What if our worldview is fundamentally incorrect: we were taught that we live in an economy where people invest their capital and labor in expectation of an economic profit. However it’s become obvious that the entertainment and news media is far more invested in manifesting a world of demoralization and degeneracy. What of all along the media was primarily for the purposes of influence if not brainwashing?
As a former PR guy, I can confirm your hypothesis. I referred to myself as Minister of Propaganda. Make shit sound and look like shinola. Or don't have a job.
These days most of the media and associated industries are made up of people with expensive degrees that will never be paid off if they don't continue to make lies look like light, as their overlords require.
As Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Goebbels was in perpetual conflict with certain elements of the Nazi party, particularly regional authorities, who thought that the only truly effective propaganda was the crude and violent sort.
I'm proud to say I never resorted to violence, but once after I got off the phone with a NY Times reporter, I felt like violence had been resorted to me. :-)
Yeah but this is kind of the point. We generally look at capitalism as a system that’s morally neutral: whatever people want, capitalism will give it to them through exchange, systematically. It empowers without judgment.
The woke types believe in anti-capitalism because the agency to create without moral judgment - namely their moral judgment - creates inequality and is thus intolerable. So you have a paradox running where what people value is removing the ability to reify values.
They’re trying to destroy inequality which means they have to destroy agency, at least agency created outside the brackets of right action as they see it. It’s loathsome behavior, but on the other hand, it’s clarifying how power works beautifully if you have eyes to see it.
My employer's marketing dept is loaded with social justice warriors. Previous employer was ~85% SJWs. Most of them are not ideologues. They're just - literally and obliviously - useful idiots. They don't know they're useful to someone, nor do they know they're idiots. They don't even seem to know they're arguing for the abolition of their own livelihoods.
In fact, if you scratch the surface of their "ideas" you find they are 100% misinformed: history, crime, philosophy, religion, slavery, tax code, economics, climate...they know nothing true about anything. They repeat as fact (with impressive certainty) what their professors and the media told them to say, but are factually incorrect about everything.
That is pretty much the sum and substance of "anti-capitalism." There is no real or valid ideology there. They don't actually care about anything; if they did, real-world outcomes would dictate that their views be the opposite of what they are. It's a vacuous and (most importantly) vain ideology more or less designed to bed stupid college freshmen. And they've adopted it as their own. But because it's a swirl of lies circling a hollow center, all it CAN do is collapse and take down anyone/anything associated with it.
It's just a question of how well we can contain the damage.
Yes, when I meet young college grads, I am astonished at the mush they have for brains. Their ideas, if applied, will destroy everything, yet they cannot see it. The Long March Through the Institutions has been completed, and ideological subversion has succeeded. Yuri Bezmenov talked about this, there are good videos of him on youtube. Young people are totally inverted in their reality, and have been subjected to intense, full throttle social engineering, from the day they first started consuming media, all the way through college.
I'm a bit of an environmentalist and last ran for office in 2023 (about 40 votes short) and after leaving one meeting there were 2 Green Party guys arguing with a strongly anti Green candidate. I stopped and listened and somewhat joined in. It was clear that she knew far more about the topic than they did and when I mentioned that to tell them that they were wrong and that she was right.... well they didn't take to that kindly.
Young SJW's also don't really believe that the damage they cause will be a problem, because "it will be replaced,""someone will fix it," and above all, the SJW's haven't thought about it. Their affluent parents have been fixing their outcomes for them all their lives, and they haven't needed to think about much of anything really.
I don't care how many degrees these people have amongst them. They are not educated. Real education requires curiosity. These people have no curiosity about anything other than "when will my Doordash get here." The "long march" has done it's job.
Thank you for mentionng UN Agenda 2030, so few people know about it. But, yes, every single woke idea is Agenda 2030, including the terrifying belief that we need to ban all fossil fuels, which will simply kill off 90% of the world's pop.
Yes, and the obvious question is why do they keep doing it and why do shareholders keep funding it (all of them seemingly unpunished)?
Because it defies basic logic and normal market mechanics, we have to assume some kind of covert incentive structure is at work. Shareholders are not stupid (even the pension fund managers) and they must being expecting a payday (including non-financial incentives) the average person cannot see.
The only rational explanation is that they are playing the long game and believe there will be a large ROI somewhere down the road. I assume this is when the Great Reset and digital/AI global control architecture is fully in place and the current shareholders of industry are the beneficiaries of a command global economy of captive/brainwashed wage slaves/consumers.
We also have to consider active treason of other state/non-state actors alongside the obvious media psyops/propaganda, which by definition is a long game.
