This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Timothy Ballard is a former DHS agent who, in 2013, left his role fighting criminal child exploitation and founded Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR. It's a parapolice organization which operates internationally, infiltrating child trafficking rings, identifying ring leaders, working with local law enforcement to arrest the leaders, and providing support to the victims after they are rescued. [1] I have not delved deeply into the history or workings of the group, so their actual effectiveness is a mystery to me, but they boast some impressive sounding results; a blog post from yesterday claims 51 survivors of an international sex ring saved and 22 suspects apprehended in "a joint effort by the Hellenic Police, the Spanish National Police, INTERPOL, O.U.R., A21, and Homeland Security Investigations." [2] It sounds very impressive, uplifting, and even badass. It's the kind of thing Hollywood would love to make a movie about - and they did.
In 2015, director Alejandro Monteverde and a production company approached Ballard to make a movie documenting his exploits. Ballard had been approached many times before by for movie deals but had turned them all down. This time, Monteverde's work was able to impress Ballard (and his wife) enough to convince him to sign on to a movie deal. Ballard was extensively interviewed, a script was written, and filming started in the summer of 2018. Interestingly, Ballard requested that actor Jim Caviezel portray him - Caviezel notably portrayed Jesus (yes that one) in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, though Ballard cited Caviezel's performance in The Count of Monte Cristo as the reason for his request. The film was completed that year and Fox was signed on to distribute the film under the name The Sound of Freedom. [3]
Fox was not around long enough to complete the deal. They were acquired by Disney, who shelved the movie (Disney later claimed they had no knowledge of the movie, which is plausible given the enormity of both Disney and the former Fox). It sat in limbo until earlier this year, when the filmmakers bought back the rights to the movie and approached Angel Studios for distribution. Angel Studios is an interesting company; they are entirely supported by equity crowdfunding, in which small investors provide funding in exchange for securities. As the name might suggest they are heavily Christian focused, with one of their largest previous projects being The Chosen, a dramatic television retelling of the life of Jesus Christ. They implement their crowdfunding model by presenting their investors with several options for new projects and ask them to vote for which ones they would like to see. Reportedly, The Sound of Freedom reached a critical threshold of votes within days, the release was greenlit, and the movie hit theaters on July 4, 2023. It instantly became a hit, and a target for hits.
If you have heard about this movie before now, it was probably in the context of controversy. Lefty media outlets have been dogpiling it, with Rolling Stone calling it "a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms"[5] and a CBC Radio columnist saying it was "a dog whistle for xenophobic Pro-Trump, Pro-Life types".[6] Criticism of the movie itself is weak, with the arguments boiling down to "it's not realistic" and "the plot doesn't always make sense", things that could be leveled at any summer blockbuster. External to the film, they criticize Caviezel and his penchant for QAnon conspiracy theories, but never mention the Mexican native director, whose father and brother were kidnapped and killed by a cartel.[7] What many have been focusing on is these outlets' attempts to seemingly pull the rug out from under the whole movie by downplaying child trafficking as a real world issue, trotting out 'experts' to point out how the depiction is 'dangerous' because it sets 'unrealistic expectations' and generally setting the tone that trafficking isn't really a thing people should be worried about.
This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right? These commenters point out how outlets like Rolling Stone defended Cuties (the infamous Netflix movie about pubescent girls dancing in modern sexually charged style) and didn't seem to have a problem with Taken, the 2008 movie with an obviously exaggerated human trafficking plot. But that was a decade and a half ago, and we know why this is happening now: it's culture war, pure and simple. While Righties are accusing the Lefties of covering up for their corrupt pedo elites, I theorized this might be legacy media feeling threatened by upstart conservative alternatives, but after researching I don't think there's much more to this than "Red Tribe likes this, so it must be bad". Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.
Other titbits I want to mention:
[1] https://ourrescue.org/ [2] https://ourrescue.org/blog/51-survivors-of-human-trafficking-freed-in-greece [3] https://www.deseret.com/2018/6/4/20646317/actor-jim-caviezel-set-to-play-second-most-important-role-in-o-u-r-story-the-sound-of-freedom [4] https://variety.com/2023/film/box-office/sound-of-freedom-box-office-success-1235664837/ [5] https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/sound-of-freedom-jim-caviezel-child-trafficking-qanon-movie-1234783837/ [6] https://twitter.com/Harry__Faulkner/status/1679207525495844865 [7] https://people.com/crime/ali-landrys-father-in-law-and-brother-in-law-found-dead-in-mexico/
Your analysis matches what I've been seeing. I've also been following the Wiki Talk pages on this film which is pretty wild. The argument is that QAnon is a thing, so it's important to note in the Wiki page that this film is...somehow...associated with Q-Anon. To me, it all looks like opinion laundering. Something like, "We've convinced ourselves that Q-Anon is an important conspiracy (because Trump believes some or all of it?) that everyone should be aware of (and against), so now we can point at any tenuous connection to Q-Anon as an obvious problem." The argument is circular.
Here's one line from the wiki page that really stuck out to me:
First, the word 'spurious' is obvious editorializing (against Wiki's view-from-nowhere) which is unsupported by the linked article, but what's really 'spurious' is the claim that 'adrenochrome' is an obvious conspiracy theory. The take goes like this, "adrenochrome doesn't do what people claim, therefor any reference to this is a conspiracy theory." That should raise some flags because, whether or not Adrenochrome is real, effective, or something Caviezel believes in, has no bearing on whether or not people are killing children for their blood, something Ballard claims having seen numerous times in videos he had to watch for the DHS. AFAICT, there's no dispute (or even discussion) about the claim of blood sacrifice just whether or not Adrenochrome is real or a conspiracy theory. This is a prime example of the kind of reporting/editorializing that sets people on edge.
I've been watching this story develop on various media-critique YouTube channels and it's just bonkers how rapidly this became culture war. If you're a publication on the left, why not simply leave it alone, say nothing? That's the part that's weird to me. From a strategic point, how does this not tip middle-of-the-road Americans toward the conservative viewpoint and further reduce the credibility of these journals? The RS piece is especially egregious, IMO.
Also, the denigration of the film is weirdly anti-Latino. As you correctly pointed out the production is almost entirely Latino and the film has a lot of Spanish with subtitles. It's about to be released in Mexico, at which point, I think we're going to see it get a huge bump. If one considers this a Mexican cinema production (cast, crew, writing and directing are largely Mexican) this is the highest performing Mexican film of all time. It's admittedly a bit of stretch and why I didn't add it to the Mexican Cinema wiki page. I'll let other people have that fight.
More options
Context Copy link
Caviezel's been radioactive for a while and his attachment to this project pretty much guaranteed it was going to be controversial.
A couple of acquaintances of mine and I had a brief talk about this last night. My super-lefty acquaintance is irate that anyone would consider going to see it. He doesn't believe in separating the art from the artist ("we must separate the bad actors from the power structures that enable them") and has an unfortunate tendency for guilt-by-association, so he was suspicious of Ballard by extension. My more centrist acquaintance thinks it's bringing awareness to a under-discussed issue.
I think your experience is broadly what's happening: extreme-lefties will hunker down with the Q-Anon take; Righties will support it's trad values and centrists will look at it, say what's the fuss and become further ostracized from lefty news and culture outlets. This may be going too far, but I'd categorize this as the Left creating its own problems by unecessarily pushing people away.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.
While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.
I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?
This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.
I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.
