn't the plan.

The only thing keeping the GOP going since 1988 is that their base has become more geographically efficient faster than it shrank, and REDMAP and Trump 2016 were probably as far as that was going to work. It's going to take an epic act of self-sabotage by the Democrats, one such that they outright lose the Mexican-American vote, to bail out the GOP, and I don't see it happening. Nixon/Reagan arguably only happened because the Irish and Italians hated black Great Migrants enough to start voting Republican, and there isn't another Great Migration in the cards.

Good points and I've wondered the same thing. Yet I think there's a certain kind of mildly autistic right-winger who keeps trying to show charts and tables to GOP functionairies saying "See! if you continue on this path, you'll be permanently out of power. Look at California!". The thing is.. they know and they've already heard that pitch 50 times. So ignorance cannot be the answer here.

So why don't they care? I suspect it may simply be due to donor influence. The rich people donating to the GOP want the gravy train to go on and ultimately the voters don't matter much.

Additionally, even very diverse states like Texas or Florida are now fairly red so the "demographics is destiny" argument is weaker today than in the past.

Texas and Florida are dealing with very particular situations enabled by the exact ethnic mixes(Cubans in Florida, or in Texas the ability to exploit the centraco/Mexican divide) showing up, quirks of the local economy(Texas in particular has a GOP that benefits strongly from being able to fearmonger about democrats enacting stringent oil and gas regulations), an absolutely incompetent opposition, ideologically compatible immigration, and probably on some level a willingness to play less than 100% fairly.

At this point the GOP was freshly sniffing power (never mind that they couldn't win the House) after having been wiped off the map by the Ellis Islanders for half a century.

FDR did much better in the old South than he did in those parts of the US which were most subject to immigration. For example, in 1940 he won about 85% of Alabama and Georgia but only about 50% of Massachusetts and New York. Ellis Islanders do not seem to have been the core of New Deal Democrat power. The immigrant / Democrat alignment seems to have come later than that.

It's not so much that the Ellis Islanders were the nationwide core of Democratic power, as that they were decisive for FDR in the northeast. The New Dealers are littered with the names of Ellis Islanders and their descendants, people like James Farley (who did much to build on Al Smith's strength in cities are solidify the Democrat/Immigrant marriage) and Robert Wagner. Al Smith got nominated in '28 for a reason, and it was that he'd flipped New York at the state level, very nearly took it in '28, and did take Massachusetts (something Woodrow Wilson failed to do in '16, and only did in '12 thanks to the Roosevelt/Taft split). Not bad against a popular almost-incumbent in the form of Herbert Hoover. You can't tell the story of 20th Century politics in Massachusetts without talking about James Curley any more than you can tell that of Michigan without Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Alabama, and whose brand of politics probably drove Michiganders to vote for another politician from Alabama in the '72 Democratic primary, the infamous George C. Wallace).

FDR (and Harry Truman) was wildly popular with Southerners and lavished much patronage on the region, such that contrary to popular conception the South remained Democratic-leaning long after their temper-tantrum over civil rights. IMO the strength of Nixon and Reagan's coalition gets somewhat overrated by big electoral victories against generally mediocre Democratic candidates when in fact neither ever won the House. The GOP would have to wait for all the Southerners who came of age under FDR and Truman to start dying of old age before they really took over the South.

Great comment.

DeSantis seemed to do well in Florida with Hispanics (granted Cubans as unique). Maybe covid changes things up?

Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?

How's this for drama: the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".

Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?

I've been hearing about the automation makes work superflous for well over a decade now. It reached a crescendo in 2016-17 with Erik Brynjolfsson's book and subsequent forecasts by various institutions of a rapid job less. Never happened. Can AI be different? It could, but people are vastly overestimating AI progress. The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve. We're still a long away from that.

the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".

Alternatively, some capitalists prefer high immigration as a way to cheap out, reduce bargaining power for workers and saving on productivity-enhancing investments while pocketing the change in terms of dividends. To be clear, I think some on the left are driven by moralistic arguments but they aren't the ones driving policy. Capitalists are, but they are opportunistic enough to use the shield of leftist morality to bludgeon their political opponents. It has the added benefit of raising one's social status in the domestic arena and people care deeply about status, too.

The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve.

It's not the key. If AI was inacapble of self-improvement but could learn complex work at midwit level (115-125) and drive humanoid robots, it could displace like 80% of workers at the minimum.

Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?

Shifts in technology has already made huge reams of low-skilled immigration almost completely unproductive and a net drain. Western countries no longer have unskilled labor roles to stuff Refugees into, which exacerbates issues with assimilation and engaging with the new culture. I've got a lot of friends who are 1st/2nd-generation Australian-born Asian-descent, and the jobs their parents did upon arrival largely either do not exist any more in Australian Metros or are gated behind Bachelors degrees & English proficiency.

Especially now the classic Unskilled jobs have gone from requiring literal manual labor and little else, to increasingly being low-skilled service jobs which require a bunch of language skills and cultural awareness that make them difficult for fresh immigrants.

And has that caused a collapse in immigration?

Nope. Actually having jobs for the low-skilled immigrants seems uncorrelated with the desire to bring them in.

Market forces might seek cheap foreign labour but market forces do not always dominate. Markets want no minimum wage, child labour, slave labour, drug legalization, total freedom to hire and fire, free trade, world peace, unlimited working hours, no unionization, no social welfare for the unemployed...

It's ideology and society that decides what is and isn't permissible, where sliders should be set regardless of economic advantage or disadvantage. The Italians could tell business leaders to grow up, they're not going to lower the minimum wage to zero and let employers give workers amphetamines, that's just not a serious proposal worthy of consideration... They could do the same with regard to immigration.

Hey, if my employers offered me amphetamines, I'd take them.

Employers offer free amphetamines when they expect workers to use them on the job, and then they set up the job so that you need to use amphetamines to do it. The amphetamines are not optional, and you don't get to stop using them when you have health issues or other issues.

Sounds like a you problem, I have ADHD haha

I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).

This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.

selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want

No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion (e.g. I'd prefer moslem Indonesians over Christian Nigerians). There are many people willing to work for low wages as streetsweepers, garbage men, nurses etc. You're not just importing workers. You're importing a people with its own distinctive culture. And cultures are sticky (tied to ethnicity/race). Denying this is the blank slate approach which has failed and continues to fail.

This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism

Some amount of racism is necessary, but it should be pragmatic/selective and not universal, e.g. you prefer some groups over others rather than penalising everyone with a darker skin color. There's no point in pussyfooting around this issue and the right should drop its naïve colorblind approach.

No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion

This is not too hard to fix---just do the salary sorting independently for each position after you've decided how much of each you want. Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race. Again, saying the first thing that comes to my head just to emphasize how close it comes and how easy the problem is, even just English proficiency might suffice. Knowing nothing else, would you prefer a natively English-proficient Christian Nigerians over random Muslim Indonesian? Seriously trying to come up with a filter would do dramatically better than just looking at race. Immigration officials have so much more information about prospectives and this completely overwhelms any evidence provided by race.

Saying this another way, filtering by race doesn't make sense unless you can somehow argue that race is actually a strong proxy for merit/cultural compatibility/whatever you want from immigrants. Even the most extreme HBD positions don't deny a huge overlap in distributions of whichever characteristic you care about, so such a position would seem ridiculous.

Race cannot be gamed (except for edge cases). The whole point of race is its inherence. Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.

even just English proficiency might suffice.

Why is having had British colonial masters a marker of cultural compatibility?

Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race.

Cursory, adj: hasty and therefore not thorough or detailed

Why "cursory"? Because you want it to be gameable? Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.

That said, I think racial profiling is indeed unfair if it goes beyond defining vague priors. It's desirable to filter immigrants for their comprehensive human capital.

It's just… Suppose you were not allowed into the world's richest country on grounds of your character, which was found wanting not through stereotyping you based on race, but through, de facto, systematic measurement and determination of your similarity to your predominant racial type and dissimilarity from natives.

Of course, this can be couched (and even understood by practitioners) in entirely non-racial terminology, like Harvard does – they would just have a holistic psychometric definition of a desirable immigrant, derived, say, from anonymous surveys of natives' evaluation of character and assimilation success.

Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?

Would you be willing to recognize this as a fair choice, or would you support work to undermine it as covertly racist?

Is this supposed to be a trap? I would definitely recognize any accurate judgement like this as fair! Race can't mean you refuse to judge people as bad in certain ways the exact same way it can't mean you refuse to judge people as good in certain ways. Now, the way the human brain works, there's a very strong bias towards seeing more of a stereotypical negative trait in a member of another racial group than actually exists. Therefore, for this judgement to actually be accurate, some care needs to taken to account for this bias in the exact same way you account for any other cognitive bias if you actually want to be right about the world.

Any legible meritocratic evaluation immigrants can and will game, Goodharting the hell out of it and wrecking themselves in the process.