The Green New Deal IS Agenda 2030, thus, Bernie Sanders rose up in 2015, when Agenda 2030 was signed, and was the Trojan Horse for the "squad." Every single idea from the squad is agenda 2030. Remember, AOC did a video about having trains that don't need fuel and that we won't drive anymore, cows will be banned, etc. The Daily Clout on youtube has a good video called "What's the Green New Deal?"
But yeah, it’s always been an anti-agency stance, and nihilistic. Even if you just isolate it to money, argue against capitalism as a system, I’ve never heard a compelling alternative system of merit posited by that crowd.
an obvious solution is to keep capitalism but localize/decentralize the economy so that monopolists don't control everything. But, the Left is extremely anti-small business and anti-farm (consider the energy policies and carbon and nitrogen taxes on farms in blue states).
💯🎯 the transhumanist antihuman globalist pedophillionaires, who’ve been bankrolling the predictive programming / conditioning machines we’ve been shaped by our entire lives, have run this same Agenda 2030 for generations. All roads, all “media” - “news,” film, socials, music - lead there. I think we humans have finally stopped playing Agenda 2030, tho. We’re out. We need to build all new systems without the globalists.
media is for social engineering/manufacturing consent. Hollywood's roots are in the Tavistock Institute in the UK, and the Tavistock Institute was founded specifically TO social engineer people (it was founded, btw, by eugenicists).
So how does this actually work? Capitalism used to work like this: if people don't buy it, you go out of business. But in this system, people don't seem to care about profits anymore. Who pays for the failures to keep spreading? Is it the gazillionaires? The taxpayers?
It's as if we had a system where the inventors of malfunctioning useless mousetraps keep going despite it. How is it done?
I don’t want to ruin anyone’s conspiracy theory, but the studios are probably banking on residuals from the streaming companies and they have a few profitable shows and films coming out every year still. The failures are eating the profits, and probably keeping the corps from having to pay taxes. Writers, like Chris’s wife, are also losing money in it.
This is still subsidy. The successful stuff people want to watch pays for the activism of the decision makers with their awful shows, so it’s just garden variety institutional capture. Entertainment media has always been high margin high risk, now that model is being abused for the purposes of making woke agitprop.
Don't kid yourself. The streamers during the strike were losing less money than before it. Not producing content turned out to be less expensive than producing content that nobody watched. The reckoning is all around Hollywood and it is the massive loss of work for film people, work that maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place since streaming artificially bloated our numbers. Either way studios are racing towards consolidation and financial ruin. The studio business was always fraught but now it's ridiculous. There's no way that at least in CA, an impossibly great place to produce TV and features, the studios don't sell off their lots + ranches and become shadows of themselves. It's very sad and predictable.
No disagreement. I wasn’t saying that producing bad programming and not producing at all were revenue neutral, that’s obviously not true. But I think there are probably a lot of people in the industry that got into it to promote their point of view, and they will gladly use whatever profits, or just credit, the studios have lying around to make something they think will move the political needle.
Or, they do it just to piss off and “own” the fans of franchises that catered to the male gaze, or whatever. They don’t care about the institutions they’re leeching off of. True believers are like that.
That's what I'm wondering too. Doesn't this suggest that our economic system no longer works according to the model we have of "capitalism"? Our current system operates under a capitalist façade, but something else is actually running it. Free enterprise has been corrupted by third party funding sources that probably come from gazillionaires or government administrators who direct the flow of taxpayer money.
Perhaps the businesses we patronize are no longer independent operations, but merely assets of larger organizations whose managers don't really care much whether they profit or not.
That’s a damn good question. Usually one can point to government subsidies to explain zombie companies or zombie products that live despite unprofitable market demand—the electric car market, for example. But, as far as I know, Hollywood studios aren’t known for feeding at the government trough. Or, are they?
All of the studios through production arms get massive subsidies through tax write-offs from States across the country. Where I live in Baltimore House of cards which minted money for Netflix, demanded an increasing number of State subsidies from Maryland and got them. Movies that 40 years ago would never have shot in places that didn't make sense for the script now routinely do so, all because of tax write-offs. It's a really ugly sorted business where the subsidies in the form of givebacks are sold in the marketplace to other industries that need write-offs or reductions in tax liability. So tax reductions that are given to a hit show and up on the market and sold to a banker insurance company that needs the right office somewhere else. And that happens at a discount, so my taxes in Maryland help a bank in Omaha to offset tax liabilities all to my detriment and at a sweet discount from the original liability for that bank in Omaha.
They do in Canada. If you look at the credits of movies, many American ones of they've been filmed even partially in Canada have Govt of Canada funding. Not sure how it works in the states.