Agree + emphasizing the last line: "...prove to be dangerous down the line." This has always been my contention with Wokeness going back to, at least, the emergence of Jordan Peterson. The left seems to be creating it's opposition through its actions and it's extremely dangerous if you're a person who actually cares about progressive and liberal values. The reaction will be reactionary and that's bad.
More options
Context Copy link
I would not start celebrating just yet. War makes a distinction between tactics and strategy. The Republicans have good tactics. Everything from Loudon County, "we're coming for your children", trans sports and now ""MAP""-sympathetic liberals are tactical wins. But strategic wins are nowhere to seen. Hell, it's not clear there even is a strategy.
Supreme court capture was a fortunate strategic win for Republicans. But from a strategic POV, I can't think of anything else that's gone in their favor since 2010-ish. If anything, they've further alienated every institution while refusing to enfranchise new institutions that are favorable or ambivalent towards them.
Every time a tactical win hints towards a long term strategic strategy, the Republicans have shown themselves to be incompetent in pursuing it. Republicans continue to live in the 20th century, as a party of the White-Christians. Now the party of Rural-White-AntiElite-Christians.
Some Hispanics, Asians & Free-Speech-Atheists have landed on their laps, but there have been no real efforts to court them. Each of the conservative arms seem to be fighting on their isolated fronts, with zero communication or attempt at unifying these tactical fights along a single strategic meta-objective. The Tates don't get along with the Petersons. The Rinos don't get along with the Tea Party. The Race Blind don't get along with the White-race essentialists. Yeah, differences exist in all big tents. But, this "Enemy of my enemy" tactical alliance leads to "crabs in a bucket" style strategic failure.
Liberals on the other hand have continued their decades long progress down unified aims of 'destigmatization, equity, removal of individual responsibility and handing over governance to faceless beaurocrats'. It isn't a slippery slope as much as heavy steam roller with immovable momentum in a single direction.
Ironically, Tucker Carlson (despite being exiled from Fox) appears to be the only one who is able to interact with all faces of the American right. In that sense, he does come across as the Republican Jon Stewart. Both of them clearly peddle propaganda, but know how to appear as if they are good faith actors. The know how to keep the public on their side while still getting audience with their party elite. In the long term, Conservatives need to prioritize recovery/reinvention of their institutions. I will start trusting a revival of conservatism when they can reclaim institutions of Prestige.
Towards that goal, I'd look at the success of Israeli and Indian conservatives in institution capture over the decades. Neither have been perfect, and face a ton of criticism in how slow they've been. But, there's stuff to learn. I can speak more for Modi, other's can opine in on the specifics of other successfully executed long term conservative strategies.
First, pick your battles.
Passion of the Christ is not coming back, and no future generation is going to be above 50% white. Gays-Lesbians-and-Bisexuals as a people are here to stay, and blanket bans on abortion will continue to be unpopular.
But that doesn't mean you can't get your wins from elsewhere.
RRR and Kantara were able to successfully outshine Bollywood ( a left liberal stronghold) by heavily inculcating Hindu/Indic themes without calling it as such. The directors of these movies aren't random conservatives. They are just great artists, who happen to draw heavily from Indian myth. Now, South India has developed its entire self-sustaining industry that doesn't depend on kowtowing to Bollywood in order to build an entertainment career. There is a US TV show called Manifest which does something similar. It has a clear Christian undercurrent, but stays vague enough to appeal to large audiences. You can win christian-ish, anti-abortion-ish or even anti-immigration-ish battles..... but you need to pick ones that don't look like dogwhistles. They also need to be a compelling narrative that works in their own right, besides the undercurrents.
Second, pick your alliances.
Modi has stopped trying to win over liberal-arts students at top liberal arts universities. But his strong-man numbers first image appeals more directly to India's vast STEM population. College educated STEM grads are neither religious nor conservative. But, he knows he can make more sense to them than any other group. STEM grads understand the the optimism around boring-but-at-scale policy. STEM grads care about education. So he appeals to NRIs (mostly engineers), obtains favorable foreign Visa deals, talks about hard-infrastructure (toilets, roads) and maintains the support from this group. They might disagree with his religious leanings, but he never talks about those leanings when addressing this group. Of all the institutions that are adversarial towards Modi, STEM universities are the least hostile, and that is an acceptable deal for him.
The Republicans must enfranchise a young group group on the rise. And that means making deals with institutions are 'least-hostile' towards them. Joe Rogan, Tate and Peterson are the obvious faces that appeal to college going future-corporate-leader types. Remember, these people 1 degree of separation from true institutional powers like Huberman and Attia, who call Stanford home. BYU, GMU and similar departments have groups who have agreement with the conservative movement. Contrarian leftists and Enlightened centrists can easily be brought into the fold without needing them to scream allegiances. But maintaining constant interaction with these folks is important. Hell, DARPA funded labs and affirmative-action-agnostic universities like Caltech/MIT also have avenues Republicans could exploit. non-coastal STEM focused public universities like UMich, UWisc, GATech, Purdue also have some possible avenues for alliance.
I could go on, but prestige education, prestige news (in any medium of their choice) and prestige entertainment are essential institutional pillars for any successful movement. As long as conservatives fail at establishing long term strategic progress towards these 3 pillars, all the tactical wins are meaningless.
More options
Context Copy link
It may be related to a mindset common in the American right, the type of siege mentality that is the justification for a lot of right wing politics. American right wingers tend to want to live on a farm with many guns and shoot at the imposing threats. The pedos are coming for the kids, the taxman is coming for your money, the green people are coming for your car, the FDA is coming to forcibly vaccinated etc. The left does see itself as oppressed but sees more structural oppression rather than conspiratorial oppression and has less of a siege mentality.
The journalists may be picking up on the siege mentality perspective of the film and therefore coding it as right wing.
The Right Wing mentality of the film is the Cowboy-Run-and-Gun attitude of the protags and their org. That if we just gave enough good guys enough guns and enough free rein, they could kill off all the bad guys and rescue all the kids. The failure to do so is a failure of determination, of willpower, of courage. ((I suppose for some absurd value of enough they would be right: if we devoted the entire resources and budget of the US Marine corps to tracking down traffickers it would make it harder))
The left wing liberal mentality is that
Always the left wing liberal solution is something-something structural causes, combined with government surveillance and intrusion into family and private relationships.
Left wing liberals argue that claiming you're anti-pedo so you spend your time running around with guns "tracking down traffickers" is like claiming you're anti-hunger so you spend your time ordering sandwiches from Quiznos for random people: somewhere between wildly ineffective altruism and actively distracting from the reality. It might make some former DHS agents feel like big men, but it doesn't do much to help kids.
ETA: The near perfect inverse parallel is the BLM argument made by many conservatives that Floyd-Style police killings, while unfortunate, are a drop in the bucket compared to Black-on-Black crime. So saying BLM and opposing police is going to cost Black Lives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, but it still can be criticized, because sometimes "my ideological enemies are building a weapon" amounts to "my ideological enemies get to fight fairly". Or to put it another way, the left is so used to privilege that equality looks like repression.
Movies and TV that are deliberately promoting some progressive bugaboo in an unfair way are too common for me to care that somehow, some conservative managed to do the same thing once.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Disney's PR team is very very good at manipulating entertainment reporters and online forums. They no how to kick up a mob to attack a competing movie.