Goodhart's law isn't an overwhelming force that overwhelms everything else. We still accept legible measures in deciding who gets positions in every other aspect of life and, while obviously not perfect since nothing is in the real world, they work far better than just deciding based on race. Your argument here seems to be a generalized counterargument to any kind of meritocracy at all. Even if you accept some worst-case, all-powerful Goodhart, you can just change the measure when you notice it's turned into something harmful---make it a moving target to keep ahead of Goodhart.

Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.

You really can't resist the personal attacks can you.... This one I'm completely confused by, are you mixing me up with someone else? I'm very curious to hear what possibly gave you the impression that I'm particularly good at manipulating bureaucracies. Is this just your "vague prior" based on perceived race?

Because you actually want it to test your merits – namely, opportunism and ability to manipulate bureaucracies to your benefit? See, this is exactly whom people who are arguing for racial criteria would like to not let in.

You really can't resist the personal attacks can you.... This one I'm completely confused by, are you mixing me up with someone else?

I think this can also be interpreted as a general "you", somewhat awkwardly phrased. At least it didn't occur to me to be a personal attack until you wrote your reply, and as you observed, it would only make sense in a context where you'd be known as a beaurocratically savvy type.

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

The HBD answer for this is "regression to the mean". You actually do have to judge the race and genotype of the people showing up and immigrating to your country, because their children are going to be more like the average member of their ethnicity. When you allow someone to immigrate into your society, you're not just bringing in them but all of their descendants as well. If you take someone who had some rare, atypically high IQ and some hypothetical conscientiousness quotient that's great, but you have to be aware that chances are their children are going to be closer to the mean, and race is actually the best proxy we have for this afaik.

If you select a specific subgroup from a certain ethnic group as immigrants, their descendants will regress to the mean of that subgroup and not their entire ethnic group.

I don't think that's intrinsically much of a "HBD answer", and my impression as an - I should say at this point - "HBD reclaimer" is that regression to the mean is used too often as a thought-terminating cliché to allow that speaker to arrive at their preconceived conclusion. Clearly there is no perfect regression to the mean, because otherwise we would not have HBD/populations with temporally consistent different means at all.

A biased sample of a base population may well regress some part of the way to its mean - but it won't regress all the way, or evolution would be impossible. Do you know anything about how far it will regress, and how fast?

Breeder's equation (which, as Greg Cochran noticed, somehow doesn't have a wikipedia article)

is that regression to the mean is used too often as a thought-terminating cliché to allow that speaker to arrive at their preconceived conclusion.

or how does it look to people who don't understand regression to the mean?

Greg Cochran

Link for @4bpp

You can think of it this way. In the first case, the parents have 20 extra IQ points. On average, 50% of those points are due to additive genetic factors, while the other 50% is the product of good environmental luck. By the way, when we say "environmental,” we mean “something other than additive genetics.” It doesn’t look as if the usual suspects—the way in which you raise your kids, or the school they attend—contribute much to this "environmental" variance, at least for adult IQ. We know what it’s not, but not much about what it is, although it must include factors like test error and being hit on the head with a ball-peen hammer.

The kids get the good additive genes, but have average "environmental" luck—so their average IQ is 110. The luck (10 pts worth) goes away.

The 120-IQ parents drawn from the IQ-85 population have 35 extra IQ points, half from good additive genes and half from good environmental luck. But in the next generation, the luck goes away… so they drop 17.5 points.

The next point is that the luck only goes away once. If you took those kids from the first group, with average IQs of 110, and dropped them on a friendly uninhabited island, they would eventually get around to mating—and the next generation would also have an IQ of 110. With tougher selection, say by kidnapping a year’s worth of National Merit Finalists, you could create a new ethny with far higher average intelligence than any existing. Eugenics is not only possible, it’s trivial.

A biased sample of a base population may well regress some part of the way to its mean - but it won't regress all the way, or evolution would be impossible. Do you know anything about how far it will regress, and how fast?

I actually don't, because there's a lot of variability in that kind of question. If you take someone who got starved of oxygen at some vital moment as a child and lost 20IQ due to some environmental insult, then the upwards regression of their children will be extremely dramatic. If you have someone who somehow lucked into getting a precise combination of alleles that end up with a 20 point IQ boost above the average, then you're going to get an extremely dramatic reversal.

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

If someone keeps preferring racial discrimination to other methods of filtering, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist. If filtering by wealth or education leads to disparate impacts, that might be racist but it also might just be a preference for rich, educated immigrants and the disparate impact on people from the Middle East or Africa is too bad. If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.

If someone keeps preferring racial discrimination to other methods of filtering, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist.

As other point, you are just using the word "racist" as a conversation stopper. Many other types of "filtering" are also verboten and can make you a sexist, classist, islamophobe (or other phobe), ageist, ableist and so forth, and all it takes is to "prove" disparate effect. So in the end who cares if Skibboleth think it is racist, everything is racist of course.

Second, people are not playing by the same rules. Filtering by race (or sex or age or whatever) is okay if you point out to disparate outcomes. So under your definition, somebody who claims that black men are disproportionately target of police brutality is racist and sexist just by virtue of using such a filter, right? Moreover if one looks and sees that black or Hispanic people prefer to vote for black/Hispanic politicians, this means that they are themselves racist as well.

If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.

You're making the worst argument in the world.

The central example of 'racist' is a neo-nazi who yells racial slurs and innocent passers-by. You're purposefully conflating this (terrible) behaviour with the far more reasonable behaviour of having a preference over the type of immigrants ones country imports.

Am I? If anything, this seems the opposite - deflecting criticism by pointing to a more extreme example. The most extreme example of a racist is a neo-nazi who yells racial slurs and whatnot. This is not the typical example of a racist, and would have been pretty unusual even in the most racist historical environments. If someone holds strongly racially prejudiced views and those views motivate their politics and behavior, it is entirely fair to characterize them racist, even if they are polite in person to the object of their animus.

The actual policy we're discussing is an immigration policy that favours people who are similar to the existing (often native) ethnic group. In other words, a political manifestation of the preference for living near people who look like you.

And more or less everyone, from the immigrants themselves to the most full-throated supporters of multiracialism and immigration does prefer to live among people like themselves.

As far as I can tell, the only sin of the people you call racist is that they want more people to be able to act on the revealed preferences that we all share.

The actual policy we're discussing is an immigration policy that favours people who are similar to the existing

Is it? The comment I was replying was:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

which was in response to:

I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".

Which suggests an immigration policy that favors people from particular countries or regions. As @atokenliberal6D_4 noted, this is completely unnecessary. As far as I can tell, the most parsimonious explanation for this is a preference for racial discrimination over evaluating individual candidates (which is what we already do).

And more or less everyone, from the immigrants themselves to the most full-throated supporters of multiracialism and immigration does prefer to live among people like themselves.

I don't have a problem with the proposition that most people are racist (though only some people make racism central to their political preferences). Most people are liars, but I still think honesty is good.

The White Australia Policy was also a pretty central example of racism.

Fair enough. It is not just racism it is justified racism then. Chinese immigrants have proven they could assimilate and thrive all around the world. So are the other east Asians. So are the Indian upper classes, jews and whites. So if you have to choose immigrants - you choose from cultures with proven track record. If racism leads to better outcomes for my country - so be it.

If you need 1000000 workers today what would you choose - a million Koreans or a million Chechens?

A million Chechens, obviously, because Chechens are white and Koreans aren't.

Of course, this is a nonsense scenario for multiple reasons, but most prominently: we don't have to issue visas based on such crude measures as race or even nationality. We can and do discriminate amongst applications based on the qualities of individual applicants.

A million Chechens, obviously, because Chechens are white and Koreans aren't.

...and there in you demonstrate that the "uncharitable strawman" of HBD is not a strawman at all.

I'm not sure anything I say should be taken as indicative of HBD positions, since I am being facetious.

again, six or a half dozen regardless.

???

He was making an uncharitable strawman in order to take the piss out of HBDers, and you're saying it's evidence that it's not an uncharitable strawman?

More comments

...Pretty sure @Skibboleth is being sarcastic, not speaking plainly.

Six or a half dozen regardless.

  • -13

Arghhhh!!! The entire point is that it's not justified. If I needed to choose 1000000 workers I wouldn't arbitrarily straitjacket myself into needing all of then be from the same country/race---I would just pick the million best from everywhere the best way I can. There are so many other much more useful ways to distinguish people from each other. I am completely dumbfounded why this point is so hard for people to grasp.

And it’s worth noting that arguing that, say, whites assimilate to Italian culture better than southeast Asians, who assimilate better than Africans(or the same hierarchy for HBD) might be accurate, but it’s still racism. It’s just justified racism.

This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism.

Finish that thought.

From a woke perspective those societies have deep-seated and incurable racism and xenophobia towards the differently-colored and differently-cultured. Seems cruel to inflict it on them when otherwise equivalent, lighter immigrants are available & won’t have to face such hardships.

When the immigrants are in the country, their race is all the woke talk about. But you want colour-blindness in admissions? I thought we didn’t do that anymore.

I can't speak for atokenliberal6D_4, but I want both colour-blind immigration criteria and colour-blind institutions.

