lurkerbelow

Tough crowd (filled with guys that like androgynous tomboys with dude haircuts and manly, manly chiseled jaws), tough crowd... (Insert gif of Rodney Dangerfield loosening his tie here) But hey, you guys do you. I'll be here in the background, silently weeping for a bygone era when actresses actually looked feminine, and wondering why Bailey Jay looks more fem than many of the Hollywood starlets with the Jodie Foster/Angelina Jolie/Carla Delavigne "chiseled jaw" look that is so in fashion these days...

Coming out of lurker mode to post some quotes regarding Ruby Rose as Batwoman. I did not write these, but found them interesting, and relevant.

Nevermind.

Thank you for replying. As for my statement that no one should do opiates, I mainly meant that no one should ever abuse them (the way I did.) I was addicted to opiates after most of my family died, and it was my way of coping. I did a semi-homemade form of opiate that included in it codeine and morphine, as well as a litany of other forms of opiates (a double digit number, IIRC). And I became addicted to all of them. Kratom was pretty much the only thing that saved me from addiction. I can understand pain, and the need to take opiates, very well. I do not know you or (aside from what you have written) exactly how much you need opiates, and I truly do not want to sound like a prosthelytizer, but I wish you (and everyone else who need pain relief) would check out a little thing called Kratom. It saved my life, and on the particular forum I just linked to, I have read so many testimonials discussing how it saved people from both debilitating physical pain and opiate/opioid addiction. It even helps tremendously in overcoming alcoholism. Kratom is damn near a miracle drug, and of course both the DEA and FDA are relentlessly attempting to get it banned (even though it is one of the safest dietary supplements one could ever take, and is basically as safe as coffee) - mainly because it is cheap, plentiful, and threatens the pharmaceutical industry's huge profits on suboxone. Thank you for your civil tone, by the way. I will try to remember to say a prayer for you (and your cats) next time I pray.

That's true. The Death Wish remake with Bruce Willis came out not long ago as well, and now there's Glass. I hate that genre more than the "Cool Black Guy Kicks Ass" genre, by the way.

Keanu Reeves is multiracial. So Is Vin Diesel. Tom Cruise is box office poison (at least here in America), and the only reason he hasn't been kicked out of the Eyes Wide Shut parties is because he is still a draw overseas, especially in Asia. He still has a very short amount of time before he's done completely, though. I'll give you Statham, although he is mostly a B-list actor at best, and Stallone is even more washed-up than Jean Claude Van Damme. But, I am painting in very broad strokes. I admit that. I suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder, which leads to (please forgive what I just realized makes a very stupid pun) "black-and-white thinking". Nuances are sometimes lost on me. And I accept your point about the Hispanic and Asian comedy relief actors.