Reviewing films is actually quite hard. You get to watch them once and you need to come out with some kind of take based on your notes. You need to do this with multiple movies. Often they are watched without much of a break.
So there's plenty of room for a friendly PR person to offer some notes about other studios movies that are easy to string into an article.
My take is that Disney is upset about TSOF embarrassing the new Indiana Jones movie and in response they are kicking up a culture war storm. A lot of reporters are joining in the gang pile because it's fun and easy.
Beyond that, a lot of people in DC at places like the State Department see the cartels as useful. The CIA has most likely been co-ordinating & manipulating them quite a bit over the years.
Movies that paint the cartels as scary badasses who are just trying to make money getting cocaine to consenting adults are OK.
Movies that point to child exploitation or fentanyl deaths in the US make the CIA look bad by association, so they are attacked.
This is sort of true, but only if you succumb to all the bullshit fluff the pr people push on you. Even if you watch 3 films back to back with only 15 minutes between them, it's not hard to make detailed notes to build your review from - as long as you don't spend each break trying to max out the pr firm's open bar tab or simping for whichever featured extra they convinced to come along.
It's true that big studios like Disney are very good at manipulating entertainment reporters and critics, but part of the job of being a critic is not allowing that manipulation to work. Or it should be, it's supposed to be. But progressives like blacklists when they are in charge, so critics have to play nice or else they don't get access. But society has no obligation to print or listen to a bunch of chucklefucks lying about what they watch to keep their jobs, like some kind of sinecure.
More options
Context Copy link
Could you provide some supporting evidence for why you believe this movie's criticism is due to separate conspiracies by Disney, the State Department, and the CIA?
How does Disney benefit from attacking a movie that, at the time of the rolling stones article, had earned 25% of what Indiana Jones had done at the domestic box office?
Why would the CIA be particularly troubled by this movie showing the cartels involved in human trafficking, but not others?
Why would the State Department's main lever of shutting a movie down to be releasing negative critical reviews after release, as opposed to a myriad of powers it could presumably exercise for a movie by a former DHS employee that was partially filmed in California?
The State Department and the CIA aren't really separable in this context, CIA agents use State Department covers at embassies and they coordinate with State Department staff.
It isn't some formal policy, it's the DC dinner party circuit. DOS/CIA employees have been dropping sly hints about using the cartels to look cool at dinner parties for years. A movie comes out about how their cartel friends are sexually exploiting children. They respond by going on a tear to any reporter who will listen about this evil Q-Anon conspiracy movie.
The movie you linked to doesn't seem to involve the Latin American cartels and only made $20k at the box office, so I imagine there wasn't much discussion.
DHS isn't one of the "cool" agencies. ICE agents don't get invited to the good parties to tell stories.
Disney using their PR staff and entertainment reporter contacts to attack their competitors hardly seems like some far flung conspiracy I need to prove. SOF's success is an embarrassment not just for Disney but for all of the big distributors. The number 2 film for July 14th weekend is distributed by Angel Studios. That undercuts the perceived power of the major distributors.
However Angel Studios lacks the skills and connections to defend the movie.
Arguing about revenue at the time of the article isn't a good metric. Disney has people monitoring other movies and using various metrics to predict their success.
Disney had a whole lot invested in Indy 5. Wikipedia lists it as the 13th most expensive film ever made and there are rumours that Kathleen Kennedy has been playing with the books because the real cost is even higher. It's the first LucasFilm release since Rise of Skywalker in 2019. It was expected to gross over $1B.
And it came in behind Sound of Freedom in it's third week at the box office.
Disney is struggling. They may have to fire Kennedy over that.
Disney attacking the movie out of anger and desperation, not because it's an effective strategy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Stuff like this is why I come here. I don’t mind criticism of a movement provided it’s based in facts. And what bothers me about most of the criticisms of both them film and the organization is based more on “yuck” emotions than facts. The critics to my knowledge haven’t pointed to fabricated parts of the movie or even the financial statements of the organization itself.
I find the “yuck” emotion writing tends to discredit the opposition to the idea in question just because to my mind, if you had real reason to distrust the movie or the organization that’s what you’d talk about. Instead it’s been wall to wall “oh my god, can you believe this MAGA Qanon movie is actually being shown in theaters, and people are not only going to eww see it but actually shudder like it!” It’s a terrible way to get people to listen to your opposition to the film simply because it cannot articulate why it’s wrong or why OUR isn’t exactly on the up and up.
I mean we agree, OUR seems much more interested in funding pet projects through grants, and my understanding of 50c3s is that it’s hard to track what the money is used on.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I'm head-desking right now because how ideological do you have to be in order to go "pro-lifers think child sex trafficking is bad, and we all know pro-lifers are scum" without realising that you are within a gnat's whisker of going "which means child sex trafficking is a Good Thing that Our Side must and should support"?
I'm not surprised by this because it often happens after take-overs; the new owners aren't interested in the projects the former independent entity were working on, or the new guys scrap projects in favour of their own pet projects. The irony here is that Disney sat on it and sold it back, pretty clearly because they thought it was some niche thing that wouldn't appeal to many, and now it's outdoing their tentpole Indiana Jones movie, a movie they really needed to be a hit after the recent string of less than impressive performances.
I even understand the suspicion about "this is a Christian outfit" but honestly, if you can't even bring yourself to agree with the Bible-bashers that kidnapping and selling kids for sex is a bad thing, I suggest you take a look at your life and your choices. And from what I understand from reviews, this isn't a movie that is all "Y'all need Jesus" and "God saved these children". But the guy depicted/his wife may be religious (in clips the actress playing her is wearing a cross), so is that now a big no-no in the movie making business? 'Oh it has an unrealistically positive ending!' okay, and? That's the movies for ya!
Even crusty old drink-sodden Youtube reviewers liked it!
'Cos the victims in it are Hispanic children. Hmmm, why on earth would that appeal to a Hispanic audience, and not our big superhero movie with a Hispanic side character? Ponder, ponder....
MAPs, darling. "Paedophile" is sooo judgemental and offensive to people struggling with their sexuality who are non-offending. That term and that attitude forces them to interalise social stigma. And it engenders hysteria such as this about scholarly work.
There's always room for another stripe on the Progress Pride flag, and if the LGBT community don't want that right now, give it a couple of years until the softhearted and softheaded sociologists work on normalising such attractions.
The "it's got a Christian character, therefor it's Christian propaganda," aspect of this story bugs me too. Would we do the same if it was a Jewish person? I'm not sure. If a protagonist said, "My Jewish faith compels me to stop child sex-trafficking," would someone say this was a Jewish movie? I doubt it, but maybe...?
More options
Context Copy link
It amuses me how many people still think there's support in the LGBT community to normalize pedophilia, given that community used to be significantly more supportive of pedophilia and has been backpedaling on it for decades. What they want to normalize is child sexuality, not creepy adults exploiting it. It's no different than the feminist argument against modesty: women [children] should be free to do what they want without men [pedophiles] sexualizing them for it. Hence Cuties.
As one of the few people who actually bothered to watch Cuties, this may be the perception of how that movie fits into the culture, but it's not apt. The movie is extremely critical of sexualized cultures that young girls inherit from their confusing adult influences. Yes, it also leans into an uncomfortably sensationalistic depiction of that sexualization, and I'm sure it will be found on many unsavory hard drives, but that's not its messaging.