Maybe they are. I was looking at a video the other night that claimed that the CIA has been funding and censoring Hollywood studio productions for quite a while.
"Capitalism", "communism", "socialism", etc. are nothing more that academic fictions. They are cover stories/rationalizations for different varieties of political theft and abuse toward the end goal of totalitarianism.
To borrow a phrase from Tom Wolfe, think of capitalism as the magic umber bird flying higher and higher in ever more concentric circles, till if finally disappears up its own fundamental aperture.
I had only watched the first bit of the clip until I saw your comment and then I went back and watched the whole thing.
My God it is dreadful! In what universe would anyone willingly watch that? Did they not show this clip to anyone that was not part of the production early on?
Many years ago I worked at Disney Animation. At the wrap party for one of our dreadful films (between the Lion King and the Pixar acquisition) people were having a great time. Everyone would say the film is awful but look at this little part here that I worked on, it's great! I never could understand how a project would continue on its course driving into a brick wall when we all could see the wall looming in the windshield.
The left destroys everything they touch. It is a feature of all socialist ideologies. To not do so these people would have to admit error or wrong-think and they are incapable of doing so, even to their own destruction.
Actually that’s the Left’s raison d’être. Critical theory was first conceptualized by Marx, and then expanded on by Horkheimer. Loosely, you must first destroy society in order to rebuild it.
That’s why the Left is ALWAYS unhappy. There is always something requiring destruction. That’s why they constantly flit from issue to issue.
They never really get around to the rebuilding part though, do they? Destruction is all they are capable of. Their imagined utopia is just an excuse to burn everything.
The closest was Russia with the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that lasted 74 yrs. At least the Leninists weren’t suicidal nihilists like these modern western assholes.
Many outside the Los Angeles scene may not be aware that the porn industry calls the neighboring San Fernando valley “home.” But, have you seen any porn lately? It suffers from the same malady as the PG flicks. It’s becoming completely clinical, like watching two people having sex that are participating in a Masters and Johnson research project. No passion, no anticipation, no romance, no conversation, no foreplay. Just mechanical copulation filmed in a bright room during a 15-minute coffee break. It’s formulaic. It’s like the writers were recruited from the video game industry.
Your post inspired the thought that the porn industry is ripe for humans to be replaced with AI. No more STDs, health tests/certificates, no more payroll for “actors.” Just computers accommodating gargantuan dimensions, incredible speed and almost infinite endurance. I foresee user controls to allow customer alteration of the “actors.”
We already see the beginning of that, right? Computer generated images of “perfect” masculine or (usually) feminine beauty. No flaws, no fat, no hair plugs, no blemishes.
Absolutely. I think a little more work is required – some of the images look a little doll-like. OTOH, the AI images of Larry Elder in the Yrefy ads look perfect.
“Fewer Than 40,000 People Watched Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.”
15k downvoted the video, and some comments referenced that there used to be another video that they took down to re-upload. So lots of people had strong feelings about ST:SA. Just not in the way that generates revenue.
Nerdrotic streaming a Spock-doll at the same time the amply named Star Trek SA premiered and the doll getting more viewers probably drove it home to the production team as well as he writers and corporate.
I've been by-passing so much new "product" that on any given night I'd rather watch an old Richard Widmark picture. Definitely check out Pickup on South Street. It really is shocking how *bad* the past decade or so has been for mass entertainment. I can spend the rest of my days not watching anything made past, say, 1985.
I agree to some extent, sometimes a black and white movie is the best option.
However, I think the 90s was somewhat of a golden era with movies like Red Rock West, Gattaca, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption, The Sweet Hereafter, The Usual Suspects, Reservoir Dogs, Michael Collins, L.A. Confidential, to name a few.
The other day I happen to be watching the movie Love Actually with a friend who hadn’t seen it. I was taken aback when Emma Thompson was wrapping gifts for her little girl to give to her friend. She held up two different Barbie dolls to choose from. She asks “now which one of these shall we give to little Emily. The transvestite, or the dominatrix?” That was 2003. I hadn’t realized it had started that far back.
Big Ag, "Supermarket to the World" and Hollywood, "Movie Capitol of the World" have been the #1 and #2 non-weapons US exports in our balance of trade account books ever since manufacturing was hollowed out and exported overseas.
Hollywood and food. And armaments. That's what brings dollars back to the US that we send overseas for all we import.
They've polluted the food we grow with glysophate-laden GMO crops, many countries no longer buy it. They've polluted media entertainment offerings with woke cultural propaganda global populations (and domestic) no longer watch.
