"Are you implying that what comes out of Hollywood is somehow not propaganda?"
To answer a question with a question:
Do you want to replace the propaganda you see with more, albeit different, propaganda?
I'm unfamiliar with the shows you mentioned, so I can't respond to them directly. However, I will say that it seems your problem isn't so much with movies, as with movies, television, and the entertainment media in general. (this may just be answering my own misinterpretation of your original post)
(And to be fair, I suppose I ought to answer your question as well. Some of what comes out of Hollywood is propaganda -- works whose raisons d'être are not the telling of stories and the illustrations of characters, but the selling of ideas. Most of what comes out of Hollywood, though, is not propaganda)
"Disagree on both counts. There are taboos that have been proscribed across the overwhelming majority of societies over time. Maybe there is some room for subjectivity, but I disagree with the idea that there is significant variance over time. Nor am I trotting out some closit prudishness here. For example, I though Pulp Fiction had an excess of potty mouth. However, the title is Pulp Fiction. Truth in labelling never had a more concise example. And the random vignette approach to the movie marks it a classic. Request you re-consider my original post."
I think your use of the term "potty mouth" implies some closet prudishness. Try: cursing, swearing, or cussing.
As to societal change: bad taste, for some parts of the American South fifty years ago, would have been showing black children and white children going to the same school. Likewise for a mixed race couple in any venue. Sixty years ago, and still in some parts of the world, it was/is bad taste to show women wearing pants.
Or we can delve further back. In early northern Europe, wergild was a legal form of dealing with murder. Blood revenge was also legal. If you want to go biblical, there were some close cousins that got married... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
As for Pulp Fiction: there was no randomness involved, and they were not vignettes. There were, if I recall the number correctly, four intertwining stories, told independently, whose parts served to shade one another.... and from your description of Pulp Fiction, I'm guessing you're not a fan of the Big Lebowski.
"The real things needing challenging are the decay elements in society."
You're not after good taste, you're after propaganda. A media fed force against the decline of Western Civilization as you see it.
About this we can reach no consensus, for our worlds fly apart at different seams
You see a world where people should stay married, and I see one where divorced fathers are naturally discriminated against in matters of child custody.
If we're talking about good taste here, I can think of plenty of classics that have been labeled as being in bad taste at one point or another.
As another poster said, taste is in the mind of the beholder. There is such a thing as a broader, societal taste. This, however, tends to change greatly both between societies and time periods. smitty one each does not want movies of "good" taste, he wants movies of "his" taste.
Anyway, as to sex and/or gender confusion, it's a device in more of Shakespeare's plays than I wish to verify. And as for incest, hath he heard not of the good Prince Hamlet?
"It's not because of a lack of imagination, or a lack of open-mindedness... it's because that means that it would take 400 million years for one side of the body to know what was happening on the other side and then send a signal back, and that's if you assume the speed of light."
No, to a certain extent, it is because of a lack of imagination. We're talking about planets and stars, galaxies and gas clouds being part of a living structure. None of those objects are components of any kind of living structures we know of. If you're willing to take the leap that celestial bodies may be part of a life form, why, then should you be unwilling to take similar leaps to explain how such a life form would work?
For example: the signals could be sent via an alternate Universe, one in which the limits imposed by special relativity do not apply. Black holes at the nuclei of galaxies could act as nodes, through which currently unobserved information is sent.
A bit kooky, perhaps. Out there, yes. But not really any more out there than the idea of a multigalactic life form.
"The number of neuronal/synaptic combinations and permutations in your brain, the thing thinking of these words, exceeds the total number of subatomic particles in the entire universe by three orders of magnitude! Now that's a large structure, and makes 200 million light-year wide amoebae puny by comparison."
As with all things, a Star Trek reference can apply here:
What's really interesting is that I would know about none of this if the scanner hadn't gone off and led to that anecdote.
Not saying that that was why the scanner went off, or that steps must be taken to protect us from the fruits, but that high profile reactions to items perceived to be inoccuous can spread around information you'd rather stayed put.
I think one of the big questions here is: can we create an alternative to the propaganda?
And another big question: Is the propaganda attractive because it's more easily obtained, or because people like it better?
Wikipedia functions, and there are any number of reasons why it shouldn't. I think it's possible that an alternative can be created here... even with the much larger probability of astroturfing. Whether or not people will actually choose it, though...
