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."

Comments

Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternative title: IMDB fails to prevent botting and vote brigading

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Penguinisto]

Pretty much this, right here.

Given the topic of the movie, how frickin' hard would it be for IMDb to dump anything with a Turk/Russian/{CDNs-common-to-VPNs}-IP-originate vote of less than 3 stars?

I'm guessing they'll wait for some SJW-centric production to get vote-bombed, and then decide to do something about it?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Luthair]

I'm not sure that is really workable, they could use VPNs, proxies or bots. Its hard to see what they can do long term other than hope the bots are a minority.

They should probably restrict reviews for early releases, I think Rotten Tomatoes did something similar in the past few years - at least I feel they used to have an issue with people rating movies before they could have been seen.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anubis IV]

I was going to suggest that the alternative title could be "Someone Didn't Get The Memo: IMDb Scores Are Still Useless".

A few years back, I used an extension to display IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic scores in Netflix's web UI, thinking they'd help me cut through the chaff and find the films I was most interested in. It became apparent almost immediately that while the Rotten Tomatoes scores were good and the Metacritic scores were occasionally decent, the IMDb scores were nothing more than useless noise, given that they were so far out of sync both with what the other sites are reporting, as well as what my own experiences would suggest reasonable scores should be for the films I had seen. And really, none of this should come as a surprise, given that IMDb is a wiki platform with poor policing, meaning that the scores have become a battleground for various forms of e-peen measuring contests.

So far as I'm concerned, Rotten Tomatoes has for years done a far better job, particularly with their distinction between critic and audience scores, which makes it much easier to understand what to expect from a movie:
- High critic score/high audience score = probably the best thing I'll see all year
- High critic score/low audience score = a thought-provoking film that likely won't entertain
- Low critic score/high audience score = mindless, "junk food" entertainment
- Low critic score/low audience score = a trash film that's only thought-provoking inasmuch as it begs the question: why was this film was made?

In contrast, IMDb scores give me no useful information. They don't tell me what to expect, whether I'll like the film, or even if it's a good film. They're just noise.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Pascoea]

vote of less than 3 stars

Why only negative votes? Wouldn't it make sense to dump everything?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[The-Ixian]

Aren't people entitled to their vote? From the way TFS states things, it was a call to action on the part of some popular Turkish forums.

I say, system is working as intended. If you don't want Turkish votes, don't let them vote.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[PatientZero]

You want votes from real people who've actually seen the movie.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, but now I got a new hobby. I never would've thought to troll movies.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

"decide to do something about it
Because then they would be accused of manipulating the reviews to artificially increase the movies ranking. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. It's just more proof that the Internet is having a detrimental effect on societies across the world. No one, big or small, publishes the news any more. They report opinions crafted to support their own point of view. The Internet has evolved into the complete opposite of what it was once suppose to deliver. And there is not a damned thing anyone can do about it. And who is to blame for this state of things? Damn near every one stuck in their individual echo chambers who do the most damage. "I read it on the Internet so it must be true." This declaration use to be a joke but it is now treated as the kind of wisdom that should be carved on stone tablets.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Old97]

I'm sure you are correct because I saw your post on the internet.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Bots, what part of bots don't you understand?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[The-Ixian]

Well sure, but obviously that is not how their system has ever been set up.... so... is this another one of those ideals vs. reality debates or what?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Grishnakh]

You want votes from real people who've actually seen the movie.

Wrong. You might think that's a good idea, and I would completely agree, however IMDB does not. If they did, this wouldn't be a problem, because they would have designed their system to account for this.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how every topic is an opportunity for you to trot out your fear and hatred of SJWs. It's really about ethics in gaming journalism for you, isn't it.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't know what the phrase "begging the question" means, and aren't willing to find out, so really the best thing for you to do is just stop using it instead of abusing it.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't I read anything anymore without some fuckwit going on about MAGA or SJWs? Grow the fuck up!!!

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[barc0001]

There's tons of ways to block botting. Easiest is when a vote is entered the IP and userid for that vote goes into a table with a timestamp. When another vote for the same IMDB item is cast the table is referenced and if it's the same IP but a different userid and less than 10 or 15 minutes has elapsed, the vote is rejected and the UI pops a message about the same IP with a captcha to solve. If the captcha is solved then the vote is registered. That way bots are blocked but a family who just watched a movie and for some reason ALL of them wanted to rate it on IMDB within a 15 minute window afterward could still vote.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[wisnoskij]

Nothing to do with Hollywood or Trolls. Just people pushing an political idea.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[wisnoskij]

Restricting to the locations that the film is available would not make it impossible to game, but then nothing ever will. It will turn the potential millions of downvotes into hundreds or thousands (also you can just block proxies).

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[The MAZZTer]

There's another reason why it's not really workable... it requires a unique solution for each movie. Building a more general solution that can be applied to all movies would be a better use of resources.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[wisnoskij]

This is the exact opposite of all of my experience. Rotten Tomato scores never make sense, half of my top 50 movies have like a 1/10 score on RT, while thousands of average to absolute horrible films score 9-10. The problem is that Rotten Tomato does not even try to rate the movie, it just give a summery of the percentage of people who thought it was OK or better. Every single movie that gets any advertising dollars spent on it seems to score pretty high using this metric.

IMDB does not have the same issue. They do not have thousands of films scoring 100% (including every single "hit" film that year), and it does not tend to score decent films 0-10% just because their advertising budget was nill. It is far from perfect, but when a film scores 85-90% it is almost certain that a lot of people really liked the film, and not just because it is an uncontroversial crowd pleaser.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[xevioso]

This. Many sites do it, and while it takes some setting up, it;'s fairly straightforward to prevent folks from the same IP or username from voting repeatedly. It's not normally an issue in IMDB because who cares enough about a movie to vote enough times to change the ratings in that way?

Oh wait...

Actually, when I see something with lots of single stars I'm pretty suspicious anyway.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Would recommend to google the matter. And you will realise it is easy to find 100K brainwashed turks who madly bash anything that mentions Armenian genocide.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Pseudonym]

Hang on, isn't this a SJW-centric production? Or did I miss the memo from 4chan about what is to be labelled "SJW" this month?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[TangoMargarine]

How would you go about verifying someone rating a movie has seen it?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Rakarra]

Well sure, but obviously that is not how their system has ever been set up.... so... is this another one of those ideals vs. reality debates or what?

Sure, but it has ALWAYS been intended for real people who have seen the movie. Of course, there's no way to enforce that sort of thing. In general though it isn't too much of a problem except in very controversial cases for mass-release movies, such as Ghostbusters (2016) or when the viewing numbers are so low, because of limited-release engagements in the first week. At that point, it's not TOO difficult to rig the system with lots of fraudulent votes.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever stop to think that maybe Ghostbusters just genuinely sucked ass? I haven't heard a single good review from friends on it so why should I think IMDb rating is rigged? Do you think these people that rated it poorly that didnt see it would have given it a good rating had they seen it? It seems to me lots of people legitimately disliked this film based on its premise alone. Bottom line is: if you make a controversial film expect a controversial review.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Most major websites that allow some form of up/downvoting and comments are easy to brigade and bot (Amazon, Reddit, Youtube). They want to reduce the barriers to end users signing up and using their platform since that increases the chances they return, allows them to market to them through emails and notifications, which increases the total user count making them more appealing to advertisers and investors.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[omfglearntoplay]

I like your summary, but I have a few observations.

IMDB skews toward young male audiences.

Metacritic is also useful sometimes... it will skew low for scifi, horror, or fantasy in general, unless it is an independent movie that happens to be great.

Rottentomatoes is pretty good, but I remember reading it skews high or low due to it being a simple thumbs up vs. thumbs down. Easier to get a 99% on Rotten than other sites.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry about it. Grandparent AC's correction was pure pedantry. "Begs the question" is a lost cause, just like "literally". Logicians should just adopt a new phrase, like "assumes the conclusion", for the logical fallacy, and concede that "begs the question" means "raises the question" or "invites the question".

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[barc0001]

Oh OK. So since we can't fix every possible problem, we shouldn't bother trying to fix any of them. Good thinking!

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Russia? They recognize the Armenian genocide.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, ghosting helps to hide from the user. To make it looks like their votes countes when they really did not.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't work with films that critics are afraid to be negative against. The Force Awakens was complete trash, yet it was praised for some bizarre reason.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[rtb61]

Wait up, is this fair or is it just selective censorship based upon greed. So you have what is often crap content created by Hollywood vs content collectively created by many more individuals that targets the Hollywood content. Basically content wars, the rich and greedy vs trolls (why trolls, fine, want a another label to distort from what it originally meant fine, trolls originally were individuals whose purpose was to annoy people of forums, not creative content challenging other content and collective 'trolling' is creative content just like any other). What is really going on here, silence the many to feed the greed of the few. Bunch of people hate the content and down vote it, their choice, end of story (for what ever reason, they hate the story, they hate the trailers, what ever). What is happening is the express intent by corporations to silence the opinions of thousands of people because they corporations feel those opinions challenge the profit and power of those corporations. You are being targeted by the concept, that when you have an opinion, you should not be allowed to express it, if it threatens the profit of corporations.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

Have you seen the ratings for Tropes Vs Women? They didn't do anything about that either.

Not everything is an SJW conspiracy.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Rakarra]

IMDB is the MTV Movie Awards of movie rating websites.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

GP is being a dick. Common usage drives definition, not asshat pedants.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would IMDb do that? How do they know that the votes aren't legit and that the movie didn't suck? "The Promise" only has a critic score of 35% on Rotten Tomatoes so it sounds to me like it's just a bad movie and the makers of it are just a bunch of crybabies.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Ghost Busters with the girls was so good, I bought the $7 DVD. Why not watch and make your own opinion than relying on the internet to decide for you?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Grishnakh]

Well, if the movie has only been shown once in a certain location by a small number of people, and a far larger number of people from another region suddenly jump in and vote it down, I'd say it's pretty obvious they haven't seen it.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is: if you want your polling/rating system to be any good, you have to put in protections to prevent abuses like this. Since it's really hard to predict these things beforehand, you have to be ready to react after the fact and make changes and corrections. In this case, I'd say that means banning anyone from a Turkish IP from rating this movie, ever. They've already shown they can't be trusted and will abuse the system. Any ratings from those addresses should just get an error message saying "this IP address has been the source of abuse and can no longer submit votes".

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

What competing content ? You are welcome to watch whatever movie you want and rate it however you feel.

Rating a movie you didn't even watch is dishonest , and organizing a campaign to down vote a movie that is portraying events contrary to your fake history is ... revisionist politics as usual.

The Nazi and Muslim genocide denial is not a point of view it is a lie.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? "Tropes Vs Women" has a rating of 1.3 / 10. Obvious rating inflation!

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

"Since it's really hard to predict these things beforehand"
It's not really hard to predict these type of things but it really doesn't matter because there is nothing you can do to address the problem. I'll rephrase. No one would accept the solution to inject some honesty into the online discourse which would boil down to getting rid of "Anonymous Coward". If people think they have something positive to convey in their online actions they should be willing to identify themselves. But of course this is a fantasy solution right now.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Mashiki]

Have you seen the ratings for Tropes Vs Women? They didn't do anything about that either.

Not everything is an SJW conspiracy

No, and neither can you. Because she hides the ratings and disables comments.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

What new conspiracy theory is this? She doesn't control IMDB, and they comments and ratings are displayed there.

I suppose to be fair I should point out that The Sarkeesian Effect got savaged too, but that really is total crap.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[kuzb]

Tropes Vs Women deserved its rating. It's utter and complete dogshit that attempts to make an enemy out of everyone that dares to challenge her claims.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Grishnakh]

Hmm, that's an interesting position to take, considering you're posting as AC here.

But I mostly agree. Even requiring a pseudonymous account would go a long way towards eliminating a lot of crap, because it takes extra effort to set up an account.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

High critic score/high audience score = probably the best thing I'll see all year

Except STAR WARS: EPISODE VII - THE FORCE AWAKENS and many other movies which were heavily bribed to get high ratings from the critics. Yeah, right.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, it has 51k votes with the rating '10'... So people are trying to counteract the flood of ratings.

I don't think either side of the equation is right. If one is dumped, both should be.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

I guess you haven't seen it then... It's insightful, entertaining and the arguments are well made. It doesn't seek to make enemies of anyone, always offering constructive criticism and praise where it is due.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

The stench of reddit is all over you.

Dis-GUSTING!

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Maritz]

I'm guessing they'll wait for some SJW-centric

Funny how unironic use of a term like that marks one out as a cunt of a particularly pathetic variety. Ethics in gaming journalism, bud.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Maritz]

Given that Turks just voted to make Erdogan their official tyrant, I would believe just about anything at this point.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Maritz]

This guy doesn't need to see it bud, he likes his ethics with lashings of gaming journalism. Don't waste your time.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Mashiki]

What new conspiracy theory is this? She doesn't control IMDB, and they comments and ratings are displayed there.

The two of us saying something different. That's all, no conspiracy. Most people aren't going to go to IMDB for ratings, they're going to look at the source(youtube). Where she disables everything.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

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?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, you know, not allow voting or commenting on movies that haven't actually opened yet.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[tehcyder]

How would you go about verifying someone rating a movie has seen it?

All you have to do is ensure that anyone posting anything on the internet uses their own real name and address, and has provided a copy of their passport/driving licence or other official ID as proof.

In order to be allowed to rate a movie, you would have to provide a copy of your cinema ticket.

In other words, anonymous online reviews are currently close to meaningless. Personally, I would rather read a couple of reviews by decent film critics, rather than take any notice of the number of 1* or 5* reviews.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[tehcyder]

I'd say that means banning anyone from a Turkish IP from rating this movie, ever.

So they just get their friends or family in other countries to rate it instead.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[N3wsByt3]

That said, you're feeding the trolls by this.

The more you feed them, to more obnoxious and clingy they'll get. Bad idea.

Ignoring, thus, is the best thing you can do with pedantic, trolling AC's.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[N3wsByt3]

As a non-native English speaker, I always thought the latter WAS what the sentence meant. Isn't begging a way of asking for something (as a beggar)? Asking for a question, thus, would logically be more close to 'raising a question', rather than 'assuming the conclusion' to the question. I would have thought. So I can't really find it a disturbing usage.

In contrast, however, I find it mildly annoying that a lot of people (on youtube, for instance) use 'literally', when they mean the exact OPPOSITE of it. They mean it 'allegorically' yet use 'literally'.

Maybe that's because the 'new' meaning isn't as ingrained as yet, or maybe because there is a very close equivalent in my own language which still means what it normally means, but regardless: sometimes, misuse of words CAN be annoying, and this misuse of 'literally' I find more grating than something that begs the question.

Now, this is subjective, of course. But. The above AC however, clearly was being pedantic and wanted to troll.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[TangoMargarine]

But what if somebody leaked the film beforehand?

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[TangoMargarine]

All you have to do is ensure that anyone posting anything on the internet uses their own real name and address, and has provided a copy of their passport/driving licence or other official ID as proof.

Oh, is that all? Thanks, Orwell :P

In order to be allowed to rate a movie, you would have to provide a copy of your cinema ticket.

So we only care about the opinions of people who've watched the movie legally? I take it we're only caring about the ratings for the first few weeks after release, before they start showing it on cable channels?

In other words, anonymous online reviews are currently close to meaningless. Personally, I would rather read a couple of reviews by decent film critics, rather than take any notice of the number of 1* or 5* reviews.

Yeah, true enough.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anubis IV]

Ehh, no system is perfect. I'll admit that there are exceptions, but I was speaking about these sites on the whole. Plus, I'm not convinced that one was about bribes, so much as it was about people wanting to be convinced that Disney and Abrams had managed to right the sinking ship that they loved. In that regard, Disney and Abrams did succeed by producing a decent movie. It was by no means a great film, nor worthy of all of the high scores it received, but it was sufficient to tell everyone that Star Wars was back, which was exactly the purpose it needed to fulfill.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, dude. That's a class act. *salutes*

(not the same AC)

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh OK. So since we can't fix every possible problem, we shouldn't bother trying to fix any of them.

Well, this discussion is about this specific problem, so maybe you're looking for some other conversation, down the hall.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[ZorroXXX]

Thank you very much for your post. You are making the world a better place by showing that admitting mistakes is not such a big deal that unfortunately some people make it. Again, thank you.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Rakarra]

Did you ever stop to think that maybe Ghostbusters just genuinely sucked ass? I haven't heard a single good review from friends on it so why should I think IMDb rating is rigged? Do you think these people that rated it poorly that didnt see it would have given it a good rating had they seen it? It seems to me lots of people legitimately disliked this film based on its premise alone. Bottom line is: if you make a controversial film expect a controversial review.

Ghostbusters sucked. I saw it and it was "meh." Fluff, a waste of my time. But the howling and outrage started long before the first trailer came out, and most of the virulent anti-GB stuff that came out came from people who didn't want to "waste their money" on it. IE, they didn't see it.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Sedar Argic is back!

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Cinnamon Beige]

There's another reason why it's not really workable... it requires a unique solution for each movie. Building a more general solution that can be applied to all movies would be a better use of resources.

Easy. If it's not been released in a region, nobody whose IP is out of that region can review it, period, and just blacklist the proxies.

The suggestion of there being a cap on how quickly you can post reviews on the same movie from the same IP address will also work for this, and I'd flat-out have it indifferent to the star rating given to block a movie from getting astroturfed, too.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anubis IV]

That's true, but whenever I learn something like this, regardless of whether it was in response to a troll or not, I like to both correct myself and share that correction/education with the others here, if only so that anyone else making the same error can learn from my mistake.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anubis IV]

Sorry, I'm not up to date on every meme. I'm guessing you're trying to be clever by referencing something that happened somewhere on the Internet?

As for Reddit, I've never had an account there. About the only time I visit is when friends or search engines link me there. With all the political stuff it seems like they're embroiled in, not to mention their nonsensical moderation system, I've never had an interest in participating. Honestly, Slashdot is the only place with comments that I participate on a regular basis at this point.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[N3wsByt3]

Well, to each his own, I guess.

I can understand what you're getting at, but subjectively speaking, I wouldn't have wasted (as what I perceive it) so much time to a pedantic troll. Yes, it may, or may not lead to some moderate enlightenment for others to read, but even then I doubt it's worth the effort (or you should have addressed it more generally, and not in a one-by-one step as a rsponse to the troll, if your goal is edacutaion of the reading populace). IMHO, of course.

In fact, I thought 'it begs the question' also meant 'it raises the question'. I've always seen, it used like that, en though I'm not a native English-speaker, I'm quite fluent - even if I say so myself. ;-)

But I'm not sure this whole things has convinced me to change my opinion or usage of the term. Ok, granted, I've learned the technical correct side of it. I'll take note of it. But it doesn't change much de facto, because, however one turns it, the usage is SO common these days in regard to the meaning 'it raises the question', that it seems to me - and apparent the majority of people - to have surpassed the original meaning and intent.

As with all things, language is a 'living' thing. Myriads of words before and after us and our lifetime, will change, warp, drift and get other meanings. Even a lot of words today don't mean exactly the same what they meant 200 years ago, but no-one today is still complaining about that, isn't there? A language that doesn't change anymore, is dead.

After all is said and done, the meaning of a word is derived from it's usage, period. It can be annoying during a time, for instance, when people misuse 'literally' when they, in fact, mean the opposite; 'allegorically' - but even there, if the usage becomes really common and the norm, I guess I'll accept it. Don't get me wrong: I think the semantics and the real meaning of words - as defined by the dictionaries - is of paramount importance, if you want to communicate sensible with someone else.

I'm just saying, sometimes, the meaning of a word changes, and that change even gets into a dictionary as well.

Well, anyway, I'm digressing.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anubis IV]

I agree. I think I was slightly miffed at the previous poster as well, hence the play-by-play, but I did spend more time on that post than necessary. And I do agree that language is a living thing. I think there's a balance to be had between prescriptivism and descriptivism. As a rule, I err on the side of trying to use things as prescribed, while at the same time trying to practice patience and tolerance towards those whose notion of language is a bit more...fluid.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[mpeskett]

If it helps, one way to rephrase the original sense of "begging the question" was "asking to have as an assumption, the thing that is in question".

