JAMES GUNN FIRED FROM MCU

[Craig H]

Once again, nope. Jesus, what's up with all the death traps you all have to drive over?

[J.T.]

7 minutes ago, Craig H said:

Once again, nope. Jesus, what's up with all the death traps you all have to drive over?

Welcome to DelMarVa where the most populous areas in the region are surrounded by rivers and other large bodies of water.

[OSJ]

I have become very thankful that I don't drive. 

[OSJ]

1 minute ago, J.T. said:

Welcome to DelMarVa where the most populous areas in the region are surrounded by rivers and other large bodies of water.

Large bodies of water? What are those? Remember, I live in New Mexico.

[odessasteps]

I would much rather drive over the dam every day than the I-95 bridge up here with it's no sides, trucks driving 70+ and high crosswinds. 

[SorceressKnight]

6 hours ago, Curt McGirt said:

1. I understand your argument, and I would like to agree with you, but 

2. It's an ideal reality. From at least what I've experienced in my life, people aren't going to respond that way (because they're assholes and bigots), and I feel that if someone wants to form an online shelter for themselves on Facebook or a forum or whatever, they deserve to do that. All I'm saying.

There are a lot of existential arguments in this thread that I don't even want to touch upon and will leave to the braver of you

1. I understand your argument, and would like to agree with you and the people opposite it there, but

2. It's not an ideal reality as well...and that's the reason it also doesn't work on the other side as well. We can all agree people probably won't respond that way (because they're assholes and bigots), and people who want to form an online shelter for themselves on Facebook or a forum or whatever deserve to do that, but

3. That ignores the facts that being an asshole knows no gender, it knows no race, it knows no creed, it knows no orientation or identity, it knows no religion or lack thereof, it knows no political party, it knows no fandom, it knows no tribe or group. Eventually in any group of people, you're going to find at least a few assholes, and sometimes, those assholes can galvanize everyone else to fall in line to their side under the "Well, I care about this the most, and that means I'm better than you...and so if you don't care as much as I do, then you're a bad person at best- one of THEM at worst. You're not ONE OF THEM, are you? ARE YOU?"  Even common civility doesn't work since in a lot of cases in modern time, simply being civil to someone who disagrees with you is tantamount to supporting them and being a bad person, or ONE OF THEM. 

[BurningBeard]

17 hours ago, Betsy Zeidler said:

How do y'all think social media works?  I choose the people I want to follow, so I don;t have to put up with their quirks, opinions and bullshit unless I choose to.

The conversation has moved on to roads but I wanted to address this. I really noticed a change with Twitter when people's likes started trickling into other people's timelines. All of a sudden you were exposed to crap you'd never follow or entertain. The whole point of that website was to curate to your interest, and that power was taken from you under the guise of social outreach. It was a bullshit move.

Anyway, back to your scheduled programming, in England we have this circular road called the M60. It's rather safe by all your standards but is permanently congested, leading me to believe that a demon serpent lies coiled underneath the motorway feeding on all the anger and negative energy drivers emit. I'd pitch that as a Hellblazer story if it still existed (and no the soft DC bollocks doesn't count)

[lurkerbelow]

9 hours ago, evilwaldo said:

But is it an echo chamber and how is it different from television?  My take on both television and social media is this.  I have the power of the remote control.  If I see something I don't like when I turn the television on, I change the channel.  Nobody is forcing me to watch the news, KUWTK, or any reality television.  If I turn on the television and find nothing on I turn off the television and find something else to do.  Pick up a book, play a game, go to the gym, etc.

How different is the echo chamber on social media than the echo chamber on television?  I see no difference.  I have the power of the remote control.  I will wield that power.

 

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.

 

 

[Casey]

Boy, I can't wait to see how this plays out.

[Technico Support]

@lurkerbelow

First of all, welcome, and thanks for posting.

The right's "Hollywood is full of liberals pushing the liberal agenda down our throats" is so tired and false.  A great deal of what you generalize as "Hollywood" is full of fake liberals who are racist and sexist as fuck.  If Hollywood was some shining beacon of happy liberalism and all that liberalism entails, why are so many major players going down in the me too movement?  Why are there protests every year of the Oscars being so white?  Why does a guy like Cliff Curtis get cast in roles for at least five different races?  Institutional racism is a thing (the "sin" of being born a white male, as you say) and, with Hollywood essentially being run by white guys, bet your sweet ass it's not as liberal and inclusive as you assume.  Liberalism in Hollywood is like cutting down the woods to build condos, then "offsetting" it by planting a tree somewhere.  These guys might support "liberal" causes, but that's just to assuage their guilt from being awful people in their everyday lives.  Hollywood execs supporting liberal causes is like Ted Cruz going duck hunting.  It plays well to the base.

Right wingers take anything that challenges the straight white male status quo as a personal attack, like holy shit, how dare anyone cast a woman or POC when a straight white guy could fill the role?  Look at Marvel as an example.  How can you complain about forced diversity, "blackwashing," etc when the cornerstone of the multi billion dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe is three white guys?  But a lesser Thor character the general public has never heard of gets a black actor cast in the role and suddenly it's indicative of Hollywood pushing an evil liberal agenda.  Releasing Black Panther after the previous SEVENTEEN MCU films centered around white guys is somehow indicative of that damn liberal elite doing the SJW thing again.