It's hard not to think it's intentional. The only other major inflow of dollars that's remains desirable is weapons systems. Ukraine, Israel, Iran. All useful in showcasing the merchandise and drumming up demand. War is great for jobs, the US economy Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer crowed a few years ago. Without war and US arms merchants profits the trade deficit would be exponentially worse than it is today.
Make what you will of Hollywood sinking its own ship and the world's supermarket being exposed as peddling poison. And wars popping up out of nowhere for no good reason under Biden. And now even 'the Peace President' with an itchy trigger finger joining in. When it's the only part of the export economy that's not being intentionally scuttled I suppose it...makes...sense?
New, original ideas are in such short supply over here. The phrase “reimagined” (used excitedly to promote a new production) always elicits huge groans in this house as we visualise a classic film/tv series being subjected to wokery and rendered unwatchable.
The most recent Star Trek movie was also a huge piece of garbage! What was the title? Section 31? I didn't watch it, and refused to watch Academy too. I've seen the reviews from guys like Dave Cullen, and The Critical Drinker, and the show was Wokeness at Warp 10. SMDH. I regularly watch the 5 original shows, & movies, pre-Discovery. Even the Kelvin movies are decent. Picard season 3 was pretty good, as they changed show runners for that last season. And could have launched into what the fans wanted next, which was a Star Trek Legacy series. Strange ANew Worlds will finish seasons 4&5 and done. They talked about another follow on series, featuring Kirks Enterprise, which could have used the same sets as SNW, but, nope! They went with the utter failure, Academy. Someone call "time of death" for Hollywoke.
I wonder if the Starfleet Academy creators and cast are embarrassed that people prefer watching William Shatner wrestle a dude in a rubber lizard suit.
My husband and I almost exclusively watch shows on Britbox and Acorn. The contrast in writing, acting and production quality is striking. We never ever watch network shows, especially “comedies” that are sophomoric, cringy and seriously unfunny.
British shows historically had better writing, but the last five years or so, the plot lines and casting have been flooded with Wokeism to the point where it’s taken a toll on the overall quality. It’s a shame.
My personal breaking point came while watching the BBC Two coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, when two-thirds of one episode was devoted to a garden by "Windrush generation survivors" that was entirely themed around racial grievance. They even had broken slave shackles cemented into the pavers and a lecture about how Brits growing flowers in their gardens that were brought from elsewhere by Victorian explorers is "colonialism and exploitation." And all the BBC bobbleheads nodded solemnly along and agreed to every bit of it. In an effing flower show.
Some people think this era is capitalism eating itself.
It’s not. It’s anti-capitalism eating everything.
What if our worldview is fundamentally incorrect: we were taught that we live in an economy where people invest their capital and labor in expectation of an economic profit. However it’s become obvious that the entertainment and news media is far more invested in manifesting a world of demoralization and degeneracy. What of all along the media was primarily for the purposes of influence if not brainwashing?
As a former PR guy, I can confirm your hypothesis. I referred to myself as Minister of Propaganda. Make shit sound and look like shinola. Or don't have a job.
These days most of the media and associated industries are made up of people with expensive degrees that will never be paid off if they don't continue to make lies look like light, as their overlords require.
As Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Goebbels was in perpetual conflict with certain elements of the Nazi party, particularly regional authorities, who thought that the only truly effective propaganda was the crude and violent sort.
I'm proud to say I never resorted to violence, but once after I got off the phone with a NY Times reporter, I felt like violence had been resorted to me. :-)
Yeah but this is kind of the point. We generally look at capitalism as a system that’s morally neutral: whatever people want, capitalism will give it to them through exchange, systematically. It empowers without judgment.
The woke types believe in anti-capitalism because the agency to create without moral judgment - namely their moral judgment - creates inequality and is thus intolerable. So you have a paradox running where what people value is removing the ability to reify values.
They’re trying to destroy inequality which means they have to destroy agency, at least agency created outside the brackets of right action as they see it. It’s loathsome behavior, but on the other hand, it’s clarifying how power works beautifully if you have eyes to see it.
My employer's marketing dept is loaded with social justice warriors. Previous employer was ~85% SJWs. Most of them are not ideologues. They're just - literally and obliviously - useful idiots. They don't know they're useful to someone, nor do they know they're idiots. They don't even seem to know they're arguing for the abolition of their own livelihoods.
In fact, if you scratch the surface of their "ideas" you find they are 100% misinformed: history, crime, philosophy, religion, slavery, tax code, economics, climate...they know nothing true about anything. They repeat as fact (with impressive certainty) what their professors and the media told them to say, but are factually incorrect about everything.
