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Hollywood Is Losing the Battle Against Online Trolls (hollywoodreporter.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Hollywood Reporter article: It had taken years -- and the passionate support of Kirk Kerkorian, who financed the film's $100 million budget without expecting to ever make a profit -- for The Promise, a historical romance set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide and starring Christian Bale and Oscar Isaac, to reach the screen. Producers always knew it would be controversial: Descendants of the 1.5 million Armenians killed by the Ottoman Empire shortly after the onset of World War I have long pressed for the episode to be recognized as a genocide despite the Turkish government's insistence the deaths were not a premeditated extermination. Before the critics in attendance even had the chance to exit Roy Thompson Hall, let alone write their reviews, The Promise's IMDb page was flooded with tens of thousands of one-star ratings. "All I know is that we were in about a 900-seat house with a real ovation at the end, and then you see almost 100,000 people who claim the movie isn't any good," says Medavoy. Panicked calls were placed to IMDb, but there was nothing the site could do. "One thing that they can track is where the votes come from," says Eric Esrailian, who also produced the film, and "the vast majority of people voting were not from Canada. So I know they weren't in Toronto." The online campaign against The Promise appears to have originated on sites like Incisozluk, a Turkish version of 4chan, where there were calls for users to "downvote" the film's ratings on IMDb and YouTube. A rough translation of one post: "Guys, Hollywood is filming a big movie about the so-called Armenian genocide and the trailer has already been watched 700k times. We need to do something urgently." Soon afterward, the user gleefully noted The Promise's average IMDb rating had reached a dismaying 1.8 stars. "They know that the IMDb rating will stay with the film forever," says Esrailian. "It's a kind of censorship, really."
Does Turkey even need to be discredited? They seem to have done it all by themselves.
Erdogan did not run as a dictator. During his initial rise to power he was actually a very moderate politician. He called for EU membership for Turkey, and under his direction the country did enter negotiations with the aim of getting that membership. He pushed major labor reforms too, giving employees substantially greater protections than ever before in the country and introducing non-discrimination law. He changed later on, slowly, over the course of the 2000s at 2010s, depending increasingly upon tighter control of the media and repression of opposition to stay in power and growing steadily more conservative and Islamist in his social policies.
He called for EU membership for Turkey
And he single-handedly took those aspirations behind the shed and shot them in the back of the head.
Peter Jackson had a percentage of the gross for LotR. And guess what? All the gross numbers from abroad were completely phony.
The game was: Peter and I both have a claim on the gross, while the film is owned by a company where I have controlling interest. Then I sell the full foreign rights to a company that I have 100% ownership of for, say, $10 million. Peter gets a piece of the $10 million in gross, I get to keep the $200 million in foreign sales.
This is how most of the Russian oil tycoons made their money, too, by selling low to a shell company that they completely owned. The Russian gov't gets a percentage of the low price sale for the oil lease. The tycoon gets 100% of the profit thereafter.
Let me provide a play-by-play reaction to your post...
You obviously don't know what the phrase "begging the question" means
Crap, did I accidentally use it other than how I intended?
*goes back to check*
No, I used it exactly as I intended to. Is it possible I've been misusing it this entire time without knowing any better?
*pulls up a DuckDuckGo search in another window while reading the rest of your comment*
and aren't willing to find out
Well, that's a rude and baseless assertion that isn't supported by any evidence. I certainly wasn't willfully misusing it, and I'm not aware of having received correction from someone in the past. That said, I don't get notified when ACs respond to me, so it's certainly possible that you or someone else has been screaming at me about it for years without my awareness. I should still check whether I used it correctly, or maybe he'll tell me how I misused it if I just read a bit further.
so really the best thing for you to do is just stop using it instead of abusing it.
...seriously? Rather than provide a helpful bit of education or correction, you're simply telling me I'm wrong and should stop? Give me some credit. This is Slashdot. Many of us are open to receiving correction when we're wrong. Some of us even enjoy being told why we're wrong, simply because the quickest way to ensure we're right is to learn from our past mistakes.
For anyone curious: I abused the term. While the way I used it (i.e. to mean "inviting the question") is well understood in everyday usage, it's incorrect in much the same way that "I could care less" is almost always the opposite of what the speaker actually intended, yet will still be understood by most listeners. Particularly in legal and logical contexts, "begging the question" strictly refers to a form of circular reasoning. For instance, "reasonable people think and reason intelligently" begs the question "what does it mean to think and reason?", which leaves you right back where you started.
I really should have been aware of that already, but clearly I've incorporated the incorrect usage into my own speech. I'll try to do better going forward, so thank you, AC, for your correction, though it may have been mean spirited.
And you consider this some kind of assault on your free speed or something?
Her videos are partly aimed at children, her charity uses them to promote feminism to young people in an accessible way. Probably wouldn't work very well if every school's content filter flagged them up due to the comments. Anyway, people discuss them elsewhere, including here. What do you want, forced comments on her videos?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Did this amount to a centrally planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the Armenian people?
I don't think so."
You're wrong. Simply, clearly, and provably wrong. There's a whole wikipedia page full of high-level government witnesses - including Turks/Ottomans - that talk about the intentions, the systemic nature, and the results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Basically, the Turks who want to continue to deny the genocide (and you, apparently) are claiming that they didn't _intend_ for 1.5 million to die, it 'just happened' that, after the massacres, everyone who wasn't killed right away somehow died during an organized and planned forced march through the Syrian desert with no food, water, shelter, or rest.
And the justification of some Armenian 'fifth column' is ridiculous. You don't kill all the women, children, and grandparents because a handful of Armenian men are helping the war against you. It was simply an excuse to take action against a hated group people who were already denigrated third-class citizens because they weren't the correct religion.