So for example, if you were to argue something like "Chemical X will give you cancer because it's a carcinogen". The evidence that you're offering, "chemical X is a carcinogen", is just a differently worded version of your conclusion, "chemical X causes cancer". You're asking (begging) for "it's a carcinogen" to be taken as a true fact and entered as supporting evidence, when the question you're supposed to be answering is whether that's true in the first place.

So that's why it was once called "begging the question", but the twist of logic it takes to understand it is a bit far to reach for how we use the words now. Which is why it would probably be best to abandon it - find a new term that more obviously describes the logical fallacy and let "begging the question" mean "begs for us to ask the question", in the way people are already casually using it.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Protip: When you get equal numbers of +1s and -1s on any comment which contains the term "SJW", you know you're doing something right.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[kuzb]

I saw it. It's complete dogshit that deserved its rating. Anita is a virtue signalling professional victim that deserves nothing.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[kuzb]

So because I didn't agree with it, I must not have seen it. Do you work for Bioware or something? This is exactly the kind of broken logic I expect from worthless virtue signalling SJWs.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[RockDoctor]

Any ratings from those addresses should just get an error message saying "this IP address has been the source of abuse and can no longer submit votes".

s/address/"range of addresses"/

And I'm sure you know that, so lets move on.

I was working in Turkey two years ago. If I were the sort to watch movies in my hotel room on my laptop (can Fedora play DVD movies yet? I've never been minded to find out, and don't have a DVD movie to find out), you would ban me from voting on the movie I've just watched? Obviously, yes.

It's hard to design such systems so that they're actually fair.

I just realised, I wasn't aware until that IMDB actually had a "star" or "ratings" system. Show how little interest I have in people's opinions, compared to things like plot summaries.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Grishnakh]

I just realised, I wasn't aware until that IMDB actually had a "star" or "ratings" system. Show how little interest I have in people's opinions, compared to things like plot summaries.

That would make you very, very strange. IMDB has had a rating system for, well as long as they've been a website I think. Their ratings have long had a certain amount of weight to them. And that's nothing new: people have been listening to movie reviewers like Roger Ebert for a very, very long time. Without considering peoples' opinions, it would be very easy for you to read the plot summary of something like, oh, Battlefield: Earth or Gigli or an Uwe Boll movie and think "that sounds like it might be a good movie", and proceed to waste 2 hours of your life on it. Obviously, you have to take ratings and reviews with a grain of salt, but they are useful for avoiding the real stinkers, and frequently also seeing some real gems.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[nanoflower]

There are general solutions that could certainly help. Perhaps not allowing anyone to vote on a movie unless the account has been on IMDB for at least a week (or a month or whatever value makes the most sense.) That won't prevent long time users from ganging up against a movie but will at least prevent someone from pulling in a bunch of new accounts that will likely only be used for that one movie vote.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Mashiki]

Her videos are partly aimed at children, her charity uses them to promote feminism to young people in an accessible way.

And are full of information and claimed facts, which are proven false even at the most casual glance against actual scientific literature. Tell me something, at which point do you stand up and say "when a person refuses to debate another, and claims dissenting points of view are harassment" do you look at that person and consider that their view is shit? Because she's done that. And until that changes, she's no different then a preacher claiming the world is 6000 years old.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

She does actually engage in debate with lots of people. In fact, if you bothered to watch her videos you would know that she does address criticisms in them. For example, the claim that she thinks all violence against women is a problem was debunked in a recent one.

What you mean is that she won't engage in pointless debates about feminism being anti-male and other such bullshit. Well, guess what, some people want to talk about complex issues in feminism, not constantly re-hash the basics with you so that your shitty YouTube channel can get some more hits. I mean, have you seen her critics debating skills? Sargon did a live debate with a feminist last year and spent about 50% of the time with his microphone muted by the moderator as he tried to shout over her.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Mashiki]

She does actually engage in debate with lots of people. In fact, if you bothered to watch her videos you would know that she does address criticisms in them. For example, the claim that she thinks all violence against women is a problem was debunked in a recent one.

No, she actually doesn't. Rather she turns around and gets into a group of people with like-minded individuals who will support her viewpoints without challenging them. But I'm sure that's very valid, because she just happens to keep saying that. If her "official twitter" account is legitimate.

What I mean is exactly what I said. She doesn't debate people, she only wants to engage in actions that are self-reaffirming to her. But let's compare against say Milo, who offered $10k to the charity of her choice for a one on one debate, even going as far as to offer pre-screened debate questions weighted in her favor.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

What you mean is that

DRINK!

When AmiMojo tells other people what they think, or what they "really mean", the same way misogynists and anti-feminists tell women/feminists that what women "really mean" (i.e "what feminist really mean here is they hate men"), take a drink

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[jwhitener]

Have you tried recently? Every time I search for a movie, google shows the RT score, imdb, and amazon score, and they all pretty much align.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you understand the meaning of the word "review"? When you don't like a book's author or cover or blurb or premise, you're free to not read it. But if you haven't read it, don't lie about it just so you can leave a fake review.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

So you haven't seen the videos then? You have not seen her talk where she addresses the specific criticisms about Hitman, for example? It's on YouTube.

I wouldn't debate Milo even before his fall from... Whatever that was. His technique is basically to talk over his opponent and make several trite points in rapid succession. If you try to respond he will just throw more at you so that it looks like you are drowning, and if you ignore him and try to make your argument you get accused of ignoring him and he carries on taking over you anyway.

It's an old technique.

Tell you what, why don't we request that Slashdot do a moderated debate between you and I? Could be an interesting new feature. Get questions "ask Slashdot" style from users, and go from there.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Mashiki]

You mean the part in her Hitman video which you are penalized for killing innocent people? That she doesn't even state, and claims the exact opposite. That those "scores" are the determining factor which allows the unlocking of new equipment. You should go play the game before you make a bigger ass out of yourself, then she made out of herself on it.

Tell you what, you had the brainwave idea you can go suggest it. You believe you have enough invested capital in it to make a go of it, so I'll wait.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

Yes, that bit. In her talk she addresses the claim directly by pointing out that although you lose 100 points when you murder the innocent strippers, you get 100 points back as soon as you hide their corpses in the convenient chests placed right behind them.

You should go play the game before you make a bigger ass out of yourself

Perhaps you should take your own advice...

Anyway, even if she was wrong, which she isn't, it's a trivial detail unrelated to the main point she was making at the time.

I'll ask about the debate. I doubt they will go for it, so if you know of any other venues online where we can have a moderated debate let me know.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Mashiki]

Yes, that bit. In her talk she addresses the claim directly by pointing out that although you lose 100 points when you murder the innocent strippers, you get 100 points back as soon as you hide their corpses in the convenient chests placed right behind them.

You mean the: Killing civilians is an automatic -250 pt loss, it's -350 if you don't hide the body. Seriously, you're just digging yourself into a hole. In other words, she was wrong, you were wrong and she's lying out her ass. That's not even touching on the non-studies that she presents as factual. The DiGRA ones are among the worst, and anyone who's had a paper publish can tell that. Especially since the content of them are written with a conclusion first, and even when evidence is presented in the opposite direction and contradicts the main thesis it's ignored out of hand.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

Go watch the video. The point loss/recovery perfectly balances out.

Which is entirely unimportant for the point being made.

By the way, no response from /. about our debate. Any ideas? How about debate.org? Formal style, you make arguments and rebuttals, and other members of the site then vote.

I'm up for it. You can pick the first topic.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

So are you saying people are not allowed to believe something that isn't true?
That's a pretty slippery slope.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

The simplest solution is to simply state in the films description in big bold letters that the film may be controversial to sponge viewers and let Joe public work out why there could be a disproportionate number of single stars.

Re: Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

*Some* viewers

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[Mashiki]

No the point/loss recovery doesn't balance out. You mean the point that there is no penalty for killing someone? Gee. Maybe you need to dust off your copy, or go buy one. It's cheap these days on steam, it'll take you less then 2hrs to get to that level. On top of that, this is the type of stuff she considered "sexualized". You're cheering on a person who is no different then Jack Thompson.

Re:Nothing to do with Hollywood

[AmiMoJo]

Okay, okay, whatever. Would you like to take part in a debate with me? I'm ready to go. You can select the first topic, although might I suggest either this video or Tropes Vs. Women in general.

Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing but propaganda and lies designed to discredit Turkey.

Re:Fake movie

[Luthair]

Does Turkey even need to be discredited? They seem to have done it all by themselves.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

sayeth the turkish (or possibly russian) bot...

History says differently though.

It seems the time has come to give users access to customize their rating weightings and content filters to allow for things like geographic proximity, known trolling/botnet addresses, and previous record of high quality content. I'd rather see the opinion of an esteemed scholar I disagree with on a subject especially outside their expertise than a prepubescent script kiddie on his first outing.

Re:Fake movie

[hackel]

Turkey lost any and all of the credibility it had earned over the years when they "elected" Erdogan and his disgusting Muslim buddies to ruin the country.

Re:Fake movie

[SuricouRaven]

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.

Re:Fake movie

[thegarbz]

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.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

It has nothing to do with them being Muslims, you abject moron. It has everything to do with them being authoritarian dogmatic pseudo-religious autocrats.

If a Christian or Jewish cabal orchestrated a coup, it would have equally nothing to do with those religions either except as their rhetorical umbrella.

Re:Fake movie

[mark-t]

Better yet, the time has come for people to recognise that ratings on sites like IMDB do not necessarily reflect the views of people who might have even ever seen the movie in question, but may also be part of an deliberate effort to misrepresent it (either positively or negatively) by a group of people who have a common agenda with respect to the work, and should be taken with a sufficiently large grain of salt.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Erdogan is a fascist!

Re:Fake movie

[dmgxmichael]

The United States lost any and all of the credibility it had earned over the years when they "elected" Trump and his disgusting evangelical buddies to ruin the country.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Poe's law strikes again! Of course the other reactions to the post are priceless! Thanks all!

Re:Fake movie

[Nidi62]

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.

Culminating in quite possibly orchestrating the coup last year and using that (and the very fortuitous rise of ISIS in Syria) to justify the sweeping grab for power that he just pulled off, effectively guaranteeing he will be in control in Turkey at least through the next decade. He used the coup to purge the military, leaving only loyalists who he can trust not to fulfill the Turkish military's customary role of maintaining secularism in government. You have to give him credit: for a politician he played the long game very well.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

when they "elected" Erdogan and his disgusting Muslim buddies

What's with the quotes. They did elect him!
That's what happens when you ask a country of Conservative, religious traditionalists to vote. They vote for a conservative, religious strongman.

That's democracy. If you don't like it, openly support oligarchy or technocracy or a dictatorship. Don't just put quotes around "elected".

Re:Fake movie

[ckatko]

Seems like a great strategy for gaining power. Promise liberals feel-good utopia to get their votes and money, and then as the other poster said, "drag them behind the shed and shoot them."

Like did you know Al Gore, Mr. Inconvenient Truth? While I'm NOT debating the validity of global warming, it's pretty alarming that Al Gore just-so-happens to own and run companies that directly benefit from green energy grants, including IIRC, one where polluting companies "buy" pollution credits from his company who gets the credits from companies that don't use their full allotment of pollution. So he's actually ENCOURAGING pollution by allowing shitty companies to buy the excess "not pollution" from actually green companies.

Re:Fake movie

[PatientZero]

An excellent example of why limited terms are a necessity, even if it means cutting short a good leader's reign.

Re:Fake movie

[farble1670]

It has nothing to do with them being Muslims

Are you sure?

In 2011, Erdoan ordered the tearing-down of the Statue of Humanity, a Turkish-Armenian friendship monument in Kars, which was commissioned in 2006 and represented a metaphor of the rapprochement of the two countries after many years of dispute over the events of 1915. Erdoan justified the removal by stating that the monument was offensively close to the tomb of an 11th-century Islamic scholar,

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA has nothing to do with Trump. Your post has nothing to do with the topic. Why are you insisting on bringing him up out of left field?

Re: Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

The only good thing about Turkey is the turkish bath houses. All those fat sweaty gay men rubbing up against you. I love it. And turks penises are small, so they don't hurt your ass so much. Oh, and having sex with goats is legal in Turkey. Even the Turkish prime minister loves to have sex with goats. Yep. Turkey is a great country. I give it 5 stars for the goat fucking.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you literate, able to read at all? The political reasons behind the actions (hatred of Armenians and destruction of the monuments of Armenian genocide) are being flavored with Islam but it has NOTHING TO DO with Islam in any real way. Whatever excuse Ergo comes up with to make an issue "Islam" focused is simply that, an excuse and an appeal to a broader base of semi-uneducated religious statists. Much like when Trump/Pence tries to make keeping transsexuals out of bathrooms a "Christian" issue.

Jesus Christ didn't hate on gay people. It's not a Christian issue. It's the dogma of a subset of IDIOTS who CALL themselves Christians.

Re:Fake movie

[Old97]

You are making the mistake of confusing his tactics with some coincidental attribute that he used to bind his followers to him. Erdogan is an authoritarian working to install a one-party dictatorship. He's something of a Fascist. Since he happens to be Muslim along with his people he's using that religious and cultural context to employ pretty universal tactics. The Nazi's and Fascists used some Christian symbols and traditions. Stalin even resorted to Tsarist and Orthodox symbols and traditions to build popular support during World War II. Religion and culture are used to create bonds between the leader and the followers. It's their source of tribal identity. Modi in India uses Hindu culture and traditions. In Myanmar it's Buddhism.

Re:Fake movie

[Grishnakh]

Wrong: No True Scotsman fallacy.

A religion is defined by its current believers, not by what some outsider or one anonymous internet commenter claims its founder would do.

Keeping transsexuals out of bathrooms is absolutely a Christian issue today, just like issues being flavored with Islam by Erdogan and other such leaders are absolutely Islamic issues. As long as the followers of the religion believe the issue to be religious in nature, it is. Who are you tell tell them that they're doing their religion wrong?

I'm not Christian, so for me to say that all the Christians who believe the bathroom issue is a religious issue isn't would be the height of arrogance.

Re: Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a great strategy for gaining power. Promise liberals feel-good utopia to get their votes and money, and then as the other poster said, "drag them behind the shed and shoot them."

That is wasteful, what you do is blame the liberals for causing all that ails you, gain power, promise a Utopia if only the evil liberals are purged, and convince your followers to hand over their lives to do so.

It's very successful, they jump right into the thresher, it is just like making Soylent Green.

Re:Fake movie

[Old97]

What makes you think that a majority of Christians agree on any specific social issue? First of all, "Christian" or "Christianity" is not a religion. It's an umbrella term claimed by many religions. Many denominations, churches and sects identify as "Christian", but not all of them agree on who is or is not. Mormans believe they are Christian. Most other "Christian" groups don't think they are. The KKK and Aryan Brotherhood types identify themselves as "Christian" though I'd think almost every other "Christian" group rejects them and their claim. Islam is similar in this respect. It's not even as simple as Sunni versus Shiite. I've read that most people who identify as Muslim reject ISIS. Is ISIS a Muslim group? Most of Erdogan's opponents in Turkey identify as Muslim. So while it is possible to look at a specifi group and make your argument, Christians and Muslims are not specific groups. T

Re:Fake movie

[farble1670]

Are you literate, able to read at all?

Did I say anything about the Armenian genocide? What I implied was that Erdoan colors himself with Islam, his party runs on Islamic values, and he is elected by Islamic people. I think you should ask him if his values have "nothing to do" with Islam. I suspect the answer would be yes, they do.

Jesus Christ didn't hate on gay people. It's not a Christian issue. It's the dogma of a subset of IDIOTS who CALL themselves Christians.

Well the old testament does hate on gay people. See Romans 1:26-27.

Re:Fake movie

[ghoul]

He realized EU was just trying to give him Blue Balls. The Blue state will never let a Muslim majority country join. Heck they wouldnt have let Spain join if the Muslim in Spain had not been conveniently genocided. A spurned lover is the worst enemy. So when are we getting the movie about the Christians Genociding Muslims and Jews out of Spain? Bueller? Bueller?

Re:Fake movie

[farble1670]

You are making the mistake of confusing his tactics with some coincidental attribute that he used to bind his followers to him.

His party has (had?) Islam in the name. He runs on Islamic values. He quotes Islam in his rulings. He was elected by a nation of Islam followers.

Regardless, the point is rather moot. A religion is as it's followers do. If 98% of condemn homosexuality, does it matter that several critics claim that homosexuality does not go against 's teachings?

Re:Fake movie

[ghoul]

I am sure you are glad that Obama was term limited and Trump replaced him. BTW Edogan was term limited as Prime Minister which is why he became President and then did a referendum to move the Presidency from a ceremonial to an executive role

Re:Fake movie

[ghoul]

How dare you raise Myanmar. Aung San Suu Kyi is our great Democratic leader. She is the daughter of our even greater late democratic LEADER
So what if she is allowing the genocide of Muslims? That is not as important as the fact that under her Myanmar will turn towards the US and away from China. Whats a few pesky Muslim lives when we are fighting the war for democracy? Shame on you!!

Re:Fake movie

[Old97]

Most of the center-right parties in Europe have "Christian" in their names. That doesn't make them Christian. When they win an election it does not mean the country has become more Christian. One wouldn't get many votes in Turkey if your party's name included "Christian". So, you use "Islam". Whatever gets the votes. Now almost all of Erdogan's opponents in Turkey are also Muslim. Are you saying that Islam is defined by the outcome of Turkish elections? What about all the Muslims in other countries? Most Muslims don't live in Turkey. How do Muslim's vote in the U.S.? If they vote Democrat does it mean Islam supports trans-gender bathrooms? If they vote Republican does it mean the Islam fears and hates it's followers?

Re:Fake movie

[xevioso]

Perhaps, but he's not wrong.

Re: Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

The at least one unrelated reference to trump. Thanks for wasting your time.

Re:Fake movie

[TangoMargarine]

I am sure you are glad that Obama was term limited and Trump replaced him

On the other hand, Trump is term-limited too. And it's a constitutional amendment so the Republican-controlled legislature would need Democrat help to get to the 2/3rds mark to repeal it.

BTW Edogan was term limited as Prime Minister which is why he became President

Hey, kind of like Putin :P Could Erdogan just hop back to PM next election anyway?
The difference being that apparently the Russian rule is contiguous terms, not terms ever like the U.S.

Re:Fake movie

[TangoMargarine]

Heck they wouldnt have let Spain join if the Muslim in Spain had not been conveniently genocided. A spurned lover is the worst enemy. So when are we getting the movie about the Christians Genociding Muslims and Jews out of Spain? Bueller? Bueller?

You mean the expulsion of the Moors in the 1600s? About 300 years farther in the past, but okay, let's start arguing about the Crusades. That's always a fun topic :P

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Discredit a shit hole that was once democratic, they did that all by themselves, voting for Erdogan and his fascist ilk, and denying the obvious fact of the Armenian genocide.

Re:Fake movie

[david_thornley]

It's not a No True Scotsman fallacy. The fact that Turkey is Muslim does not keep it out of the EU. If Turkey was a reasonably secular state, with a free society and more economic development, it would fit right in despite its religion. The fact that Turkey is Muslim explains much about why Turkey isn't reasonably secular with a free society and more economic development, but it has nothing directly to do with whether or not it can get into the EU.

I feel I do have reason to compare what Christians say and do to what Jesus is recorded as saying and doing. Unfortunately, to be a Christian it isn't a requirement to think that Jesus guy probably had a clue, because I rather admire Jesus.

Re: Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean Paul in the new testament didn't like what Roman priests were getting up to and took their homosexual actions to be a result of their corrupt worship of Roman gods. My personal benchmark to identify a fake Christian is if they use hate instead of love as their motivator. If you see a "Christian" hating on others, you know that you have quite a different beast on your hands.

Re:Fake movie

[Grishnakh]

I never said anything about Turkey being part of the EU; you must be thinking of some other poster. I only addressed your assertion that political actions or excuses for actions are not associated with Islam, which is blatantly false. Religion has long been used by political leaders as a tool, but that doesn't mean the religion has nothing to do with those leaders' actions, or that the religion is blameless; in fact the opposite is true. If the religion actually lived up to its divine claims, then it would be impossible for it to be subverted that way.

