[Admin Mode]Away from home for 8 days, and 8 days 2 hours 10 minutes afterwards the power goes out. Had to update DNS records.
Saw shawty from behind and I exclaimed "gotterdammerung"
And realized I should probably stop reading German philosophers while listening to rap.
And realized I should probably stop reading German philosophers while listening to rap.
Stupid mongorians, don't they rearize they supposed to capture reader of their nuclear powered northern neighbor and the arry of their nuclear powered southern neighbor?
Herro mongorian!
Herro mongorian!
If there's one thing England is known for, it's how dry it is. "Land where the sun is never hidden and clouds are unknown" they call it.
I hate it when people misinterpret the double slit experiment.
Look, Quantum Physics is totally unintuitive and doesn't behave like the macro world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have rules or that it's a magic spell. It means that it has its own set of rules separate from the macro world.
If you measure things in the macro world you change the measurement by measuring it too. For example, in order to measure a temperature, you have an RTD you run current through that adds heat or a bimetallic element that takes it away. Even something non-touch like infrared requires the object's measurement to change because giving off the infrared light takes energy. This isn't because an all-knowing universe server operator steps in to fiddle with energy levels, it's because the nature of the stuff at the macro level is such that you need to add or remove energy from a system to measure that system. Sometimes like using light to detect distance of a quite large object it's a trivial amount of energy, but start bouncing photons off of something still in the relatively macro realm that is nonetheless not at the quantum level, and you'll make a real mess.
When you get down to the unintuitive quantum level, the same applies. It isn't because some mystical being is looking down going "oh, looks like a human is watching, better stop surfing twitter", it's because the nature of the stuff at that size is such that you can know how fast something is or where it is but not both, and that's that. As well, sometimes light acts like a particle and sometimes it acts like a wave, and again that's not because the server operator steps in and changes things, it follows rules we can learn even if they are unintuitive.
Some of the earliest work on quantum physics ended up applying to cat's whisker crystal radios. They had to learn a whole new discipline to understand why the crystals behaved in a certain way, and that ended up leading to semiconductors and later microchips. Quantum physics applies in every bit of a modern CPU or GPU, even if nobody's looking at the screen.
When people start saying "Quantum Physics says" and then the craziest shit in the macro world you ever heard in your life, it's the same as the rich guy in the 50s who drank radium infused water because "energy is good, radiation is energy, so load up my water with radiation, doc!" -- it's quackery of a real thing that's used every day for real things.
Look, Quantum Physics is totally unintuitive and doesn't behave like the macro world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have rules or that it's a magic spell. It means that it has its own set of rules separate from the macro world.
If you measure things in the macro world you change the measurement by measuring it too. For example, in order to measure a temperature, you have an RTD you run current through that adds heat or a bimetallic element that takes it away. Even something non-touch like infrared requires the object's measurement to change because giving off the infrared light takes energy. This isn't because an all-knowing universe server operator steps in to fiddle with energy levels, it's because the nature of the stuff at the macro level is such that you need to add or remove energy from a system to measure that system. Sometimes like using light to detect distance of a quite large object it's a trivial amount of energy, but start bouncing photons off of something still in the relatively macro realm that is nonetheless not at the quantum level, and you'll make a real mess.
When you get down to the unintuitive quantum level, the same applies. It isn't because some mystical being is looking down going "oh, looks like a human is watching, better stop surfing twitter", it's because the nature of the stuff at that size is such that you can know how fast something is or where it is but not both, and that's that. As well, sometimes light acts like a particle and sometimes it acts like a wave, and again that's not because the server operator steps in and changes things, it follows rules we can learn even if they are unintuitive.
Some of the earliest work on quantum physics ended up applying to cat's whisker crystal radios. They had to learn a whole new discipline to understand why the crystals behaved in a certain way, and that ended up leading to semiconductors and later microchips. Quantum physics applies in every bit of a modern CPU or GPU, even if nobody's looking at the screen.
When people start saying "Quantum Physics says" and then the craziest shit in the macro world you ever heard in your life, it's the same as the rich guy in the 50s who drank radium infused water because "energy is good, radiation is energy, so load up my water with radiation, doc!" -- it's quackery of a real thing that's used every day for real things.
That's why I plan (as a Canadian) to illegally immigrate in November to cast my vote for Donald Trump. Since the Dems love illegal immigrants voting so much.