The ganking situation in that game would be horrendous. There you are, swimming around, catching smaller fish and looking for a good place to spawn, when BAM lunch descends from above. You try to swim around it, because you know what it is, but your fish is too stupid to listen, and bites down on the free food hook and all. Now you have to respawn all the way upriver and swim for hours just to get back to where you were.
"I find this issue complicated by the right to self rule. The Chinese government might restrict freedom of the press and run a dictatorship but every nation has the right to self rule and if you want to go into China you must play by the Chinese rules."
So you set a state's rights as supreme. Any inherent rights of the individual are automatically subordinate to the state's right of self rule. I am not arguing that a company should enter a country with the purpose of not obeying its laws. But companies do have choices in where they do business, especially when it is a matter of expanding into another country.
As all companies enter into agreements with their employees, so is there an agreement between governments and citizens. A contract that negotiates the rights of the state and the rights of the individual, limiting both. Depending upon the country, this contract is designed to maximize benefit to either the government or the citizenry. The contract between a company and its employees strikes a similar balance, determining what management owes the employees and what the employees owe the management. People can get stuck in bad contracts with companies, but they have a much easier time getting out of them than people stuck in a oppressive country. Just because a company has a right to abuse its workers, just because a country has a right to abuse its people, that does not mean they are right in doing so. Neither is aiding a country in its ill practices, especially when one has an opportunity not to (by not doing business there).
You may argue from Shakespeare: "to do a great right, do a little wrong." This, more or less, seems to be the argument of most defending Google's presence in China -- that their presence there, even under the influence of local laws, helps the people. I cannot argue this. I have no doubt that in some way it does help. The question is, does the help Google's presence supplies to the people exceed/outweigh the help their presence lends to the government?
"What about Coke, Boeing, and the other major US/Western firms which have setup in China? Are they following Western labour laws? Western marketing laws? Western censorship laws? Google has become a lightning rod to this kind of criticism but they are not breaking any laws and other companies are abiding by the same rules without the criticism. So either you should complain about all the Western companies operating in China or none of them -- targeting Google as the lone bad guy seems a little unjust. And personally, I find those exploiting the lax labour laws to be far greater offenders of human rights and morality than Google."
There's a reason Google is the lightning rod for this kind of criticism: they have protrayed themselves, and more importantly have been adopted by many as being a more moral company. Yahoo may be immoral in fingering reporters, but they've shattered no one's image of them in so doing. No one expects any better of Yahoo. People may hate totalitarian regimes and inhumane working conditions, but the shattering of their illusions they hold as a much dearer crime. Google is just paying for its public goodwill.
See, if the great-grandparent were posted by a non-AC, I might have some meaningful or at least mildly diverting response to this could-be follow-up post.
Eh, what the hell.
Like the grandparent said: shit happens. Trousers get stuck in car doors and tag along for drives of their own. It's not your fault, per se. Hell even if it is, do you want a dozen jerks with nothing better to do calling up their mates and telling them to turn over to watch the pantsless git on channel 12? The size of the audience makes a difference, and when you're the one that's under the camera's eye, it's never just a "C-SPAN sized audience" that's watching, it's everyone who gets the channel.
Heck, shit doesn't need to happen. People will watch anyway.
Aren't we addicted to watching people enough? When you go out, there's certainly an audience there, but the majority of them are there to do more than just watch what you do. This isn't about the active privacy of one's home. This is a sort of passive privacy -- if you don't screw up or around bad enough (and if you aren't unlucky enough), no one cares to see what you're doing.
I'd look to the Truman Show rather than 1984 for an analogue here. No, there is no life direction being enacted by some man in a room, and no, the world isn't a literal stage, but the show is remarkably similar: lots of boring every day stuff that most people don't care to pay attention to in their own lives. But shows like Big Brother have shown us that people are willing to watch badly dramatized boring every day stuff. This just removes the dramatization.
Slashdot Mirror
"Are you implying that what comes out of Hollywood is somehow not propaganda?"
To answer a question with a question:
Do you want to replace the propaganda you see with more, albeit different, propaganda?
I'm unfamiliar with the shows you mentioned, so I can't respond to them directly. However, I will say that it seems your problem isn't so much with movies, as with movies, television, and the entertainment media in general. (this may just be answering my own misinterpretation of your original post)
(And to be fair, I suppose I ought to answer your question as well. Some of what comes out of Hollywood is propaganda -- works whose raisons d'être are not the telling of stories and the illustrations of characters, but the selling of ideas. Most of what comes out of Hollywood, though, is not propaganda)
"Disagree on both counts. There are taboos that have been proscribed across the overwhelming majority of societies over time. Maybe there is some room for subjectivity, but I disagree with the idea that there is significant variance over time.