That is pretty much the sum and substance of "anti-capitalism." There is no real or valid ideology there. They don't actually care about anything; if they did, real-world outcomes would dictate that their views be the opposite of what they are. It's a vacuous and (most importantly) vain ideology more or less designed to bed stupid college freshmen. And they've adopted it as their own. But because it's a swirl of lies circling a hollow center, all it CAN do is collapse and take down anyone/anything associated with it.
It's just a question of how well we can contain the damage.
Yes, when I meet young college grads, I am astonished at the mush they have for brains. Their ideas, if applied, will destroy everything, yet they cannot see it. The Long March Through the Institutions has been completed, and ideological subversion has succeeded. Yuri Bezmenov talked about this, there are good videos of him on youtube. Young people are totally inverted in their reality, and have been subjected to intense, full throttle social engineering, from the day they first started consuming media, all the way through college.
I'm a bit of an environmentalist and last ran for office in 2023 (about 40 votes short) and after leaving one meeting there were 2 Green Party guys arguing with a strongly anti Green candidate. I stopped and listened and somewhat joined in. It was clear that she knew far more about the topic than they did and when I mentioned that to tell them that they were wrong and that she was right.... well they didn't take to that kindly.
don't forget they save their worst for apostates.
Great comment!
Young SJW's also don't really believe that the damage they cause will be a problem, because "it will be replaced,""someone will fix it," and above all, the SJW's haven't thought about it. Their affluent parents have been fixing their outcomes for them all their lives, and they haven't needed to think about much of anything really.
I don't care how many degrees these people have amongst them. They are not educated. Real education requires curiosity. These people have no curiosity about anything other than "when will my Doordash get here." The "long march" has done it's job.
so true.
Marky Martialist- the woke types have no idea they're just pawns in the UN2030 sustainable development goals game
and if you told them they'd just shriek and call you a conspiracy theorist
it's a race to the bottom
no more inequality if we're all slaves
Thank you for mentionng UN Agenda 2030, so few people know about it. But, yes, every single woke idea is Agenda 2030, including the terrifying belief that we need to ban all fossil fuels, which will simply kill off 90% of the world's pop.
What is happening is they are destroying institutions and shareholder value as viewers go elsewhere.
Yes, and the obvious question is why do they keep doing it and why do shareholders keep funding it (all of them seemingly unpunished)?
Because it defies basic logic and normal market mechanics, we have to assume some kind of covert incentive structure is at work. Shareholders are not stupid (even the pension fund managers) and they must being expecting a payday (including non-financial incentives) the average person cannot see.
The only rational explanation is that they are playing the long game and believe there will be a large ROI somewhere down the road. I assume this is when the Great Reset and digital/AI global control architecture is fully in place and the current shareholders of industry are the beneficiaries of a command global economy of captive/brainwashed wage slaves/consumers.
We also have to consider active treason of other state/non-state actors alongside the obvious media psyops/propaganda, which by definition is a long game.
The Green New Deal IS Agenda 2030, thus, Bernie Sanders rose up in 2015, when Agenda 2030 was signed, and was the Trojan Horse for the "squad." Every single idea from the squad is agenda 2030. Remember, AOC did a video about having trains that don't need fuel and that we won't drive anymore, cows will be banned, etc. The Daily Clout on youtube has a good video called "What's the Green New Deal?"
That’s a great summary of socialism/ anti-capitalism, Mark. Equality versus agency.
Or are you strictly “Marky?” Apologies if so.
Name’s not really Mark, as you like.
But yeah, it’s always been an anti-agency stance, and nihilistic. Even if you just isolate it to money, argue against capitalism as a system, I’ve never heard a compelling alternative system of merit posited by that crowd.
an obvious solution is to keep capitalism but localize/decentralize the economy so that monopolists don't control everything. But, the Left is extremely anti-small business and anti-farm (consider the energy policies and carbon and nitrogen taxes on farms in blue states).
💯🎯 the transhumanist antihuman globalist pedophillionaires, who’ve been bankrolling the predictive programming / conditioning machines we’ve been shaped by our entire lives, have run this same Agenda 2030 for generations. All roads, all “media” - “news,” film, socials, music - lead there. I think we humans have finally stopped playing Agenda 2030, tho. We’re out. We need to build all new systems without the globalists.
ART!, it's NOT "what if", it's WHAT IS....research Edward Bernays, for a start....you're on the right track, tho....
media is for social engineering/manufacturing consent. Hollywood's roots are in the Tavistock Institute in the UK, and the Tavistock Institute was founded specifically TO social engineer people (it was founded, btw, by eugenicists).
Biggest problem with capitalism is it produces so much wealth and ease that people become socialists just to spite their dads.
This should be a bumper sticker. Bravo.
Wealth and unease.
People who lack the 'animal spirits' to give it a go, become tedious censoring regulating socialists.