Tbf, I was in my mid-20s at the time, and the teachers and principal kept telling me to leave the third grade classroom or they were going to have me charged with trespassing so buying a house would have been a better choice.
What kind of overtime pay do you think there is when you're stuck in a tin can in space for 8 months?
Last week, dozens of piracy sites went down that had shows that weren't on Crunchyroll. This week, those shows are on Crunchyroll.
I'm not making any arguments about why that happened, but it's strange af.
I'm not making any arguments about why that happened, but it's strange af.
There's some amazingly good stuff out there. Our cups runneth over.
The key with any sort of news or economic stuff boils down to one question: "Is this information good enough to help me run my life better?"
Overly optimistic news is obviously a problem because it might have you taking unnecessary risks because everything is fine. On the other hand, doomerism is just as bad because things aren't always all bad, and every cloud has a silver lining.
In the past I listened to a lot of APM or NPR, and I made decisions based on the news I got from them, and my predictions were often wildly wrong -- Predict one thing and the opposite would happen, pretty often. Much of the establishment media is like this -- if you listen to them, you'll be led astray because they report the official narrative, and it only shifts significantly after news has already started to happen and you can't do anything about it.
I often go back to my decision in 2020 to refinance my mortgage. (In Canada there's essentially no such thing as a 30 year fixed mortgage since banks take all the risk on such a thing and so while a 5 year fixed could be gotten at 1.9%, a 25 year was closer to 10%). 92% of people go with mortgages of 5 years or less, and they need to renew every 5 years or less at a new rate) -- the financial doomers I watched ended up helping me understand I should break my mortgage and refinance in 2020 for 10 years at a slightly higher rate because government policies at the time were almost custom-made to produce stagflation and thus Interest rates would inevitably rise. They did rise, and if I had taken no action I would be refinancing closer to 6% right about now as many people are.
In another case, I saw news stories about potential food shortages, and potential fuel shortages, and so I grabbed some gas cans with some stabilizer, a generator and some electric space heaters and filled the cans up with gas, and grabbed some staple foods that would last in storage for 20 years. It turns out there were food and fuel shortages shortly afterwards -- just not in my region. Europe got hit hard, and there were many stories of massive consequences to a lack of energy, and there have been revolutions in part over lack of food such as in Sri Lanka. I didn't end up needing the stuff I bought, but it was a measured response so I have fuel for years to come (I just use it in the lawnmower and snowblower), and occasionally we have some rice from one of the 80lb bags I've got tucked away. Not really the end of the world having food and fuel on-hand. It's important not to let total doomerism take over your psyche because even with good news sources you can get things wrong because you read the signs wrong.
The day Trump was shot, I had spent most of the day outside at the park with my son. And after I found out about Trump getting shot, I went back outside and we continued to play. What was actually important to me that day was the time I got to spend with him, not time I'd later spend looking into the details of a bit of political violence.
I used to host OpenStreetMap on fbxl (used the server for something else later), and I had an interesting moment I'll never forget. You start off looking at a world map. You see every piece of land on earth and go "This is what's here". As you slowly zoom in, the country lines show up, and you go "this is what's here". As you keep zooming in, you see provincial or state lines, and you go "this is what's here", and as you keep going you start to see cities, and then you see the streets in a certain city. Keep zooming in and you see the individual buildings, and that's where the map stops. But that's where the map stops but that isn't where complexity stops. Inside those buildings are many individual details -- what furniture there is and where, the relationships between the people there, other things strewn about. If someone has a handful of money, that's a tiny thing but it can be really important to the people inside. In the dirt in the back yard or even in the drain under the sink there can be entire microbiomes living, breeding, and dying and to the microorganisms living there, the drain under your sink is their entire world, it looks to them like the map of the world I started with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekt7VujAWNE
The world is infinitely complex, and it all matters, but we often ignore the small for the very big as if the very big is more important, but it isn't necessarily. As the western roman empire fell, that was a huge event, but most of the planet didn't care. There were tribes in the Americas that didn't realize the western roman empire ever existed. Asia mostly went unaffected. Australia didn't care. North Africa was affected, but Africa is a huge continent and most of it didn't care at all that something called Rome went away. Northern Europe lost its biggest customer for bog iron but otherwise wasn't directly impacted. For many of the people within the western Roman empire, life actually got a lot better. According to evidence from people's bones, the average person's health improved more than at any point in history when the western Roman empire fell. Despite that, many people think this empire falling was one of the worst things to happen in history.