As for comparing the words and actions of real, modern-day Christians to what Jesus supposedly said and did, you can make that comparison, as it is interesting in pointing out what appears to be hypocrisy of Christians from your point of view, however that doesn't mean that those peoples' doings aren't "Christian", they absolutely are, and since they claim to be true believers and you don't, then they have far more claim to what constitutes "true" Christianity than you do. Similarly, ISIS and Taliban leaders have far more claim what constitutes "true" Islam than anyone who isn't a Muslim.

Re:Fake movie

[Grishnakh]

These are all examples of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Just because all these different sects don't like each other and disagree on who's a "true" believer of that religion doesn't make it so. From the perspective of an outsider, ALL people who claim to be Muslims are, and ALL people who claim to be Christians are. It's really rather offensive for any of them to claim the others aren't; that's like me as an American trying to claim that people from Mississippi aren't "true Americans". It's patently absurd. For a Christian, the only real requirement is to believe in the divinity of Jesus. For a Muslim, the only real requirement is to believe that Mohammed was Allah's chosen prophet. Everything else is just disagreement on fine points of theology. Obviously, these different sects have some significant disagreements, but that doesn't mean they can't be grouped together by outsiders, or that any of them aren't "true".

And yes, "Christianity" is a religion. It's not a single organization obviously, it has many different sects, but look up the definition of "religion": it fits. A "religion" doesn't mean a specific organization.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Turkish military's customary role of maintaining secularism in government.

But think about it: would it be a good thing to have the US military to drive tanks around the White House every time a President Elect confesses believing god of some kind? Would that be sign of a working democracy?

Re:Fake movie

[Ihlosi]

Erdogan did not run as a dictator.

Most dictators that turned democracies into dictatorships didn't run as dictators. It just happened that they needed all that power (legislative and judicial in addition to their executive powers) to keep country xyz safe and make it great (again).

There's basically a book on how to do this.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that be sign of a working democracy?

Yes. Not a healthy democracy, mind you, but at least a working one. Where the alternative is a movement which has "abolish democracy" at the top of the agenda, preventing that group from assuming power is paramount if you believe in democracy. Even if it takes undemocratic means to do so.

TL;DR: Where the alternative is no democracy at all, the answer is "yes."

Re:Fake movie

[SuperDre]

LOL, with Erdogan in the hot seat, it's not a difficult job to discredit Turkey, it's doing itself by letting that dictator stay in 'office'.. Erdogan isn't far from what Hitler did last century....

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, they don't have to agree to still be 'in' the same religion. I like football- does that make baseball players not sport fans?

Look, what you said is actually the reverse: religion is the greater umbrella concept- whilst Christianity is a religion (that references Christ, despite the religion's codification being authored by Paul). The DENOMINATIONS, factions, variances are sub-categories of religions not the religions themselves. They are as you accurately said, denominations.

This reminds me of the lady I once heard saying that she was religious and other people were not. Why? Because what other people believed were not religions, they were cults. (Because she had identified her denomination as the umbrella concept- instead of the sub-variance it is).

In other words: All restaurants are a religion, restaurant themes are the major variances, (Chinese food, Italian, coffee-house), and the denominations are the local idea, (Panda Express Chinese, Milaggio's Italian Pizza, Starbuck's Coffee). The wild-card is all you can eat buffets which can appear across any of these denominations... and therefore mislead you.

Re:Fake movie

[N3wsByt3]

When?

Right after the massacres the Muslims did starting with the prophet Mohammed (PUH!) and continuing with the Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr, who launched Islam into almost 1,500 years of continual imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquest and subjugation of others through invasion and war, a role Islam continues to this very day.

But back to Spain. How come the Muslims where there in the first place? Spain has always been Christian, at least since 349 D.

Ah, that's right! Because they INVADED Spain in the first place. Who would have thought!?

You clearly didn't.

Re:Fake movie

[N3wsByt3]

I largely agree with you, with the caveat the actions done are also done *in the name* of that religion, to be considered 'religious'. Otherwise, one could call the first and second war in Iraq a 'holy War' perpetrated by Christianity onto Muslims. But those wars weren't religious wars. And even though, statistically speaking, I think it's true most of the soldiers of the West were Christians, that wouldn't make it a 'religious/Christian' war.

In contrast, however, it's true that doing something 'in name of (ones') God', clearly validates the nominator that it's religious in nature, EVEN - as you say - some others of the same or similar faith may disagree, and claim it's not about their religion. This is especially true in the case of Islam, since they have no central authority (Like the Pope in Rome For Catholic Christianity) who determines what is the 'right interpretation'.

There is NO right interpretation in Islam, and no-one with absolute authority to claim so. This in turn means, that ALL interpretations can be considered correct - even though warring factions will never agree what interpretation is the correct one, and think 'theirs' is correct - ad infinitum.

The truth is, all interpretations have equal worth within Islam, from an objective stance. Even ISIS is not 'wrong' based on their interpretation; we merely find their interpretation (certainly as Westerners) despicable and vile. And, it must be said, also by a lot of other Muslims. But they're not *wrong* when claiming the Koran says the kill unbelievers. It's in there, all right. And, in their view, they're only adhering to what the Prophet asked - and they're right there too. Because, as with any 'Holy' book, it's full of contradictions, and thus you can choose and cherry-pick whatever you want. But it's ALL there, so one can't say (moderate) Muslims saying that the Koran says Allah is merciful are wrong. BUT, and here is what is controversial for the multicultural left; neither are radical Muslims saying the Koran says killing the unbelievers (and many other things that are murderous and vile, like with enslaving women as warbooty).

So it does the Islam good or bad? Neither and both, but looking at the recent developments of the last ten years, it's clear without a doubt that it's pretty dangerous, especially to democratic Western societies. That's because, apart from the terrorist attacks, a *significant* and large part of the Muslim-community still have ideas that are antithetic to Western, democratic values, even if they don't use outright violence like the 1-2% of extreme radicals of their religious community.

Re:Fake movie

[david_thornley]

First, I'm saying that a Muslim country could be admitted into the EU, provided it measured up to the standards. Islam comes into play as it's part of what keeps Turkey back from meeting the standards. Currently, it's used as an excuse or inspiration for a lot of bad things.

Second, I know some Christians, who do seem to try to follow what Jesus was doing. My idea of what Christianity should be is based largely on them and the Gospels. Their brand of Christianity is at least as valid as a lot of other people calling themselves Christians. I don't try to define Christianity, and I'm not interested in pointing out hypocrites.

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

These are all examples of the No True Scotsman fallacy. Just because all these different sects don't like each other and disagree on who's a "true" believer of that religion doesn't make it so.

Actually, it does make it so, as pointing out the identification and recognition of groups is a reality. People are able to exercise discernment. The fallacy you refer to is a tendentious manner of argumentation, and not persuasive at all.

From the perspective of an outsider, ALL people who claim to be Muslims are, and ALL people who claim to be Christians are.

Nope. From the perspective of an outsider, it could be that differences are minor, or differences are extreme, it can be quite distinct, depending on the circumstances. Outsiders are capable of thinking, you know?

It's really rather offensive for any of them to claim the others aren't; that's like me as an American trying to claim that people from Mississippi aren't "true Americans". It's patently absurd.

You'd have been better off picking a more particularly rigorous example. Like Native American tribes. Were they Americans? Not by law, until Congress decided they were citizens. Africans? Well, there was this Supreme Court case...and some in the South, do still hate being called Yankees. Of course, you could find arguments over who is a Southerner, if you wanted.

However, a more pertinent example that sticks with your example, is the people of Mexico, the Honduras, and even Brazil(as well as the other countries), who say they are Americans. Is that a valid claim, or is it something that can be recognized as a tedious assertion?

For a Christian, the only real requirement is to believe in the divinity of Jesus. For a Muslim, the only real requirement is to believe that Mohammed was Allah's chosen prophet. Everything else is just disagreement on fine points of theology. Obviously, these different sects have some significant disagreements, but that doesn't mean they can't be grouped together by outsiders, or that any of them aren't "true".

Actually, it does, and in fact, there are Unitarians. You basically excluded them as Christian, yet...they'd call you absurd. And they aren't alone. And Muslims would point out that your understanding is limited.

And yes, "Christianity" is a religion. It's not a single organization obviously, it has many different sects, but look up the definition of "religion": it fits. A "religion" doesn't mean a specific organization.

And yet few people will go forth screaming about how "ALL YOU CHRISTIANS are alike" and be taken seriously, particularly by the same people who sagely nod their heads at the idea that "ALL MUSLIMS are alike" and use it to condemn the whole.

You have been following the conversation, right? It doesn't seem to be the case, your responses seem off-kilter. Not just Old97, but david_thornley, and your initial foray into this thread, you seem determined to push forward your own recitation of a fallacy, without realizing that it isn't actually very helpful.

Re:Fake movie

[ghoul]

Muslims did not genocide when they captured Spain from the Romans. They converted folks from Roman religions to Islam. Some may have been from families recently converted to Christianity. However under Muslim rule both Christians and Jews were able to live as tax paying citizens. However when Aragon and Castille started their pogrom no muslims were left. They had to emigrate, convert or die.

Re:Fake movie

[farble1670]

That doesn't make them Christian. When they win an election it does not mean the country has become more Christian.

He (Erdoan) quotes Islamic values and acts on them in the name of Islam. And yes, if the population of a country elects a religious leader that runs on religious values, it DOES mean the country has become more religious.

Are you saying that Islam is defined by the outcome of Turkish elections?

Islam, as all religions, is defined by the values of the people that make up the faith and the leaders they elect / appoint to project those values. This, as opposed to how some random guy on the internet defines it.

How do Muslim's vote in the U.S.? If they vote Democrat does it mean Islam supports trans-gender bathrooms? If they vote Republican does it mean the Islam fears and hates it's followers?

I personally vote with the issues not based on the D/R in front of the candidates' names. To be honest though not even sure what you are getting at.

Re:Fake movie

[N3wsByt3]

I'm afraid you have an overly optimistic view of Islamic conquest. Let me give you a link to help you open your eyes a bit: http://www1.cbn.com/churchandm...

One sees there a plethora of massacres, genocides and mass killings done by Muslims. Where they alone in that? No, Christians did their share (Buddhists far less, if one is honest), however, far LESS than Muslim conquest has done.And mostly, in regard to the crusades and other fights against Muslims, it was *in response* to the conquest of Christian grounds and land. Meaning, if the Muslims hadn't INVADED and CONQUERED Christian lands and countries, they wouldn't have had such a reaction neither. I couldn't find any specifics on the conquest of Spain to demonstrate unambigiously that the killings done by Muslims there is 'less' than those of Christians, but in any case it seems rather overly naive to think Muslims didn't kill off civilians and innocents at all, when they clearly had no problem doing it everywhere else.

But, regardless, I'm willing to gleen over all that, since it's in the far history, and during those times violence was rampant everywhere. It's of little use trying to convince whomever was 'the bloodiest' hundreds of years ago. Of far more concern is, how Muslims react NOW, in current times. And in this respect, it does not bode well.

http://www.pewforum.org/2013/0...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As one can see, a majority of Muslims in Muslim-countries, and even a significant large proportion of Muslims in Western countries have ideas and beliefs that are antithetic with the mores, rules, and values of Western democracies. We're not talking about terrorists here, we're talking about *radical views* hold *by* Muslims, which is much broader then straight out terrorism, but still - even more so, I would claim - a danger to the continuation of Western democracies with their values derived from the Enlightenment.

It is THAT which is *really* worrying, though less visible and less openly violent than beheadings of ISIS. Unless there is a drastic reformation of Islam, such as has happened to Christianity, I claim the following: Islam is unreconcilable with, and a danger to, Western, democratic values based on the enlightenment, and, if we do not (re)act against this, it will - in the long term - mean the end of our era. It's clear as daylight, you can not have or maintain our Western system if Muslims continue to flood in (or breed and propagate faster and more in the Western countries than the original populace) while remaining as insensitive to integration and incorporation of our values as they are today (and ever have been).

Note that I'm not talking about race. Race is not the problem. I'm also no racist. Raise Blacks, Berbers, whatever, up from infancy in ones' own culture, and they ARE and BEHAVE like one of us. I'm saying it's the culture and mentality that is the problem. 40% of British Muslims want the Sharia to be the supreme law, trumping any other laws. 40%!! That's HUGE. That's like, a thousand times more and higher than when you would ask an original, born-and-raised Brit. I find it peculiar that the danger of this is not more than apparent to the left. If you take in a million refugees, as German did, and 40% of them wants to introduce sharia-law, one has to be blind and stupid not to see how this will create tensions and huge societal problems for your own civilisation and society. Yet, the West turns a blind eye. It's incomprehensible. It's like cultural suicide, and we're doing it to ourselves, like a bunch of lemmings.

Even the 'moderate Muslim' should be worried, in fact. At least those who wanted to escape from sharia law and the oppression of their home countries. If this keeps up, I foresee the end of our current Western model by the end of the 21ste century, if not sooner. This is not Islamophobia, it's just an observation and logically deduced analysis.

Re:Fake movie

[ghoul]

Oh Muslims have problems. Just Christians should keep their mouth shut as they have a far more bloodier history of discriminating on the basis of religion. Its built into the religion. Christians believe anyone not a Christian is a heathen and going to hell so needs to be converted. Islam at least has scope for a Dhimmi status where people can live in a Muslim society without converting. As neither Muslim or Christian I say a pox on both your houses. Just because Christians today dont behave like savages doesnt take away that they believe in a savage book burning evangelizing (thats a dirty word) religion that pushed Roman Europe into a 800 year dark age due to the basic religion being anti-science.

Re:Fake movie

[N3wsByt3]

I would claim it rather being the Qu'ran and Islam, instead of the bible and Christianity. That said, buddhism has even less violence done in its name than either of those. Jainism even far less, if not outright 'none'. But regardless, that sort of discussion is endless and leads to nowhere. I would agree that all religions have blood on their hands, and while one might dispute who has 'the most blood', it changes nothing to all the rest I pointed out.

All monotheistic religions believe in a nonsensical book that is rife with contradictions, but that said, the most dangerous religion nowadays, is clearly Islam.

I also note that you did not address the main point I made, namely that a large percentage of Muslims want the sharia and have ideas that are not compatible with Western concepts (such as respect for free speech, EVEN if it's directly insulting the prophet Mohemedd (PUH!)), and that the sharia is at odds with our Western democratic values. Hence, as it currently stands, it is antithetic and therefore a danger to Western democratic values and its society as a whole, which is based on those values of the Enlightenment.

Re:Fake movie

[ghoul]

Most modern folks are not religious. If they actually believed the Bible or the Quran they would be out killing each other. So given that, I don't really see a reason for singling out Muslims in western society. Those who live and work peacefully and pursue their own religion without pushing it in others' faces I have no problems with. Yeah if someone tried to say food in public cafeteria needs to be halal I would shut them down but I myself do buy Halal meat .I find Halal meat actually more tasty. The way of killing while being more cruel for the animal leads to the blood draining out so it does not have the yucky blood taste. Just goes to show that while noone should be forced to follow a religious practice sometimes it makes sense and non religious people may follow the same as long as you don't force them.
For those who want to change western society into a total replica of their home societies I have no sympathies. Every society has a right to exist. Similarly I have no sympathy to imposing Democracy by dropping bombs from 30000 feet. Democracy from 30000 feet does not work.

Any society which tries to tell other societies you should change risks opening itself upto scrutiny which it may not survive.
Which is basically why I say Christians should shut up about Muslim intolerance and focus on their own shortcomings.

BTW Fun thought experiment. Hitler used the Swastika - An Aryan symbol commonly used in Hinduism. Today it is pretty much banned which can be a shock to Hindus coming to the US when they decorate their doors with Swastikas. However the KKK used the Cross as their symbol. Lets imagine the cross being similarly being banned or socially shunned.

There are many double standards in western society. Again as I said "Don't invite scrutiny which you wont survive"

Re:Fake movie

[N3wsByt3]

"So given that, I don't really see a reason for singling out Muslims in western society. "

I've given you the reason in my former posts. Whether one wants it or not, in comparison, today, FAR more acts of terrorism are done in the name of their religion by Muslims than by Christians. But, as said, what's even worse is that FAR more Muslims uphold and concur with ideas that are antithetic with democratic, Western values based on the enlightenment. Those are not all terrorists; they just hold extreme views (extreme in regard to our values). If you looked at the links I provided you, you can note that some of those views - which are incompatible with how *we* think about things and go against our basic values - have either a majority, or a very large minority being supportive of it.

If you would take a random sample size and compare Muslims with non-Muslims in regard to women's rights, homosexuality, etc., you would see a HUGE discrepancy in Western countries between the two groups. clearly, the correlation is not by accident, but has a *causal* relation: it's because they are Muslims, such a large part thinks that sharia should be the only law being applied, that women are less worth than men, that homosexuality is abhorred, that they think fre speech does not allow to insult the prophet Mohammed (PUH!), etc.

you wouldn't find these numbers and percentages with atheists, not even with Christians, nor Buddhists, etc. the reason for that is what you said: most people, even claiming to be Christians, aren't all that religious anymore, and Christianity has had a reformation and lost a lot of its sharp teeth anyway.

The Islam has not - or to a far, far lesser extend. Muslims are also to a far higher percentage still devote in the classical sense. You only have to look at the mosques for that: almost always filled, while the churches in Europe are dwindling and largely empty. So, both in religiousness as in the strict applicability of their holy book, Muslims are far more ferocious, percentage-wise, than any other religion these days. That's why you see raving and angry-shouting Muslims trying to get a museum shut down, or making threats - by legal and illegal means - if that museum was posting art that offends their prophet. Do the same with Christians, and the most you get is some bishop saying it's not very proper. That's also why you see people being shot for making a cartoon of Mohamed *by Muslims* - tell me, when was the last time a group of people were shot dead out of religious motives because they offended, say, Jesus?

It's this sort of blindness that annoys me the most. Yes, there has been brutality in the past by all monotheistic religions. Yes, you have nutcases here in the West too, who commit terrorist attacks or who want to impose their religious laws on others. Yes, you have homo-haters in the indigenous populace also. Yes, you have people thinking women are inferior to men as well. But *comparatively* you have FAR more of them within the Muslim community than in every other religious or non-religious community. This is a fact; see the links I gave you, and compare those numbers with the average you get asking the same questions of natives in Europe. The scale and level is considerably higher than with the local communities, and even with any other group who is or has settled themselves in Europe, and their integration is one of the lowest.

Your halal-example shows the same sort of naivety, imho. Ok, so you like halal meat more. Good for you. Now, say I want to eat non-halal food. Do you know it has become increasingly difficult, with the exception of pork, to find *any* non-halal meat anymore in my country? Even when it's not explicitly mentioned, it's still made in a halal way, because that's more convenient for slaughterhouses, even if they technically break the law with it (since they are obliged by law to sedate animals before killing them). Alas, we made the mistake of allowing an exception for religious reasons, and now it's done with all and every animal/meat, wheth

Re:Fake movie

[ghoul]

From your passionate response I must conclude you live in Europe rather than America. The fundamentalist muslim you refer to who does not want to adapt is far more common in Europe than in the USA. There is a reason. USA is a land of immigrants and while everyone assimilates nothing is forced. Europe on the other hand for a long time did not want the Muslims except as cheap labor. it put them into ghettos on the outskirts where they indulged in their own version of Circlejerk. I have seen families where the mother wears skirts to the knee but the younger generation is wearing headscarves. This is because while the older generation came to Europe with hope in their hearts the younger generation feels they will always be treated as an outsider so they turn inwards and listen to the fundamentalist preachers. This is not going to get any better by shutting them out with statements like "Islam is the problem"

The other problem is of course refugees. Economic migrants come to the West because they want to so they want to live in western society are open to adapting new practices. Refugees don't. They were perfectly happy with their own cultural practices and were forced out of their countries and many of them blame the west for the sad plight of their countries (And with the number of countries the West has bombed or done color revolutions in during the last 25 years they have a point).
For refugees you may want to have cultural education classes and again don't settle them all in one group in one area. Spread them across so that they adapt to the local culture. Again locking them up in detention camps is only going to make the problem worse.
We want to avoid fundamentalism not Islam. if you say Islam is bad that will only create further fundamentalism in response.
While the US has created many of the problems by destabilizing the middle east, it has done a much better job of assimilating muslims than Europe. Perhaps time for Europe to take some lessons from its daughter culture

Re:Fake movie

[stealth_finger]

Heck they wouldnt have let Spain join if the Muslim in Spain had not been conveniently genocided.