Like Greta.
So how does this actually work? Capitalism used to work like this: if people don't buy it, you go out of business. But in this system, people don't seem to care about profits anymore. Who pays for the failures to keep spreading? Is it the gazillionaires? The taxpayers?
It's as if we had a system where the inventors of malfunctioning useless mousetraps keep going despite it. How is it done?
I don’t want to ruin anyone’s conspiracy theory, but the studios are probably banking on residuals from the streaming companies and they have a few profitable shows and films coming out every year still. The failures are eating the profits, and probably keeping the corps from having to pay taxes. Writers, like Chris’s wife, are also losing money in it.
This is still subsidy. The successful stuff people want to watch pays for the activism of the decision makers with their awful shows, so it’s just garden variety institutional capture. Entertainment media has always been high margin high risk, now that model is being abused for the purposes of making woke agitprop.
Don't kid yourself. The streamers during the strike were losing less money than before it. Not producing content turned out to be less expensive than producing content that nobody watched. The reckoning is all around Hollywood and it is the massive loss of work for film people, work that maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place since streaming artificially bloated our numbers. Either way studios are racing towards consolidation and financial ruin. The studio business was always fraught but now it's ridiculous. There's no way that at least in CA, an impossibly great place to produce TV and features, the studios don't sell off their lots + ranches and become shadows of themselves. It's very sad and predictable.
No disagreement. I wasn’t saying that producing bad programming and not producing at all were revenue neutral, that’s obviously not true. But I think there are probably a lot of people in the industry that got into it to promote their point of view, and they will gladly use whatever profits, or just credit, the studios have lying around to make something they think will move the political needle.
Or, they do it just to piss off and “own” the fans of franchises that catered to the male gaze, or whatever. They don’t care about the institutions they’re leeching off of. True believers are like that.
Anti-capitalism will eat everything.
That's what I'm wondering too. Doesn't this suggest that our economic system no longer works according to the model we have of "capitalism"? Our current system operates under a capitalist façade, but something else is actually running it. Free enterprise has been corrupted by third party funding sources that probably come from gazillionaires or government administrators who direct the flow of taxpayer money.
Perhaps the businesses we patronize are no longer independent operations, but merely assets of larger organizations whose managers don't really care much whether they profit or not.
That’s a damn good question. Usually one can point to government subsidies to explain zombie companies or zombie products that live despite unprofitable market demand—the electric car market, for example. But, as far as I know, Hollywood studios aren’t known for feeding at the government trough. Or, are they?
All of the studios through production arms get massive subsidies through tax write-offs from States across the country. Where I live in Baltimore House of cards which minted money for Netflix, demanded an increasing number of State subsidies from Maryland and got them. Movies that 40 years ago would never have shot in places that didn't make sense for the script now routinely do so, all because of tax write-offs. It's a really ugly sorted business where the subsidies in the form of givebacks are sold in the marketplace to other industries that need write-offs or reductions in tax liability. So tax reductions that are given to a hit show and up on the market and sold to a banker insurance company that needs the right office somewhere else. And that happens at a discount, so my taxes in Maryland help a bank in Omaha to offset tax liabilities all to my detriment and at a sweet discount from the original liability for that bank in Omaha.
They do in Canada. If you look at the credits of movies, many American ones of they've been filmed even partially in Canada have Govt of Canada funding. Not sure how it works in the states.
Maybe they are. I was looking at a video the other night that claimed that the CIA has been funding and censoring Hollywood studio productions for quite a while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yootr6Vf7E0
Government is the vehicle through which the incentives are inverted. If you fail, you get more funding; if you perform well, your budget is cut.
When you see this playing out, assume that government is behind it.
Great question.
"Capitalism", "communism", "socialism", etc. are nothing more that academic fictions. They are cover stories/rationalizations for different varieties of political theft and abuse toward the end goal of totalitarianism.
To borrow a phrase from Tom Wolfe, think of capitalism as the magic umber bird flying higher and higher in ever more concentric circles, till if finally disappears up its own fundamental aperture.
Quit oppressing people with your observations, Captain Obvious.
LOL also wow. All that destruction seems super environmentally friendly
Right? Let's look on the bright side. No production trucks means no exhaust, which ends climate change for sure.
Pretty soon the drug addicts will run out of used hollywood trailers to live in.
Can think of no better word than "woke slop" for this crap. You nailed it!!
ST video- 2:00 "some of you are the first of your species"
[camera focuses in on black girl]
Come on, don't make it this easy for us.
Such an awkward and forced shot
Does condescension ever really land well?