Given that fact, it's probably important to pay a little bit to the outside world to make sure you're prepared for the future, but it's more important to make sure the world around you right now is good. I've always considered my relationship with my wife important, but I've really spent time cultivating it in the past 5 years and I'm happy I have because we're closer than ever. The time I spend with my son is surprisingly beneficial for my own mental health, but more importantly he's going to grow up and the decision to spend time with him is going to splay out in consequence that will pan out for generations -- the world around him will be different based on whether I spend quality time with him or not, and what specifically I decide that quality time looks like, not just in this moment potentially when he chooses who to marry, how he treats his kids, and how their kids decide to live their lives as well. Unlike many things where there isn't much evidence to support the idea that you can make a change, we know the overwhelming difference you can make in the life of your child, and the lives of people around you.
And in the same way the microbes under your sink could potentially get you sick and you can get your whole household sick and if you've got a kid in school they could send those germs to the school affecting a chunk of the school and thereby the city, I think part of the problems we're seeing today in the world are caused by people making the wrong decisions about their micro lives. At the end of the day politics matters but equally doesn't matter. It has effects on your personal life, but it isn't all that affects it or even the most potent thing -- you can't really talk about how your life is going based on who is president as much as what's actually going on in your life.
And that's where I think the media is dangerous but also can be beneficial. If you're able to take what you see and use it to make your micro life better, then it's useful, and if it only stresses you out over things you can't change or it misleads you into making poor decisions, then it's harmful.
The key with any sort of news or economic stuff boils down to one question: "Is this information good enough to help me run my life better?"
Overly optimistic news is obviously a problem because it might have you taking unnecessary risks because everything is fine. On the other hand, doomerism is just as bad because things aren't always all bad, and every cloud has a silver lining.
In the past I listened to a lot of APM or NPR, and I made decisions based on the news I got from them, and my predictions were often wildly wrong -- Predict one thing and the opposite would happen, pretty often. Much of the establishment media is like this -- if you listen to them, you'll be led astray because they report the official narrative, and it only shifts significantly after news has already started to happen and you can't do anything about it.
I often go back to my decision in 2020 to refinance my mortgage. (In Canada there's essentially no such thing as a 30 year fixed mortgage since banks take all the risk on such a thing and so while a 5 year fixed could be gotten at 1.9%, a 25 year was closer to 10%). 92% of people go with mortgages of 5 years or less, and they need to renew every 5 years or less at a new rate) -- the financial doomers I watched ended up helping me understand I should break my mortgage and refinance in 2020 for 10 years at a slightly higher rate because government policies at the time were almost custom-made to produce stagflation and thus Interest rates would inevitably rise. They did rise, and if I had taken no action I would be refinancing closer to 6% right about now as many people are.
In another case, I saw news stories about potential food shortages, and potential fuel shortages, and so I grabbed some gas cans with some stabilizer, a generator and some electric space heaters and filled the cans up with gas, and grabbed some staple foods that would last in storage for 20 years. It turns out there were food and fuel shortages shortly afterwards -- just not in my region. Europe got hit hard, and there were many stories of massive consequences to a lack of energy, and there have been revolutions in part over lack of food such as in Sri Lanka. I didn't end up needing the stuff I bought, but it was a measured response so I have fuel for years to come (I just use it in the lawnmower and snowblower), and occasionally we have some rice from one of the 80lb bags I've got tucked away. Not really the end of the world having food and fuel on-hand. It's important not to let total doomerism take over your psyche because even with good news sources you can get things wrong because you read the signs wrong.
The day Trump was shot, I had spent most of the day outside at the park with my son. And after I found out about Trump getting shot, I went back outside and we continued to play. What was actually important to me that day was the time I got to spend with him, not time I'd later spend looking into the details of a bit of political violence.