Thank you for replying. As for GoT, I love the books, but the television show relies on nudity and extreme violence to keep the short attention spans of its viewer base. As for Jim Jefferies, I used to love him when he was an equal-opportunity offender, but he sold out when he got his Comedy Central show. Now he's basically a Koala Colbert following the television industry's previously mentioned drive to be an echo chamber. I am disappointed in him. Equal-opportunity offenders are getting rare these days, as even Bill Burr has become toothless since getting married. At least there's still Doug Stanhope and Anthony Cumia. As for life, I am getting help. I am seeing a great therapist now, and am undergoing the process of switching psychiatrists. The internet offers a pseudo-anonymity wherein we think we have privacy (all the while the NSA and Google know everything we've ever said or done online), so I don't know how much I should reveal about myself here, but if the previous heroin references were not enough of a clue, I am a recovering opiate addict. (Not heroin, interestingly enough, since I have a phobia about needles and the idea of sticking one into my vein in order to feel good seems madly paradoxical; but I was addicted to a form of opiates that were, and still are, legally possible to buy online, on such sites as Amazon - I won't get into details, as no one ever needs to do opiates, especially the kind I took, unless their life is so ruined that the added effect of an opiate addiction would be a drop in the bucket of harm and suffering in the first place, and I don't want introducing new people into the world of opiates hanging on my concious, so this is all I will say about it and leave it at that.) I was saved from my opiate addiction through a supplement known as mitrgyna speciosa, aka Kratom, which, of course, both the FDA and DEA are both trying to ban since, aside from being as safe as coffee, it saves many (and has the potential to save much, much more) from opiate addiction and/or excruciating pain, and it's also very inexpensive, and so it threatens Big Pharma and the kickback money politicians get from them. Plus it being made illegal offers the potential to put even more harmless citizens into for-profit prisons, and helps the economy by employing entirely useless cops, prosecutors, and DEA agents, and so Kratom users are facing a very uphill battle in keeping it legal. But, thanks for the kind words. Thank you, as well, for replying. I, personally, am all over the map on the left/right spectrum, as I believe in global warming, single-payer healthcare, drug legalization, and a social safety net, among other things, and despite my last post, I would not consider myself a member of the alt-right. As for race and the presence on actors and actresses of color, it is not their being included in movies and television shows I have a problem with - it is how they are portrayed that I dislike. Yes, there should be more non-white characters (and not just black, like it currently is in Hollywood). But, the main problem with special interests that demand an ever-increasing amount of representation for their respective groups in Hollywood, is that they only want a certain *type* of representation: that being, solely positive. How many movies with black heroes and white villains have you seen, compared to the reverse? How many lesbian villains do we have (outside of 1960s vampire movies)? About the only "ethnic" characters that are portrayed as criminals are the occasional Hispanic characters. I realize that we have a diverse society and that should be reflected, but onscreen depictions should be realistic as well, and special interests demand that every portrayal of their constituents be an "uplifting" one. That has resulted in a Hollywood that churns out movies and TV shows by the dozens with black/female/occasionally South Asian/the rare Hispanic/LGBTQ+ good guys fighting villains (and street criminals in downtown NYC or LA) that are invariably white and male. You mention the MCU movies, but outside of those (or other comic-related movies), who are the action heroes? Dwayne Johnson, Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and a bunch of women. And in the vast majority of those movies, the villains are always white actors that were seemingly chosen based on how WASPy they looked (extra points if they have blond hair). Who are the actors playing the comedy relief roles? White males (and Kevin Hart). I believe actors and actresses of color should be represented, but their has to be a fairness and a balance in the way they are depicted. And there just isn't. That is what I object to.