When was this?

Re:Fake movie

[N3wsByt3]

Again, I think this is naive.

I refer again to one of the links I gave. There you can see that even among Muslims in the USA there is a considerably HIGHER - significantly so, in scientific terms - percentage that think it's ok to, for instance, stone women to death which are 'unfaithful'.

The only reason, thus, why the USA doesn't have as many problems (yet) is because of..numbers. It's as simply as that. Germany, last year, got 1 million (!) refugees - in one year, thus. In comparison to it's populace, that would be equivalent of the USA taking in 4 million a year. Everyone with a grain of intelligence will understand that, if the USA did the same, EXACTLY the same problems would occur. (And btw, once they got the nationality, you can't force them to settle anywhere, since as a citizen, they're free to go where they want, so your idea of 'spreading' doesn't help. In fact, after 20-30 years, there is no spreading to be done anymore, because they're in all cities with their own neighbourhoods).

Can you imagine how well the USA would fare, if they took in 4 million people per year for 20 years in a row, where 40% of them think the sharia should be above the constitution, and 12% think it's ok to stone women to death?

I say Islam is bad, because it IS bad - if you follow what is actually described there and you believe the stuff is actually the 'word of god' you have to follow. Other religions may be considered bad too, but those are NOT, or far, far, far less, being interpreted literally anymore, nor are the adepts of those religious so devout anymore, as it is with Islam.

In fact, the problem is NOT being fanatic, at least not on its own. Take the most fanatical Jainist, and that will lead to someone avoiding to trample on insects and who wouldn't even try to hurt bacteria. A fanatical Jainist would be a complete and utter pacifist. So being 'fantical' about your religion, when that religion is inherently peaceful, makes person that is fanatically peaceful. There is no problem with that. So how comes it is with Islam (and, granted, some other religions)? Because there IS bad in there, and it DOES say things that are antithetic to modern thoughts, and the more literally you take this, the more bad it becomes. So it's not just fanaticism that is the problem, it's the sourcematerial as well.

But anyway, the point is, the USA has no problems, not because the Muslims they have are so welcomed by the populace that they don't have any of the antithetical values and wishes anymore ( - as evidenced by the poll, they still have, and still with a far larger percentage than the rest of the populace), but primarily because they have far less than the EU. The percentage of Muslims in the USA make out 0,9% of the populace... in Germany, however, it is more than FIVE TIMES as high. Plus, the USA has far more landmass, so you *can* spread them better, in most EU countries, there is nothing to spread anymore: they're in every city, within there neighbourhoods. Many of which have become no-go zones for the police, btw.

It's all about numbers, thus. The more you have them, the more problems you get, because the more people you get with undemocratic ideas - EVEN if, as correctly noted, not ALL of Muslims share those views. My point is, that that doesn't matter: whether all adher to it or not, it doesn't change the fact that TOO MANY do, and that your society/civilisation is going to buckle under it, if one keeps accepting people where 40% wants to abolish your laws.

And the left has tried for 40 years to claim 'spreading' and 'education' will deal with it, and make them all integrate. Alas, wishful thinking: integration goes extremely slow and is very poor, with Mulims, simply by the fact they don't really want to integrate - especially the 40% that finds their laws should govern the land. In fact, polls have also shown, that even among second and third generation immigrants, it's even worse then with their parents that came in the 60'ies. A recent poll with those youth in immigration-neig

Re:Fake movie

[Anonymous Coward]

Christian religion does actually have some well-defined requirements which are the necessary condition of a sect to belong to the religion. One is the status of Jesus and the meaning of his death and resurrection. This is the one that already thins the herd enough already. The "Christian way of life" and other such terms are just inventions of the conservatives to put their herds of believers into submission. Muslims have their pillars of faith. It is all that is required and the rest is just invention of the times, culture or the particular sect to serve their purposes.

Oh no!

[Threni]

Someone is wrong on the internet! And now all those random anonymous people who post on IMDB mean I'll never watch another movie again!

If IMDB was so important to the success of a movie wouldn't there be evidence of every major hollywood movie being hyped there by millions of paid shills?

Re:Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only were lots of someones wrong, but a very self-important someone was WRONGED. And their FEELINGS WERE HURT!

#StopThePain2017 #KardashiansAreArmeniansToo

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if they didn't invest so much in battling the non-existent pirates by buying out the US government they'd have some cash (in which they stole from the actual artists that feed them) to fix whatever the fuck this so-called problem is.

This makes sense....

[__aaclcg7560]

This is what the Slashdot trolls do when they're not busy buggering me.

Re:This makes sense....

[Anonymous Coward]

A wee Freudian slip there, eh?

Re:This makes sense....

[__aaclcg7560]

Nope. :P

Re:This makes sense....

[ckatko]

What the hell is a troll anyway? The news uses it so often now to basically mean, "Anyone we don't like."

It's like when these rags go to write a story they just roll a die full of meaningless words "Troll. Nazi. Misogynist. Sexist. Racist. White Supremicist. Deplorable. Rape apologist." and whatever word comes up, they just throw it out and expect nobody to question it. "They used Nazi to describe this person, so I'm pretty sure they're talking about a bad guy!"

Re:This makes sense....

[suutar]

As I understand it, a troll is someone who puts up something (a vote, a post, whatever) for the specific purpose of pissing someone else off or harming them somehow, usually reputationally. I believe it was originally related to the fishing term, with the implication that the intent was to generate an angry reaction (see also flamebait). There's probably subtleties to the term that I'm missing, though.

Re:This makes sense....

[__aaclcg7560]

"Troll. Nazi. Misogynist. Sexist. Racist. White Supremicist. Deplorable. Rape apologist."

That describes Trump's base supporters in a nutshell.

"They used Nazi to describe this person, so I'm pretty sure they're talking about a bad guy!"

No Republican has ever used Nazi imagery without it blowing up in their face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RvfzFv3c6Y

Re:This makes sense....

[Anonymous Coward]

Half of the US are national socialists?

Re:This makes sense....

[Anonymous Coward]

Half of the US are national socialists?

No, they just get a stiffy wishing they could get away with all of their fascist authoritarian dreams.

moives don't make a profit

[Joe_Dragon]

movies don't make a profit. They make it all on the back end where we don't have to pay out any % to actors.

Re:moives don't make a profit

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why anyone involved with a Hollywood production should get their money up front as a flat fee, or as a percentage of the gross, not net. Because under Hollywood accounting there will never be any net.

Re:moives don't make a profit

[Comrade Ogilvy]

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.

Re:moives don't make a profit

[ghoul]

Putin is using the law to claw back these companies by invalidating the previous sales where the board of directors did not do their fiduciary duty and the bought and paid for press is raising a hue and cry about these.

Re:moives don't make a profit

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Indeed. The Russian populace is not mysteriously backing a crazed tyrant on these prosecutions. The Russian people are simply better informed than most Westerners on the particulars and do not feel sorry for lying thieves who are brought to justice. Nor do they think that their admittedly imperfect justice system would magically be improved by failing to prosecute these egregious cases. Western leaders and Western press are quick to presume that not prosecuting a political rival of Putin must be a good thing, but what if the person is question is far less than innocent? Russian politics are dirty, but that does not mean it is easy to pick out good guys and bad guys.

While I support this movie and message

[Anonymous Coward]

Erdogan made some comments the other day about throwing them out into the sea (capsizing boats full of refugees was one of the ways they killed them). I really worry that this is all part of 'Operation Turkey Freedom' coming in a few years. Not that Erdogan doesn't need his ass beat, but I would rather they just slowly collapse over decades like Venezuela.

Re:While I support this movie and message

[Anonymous Coward]

I really worry that this is all part of 'Operation Turkey Freedom' coming in a few years.

But the poultry farmers won't like it.

Re:While I support this movie and message

[stealth_finger]

I really worry that this is all part of 'Operation Turkey Freedom' coming in a few years.

But the poultry farmers won't like it.

Stop this war on Christmas

Maybe people are tired of this dreary stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one know that I do not want to spend my money on dreary movies about genocide. During America's darkest days of the depression and WWII, the studios made happy, uplifting movies. If there was ever a need again for happy uplifiting movies, that time is now.

Re:Maybe people are tired of this dreary stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

The movie isn't for the US audience, other than to lower morale even more. It is for India, China, and other places where the economy is flourishing. China has never seen an economic boom as they are seeing now, for example.

As for US audiences, I wonder why every movie, be it comic book stuff, is always gritty and depressing. Makes me wonder if that is deliberate, just as a subtle way to demoralize the American audience... hell with the current economic climate, it is hard to get any worse.

Re:Maybe people are tired of this dreary stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

"During America's darkest days of the depression and WWII, the studios made happy, uplifting movies."

You've never seen "The Grapes Of Wrath", or "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang", have you?
Hollywood Movies, especially the "Pre-Code" productions, were anything but happy or uplifting. Cagney and Robinson played amoral thugs, Stanwyck and Harlow played whores. Even Jimmy Stewart's first major role was as a conniving murderer in "After the Thin Man". Strip the music out of Busby Berkeley, and you have movies about depression, failure and despair. And the lesson of "The Wizard Of Oz"? No matter how miserable and poverty-stricken your life is, don't fall into the trap of falling into make-believe.
These movies weren't about Fun, they were about Survival.
Hollywood's later reaction to beating the Depression and winning the War? Fluff. That and blacklisting those who claimed that Solid Republican Virtues weren't what accomplished it all. Republicans were about as beneficial then as they are now. That is, they were parasites hellbent on killing off their Hosts. But most of all, then and now, American Republican values centered on hypocrisy. That's why self-absorbed asswipes like Reagan switched from Democrat to Republican after the War, despite the previous public facade of giving a damn. They just found a more receptive environment for approved selfishness.

"I for one know that I do not want to spend my money on dreary movies about genocide."
I have no horse in the Turkish/Armenian races; the problems began long ago and aren't likely to end for a long time to come. And despite the surface gloss about Religion, this is, as always, about Politics and Control. There are Turkish Christians, just as there are Armenian Muslims. Hell, the original Irish Fenians were often Protestant. The only reason that Ireland is as peaceful as it is now, considering the fairly recent bloody past, is that few in the North or the South give a damn about Religion any longer. Any Religion.
However, you have a very valid point. I don't like dreary movies either, whether about Genocide or not. But just yesterday I got involved in a long online debate about what was the most depressing movie ever made. The consensus as of this morning is "On the Beach". (These folks know their Films.) This Film was about simply, eventually, giving up.

Re:Maybe people are tired of this dreary stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. I'm an American, but I enjoy the Bollywood movies because they are so entertaining without causing angst.

A solution (partly)

[Anonymous Coward]

The IMDB should make it so the user could sort the rating by geography. In this way one could, for example, filter out all the reviews from Turkey from the ratings results. or see how a film was rated by reviewers from a particular country or region.I mean IMDB is a database right?

Re:A solution (partly)

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean IMDB is a database right?

It's actually a series of tubes.

Re:A solution (partly)

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct. They have a pretty darn good database, and have had it years before anyone else had anything comperable. Over 20 years ago. That Colin guy who founded it was pretty smart. I don't know how much of the database is exposed but this is an "app" crying to happen. What is exposed allows you to make some pretty amazing querys.

Ignore ratings

[Revek]

Why should I depend on some random people to tell what I will like and dislike?

Re:Ignore ratings

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not telling you what to like/dislike, it's you attempting to make an informed purchase. Don't know about you, but I can't go to every movie to see if it's any good. I usually end up narrowing down to a couple of choices that interest me; if one of those choices is getting particularly bad reviews, I will likely skip it (or at least wait for dvd/Netflix) and go to one of my other choices instead.

Re:Ignore ratings

[Chris Mattern]

Yes, but the critical question is--do you get those reviews you base your decisions on from well-known critics, or those aforementioned random people?

Not just hollywood

[s1d3track3D]

Gone are the days of 'experts' guiding content consumption. Nowadays everybody has a some sort of internet connected device and an opinion. If they can also then tap into social media and create a cause they can summon a quite a force.

Recent non-movie events with airlines, the 'leggings' incident and United fiasco.

Re: Not just hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

This will have to be addressed.

Yet another reason to hate Turks?

[hackel]

Honestly, sometimes I think these idiots deserve Sultan Erdogan. What a pathetic display this was. Of course there are plenty of good, decent, progressive Turks out there, and it's very sad that their voices can rarely be heard over these idiot children. Very sad indeed. I can't imagine anyone taking an IMDB rating seriously, but the fact that they are refusing to do anything to combat this is equally disturbing. "Nothing they can do" is total bullshit.

Re:Yet another reason to hate Turks?

[Kohath]

Because seeking out reasons to hate groups of people is ok? A good use of time? Better than some alternative?

Re:Yet another reason to hate Turks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reasons to hate need people to hate. Lots of 'em in an Angle-republic. Nibbers and Jewboiz and narco.MEX and Muzzi-wog ... well of-course brainfuck librall.

Re:Yet another reason to hate Turks?

[ghoul]

You do realize that Ottoman Armenian citizens who had been treated fairly by the Ottomans and given the same right as muslim citizens rose up in revolt and collaborated with the invading Russian army. They thought they could finally have their Christian state where they would be free to treat their Muslim neighbors as badly as they wished? (cf. Nagorno-Karabakh). When the Russians left them hanging and the Ottoman state came back to reclaim those areas the Ottoman state's stormtroopers - the kurds (todays darlings) went a little heavy handed and did not care about collateral damage. This cause vast exoduses of civilians and deaths from disease and starvation. Their was no gathering up and shooting like Nazi Poland or Zionist Palestine or even gathering up like Rooseveltian US. It was war. People bet on the wrong side and lost and many of the survivors died fleeing as refugees. The demographics changed with the Kurds taking over most of the Armenian lands. Still not what the public thinks of when they hear the word Genocide

Re:Yet another reason to hate Turks?

[Anonymous Coward]

progressive

Careful with that word. Fifty years ago it meant someone who supported the civil rights movement, and wanted people to be treated equally, regardless of race or sex. Today, it means someone who thinks that white men shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Re:Yet another reason to hate Turks?

[Anonymous Coward]

The American Ambassador to Constantinople in 1915 disagrees with you. "Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place."

Some other eyewitness accounts.
"The men were ordered to leave the village - they were taken away and never seen again. The women and children were told to go to the old market. The soldiers came then and in front of the mothers, they picked up each child - maybe the child was six or seven or eight - and they threw them up in the air and let them drop on the old stones. If they survived, the Turkish soldiers picked them up again by their feet and beat their brains out on the stones."

"There was a place near Mush where three rivers come together and pass under one bridge. My mother went there in the morning and saw hundreds of our men lined up on the bridge, face to face. Then the soldiers shot at them from both sides. She said the Armenians 'fell on top of each other like straw'. The Turks took the clothes and valuables off the bodies and then they took the bodies by the hands and feet and threw them into the water. All day ong they lined up the men from Mush like this and it went on until nightfall."

"The Turks sent them all north into the desert. They tied them together with many other people. MY father and my sisters were tied together, Yeva and Hartoui by their wrists. Then they took them to a hill at a place called Margada where there were many bodies. They threw them into the mud of the river and shot one of them - I don't know which - and so they all drowned there together."

"I may tell you that two days south of Deir we met the first fringe of Armenian refugees and for the next three months I was seeing them continually. To attempt to describe their plight would be impossible. In a few words, there were no men of between sixteen and sixty among them, they had all been massacred on leaving their houses, and these the remainder, old men, women and children were dying like flies from starvation and disease, having been on the road from their villages to this, the bare desert, with no means of subsistence, for anything from three to six months."

All from The Great War for Civilization - Robert Fisk.

Re:Yet another reason to hate Turks?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize Erdogan is a symptom not a cause of what has been happening in Turkey for 15 or so years. About 10ish years ago there was a wave of antiscience rhetoric commenting on peer reviewed publications in Nature and Science of all places all coming from Turkey.

100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Digging up historical grievances helps no one.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Digging up historical grievances helps no one.

So Kohath's chosen path of trolling on this thread is to go with ignoring the actions today, and dismissing the tragedies of yesterday.

Thanks for revealing yourself.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Luthair]

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Denying historical atrocities helps no one.

FTFY.

I don't understand why the Turkish government doesn't just admit "yes it happened, yes it was horrible". As you said, it was 100 years ago. Who from that time period is still in the government today? Just because you admit that an atrocity occurred in the past that was perpetrated by the government that you presently lead, does not mean that you are saying that you yourself perpetrated those atrocities.

"I vow to never make the same mistakes as my predecessors" is a much better line than "all of my predecessors were perfect and never made mistakes".

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

What about people who only learn and repeat meaningless cliches?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Nidi62]

Digging up historical grievances helps no one.

And burying historical grievances only hurts the next group of victims when you can't show that you are on the path to the next atrocity.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Revek]

And I'm fresh out of mod points. I wouldn't be able to decide between funny and insightful anyway.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Revealed: Kohath doesn't support digging up 100-year-old grievances to use against people who weren't alive 100 years ago. He apparently thinks people should focus on building a better future instead.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Maybe they have better things to do?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better things to do? How can your schedule be too busy to admit that an event happened?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Short and to the point. Well done, troll.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[thegarbz]

Turkey is a bit like North Korea. The dedication to the country is absolute and the country can do no wrong, not in history, not in the future. Turkey wants to be a member of the EU. Yay Turkey. Turkey thinks the EU is an evil institution against everything Turkey stands for. Yay Turkey. Turkey doesn't have a dark and evil past, anyone saying otherwise is just trying to re-write history. Turkey's current supreme leader is nothing like a dictator. Anyone saying otherwise is just a supporter of Fethullah Gulen who had the audacity to try and overthrow the Turkish government by coupe ... while not even in the country.

All over Europe, the only foreign flags I see waved at protests are for Turkey, the greatest country in the world. We don't want to live there, but don't you dare tell us they aren't the greatest. Yay Turkey.

Also genocide didn't happen.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[b0bby]

This is the first I'd heard of this movie. But , from TFS it's:

a historical romance set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide

In my book, setting a movie against a historical backdrop doesn't constitute "digging up historical grievances", it's been a common part of movie making for a long time.

That said, Turkey is generally hyper sensitive to this. As far as I'm aware though, the facts are against them.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Except it was 100 years ago. The next everything already happened. And the next, and the next, and the next, etc.

What's the specific lesson then? If it's so important that people who weren't alive in WW1 need to be burdened with it, then surely you can tell us.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Because people spend their days listing off information about every historical event that ever happened to everyone?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

The point isn't "don't make a movie". The point is: who cares? People should stop trying to start/continue fights about ancient history.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Not trolling. Telling people to focus on things that matter. Ancient grievances don't matter if they're left in the past. And people who leave them there are better for it.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[farble1670]

Digging up historical grievances helps no one.

Ahem.

Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone saying otherwise is just a supporter of Fethullah Gulen who had the audacity to try and overthrow the Turkish government by coupe ... while not even in the country.

Doesn't seem like he would be a champagne socialist

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Revealed: Kohath doesn't support digging up 100-year-old grievances to use against people who weren't alive 100 years ago. He apparently thinks people should focus on building a better future instead.

Continue with your trolling, that shows what you think, not your self-important aggrandizement that only reveals your pomposity.

So troll on down the river, troll your way down the lane.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

There's that cliche again. What's the specific lesson that's so important here? Please inform us exactly what lesson we are supposed to learn from these specific events. And explain the relevance to today and tomorrow.

It's important, right? Please explain then.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

So saying "this happened, it was bad" one time somehow is more time-intensive than saying "it never happened, stop claiming it did, shut up shut up shut up" day after day after day after day after day after... well, you get my point I hope.

In your universe, is up down, full empty, black white? Or is time the only oddity?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Fangatafoa]

This is one event, that they had deep historical connections to.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Except none of the people you are talking about were alive and making decisions during WW1. So they are not guilty of what happened in WW1 and the WW1 Turks are not guilty of these alleged attitudes today. They're 2 entirely seperate groups of people.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

And? What's your preferred outcome? Who benefits?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

well, you get my point I hope

Not really. What's the best outcome? Who benefits?

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's so important that people who weren't alive in WW1 need to be burdened with it, then surely you can tell us.