... and from your description of Pulp Fiction, I'm guessing you're not a fan of the Big Lebowski.
Nor am I trotting out some closit prudishness here.
For example, I though Pulp Fiction had an excess of potty mouth. However, the title is Pulp Fiction. Truth in labelling never had a more concise example. And the random vignette approach to the movie marks it a classic.
Request you re-consider my original post."
I think your use of the term "potty mouth" implies some closet prudishness. Try: cursing, swearing, or cussing.
As to societal change: bad taste, for some parts of the American South fifty years ago, would have been showing black children and white children going to the same school. Likewise for a mixed race couple in any venue. Sixty years ago, and still in some parts of the world, it was/is bad taste to show women wearing pants.
Or we can delve further back. In early northern Europe, wergild was a legal form of dealing with murder. Blood revenge was also legal. If you want to go biblical, there were some close cousins that got married... and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
As for Pulp Fiction: there was no randomness involved, and they were not vignettes. There were, if I recall the number correctly, four intertwining stories, told independently, whose parts served to shade one another.
"The real things needing challenging are the decay elements in society."
You're not after good taste, you're after propaganda. A media fed force against the decline of Western Civilization as you see it.
About this we can reach no consensus, for our worlds fly apart at different seams
You see a world where people should stay married, and I see one where divorced fathers are naturally discriminated against in matters of child custody.
If we're talking about good taste here, I can think of plenty of classics that have been labeled as being in bad taste at one point or another.
As another poster said, taste is in the mind of the beholder. There is such a thing as a broader, societal taste. This, however, tends to change greatly both between societies and time periods. smitty one each does not want movies of "good" taste, he wants movies of "his" taste.
Anyway, as to sex and/or gender confusion, it's a device in more of Shakespeare's plays than I wish to verify. And as for incest, hath he heard not of the good Prince Hamlet?
I believe the proper response in these situations is:
"That's not what she said!"
wooo!
[/bender]
"It's not because of a lack of imagination, or a lack of open-mindedness ... it's because that means that it would take 400 million years for one side of the body to know what was happening on the other side and then send a signal back, and that's if you assume the speed of light."
No, to a certain extent, it is because of a lack of imagination. We're talking about planets and stars, galaxies and gas clouds being part of a living structure. None of those objects are components of any kind of living structures we know of. If you're willing to take the leap that celestial bodies may be part of a life form, why, then should you be unwilling to take similar leaps to explain how such a life form would work?
For example: the signals could be sent via an alternate Universe, one in which the limits imposed by special relativity do not apply. Black holes at the nuclei of galaxies could act as nodes, through which currently unobserved information is sent.
A bit kooky, perhaps. Out there, yes. But not really any more out there than the idea of a multigalactic life form.
Fascinating.
Maybe I, too, have had some ear circumcision in addition to the standard one. Perhaps prostheses are in order?
"The number of neuronal/synaptic combinations and permutations in your brain, the thing thinking of these words, exceeds the total number of subatomic particles in the entire universe by three orders of magnitude! Now that's a large structure, and makes 200 million light-year wide amoebae puny by comparison."
As with all things, a Star Trek reference can apply here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_IDIC
Well, it is an odd character that comes from above.
Why is Irvine at the top of that list?
Weird...
What's really interesting is that I would know about none of this if the scanner hadn't gone off and led to that anecdote.
Not saying that that was why the scanner went off, or that steps must be taken to protect us from the fruits, but that high profile reactions to items perceived to be inoccuous can spread around information you'd rather stayed put.
I don't think you're being cereal.
Just heaving a bit of fun. :)
"A light saber dualing game would be the ultimate on Wii. They really really need to make it."
That would be fun... but I wouldn't mind using just one lightsaber if I could duel with it.
I think one of the big questions here is: can we create an alternative to the propaganda?
And another big question: Is the propaganda attractive because it's more easily obtained, or because people like it better?
Wikipedia functions, and there are any number of reasons why it shouldn't. I think it's possible that an alternative can be created here... even with the much larger probability of astroturfing. Whether or not people will actually choose it, though...
"Damn, I need more vacation."
Don't you know that vacations can kill you?
(I already feel bad about posting this... so much for feeling superior to the rest of Slashdot)
We apologize for the mash up with the previous posts. The current poster wishes you to know that the posters responsible have been sacked.