I'm not sure whether you are agreeing with me or misunderstanding me, so I'll clarify why I said 'Hence Cuties'. The behavior of the girls in the movie is intended as part of an exploration and critique of women's experiences. Critics of the film argue that the movie is morally bad because of how the girls are portrayed while supporters argue there is nothing wrong with the movie itself and that it is instead viewers (eg, "pedophiles") who interpret it in a titillating context who are morally in the wrong. That is, women should be free to make a movie about their experiences without men coming along and sexualizing it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Counterpoints:
You can be "amused" by this all you like. Beyond a certain point, acting as if people concerned about the pro-paedophilia contingent of LGBTQ+ activism are just tilting at windmills strikes me as gaslighting.
There's a big issue that needs better policing, self- or other-wise, but I'd caution some of these examples aren't particularly good ones. In particular, the actual proposal from Tatchell was :
That is, essentially a Romeo and Juliet law. There are some good arguments against these laws: there's a lot of potential for abuse with a lot of the covered age ranges, even within same-age relationships in these age ranges, there are pragmatic arguments against people this age having even safe and consensual sex, and far more than the general sphere this subject is especially vulnerable to the Murder-Ghandi problem.
But they are extremely far from the central case for pedophilia.
More options
Context Copy link
Actually the scary part is that the LGBT movement has more or less flipped the stranger danger on its head. What’s being normalized is keep the parents out of the loop and almost presenting parents as “the enemy of their children,” and normalizing structures in society that actually work against parents being able to find out where their kids are and what they’re doing online (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.calculator.vault.hider&hl=en_US) for a quick example, is an app that exists strictly to hide apps (and thus online communication with strange adults and other potentially dangerous behavior). Schools have been very open — to the point of creating policies forbidding disclosure without the child’s permission— of helping children of varying ages, down to elementary school, hide sexual secrets from their parents.
I was a kid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I can remember the fear parents had of the internet being available to kids — because they might talk to strangers. We were warned, repeatedly, not to talk to anyone online we didn’t know in person. There were hysterical news reports about Pictochat on the Nintendo DS — because it enabled a child to talk to a strange adult without notifying their parents (even though you had to share information in person first). And obviously there was the stranger danger stuff where any adults who took a particular interest in children were to be reported to your parents immediately, and adults were not taking any of it lightly.
Obviously, this was overkill, but the switch is mind boggling to me. We’ve gone from a fear that an adult might be talking to a kid without parents knowing about it to treating the very idea that parents might want to keep other adults from talking to their kindergartners about sex without their knowledge or consent— including not informing them about what the child is saying about his/her sexuality— as the default position.
Obviously, this is the part pedophiles like more than anything else. Kids now take it as a given that parents are not to be told about their sexuality. That sexual thoughts and feelings are not to be talked about with the parents who know them best. That loving adults want to help you with your sexuality and that in order to do that keep it a secret from your parents. Which almost every advocate group trying to prevent child sexual abuse says is one of the common occurrences in child sexual abuse (https://rainn.org/articles/talking-your-kids-about-sexual-assault) the child is made to keep secrets and often fears punishment if they tell. Now, we teach that exact thing in every classroom in the country and don’t see the irony.
Not the only thing that was in the current year flipped without anyone caring and even noticing.
Even more jarring is transformation of people who were preaching "violence bad! guns bad! self defense bad! human life sacred under any circumstances!" into avid flag waving patriots "glory to ukraine! glory to heroes! death to orcs! no surrender, no step back! throw the moskal to the shark!", without even bothering to justify this abrupt change of their principles.
(yes I know there were never any "principles" involved, but it is still jarring)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ten years ago liberals would have sworn to you that Sista Soulja style "whiteness is the devil" rhetoric was dead and gone, and would never come back.
And now we know that they were deliberately hiding and nurturing it for over two decades, bringing it out of the closest at the first possible opportunity. When a group treats all interactions as tactical engagements to shift the overton window, that's exactly what happens: the quiet part stays quiet, until a memo goes out and suddenly the absurd strawman extremist position is once again party doctrine.
So we already have one example of an extreme leftist position that was pushed out of the overton window only to return far stronger than before, apparently with the assistance of liberals with a no-enemies-to-the-left policy. Why will this be any different?
There's also the point that only heterosexual age-gap relationships seem to disgust progressives. 8 year old boys in stripper dresses getting cash tucked into their panties by adult men is a library activity, while girls getting married at 17 has been made a crime. This means we're a lot closer to the days of the Berlin adoption agencies giving boys to paedophiles than you'd think from the rhetoric about "predatory (straight) men"
The usual argument for abolishing the AoC is about individual freedom. That's very much not an extreme leftist position; it's an extreme liberal position - a libertine position.
SJ is sometimes called "the successor ideology" because it grew out of liberal culture but is not liberal itself. The direction you go from moderate liberalism to get to SJ is at an obtuse angle with the direction you'd have to go to get to abolishing the AoC. And I say that as someone who wants to lower the AoC.
Does SJ memory-hole stories about gay molestors and occasionally enable them*? Yes. That's because they're optimising too hard on "accept gay people" - to quote B5, "conspiracies of silence because the larger ideals have to be protected". It's not because they actually support child molestation in and of itself.
*The conservative media amplifies this for the exact same reason the SJ media suppresses it i.e. it is highly politically inconvenient for the Blue Tribe narrative. It's not actually as common as reading conservative media would lead you to believe.
Which variety of child sexual abuse? The sort where two men adopt / foster boys they abuse and sometimes produce pornography with or the sort where homosexual men will invite teen boys that are 'old souls' to pool parties for leering, letchery, drug use, and also sometimes pornography production?
I find both unacceptable. I suspect the latter is more common than the former. I also suspect the latter is more acceptable in the letch community.
How common does conservative media lead people to believe it is? I'm certain there are unreported instances of both occurring this weekend. Given the current year acceptance of alphabetism, isn't it likely there's more of this abuse now than anytime in the last 40 years?
What I said was that SJers enabling gay molestors is not as common as conservative media would have you believe.
Haven't they enabled all they've failed to call to account?
Arguably they've enabled all the molesters the SJ activism has camouflaged or hidden. SJ work to normalize homosexuals has enabled a non-zero number of molesters.
I understand not all homosexuals offend. In the same way 'not all men'.
I'm saying that "SJer spots gay molestor, doesn't report it to authorities because doesn't want to appear homophobic" is a real thing but not nearly as common as conservative media would have you believe (though much more common than SJ media would have you believe), in both cases because it's highly politically inconvenient for SJ.
"SJ journalist hears about gay molestor being arrested, doesn't report on it to the public", that's basically standard practice. But this isn't as directly harmful; the molestor is in jail whether or not we know about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A gay teen boy going to a gay pool party in a Speedo where lots of gay non-teens will offer him alcohol and feel him up is bad and creepy, for the same reasons that a heterosexual teen girl going to a pool party in a string bikini where adult men will give her alcohol and feel her up is bad and creepy. But neither are pedophilia and most people find it hard to get worked up about the former happening to someone else’s son, just like they would find it hard to get worked up about someone else’s son going to a cougar pool party in a Speedo where adult women will let him drink and feel him up. I suspect that the first scenario is more common than the other two combined, possibly by a very large margin, but it’s not something that conservative media dwells on a lot.