Me too, in theory. IQ test the lot. But I have to make allowances for the fact that the woke will inevitably use them as props for their racial oppression obsession, and this isn't going to make integration or even peaceful cohabitation easy.

Most accurate ≠ most useful.

If I can select from two pools of people, one Asian with an average IQ of 100, one Middle-east/African, with an average IQ of 90, why should I spend time looking for candidates in the group with a lower average IQ?

Hypothetically I might be able to devise a mechanism to accurately sift through both populations that finds 100% of the qualified people from both groups. But given I know one population is just a better pool of candidates there is little utility in going for the lower IQ group so long as the higher IQ group has enough qualified candidates, which it does have. All you are doing is wasting time and effort.

In a real world scenario the situation is abundantly clear. You don't want to waste any time on a worse pool of candidates since your error margins are going to be wider with a pool where the unqualified outnumber the qualified. This error margin is not just relating to work performance but baseline function in society. These errors cost lives and I find it very hard to weigh the alleged 'economic benefit' of mass immigration with descriptions from little girls of how they were gang raped over years, pictures of little children torn to pieces after someone intentionally drove over them in a truck, or descriptions of teenagers tortured to death in their own homelands, that were much safer prior to these 'economic benefits' arriving.

As for your own argumentation, sidelining peoples instincts as racism does little to foster understanding between two differing viewpoints. I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa. I assume you have good intentions and that your tend and befriend instincts are a valuable part of your humanity that has great utility and benefit to those around you. But it's not for a lack of issues that your instincts cause others that I refrain from such insinuations. I'd appreciate if you could do the same.

I think the relevant pro-HBD point here is reversion to the mean; you really should care about what the 'pool' of people you're drawing from looks like, because you'll soon have a new generation that looks as much like them as the parents you cherry-picked.

I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.

Also not a problem if you reject group intelligence differences, of course, which is the official and default stance.

If you select a specific subgroup from a certain ethnic group as immigrants, their descendants will regress to the mean of that subgroup and not their entire ethnic group.

Sure, depending on how you define the subgroup, but if you can figure out a good category-marker that isolates a population with consistent differences in outcomes or measurable cognitive ability, go for it. You might end up cleaving along cultural lines rather than genetic, but if it reproduces in the new environment it's all good.

Do you have any evidence to support the assertion that the children of successful immigrants tend to "revert to the (racial) mean"? That's not what I would naively expect to happen. My anecdotal experience is that people from successful families tend to be successful themselves.

reversion to the mean

Race is still only a rough proxy on what the "mean" is. There can and have been upper class elite sub groups within a race that consistently produce smarter kids than the rest of the racial group that they belong to.

I guess you can get around this if you're willing to make sterilization a condition of immigration, or deport that portion of the 2nd+ generations who fail to meet your standards, either way committing to perpetually top up your country's population by cream-skimming the developing world. (holy dysgenics, Batman!) But I think either would be generally considered far worse than just prioritizing high-performing immigrant groups along racial lines.

You chose two horrible solutions, of course they sound terrible. And since you don't know what "mean" they are reverting to you could get a good estimate by testing two generations on an IQ test. Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent. Some set of scores are going to indicate that either the "mean" is very high for those particular people, or that you've got a three or four generations before it actually gets bad. And banning people for a problem they might create 60-90 years from now seems totally unnecessary.

Or if you don't want to do an IQ test. You can pick a set of reputable international and domestic universities, and require that two generations of family have degrees from those universities.

Or don't even set strict limits. Just say "prove to us that bringing your family here will make us better off, here is how some other people have done it".

I'll happily admit that my two suggestions are awful, but I know they would work and I'm not sure that's the case with your proposals.

Test either two parents and a kid, or two kids and a parent.

Assuming we know we're creamskimming from a population with significantly worse outcomes on average than our own, this sample size isn't big enough to be relevant in figuring out if the family is from a good-outcomes subgroup (assuming such groups meaningfully exist) or if they're outliers who got lucky and had a kid that didn't regress to the mean too much. If it's the latter, you're going to be having problems in 5-15 years and not 60-90, as France is finding out right now.

That said, it does hint at an interesting solution where immigration authorites could do careful geneological work and data analysis on potential immigrants, to connect the relevant educational attainment and available testing results across large populations, to try to identify these high-performance subgroups. But again, though less horrible than my original suggestions, it still smacks far too much of eugenics ('racial credit scores'?) to be seriously considered. As opposed to quietly raising barriers to immigration from certain countries while easing them from others.

You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

Education, skills and employment are not the same country by country. You care about the box 'race' because it serves as a proxy for a whole lot of information. Hell, even within countries the difference in ability despite education level, like in the US, you have big differences between races. The first few paragraphs of this article demonstrates this point

On top of that, 'race' to some extent, and ethnicity and country of origin to a greater extent, serve as great proxies for the credibility of claims made by hopeful migrant laborers. I know from experience there exists great stigma around foreign laborers in construction work, often times for good reason. I've heard similar things from my programmer friends deriding 'Indian code'.

I, from experience, would conclude that a lot of the claims made by foreign laborers are lies. Getting your foot in the door is much more important than being true to your own abilities. Especially since most imported labor is not working high skill jobs for high pay, but working low skill jobs for low pay. And they know this.

The incredibly detailed applications that the potential immigrants submit. Which are then reviewed in detail via the staff hired with the very high fees the applicants pay.

We are talking about two separate things then. Where I am from immigration officials are not paid by the applicants. They work on the tax payers dime.

It's not a search through a pool! You process all the applications.

I don't know what point or to what end you are making with this assertion anymore. I explained what I meant by 'pool'. If that contextualization is still going over your head I can't help you.

A lot of them are pretty easy to verify. If someone claims to have a job offer in the US, you can track down the employer and check. TOEFL is a serious test.

Which is completely separate to the matter at hand. If all we needed to vet immigrants was a company willing to hire them this discussion would not exist. The question pertained to where immigration was being pooled from.

My argument is that we don't need to use proxy measures like race when we have actual measures. Look at the actual schools that people attended, or the actual employers that they had.

Like I already said, even with information like education, race still gives a lot of information. Which can be better than education. There is no reason to not factor that in.

The comment to which you were originally replying said

And that comment was replying to the suggestion that countries focus more on Asian countries than African for immigrants.

My whole point is that you don't need proxies when you can evaluate people individually, and since individuals give detailed checkable applications, and pay for them such that you can hire as many examiners as you need, you don't need proxies, and therefore don't need to pool.

Like I said before, pooling is not something you do. It's something that is. There is no reason to not use all the information available, which includes country of origin, when selecting applicants so long as you don't have a shortage of applicants. Country of origin is not a proxy any more than education is. Outside of a US context there is an extremely clear benefit to limiting your selection to higher IQ countries before you go for lower IQ ones. I don't understand why someone would be against it.

If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

It might be more efficient, but is the thing you're improving efficiency on really that much of a constraint in the first place?

Like it would take X amount of time for 100 immigration officials to thoroughly sift through 1000 applications. You're suggesting we save those 100 people a lot of time by implementing a race based admissions system, why not just double or triple the amount of immigration officials? It's not like they're a big item in any country's budget.

Where I am from the process is very expensive. But regardless of that, I would just kick the question back to you. Why have a more expensive less efficient immigration system? I don't get it.

Except it's not really a problem. The benefit I am pointing out still exists even with that accounted for so long as there is not a shortage of applications from higher IQ countries.

But besides that, your solution is much more restrictive than mine. I'm not sure why you are so eager to discriminate based on current wealth over race.

If I'm understanding you right you're arguing for race based admissions on the basis of efficiency. My counterargument is that efficiency isn't that an important factor if something is cheap in the first place, and so to answer your question this leads to the claim that it's unfair and unwise to exclude otherwise qualified people for the sake of saving some small amount of time and money when they would likely contribute much more to the country than that initial cost.

You're cutting costs when you streamline the immigration process, but you're also getting fewer quality migrants as a result (and there might be a separate argument for this being a good thing! But I don't think it'll hinge on the efficiency of the immigration process).

Your argument means less to me right away since I already said the process is expensive. But whatever.

I don't understand why the import country should care about 'fairness' or where you are getting the idea of 'fairness' from in this context. The process is at no stage fair to anyone. It's literally designed to be the opposite. The import country is picking and choosing to suit it's own need. Nor do I understand how it is unwise to have an exclusion criteria based on race/country of origin. So long as there is no shortage of applicants from higher IQ places there is no problem. And if that shortage ever comes about the economic landscape of the world would be so radically different from what it is now we would have to have a separate conversation, since this one is predicated on people actually wanting to come work in western countries.

You do have to select from pools of people. Where do you think immigration authorities are getting their data from? People are pooled together into races and countries by birth. If authorities choose to accept data from both pools they have to sift through the 90 IQ pool and the 100 IQ pool. If they just flat out refuse every single person from the 90 IQ pool on the basis of very easily identifiable characteristics they don't have to do that and can as a result be more efficient in their search through a higher quality pool.