Coming out of lurker mode just to say this: First off, your post, and the posts of some others here, were well-said and did a good job of making me see your side(s) of the situation. So, well done on that front. I am going to try to say what I say next as respectfully as possible, but I am so weary and sick of life that I don't know how good a job I'll do of it. With this in mind, please forgive me if I sound like I have 'tude (or sound like your typical edgelord). However, the television/echo chamber analogy might not have been the best one, because unless you watch anime on Adult Swim or something on Univision, almost everything that airs on US television is produced by Hollywood, and Hollywood might very well be the largest echo chamber in America, at least outside of the news industry. For instance, you have The Daily Show and its now-seemingly-endless clones (Samantha Bee, Jim Jefferies, Colbert on the Late Show, Seth Meyers, and probably a *lot* more that I'm not aware of), and in those, just like in the news media, you have a very strong alt-left presence (or, rather, the CTRL-left - yes, it is a lame keyboard pun, to be sure, but that's what it's called), yet there is no alt-right presence to speak of on anywhere on American television; the closest one can get to it is Fox News, which is more of an establishment-wing GOP/neocon channel that alternates between catering to audiences that are either conservatives strictly in the economic sense, or Christian fundies. Even though there is an audience for it, one would have to go to the internet for programming similar to what, let's say, Blaire White puts out, as it is nowhere to be seen on American television, despite there now being more televised content than ever; some (admittedly alarmist) critics have said that this is due to the theory that one cannot even find work in Hollywood if one is openly right-wing, so no matter which channel you turn the remote to, you are incredibly likely to find something that qualifies as "PC" at best and is likely to be pushing a CTRL-left agenda. You still wield "the power of the remote", but does it truly have any power when the television industry only gives you a very limited amount of options? The state of Hollywood, with its adherence (in an almost religious sense) to ideology such as "inclusiveness" (in the vein of blackwashing formerly white characters, and the act of ensuring that any given movie or television show has enough characters of color being put before the act of ensuring that said movies or television shows are well written) and "diversity" (as long as it is only diversity of nationality, religion, race and/or ethnicity, as long as that diversity in only on-screen and never at the studio or network exec level, and there is never ever any diversity of thought or opinion as everyone must be in lockstep with their beliefs - oh yeah, and all the mandatory characters that aren't straight, or white, or male can only be good guys, preferably main characters, while all the villains are white guys playing White Supremacist stand-in characters) along with the supreme arrogance of what regular Joe Americans saw as "elitist Hollywood snobs" foregoing any and all semblance of impartiality and becoming blatant activist shills for Clinton, and the tendency of the left that so dominates both Hollywood and the news media to so adamantly assert that anyone admitting a dislike of movies which push progressive agendas (such as anyone who disliked the Ghostbusters reboot, even if the dislike was based on its merits alone) was a hateful misogynist bigot *on top of* the original sin of being born an evil white male (which has now shifted to aiding in the demonization of any criticism of Oceans 8 and Captain Marvel) are some of the many reasons that led to the perfect (shit)storm that resulted in Trump being elected in 2016. Trump's victory was a lot like Ayatollah Khomeini's rise into power in Iran - in both cases the people felt oppressed by a government, ruling class/group of elites, news media, and a pop culture that no longer represented them, perhaps even openly despised them, and served special interests above the greater good of the people of their countries. The people felt disaffected, marginalized, and disenfranchised - and when that happens, they often embrace despots that they think will represent them, even if only because they're not the other despots that represent others before representing them. Hollywood, the vast majority of the news media, and the greater overall pop culture in America in general, are all echo chambers for the CTRL-left. And they are all very contemptuous of "flyover country". The left-wing bias had been inherent in the mainstream media for decades and decades, and the New York Times for example has, since for pretty much the start of the 20th century, been shills for Communism, but it was cemented in the early 00s when Dumbya got elected through the "hanging chad" shenanigans with sites like moveon.org and Daily Kos forming the base of what would become the modern SJW community, then wastes of bandwidth and truly garbage net rags such as Salon, HuffPo, Buzzfeed, Vox, Polygon, the former Gawker and it's modern descendants Jezebel and (with all due apologies to Mr. Bixenspan) Deadspin rose to what such low things could call "prominence"; then the mainstream media did what they do best and followed the militant, extremist left-wing leaders and they became like the Buzzfeeds and Salons. And after years of hate speech and hit pieces about "toxic masculinity" and "white male entitlement" in the media and the classrooms, years of action movies starring Will Smith or Denzel Washington fighting the eeevil white criminals and/or eeevil white villains (while in real life blacks committed more than 80 percent of all interracial violent crime and the whites who were victims of them, or had loved ones who were, were expected to drop ever-increasing money on movie tickets and DVDs to see said "progressive punching-up" action schlock) while factories closed and Obama's genius plan to fix the economy was to give everyone in the Rust Belt jobs working at gas stations and McDonald's, and they had to buy their food *and* their clothes at dollar stores, while the news media cheerfully announced that the Great Recession was over, because the 1% was doing so well on Wall Street - so all the whiteys got on heroin just to numb the pain of living in such a great, progressive wonderland, and as they saw the GOP establishment do nothing but increase military spending to fight never-ending wars for the Israeli lobbyists that used federal aid money to bribe them (oh yeah, and control of the poppy farms in Afghanistan so they could make bank on all that dank heroin everyone was doing), shout niceties such as "they hate us for our freedom!" and jokes about French people, and give all their other attention to Christian fundies while their lives were Hell on Earth, they realized that neither side of the two party system establishment represented them, and so the reverse side of the Buzzfeed coin, sites such as Breitbart and 4Chan and Daily Stormer, started to fill a niche and the alt-right was born. Hillary was Obama's hand-picked would-be successor, and a lot of Obama's accomplishments in office (like, you know, making it legal for the president to kill any US citizen for any reason at any time without due process) were especially put in place by him (and the elites that spent billions on her campaign, including the salaries of all the "journalists" in the media that shilled for her) for Clinton's sure-thing easy victory in 2016. Then Trump came along. It's kind of like the music industry: mainstream music became such gawdawful shit that, while there are still a couple of pop stars and rappers with mainstream appeal, the vast majority of music listeners just tuned out and retreated into their niche communities of underground rap, EDM, K-pop, metal, punk, outlaw country, hardcore, metalcore, crunkcore, emo, screamo, and 80s or 90s nostalgia on Youtube. Mainstream politics, and the shitshow of political bias that is modern pop culture, got so unbearably bad (outside superhero movies, Instagram, and Netflix), that they became irrelevant, moderates stopped existing, and everyone went into their respective echo chambers: the CTRL-left got tumblr, their side of Twitter, network and cable television so they can enjoy endless Daily Show clones (with the exception of older white people who aren't internet savvy and really like "White People Home Renovation" shows) and the vast majority of the movie industry so they can enjoy evermore diverse message flicks about how black female scientists were solely responsible for us going to the moon, and King Arthur and Robin Hood movies with enough black actors to make them resemble Game of Thrones-themed rap videos; while the alt-right got 4Chan, their side of Twitter, the video game industry (until Gamergate. Thanks, Anita Sarkesian!) and the RPG/tabletop/board/card game industries (thanks for ruining those too, Anita!) and comic books (until Comicsgate and Marvel went full SJW, shamed all their toxic white male customers away because their tastes in entertainment were problematic, and would have gone out of business by now if not for the MCU - oh, hi there, Captain Marvel movie!), and Steven Crowder, Blaire White, Sargon, and all the other alt-right Youtube channels. And that is where they are going to stay until a new Revolutionary War (not Civil War, Revolutionary War) or the biblical Apocalypse happens. I honestly don't know which one is going to happen first.