Alcohol and a grope, likely undersells it. Many would feature hard drugs and sexual assault, the Bryan Singer senario.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A big difference is that an adult can understand that flaunting sexuality can and often does make you appear as a sexual object to other people. An adult woman understands that going out in a string bikini is going to attract sexual attention and she knows to keep it to places where she wants that kind of attention. Children don’t understand sexuality that way, and don’t understand the consequences of being sexually attractive to adults. A woman knows that walking down a street alone at night dressed to highlight her sexuality increases the risk of rape. So women generally reserve their “looking sexy” times to going out on the town with other adults she trusts. To a child, it’s just dress up, and they don’t really understand that you can’t just put on a sexy top without attracting sexual attention from others or understanding the implications of attracting that sexual attention. They just want to play dress up barbie.
That is the status quo they are fighting against though. In their ideal world, "flaunting sexuality" wouldn't make you appear as a sexual object to other people unless you intend it to. The fact that it does today is seen as a problem and rather than putting the onus on women/children to not flaunt their sexuality, they prefer to put the onus on the men/pedophiles to not perceive them doing so as sexual.
The trouble is that such a thing is impossible. The sex drive is one of the strongest biological drives except maybe food. To ask a person to not notice a person displaying secondary sex characteristics is to ask a hungry crowd to not notice a plate full of hamburgers. That’s just not how biology works.
Adults like to tell themselves that other people shouldn’t notice their sexual displays, but unless the person has very little real-world experience, they understand perfectly well that people don’t actually work the way they want to believe they do. And so while most adults have learned to mouth those platitudes in polite company. But those same people are absolutely not behaving as if they believe that. No business allows overly sexy clothes in the workplace because it’s a distraction. No woman wears skimpy clothing casually to places like the post office or the grocery store.
And again, kids and for that matter adults with autism or other learning disabilities don’t necessarily pick up on this. To a ten year old, if grownups are telling them it’s okay to dress in a sexual manner and that “the adults won’t see you that way” that’s about the end of it. They don’t get that people lie out of a need to formally maintain the narratives they hold dear.
I think that most people are capable of showing restraint; strong emphasis on "most". You also have shit like burkas and Victorians being aroused by women's ankles...and on the other hand, you've got hippies at Burning Man running around buckass naked and calling it good.
Victorians also had porn and it wasn't confined to ankles. There's a lot of post-Victorian bashing of their immediate predecessors that gets repeated in pop culture as "how it was" and it's not necessarily so (as the song goes). You probably wouldn't have much chance of seeing a woman's ankles in ordinary life as women wore boots in the daytime, so seeing ankles would be confined to intimate moments, and that's where the prospect of prurience comes in. The swimsuit covers of Sports Illustrated are not simply showing off female athleticism, after all. In this NSFW article, you can see a postcard of two women with a man, one of the women is wearing boots, and it's not their ankles they are showing off.
Besides, the era of full nudes in art (much debated) isn't swooning over ankles alone.
More options
Context Copy link
Only the naive and the autistic make somone else's restraint core to thier own identify.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If the position is that people shouldn't perceive others flaunting their sexuality as a sexual display, then I'm not sure what kind of sensible argument there is to be had. I don't even think anyone actually believes that.
This is one of those arguments that is useful in some contexts but will be immediately abandoned in others. It's not a principle or rule, but a tool that is brought out to achieve a particular job and then shelved when it's no longer useful.
In the next breath, we'll be told how it doesn't matter what the speaker meant but rather how it was perceived by the listener that made if offensive.
With this degree of incoherence, it worries me even more that they're pushing sexuality on children, because there is no principle holding that back from going in any direction with it. It's like introducing an uncontrollable pitbull to a room full of toddlers. Sure, he might just play gently with the children, or he might not. Better to keep him from the children in the first place.
This kind of insane idealism can be worse than malice.
deleted
On Pitbull owners it’s sort of a test for me for stupidity (maybe mean and too hot). It’s either people bad at math, lacking empathy, or just never saw the statistics. While pits going out and hurting/killing a loved one isn’t a gigantic risks it does happen a lot. And you have a ton of other options of mid-sized family pet dog where you don’t run risks your entire family hates you for life because you dog maimed mom it seems like an easy decision. I don’t know the exact probabilities of that happening but removing a .1% chance of that happening for basically free seems like a good deal.
More options
Context Copy link
I think I saw someone go through the dog statistics ages ago, but I'm guessing dog attacks just havent been in the news lately. Wait until the next time there's a high-visibility culture-war adjacent dog bite or police shooting of a dog, and I'm sure it'll be plastered all over the thread.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Roughly 50% of the adult population believe that enough to try and impose policy preferences based on it; this is why the claim of "victim blaming" is effective in the first place. This view skews massively female for obvious reasons.
To be fair to your other point, though, the people who believe this also form a core part of the same demographic that's currently "pushing sexuality on children"- which is also why that claim is a bit incoherent, and perhaps more accurately stated as "treat the young as if they were all women, especially the boys; man bad/foreign/unstable, women good/domestic/stable".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, I don't think they support it. But with the whole "take the T out of LGBT" and the trans push against lesbians (and to a lesser extent gay men) over "genital preferences", I think the older-style lot will find the ground going out from under them. Some variants of the new flag include the intersex symbol, which I think is absurd because intersex is a whole different thing.
No, give the sociologists and pyschologists time to agitate that the term should be MAP not paedophile, and that it should be removed from whatever the latest version of the DSM V is as a disorder (just like getting homosexuality reclassified) and the new cutting-edge understanding will be that they too are an oppressed sexual minority and any hold-outs who go "Fuck no, we don't want paedophiles included!" are being - well, whatever the term for "paedophobia" like "homophobia" and "transphobia" will be.
More options
Context Copy link
The usual argument is that they kicked out NAMBLA et al from the movement in order to gain mainstream acceptance, amd now that they have it and homosexuality has been normalized they are returning to their original goals (and more).
I don’t think it passes the smell test that LGBT people, or the movement, or a representative sampling of the movement’s leaders, or the smoke-filled back room where George Soros, the local Masonic lodge head, and some lizard people decide the aims of the LGBT movement, are pro pedophilia. I think that it’s very defensible to claim that gay male sexual norms around consent, the age thereof, harassment, and the like would be very, very bad to have adopted more widely, and that LGBT leaders have a history of overlooking pedophiles among their supporters alternating with purging them, and that trans activism prioritizes trans stuff over well established institutional knowledge for child protection and that the combination thereof will probably be used as cover for pedophilia at some point, either of the ‘kind of a creep with teenagers’ kind or of the kind this movie is about. I think it’s further fair to say that culture war dynamics might prevent that from getting shut down.
Those two statements seem directly in contradiction to me
Gay male culture seems like a survival of 70’s macho sexually aggressive norms, which includes a lot of having sex with teens being socially acceptable. Obviously that’s a different thing from out and out pedophilia, and it gets treated differently at least when gay men do it(probably more because society doesn’t actually care that much about teenaged boys having sex with adults, even if it’s technically illegal and their parents probably aren’t thrilled, than because LGBT gets special privileges).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So they were all secretly pro-paedophilia but kept it a secret for 30 years? You would think with such an enormous conspiracy there'd be a whistleblower at some point. Surely there are people in LGBT circles who are high-ranking enough that they would be in on it but who don't actually support paedophilia.
I don’t think it works that way. It’s more that the organizations were kicking out NAMBLA over optics not principles, and should those optics no longer be a problem, then they stop policing the ranks for pedophilia.