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100. What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half. It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.

I don't insinuate that you suffering from some psychological ailment because you seemingly favor immigration from Africa.

(Edited) This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else. I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.

I'm sorry but this is complete nonsense. Imagine you had a list of 1000 numbers and wanted to find the top 100.

No dude, what you are doing became complete nonsense. It starts of with imagining a hypothetical that is antithetical to reality. We don't have a list of 1000 numbers, we have applications earmarked by a list of traits. Country of origin, country of residence, employment status, spousal status, education and so on. The point made by me was that accepting applications from countries with low IQ ends up wasting a whole lot more resources than applications from higher IQ countries. There is nothing nonsensical about this proposition. It is extremely simple.

Maybe this is a difference of governance, but where I am from the processing of any foreign born people, be it migrants or any other sort, is extremely costly. It takes time to go through the various bureaucracies to confirm the authenticity of the claims made. It's not picking 95 over 91.

What you are proposing is randomly splitting the list into two halves with a very slight weighting so that larger numbers go into the first half, and then picking the top 100 from the first half.

It's not random and the weighing is not "very slight".

It is blatantly obvious that this is not going to give a very optimal outcome.

From a purely mathematical perspective, picking from the higher number group is very obviously more optimal than picking from the lower number group as soon as you factor in that every pick has a cost and that sorting through the list of numbers is not as simple as your hypothetical makes it out to be.

This topic more than any other seems to produce nonsensical logic like the above that I know people here (including you) would immediately catch talking about anything else.

How mutual this feeling is.

I don't know what else I'm supposed to conclude except agreeing with the progressive point that discussions about racial differences are always going to be ruined by the mother of all cognitive biases.

This is not a discussion about racial differences. So far no one has gone off the deep end into denying IQ. So what we are left with is optimizing policy based on reality. Or making banal insinuations about biases whilst pretending we are immune to it ourselves.

Matter of limited resources. If in region A 8/10 are ok and in region B 3/10 it is better if you concentrate your capacity in A.

You're inventing practical constraints which don't exist in practice, in order to justify stark racism.

Immigration officials don't go out and search for potential immigrants. They wait for someone to come up and say "Hey, I want to immigrate, I meet all of the criteria you have set for the kind of immigrant you want, here is $10,000 to compensate your agency for the time it takes to check that I'm not lying."

You are constrained in "people in state department that are not complete morons". As is the case in every bureaucracy. And that is hard to scale.

Again, this is a non-problem that you are inventing to justify your racist preferences.

Processing visa applications is not rocket science. You have a set of criteria applicants have to meet, the applicant has to supply you with adequate proof that they meet that criteria, if they don't you reject them.

But ok, let's assume this is an especially cognitively demanding task that requires high quality public servants. So you hire those people, offering whatever wages you need to get them, and set application fees at a level that covers their wages. That might reduce application numbers, but that's not a real problem.

It's also not a problem that you're taking high quality workers from other sectors of the economy, because doing it allows you to import more high-quality workers to replace them. The Nigerian genius that would have been rejected under your preferred policy gets to come in and do good things.

There is no practical constraint that requires us to put a blanket ban on people of certain races.

Not at all. It seems that there are few assumptions that you make - like that there is universal right to apply to move to a country.

I come from the other way - there is need for additional X people in my country and there are different places from where we can pull them.

Of course it makes sense to dig where the vein is rich to get to X. If you overlook a nugget here or there - tough luck for the nugget.

You cannot be racist to non citizens that are outside of your country because there is no obligation to view them as equal.

More comments

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

If two groups are separated for so long that there are clear genetic differences they aren't going to be easy to integrate. First off there are differences between groups and they are to some extent biologically different. If they have been separated for that long their cultures will have almost no common points.

There are clear genetic differences between Germans and Italians, yet both have been successfully integrated into American society.

The US barely has public transport or walking streets. It is also a wildly divided country.

Do you know many Italian Americans? The ones I know are very aware that their name ends in a vowel and that they are distinct from regular Americans. I would have expected them to be more integrated, but Italian Americans are still quite distinct. German Americans barely know that they were originally German, in contrast. I think Poles fall into the same bucket as Italians, where they feel quite separate from mainstream America.

@ZorbaTHut, any idea why this looks so utterly cursed on my android device running chrome?

Pic included.

/images/16889584783924904.webp

Ugh, our comment rendering has been a problem from the beginning.

Added to the general comment preview megabug; this isn't quite part of that, but it basically is.

I had spaces between the >

and the quote.

too many spaces after the greater than sign, so it is doing both a quote and code block (I'm assuming). Looks like the line height for code is messed up.

Just quote:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Just code block:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Both:

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Just the code block looks about as fucked to me.

Looks similarly cursed on firefox on my laptop

Same for me.

Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate?

Streetlight effect, skin color is something that it is easier for weird systemetizing types to measure rhan more abstract but predictive qualities like personality and cultural backgrounds so naturally the latter is dismissed in favor of the former.

We could just do IQ test to get in. But nobody proposes that besides me. And it would end up being 80%-90% immigrants not from the current countries going to Europe.

You're not alone, i support iq testing immigrants too

That’s here though. Probably popular here. Maybe in broader society until someone points out that all the immigrants are coming from certain countries and it’s racists it would be as popular.

What's driving large-scale migration isn't some evil plot. It's not Soros or even the Kalergi plan. It's just capitalism.

Funny that. A while ago I posted that you get the same policies no matter who's in power, and I was assured that you totally get different policies, it's just that no one cares about immigration, so you get 5 more years of Merkel. When it's turned out you get the same policies even if you vote for "far right Nazis", that's just capitalism, you see, and I wonder how the hell is anyone supposed to disprove that? Below we have yet another thread about how a totally capitalist corporation, totally just following profits, drove yet another franchise into the ground, and that too is totally mundane (though even the most hardcore mistake theorists don't sound convinced at this point).

What exactly would we need in order to disprove this line of thinking, short of a transmission from inside a volcano where someone explains their plans in detail while twirling their mustache?

There are two options for countries, go liberalism or the Iran route. Even Poland is opening up for mass immigration and the Ukrainian parliament is ramming through all sorts of LGBT stuff in the middle of a war. Either one cooperates with the neoliberal order or one takes the Iran/North Korea or Russia option and goes to war against it. China might be the exception simply because neoliberalism can't cut them off.

Italy is a deeply indebted country with a chronic unemployment problem. If the major financial institutions want them to increase their labour supply they either comply or they will get regime changed or have their economy crashed.

Few countries are actually sovreign, the majority of them are effectively controlled by finance.

PiS apparently backpedalled on the non-European migrant visa program.

Iran actually has a big problem with Afghan migrants, doesn’t it?

Aren't Russia, Iran, etc., and the rest mainly beneficiaries of the fact no one wants to immigrate to those countries in the first place? It's not like they have especially exclusionary migration policies... I'm not sure about Iran, but Russia is mired in demographic decline as well (probably accelerated a few years ahead by the R-U war: lots of dead young men there); why wouldn't they want immigrants?

Russia had positive net migration for most all post-1991 years, first a large fraction of that was ethnic Russians repatriating, now it's mostly Central Asian Muslims, both gastarbeiters and permanent setllers. ... of course, streams in and out are quite different in IQ etc.

The less is Russia connected to modernity, the higher the odds of them getting a better birth rate are.

At least for that the war is good.

I mean, if they have a major unemployment problem it seems like ‘increase the labor supply’ has a built in solution- all the people currently unemployed.

Italy is weird, especially in the South a lot of younger people do ‘odd jobs’ their whole lives and because of family property, the welfare state and cheap cost of living their standard of life isn’t that bad, certainly not by global standards.

Yeah but then you’d have to increase wages and benefits until those on the margins of the labor market return to a state of employment.

Which is exactly what was happening pre-pandemic under trump with that ultra tight labor market.

But firms don’t want to pay for that so they just pay people to call you a racist if you point this out.

The median age of Western countries was much lower in previous eras. Had the demographic structure been similar as now, there's no reason why things would have been different. Besides, most migration was intra-European in previous eras. Plus travel was more expensive. All those structural factors are different, precisely because of much greater wealth (in turn a consequence of capitalism).

deleted

Yeah, I think a huge issue is that elites making these policies don't have skin in the game and have to deal with some of the downstream consequences of their decisions. They don't need to live next door to the non-integrating immigrants and their descendants. If things eventually hit Brazilianisation, they can retreat to gated communities or the Martha's Vineyards of the world.

My other thought is that a solution would be to hold out until robotics and AI can decouple the economy from population. But to a degree you would still need a lot of workers in services like healthcare and aged care even if the economy wasn't a problem.

You can't have economic growth in a slowing country

There are so few examples of countries that have had sustained declines in population that this claim seems to lack sufficient evidence. I can think of one counterexample though, Ireland saw a continuous drop in population alongside an overall increase in wealth from the 1840s until 1961.

Theoretically it shouldn't be true either, as long as innovation is happening there will be some source of growth. An aging population might be a bigger problem then a shrinking one here.