I am not aware of any actions she may have made to show that she's a white supremacist; the only things I have ever read about her give me the impression that she is very left wing and politically correct; perhaps you are correct that she is, but I've never seen her do anything to make me think she is a white supremacist. However, that being said, given the fact that your race even has an ethnic slur named after its tendency to blindly defend other members of the race when they are accused of wrongdoing (that slur being "Dindus", in other words "he Dindu Nuffin"), and thus you know the effects of individuals making bigoted comments about African Americans siding with their ethnic kinsmen based upon racial purposes, I would think that you would be the last human being to have room to criticize Lena or any other white woman for "choosing whiteness" over being a female or any other label or categorization - if she even did do that, which I'm not entirely convinced that she did. Please don't bring race into an issue of Dunham wanting to defend her friend, and saying her doing so is because of "choosing whiteness" - it smacks of bigotry and race-baiting, and you should be above that.

Or maybe she, you know, just thinks the guy is innocent. Or doesn't want to accept that he would do such a thing, because of how nice he seemed to her when she worked with him. Please don't racebait.

Ah, I see that now. I wasn't just talking about this forum, though; the discourse in general society seems to address only women. And I don't know why that is. I was watching a clip from The View on youtube recently and the women on that show only addressed female victims, and that seems to be the case both within the media and with everyday folks. It seems that it's easier to talk about sexual misconduct when the target of abuse is female, for some reason. I agree with you on the issue of men being shamed into not saying anything; that is a big taboo.

Hi there. I'm usually a lurker here, but in the midst of this Hollywood burning down uproar I feel the need to make a comment about something regarding this whole debacle. I have not yet read all the posts in this thread, so forgive me if it has already been said, and of course this does not only apply to this message board but to all discussions of this issue: why is everyone focusing only on women, when it appears the same thing happens to males in Hollywood (especially underage boys)? Terry Crews and Kevin Sorbo have made claims that they were the target of sexual wrongdoing, and Corey Feldman has been trying to tell his story for years, but he only got laughed at and ignored. There have been rumors and conspiracy theories about pedophile rings existing in Hollywood for many years now, and it's not a secret that young male actors have to get on the casting couch, probably as much as young actresses do. So why is the discourse only about women?

(never mind)

Hi there. I never post here (as my name implies, I'm a lurker), but with the demagoguery of some certain posters (such as Techico Support and others) ventingly cursing "hicks" and "rednecks" for getting Trump elected, other posters (such as (BP) among others) declaring that Trump's win is a "last gasp of old white people" (with the - perhaps merely inferred by myself - smugly implied assumption that before too long they will die off and the Progressive Multicultural Communist Dream Paradise can be ushered in), and yet other posters bouncing a whole littany of other ideas off the wall, it's clear that a lot of us are reeling right now and looking for answers as to why Hillary lost and a candidate so widely considered to be so repugnant won. I don't think I have all the answers, but I read these articles and watched this youtube video, and they strike me as perceptive, or at least something to ponder. So, I just thought I'd leave these links here to give you something in the way of food for thought. I probably won't comment anymore, but I hope you read/view the links and consider them carefully. https://www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-class https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/10/democrats-working-class-americans-us-election https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLG9g7BcjKs

I'm coming out of lurker mode just to bemoan the lack of posts about last weekend's episode. This weekend's show was good, but last weekend's was better. This week had a decent six man tag with MCMG in it (it didn't have enough MCMG teamwork goodness in it, though) and Roddy/Castle which was good, but last week had Jason Kincaid being awesome and a sweet ACH/Mark Briscoe match. It also had Mark Briscoe wondering what ACH stands for and offering allegedly humorous ideas. It ruled.