More options
Context Copy link
The argument usually isn't that there's an explicit conspiracy by the LGBT community, simply that LGBT and pedophilia are natural fellow travellers. And given the enormously higher chance that gays and lesbians were sexually abused as kids and/or had significant inappropriate sexual experiences as a kid*, combined with the higher likelihood of those who were sexually abused as children to themselves become pedophiles**, the basic idea isn't that far fetched.
*: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11501300/
**: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2082860/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I fear the success of this movie amongst the wrong sorts of people may actually be detrimental to future efforts to fight child sex trafficking. Opposition to pedophilia will become a right-wing boogeyman, mostly disinformation, and, in any case, even if it is real, we will soon learn why it's actually a good thing. We can already see how expressing concern here is being interpreted as a dogwhistle for Qanon. Unfortunately, too many people will be far more horrified by the thought of being mistaken for a Trump supporter than they would at the possibility of indirectly aiding child sex traffickers. Sure, they may quietly, and in private, express their revulsion for pedophilia, but in public one would not want to say too much less the inquisitors get suspicious.
This movie presents an incredible opportunity for actual pedophiles, especially those among the Zeitgeist's activist class.
Perhaps this is uncharitable. No, it's definitely uncharitable. However, if I had made similar claims 20 years ago about transgenderism, then that would have also been uncharitable. Is there are bridge to far? Everyone says that there is, but then many of those people don't seem to have ever seen a bridge they didn't immediately run across, while dragging as many people along with them as they could. Sometimes being uncharitable is the only way to avoid being scammed, again.
God I hope my fear is misplaced.
I can't make sense of this. 20 years ago it would be "uncharitable" to think that pro-transgenderism would go far. Then 20 years later it did.
In order to fit your analogy, the backlash to transgenderism would be out of control after 20 years--not transgenderism itself.
More options
Context Copy link
The left is now experiencing what it felt like on the right when the left was demanding everyone parrot "Black Lives Matter" or else be branded a racist on social media forever. (Which ruined race relations, and became an incredible opportunity for actual racists and eugenics supporters.)
More options
Context Copy link
Become? It's already a right-wing boogeyman depending on the skin color distribution of the average perpetrator in England- bonus points for actually being the motte definition of, and what most people mean when they say, "pedophilia" (exclusively 'old man, young girl').
I'm not as convinced; I think this is also a bit Blue-on-Blue (or rather, Blue-on-Redder-Blue) given [for the former] who the traffickers tend to be (favored skin colors tend to be guilty of it more often due to vanishingly few white men in the places the women come from) and [for the latter] that it's a righteous cause that both the people whose moral foundation is "man bad -> man wants prostitution -> prostitution bad" and the people whose moral foundation is "prostitution bad" get a lot of policy mileage out of.
I think it hurts the ability to actually talk about grooming issues and pedophilia simply because as these become right-coded, it becomes harder and harder to take a position against those things without seeming right leaning yourself. And especially in activist and nonprofits, you don’t want to be seen as right wing.
Which is something that I can understand broadly, but not when it comes to "yeah, we all agree that raping young children is bad". Who the fuck cares if the most raving right-winger who celebrates Hitler's birthday every year is standing beside you when kicking in the door of a place where small children are being raped? That's being too pure.
Hitler's birthday being what it is, it's ironically a somewhat blue-coded holiday in the US...
https://twitter.com/stone_toss/status/1649056653369659393
More options
Context Copy link
I had to look that up since I had no idea when Adolf was born, and yes I did recognise that reference 😁
Telling stoners ‘yes, happy hitler’s birthday to you to, are you collecting signatures on a card for his Argentine nursing home?’ Is the best part of the month of April.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm going to say this. "The wrong sorts of people" is exactly the shitty attitude that turns off ordinary people from the progressives. "Yes, maybe child sex trafficking is arguably not-great, but if you vote Republican you have no right to that opinion and indeed you are turning away Good Right-Thinking Right Side Of History Folx" does not look good, it looks like "we'd happily defend child-fucking if we thought it would offend you normies".
Which is the fear you are expressing, and I unhappily have to agree.
And notably this attitude was why progressives lost the Virginia governors race.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, and those exact criticisms ARE levied by critics at summer blockbusters, all the time. I see that the film has a 74% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the same as Elemental and Asteroid City, and better than the Little Mermaid, Indiana Jones and Fast X. Are you sure there is a culture war angle here?
There is actually a summer action thriller out in theaters right now starring an actor known for his membership (and not simply membership - in many ways he's been the mascot) in a controversial organization that's been accused of being a cult, and has been tied to various crimes including fraud, embezzlement, racketeering, stalking, harassment, rape, and abetment of suicide. But have you noticed that the reviews for the latest Mission Impossible film don't bring up Tom Cruise's membership in the Church of Scientology, or his endorsement of Scientology's many anti-medical claims about the field of psychiatry? Why do you think critics prefer to discuss Jim Caviezel's association with QAnon instead?
One big reason people are not bringing up Tom Cruise's Scientology connection is that it is old news. For better or for worse, if a nasty fact has been out there for a long time, people don't bring it up in the discourse as much. This is how the process of un-cancellation works on an individual level (I think broad vibe shifts also have something to do with it). The Scientology thing has been litigated in the court of public opinion for quite some time.
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t have an opinion on that, because I try not to make generalizations based on n=2. And, given that Scientology is a religion, whereas QAnon is a political organization, I would certainly want to control for that. I would also want to control for the fact that QAnon has very much been in the news of late, whereas Scientology has not.
They made a good point. Acknowledge it and carry on.
This kind of pseudointellectualizing diminishes your argument.
No, they didn't. Their "point" is infantile. "Why did they mention this guy's political views but not this other guy's religious views" is a terrible argument, because they are different categories. People generally do not condemn the religious views of others; the political views of others is much more fair game. Hence, it is hardly surprising that reviews did not mention Cruise's religious views.* It is no less inane than people claiming racial bias when police crack down on gang violence but not Wall Street fraud.
I would prefer that a filmmaker's views not be mentioned at all, but OP's "argument" is pathetic..
*Assuming that they didn't. But it seems that Rolling Stone -- the very magazine that OP complained of, published this article yesterday.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
“Scientology is a religion” is a very feeble deflection, considering that’s very much up for debate, and in fact several governments have refused to consider it a religion, classifying it variously as a scam, a cult and even an organized criminal enterprise. QAnon being in the news of late is very much a function of who makes the news, and this is largely the same cohort that writes movie reviews for major publications. It was quite recently that Danny Masterson was convicted of rape, and his victims went on record accusing the Church of Scientology of harassment and intimidation on his behalf.
That's the point. QAnon is the flavor of the month, so a filmmaker's association with QAnon is more likely to be mentioned. Scientology is yesterday's news, the legal travails of a has-been actor notwithstanding, so a filmmaker's association with Scientology is less likely to be mentioned. This is not a new phenomenon.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think most people think of Scientology as a religion, more as a hybrid cult and a scam.
But you repeat yourself, waaaaHEY!
I feel the spirit of the fedora returning from the 00's!
(But for real, I do feel the spirt coming back. I would bet a small amount that religion is going to renter the culture ware space as a real target in the next couple years.)
As a veteran Internet Atheist, I sure hope you're wrong. In retrospect the whole enterprise was somewhat undignified in it's heyday, at this point it would be downright perverse.
Then there's the small inconvenient fact that atheists have been proven absolutely wrong about the impact of religion on society, and about what secularization would bring about.