The ganking situation in that game would be horrendous. There you are, swimming around, catching smaller fish and looking for a good place to spawn, when BAM lunch descends from above. You try to swim around it, because you know what it is, but your fish is too stupid to listen, and bites down on the free food hook and all. Now you have to respawn all the way upriver and swim for hours just to get back to where you were.
Haven't you seen Silithus recently? All that's missing is the Protoss, and those crystals in the crater next door are starting to give me ideas...
"I find this issue complicated by the right to self rule. The Chinese government might restrict freedom of the press and run a dictatorship but every nation has the right to self rule and if you want to go into China you must play by the Chinese rules."
So you set a state's rights as supreme. Any inherent rights of the individual are automatically subordinate to the state's right of self rule. I am not arguing that a company should enter a country with the purpose of not obeying its laws. But companies do have choices in where they do business, especially when it is a matter of expanding into another country.
As all companies enter into agreements with their employees, so is there an agreement between governments and citizens. A contract that negotiates the rights of the state and the rights of the individual, limiting both. Depending upon the country, this contract is designed to maximize benefit to either the government or the citizenry. The contract between a company and its employees strikes a similar balance, determining what management owes the employees and what the employees owe the management. People can get stuck in bad contracts with companies, but they have a much easier time getting out of them than people stuck in a oppressive country. Just because a company has a right to abuse its workers, just because a country has a right to abuse its people, that does not mean they are right in doing so. Neither is aiding a country in its ill practices, especially when one has an opportunity not to (by not doing business there).
You may argue from Shakespeare: "to do a great right, do a little wrong." This, more or less, seems to be the argument of most defending Google's presence in China -- that their presence there, even under the influence of local laws, helps the people. I cannot argue this. I have no doubt that in some way it does help. The question is, does the help Google's presence supplies to the people exceed/outweigh the help their presence lends to the government?
"What about Coke, Boeing, and the other major US/Western firms which have setup in China? Are they following Western labour laws? Western marketing laws? Western censorship laws? Google has become a lightning rod to this kind of criticism but they are not breaking any laws and other companies are abiding by the same rules without the criticism. So either you should complain about all the Western companies operating in China or none of them -- targeting Google as the lone bad guy seems a little unjust. And personally, I find those exploiting the lax labour laws to be far greater offenders of human rights and morality than Google."
There's a reason Google is the lightning rod for this kind of criticism: they have protrayed themselves, and more importantly have been adopted by many as being a more moral company. Yahoo may be immoral in fingering reporters, but they've shattered no one's image of them in so doing. No one expects any better of Yahoo. People may hate totalitarian regimes and inhumane working conditions, but the shattering of their illusions they hold as a much dearer crime. Google is just paying for its public goodwill.
The closest thing I can remember was in an episode from TOS
e pisode/68790.html ... though that was an artificial and pilotable asteroid.
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TOS/
Until they come up with a better definition of planet, I say that was a great reference.
I thought that was a Batman villain. You know, La's Ar Ghur?
See, if the great-grandparent were posted by a non-AC, I might have some meaningful or at least mildly diverting response to this could-be follow-up post.
Eh, what the hell.
Like the grandparent said: shit happens. Trousers get stuck in car doors and tag along for drives of their own. It's not your fault, per se. Hell even if it is, do you want a dozen jerks with nothing better to do calling up their mates and telling them to turn over to watch the pantsless git on channel 12? The size of the audience makes a difference, and when you're the one that's under the camera's eye, it's never just a "C-SPAN sized audience" that's watching, it's everyone who gets the channel.
Heck, shit doesn't need to happen. People will watch anyway.
Aren't we addicted to watching people enough? When you go out, there's certainly an audience there, but the majority of them are there to do more than just watch what you do. This isn't about the active privacy of one's home. This is a sort of passive privacy -- if you don't screw up or around bad enough (and if you aren't unlucky enough), no one cares to see what you're doing.
I'd look to the Truman Show rather than 1984 for an analogue here. No, there is no life direction being enacted by some man in a room, and no, the world isn't a literal stage, but the show is remarkably similar: lots of boring every day stuff that most people don't care to pay attention to in their own lives. But shows like Big Brother have shown us that people are willing to watch badly dramatized boring every day stuff. This just removes the dramatization.
Gah.
Well... probably either Maurice Leblanc... or...
Wait a minute, Monsieur Leblanc is dead!
Monkey Sensei, is that you?
WTS PALADIN ITEM ON ORG BANK
(seriously though, gave me a good laugh. You'd have my mod point if I had any, and you weren't already fixed for them)