But you're too busy not listening. Haven't you noticed?

We could tell you all day, but you would not hear.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

So where is the big deal in saying "Those people back then, not us, did a genocide"? Putting fingers into their ears and going "LALALALALALALALALA" will certainly not change history.

CAPTCHA: edicts...

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Headw1nd]

Yes, it was 100 years ago. If Turkey would own up to it, then maybe it would be forgotten history. But their failure to own up to it isn't history, it's happening right now. It's not a matter of paying for your ancestors crimes, it's a matter of lying day in and day out about historical fact. If you can't come clean about things a century ago that you aren't even responsible for, how can anyone trust you to be honest about the things you are responsible for right now?

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Brockmire]

Meaningless? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

So where is the big deal in saying...

Where's the big deal in not bothering to say it?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[thegarbz]

The can't do no wrong mentality is what causes differences in opinion of what went on. Compare it to say Nazi Germany who owned the holocaust to the point that denying it happened is actually a crime.

Not being guilty because it happened in the past and not admitting that something happened are two entirely different things. If they are so detached from their past, why are they so insistent that what happened was a-okay, totally not genocide, no sirree. It's a very different attitude from other governments that don't accept responsibility for past governments: e.g. Australia stolen generation where the government always firmly had the view: "Yes it happened, no we will not apologise because it wasn't our decision. It was a decision made at the time by different people with different circumstances."

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[farble1670]

What's the specific lesson that's so important here?

Did I say there was a lesson? Of course you are assuming I'm making so anti-Turk or pro-Armenian statement. I'm not.

The so-called "cliche" phrase we are talking about means this: don't do the same stupid shit repeatedly. I learned that when I was around 4 years old.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Brockmire]

Another cliché, you can't see the forest for the trees. It's frustrating talking to someone so stupid that a straight forward, plain language sentence is fucking perplexing to you. You shouldn't be seated at the adult table.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Why would anyone trust or not trust based on some true or false second- or third-hand story told or omitted about some event from 100 years ago? Is that a wise decision-making criteria?

I'm not seeing how it's relevant. If it's relevant to you, that seems to be something about you rather than something about the people you trust or don't trust.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree.
They are far too busy with all the denying of it happening to have time to admit that it did.

If time spent on the subject was their primary concern, saying "Yes, it happened" would probably be to their benefit by saving a lot of time, whether they actually think it happened or not.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[dj245]

Turkey is a bit like North Korea. The dedication to the country is absolute and the country can do no wrong, not in history, not in the future. Turkey wants to be a member of the EU. Yay Turkey. Turkey thinks the EU is an evil institution against everything Turkey stands for. Yay Turkey. Turkey doesn't have a dark and evil past, anyone saying otherwise is just trying to re-write history. Turkey's current supreme leader is nothing like a dictator. Anyone saying otherwise is just a supporter of Fethullah Gulen who had the audacity to try and overthrow the Turkish government by coupe ... while not even in the country.

All over Europe, the only foreign flags I see waved at protests are for Turkey, the greatest country in the world. We don't want to live there, but don't you dare tell us they aren't the greatest. Yay Turkey.

Also genocide didn't happen.

Everyone else's propaganda is easy to dismiss except your own. Our reality is defined by our experiences, and we have different experiences. Therefore one person's "Absolute Truth" can easily be another person's "Propaganda not based on reality". The USA (and your country, if it is not the USA) blows a lot of smoke, stretches the truth, and perpetuates outright lies for political reasons too.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Ok, so the answer is related to your feelings about the Turk's attitude. Why should anyone else care about someone's feelings about Turk attitudes?

I was told this was important.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Revealed: Kohath doesn't support digging up 100-year-old grievances to use against people who weren't alive 100 years ago. He apparently thinks people should focus on building a better future instead.

Civilized people have the decency to not build the future on top of the past's graveyards. OTOH Turkey (and by extension Kohath) is in good company here, as its newest great friend across the Black Sea also maintains that gulags never happened, Siberia was a pleasant holiday destination for many people looking for work after WW2 and there are no russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine - also in the name of building a better future.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

We could tell you all day, but you would not hear.

Because it's all about someone's feelings being validated? If not that, then what?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the best outcome?

The best outcome would be for them stop denying it happened.

Who benefits?

The truth.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

People should stop trying to start/continue fights about ancient history.

Then why are you doing your best to fight over it?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

So you can't think of any way anyone benefits? Neither can I.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I care. The people who's family's Turkey murdered care. Turkey should admit it was wrong, did wrong, and acted wrong. Then the world can move on.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ghoul]

You do realize Armenians complaining about genocide and ethnic cleansing is rich considering what Armenia is doing in Nagorno Karabakh?

Plus during WW1 many Turks got cleansed from European and Caucasian territories and came and settled in Turkey. Asking the descendants of these Turks to apologize for ethnic cleansing is adding insult to injury.
No one has clean hands here. Just move on and live your life and go date that cute Azerbaijani chick.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

a straight forward, plain language sentence is fucking perplexing to you

Which one?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ghoul]

The difference is Germany lost a war and the victor's version of history was forced down the throats of the next generation. Turkey won its war of inependence and threw the Italian,French and Greek invaders out so Turkey could teach its children its version of history. History is written by the winners. e.g. Churchill starved 14 million Bengalis to death during WW2, Hitler starved 6 million Jews to death. Can you guess who won the war from how much is written about the Holocaust and how much is written about the Bengal Famine?

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

I have taken no side. I don't care which side is right. I'd like people to stop fighting.

They keep telling me it's important though. Yet they haven't offered a compelling explanation of that importance. It's almost like everyone's reciting lines from some alien melodrama.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Then the world can move on.

If the world wanted to move on, the world could move on, regardless. It seems pretty clear that they don't want to.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Nemyst]

So fucking own up that your ancestors did something horrible, accept it, and get over it. Would people be fine with Germany denying the holocaust openly?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Civilized people have the decency to not build the future on top of the past's graveyards.

What's the alternative? Giving up on the future? Why would anyone want to be "civilized" if it meant they were denied a future?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

I actually find it pretty easy to dismiss whatever about 100-year-old events.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

So fucking own up that your ancestors did something horrible

What if they just don't want to? There's probably someone somewhere who said what you want to hear. Why isn't that good enough?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[NonUniqueNickname]

What about people who only learn and repeat meaningless cliches?

They go into politics.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

I nearby apologize to everyone, on behalf of everyone, for anything and everything that ever occurred. Does that solve it? If not, why not?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not blame the current generation, but admitting that some shit went down that probably shouldn't've would be nice.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well in the West usually in this situation, when they admit something bad happened, they pay the survivors. So they would benefit.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[TangoMargarine]

e.g. Churchill starved 14 million Bengalis to death during WW2

No, try 2.1 million. And apparently there's debate about whether it was his fault.

Debate over the specific cause or causes of the Bengali famine hinges on a series of interlinked questions: when the nature and scope of the disaster were recognized, whether enough food was available at the provincial or national level (or via international food aid arranged by Great Britain) to feed the population of Bengal, and whether the failure of the colonial rulers to alleviate the crisis was due to incompetence or insensitivity to Bengal's needs. [...]

The question of when the famine was or should have been recognised is relevant to a discussion of the unreliable crop statistics. The 1942–43 Annual Report of the Indian Statistical Institute (1945, p. 107) asserts that the lack of reliable crop output statistics left the government effectively uninformed about the state of agricultural output, precluding any timely response. Others, however, have expressed doubts that the government was naive or "caught napping" when it rejected those statistics out of hand.[354]

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

doesn't support digging up 100-year-old grievances to use against people who weren't alive 100 years ago.

That argument is invalid. The mass killing of jews by the Nazis happened over 70 years ago. Are you saying that 30 years from now talking about that should stop?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

So where is the big deal in saying...

Where's the big deal in not bothering to say it?

Leg me tell you what the big deal is by "not bothering to say". In the very best case, it will be a passive aggressive way of denying that it happened. Denying what happened is being dishonest. A man or a country that never admits mistakes is a dishonest man or country. Why do you not care about honesty?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Failing to disclose non-relevant information isn't "dishonest".

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[PPH]

Who remembers the Armenians?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

I don't know about your part of "the West", but I would never be willing to be held even partially financially liable for anything that happened 100 years ago. If the individuals who did it can't be held responsible, then no one should be.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

No one called for "not talking about it". People should talk about it if they want and not talk about it if they don't. But people who weren't alive and making decisions at the time are innocent of what happened. They should be free from dealing with it if they choose.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

Exactly what criteria do you use to classify the Armenian genocide as "non-relevant information"?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Those who wish to remember, remember.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

100 years passed

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

So you are saying that 30 years from now, you will classify the Nazi killing of jews during WW2 as "non-relevant information" as well?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

No one called for "not talking about it".

Have you not called for not talking about the Armenian genocide several times?

But people who weren't alive and making decisions at the time are innocent of what happened. They should be free from dealing with it if they choose.

The first sentence is a truly valid argument. Although not very relevant. Because the question is not whether people living today are responsible for things that happened 100 years ago (of course they are not), but the question is how people are dealing with the history they have inherited from their ancestors. No one is free to ignore history.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

I have taken no side.

Why are you not honest about you absolutely having taken a side?

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you keep fighting, that's a problem, you aren't even admitting to your own role. It's almost...wait, no, it is because you're trolling.

Which should be a hint to you, nobody is going to take a troll seriously. You're just the clown, and not even the Auguste, but the Bouffon.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't even quote that correctly.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

I won't be condemning people as "dishonest" for not talking about it. If they don't want to talk about it, that's up to them.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Which side?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[j-beda]

The difference is Germany lost a war and the victor's version of history was forced down the throats of the next generation. Turkey won its war of inependence and threw the Italian,French and Greek invaders out so Turkey could teach its children its version of history. History is written by the winners. e.g. Churchill starved 14 million Bengalis to death during WW2, Hitler starved 6 million Jews to death. Can you guess who won the war from how much is written about the Holocaust and how much is written about the Bengal Famine?

Not a proud moment: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/the...

My quick look indicates the famine lead to the death of 3 million. That might not play as well into the "Churchill was as bad at Hitler", but you wouldn't want to be acused of making the whole thing up.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Rakarra]

And? What's your preferred outcome? Who benefits?

The Turkish Government benefits by being able to control the narrative of history to make their ancestors look a lot better. Think of how much Americans absolutely revere their own founding fathers and take such pride in US history. There's a lot of power in being able to mythologize your nation's past.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

...the question is how people are dealing with the history they have inherited from their ancestors. No one is free to ignore history.

It's unjust to try to burden innocent people with their ancestors' guilt. It's also self-defeating, because, if you look back far enough, I guarantee your ancestors also have blood on their hands, just like everyone else's ancestors.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that I don't deny what my ancestors did, unlike the nationalist Turks.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

You're just the clown, and not even the Auguste, but the Bouffon.

I don't know who they are. Do they also want people to not start/continue fights about 100-year-old grievances?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

America is a bit like North Korea. The dedication to the country is absolute and the country can do no wrong, not in history, not in the future. America wants to be a member of the EU. Yay America. America thinks the EU is an evil institution against everything America stands for. Yay America. America doesn't have a dark and evil past, anyone saying otherwise is just trying to re-write history. America's current supreme leader is nothing like a dictator. Anyone saying otherwise is just a supporter of Hillary who had the audacity to emails ...

All over Europe, the only foreign flags I see waved at protests are for America, the greatest country in the world. We don't want to live there, but don't you dare tell us they aren't the greatest. Yay America.

Also genocide didn't happen.

Slight edit of parent's statement. I wonder if anyone will spot my subtle change.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine someone in your high school class was caught stealing a car - face clearly visible on a surveillance camera, the license plate and records make it clear that it wasn't a case of 'accidentally locked out of own car, breaking into it and hotwiring it on your own to save money' or anything innocent like that. Now it is decades later, and he is running a business but he continues to insist that he never stole that car. He owns a factory that makes widgets, would you buy from him? Or would you expect him to deliver you defective widgets and demand to be paid because he brought you widgets.

It matters because it makes it clear that they are a pathological liar - that they cannot own up to the truth.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's all about someone's feelings being validated? If not that, then what?

Oh, so you think you have heard, is that it?

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know who they are.

That would be no impediment to your performance, not that it is truthful, mind you.

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

Congrats?

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you naturally this obtuse or did you have to work at it? I think you're muddying the waters deliberately.

As to your silly confession, if an innocent person confesses to a crime, the guilty party gets away with it. I hope you agree that's bad.

Who cares? The rest of the world (apart from some Russians) believes that the Turks deliberately committed mass murder of Armenian civilians. Anyone dealing with the Turkish state now knows that they can't be trusted to tell the truth.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

The sign of a closed mind.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[RuffMasterD]

It might help the Turks to feel less defensive about their history. And it might help the Armenians to move on from their history. Germany admit they fucked up in a really big way and they have done all they can to make amends and ensure it never happens again. For them, you truly can say that digging up historical grievances does not help anyone, because they have already dealt with their past. They have earned the right to not burden current generations with the sins of their ancestors. What has Turkey done?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'know, usually when someone moves goalposts, they move them to be more in their favor, not less. I don't know where this whole "not talking about it" came from, but this is about the Turkish government actively denying it ever happened (ie, talking about it).

Re: 100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

...if an innocent person confesses to a crime, the guilty party gets away with it.

All the guilty people are dead. It was 100 years ago. Everyone left is innocent of it.

The rest of the world (apart from some Russians) believes that the Turks deliberately committed mass murder of Armenian civilians.

But they all died a long time ago.

Anyone dealing with the Turkish state now knows that they can't be trusted to tell the truth.

This is a 100% artificial concern. You're pretending this matters to start or continue a fight based on an ancient grievance. I understand this. It's destructive and unjust and potentially destabilizing. It advances the cause of hatred and it benefits no one. Just let it go.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

It's not analogous because the person who "was caught stealing a car" actually died a long time ago. And you want me to distrust a completely different person because he won't jump through a specific hoop for you. (And there's no reason to trust a random person anyway, so it's a doubly strange concern.)

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

And all the questions about why this matters are a sign of an open mind. But then the answers are about someone's feelings being validated, which isn't something I value.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ghoul]

If someone wrote something like this about the Jewish deaths people would be on their head like a ton of bricks shouting "Holocaust Denier" I accuse you of being a "Famine Denier"

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ghoul]

This wasn't even the first famine. The British caused repeated famines through food confiscation in the 300 years of rule in bengal. The British Parliament even discussed that a famine was good as it helped to control the "population problem". Hitler did not invent the term "Final Solution" or "concentration camps". Both were British inventions - one used in India and one in South Africa against the Boers.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[TangoMargarine]

Bit of a strawman. Don't suppose you have a source for your 14 million figure?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

That was a complete non-answer not even remotely related to what I asked for. Will you in 2047 start classifying the Nazi killing of jews during WW2 as "non-relevant information" because the condition "100 years passed" is true?

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Rakarra]

If someone wrote something like this about the Jewish deaths people would be on their head like a ton of bricks shouting "Holocaust Denier" I accuse you of being a "Famine Denier"

Because both are well documented, and we know mostly what went on in both events. If someone came in here saying 20 million Jews died in the German Holocaust and I responded that historians generally think that around 6 million Jews died in that time, that wouldn't make me a "Holocaust denier."

Historians also agree that the Nazi regime was pretty much the sole cause of the Holocaust, while saying Churchill or the British being the sole cause of the Bengal famine would be absolute nonsense. They're guilty, and this is a horrible act, no getting around it, of blocking aid that could have helped, but there were many major factors, such as rice crop disease and natural disasters, that helped to put them in that situation. If you would blame the British for that, why wouldn't you have put even more blame on the Japanese who cut off the regular rice exports from Burma that the Bengali depended on? Or the Axis attacks on ships that dared to cross the Indian Ocean? Yes, there's a more fringe scholarly line that pins the blame on the British War Cabinet because WWII virtually guaranteed that a famine would occur, the British basically determined where it would occur because, uhh.. racism. But that completely ignores all the other factors leading towards the famine, and it absolves local policy-makers of any blame as well as the industrialists who created such an extreme wealth gap that left so many destitute in the first place that they had nothing to fall back on.

So no, I wouldn't say the Bengali Famine and the Holocaust are really in any way similar.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[Kohath]

I don't have any good predictions for the year 2047 on that subject.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[shutdown -p now]

Because they still have a problem with aggressive nationalism, as a nation. It doesn't take forms as ugly as Armenian genocide, but look at what they're doing to the Kurds, for example. Also check this out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[shutdown -p now]

Because it is directly relevant to a great deal of modern Turkish politics, such as their attitude towards the Kurds.

Re:100 years ago, who cares?

[ZorroXXX]

I don't have any good predictions for the year 2047 on that subject.

Really? Why not? Because you claim today, with absolute certainty, that the Armenian genocide is non-relevant information (because of age). If that is a valid argument then it must be universally applicable. When you argue "if event X if older than Y years then it is non-relevant information" you cannot cherry pick values for X for which the argument should be true and "uncertain" for others. There are no reasons why that argument should not be applicable for the Nazi's killing of jews, Stalin's killing of Gulag prisoners, or other historic events if it is a valid argument.

It is not a valid argument, which is why I pick on it to expose it as such. Deep in your heart you know this as well I assume. I find it sadly disturbing that instead of admitting this you choose to try to deflect and thereby not agreeing on that calling the Nazi killing of jews during WW2 non-relevant information (when discussing history) will never be acceptable.

The (implicit) argument "nothing can be predicted about the future" is not valid either. Of course many things are difficult or impossible to predict about the future, but not everything. Example: I claim today that a man that never admits mistakes is a dishonest man, and I will most certainly continue to do so in 2047 as well.

I do not understand why you engage the way you do. Could you help me understand by trying to explain what you lay down as problem and cause for your action?

What is the problem? ... What is the cause? ... What is the solution? Emotionally engage in advocating that the Armenian genocide can be ignored.

Or maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Alternate headline: Hollywood discovers that the internet can be used by unwashed masses to fight the power of The Man. It just wasn't used in that way this time...

Surprise! The tactics that make the internet so popular with Hollywood leftists can be used against Hollywood leftists!

*disclaimer* I am not well-informed about the Armenian "genocide" and do not take a position on whether or not it should be labelled as such. It certainly sounds like an intentional effort to kill off a whole culture, but that would be culturocide or something that we don't appear to have a word for yet, since we would immediately have to apply it to US culture, Islam, and to liberals in general, so... anyway. Turkey did something bad/evil in the last century, and somebody made a movie with that experience as the background, and Turkish citizens don't like it. Wow, way to go, Hollywood. You learned something today.

Re: Or maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Adjustments will be made so that that power will be kept well away from those who lack the wisdom and intellect to use it. People need to be understand what their place is. They need purpose and the steady hand of the State to guide them, like in Europe. The European Commission orders and the populace obeys. Simple as that.

Not to worry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Once 4chan gets wind of this they will vote it up just to piss of the turkroaches.

Re:Not to worry.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Once 4chan gets wind of this they will vote it up just to piss of the turkroaches.

No, they won't because of emerging Global Troll Solidarity. It's the only that will bring about true world peace.

Re:Not to worry.

[Anonymous Coward]

So right wing trolls fighting right wing trolls? Brilliant! Now if only we could ship the alt-right to the ISIS-controlled parts of Syria...

SPOILER ALERT: They wind up agreeing on enough to form a united front of racism, conservative bullshit, and stupidity that takes over the world. Bad end.

Re:Not to worry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Syria? Last I checked, the left has already aligned itself with islam, and since there is "only one Islam", that basically aligns you with daesh.

Feminists wearing hijabs in "solidarity" because they don't know how to spell (sexual) servitude (enjoy the culturally enriching gang rape), the muslim call to prayer in New York (oy vey), demands to let sharia law (fun things like honor killing) be practiced in the west, the list goes on.

Re:Not to worry.

[Rakarra]

Why Syria? Last I checked, the left has already aligned itself with islam, and since there is "only one Islam", that basically aligns you with daesh.

Amazing, good job with those strawmen! That's some quality straw you've shoved in there.

Hollywood needs to die

[Anonymous Coward]

This is revenge for hollywood paying for good reviews.