I used to host OpenStreetMap on fbxl (used the server for something else later), and I had an interesting moment I'll never forget. You start off looking at a world map. You see every piece of land on earth and go "This is what's here". As you slowly zoom in, the country lines show up, and you go "this is what's here". As you keep zooming in, you see provincial or state lines, and you go "this is what's here", and as you keep going you start to see cities, and then you see the streets in a certain city. Keep zooming in and you see the individual buildings, and that's where the map stops. But that's where the map stops but that isn't where complexity stops. Inside those buildings are many individual details -- what furniture there is and where, the relationships between the people there, other things strewn about. If someone has a handful of money, that's a tiny thing but it can be really important to the people inside. In the dirt in the back yard or even in the drain under the sink there can be entire microbiomes living, breeding, and dying and to the microorganisms living there, the drain under your sink is their entire world, it looks to them like the map of the world I started with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekt7VujAWNE
The world is infinitely complex, and it all matters, but we often ignore the small for the very big as if the very big is more important, but it isn't necessarily. As the western roman empire fell, that was a huge event, but most of the planet didn't care. There were tribes in the Americas that didn't realize the western roman empire ever existed. Asia mostly went unaffected. Australia didn't care. North Africa was affected, but Africa is a huge continent and most of it didn't care at all that something called Rome went away. Northern Europe lost its biggest customer for bog iron but otherwise wasn't directly impacted. For many of the people within the western Roman empire, life actually got a lot better. According to evidence from people's bones, the average person's health improved more than at any point in history when the western Roman empire fell. Despite that, many people think this empire falling was one of the worst things to happen in history.
Given that fact, it's probably important to pay a little bit to the outside world to make sure you're prepared for the future, but it's more important to make sure the world around you right now is good. I've always considered my relationship with my wife important, but I've really spent time cultivating it in the past 5 years and I'm happy I have because we're closer than ever. The time I spend with my son is surprisingly beneficial for my own mental health, but more importantly he's going to grow up and the decision to spend time with him is going to splay out in consequence that will pan out for generations -- the world around him will be different based on whether I spend quality time with him or not, and what specifically I decide that quality time looks like, not just in this moment potentially when he chooses who to marry, how he treats his kids, and how their kids decide to live their lives as well. Unlike many things where there isn't much evidence to support the idea that you can make a change, we know the overwhelming difference you can make in the life of your child, and the lives of people around you.
And in the same way the microbes under your sink could potentially get you sick and you can get your whole household sick and if you've got a kid in school they could send those germs to the school affecting a chunk of the school and thereby the city, I think part of the problems we're seeing today in the world are caused by people making the wrong decisions about their micro lives. At the end of the day politics matters but equally doesn't matter. It has effects on your personal life, but it isn't all that affects it or even the most potent thing -- you can't really talk about how your life is going based on who is president as much as what's actually going on in your life.
And that's where I think the media is dangerous but also can be beneficial. If you're able to take what you see and use it to make your micro life better, then it's useful, and if it only stresses you out over things you can't change or it misleads you into making poor decisions, then it's harmful.
People cheering for anything like what happened are idiots because even if you're perfectly compliant with today's rules, the people in charge can change and suddenly the precedent you were happy to set against your enemies will be used against you.
I was listening to a video about the new Star Wars stuff that came out, and it brought back up something I keep on tripping over every time the discussions come up: Blazing Saddles.
Blazing Saddles is a comedy Movie produced by Mel Brooks in 1974. The main character is a black man in 1874 who is working on the railroad. He gets himself in trouble, and eventually finds himself the sheriff of a town who hates him because he's black. He goes through a typical western plot of the scheming senator trying to destroy the town to make himself rich, but the twist is that part of the way he was going to do that was by making a black guy the sheriff. Instead, the new sheriff comes up with a plan to save the town by building a fake town nearby and slowing down the bandits by building a toll booth. The fake town is booby-trapped with explosives. The rest of the movie descends into a fourth wall breaking gong show. All throughout, the movie constantly made jokes dragging the racism of 1874 into the limelight as an object of ridicule.
I saw it for the first time a few years ago, and it was absolutely hilarious. It was massively successful at the box office, making 119 million dollars on a 2.6 million dollar budget.
What does Blazing Saddles have to do with the new Star Wars?
Two things:
First, the movie was as I understand it pretty cutting edge for the day, but it was a decade where many cutting edge movies were being put out. It had a black lead, it directly addressed racism as a core plot point, and as I recall it had more n-bombs than the freeside of the fediverse.
Second, 1974 was (sorry, my Gen-X mutuals) 50 years ago. A child born the day that movie came out (sorry! sorry!) are starting to look at retirement, and anyone who saw it in theatres is likely already well past retirement age (sorry Boomers!). The key point here is that it's a movie that's been around for a long time.