TL;DR there's no liberal agenda.  Hollywood is run by the studio gangsta equivalent of liberals.  Butthurt righties see every tiny stride toward making things 1% less white and male as a personal attack and indicative of some bogeyman Rush Limbaugh told them about.  Trust me, friend, the only color Hollywood cares about is green.

Also: there's a cartoon I saw online where there's a global warming summit and one scientist is raising his hand, saying, "WAIT!  What if this is all a hoax and we make the environment and the world better for nothing???"  Even if there were a "liberal agenda" in film and TV, who cares?  Is it so bad that people who have been criminally misrepresented forever can get more work today than before?   Who is being harmed in this scenario?  This is why people who decry "PC culture" are labelled racists and sexists.  Because there's no reason, except hate, to be against inclusiveness movements.

[Raziel]

Well...

 

The sad thing, is that buried in that wall of text, there are a couple good points worth exploring, and probably should be, and could be without any harm.  The problem is, it's buried deep down in a wall of LewRockwell/CFL/Freep/Reason Populist manefesto crap that has no bearing on the discussion at hand that I put about an hour before an Admin rolls around and nukes it.

[Technico Support]

I just got back from the company lunchroom and Megyn Kelly's show is on TV.  Hollywood is so liberal that they hired a Fox News anchor who famously told the world, "trust me, Santa is white."  And cohosting the show is George W. Bush's daughter. 

But Hollywood is very liberal, driven by a liberal agenda.

[MarcosLoura]

RIP thread.

I feel these videos could help some people, so I'm just going to sneak these in before the Nuke aaaaahhhh

 

[Craig H]

Y'all could have just chosen to ignore the very obvious troll.

[Spritenaut 32]

15 minutes ago, Craig H said:

Y'all could have just chosen to ignore the very obvious troll.

Wait, you can ignore trolls on the internet?  Why didn't they tell us sooner?

I feel like this thread would be eight pages shorter if Marvel fired a key grip for making racist/sexist remarks on social media (I'm not even sure what Gunn is supposed to have said).

[OSJ]

There has been some excellent and even more importantly, respectful discussion on this thread and I'll do my damnedest to make sure that it doesn't get nuked because of what was (generally speaking) a welter of nonsense around a couple of interesting points.

@lurkerbelow: If you are truly weary and sick of life, get some help, it ain't all that bad. 

Also, don't be dissing Jim Jeffries and GOT, or you shall know my wrath!  

[MarcosLoura]

If you watch a wee bit of the videos I linked you would know why I didn't "ignore the troll" ( I'm not saying that you have to do the same though).

[evilwaldo]

Any response where the person changes the color of the background and font followed by a wall of text is not worthy of a response.

[BurningBeard]

He had some valid points and it's great to have that side of the debate brought here after YOU WERE ALL JUST COMPLAINING ABOUT ECHO CHAMBERS

[Bustronaut]

Ignore the troll? Go back to discoursing as you see fit? Y'all are hilarious.

[Raziel]

I'm up for debating anything.  I'm just not going through the trouble of responding because I'm just waiting for the explosion that inevitibility locks the thread, as is the usual.

[Bustronaut]

We had a manifesto, Craig defending a terrible opinion, someone posting an hour of YouTube videos rather than attempting to post the revelvant arguments made in them, me dunking on white guys, and white guys going #notallmen.

All we need is someone objectifying women and someone coming in to "protect feelings" and we have DVDVR (and all social media, really) in a nutshell.

[Drag Race gif]

[OSJ]

1 minute ago, Betsy Zeidler said:

Ignore the troll? Go back to discoursing as you see fit? Y'all are hilarious.

 

1 minute ago, Raziel said:

I'm up for debating anything.  I'm just not going through the trouble of responding because I'm just waiting for the explosion that inevitibility locks the thread, as is the usual.

Good! Here are some other worthy topics that should prolong the life of this thread:

The Cramps were the greatest rock & roll band in the world.

Durian is very tasty and doesn't really smell all that bad.

Cats are better than dogs, and they don't eat their own shit.

Tetsuya Naito is the greatest wrestler in the world today with Pete Dunne a close second. 

NY Yankees fans eat their young.

The original lineup of GOTG was superior to the new version. 

[OSJ]

1 minute ago, Betsy Zeidler said:

We had a manifesto, Craig defending a terrible opinion, someone posting an hour of YouTube videos rather than attempting to post the revelvant arguments made in them, me dunking on white guys, and white guys going #notallmen.

All we need is someone objectifying women and someone coming in to "protect feelings" and we have DVDVR (and all social media, really) in a nutshell.

[Drag Race gif]

I don't think Hollywood Cibernetico posts here anymore. I've e-mailed Jerry Lawler to see if he'll join us, will that do?

[evilwaldo]

3 hours ago, lurkerbelow said:

lots of words

No wait, I will respond.

Were you offended by this movie?

20 years ago Blade was released and it never had the sort of backlash we see today.