Re:Hollywood needs to die

[Rakarra]

It's not really a Hollywood studio, though. "Open Road Films" was launched by two theater chains apart from Hollywood.

I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a slashdot troll since the 90s. Trolling is high art - the modern day equivalent of the court jester - the practice of teaching everyone not to take themselves too seriously.

This crap that is happening now with 4-chan esque social justice warfare against women, minorities, the historical fact of the Armenian genocide is *not* trolling. These people are doing the exact opposite of trolling - they're propping up the global misinformation machine instead of trying to convey the sense of critical thought and skepticism that I and my brethren have been working fastidiously toward for the past 3 decades (or more).
 
STOP calling them trolls. This is not what trolling is!

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Anonymous Coward]

Upvote this AC, he's had an irish baby for brekkie

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[JonnyCalcutta]

I've been a slashdot troll since the 90s.

I can vouch for this. I remember seeing this guy around regularly since the 90s.

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Anonymous Coward]

Go tell it to the hackers and the faggots.

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a slashdot troll since the 90s.

I can vouch for this. I remember seeing this guy around regularly since the 90s.

That guy is not the real AC. I am.
But he is a troll. No one but a troll would say something so obviously wrong as

These people are doing the exact opposite of trolling - they're propping up the global misinformation machine instead of trying to convey the sense of critical thought and skepticism that I and my brethren have been working fastidiously toward for the past 3 decades (or more).

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Raenex]

instead of trying to convey the sense of critical thought and skepticism that I and my brethren have been working fastidiously toward for the past 3 decades (or more)

Tell us more about the G@y N1ggers Association and frosty piss. You fAil it!

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Anonymous Coward]

The trolls on 4chan are precisely teaching people like feminists, SJWs, antifas, zionists, etc. not to take themselves too seriously.
Also, they hate Turks and armenian genocide denial because of hate group and fake news organization "the young turks".

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Nemyst]

"Troll" lost all meaning, much like "hacker", though I don't know that the former ever had as clear a definition. The funny jab troll is quite a rare creature, it's way too easy to fall into mean-spirited attacks or puerile, worthless "humor". Even in the 90s, most trolls sucked at being funny or at teaching everyone not to take themselves too seriously.

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Tablizer]

There is no official clear definition of "troll".

[NOTE: Slashdot's filter won't let me type the word "troll" too many times, so I'm using "T" instead in most cases.]

The most common definitions seem to be something like "someone who intends to agitate", which requires measuring "intent", which is not an objective metric (unless they admit it somewhere).

There's a continuum between "useful" trolls and people just being jerks for the sake jerk-hood. Socrates is an early example of a useful T: he made people think; jerks simply make everybody frustrated by playing word games or calling people names. Most those labelled T's are something in-between.

I've been called a T many times in software engineering forums where some blowhard claims that Tool/Methodology X is objectively the greatest thing since sliced bread. I push them to produce objective evidence, and they usually fail and get angry, and end up claiming "you are just not smart enough to get it". That's when you know you got them.

Objective evidence stands on its own. One doesn't have to "get" rocket science to see whether a rocket reached its destination of fell short. (Plus, a tool having a big learning curve is a problem in itself. It makes staffing harder for orgs.)

Such people make the common mistake of extrapolating their own thought processes to everybody else. Tool X may fit their own mind well, but everybody's brain is different. My pressure hopefully makes them realize this, or at least ponder it even if they don't immediately agree their evidence is subjective or poor.

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[PPH]

That guy is not the real AC.

I am Spartacus!

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Rakarra]

instead of trying to convey the sense of critical thought and skepticism that I and my brethren have been working fastidiously toward for the past 3 decades (or more)

Tell us more about the G@y N1ggers Association and frosty piss. You fAil it!

Then tell us about Ogg the open source caveman while I slurp hot grits of Natalie Portman's stone body.

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, this is simply brigading and genocide denial. Typical of them.

Re:I'm a troll and I'm triggered

[Anonymous Coward]

No, trolling is SWATting people (and getting them shot) and trying to get people to kill themselves. It isn't art, it's just shit.

rottentomatoes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad for this movie that trolls have taken the ratings down but rottentomatoes reviews are not that good, either. Im just sayin.

Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[phayes]

Looks like the summary's conclusion and the Turkish campaign to baselessly and irreversibly denigrate the movie are overblown.

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[Anonymous Coward]

45.2% 10s, 53.4% 1s! More oddly 55K mens votes average 4.3 while 24K womens votes average 9.6!

Re: Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[Brockmire]

Clearly, women love genocide.

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[michelcolman]

I just gave my first ever movie rating on IMDB. I might even go and see the movie.

What exactly was it that those trolls were trying to achieve, again? The name of a famous female singer comes to mind...

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[ElKry]

Ah, the woman who sang "Ironic", you mean?

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[Pseudonym]

Sounds like the result of the Erdogan referendum.

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[Rakarra]

It's worth noting that this isn't Best Picture of Best Foreign Film material either, its current 5-star rating is pretty close to what film critics who have seen the movie have put it at. General feeling is that the film is well intentioned and historically accurate but soapy. Think "Pearl Harbor" if it was more faithful to the politics -- there were fun moments in that movie as well, but the majority of its runtime was devoted to a love triangle with three very poorly written characters. The Promise also features a 'meh' love triangle amidst the background of the Armenian Genocide.

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[Pseudonym]

The hive mind works!

On a broader note, there is a critical mass of people who have this idea that it's possible for reviews of any artwork to be objective. This is a misunderstanding of the nature of art and art criticism. There are some things that can be objectively evaluated, but as a whole, it's entirely a matter of opinion. Expert opinion in the case of academic or journalistic critics, but opinion nonetheless.

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[EricTDuckman1414]

Democracy is the sheep getting together and telling the wolves that mutton and lamb are off the menu.

Re:Current rating on IMDb is 5 stars

[RuffMasterD]

Are women allowed to vote now that Erdogan won?

Verified Viewer ratings?

[MiniMike]

Some e-commerce sites have tags on reviews for verified buyers- maybe the movie studios should implement a similar system for movie reviews. Get a code after watching a movie, maybe by dispensing them as viewers leave (not connecting to a specific ticket to avoid privacy concerns) or when you download or buy a DVD. Use the code when reviewing the movie. Allow people to see confirmed viewer and non-confirmed ratings. Of course this could be abused, but seems no worse than the current system and might offer some improvements.

Re: Verified Viewer ratings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Huge amounts of selection bias. Everyone that is forced to watch a movie by their SO, friends, parents, etc. won't have a code to negatively rate while everyone with a code at a minimum thought the movie was going to be good at the outset. Add on the fact that initially the reviews will be padded with thousands of crew and insiders who are given "passes" and will have a strong bias or will outright lie.

This may be ok but I am sure this will be one of those things like amazon reviews where 5 stars means it might be good; 4 stars means it is terrible; 3 stars means the product has no resemblance to what you were expecting. You would never even consider buying 2 stars, if an item even exists with 2 stars.

Ghostbusters

[Anonymous Coward]

It's impossible to say whether they made an impact on the box office, but in the end, Ghostbusters lost an estimated $70 million.

Downvoting on IMDB had nothing to do with Ghostbusters losing money. It was a shit movie that wasn't funny.

Re:Ghostbusters

[Anonymous Coward]

It's impossible to say whether they made an impact on the box office, but in the end, Ghostbusters lost an estimated $70 million.

Downvoting on IMDB had nothing to do with Ghostbusters losing money. It was a shit movie that wasn't funny.

something something something patriarchy!

Re:Ghostbusters

[Halo1]

I quite liked the new Ghostbusters. It wasn't the best film ever, but it felt like an actual Ghostbusters film with the same kind of zany humour and atmosphere, unlike e.g. the Crystal Skull Indiana Jones abomination. And I say that as someone who saw the first two films as a child on the big screen.

Also, if you look at the content of the negative comments for Ghostbusters on IMDB, plenty of them do seem to be from people that somehow took offence to it.

Re:Ghostbusters

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously don't understand the hate for IJ&CS. Yeah, it wasn't the best of the franchise by a long shot but it wasn't that bad of a film. The two things I hear are the "refrigerator" scene and the aliens.

First off, the entire series was a 1940s pulp serial. Yes, it's insanely unlikely to happen in the real world but so are most other climaxes of pulp fiction. Things like the refrigerator scene are a staple of pulp. There's nothing out of line about the scene given its genre.

The aliens... So, we can believe in the mystical power of the Ark of the Covenant, a thousand year old knight, a healing grail and a high priest of Kali pulling the still-beating heart out of a human being but aliens are too far out? Seriously? Given the leanings of Slashdot I would think the sentiment of this crowd would be totally opposite...

Seeings as where you were also a child during the first two or three Indian Jones films maybe it's just a matter that you're being too critical of the same kinds of things that made the earlier films great in your still-innocent eyes and that you now relive for, if nothing else, their camp value?

Re:Ghostbusters

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I'm going to step in with my (anonymous, cowardly) perspective on the new Ghostbusters film.
I really, really liked the original movie. The second one was still pretty good - the chemistry between the original cast remained. So when I heard that there was going to be a reboot/follow-up, I was stoked to see it.
But then the early publicity material started hitting the news, framed in terms like:
"...Paul Feig's all-female Ghostbusters reboot..."
"Striking a blow for equality, the new Ghostbusters female cast..." ...and similar.
What the heck? I don't go to the cinema to be lectured at by SJWs who want to guilt-trip me, a white hetero western male. I go to be entertained. Pitching this movie first-and-foremost as a "brave statement of gender re-affirmation" or whatever completely and utterly turned me off it, in much the same way that I'd feel if someone told me to go see a movie that was "an exploration of the struggles of a Somali Maoist basket-weaving collective, expressed in the form of interpretive dance. With Esperanto subtitles."

Had the Ghostbusters advance publicity pitched it FIRST and FOREMOST as a Ghostbusters movie, and made less of a big deal of the cast's gender (I mean, why mention it at all??), I probably would have seen it.
I mean, did anyone think it necessary to mention the gender of the original cast? "Coming in 1984 from Ivan Reitman! A hilarious supernatural comedy with an all-male cast!* (*except for the strong female lead Sigourney Weaver and all the others)"
So I simply refused to see the movie, on principle.

Re:Ghostbusters

[Anonymous Coward]

It's impossible to say whether they made an impact on the box office, but in the end, Ghostbusters lost an estimated $70 million.

Downvoting on IMDB had nothing to do with Ghostbusters losing money. It was a shit movie that wasn't funny.

something something something patriarchy!

something something something wrong!

Original AC here. I had ZERO issue with the cast being female. I had a LOT of problems with the movie being NOT funny and boring.

Chris Hemsworth character rubbing his eyes through his glasses frames because he threw the lenses away when they got dirty. OH THAT WAS FUCKING HILARIOUS! Not.

Re:Ghostbusters

[Anonymous Coward]

It was worth the $8 ticket to see Chris Hemsworth suddenly rub his eyes through his glasses.

Turkish 4chan

[Anonymous Coward]

that sounds nastay~!

Rick Santorum lost the battle with google bombers

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

News at 11.

IMDB 'can do nothing': poppycock

[griffo]

What utter BS that IMDB cannot control their rating system. They will not maybe. But cannot is a lie. Do they not own their own site?

Re:IMDB 'can do nothing': poppycock

[Anonymous Coward]

By "they" of course you mean Amazon since they own iMDB. And yes Amazon has been known to sweep aside obvious fraud in their reviews from time to time. So they could do it if they chose to or the studio puts enough pressure on them - given Amazon's market position I don't think they will be swayed much.

For whatever reason people with no power feel they make a difference by posting one star reviews and ratings. But it has no effect on sales anyway. It's just internet losers blowing off steam in some weird collective fashion. By next week it will be forgotten.

Re:IMDB 'can do nothing': poppycock

[djinn6]

If they changed a movie's rating because a studio called them (or worse, paid them), then their ratings would go from sometimes useful to completely useless. They certainly "can", in the same sense you "can" go outside and murder someone, but not if they want to stay in business.

Just what does a star mean anyway?

[Ichijo]

It's a completely subjective unit of "goodness" or "I-like-it-ness" whose ratings tend to cluster around 1 or 10 (or 5 on a 5-star scale) making it a very polarizing way of rating things.

But if you asked people to rate each movie relative to another movie, they would have to think a little more and so voting brigades could not simply assign "1 star" or "10 stars" to movies.

Then you could use a Condorcet method or similar to rank all movies in order from least to most liked, and assign each movie an "all movies" percentile ranking and also one or more category-specific percentile rankings. This would flatten the ends of the ratings histogram and boost the middle where more movies should have been in the first place.

Re:Just what does a star mean anyway?

[thegarbz]

whose ratings tend to cluster around 1 or 10

It's called rater bias and it in itself is an important and useful statistic to have. The bias in the scale makes people say they either like something or they hate something. People who think critically have the option to not chose absolutes. However when you average the results, even when they are skewed to either end they produce a very meaningful answer, a tendency for people to either like or hate something.

In general, don't overthink reviews, and don't live by them. Different movies have different themes and compare to each other for different reasons. It's one of the reasons why your method doesn't make more sense. What's better Saving Private Ryan or Pixels? The former a multi-oscar winner, the latter critically panned. Right now? I wouldn't say any praise for the former because frankly I'm not in the mood for heavy deep and meaningful war films. /disclosure: Posted from in front of my TV watching Pixels. It's garbage but it's fun.

Re:Just what does a star mean anyway?

[david_thornley]

Traditionally, there's a difference between reviewing and rating. Rating is a one-dimensional number indicating how good the movie is, and often disagrees with my own taste. Reviews are descriptions. A really good review is one that tells everyone how much they'd like the movie, whatever their tastes are. Internet reviews can't be aggregated well, but ratings can.

Re: Just what does a star mean anyway?

[Brockmire]

You'd be wise to make that your last Sandler film. Sandy Wexler was by far the worst Sandler movie and worst movie in general I've watched in years. Netflix should feel butt hurt over this pile of shit.

Re: Just what does a star mean anyway?

[thegarbz]

I wasn't keen on watching it either. I just needed something stupid on in the background.

Verified watcher?

[fishscene]

Maybe coordinate with Fandango/Theater's to do what Amazon does for Verified purchases (Verified watcher). That way, you can filter out the unverified noise and see ratings from those who spent money to see it. Also, if you request a refund, you should void your Verified watcher status on your review. You can hurt them financially or publicly with a review, but not both.

You can't trust IMDB

[OrangeTide]

So we're back to being unable to trust reviews. Game reviews are bought and have been from the first gaming magazines. Film critics have weird bias that makes it tough for average people to compare their own tastes to the critic's tastes. At least with Siskel and Ebert you had two very different points of view, and I tended to like things that Siskel liked.

In this era of we have setup very democratic systems that allow everytone to contribute. Theoretically we can have access to information of not just the average(mean) review, but we can see reviews are very polarized or if they fall into a normal distribution. But the problem with anonymous democratic systems is a social mob can hijack it. When there is no consequence to your reputation for your behavior, you'll find a few bad apples that push beyond the limits just to watch the carnage. Be it trolling someone until they commit suicide, to lighting cars on fire after a football game.

Re:You can't trust IMDB

[The-Ixian]

Bah, who looks at ratings on IMDb anyway? That always seems to be the site for factual movie content..

_examples_

Usually: Hey, who was that guy in that one movie? Oh, let me check IMDb...

Never: Hey, should I go watch that movie? Let me check IMDb...

Re:You can't trust IMDB

[OrangeTide]

Fact based information is probably why more people go to IMDB. And I think the subjective ratings is more of Rotten Tomatoes' thing, but they are open to manipulation as well.

Re:You can't trust IMDB

[david_thornley]

These aren't reviews. These are ratings. It's easy to take a pile of ratings and display the average, but it's not possible to do that with actual reviews, and many more people will submit a numerical value than will submit a thought-out description.

Re:You can't trust IMDB

[OrangeTide]

The general populace demands a one-dimensional metric for everything. This toaster is 4.1 out of 5, a unit-less dimension we like to call "stars" because deep in our hearts we know that it is arbitrary bullshit. Yet somehow we want to precisely measure the bullshit to two significant digits.

You trust IMDB ratings?

[kwerle]

RT critics say 38%.

Why would you trust IMDB ratings for any film? Is there anyone here that finds IMDB ratings at all useful? Serious question.

I find RT scores useful for things to avoid because they're trash. And in general a high score (by critics) is a good sign.

Re:You trust IMDB ratings?

[Gilgaron]

Yeah I think Hollywood won, the trolls got stuck in the honeypot bombing reviews no one looks at. It'd be like bombing reviews on Kmart's webpage for a product while leaving Amazon alone.

Re:You trust IMDB ratings?

[thegarbz]

RT critics say 38%.

RT critics are as unreliable as an IMDB review that has been trolled by 4chan before its been released. They often get corrected, they often disagree with user ratings. Frankly RT are a great source for a general idea of how good a film is ... a month after its release.

Re:You trust IMDB ratings?

[kwerle]

Having read the text that goes with the reviews, I tend to believe they watched it and actually had the opinions expressed. And from what they say, I probably wouldn't like it, either.

I figure that's at least one better than spammed not-reviews.

Re:You trust IMDB ratings?

[Anonymous Coward]

And right about here is where I realize we're not talking about Russia Today.

Re:Rick Santorum lost the battle with google bombe

[Anonymous Coward]

No, see, Rick Santorum is evil, so it's okay. Necessary, even. You should participate in that, or you are evil too, and you should tell everyone you participated so they know you're good.

But when good, correct things like this movie are trolled, then it's bad.

It's like dealing with a wikipedia admin

[Anonymous Coward]

IMDB says they'll do nothing, unsurprising.

Wikipedia admins? A few neo-nazi palestinian types got a dozen admins blocked for adding hebrew pronunciation guides on regional, at least partly Jewish foods like Felafel... and the neo-nazi wikipedia leaders just rubber stamped it for their pallywood friends.

Maybe the movie isn't very good

[willoughby]

These folks seem to think their movie deserves a high rating because of the honorable subject matter and courage to tell a little known story. I've seen plenty of films which were lousy no matter what the subject matter was. This might be just a failed attempt.

Re:Maybe the movie isn't very good

[Higaran]

I'm sure that they think they made the best movie ever, but I agree, it's not possible for 100000 reviews when only 900 people saw it at the premiere. This is a very tough issue, it won't be really settled for a few generations more.

Re:Maybe the movie isn't very good

[Anonymous Coward]

These folks seem to think their movie deserves a high rating because of the honorable subject matter and courage to tell a little known story. I've seen plenty of films which were lousy no matter what the subject matter was. This might be just a failed attempt.

From TFS:

"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,"

Get it, now?

Re:Maybe the movie isn't very good

[Anonymous Coward]

This film was 'rated' by lots of people that never could have possibly seen the movie. Therefore, they aren't even rating the movie, so how could you tell if the movie is any good or not?

Natural resistance

[iMadeGhostzilla]

I'm neither Turkish nor Armenian so I don't care either way but sounds like what the Armenian financier is hoping for is to use his money and influence to push his controversial views onto general audience yet not to have to fight any resistance that naturally comes along in reaction to his actions. Well that's impossible, it's like ignoring the laws of physics. If you want us to see your one-sided presentation you'll have to do more than spend a portion of your wealth and never *really* expect to make a profit, Mr. Financier. Do something heroic, risk your life for your cause or something and we'll ignore the trolls and see the movie regardless of its rating.

Same would apply for any propaganda movie the Turkish side would try to push.

Re:Natural resistance

[Anonymous Coward]

>Armenian financier is hoping for is to use his money and influence to push his controversial views onto general audience yet not to have to fight any resistance that naturally comes along in reaction to his actions

I'll say. The slippery bastard died just before the movie started filming. Of course, it isn't unusual for wealthy oligarchs to finance films "pushing" their views to the public.

Disgusting use of censorship to protect bad movies

[Anonymous Coward]

This is ridiculous that Hollywood hates us so much that they break the law in order to try keep us uninformed of just how bad the garbage is that they release. This movie is hateful shit that tries to make Turks look like killers. They lie so hard. They try to make us look as bad as Germans. The Germans made the decision to kill many times more people. The Germans are worse. They are who Hollywood should be talking about because the Germans are so racist and such murderers.