Really, there are things we can criticize the boomers as a bloc for, but it's historical revisionism to look at this movie and say "they didn't have black people in movies, they didn't discuss racism, and if they had black people in those movies white people wouldn't watch them" -- obviously all of that is wrong.
Star Wars was released in 1977, and it did a lot of things too -- Everyone knows Princess Leia was one of the early girlboss characters, but besides that the assault on the death star had a lady named Mon Mothra in charge, and in the movie it wasn't a big deal, everyone was focused on the mission.
The Empire Strikes back introduced a black character, Lando Calrissian (If I get the Star Wars names wrong here, I'm not even sorry) who was the black leader of an entire city and a really cool character to boot. Everyone remembers Lando.
In Return of the Jedi in 1983, it explicitly reveals Leia was Luke's sister and also strong in the Force, so if Luke fails, she would be the galaxy's last hope, not directly showing a female jedi because that's not what the story was about, but making it clear girls could be jedis.
The Prequel trilogy introduced Motherfuckin Samuel L. Jackson playing a Motherfuckin black motherfuckin jedi. Everyone was made of planks of wood in that movie, but apparently other media helped flesh out his character as incredibly interesting.
I'm enumerating all these things to show that Star Wars already hit all these notes before many of the actresses rambling on about diversity were even born. They're acting like they're doing something really amazing that will change the world, but the world already changed, and it was the Baby Boomers that changed it. These people are walking into the middle of Washington DC and pretending they founded America.
In short, it's literally not progress. Considering how poorly done these diversity roles are done and how poorly the media is taken because they focus first on pretending to be groundbreaking and then maybe sometime after with making something people actually want to see, it's worse than nothing because we already have had competent people make good works people look back on fondly. When a bad piece of media carries your message, it hurts the cause as much as a good piece of media carrying your message helps your cause.
The marketing juggernaut has taken stuff that just kind of "Was" and changed it into a bullet point for the marketing blurb. "Star wars 4: we no longer murder women and minorities, and we're also no asbestos free!"
I also feel like it lets people who aren't nearly as competent as their parents generation pretend they're doing something important when in reality they're just failing to live up to the standards of those who came before. "Well even if our movie sucks you need to watch it because we have black people!" -- Nobody cares. If you take Star Wars as a whole continuity, there isn't really any sort of real minority that isn't somehow represented. What they're doing isn't important, which is a deathblow because it also isn't competently produced or entertaining.
Some might call the problem tokenism, I think that's wrong -- the problem isn't necessarily tokenism, it's worse: With tokenism, you include a black character to meet a quota. That can mean the black character is a token addition but otherwise inoffensive (and in fact can end up as a great character in their own right under a good writer). This is an active, religious thespiannic diversity. It's shouting from the streetcorner so everyone can see you being ever so pious. And as part of the performative aspect it stops being inoffensive and starts actively trying to be offensive. You see it in the interviews around the modern movies -- nobody's seen the movie yet, but they're railing against fans who hate the movie, especially "STRAIGHT WHITE MEN" because they hope that muckraking will cause controversy and attacking the core demographic of the film was a good way of doing that. Thankfully, people are getting wise to the grift, and so instead of getting outraged when these people say stupid things, they just ignore them, and now that the money is running out we're seeing the trickling of a sea change. It goes beyond merely performative, and into the thespiannic -- like a stage actor screaming their lines so everyone in the back row can hear.
"Oh, this movie [that was just announced and nobody knows about yet] there's so many people attacking me, I got death threats!" uh huh? On the Internet, even? Sounds scary. And they were just lurking, waiting to jump on you, they didn't even wait for the film to be announced! Horrifying.
If you're actually breaking barriers, you don't get full backing of the Hollywood hype machine. The suits aren't going to want to support you because you're trying something new and dangerous. In that sense, Gina Carano's actions are more cutting edge than any of the management approved controversy being drummed up, and they fired her and blacklisted her.
This concept of "Safe edgy" is interesting to think about, but it isn't new. TV in the 90s was filled with TV shows or advertisements pretending they were pushing the edge when in reality they were doing exactly what the execs wanted them to be doing. Once you know what you're looking at (Don't you DARE spell "Extreme" with an E at the beginning because we're XTREME here! "No way!" WAAAAAYYYY!) the verisimilitude (appearance of being real) breaks down and you realize you're looking at a square pretending to be edgy and cool. And to be clear on something, there was a lot of fake edgy back then, but there was also a lot of real edgy and those guys were constantly one quip from having their show canceled by the networks. A lot of them didn't make it, but they left behind great works.