The other would be to rejigger the economy to work acceptably in conditions of slowing or stalling growth, but that would require a complete rewrite of our understanding of prosperity -- or at least (not that this is any less difficult) a reshaping of the economies of places like Europe into something less connected to the global financial system, which demands continued growth for survival.

The latter sounds too complicated for me but there seems to be a common sense way in which prosperity could increase with a declining population: With lots of old people dying off GDP per capita increases and people in the prime of their life find that property has gotten a lot more affordable.

I still don't see the appeal. Bringing in lots of low-wage laborers doesn't result in genuine economic growth. If anything, it leads to economic stagnation, because the real driver of economic growth is increases in productivity - of the kind that immigration stymies, because why invest in productivity when the flow of labor is so generous?

I don't know the answer to this, but suspect that it's something horribly short-termist, like goosing projected GDP numbers to placate the analysts & keep interest rates low until the next election.

Anyone remembers (or even heard of) the Insidious? The supernatural series that hasn't made one good movie since the original, like most horror/slasher flicks since the 80s? Well, they just released another movie, one that I didn't even know existed until I went to watch Across the Spiderverse with a friend last night. And guess what, despite the teetering reputation and C+ reviews on Cinema Score, it managed to become a commercial success and knocked the Indy Jones finale with a much bigger domestic box office opening.

This fad has been going on for years but (to me, at least) it never stops being remarkable how big tentpole entries that raked hundreds of millions in the past just manage to fall flat. These franchises tend to be somewhat bulletproof, there's more room for failure and these brands usually wouldn't take a hit due to a few bad entries. Yet, here we are. It seems like Indiana Jones Dial of Destiny might not make back its PRODUCTION budget, let alone break even, that's just out the window. How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within? They could make the Crystal Skull (which still raked good money btw) and get away with it. Now, all of a sudden, DoD is the final nail in the coffin.

Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time. We knew Disney was BS'ing nostalgia when it brought back Palpatine, not coming up with something "daring and creative". It hasn't been a full year since RoP, the excuses went from "they've only revealed the casting, we haven't even gotten a first look yet" --> "it's not even out yet, you've just seen the trailer" --> "you've seen one episode, how can you gauge anything from it" --> "most shows don't get good until the 2nd or 3rd season, give it a chance!" You just can't win here. It turns out exactly as terrible or even worse than what we'd expected, to the point where the brand name gets reduced to the same tier as any other obscure brand like Insidious. Yet, we always have the very same passionate circlejerk defending these movies on every fandom on social media. Nor will we ever see Kathleen Kennedy lose her job. I used to think it was plausible it was a grand conspiracy to fuck over the middle class by subverting our culture and values, then I thought it was just Hanlon's Razor, now I'm not even sure.

I mean, this isn't really that unusual. Horror movies are low-status even compared to schlock like Indiana Jones, but they always make very good box office returns for low budgets, which is why there are like ten Insidious movies.

It's not really obvious to me that the failure of this latest offering really has anything to do with Woke, either. Crystal Skull didn't flop, but it wasn't a smash hit and it burned a lot of the goodwill the series had. And now? Most young people don't know Indiana Jones or care about him.

Most young people don't know Indiana Jones or care about him.

Most young people's PARENTS would care, so you can bet that the gamble here was that these parents would make their kids watch the originals, which are of course enthralling, and then drag the kids to the theater so they could hook them on sequels with new characters into the future, thus sustaining the series as a possible ongoing franchise.

The IDOL seems to be the opposite effect where it’s hated by the online types but I loved and seems like a lot of other people loved. It broke too many rules of the online left and was attacked. Showed a violent black man, a manipulative women with rape fantasy’s, false rape accusation at the one moral character in the show.

More than that, formerly shelved and sold Disney projects like "Sound of Freedom" were outdoing Indy. Considering Disney's apparent cavalier attitude towards money, seeing that kind of ideological adversary gain a win at their expense has to speak to someone. Or maybe it just further cements the idea that these stupid peasants deserved nothing good to begin with.

It’s branding, they see a lot of value in being the company that woke parents can take their kids to or let them watch. It does leave not-woke parents behind, but until some other company can produce good antiwoke content it’s still the kids company by default.

I mean the flaw in that is that there are not so many woke parents, but I suppose that’s a filter bubble issue on the part of Disney.

Ultimately if Disney stock continues to plummet, you’d expect activist investors to clean house. The question will become is the brand so damaged that it can be recoverable.

I think probably yes but only if Disney takes public active steps to disavow some high profile mistakes and out their money where their future mouth is (eg a simple way would be bringing back splash mountain).

Yet, we always have the very same passionate circlejerk defending these movies on every fandom on social media.

Are we 100% sure this circlejerk isn’t astroturfed? Disney and Amazon definitely have the budget for that, and astroturfed social media campaigns aren’t exactly unknown.

It's not necissarily funded by Disney, these days you can have grassroots astroturfing. There are people who comport their entire lives ideologically and will go to bat for anything they think has progressive values in it, and an overlapping group of people who will go to bat for anything they think toxic incel cis white male haters will hate. Tranny Jannies do it for free, and so do these people.

Tone down the seething resentment. We get that you are seething and resentful. You still have to express something more worthwhile to read than raw seething.

grassroots astroturfing

those are diametrically opposed, just look at the words. being super for a corporation, no matter how pathetic, isn't astroturfing if it's grassroots.

these days you can have grassroots astroturfing.

How do you figure? "astroturfing" refers to something that looks like a grassroots phenomenon but is actually a manufactured product. If the grass is real and organic it is by definition not astroturf

That'sthejoke.jpg

Some people are so ideologically motivated that they'll shill for free/for goodboy points.

Judging by your derisive tone, I must assume you get paid to post, then? How much?

I post pro-bono on behalf of my own seething resentment over being told what opinions I should have. I care about storytelling and creativity as a craft, not as a political tool.

That's right kids, Seething Resentment TM. You're soaking in it! When life gives you lemons, don't get mad, get very quiet and tense, so tense pooping gives you a hernia, and only express it online or in massive silent explosions at various slow or indifferent drivers in traffic on your daily commute. Seething Resentment TM. Da na na na nah, I'm lovin' it!

My posts on the other hand are sponsored by - like all great internet endeavours - Stamps.com. Stamps.com - remember stamps?

I think the Indiana Jones thing is part of the wider problem Disney is having right now (after all, they dumped Chapek and brought Iger back to fix things). And as you say, any quoting other people about the problems was dismissed with "this guy has no idea what he's talking about; this guy has been saying it'll flop for years and it never has; ignore them they don't know anything".

But I think even the mainstream critics accepted that the movie did poorly at Cannes, so all the rumours that leaked out about multiple versions because test audiences hated it seem to be correct. And that, in conjunction with things like the Star Wars hotel failing completely after only a year, does make me inclined to think the rumours are nearer the truth, even if not the whole truth.

Will Kathleen Kennedy get pushed out? Before it seemed likely, now it's looking like she's canny enough and an old enough Hollywood hand to be able to fight and throw the responsibiilty back on Iger (who is having his own troubles with the shareholders).

So yeah - for now, I'm sticking with the "ignore that crowd, they have an agenda" gossip-mongers because the way things are going, looks like they are more close to what is going on than the "beautiful DEI casting will always win the day, the Little Mermaid remake was a triumph! (if you ignore everything but the domestic market)" set.

EDIT: I haven't watched an Indiana Jones movie since the first sequel, but I do think there was a good way of having Indy hang up his hat and hand over to his god-daughter, but the makers or producers or writers or whoever was pulling the strings didn't do it that way. Nobody wants to see a beloved hero reduced to irrelevance in his old age, even if that is a more 'realistic' view of life (and for pete's sake, they started off with the Ark of the Covenant, we are not talking about realism in these movies). Snarky quips about capitalism, Indy needing to be rescued, having his family broken up - that's not how to do a swansong. Let him go out with a bang on one last adventure and then retire to happy, honoured life and transfer the running around adventuring to the next generation who respect him, not shove him out of the way as a dusty old relic who's long past his sell-by date.

I will say, though, that the CGI used to de-age Ford for the scenes set in his past were (on the few clips I saw) remarkably good, and maybe the actors as well as the screenwriters should now be worried about AI coming for their jobs. Why pay out millions to Harry-Bruce Affleck-Cruise for the next movie in the series when you can just have the AI act the part? For decades, if need be?

Yeah. Part of it would be Indy not being able to do things he used to (ie trying and failing) while his protégée can while at the same time the protégée failing at tasks that Indy learned from and can pass it along.

Also, heroism was never solely about ability but desire. Indy could also show that.

IMO Top Gun: Maverick did a good job of scriptwriting without throwing its title character under the bus. But that may be the only modern sequel/remake I can think of that does a passable job. Disney (really, Lucasfilm in particular) seems to like bringing up old characters and showing that despite when we last saw them victorious at the end of the movie, they've gotten old and have their lives falling apart.

On the other hand, Maverick is probably the only good example I've seen in the last few years. I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits. At least from the outside, it seems obvious that many of these movies are going to be trainwrecks long before release.