Only if it’s strictly enforced
Woke kills things at warp speed. Good writing in Hollywood is in shorter supply than dilithium crystals.
I had only watched the first bit of the clip until I saw your comment and then I went back and watched the whole thing.
My God it is dreadful! In what universe would anyone willingly watch that? Did they not show this clip to anyone that was not part of the production early on?
Many years ago I worked at Disney Animation. At the wrap party for one of our dreadful films (between the Lion King and the Pixar acquisition) people were having a great time. Everyone would say the film is awful but look at this little part here that I worked on, it's great! I never could understand how a project would continue on its course driving into a brick wall when we all could see the wall looming in the windshield.
She’s your new airline pilot!
You would think that even the woke might actually WAKE UP to this...NOPE.
The left destroys everything they touch. It is a feature of all socialist ideologies. To not do so these people would have to admit error or wrong-think and they are incapable of doing so, even to their own destruction.
“The left destroys everything they touch.”
Actually that’s the Left’s raison d’être. Critical theory was first conceptualized by Marx, and then expanded on by Horkheimer. Loosely, you must first destroy society in order to rebuild it.
That’s why the Left is ALWAYS unhappy. There is always something requiring destruction. That’s why they constantly flit from issue to issue.
They never really get around to the rebuilding part though, do they? Destruction is all they are capable of. Their imagined utopia is just an excuse to burn everything.
👍
The closest was Russia with the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that lasted 74 yrs. At least the Leninists weren’t suicidal nihilists like these modern western assholes.
Many outside the Los Angeles scene may not be aware that the porn industry calls the neighboring San Fernando valley “home.” But, have you seen any porn lately? It suffers from the same malady as the PG flicks. It’s becoming completely clinical, like watching two people having sex that are participating in a Masters and Johnson research project. No passion, no anticipation, no romance, no conversation, no foreplay. Just mechanical copulation filmed in a bright room during a 15-minute coffee break. It’s formulaic. It’s like the writers were recruited from the video game industry.
Your post inspired the thought that the porn industry is ripe for humans to be replaced with AI. No more STDs, health tests/certificates, no more payroll for “actors.” Just computers accommodating gargantuan dimensions, incredible speed and almost infinite endurance. I foresee user controls to allow customer alteration of the “actors.”
We already see the beginning of that, right? Computer generated images of “perfect” masculine or (usually) feminine beauty. No flaws, no fat, no hair plugs, no blemishes.
Absolutely. I think a little more work is required – some of the images look a little doll-like. OTOH, the AI images of Larry Elder in the Yrefy ads look perfect.
Wait. You thought there were health tests?
I was under the impression a copy of a clear HIV test dated within 28 days has been required for decades.
We have a very different understandings of who pornographers are, how they operate, and what they care about.
Answers like that are the definition of “enervating.” They subtract energy from the universe and add nothing.
Nailed it.
The difference between genius and stupidity is that even genius has its limits.
Or as I once heard it in my factory days: “Ignorance can be cured. Stupid is forever.”
That’s awesome…I’ll be using that.
Very good 👏👏
“Fewer Than 40,000 People Watched Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.”
15k downvoted the video, and some comments referenced that there used to be another video that they took down to re-upload. So lots of people had strong feelings about ST:SA. Just not in the way that generates revenue.
Nerdrotic streaming a Spock-doll at the same time the amply named Star Trek SA premiered and the doll getting more viewers probably drove it home to the production team as well as he writers and corporate.
(I think it was for Star Trek SA at least?)
Never watched it, and I'm a die-hard Trekkie.
How this ends is AI film production.
They’re all already telling themselves that AI is why they are all unemployed.
I've been by-passing so much new "product" that on any given night I'd rather watch an old Richard Widmark picture. Definitely check out Pickup on South Street. It really is shocking how *bad* the past decade or so has been for mass entertainment. I can spend the rest of my days not watching anything made past, say, 1985.
I agree to some extent, sometimes a black and white movie is the best option.
However, I think the 90s was somewhat of a golden era with movies like Red Rock West, Gattaca, Fargo, The Shawshank Redemption, The Sweet Hereafter, The Usual Suspects, Reservoir Dogs, Michael Collins, L.A. Confidential, to name a few.
I do get nostalgic for the 90s.
we could watch good movies for the rest of our lives and never leave the 1950s
You know what, you're right. Ok, I'll bump that up to 2005 or so (with addendums like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, etc.).
“Hell on Wheels”. An excellent series.
It seems like after 9/11 it went downhill quickly.
I forgot to mention the great educational (propaganda) films from the mid 1900s:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoHF1HAAMT7zb27CgbnP5KuQiWoblNokG
I forgot about True Romance! 1993, one of the all time greats.