EDIT: I'd argue they were wrong about what religion did, but the people arguing in favor of religion are also wrong about what religion does. It might have done that in the past, and it might still do it if you are a goat herd in the Hindukush or a dirt farmer in the Indus valley, but not so for a western capitalist. I forgot to include this though so you get it as a weird edit instead lol.
Yes, but nowadays we've moved further along the Nietzschean path and there are new angles to attack religion from kinda percolating out there in gen z and gen alpha; mainly that people who claim to believe it don't actually believe it, because they don't act like they believe it.
Think about all these Johnny come lately statue profile pic dudes shopping which trad version of religion to choose; and realize that is how young people are going to experience popular religion; jut like we experienced religion like a kubrik film of incredibly venal mega churches and 9/11 and such.
We are in the Reaction phase right now; soon we will be in the counter-reaction phase.
Huh? They're admittedly thinned out, but there still are religious communities in the west, and you can actually observe they're getting something out of it.
So? This applies to anyone as far as I can tell, even nihilists.
This is what I meant when I said it's going from undignified to perverse. As misguided as it was, I can understand "counter-reacting" to Alabama hicks teaching creationism in public schools because you think it will bring about a new age of peace, science, and freedom from dogma, but "counter-reacting" to dudes on Twitter trying to LARP themselves into finding some meaning in their life because something, something, muh Nietscheanism feels like a parody of itself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I for one see no principled distinction to be made between a religion and a cult. The former all arise from the latter, and they accrue a veneer of respectability from being old, or formed at a time where accusing something of being bad because it was a fresh cult would be met with mild confusion.
They're all scams anyway, even if some of the religious fall for it too. That's how MLMs work.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is so silly. You can't take scientific language and apply it in any way you'd like. If your parents lavish your brother with attention, encourage him, give him 2 free ferraris when he turns 12, and so on, while locking you in the attic, n(umber of brothers)=2 so you shouldn't generalize about their behavior.
No, n != 2. Yes there are 2 movies involved but there are innumerable critics making the same decisions about those two movies. You don't just get to find a hypothesis, pick a certain aspect about that hypothesis which involves a small number of entities, and decide that since that number of entities is small the hypothesis must be discarded without further evidence. Perhaps there are only 2 brothers, but there's a long chain of consistent behavior to observe and use to inform your conclusions about your parents. Perhaps there are 2 sexes, but there are billions of instances of each sex to observe. Perhaps there are 2 movies, but there are hundreds of critics to observe. n(umber of relevant entities) != 2.
As far as Scientology vs. Qanon, you mentioned wanting to control for one being a political organization. Yes, that's exactly the point. People care about one as a political organization and not the other as a religious organization. You're controlling for the very point which @CriticalDuty made. "Oh well obviously one actor has politics they disagree with, so we should definitely control for that before determining whether critics care about actors' political opinions."
But, again, the example you raised -- Tom Cruise -- is about religious belief, not political beliefs. So, you seem to be saying that that example is not germane.Which I agree is the case.
The point is that the critics' complaints are explicitly political, rather than actual criticisms of people with crazy beliefs. Tom Cruise is a great example of someone with crazier beliefs who has not received the same criticism, proving that the critics' motivations are partisan, not principled.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Rolling stone on another summer blockbuster:
From a summer blockbuster whose politics align with Rolling Stone's. Considerably more unrealistic (it's a comic book film).
Well exactly; it's not supposed to be realistic, so criticising on those grounds would be absurd. But if you're making a film at least partly based on real events that is being sold as an important story that needs to be told, the bar is obviously going to be considerably higher as far as realism goes.
More options
Context Copy link
Going off on a tangent here, but yet another live action remake of a Disney classic animated movie is going to be released next year (I think) and judging from prelimary photos, it's going to be - interesting.
They're making "Snow White" as a live action movie. Rachel Zegler will play Snow White and Gal Gadot will be the Wicked Stepmother Queen. All well and good, but the seven dwarves are - by the looks of it - not going to be dwarves. EDIT: and of course no Prince Charming, Snow White is a Strong Independent FairyTale Princess who don't need no man, she dreams of being a leader herself.
These photos were first claimed to be fake, and to be fair I couldn't believe anything so badly costumed was real, but then the revised commentary on that was "these are not official photos", they're using stand-ins and they're pick-up shots (whatever those may be).
Judge for yourselves as to how you would describe the Seven Companions 😁
Now, it could be that these are indeed fake photos to mislead people snooping around trying to get shots on-set, and I hope so. But one never knows, do one?
"Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"
"Fairest? Not you, and surely not your stepdaughter. Cruella de Ville has a shot at it. Maybe Hannah. Fairest. Ha. You know I'm a normal mirror when you're not waking me up, you could see for yourself!"
There's "fairest" as in "lightest-skinned" and "fairest" as in "most beautiful". I think a lot of people think Gal Gadot is an attractive woman, so "aging queen whose vanity is what makes her insecure" works just as well there. The Snow White actress is half-Polish, half-Colombian, or quarter-Colombian at least, so again we're not talking totally South American Hispanic/Latina. Traditional Snow White has coal black hair anyway. So that one is "they don't understand the source material, and the folkloric tradition of 'black hair from the raven, white skin from the snow, red cheeks from the blood on the snow', but it's not as awful as it could have been" for me 🤷♀️
I'm more concerned about the awful looking costumes so far. Even the one for Snow White looks cheap and poorly-designed, something for an am-dram presentation rather than a multi-million dollar big studio adaptation.
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
I doubt it--why should some corrupt wicked stepmother care about who's the fairest of them all in that case? Her motivation is that she wants to be fairest, and anyone with that motivation isn't exactly going to hunt down the people fairer than them.
Indeed. Though the movie need not make sense of course. The stepmother does indeed mean "fair" in the sense of "beautiful", but in Snow White specifically, beauty is tied into pale skin. It isn't just that; Snow White is white from birth but doesn't surpass the Queen until she is seven years old.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oooh, that one makes sense, because one report had it that there wouldn't be any Prince Charming and that Snow White wanted to be a leader! So Justice Snow could indeed be the interpretation going on there!
More options
Context Copy link
Not sure if joking, but "fair" in the context of "somewhat archaic faery-tale English" just means "beautiful" -- I'm actually somewhat surprised that they haven't cast a black girl tbh.
True. But in the tale Snow White was considered beautiful largely because of her fair skin (as contrasted with her red lips and black hair), which she was literally named for.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why not just come out and say that you are referring to Black Panther?
And, I have seen neither film, but surely you can see that lack of realism is usually a more serious flaw in a film that purports to be a true story than it is in a comic book film. You seem to be falling victim somewhat to confirmation bias.
But it is also a convention that for "dramatic purposes" characters can be dropped, amalgamated, and even invented for the movie, even ones based on true stories. 'Lack of realism' has not been a criticism much seen before in such cases.
for movies that purport to be based on true stories, maybe lack of realism should be?
I'd agree that lack of realism should be a criticism for 'based on a true story' but the accepted interpretation seems to be that for dramatic purposes, sometimes you can/have to do a bit of inventing.