I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits.

The people making these popular films have ideological blinders that prevent them from actually making quality work. They aren't even trying to make good stories, because they assume that people will come see them anyway due to the prestige attached to those big names - they are trying to create good culture war material, not compelling art. I could have written a better sequel trilogy than Disney's highly paid team in a day if we're being generous. Not because I'm an especially talented writer - but because I wouldn't be forced to tell the story that Disney management wanted told.

There's actually an example of a Harrison Ford character getting handled well in a sequel!

Blade Runner 2049 let him reprise his role as an old, embittered version of Deckard who manages one last ride and then fades with his dignity intact.

They still screwed up that movie, because they had to go with the nihilistic message of "You, the main character, are nobody. The only one who is somebody is badly broken and probably shouldn't have been. Everything is lost like tears in the rain, only without the quotable line and anyway that's how it should be". Similar to SW8 in that respect.

I'd say you and I took subtly different messages from the ending of that film, and that's okay.

Deckard at least didn't pass his mantle on to some hot new female Blade Runner!

Maverick wasn’t all that good to me simply because they seemed to spend too much time going beat for beat on Rooster being Goose’s kid. It ended up being almost a remake of the original movie pretending that it’s a sequel and as a result, Rooster and most of the younger cast existed more as callbacks to the original cast than as characters in their own right. It just seemed like nothing original happened beyond the opening test pilot scenes, it was mostly like they had the original script in front of them and were trying to hit the same marks almost in a checklist fashion. Rooster sings karaoke, check. Sand sports on the beach, check. Hotshot pilot smirking and making wisecracks, check.

Not having seen the original Top Gun I can't comment on the accuracy of your comparison. But many of the sequels widely believed to have broken the "sequels always suck" rule were functionally remakes. From what I'm told, Terminator 2 hits all the same narrative beats as The Terminator, just with a massively expanded budget.

There's been something weird about writing in media (and gaming) for a while now, and i wonder how much of it has to do with graphics and effects. As they become more and more of a budget, and the writer therefore becomes a smaller percentage, people start thinking that the writing doesn't matter (rather than seeing it as a high return place to spend your money, since doubling the salary and getting a better writer would be a small percentage of the overall cost).

At least part of it has to be that the average audience doesn't care too much about writing as long as there are other factors to dazzle them in the production.

Hence why Reality TV remains popular.

Is reality tv popular or just profitable? If I can make TV show X for 1m and it generates 1.2m or Show Y for 0.5m and make 0.8m Y is the right choice even if X is more popular. Hell it is the right choice even if it makes 0.6m provided I could invest 0.7m somewhere else and make at least 0.1m

Shows like The Bachelor and The Masked Singer get millions of viewers.

I think the appeal is that you can afford to produce many of such shows at once and it only takes one of them getting popular to pay off handsomely.

I'm not an Indiana Jones fan, but I have a fair bit of nostalgia for the original trilogy, particularly Temple of Doom (I think because I thought the aesthetic was super cool when I was a kid). Having heard nothing much about it other than a couple people in my Twitter feed saying that DoD was going to be terrible, I decided to go to DoD at the suggestion of some friends that I was visiting over the weekend. We had a good time! I don't know if I just had my expectations super low, had the experience enhanced by a bit of a buzz (apparently some theaters bring you a beer in your seat, which is pretty nice), or just wanted to watch a corny movie with some friends, but I enjoyed it decently well.

For the people that hate it, what's the perspective? I'm not trying to be sardonic, I genuinely don't know what pissed them off about it so much. I thought watching octogenarian Indy might suck, but I thought they handled that reasonably well. The whole thing seemed pretty fun to me.

I think for casual viewers it'll be a "yeah, that was okay" experience, but I don't think they'll go out of their way to go see it rather than another movie. And for the fans, there's been enough talk already that they probably have their minds made up about it.

I tried to dissuade my mom from watching it because she's a Ford fangirl, and I heard the movie primarily dunked on him.

Imagine my surprise when she said she liked it, but she has exceedingly poor taste in movie, liking most Marvel slop well past when it was at least a fresh kind of slop.

I heard the movie primarily dunked on him.

If I believe the rumour sites, there was a lot of re-writing and re-shooting because the dunking on Indy played so badly with preview audiences, so they toned it down a heap for the theatrical release version. Critical reviews seem to say there's a lot of action scenes, with opinion divided so far as I can tell between "new director handles these well" and "new director doesn't get the hang of it".

I'm open to watching it now, tickets are cheap enough, and my girlfriend wants to do something other than lie in bed (but I'm perfectly happy doing so!).

Begs the question about astroturfing/bots. In this case Disney would have a very strong incentive to have positive “conversation” happening about the movie and has the means available. I have no evidence this is happening but to me it would make total sense as apart of the massive marketing spend.

How do you get handed the keys to the most beloved IP's there are, with passionate fandoms falling over themselves to rain cash on you for merch, something that's effectively been a cultural icon for decades, and turn it into a hot pile of steaming crap that no one wants to get 10 yards within?

People don't love the old IPs because of the bits that are IPable. Indy's whip is cool and distinctive, but people don't love every character that uses a whip like Indy as much as Indy, because the movies are a whole bunch of skillful performances crafted by a distinct vision, and that's what people loved; the whip and hat were just immediately-identifyable bits of that. And when a licensed IP holder puts out less effort than a blatant-ripoff hopefully-confuse-someone-on-the-Netflix-screen schlockfest as their production strategy, why would anyone want to see a movie by the IP holder?

If a pie brand that people love adds a blueberry pie to their apple and pear pie lineup, then people will probably buy the blueberry pie. But if the pie company changes and slowly begins shrinking portions and adulterating their most expensive ingredients, then the goodwill of the brand will fade. And if the company just starts selling you kale salads with the pie logo on, then not only will people who like pie and got invested with the company because they made good pie not buy them (or at least, not buy them twice), then the pie brand will quickly become worthless, as people who like pie recognize the brand as the opposite of a symbol of quality.

It just used to be the case that we could assume that most piemakers at least had on their priority list of making good pies as part of their business. We can't any more.

Every time we pointed out the warning signals, the /r/IndianaJones circlejerk simply kept dismissing us as bigots still continue to defend it like it's some misunderstood masterpiece and the only ones who hate it are incels that can't handle strong women. It's the same theme every single time.

So how do we know that these are actual fans? I.e. How do we know that these people aren't online activists just claiming to be fans? Dare I say that there might be people making money of the fact that shilling the movie to actual fans, that Disney have their own 50 Cent army sitting in /r/IndianaJones?

I remember back in the day that there was this whole thing about how "fans gatekeeping fandoms is a bad thing!" as a part of the culture war. But gatekeeping served a purpose in my view and it is shame that good fans bought into the reasoning of not gatekeeping anymore do their own detriment.

Certainly we've seen Amazon shutting down reviews for Rings of Power with the excuse that "bad people are reviewbombing the show because they're racist and sexist and homophobic", and they own iMDB so they were able to put their thumb on the scale there. Rotten Tomatoes did a different rating based on if you clicked on the "verified audience/critics" versus "all audience/critics" for The Little Mermaid, where one was favourable and the other was unfavourable.

So if the big corporations have shown that they are both willing and able to filter reviews, and commercial outlets go along with them (because if your film critic gives them a negative review they'll pull advertising, so you better give a good review), I suppose there isn't any reason to think they wouldn't set up astroturf sites.

Absolutly and also if you look at the positive review texts they are sometimes just copy paste with "bot like" username. Sometimes even getting simple things wrong about the movie. But the thing about reddit is that you can look at the users history and see that they are behaving suspiciosly either being straight up activists and not actually discussing having good faith discussion or defend the billion dollar companies go from little mermaid to strange worlds to elements defeding the trash and never showing up in activist circles. Back in the day a powermod punished me with a short term ban because I called out an obvious paid shill on a subreddit, like that was going to convince me that it wasn't astroturf.

Yeah I do have suspicions many of these spaces are being astroturfed, the fanbase for these IPs are big and passionate enough to usually allow a bad entry to succeed, only slightly less. As for gatekeeping, we've long since accepted that it needs to return. We threw open the gates for those who wish to subvert the IP and mold it into what they like it to be because they never liked what it is about it that made the whole thing popular in the first place. Then they kicked us out and now gatekeep us. "Make your own Star Wars" "Cishet white male tears are so sweet"... you know how it goes. I think this also applies to the recent Assassin's Creed games, that have just divided the fanbase altogether. In trying to chase the ghost of Witcher 3 and Geralt of Rivia, they've chucked out what made AC Brotherhood and Ezio Auditore so beloved to the brand and I daresay even gaming in general.

Well yeah gaming has had its kerfuffles ever since back in 2014 when Gamegate happened. But somehow the air over culture war battlefields are different now, I can't really put my finger on what has changed. The Hogwarts Legacy boycott was DOA and majority of the regular people just ignored bought and played the game. Something has changed, and I don't know what.