Slashdot IMDb!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously - if the idea of a bunch of low-IQ Turkish nationalists wanting to downplay a movie about the horrors of their history bugs you, just sign into IMDb, find the movie (I think the URL below is the right one) and give it 10 stars. That'll show them that geeks are smarter than genocide-denialists. :-)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4776998/

I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[Spy Handler]

IMDB rating number these days is completely meaningless. Many complete trash films that deserve 2 or 3 stars at most end up with very high ratings because.... Disney owns the film.

Take Force Awakens, which has a very high 8.1 rating. However if you go into the User Review section, majority of reviews are very very scathing. And having watched the film, I agree that the movie was terrible. So why the disconnect between user review and user ratings?

My guess is that it's easier to game the user rating than it is to submit fake reviews, because writing a genuine-looking review is much harder than simply stuffing fake votes with a bot or (in Disney's case) simply paying for a higher number.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

The movie wasn't terrible. It wasn't anything special or original, but it showcased Disney's ability to making Star Wars films that feel like Star Wars.

Maybe you're opinion is just out of sync with what most people think?

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[Kjella]

Take Force Awakens, which has a very high 8.1 rating. However if you go into the User Review section, majority of reviews are very very scathing. And having watched the film, I agree that the movie was terrible. So why the disconnect between user review and user ratings?

14yo kid: It has laser guns and lightsabers -> high rating
Anal retentive SF-nerd with "Han shot first" issues -> bad review

Seriously, some people take light entertainment waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously. Star Wars, obviously. All the superhero movies Marvel makes, they're comic books in movie form. Even LotR had their naysayers because Tom Bombadil was missing and Arwen's love story was a side show from the appendix and... whatever. Consider it a bit like the biggest hits on the music charts, they're not the deepest and most "meaningful" songs. They're what most people want to hear, just like McDonald's isn't going out of business no matter how many food experts shit on them.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[rkordmaa]

The movie was pretty damn terrible and unlike the real movies utterly forgettable. They copy pasted the least meaningful parts from the original trilogy and didn't create anything of value.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[PoopJuggler]

I agree. I would give it a 7, not an 8, but overall it's a decent film. It's a problem of relativity. Everyone who hates that film only hates it because they're comparing it to its predecessors. That is not the correct way to review films. Films should be reviewed on their own, and that's something that Roger Ebert was really good at and one of the reasons I liked him as a film reviewer. Part of the blame is on Hollywood for making sequences of films that are more like serials than films, but regardless, you should still review them on their own merits. If you want to rate the entire series separately with each film contributing to an overall score, that's fine, but to say The Force Awakens is a "terrible" movie really isn't going to be congruent with how most people feel. I think what most people mean when they say it's terrible is that the overall arc of the entire series is terrible.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[PoopJuggler]

That's not a review of the film, that's a review of the overall Star Wars story. The film itself, as a standalone, is good. Good acting, good effects, decent story, decent writing. I dock points for some cliches and weak storytelling moments, but overall it's well-made and entertaining. What you're reviewing is Disney's decisions about how Star Wars should be proceeding, not the film itself. If you did a literal copy and paste of "The Godfather" and called it "The Godfather" it would still be a good movie. I hate JJ Abrams as much as the next guy, and I hate that they copied elements from previous films too, but that's a critique of the "meta-film" and corporate decisions, not the actual film.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[david_thornley]

Speaking as one insistent that Han shot first, I liked the movie.

It was obviously a remake of Star Wars (later Star Wars: A New Hope), and had the quick scene at the beginning to establish the First Order as bad guys and get rid of the Republic. That was lame, but it beats the prequels as setup. After that, it was lightsabers and X-wings and Force users and fighting, with characters I found more interesting than the originals and more depth in the plot, partly because it seemed like there was more of a Universe behind the movie. Star Wars always felt to me like a stand-alone movie with later films retconning it; this is more a movie in a series. It has some of the qualities of Star Wars and some of The Empire Strikes Back.

It's not a great movie, but I enjoyed it.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[j-beda]

That's not a review of the film, that's a review of the overall Star Wars story. The film itself, as a standalone, is good. Good acting, good effects, decent story, decent writing. I dock points for some cliches and weak storytelling moments, but overall it's well-made and entertaining. What you're reviewing is Disney's decisions about how Star Wars should be proceeding, not the film itself. If you did a literal copy and paste of "The Godfather" and called it "The Godfather" it would still be a good movie. I hate JJ Abrams as much as the next guy, and I hate that they copied elements from previous films too, but that's a critique of the "meta-film" and corporate decisions, not the actual film.

That's an interesting point, but to remove a film from its historical context is also an error in my opinion. If a significan number of people have seen "The Godfather", and further have seen later films infleuenced by the ideas, methods, and techniques used in "The Godfather", then a literal copy/paste of "The Godfather" released today would be rightly criticised to be dated and derrivative (assuming nobody noticed it was the same :-).

Great films of yesteryear would likely not be great films of today. When new viewers are exposed to those great films, unless the viewer is prepared to inerpret the film as historically significant, they are understandably not as impressed as those who first viewed the films when originally released.

The art not only reflects the vision and intent of the artist, it also is a function of the experience and history of the viewer.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

"Even LotR had their naysayers because Tom Bombadil was missing..."
Tom Bombadil had his own story completely separate from the LOtR, and it has puzzled many for six decades why he was included, other than to set up the chilling Barrow Wights episode... which was dictated by the Maps drawn before the story was fleshed out. If the Barrow Downs were placed outside of Bree, which is actually more logical, then Strider could have freed them, Merry and Pippin would get their swords, and the Story moves on.
"...and Arwen's love story was a side show from the appendix..."
I wasn't so bothered by that. For one thing, it expands on a concept that Tolkien was developing- The Age Of Elves was waning, the Age Of Men waxing. Without Arwen, Aragorn was just another Man, or Dwarf, fighting old battles yet again for Family Honor, without any insight to character. Which brings us back to Bombadil. The focus of Tom Bombadil's life was his Wife, Goldberry. Nothing else much mattered. Tom and Goldberry were dropped from the movies, and without Arwen, the only recognizable developed Female Characters are Galadriel, Eowyn... and Shelob.

BTW, Jackson's "The Hobbit" was a reeking pile, although Freeman did his very best. But at least it's better than that truly steaming pile from Rankin-Bass. There are very few films that I despise; the Rankin-Bass "The Hobbit" is right down there.
I may be slightly obsessed here, but then again, I was one of the kids chalking "Frodo Lives!" on various dilapidated doorways in Manhattan's old Radio Row, back in the early Sixties. Gone now, for reasons lost to time and Property Developers.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it wrong to want better?

TFA was pretty mediocre, and the only thing that carried it (besides action scenes) was the actual decent acting for once.

Re:I only use IMDB for the user reviews

[toddestan]

That's basically all it was. After the whole prequels mess and how they have not aged well, they just played it safe with something that was not original but felt very Star Wars. It wasn't the best Star Wars movie, but it was far from the worst, and I was entertained. A score of 8.1/10 might be a bit high, but I would consider it a pretty solid 7/10.

IMDb

[skinfaxi]

"Panicked calls were placed to IMDb, but there was nothing the site could do." I think that it would be more accurate to say there was "nothing the site WOULD do." There are all kinds of things they COULD do, it's their site.

Re:IMDb

[harlequinn]

Exactly. I've had arguments with company reps before where they've said "there's nothing we can do" and I've had to correct them with "no, there's lots you can do, it's just you're not willing to do it".

Literally Hitler

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

No, this is not against trolls, but something far worse. Erdogan is literally the closest thing in the industrialized world to Hitler we have. Don't believe me?

1. It's looking more and more like he staged a fake coup (remind you of the Reichstag burning?) to preemptively crush dissent.
2. He's adopted a view of immigration and migration that is close to the Nazi policy of lebensraum.
3. He has used a popular referendum to greatly empower himself and gut the authority of competing institutions.
4. He has taken a Turkish equivalent of the Nazi view about fellow Germans living in other countries. His government went nuts when European states clamped down on Turkish political organization in their borders.
5. FFS, he even channels Hitler with the moustache.

Odds are very good that if there is a mass civil war in Europe over race and religion, it will be directly the result of Erdogan's work combined with the idiocy of Merkel and a few others who let him get away with it. Anyone who considered Erdogan, who wants to resurrect Ottoman Turkey, would have wanted to keep those migrants out at bayonet point if necessary.

Re:Literally Hitler

[Anonymous Coward]

Merkel reminds me of Carter. A person with very noble intentions, trying to show some compassion. However, the European doctrine of ignoring the atrocities in the region, then opening the floodgates to all the combat-age males did a number to weaken Europe as a whole, since the native population now has to deal with infighting.

However, even though the Merkel Doctrine reeks heavily of Chamberlain's "peace at any cost... here is Czechoslovakia " tactics, they are still what the EU does, and it is tearing them apart.

Re:Literally Hitler

[halivar]

He's going to have a real problem on his hands when all the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq is finished with ISIS and has idle time on their hands. Erdogan will stop at nothing to prevent a unified Kurdistan, and it's likely to tear NATO apart.

Re:Literally Hitler

[geek]

There's more to this too. People should really read up on Turkey and it's history. I often point people here first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Erdogan is a monster in the making and people are just standing by as it happens. History repeating itself.

Re:Literally Hitler

[Mike Van Pelt]

Erdogan, alas, ended Kemal Ataturk's enforced secular state in Turkey. The way I've heard Kemalist Turkey described, the military's duty was to enforce a secular state. If an Islamist government was elected, as soon as they started to govern as Islamists, the military would overthrow the government, shoot as many Islamists as seemed appropriate to them ... then, remarkably for this sort of military coup, as soon as things had cooled down enough, hold new elections. "Try to choose more wisely this time. If not... we'll do it again." And they would.

Erdogan was canny enough to get enough of his own people in power in the military, and purge enough of the Kemalists, and the remaining Kemalists didn't catch on soon enough, so ... interesting times.

Not to say that Kemal Ataturk's system didn't have a whole lot of glaring problems, of course.

Re:Literally Hitler

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that you need to review the difference between the words "literally" and "figuratively".

Re:Literally Hitler

[david_thornley]

The nice thing about his similarity to Hitler is that he doesn't run a country that's very powerful both with industry and military strength. I'm more worried about Russia, which also reminds me of Nazi Germany, with the Crimean Anschluss and the Sudetenland-equivalent in east Ukraine.

Re:Literally Hitler

[Anonymous Coward]

To put a positive spin on this, Erdogan is creating a civilian controlled Turkey. It took decades to transition to a modern democratic society after the wars due to Cold War tensions and "war restitution" here in the neural zone of Scandinavia. Lets see how long it will take for the Turkish to do the same. Although I do wonder about the Islamist - secularist political axle. There is a lack of political nuance or will in the country if those issues are all there is.

Re:Literally Hitler

[bluegutang]

Erdogan is more like Mussolini than Hitler. He's a dictator, sure, but he doesn't have Hitler's rabid hatred of any minority. Not even the Kurds. There are actually a ton of devout Muslim Kurds who vote for Erdogan's party. Not to excuse the brutality Erdogan is using against rebellious Kurdish areas in southeast Turkey, but he obviously doesn't intend to exterminate all Kurds, like a Hitler would.

Re:Literally Hitler

[bluegutang]

Another point of similarity to Mussolini, not Hitler, is military weakness. Mussolini had trouble conquering Ethiopia of all places. Hitler came very close to conquering all of Europe. In today's Turkey, Erdogan has so weakened the military by purging political opponents that it's been having major trouble conquering territory from irregulars in the failed state of Syria.

Re:Literally Hitler

[fedos]

he doesn't have Hitler's rabid hatred of any minority

Except, you know, the Kurds

Re:Literally Hitler

[bluegutang]

You should read the second half of my comment...

Re:Literally Hitler

[Rakarra]

A person with very noble intentions, trying to show some compassion.

Unless you're Greek!

Re: Literally Hitler

[Brockmire]

That's some fucked up idea of "civilian controlled".

This movie is a PR and failed miserably at it

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a PR movie and they failed at it. In olden days, money used to win, now the trolls win. In 1940s, there was a man made famine in Bengal in British India and the man at the center was Winston Churchill. The famine killed 5 million people. Has anyone heard about it? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
India was too poor to fight against heroic image of Churchill and only recently people have started noticing it.

In 1971, Pakistan army massacred 3 million of its own people in East Pakistan. USA continued supplying arms well after the massacre started. Once again, no one knows because India and Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) lost PR battle against Nixon and US. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide

Compared to the above two, Armenian massacre is small.

Oh and don't we on slashdot ignore AC and "-1" modded comments, like this one?

Re:This movie is a PR and failed miserably at it

[Anonymous Coward]

nice source, did you write it yourself?
"a systematic collection of statistical data was aborted, possibly because the data did not substantiate the claim that three million had died and at least 200,000 women had been raped."[

Re:This movie is a PR and failed miserably at it

[Lab Rat Jason]

Pointing to other's wrongdoings does not justify one's own.

Re:This movie is a PR and failed miserably at it

[ZorroXXX]

Compared to the above two, Armenian massacre is small.

You are making up a false dilemma here. If is not either the two examples you gave or the Armenian massacre, is is both.

All wrongdoings by any country should be openly discussed, be it Japanese war crimes during WW2, human rights violations by the CIA, the Bosnian genocide, etc. Trying to downplay any such event as "not important" or "not as bad as something else" is being dishonest and respectless.

Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, people who did bad things in the past continue to deny having done bad things.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[PatientZero]

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people involved in WW1 aren't around anymore.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[Anonymous Coward]

True, that's why historians advise for pure retribution you need to butcher-out a few-100-thousand ISIS-supporting Turks. Shoot them anytime & anywhere ... it's a numbers thing vs Armenians ... Kapish? And such historians advise hot AK-47 toting Kurdish babes will love you for that.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[ShanghaiBill]

In other news, people who did bad things in the past continue to deny having done bad things.

The Turks don't deny that bad things happened, nor do they deny that they were the ones that did it.

What they do deny is that it amounted to genocide. In 1915 the British Empire landed 250,000 troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula, and the Russians launched a major offensive in the Caucasus. The Turks were fighting for their survival as a nation. The Gallipoli landing failed, mostly due to astoundingly incompetent leadership on the allied side, but also due to the brilliant and decisive leadership of Mustafa Kemal on the Turkish side. But the Russian offensive was successful, partly due to support from Armenians who viewed the Russians as liberators. In "liberated" areas, thousands of Armenians volunteered to fight with the Russians.

In the face of this offensive, and clear evidence that the Armenians were a "fifth column", there were Turkish reprisals and massacres, but mostly the Turks tried to deal with the Armenians by deporting them to Northern Syria (which was then part of their empire). This was all done during the deprivations of a world war, and many, many Armenians died enroute to Syria and in the camps once they got there.

Did bad things happen to the Armenians?
Yes.
Did really REALLY bad things happen to the Armenians?
Yes.
Did millions of Armenians die as a result of Turkish actions?
Yes.
Did this amount to a centrally planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the Armenian people?
I don't think so.

Since Armenia is a landlocked country mostly surrounded by neighbors that hate them even more than the Turks do, and Turkey is their main route to the sea and one of their biggest trading partners, is it really in the best interest of the Armenian people to focus on "re-labelling" atrocities that happened over a century ago, rather than facing up to the many many problems that face Armenia today?
You decide.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[Anonymous Coward]

> but mostly the Turks tried to deal with the Armenians by deporting them to Northern Syria (which was then part of their empire)

Intentionally deporting them to an area that that lacked the facilities or infrastructure to support them is no different than outright killing them.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[david_thornley]

The Gallipoli landing failed, mostly due to astoundingly incompetent leadership on the allied side, but also due to the brilliant and decisive leadership of Mustafa Kemal on the Turkish side.

The Allied leadership at the site was reasonably good, much like the Turkish leadership. The amazing performance of Mustafa Kemal is mostly politically motifated retconning.

The Allied failure was at the highest levels. The original idea was to force the channel with warships, and that failed catastrophically* (partly because they didn't have adequate minesweepers). The original plan was to try this, and if it didn't work, give up and try something else somewhere else. Instead, the new plan was to invade from the sea. Since the Allies couldn't spare enough troops from fighting the Germans on the main front (much as the RN didn't think it could spare sufficient fast minesweepers), the operation was always conducted with too few resources to accomplish anything but so many that the losses were impressive. The experience of the Australians contributed to the separation of Australia from British, the Australians feeling like they'd been thrown into a bloody and futile battle that the British didn't want to fight.

*The old battleships lost were of little value, but they took a lot of their crews down with them.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[Nikkos]

"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.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[shutdown -p now]

Genocide doesn't require a "centrally planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the people". You admit that millions of Armenians did die - were killed, that is - as a result of Turkish action. That alone makes it a genocide regardless of anything else.

The fact that Hitler fondly cited it as a role model for what he did (and why others "wouldn't care"), is icing on the cake.

Re:Nothing to do with bots and vote brigading

[painandgreed]

The Turks don't deny that bad things happened, nor do they deny that they were the ones that did it.

What they do deny is that it amounted to genocide.

The real trouble with that is that the term "genocide" was specifically created to describe what the Turks did.

Ugh, not "trolling"

[gizmo2199]

People with legitimate grievances aren't "trolls", just people you disagree with.

That's not trolling.

Trolling is the art of annoying people on the internet through the use of contrarianism, and/or dickishness, purely for the lulz! Jeez!

Re:Ugh, not "trolling"

[Nidi62]

People with legitimate grievances aren't "trolls", just people you disagree with.

Disagreeing with a movie portraying the killing of over 1 million Armenians by the Turks during WWI is a legitimate grievance?

Re:Ugh, not "trolling"

[Anonymous Coward]

People with legitimate grievances aren't "trolls", just people you disagree with.

Disagreeing with a movie portraying the killing of over 1 million Armenians by the Turks during WWI is a legitimate grievance?

They don't disagree with the movie, since they haven't seen it. They disagree with the idea of any such movie being made at all.

Making excuses for this is just pathetic.

Weak Response...

[sizzlinkitty]

IMDB can be doing more to fix this issue but since they are taking the easy out here, fighting fire with fire is the only suitable response.

I believe the best response would be for IMDB to limit what users can rate and how early in the release of the movie it can be rated. When someone attempts to put a rating on a movie that hasn't officially been released and their account is new or with very few reviews (which I assume is the case with most of the fake reviews), you hold their reviews back for moderation and flag as internet troll.

Re:Weak Response...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen films before they've been released, several times in fact. I'm not a critic. I got free passes to a critics' screening due to my involvement in a public group that was likely to create positive buzz about the film I was invited to. This isn't an uncommon practice in the film industry. After my initial critics' screening I was surveyed and gave the film mostly positive marks and for a few years after that I was typically shoulder-tapped as an individual for other pre-screenings based on past screenings and interest in a film's subject matter.

So if IMDb did what you've suggested that would be a negative to the current workings of the industry. While I agree that pre-release voting on a large scale is a red flag it certainly isn't out of order to have a few hundred to maybe a couple thousand people who are involved in these screenings to also be a rater on IMDb. It doesn't imply that there's something amiss at all.

On a lighter note, I've also rated every Benji film with a 1 on IMDb one day... a bit of trolling I guess but I hate that dog.

Re:Weak Response...

[Anonymous Coward]

A better response would be to have minimum wordcounts for 1, 2, 4, and 5 star reviews, along with a Robot9000-style checker to detect plagiarist/botted comments.

Now I have to see the movie

[Anonymous Coward]

I will now have to see this movie. I also had to watch "The Interview" just because Kim Jung Un did not want me too. Hopefully this is better than "The Interview".

Re:Now I have to see the movie

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Interview"

A bigger bomb than anything the Norks have managed to launch.

And what do you expect after recent events?

[Anonymous Coward]

Events which recently crowned Turkish president Erdogan to be the Pasha Sultan, with soon-to-have powers to cast death-bolts.

Streisand effect, please.

[Lorens]

This ought to backfire.

Will probably see this in theater

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to show the support

welcome to democracy

[holophrastic]

welcome to democracy. The majority can choose to agree on anything -- it doesn't need to be true. In this case, the majority decided the movie was bad, and the majority decided that they didn't need to see it to judge it.

welcome to democracy. if everyone's vote counts the same, and everyone isn't intelligent, then the vote is equally not intelligent.

still democracy -- actually, even moreso, since the vote is specifically for what people want, independent of truth.

so, until you say that democracy should weigh votes based on value -- in this case, geolocation, or having seen the move, and in presidential elections by some degree of education, investment, or at least understanding of candidate platforms -- then you get crap opinions from crap people.