The veneer of fake edgy hid milquetoast products back in the day, and often you'd get your XTREME LEMONADE and find that it was competent lemonade, not great but not horrible, just boring. I think part of the problem today is that fake edgy often is a mask over a mask; You're obviously being fake and so under that mask is something, but the boring underneath the fake edgy mask is the actual mask over what is often the absolutely horrible people inhabiting Hollywood and other media industries.
But we found that in the following decades that a lot of our heroes in Media were terrible. You'd have some actress up on the big stage and she would make a point to heartfeltedly thank Harvey Weinstein who that actress probably needed to do something unspeakable to in order to get the part, right before they paid lip service to whatever social cause is trendy this week. We didn't know, but they did and they were complicit. And anyone who thinks that that was an isolated incident and that everything is fine now is in denial. For all the "we just love women and minorities!", it's a paper thin facade intended to cover up the window through which you can see Jeffrey Epsteins private island.
I know, that's a lot to think about from just a bunch of idiotic hollywood actors pretending they're saving the world by selling you a shitty movie, but it isn't like I'm interested in the movies themselves anymore.
Blazing Saddles is a comedy Movie produced by Mel Brooks in 1974. The main character is a black man in 1874 who is working on the railroad. He gets himself in trouble, and eventually finds himself the sheriff of a town who hates him because he's black. He goes through a typical western plot of the scheming senator trying to destroy the town to make himself rich, but the twist is that part of the way he was going to do that was by making a black guy the sheriff. Instead, the new sheriff comes up with a plan to save the town by building a fake town nearby and slowing down the bandits by building a toll booth. The fake town is booby-trapped with explosives. The rest of the movie descends into a fourth wall breaking gong show. All throughout, the movie constantly made jokes dragging the racism of 1874 into the limelight as an object of ridicule.
I saw it for the first time a few years ago, and it was absolutely hilarious. It was massively successful at the box office, making 119 million dollars on a 2.6 million dollar budget.
What does Blazing Saddles have to do with the new Star Wars?
Two things:
First, the movie was as I understand it pretty cutting edge for the day, but it was a decade where many cutting edge movies were being put out. It had a black lead, it directly addressed racism as a core plot point, and as I recall it had more n-bombs than the freeside of the fediverse.
Second, 1974 was (sorry, my Gen-X mutuals) 50 years ago. A child born the day that movie came out (sorry! sorry!) are starting to look at retirement, and anyone who saw it in theatres is likely already well past retirement age (sorry Boomers!). The key point here is that it's a movie that's been around for a long time.
Really, there are things we can criticize the boomers as a bloc for, but it's historical revisionism to look at this movie and say "they didn't have black people in movies, they didn't discuss racism, and if they had black people in those movies white people wouldn't watch them" -- obviously all of that is wrong.
Star Wars was released in 1977, and it did a lot of things too -- Everyone knows Princess Leia was one of the early girlboss characters, but besides that the assault on the death star had a lady named Mon Mothra in charge, and in the movie it wasn't a big deal, everyone was focused on the mission.
The Empire Strikes back introduced a black character, Lando Calrissian (If I get the Star Wars names wrong here, I'm not even sorry) who was the black leader of an entire city and a really cool character to boot. Everyone remembers Lando.
In Return of the Jedi in 1983, it explicitly reveals Leia was Luke's sister and also strong in the Force, so if Luke fails, she would be the galaxy's last hope, not directly showing a female jedi because that's not what the story was about, but making it clear girls could be jedis.
The Prequel trilogy introduced Motherfuckin Samuel L. Jackson playing a Motherfuckin black motherfuckin jedi. Everyone was made of planks of wood in that movie, but apparently other media helped flesh out his character as incredibly interesting.
I'm enumerating all these things to show that Star Wars already hit all these notes before many of the actresses rambling on about diversity were even born. They're acting like they're doing something really amazing that will change the world, but the world already changed, and it was the Baby Boomers that changed it. These people are walking into the middle of Washington DC and pretending they founded America.