In which case, if you were perfectly fine with "the last true-story movie totally made up the character of Benji Bestboi and in fact the ending in reality was not that they won a gazillion dollars and shut down the evil Rice Krispie manufacturing plant, but they had to cease their protests since they were being nuisances and the Rice Krispie plant was sold for a gazillion dollars so the Wicked Owners made a fortune", then you don't get to suddenly be all "in scene 94 of this movie, the calendar shows 1st July 73 when in actual fact that particular visit to the bar happened on 30th June 73" about this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My point is that there is nothing notable about the content of the movie to warrant controversy - it's all about how it was made and is watched by the wrong type of people. Skim through that linked Rolling Stone article - it's pretty obvious culture war. And understand that this isn't an isolated event; there are many more articles like that one, and most of the discussions of this movie on Reddit quickly devolve into claims of conservative histeria over supposedly non-existent child trafficking.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The culture war angle is even simpler- Jim Caviezel is One Of The Bad People, so nothing he does can be good. Nevermind that he took credit but wasn't the brains behind the operation. It's straightforwards cancel culture dynamics against the heir apparent to Mel Gibson.
I don't follow Hollywood and didn't know anything about Caviezel before writing this, so I missed this angle, but it sounds plausible. There's definitely a larger "red vs blue" dynamic here, however, given how much space the articles dedicate to trashing the audiences.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Directing me to this guy has led me to some truly bizarre works about Mormonism and American history. Ballard wrote three books - The Lincoln Hypothesis, The Washington Hypothesis, and The Pilgrim Hypothesis - arguing that Lincoln was inspired and influenced by the Book of Mormon, that Washington was a pious proto-Mormon setting the stage for the restoration of the saints, and that the Pilgrims were prophetically guided to America in order to create Mormonism. It all seems quite bizarre, and if this positive review is to be believed, he supports British Israelism?
I realise that's not directly relevant to the culture war angle of this film, and he and his charity can have done wonderful things even if he's a fruit loop in terms of historical and theological knowledge, but... wow, this is a reminder to me of how strange the Mormon world can get.
Addendum: I was able to find a copy of the book. Yep, there's very straightforward British Israelism here, complete with nonsense about Saxons meaning 'Saac's sons'.
The first is silly but mostly harmless. The other two (especially the last) are practically Mormon doctrine. The idea is that God organized things so that a country with religious liberty would be created.
Would love to hear more about this. Sounds like he was being literal unfortunately, but just want to confirm he's not being metaphorical? Mormon doctrine believes that everyone on Earth will be "adopted" into one of the tribes of Israel and given a purpose/duty based on which tribe they are adopted into.
He's not being metaphorical.
Chapter two of The Pilgrim Hypothesis is a straightforward introduction to British Israelism. He argues that the lost tribes migrated northwest into Europe where they interbred with Germanic tribes, and the introduction of Hebrew to ancient German caused the first Germanic sound shift.
Specifically, he interprets Genesis 49:22 ("Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a spring; his branches run over the wall") to mean that Joseph's descendants must have come to America - 'the wall' is the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore he also wants to connect the Pilgrims to the biological descendants of Joseph. A Mormon elder argued this in the 1880s, you see, so now that needs to be justified somehow. It seems like this has been a line in Mormonism for a while? He cites another early pamphlet - it seems of a piece with Mormon pseudohistory about Native Americans. He relies heavily on this piece as well, and dodgy etymological arguments.
At times it gets rather comical. He does rely on nonsensical folk etymologies ('Saxons' as 'Isaac's sons', 'British' as 'berit', covenant, plus 'ish', man, etc.), many of which rely on outright false claims (he claims that 'angle' is Hebrew for bull, which it... isn't). There's also a lot of conspiratorial nonsense about symbols. The Great Seal of the United States has some biblical imagery on it (e.g. the stars above the eagle's head form a Star of David, surrounded by rays of light and clouds, reminiscent of Moses' trip up Sinai), which apparently proves something. British monarchs wear a crown with twelve jewels on it (do they? I can't tell which crown he's talking about, and St. Edward's Crown has a lot more than twelve stones on it) and there were twelve tribes of Israel. He mistakes the portcullis symbol of parliament for a breastplate and then says it's reminiscent of the Urim and Thummin.
It's genuinely that bizarre. I feel I need to prove I'm not just making this up:
Or on the names:
Yes, he appears to have mixed up BC and AD.
It's all like this - a series of coincidences held together with thumbtacks and spit, so that he can declare that the Pilgrims' voyage and the founding of America satisfies some sort of biblical prophecy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Even if the guy is a fruit-loop, that leads us back into the wider argument about separating the artist from the art. Is the movie a good movie as a movie? If there isn't a ten minutes post-credits harangue about everyone should become a Mormon, then even if the guy is a Mormon, so what?
If people on the right were objecting to a movie because the director is a gay predator, imagine what the likes of Rolling Stone would have to say about that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Just saw the movie tonight in Phoenix, AZ. You're right about the audience, at my theater it was about 50% female and almost entirely Hispanic. Very big crowd for a film that released ten days ago.
I thought the film was okay -- some nice camera work despite most of the film being shot with a very shallow depth of field (what's up with this? why are films doing this all of a sudden? it's a terrible stylistic choice). The first hour seemed to drag at times, but the second half was pretty exciting.
People are calling the film "politicized" but there is literally zero politics in the plot, or even the undertone. The only message is a plea to pay more attention to child trafficking.
More options
Context Copy link
I'll second @huadpe's caveat about the organization possibly grifting, but what strikes me about the reviews is how much like propaganda they seem. They're all about how the wrong people like the movie and who the people involved are associated with.
Rolling Stone:
and
Vice:
There's a ton of weasely connotation-laden words as well: "ilk", "relentless", "hackneyed", the aforementioned audience's "bellow"s, etc. It's hardly worth selecting quotes because the entirety of the articles is like this.
I guess this is valuable to people who are left-aligned but didn't know they're supposed to hate this movie.
Gasp! The Catholics like this movie! Well that tells us all we need to know! 🤣
Honestly, with reactions like this, why do they wonder that people go "Okay, groomer"?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Wouldn't the content that was crowd sourced being released mean that the fundraising isn't a scam?
Oh I thought we were talking about Angel studios who crowdsource fund their films.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A fundraising scam, as distinct from the good old-fashioned Hollywood creative accounting?
Yeah, there may be legitimate questions about the organisation. But until Rolling Stone does an exposé on "how did Patrisse Cullors afford those houses?" (which it seems not to have done, unlike other left-wing aligned outfits which did run stories) then I'm not going to be too outraged. If the guy is working off the back of this movie to fool people into donating, he had to wait five years for the payday.
That doesn't make it right if it's a grift, but it does mean he's been out there all along and they never were bothered - or aware - until now that the movie is doing so well.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't have a lot of background on this either, but I'd say if they're a fundraising scam, we'll probably have the details within a few months. It sounds like the mainstream press doesn't like them much, and they're on the radar now.
More options
Context Copy link
I purposely kept my focus limited for this piece but I would be curious to know more about OUR. The critical articles throw out some accusations of questionable tactics and effectiveness, but I don't recall anything claiming it's a scam. The credible thing to do, if you wanted to undermine the film, would be to publish a scathing expose of OUR, but that would take effort.
More options
Context Copy link
At this point being a scam is par for the course. Even our very best minds of rationality and reason found ways to funnel money into dead end policies for criminals.
At this point I'd call it fair to say that you donate money to feel good. There's no reason to assume that any monetary amount will fix anything. If you actually care about an issue you are going to have to do something about it yourself. With that in mind it seems most people don't care all that much.
More options
Context Copy link
I think that is a concern for pretty much any non-profit.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link