Stop listening.

Why would you base your actions on the opinions of random strangers?

Perhaps a more concise example: move oscars. They've never voted a shitty movie for the best picture award. Some crappy action movie, like starship troopers, or some crappy animated movie, like bubble guppies clearly aren't impressive, innovative, or special in any way. Except that they usually deliver precisely what they promissed to deliver. So if you watch it, based on the trailer, and you expect what you saw in the trailer, and it delivers what you expected, then isn't it the perfect movie for you at that time? Just 'cause Shmikel and Jeeburt don't think it's worth seeing, doesn't mean it isn't the perfect movie for your evening.

In this case, maybe the majority vote this movie as crap because they feel it's crap based on the subject matter alone. Isn't that valid? You might think a movie is crap because the title is mis-spelled, or because you hate a particular actor, or because they abused the canine actors off-camera.

The point is, it's a valid opinion to state, whatever the source of the opinion, and it's a stupid opinion to read, unless you know and agree with the context of that opinion.

Re:welcome to democracy

[david_thornley]

Politically motivated movie ratings are not the same thing as politically motivated politics. Votes from people who've never seen a movie are different from people voting on who will represent them in government for the next 2-6 years.

Re:welcome to democracy

[holophrastic]

For a second-term president, maybe. But for a first-term president, that's just another movie that you haven't yet seen.

Simple Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Delete the existing page, destroying the troll-work, re-create it, and block all votes from Turkish IP addresses, and deny votes from all users with referrals from Turkish troll websites.

Hollywood Becoming Less Effective Manipulators

[NicknameUnavailable]

TL;DR: Who cares?

IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings are garbage

[mea2214]

As a movie buff I like the IMDB site but their ratings make no sense. For example, the recent remake by Disney of "A New Hope" using a female lead was thoroughly trashed with one star ratings on IMDB. Reading them was as entertaining as reading Monster Cable reviews. IMDB gave it an 8+ rating overall. There is no possible way that wasn't fabricated. In order to rate a movie you have to write a review. I doubt any of these trolls can put together a single grammatically correct sentence let alone form a coherence thought. Their written reviews would make it obvious they probably didn't even see the movie. Rotten Tomatoes is just as bad making up numbers to promote certain movies Hollywood needs support -- like that billion dollar reboot of the Star Wars franchise.

separate votes by region, demographics?

[kiviQr]

Couldn't IMDB separate votes to certain criteria? Sure it will get one star in Turkey, but usually people care more about scores given by people in the same region and age - or as some prefer cohort.

I don't know how...

[Zurkeyon3733]

As they are paying the salary of MOST of them... Liberal Trolls and Hollywood are IN BED TOGETHER! SNL is the BIGGEST Hollywood TROLL that exists. LOL

I'm thinking this IMDb page needs to be....

[pele]

Slashdotted!

and its rating, subsequently, improved, just to show the turks there is another side to every coin.
I remember slashdot bringing whole sites down within minutes of links being posted. So here goes...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt47...

Re:I'm thinking this IMDb page needs to be....

[pele]

Well, it's already up to 5*

Re:I'm thinking this IMDb page needs to be....

[pele]

I'm guessing 51356 10* votes managed to more or less cancel-out the 60670 1* so it's pretty-much a level-playing field now. Which is good.

Re:Disgusting use of censorship to protect bad mov

[Lab Rat Jason]

I honestly don't know much about Turkey, but as for the Germans: They've owned up to what happened and they've passed laws to make the truth easier to get at. They've searched the world over to locate war criminals from that time and ensure they are prosecuted. They've repatriated stolen art, personal belongings, and family fortunes to those it was stolen from. In short, a generation of Germans who weren't even alive when this atrocity happened, have stepped up to make amends and heal the world. So even if Turkey was innocent of the accusations, they would be no better than the Germans. And by the way, Hollywood has flogged Germany over and over again for what happened... so in all respects you are mistaken.

Hollywood Is Losing the Battle Against Online Trol

[kelemvor4]

Re: Hollywood Is Losing the Battle Against Online Trolls

Well, at least trolls are doing some good for the ol' neighborhood.

It's BS that they can do nothing about it.

[Archeopteryx]

They own the database, they have the DBAs, they can fix this.

Re:It's BS that they can do nothing about it.

[Archeopteryx]

Though I see now that about 100,000 more votes made this a 5.0... That STILL needs to be fixed.

It's simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

People are tired of hollywood's socjus campaign.

Distraction from:The Promise reviewing poorly.

[netsavior]

This seems to be an article about brigading; but it is not. This article is an attempt to get ticket-buyers to distrust movie reviewers by inflating the perceived effectiveness of stupid IMDB reviews.

Look, Turkey is fucked up and the Armenian Genocide is a real thing that is important. This movie is mediocre at best, according to a bunch of movie reviewers who are probably (almost certainly) not on the Turkish government's side.

It can be both: Botters could have deflated the IMDB rating and the movie could still be bad.

IMDB ratings are garbage, professional movie critics aren't that great either, but they are also not under the sway of the Turkish Propaganda machine, and they think it is a boring cookie-cutter movie.

So I would say it seems more likely Hollywood is gaming the battle against critics, by exposing online trolls, and using the narrative in its own favor.

Rotten Tomatoes

[Anonymous Coward]

So far as I'm concerned, Rotten Tomatoes has for years done a far better job ...

Although Rotten Tomatoes probably has the best movie rating system on the web, it can still be highly inaccurate. For example, the 2014 film Lucy received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, despite being one of the most poorly-conceived and totally inane films I have ever seen. See the review by Christopher Orr

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/life-is-futile-so-heres-what-to-do-with-it-according-to-lucy-a-spoilereview/375006/

for a detailed accounting of the elements that make this film so horrible. (Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was like Shakespeare in comparison.) It boggles my mind that Lucy could be so highly rated on Rotten Tomatoes.

Re:Rotten Tomatoes

[RoccamOccam]

Interestingly, currently the Rotten Tomatoes Critic score for The Promise is only 38%, while the User "Want To See" score is 83%.

Re:Rotten Tomatoes

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe you're not qualified to review films.

Re:Rotten Tomatoes

[Anubis IV]

For example, the 2014 film Lucy received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes

I wouldn't consider its 67% critic score and 47% audience score "overwhelmingly positive". Quite the opposite, in fact, since those scores tell me is that the film was divisive among critics and was not altogether that well received among general audiences. And both of those make sense, given that Luc Besson's films tend to have decent technical chops (e.g. tight action, decent cinematography) but have for some time been sorely lacking in areas that are really important, especially to general audiences (e.g. pacing, story, characters you actually enjoy).

To me, it's felt like he's been going downhill ever since Leon (1994), though others may suggest The Fifth Element (1997) was his peak. Either way, he's been in decline for quite some time, and I agree with you that Lucy (2014) didn't do him any favors.

No mystery

[Anonymous Coward]

Turks and muslims are downvoting the movies cuz it doesnt star their truck of peace in it

Re:Disgusting use of censorship to protect bad mov

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look, a lying muslim feeding us non-believing kafirs more taqiya lies!

If you are such wonderful people, then why did Erdogan, himself, use SENDING MORE MUSLIMS TO EUROPE... as a THREAT when Denmark didn't let them hold political rallies? Denmark belongs to THE DUTCH, not a bunch of violent lying foreigners.

Turks are gays

[Anonymous Coward]

Turks are gays. Yeah, very gays. Uhoh.

Vote breakdown

[Headw1nd]

So there is a breakdown of the vote, and it's quite amusing. Looks like they could just skim off the 1's and 10's and get a decent picture of the actual score.

Humorous

[SuperKendall]

You want votes from real people who've actually seen the movie.

Say you sat down every one of them and made them watch the movie. Would that change votes in any way? No.

Online voting will always reflect that hatred is more intense and brings more action than love.

Only Solution: Take online voting results with a boulder of salt. Or do not allow voting at all.

Re:Humorous

[Anonymous Coward]

Say you sat down every one of them and made them watch the movie. Would that change votes in any way? No.

No but if you made them pay to watch the movie before voting then A. they might learn something about something that happened and B. the producers might not care as long as they get paid.

lets say 100000 random IP addresses vote

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you determine which ones are fraud IPs? Keyword: Random IPs

Ahh there you go, finally your brain is catching up

unrestricted public engagement is pointless

[ilsaloving]

Here is yet another example of why engaging the public on things, simply isn't worth the effort.

With the exception of places like Slashdot, where moderation is *also* handled by people at large, I can't think of a single example where public engagement has been a good thing.

The average person simply cannot be trusted with the dual power of anonymity and a public audience. This has been demonstrated time and again on countless comment boards, blogs, etc. It's to the point where this sort of thing isn't even news anymore unless it happens on a massive scale like what happened with IMDB.

And heaven forbid you try to moderate, cause then it turns into a giant game of whackamole where the moderators eventually throw their hands up in the air from the sheer volume. The only way that I've personally seen so far to combat this, is to also hand comment moderation to the public as well, because there are typically more decent folk than there are assholes.

It's not perfect, as it's still prone to things like groupthink or tyranny of the majority. But slashdot, for example, has outlived most other public forums so to me that says public moderation is generally beneficial.

Re:unrestricted public engagement is pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

With the exception of places like Slashdot, where moderation is *also* handled by people at large, I can't think of a single example where public engagement has been a good thing.

I, too, am nostalgic for the days of national leadership derived from lineage. Make feudalism great again.

Ratings based on people with similar tastes

[Solandri]

Kinda like what Netflix does internally. Looks at your viewing history and ratings, finds other people who've rated movies similar to you, and suggests movies that they liked but you haven't seen.

The downside (for the movie maker) is that this means a movie doesn't have a single "rating". The benefit (for the movie viewer) is that you'll see ratings more relevant to your interests. If you're an honest reviewer who gives a wide range of ratings across an eclectic range of films, then you'll see ratings based on other honest eclectic reviewers. If you're a fanboi who only gives a 10-rating for movies or series you like, the ratings will be based on the aggregate votes of other fanbois. If you're a troll who only gives one-star ratings, the ratings you see will be based on the aggregate votes of other trolls who only give one-star ratings.

The downside (for the movie viewer) is that this requires you to register an account with the review site, and they can build a profile on you. Potential privacy issues.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

The only solution is to not make movies about the Armenian genocide .

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Scientology.
Or feminism.

Re:No

[BlueStrat]

The only solution is to not make movies about the Armenian genocide .

Or Scientology.
Or feminism.

Those are OK, relatively-speaking, compared to making a video recording of abortion providers discussing selling baby parts for profit! That will actually get your house raided, any videos there confiscated, and yourself arrested and charged. Darned pesky 1st Amendment, but at least that particular use of free press and free speech rights to expose criminal actions was crushed! Another victory for Progressives.

Strat

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are OK, relatively-speaking, compared to selectively editing a video recording of abortion providers discussing selling fetal tissue at cost, with the patient's consent!

FTFY

It's okay, though. They got what's coming to them.

Re:No

[david_thornley]

Editing videos fraudulently to make accusations of illegal actions is against the law. Making movies favorable to the Armenians, KKK, or left-handed homosexual furries is legal.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

And there it is Blue Strat, RWNJ cunt spewing his nut job alr right driblle over the thread.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck is driblle? I can't find it in the dictionary you leftie scum sucking piece of dogshit.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are OK, relatively-speaking, compared to making a video recording of abortion providers discussing selling baby parts for profit! That will actually get your house raided, any videos there confiscated, and yourself arrested and charged. Darned pesky 1st Amendment, but at least that particular use of free press and free speech rights to expose criminal actions was crushed! Another victory for Progressives.

A victory for Progressives? Pretty much. Not only did those individuals break the law by surreptitiously recording individuals in states where such action is unlawful, they lied about the content, creating a libel, then all of the investigations cleared the accused of any offenses, effectively showing that the only thing to expect from the conservative anti-abortion movement is deceit, hypocrisy, and violence.

Sad, isn't it? Such an empty, soulless movement, destroyed by its own malignant depravity.

There is an easy counter to this campaign

[Applehu Akbar]

All they have to do is boldly advertise, TURKEY DOES NOT WANT YOU TO SEE THIS FILM and given the current fear of the Middle East in general and the aftermath of Erdogan being voted president-for-life, The Promise will pack 'em in.

Actually this isn't that hard.

[Chas]

Most of these 1 star reviews are coming from brand new accounts and this is THE only review by said account.

I REALLY don't think a nuke of reviews for this entry based on these two criteria (and the suspension/banning of the accounts created to do so) is a HUGE step.

If they want to expand it to the entirety of the IP space of Turkey? Go ahead.

Nothing of any value will be lost.

Gotta love Turkey

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking genocide-ignoring losers.

Ran out of points.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad I ran out of mod points before I could mod your post, and this whole thread offtopic.

Shut up turkish shill filth

[Anonymous Coward]

You filth just knowingly, freely and wilfully chose tyranny over democracy. That makes you worthless barbarian scum. Do a favor to humanity and exterminate yourselves. You're already on the right path for that.

New IMDb Feature!!!

[pipingguy]

Hey, maybe IMDb could have, like, a user comments section where people could log in to comment about specific films and there they could discuss this type of astroturfing / coordinated downvoting!

Premeditated Bull Pucky

[JimSadler]

If you and your kind are being exterminated it will not matter a fig whether that extermination was premeditated or not. If you are being butchered your thoughts tend to be about finding a way to stay alive. The Turkish government is trying to divert blame and responsibility. Shame on them.

Ghost in the Shell

[Anonymous Coward]

Also...Ghost in the Shell was a highly enjoyable film.

Were you part of "we?"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people involved in WW1 aren't around anymore.

The original people aren't, but what we're seeing in this story, is that lots of people want to adopt whatever things happened. Living people want the credit/blame for whatever the dead people did (and they're saying it's credit).

Whether this makes sense or not is irrelevant; they're claiming it (but I do admit I respect them less for it; see below). Especially at a national level, there are assloads of precedent for people speaking about past events that way. An American born only 20 years ago will often say bizarre things like "we broke our treaties with the tribes," or "we drafted people to fight in Vietnam" or "we nuked Japan" or "we saved your limey asses in WW2" etc even if he wasn't alive when the purported events happened. And this isn't just an American thing, not even a little bit. (If anything, Americans do it less than people in lots of other places.)

Some people include themselves in past "we"s, even if they weren't really there.

And some people (me! me!) don't. The bad news is that it means I didn't put a man on the moon or vote to recognize women's right to vote, but fortunately it also means I didn't segregate blacks, put American citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps, vote to hand over the alcohol (and other markets) to organized crime, etc. On balance, I'm happy to not be part of past-"we"s. My own disgraceful fuckups and sometimes-shining accomplishments are plenty of moral complexity enough!! Who the fuck isn't already weighed down with plenty of real identity that they actually earned (for good or bad, usually both), that they need to plunder the graves of their ancestors for more?! Whatever. Some people insist. Let them play their stupid games.

$100 million LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw the movie and the $100 million does not appear on the screen. Christian Bale is unconvincing as a Turkish general. 1 star.

This isn't new... its just being called new(s)

[Anonymous Coward]

This is information being used for disinformation. This is a volley across the freedom that should be the Internet's bow. This is information-warfare/cyber-warfare under the guise of movie ratings.

Sadly as most have mentioned.. without some form of moderation or non-repudiation of sources... the Trolls own the bridge, the valley and the city.

Peace out.

On another note... in my youth I didn't give jack SHIZ about the movie ratings on TV, the newspaper or radio as most of those "critics" were elitists that are alive and well today for the Oscars, the Grammys et/al. Reviews rated "The Burbs" as a must see back then (my girlfriend and I walked out in the first 20 minutes). A few more movies were rated well but I either walked out or just survived it as I couldn't get my money back. End result? Even today it only takes a preview to determine if I'm going to pay full price in the theater (Guardians of the Galaxy, Deadpool, Logan, The Great wall and many more) or wait for the Bluray (John Wick, The Revenant, 13 Hours the secret Soldiers, Captain America Civil War) or eventually the endless hunt in the bargain bin so I can link it to my VUDU account.

metamoderation

[js290]

Didn't slashcode solve this problem years ago with metamoderation?

Armenians? No big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is wonderful! So millions of Armenians were either machine-gunned to death or marched to death all the way into the Syrian desert AND it's not a big deal. Because it can't be a big deal, because if it was a big deal it would take away from the biggest deal of them all, the jewish holocaust. It's already bad enough they have to share with the gypsies (who get decidedly less). So that's the big deal why IMDB isn't taking action. Oh and it's a big deal in Turkey too, they don't like to be reminded and certainly they don't want to pay for it, that's behind the ratings bombing, to make all of this no big deal.

It couldn't be!

[shaksys]

It couldn't be that the only people who like the movie are pretentious Hollywood rich people who have to like certain things to remain cool and hip and *in* with their own crowd... Could it?

Bad reviews also for anti-right-wing artists in US

[Magnus Pym]

This sort of thing has been in full force in the US for nearly the past 8 years; organized downvote brigades have attacked entertainers that have voiced criticisms against right-wing opinions or politicians. For example, Quentin Tarantino is under massive attack for comments on the police iduring the BLM movements. His latest movie was downvoted massively (Hateful Eight) even before it came out. Even his older movies have been under attack. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series is under similar attack for her comments against Trump and Brexit, and her positions on Twitter. Her latest movie (Fantastic Beasts) have attracted a string of -ve reviewers. Amy Schumer attracts an unbelievable level of vitriol due to her anti-Trump comments. The list goes on.

The strategy is discussed and coordinated on right-wing Talk Radio and alt-right websites.

Let's see these jokers cover it. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

https://m.youtube.com/user/TheYoungTurks
Since they always are busy denying that the genocide ever happened. :D :D

System of a Down is a shitty band

[Anonymous Coward]

Deal with it.

Re:Disgusting use of censorship to protect bad mov

[bluegutang]

Re Germany: All that was done, and from what I have heard, is appreciated by contemporary Jews.

Incidentally, Austria did none of that, despite being equally a part of Nazi Germany...

localized grading

[hagnat]

perhaps the solution on imdb's side is to localize the grades of movies. What one country sees as shit can be a mastercraft in another.
GitS for example, is being dowgraded to heck in the west by SJW claiming 'whitewash', but praised in the Asian market.

Re:Disgusting use of censorship to protect bad mov

[jedZ]

Oh look, a lying muslim feeding us non-believing kafirs more taqiya lies!

If you are such wonderful people, then why did Erdogan, himself, use SENDING MORE MUSLIMS TO EUROPE... as a THREAT when Denmark didn't let them hold political rallies? Denmark belongs to THE DUTCH, not a bunch of violent lying foreigners.

I think the Danes might disagree with you on that!

re: Hollywood trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

the answer is obvious - BOMB THEM DRONE THEM KILL THEM it's what america does

There's more to IMDB rating than linear ponderatio

[termineite]

IMDB vote rate wages a lot of factors including the top 1000 voters, etc. That rating will soon go up or down to reflect the actual quality of the movie. Good or bad.

Could keys make a difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if in order to do reviews, you received a code near the end of the movie, that when combined with some identifier on the ticket you purchased would then identify you as an actual 'paid' viewer?

Nothing they can do?

[fedos]

They can delete the obviously fake ratings.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

How many peolle actually consider reviews holistically these days? I mean, come on, I've eaten at places that blew my socks off with poor ratings because of things just like this. Hell, half the time critics go on to say when terrible movie, I loved, is.

You Pay Attention To Online Ratings?

[Toad-san]

Of anything? More fool you.

By the way, just checked at imdb, and The Promise is up to 5.2.

Turkey's Position

[Anonymous Coward]

ON the incident has always been remarkably consistent, "We drove them into the desert without food, water, medicine or shelter but we didn't mean to kill them."

Put them under bridges!

[iq145]

That's where trolls belong!

IMDb ratings Hollywood

[drdic cruzzz'n]

Banned in Boston got books to sell like hot cakes...lemonade out of lemons..........label it as a Hater attack!