The other day I happen to be watching the movie Love Actually with a friend who hadn’t seen it. I was taken aback when Emma Thompson was wrapping gifts for her little girl to give to her friend. She held up two different Barbie dolls to choose from. She asks “now which one of these shall we give to little Emily. The transvestite, or the dominatrix?” That was 2003. I hadn’t realized it had started that far back.
The real joke about "Put a chick in it, make her lame and gay" is far, far darker than even Parker & Stone dared say straight out:
"Put a gay in it, to make her a lame chick"
No guesses to what "it" actually refers to - we all know Hollywood loves children.
Big Ag, "Supermarket to the World" and Hollywood, "Movie Capitol of the World" have been the #1 and #2 non-weapons US exports in our balance of trade account books ever since manufacturing was hollowed out and exported overseas.
Hollywood and food. And armaments. That's what brings dollars back to the US that we send overseas for all we import.
They've polluted the food we grow with glysophate-laden GMO crops, many countries no longer buy it. They've polluted media entertainment offerings with woke cultural propaganda global populations (and domestic) no longer watch.
It's hard not to think it's intentional. The only other major inflow of dollars that's remains desirable is weapons systems. Ukraine, Israel, Iran. All useful in showcasing the merchandise and drumming up demand. War is great for jobs, the US economy Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer crowed a few years ago. Without war and US arms merchants profits the trade deficit would be exponentially worse than it is today.
Make what you will of Hollywood sinking its own ship and the world's supermarket being exposed as peddling poison. And wars popping up out of nowhere for no good reason under Biden. And now even 'the Peace President' with an itchy trigger finger joining in. When it's the only part of the export economy that's not being intentionally scuttled I suppose it...makes...sense?
Strongly agree with the "?" after "makes sense”, FF.
One can't help but wonder if there has ever been another society that knowingly, deliberately, bankrupted itself on the way to it's irrelevant demise.
Ever heard of the term “infiltration”?
New, original ideas are in such short supply over here. The phrase “reimagined” (used excitedly to promote a new production) always elicits huge groans in this house as we visualise a classic film/tv series being subjected to wokery and rendered unwatchable.
As far as I can tell, the term “reimagined” is a useful filter.
It seems to translate as: Don't waste your time!.
Or “I’m totally out of ideas so I’m going to rehash this classic, cash in on someone else’s creativity, and pretend I’m being innovative.”
An excellent summation of the entertainment industry's current ethos!
I’ll bet the woke writers of these franchise shows never eat at a franchise restaurant. Hypocrites!
The most recent Star Trek movie was also a huge piece of garbage! What was the title? Section 31? I didn't watch it, and refused to watch Academy too. I've seen the reviews from guys like Dave Cullen, and The Critical Drinker, and the show was Wokeness at Warp 10. SMDH. I regularly watch the 5 original shows, & movies, pre-Discovery. Even the Kelvin movies are decent. Picard season 3 was pretty good, as they changed show runners for that last season. And could have launched into what the fans wanted next, which was a Star Trek Legacy series. Strange ANew Worlds will finish seasons 4&5 and done. They talked about another follow on series, featuring Kirks Enterprise, which could have used the same sets as SNW, but, nope! They went with the utter failure, Academy. Someone call "time of death" for Hollywoke.
“Jim! I’m just a country doctor!”
Better line: Jim, I'm a Doctor, not a Mason!
Creativity comes from God. God who created heaven and earth. If you reject God, you reject his gifts.
I wonder if the Starfleet Academy creators and cast are embarrassed that people prefer watching William Shatner wrestle a dude in a rubber lizard suit.
I know I am.
My husband and I almost exclusively watch shows on Britbox and Acorn. The contrast in writing, acting and production quality is striking. We never ever watch network shows, especially “comedies” that are sophomoric, cringy and seriously unfunny.
British shows historically had better writing, but the last five years or so, the plot lines and casting have been flooded with Wokeism to the point where it’s taken a toll on the overall quality. It’s a shame.
My personal breaking point came while watching the BBC Two coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, when two-thirds of one episode was devoted to a garden by "Windrush generation survivors" that was entirely themed around racial grievance. They even had broken slave shackles cemented into the pavers and a lecture about how Brits growing flowers in their gardens that were brought from elsewhere by Victorian explorers is "colonialism and exploitation." And all the BBC bobbleheads nodded solemnly along and agreed to every bit of it. In an effing flower show.
I bet the first season of Grantchester is different from the upcoming final season.
Probably. We watch it mostly as a breather from the darker crime/detective shows. I liked the original vicar the best.
We have noticed that. We call it the mandatory diversity quota. Still far and above US network offerings.