atarimcgregor

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Mission: Impossible (1996) dir. Brian De Palma

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People have been weird about Game of Thrones and similar works for some years now. Specifically, there are certain criticisms that keep popping up that are based in ideas about art and fiction that I fundamentally disagree with. Basically:

Fine criticism: “This work, which aims to starkly explore the dark side of humanity, could go about that generally worthy goal better in some ways.”

Also fine: “I understand the vision behind this work and at the very least accept it. However, I am personally uncomfortable with something so disturbing and therefore choose to engage with something else.”

Awful criticism: “The aim of this work, to starkly explore the dark side of humanity, is inherently illegitimate and bad. By portraying difficult, dark and/or disturbing things, the work and its creators are in some way taking the side of those things. Fiction should be comfortable and should ‘entertain’ in the most common sense of the word. Dark and disturbing subjects in fiction are a twisted version of that, made to entertain twisted people.”

Also awful: “The fantasy genre has a limited range of acceptable tones and subject matters. The ‘fantasy’ of it needs to apply equally to the social/human aspect of the story-world as it does to the genre setting. It is inherently contradictory for realistic human psychology/sociology to exist alongside any supernatural phenomena.” (AKA.: “it literally has dragons lmao”)

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If you’re not keeping up, Cartoon Network sold off most of its original programming over the last few years to run exclusively on HBO Max, but after a merger with Discovery, HBO has taken them all down, including those that were still in production, for what is long story short a big tax write-off. And it’s not a simple matter of them just airing or streaming somewhere else now. It’s a very complicated issue of rights and contracts and money but essentially it’s very possible that these shows will never be available again in official capacity and their creators will never see another penny from them again, either. Some completed episodes may also be lost media, indefinitely. For a couple of series, such as Mao Mao and Infinity Train, Cartoon Network has gone back and scrubbed all tweets, youtube clips or other mention of the series existence, confirming they likely no longer have the rights to take them anywhere else. The tweet today by the creator of Tig N’ Seek made me saddest.

A lot of people this week have simply given up on their industry careers, seeing years of their life’s work just vanish into a corporate vault overnight. Being able to point to your work on a streaming service had apparently even become a pretty critical part of the portfolios they now rely on to get new jobs.

Streaming media went from an optimistic new frontier to even worse than cable TV so suddenly.

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It's just so transparent that most - almost all? - anti vegan sentiment is based in the fact that people find vegans annoying and their personal choices an implicit condemnation of their own, so you get all these posts going "veganism is uhhhh (spins wheel) white supremacist" like don't hurt your shoulder with that reach beloved

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Folk singer-songwriter Bob Dylan playing chess in Woodstock, New York, 1964. Photo by Daniel Kramer.

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😀😀😀😀😀😀

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Guys we all have to be as cringe as possible to stop insufferable people who work for think tanks moving here from twitter

We need to bring back the onceler fandom

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This is such a truly, truly weird consensus that seems to be developing in certain circles. You guys have just fucking left Earth on this. Groupthink is a helluva drug.

“anyone else remember when everyone understood that the correct feminist position about sports was that women should be allowed to compete with men because they’re just as capable?“

No. I really, honestly do not remember this. Because it’s just... outrageous? Like, I don’t know if I ever heard this idea expressed before a year ago, outside of something like chess.

“When it was a trope in media to have the mysterious star athlete who just blew everyone else out of the water to take off her helmet and reveal that she was a woman the whole time?“

That trope is fun exactly because men generally have such an obvious advantage over women in the majority of sports - definitely any that are based on “explosive” muscle use or upper-body strength. That fact is well understood by almost everyone on this planet. The trope is a power fantasy and an underdog-thing.

Like, I need you guys to understand that the position: “there is no sex difference in physical abilities” is a bafflingly inaccurate, galaxy-brained position. It just is not correct. It’s incredible that this is now just an actual debate. Like, this as a general idea and not just certain nuances of it.

If we accepted this view, we’d also need to completely rethink the issue of violence against women. Are you guys literally, honestly, for-real saying that, as a society, we should stop considering gender-based physical power imbalance in e.g. domestic violence?

“Now people are rabidly arguing that supposed “men” (trans women) have inherent insurmountable biological advantages in literally every single possible activity“

I think my views on this are pretty popular among even left-leaning people, but rapidly getting less so, it seems:

(1) In sports, it actually matters whether or not being trans has inherent significant physical advantages. (2) It should be determined for each individual sport whether being trans gives athletes a significant advantage beyond the normal cis variance. (3) In situations that are inevitably going to be unfair, it is more fair to be unfair to a small minority than the vast majority. (4) Depending on the trans advantage-evaluation, segregated divisions should or should not be formed. (5) The idea of a “trans division” may not be inherently different from the idea of “disabled divisions” or the Paralympics. The ideas in the post, of completely unsegregated sports, are a threat to many disabled athletes.