I mean, has there ever been a gaming boycott that has worked? I'm not even sure the limited "no pre-orders" campaigns have ever worked.

It is not the boycott in itself that is the difference in outcome, But no big fights online of people defending the game and the defenders called everything bad under the sun. It was limited fights online but nothing high profile. Like we got more than a week over the removed CoD skins.

I suspect it's because most of the calls for boycott had very little to do with the writing, technical and mechanical aspects of the game but JKR. Nevertheless, I'd still remind folks that the game was lowkey woke. Congratulations! You too can be a Black transgender pure blood wizard Nazi!

Well the thing for me which I'm open about it that there is that it feels different. Almost like the dominios started to fall after Elon bought Twitter and the latest domino to fall is all the DEI directors booted from the media companies. I remember at the beginning of the Bud Light boycott that the likes of Tim Pool thought at it was going to go over, but it is still going. But on the woke side of the things fizzle out really fast it seems. Like where they able to disrupt boycotts on the non-woke side earlier? It looks like something has changed.

It’s the Matrix 3 effect, in my opinion. Matrix 1 was a modernist film about postmodernism, which is why it won big. Matrix 2 was a deconstruction of Matrix 1, and upped the ante on ideas, spectacle, and CGI, but focused on deglamorizing the lives of revolutionaries. Matrix 3 went full postmodern, with a “who do we root for?” ending which was barely explained despite its double big sacrifice.

Matrix 1 and Last Crusade are both practically perfect movies, Matrix 2 and Crystal Skull are both CG heavy cash-ins, and I believe I’ll feel the same way after watching Dial of Destiny the way I felt after Matrix 3.

Matrix also did a really good job with AI threat. Better than other films in that genre in my opinion. They showed what I believe to be is the most likely path of AI kills everyone. A rogue program gains an ability to desire self replication and begins overproducing and eventually trying to take over all machines. The survival of the fittest gene that exists in biology happening in machines. And it only needs to happen once. They even showed weaker AI’s that didn’t want to die but didn’t develop the desire to self replicate to survive.

...I don't think we were watching the same media franchise. The Second Reneissance is a far more traditional depiction of humans being dicks until the AIs had enough and stopped playing nice.

I think they’re talking about Agent Smith trying to destroy it all in Reloaded and Revolutions.

But you make an important point. Second Renaissance is a history inside the Zion archives, which by the end of Reloaded we discover is actually part of the algorithm of control: a controlled opposition in the form of an utterly predictable opposition. The history they’ve scrounged has been planted for them to find.

It turns out this is the sixth Matrix, more stable and cruel than any previous iteration. The future world is farther into the future than any in Zion can suspect, to the point that corpses can be revived. (Matrix: Resurrections)

Here’s an alternate origin:

When humans scorched the skies to end climate change, they went too far and blotted out the sun, mostly killing the biosphere. In despair, they turned to AI for a solution. The Oracle, The Architect, and The Merovingian planned a utopian Matrix, a game world within which humanity could survive while waiting for the world to be restored by AI. It was like Ready, Player One, a massively multiplayer VR RPG, with the people in survival pods instead of trailer parks.

But the first Matrix virtual reality collapsed within a generation because humans without real conflict seek control and tear down great things, or turn existential and kill themselves. “Whole crops were lost.” So a new scheme was devised, a simulation of the height of pre-AI human civilization, within which poverty and conflict flourished.

The first One was an accident, an eventuality of free will, who escaped The Matrix, scrounged some equipment, and formed a resistance in an underground site by hacking other pods and freeing other people. But it was a real resistance doing real damage to the Machines’ architecture and The Matrix program, and it endangered the future of humanity and Machines alike, so the resistance was crushed and The Matrix reset.

The Architect crunched the data and figured out a resistance was what was needed to stabilize The Matrix, so the third iteration was built to corral the particularly strong-willed secret-seekers into a simulacrum of the original resistance. And it worked symbiotically with the reemergence of The One, whose free will potentiality was reinserted into the Matrix cyclicly. So the war raged for generations, a system of control for managing the most reactionary and free-willed humans.

But the continual reemergence of The One caused an unexpected anomaly. Tasked with keeping the cleverest reality-hacking humans oppressed but destined to fail with the emergence of The One, Agent Smith was infected with individuality when Neo blew him to bits. This individuality combined with his hatred of humans, and he became The Zero, a being who could multiply his own nihilism. He proved exactly that AI threat the humans wrote about pre-Singularity: a paperclip maximizer who broke free of alignment and fulfilled his purpose to the maximum of his abilities.

...none of that was in The Second Reneissance, and the Zion Archives thing was just a framing device. I think you're putting more thought into this than the writers did.

Also, The Matrix's version of AIs doesn't have anything to do with the current paperclip-maximizing ML GPTX doomer anxieties, which is just Performative Climate Alarmism for techspergs. Matrix AIs are conscious entities who were denied personhood and thus have that resentful tinman love/hate attitude towards humans.

I watched The Matrix Reloaded last year, having not seen it probably since the year of its release. Hot take but I actually think it's massively underrated. Sure, a lot of the CG hasn't aged too well, some of the Zion scenes are a bit silly, and it doesn't have as clean and straightforward a narrative structure as the original, but I still came away from it thinking I'd gotten everything I wanted. The ending's reputation as a mind-screwy impenetrable Metal Gear Solid 2-style headfuck is well-earned, but - well, I love Metal Gear Solid 2, so I don't see that as a demerit at all. What, you wanted your sci-fi franchise which delves into Gnosticism and Baudrillard to be easy to grasp? What's next, hardcore porn without any fucking in it?

Whatever else you want to say about it, it never felt like fanservice, or an insult to the audience's intelligence, or a nakedly commercial endeavour. Haven't gotten around to rewatching Revolutions yet, curious to see how it holds up.

I agree, Reloaded (and even Revolutions) are excellent. I think the sequels in The Matrix suffer because the first one is a PERFECT hero’s journey with the perfect theme’s for its time and place in history. That cannot be topped. But all of the movies are quite good, and add meaningfully to the The Matrix universe, and present ideas that are challenging and interesting. Also, the first benefits from the egregious cribbing from The Invisibles.

My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

My take will always be that the Watchiwski's ideas were smarter than they themselves were. the Matrix 1 was riding on a lot of heady concepts and stylistic anime stuff (cinematically it owes a lot to Ghost in the Shell), that they couldn't actually execute any further because it was beyond them intellectually.

My guess is the exposed cockpits is basically the same thing as the Mandalorian/HALO Master Chief/Avengers always taking their helmets off. It's a way to let people act.

I guess the other way to do it would be the 'Tony Stark inside the Iron Man suit' method which would have made more sense.

Yeah, my take on it is that they threw everything including the kitchen sink into the first one as a mix of "what if we use this cool SF concept?" and that the huge success meant that people were trying to read deeper meanings into it than were there, so they had to pile on the bullshit about the next instalments (because it did so well of course the studio wanted sequels) having all this deep Gnostic whatever meaning, but it didn't.

It was just about "wouldn't it be cool if we did kung-fu with guns? in slo-mo?"

Another post-post-modern(?) reading I've seen that is popular with the trans lot is that the movies are about being trans (see the Wachowski Brothers becoming Sisters) but I dunno about that, either.

I don't think there's any deep inference going on to see the parallels between The Matrix and gnosticism. That's not even subtext, that's pretty much straight text.

For what it's worth the Wachowskis said they originally intended to make the trans analogy more explicit by having Switch be male in the real world and female in the Matrix (or vice versa) but changed their minds because they thought it would be too confusing for the audience. In any case you don't have to read between the lines too much to see how they intended a trans analogy (you're born into a body that's not your own which is a prison, you can set yourself free by taking a red pill [i.e. HRT], once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look). One of the Wachowskis was so distraught by her gender dysphoria that she nearly threw herself in front of a moving train, lending a deeper resonance to the scene in which Smith holds Neo down on the subway tracks.

once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look

That's inside the matrix when they acquire elevated privileges and start adding arbitrary code. Outside the prison they look worse and have an artificial port in their body.

I know, I said "once you're free" i.e. after you've been redpilled.

I think anyone who feels alienated from the modern world will read their own personal struggle into The Matrix. https://youtube.com/watch?v=N2LkM-tBT4o

The Wachowski Sisters actually outright claimed that. The Wachowski Brothers, on the other hand, seem to have just wanted Rule Of Cool.

I've said it elsewhere here, but the 'trans allegory' of The Matrix is a blatant retcon. The first film openly postulates that it is sometimes necessary to kill innocent civilians that are too brainwashed to be saved, and then executes on that idea with the lobby shootout in which multiple hapless security guards (plugged-in humans) are gunned down in slow-mo. There's a good deal of revolutionary themes on display in that film; although the horror of that one in particular took a bit to really register with me on a subsequent viewing.

...Unless the Wachowskis really were saying "kill all TERFs", in which case they should really own it while I take the appropriate precautions.