In short, it's literally not progress. Considering how poorly done these diversity roles are done and how poorly the media is taken because they focus first on pretending to be groundbreaking and then maybe sometime after with making something people actually want to see, it's worse than nothing because we already have had competent people make good works people look back on fondly. When a bad piece of media carries your message, it hurts the cause as much as a good piece of media carrying your message helps your cause.
The marketing juggernaut has taken stuff that just kind of "Was" and changed it into a bullet point for the marketing blurb. "Star wars 4: we no longer murder women and minorities, and we're also no asbestos free!"
I also feel like it lets people who aren't nearly as competent as their parents generation pretend they're doing something important when in reality they're just failing to live up to the standards of those who came before. "Well even if our movie sucks you need to watch it because we have black people!" -- Nobody cares. If you take Star Wars as a whole continuity, there isn't really any sort of real minority that isn't somehow represented. What they're doing isn't important, which is a deathblow because it also isn't competently produced or entertaining.
Some might call the problem tokenism, I think that's wrong -- the problem isn't necessarily tokenism, it's worse: With tokenism, you include a black character to meet a quota. That can mean the black character is a token addition but otherwise inoffensive (and in fact can end up as a great character in their own right under a good writer). This is an active, religious thespiannic diversity. It's shouting from the streetcorner so everyone can see you being ever so pious. And as part of the performative aspect it stops being inoffensive and starts actively trying to be offensive. You see it in the interviews around the modern movies -- nobody's seen the movie yet, but they're railing against fans who hate the movie, especially "STRAIGHT WHITE MEN" because they hope that muckraking will cause controversy and attacking the core demographic of the film was a good way of doing that. Thankfully, people are getting wise to the grift, and so instead of getting outraged when these people say stupid things, they just ignore them, and now that the money is running out we're seeing the trickling of a sea change. It goes beyond merely performative, and into the thespiannic -- like a stage actor screaming their lines so everyone in the back row can hear.
"Oh, this movie [that was just announced and nobody knows about yet] there's so many people attacking me, I got death threats!" uh huh? On the Internet, even? Sounds scary. And they were just lurking, waiting to jump on you, they didn't even wait for the film to be announced! Horrifying.
If you're actually breaking barriers, you don't get full backing of the Hollywood hype machine. The suits aren't going to want to support you because you're trying something new and dangerous. In that sense, Gina Carano's actions are more cutting edge than any of the management approved controversy being drummed up, and they fired her and blacklisted her.
This concept of "Safe edgy" is interesting to think about, but it isn't new. TV in the 90s was filled with TV shows or advertisements pretending they were pushing the edge when in reality they were doing exactly what the execs wanted them to be doing. Once you know what you're looking at (Don't you DARE spell "Extreme" with an E at the beginning because we're XTREME here! "No way!" WAAAAAYYYY!) the verisimilitude (appearance of being real) breaks down and you realize you're looking at a square pretending to be edgy and cool. And to be clear on something, there was a lot of fake edgy back then, but there was also a lot of real edgy and those guys were constantly one quip from having their show canceled by the networks. A lot of them didn't make it, but they left behind great works.
The veneer of fake edgy hid milquetoast products back in the day, and often you'd get your XTREME LEMONADE and find that it was competent lemonade, not great but not horrible, just boring. I think part of the problem today is that fake edgy often is a mask over a mask; You're obviously being fake and so under that mask is something, but the boring underneath the fake edgy mask is the actual mask over what is often the absolutely horrible people inhabiting Hollywood and other media industries.
But we found that in the following decades that a lot of our heroes in Media were terrible. You'd have some actress up on the big stage and she would make a point to heartfeltedly thank Harvey Weinstein who that actress probably needed to do something unspeakable to in order to get the part, right before they paid lip service to whatever social cause is trendy this week. We didn't know, but they did and they were complicit. And anyone who thinks that that was an isolated incident and that everything is fine now is in denial. For all the "we just love women and minorities!", it's a paper thin facade intended to cover up the window through which you can see Jeffrey Epsteins private island.
I know, that's a lot to think about from just a bunch of idiotic hollywood actors pretending they're saving the world by selling you a shitty movie, but it isn't like I'm interested in the movies themselves anymore.
I've seen the occasional post from Robert fourth Reich here on the fediverse. I bite my tongue every time because I have a policy against arguing with braindead morons.