“Anyway, desegregate sports“

I do think there should be completely un-gender-segregated divisions in sports where it’s determined there isn’t a sex-based capability-gap. Although there should possibly also be gendered divisions, since they might encourage wider participation through preventing e.g., a “boy’s club” image from forming.

God, anyone else remember when everyone understood that the correct feminist position about sports was that women should be allowed to compete with men because they're just as capable? When it was a trope in media to have the mysterious star athlete who just blew everyone else out of the water to take off her helmet and reveal that she was a woman the whole time?

Now people are rabidly arguing that supposed "men" (trans women) have inherent insurmountable biological advantages in literally every single possible activity and cis women are too weak and dainty and unskilled to ever compete and must be protected, and then they try to call themselves feminists who are being silenced as if that's not just the mainstream sexist patriarchal opinion

Anyway, desegregate sports. There was never any reason to separate them by gender in the first place

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T1J boiling down a lot of my thoughts:

Although it’s a complex issue, I think you can actually come up with well-reasoned, well-defined lines for what counts as “acceptable violence” and what doesn’t. And I feel like “violence as retaliation” for social transgressions on the level of “rudeness”, especially without earlier attempts to solve the issue through communication, couldn’t possibly fall anywhere even close to the “acceptable” side of those lines. I cannot come up with an example of that that doesn’t deeply violate some moral principle. I’m genuinely a bit disturbed and saddened by a lot of the discourse, including from people I respect, around that Will Smith incident.

I hope (and think?) I’m not too condescending saying this, but: Imagine you were talking to a child that had been in a playground incident, where, let’s say, another kid had made fun of their friend. Would you advocate this child solve their problem through use of violence - that the next time something like that happened, they’d just try hitting or pushing the other kid as a solution? Why? Why not? If that solution (and the values behind it) sound appalling to you in the context of children, how could it be correct in other situations? Are we not meant to instill in children the moral principles we believe in and want our society built around? What would be the justification for that moral chasm?

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Although it’s a complex issue, I think you can actually come up with well-reasoned, well-defined lines for what counts as “acceptable violence” and what doesn’t. And I feel like “violence as retaliation” for social transgressions on the level of “rudeness”, especially without earlier attempts to solve the issue through communication, couldn’t possibly fall anywhere even close to the “acceptable” side of those lines. I cannot come up with an example of that that doesn’t deeply violate some moral principle. I’m genuinely a bit disturbed and saddened by a lot of the discourse, including from people I respect, around that Will Smith incident.

I hope (and think?) I’m not too condescending saying this, but: Imagine you were talking to a child that had been in a playground incident, where, let’s say, another kid had made fun of their friend. Would you advocate this child solve their problem through use of violence - that the next time something like that happened, they’d just try hitting or pushing the other kid as a solution? Why? Why not? If that solution (and the values behind it) sound appalling to you in the context of children, how could it be correct in other situations? Are we not meant to instill in children the moral principles we believe in and want our society built around? What would be the justification for that moral chasm?

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that thing about how removing the middle 2 panels of a cad comic makes it funnier is true 

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and i think the best rule of thumb for engagement online especially with strangers is asking yourself whether or not you would say it out loud in front of them in an elevator full of other people. would you say someone has mommy milkers in that situation? would you tell them about your deepest personal traumas? would you call them fruity or a faggot or any other slur? is that what you would do? be honest with yourself

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Italian Alps. | instagram

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Harry Potter is a series about an isolated and mistreated kid who discovers who he truly is and enters a new world where he finally feels like he belongs. I mean, it’s obviously a story that’s easy for queer kids, including trans ones, to connect with and form an attachment to. That’s something that makes this whole Rowling-situation especially tragic.

So, attacking J.K. Rowling’s politics by mocking the actual books themselves and suggesting in any way that those who liked them were dumb or had bad taste, is such a shitty way of making the point. Don’t risk roping in queer fans or former fans of the series with your criticism of the author’s politics. Whatever you think of the books’ general quality is honestly beside the point.

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I can’t imagine the balls it takes to be a Russian anti-war protester right now. Good for them.

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"maus is triggering just fyi!!" yeah that's the point??? lmfao?? "oh no the holocaust exists and it's triggering my anxiety" shut the fuck up