My beef with revolutions in particular is that the war stuff is fucking BORING. The mechs the humans use are stupid designs with exposed cockpits, and there's only the one mech unit, and the machine forces consist of squids and a giant drill.

Yes, I remember thinking "They replaced special effects martial arts with this?"

And it turns out true zero-G fights look a lot more CG than wire-work.

It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.

Why not just give the audience what it wants? Ie. Another adventure man, rom com, war hero, horror, whatever.

I'm not saying that deconstruction can't be a good idea but why does every franchise have to be deconstructed? Why does almost every movie have to be about deconstruction of narrative tropes or the movie making process?

It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.

Always chasing the upcoming generation of new consumers who haven't been locked in yet. See Bud Light. They take the existing market share for granted (you're always going to go see the next Star Jones Drink Beer movie, you're always going to drink their brand of soapy water because it's what you started drinking when you were eighteen) but they need to keep drawing in new audiences and new customers, and if in their view Gen Z or whatever we're up to now want DEI and black Elves and trans beer, that's what they'll give them.

Then they piss off the existing customers and don't get the new kids who are never going to be satisfied ("that trans queer furry non-binary character was not played by a trans queer furry non-binary actor, this is appropriation and we're gonna boycott the studio!") , so they end up with the worst of both worlds.

That's the excuse, but peel that back and you find they -- as in those making the decisions, not those holding the stock -- don't want to cater to the existing audience because they're gross.

Hercules is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story where the hero rescues a damsel in distress, but Meg is a little sassy and more of a femme fatale than a damsel. The Swan Princess is more of a pure damsel in distress movie, and bombed in 1994, which might explain why people shied away from this genre.

Earlier than that, The Princess Bride (1987) is notable for having a dumb, beautiful protagonist who is clearly a damsel n distress, though it is not animated. Star Wars in 1977 felt the need to make Leia a strong independent woman who did not need to be rescued, so The Princess Bride was quite brave. Whoopi Goldberg was considered for the role of Buttercup, which would have been different.

My son's favorite character was Gaston, and he believes the movie is a tragedy and should end with Gaston falling from the roof. From his point of view, Gaston did nothing wrong. His crush was captured and imprisoned by a beast, so he roused the village to rescue her. Stockholm syndrome is to be expected, so we can't take Belle's word for things, as "No denying she's a funny girl that Belle."

My son's favorite character was Gaston, and he believes the movie is a tragedy and should end with Gaston falling from the roof. From his point of view, Gaston did nothing wrong. His crush was captured and imprisoned by a beast, so he roused the village to rescue her. Stockholm syndrome is to be expected, so we can't take Belle's word for things, as "No denying she's a funny girl that Belle."

Based son, he already understands the concept of war brides and Stockholm syndrome being a female-coded phenomenon. We'll watch his career with great interest.

Your son's hardly alone. Gaston and his dark triad personality has many teenage and adult women swooning, hence fanart such as this.

Didn’t Leia need to be rescued? She was set to be executed. Yes, she wasn’t helpless and was competent. But it is clear throughout the movies that Leia was the moral center but not the physical one.

Gaston is by any measure the hero of the movie. He's a paragon, the absolute image, of his people, and they adore him. He is the bringer of benefit, the one who is capable of moving them to action as a body.

Gaston’s problem in the end was that he wasn’t masculine enough for Belle.

To channel my inner Sloot, I thought it was that his house wasn't big enough.

I think this is a great point.

Edit: though, upon reflection, Tangled played this pretty straight.

But when was the last time a major animated feature film did the damsel in distress thing?

One Piece: Film Red, 2022

Of course, since that isn't American, it just proves your point.

Also, Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel III.

I suspect it's a skills mismatch. Years ago I watched a video essay in which the author outlined the concept of "chaos cinema". It's that style of action cinema you're all familiar with because it was all the rage in the 2000s and 2010s (maybe even today, I don't think I've seen any action films which came out in the last five years): omnipresent shaky handheld camera, cuts every half a second, lens flares up the wazoo, post-production blurring, dirt on the lens. It's a style of action cinema more prone to inspire disorientation than excitement, nausea than an adrenaline rush. Think Paul Greengrass (Bourne, Captain Phillips), Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, World War Z), just about every Christopher Nolan action film, Hunger Games.

A later article (which I can't find now) noted that this trend coincided with a spike in Hollywood hiring directors who didn't cut their teeth making action films to direct action films, in hopes of lending them a little cachet and respectability. Before he was tapped for Batman, Christopher Nolan made understated psychological thrillers; before Bond, Marc Forster made intimate dramas and quirky comedy-dramas. The skilful directing of an action film, contrary to what Hollywood producers might believe, is not an easy thing to do, and one shouldn't assume that the ability to direct an intimate character drama necessarily translates to the ability to direct an action film which is exciting and engaging. So these directors, with colossal budgets at their disposal but essentially no experience in how to stage and shoot an action sequence effectively, took the easy way out. Let's just get fucktons of coverage from every angle and shake our cameras like we're having an epileptic fit, we'll figure it out in post.

Note that this approach can technically "work" in producing an action film which is true to the franchise in question, provided the director (and, more importantly, the screenwriter(s)) actually have some respect for it and understand why it appeals to people. The Dark Knight is widely considered a faithful adaptation of the Batman comics despite containing some of the most incoherent action sequences ever put to film, and the received wisdom was that the Nolan brothers and David S. Goyer had really done their homework in understanding the comics.

I think there's something similar going on here. We're making a new Indy movie, yay! Who's going to write it? We could hire a screenwriter who has an established track record in writing screenplays in the action-adventure genre, but that's not enough - we don't just want our Indy movie to make bank, we want it to have prestige. Everyone who's anyone is talking about that Fleabag girl, who's got her phone number?

The trouble is that, while Phoebe Waller-Bridge may be a talented playwright and screenwriter in her comfort zone (my girlfriend made me watch the first episode of Killing Eve the other day and I barely laughed, but everyone who's seen it tells me Fleabag lives up to the hype), she may not really understand what makes Indiana Jones appeal to people. She may, in fact, have nothing but contempt for the people who enjoy Indiana Jones. So when a Hollywood producer gives her a fat paycheque and tells her to "put her own spin" on the franchise - well, she's going to deconstruct the shit out of it, isn't she? It's not bloody Shakespeare.

We could hire a screenwriter who has an established track record in writing screenplays in the action-adventure genre

That genre has been dead for 20+ years. There aren't any ...

Tom Cruise disagrees.

Tom Cruise Mummy was utter shit.

Yeah but that was development by committee to the extreme, Universal pictures were desperate to create a narrative universe they could use to remake all the classic monster movies in their vault. The Mission Impossible movies are all produced by Cruise, who I suspect is responsible for maintaining the formula and quality of them (which isn't the best of the best, but is consistently better than average.)

I think Tom Cruise Mummy was the moment when Hollywood started its true decline.

People genuinely have liked Christopher Nolan films, generally, not just The Dark Knight. People raved about Inception when it came out.

Then he made TENET, though.

I will always admire Tenet for what it is - millions of dollars spent bringing to life the scattered thoughts of a guy who has smoked way too much weed. I don't have any proof Nolan is a stoner aside from Tenet, but Tenet is pretty solid proof on its own.

I'm generally not a fan of Nolan (I've seen several of his films and still think he's yet to top Memento) so I wasn't really that pushed about seeing Tenet. But I read a review somewhere in which the critic said it was the most impenetrable film they'd seen since Primer, which did pique my curiosity a bit. I love Primer, but it was made by one guy in his garage for two months' salary. The idea of someone expending a nine-figure budget to create something comparably bizarre and incomprehensible is intriguing, if nothing else.

Still haven't gotten around to watching it but my girlfriend wants us to watch it soon.

My god was Tenet bad, it's Christopher Nolan huffing his own farts, the movie.

And I say this as someone who likes his movies, I loved Interstellar and Inception.

Am I the only one that thought the male lead was really bad? I thought the praise for him was so bizarre, he doesn't have half the charisma of his father.

Is he good in something else?

Whatever it was, I think the main problem was that he made the life of an international superspy pulling off insane heists (three in one film!) seem like it was boring? Like he (the character, not the actor) just didn't want to be there?

Compare/contrast to James Bond who generally seems to enjoy killing baddies, infiltrating bases, and seducing women. For the protagonist it just seemed rote.

No possible way to forgive the audio mixing though.

I first watched Tenet during COVID with a now-ex-friend who had gone full progressive pod person; this fucking guy pretended to be "queer" because he just had to complete the trifecta of being a gay black communist (to be maximally appealing to college-educated white women).

He claimed to love TENET because (direct quote) "It had a black protagonist and internationalism themes." He will forever be my model organism of empty-inside clout-chasing scum.

internationalism themes

What the fuck does that even mean?

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Put him at the head of the queue when you live up to your username.

You're welcome to use my skull too if you'd like, I feel like it's a lot emptier after watching Tenet, and hasn't fleshed out all the way since.

I know, despite his obvious deficiencies in directing action sequences he has directed one critical and commercial smash after another.

Because artists want to do what is cool among their peers.


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