The Pledge Drive continues! If you enjoy this blog, and can afford it, please click on the “donate” button below! Thanks!
The reviews are in! Well, technically speaking, a review is in.
The Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl has posted his review of Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill, her totally objective documentary about the Men’s Rights Movement that was funded in part by some of the people featured in it and that will be opening in theaters a theater Friday
Let’s just say he didn’t like it:
[F]or two agonizing hours, Jaye tumbles slowly down America’s stupidest rabbit hole, discovering that Men’s Rights Activists are actually just dudes who have been dicked over by a culture that punishes masculinity. …
Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016, endorsing their anecdotal complaints about unfair family courts, incidents of men being tricked into being fathers and — I didn’t quite follow this one — one father’s conviction that the women who had custody of his son were systematically trying to make the boy fat.
One can only assume that they are fattening him up before they EAT HIM.
Confused MRAs, apparently unable to understand how anyone could possibly hate a film they’re pretty sure they’re going to just love, have responded to Scherstuhl’s review by crying “conspiracy.”
In a comment on the Village Voice, MRA David King (presumably the same David King who is the “Chief Information Officer” for A Voice for Men) suggests that “[s]omething definitely stinks, and it’s not the film under review.”
He submits these, er, facts to a candid world:
• September 29, Cassie Jaye tweeted “Events surrounding The Red Pill documentary are getting curiouser and curiouser”, the same day Scherstuhl tweeted that he’d “agreed to review” TRP, the same day Scherstuhl invited a well-known anti-male MRA antagonist to DM him via Twitter.
Just FYI, the “well-known anti-male MRA antagonist” in question is apparently little old me, though I’m pretty sure I am not actually anti-male. I didn’t DM Scherstuhl, though I think I retweeted a couple of his Tweets.
King continues:
• October 4, HP and Village Voice publish this hit piece using present-tense language (“this movie is playing in two American theaters”) strongly implying that the author has seen a film which doesn’t debut for another 3 days on October 7,
HOW ON EARTH DID A FILM REVIEWER SEE A FILM BEFORE IT WAS EVEN OUT oh wait that’s how film reviewing works.
• so Scherstuhl has not seen it at a theatre and cannot have seen it anywhere else unless either a) invited to by CJ (in which case HP and Village Voice, at which Scherstuhl is an editor, have violated the embargo such previews usually carry) or b) he has acquired a copy illegally.
Since both HP and VV have published this review already, since embargoes on unreleased films are the norm, and barring decent evidence of mismanagement on the part of CJ and her team, that rather heavily points at the latter. Whichever the case, violation of contract (best case) or breaking the law (worst case) doesn’t look good for either HP or Village Voice.
Yes, because films are NEVER reviewed before they hit theaters oh wait.
• If the author has not seen it, then he’s lying through his teeth both in the article’s content and about its provenance. He misrepresents the review as being based on an alleged viewing post public release but, owing to an editorial screw-up, the copy got released days before it should have been, proving that his article is a premeditated and contrived attack motivated by political animus.
• There are numerous tells in the language used in this article that strongly hint at an agenda and a prior conclusion (read: closed mind) so it almost doesn’t matter whether Scherstuhl did see it or not because the actual content of the film would make no difference to the content of the article.
King blathers on for a while along these lines, and even mentions me by name once! It’s good to be noticed.
Meanwhile, on Twitter, the lovable Dan Perrins seems to suggest that I might have actually paid Scherstuhl for his review.
A ? for the lawyers.
I'd also suspect some payola for the review as well.
Given @DavidFutrelle lack of integrity— Dan Perrins (@BlackBeard20096) October 4, 2016
Apparently Dan lives in an alternate universe in which men are oppressed and I am filthy rich.
Speaking of films, here is a short documentary about a capybara who jumps into a pool and plays with a pool noodle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=291Bry2FlsU
@Jack, I know, right? Need more of this:
@Megalibrarygirl, so dang true, right there. Adding the “just the ones who get up to mischief” is no improvement. Appending it to the “brown people” as if it were a sub-trait. Stealth racism, ugh. It’s the 1920s all over again.
@littleknown, I’m sure he won’t, either. As a tease for him, though, one of those links has some criticisms of the methodologies used to create the overall statistical view. If he can find it, he could perhaps make an actual reasonable counter-argument to the claims.
That’s how to do it in the real world, Roger. Examine evidence. Accept the outcome of that examination, tentatively, until new evidence arrives. When that happens, re-evaluate and adjust. That ain’t even the “science” way to do it, it’s the human way to do it.
EDIT, @Brony, i love your diagrams :3 for obvious reasons. Informative!
(Brony, I’d have a minor quibble with the diagram at the bottom, though; it talks about how the sense of smell is processed outside of the cerebral cortex. It doesn’t mention this with the other senses, though, making it seem like the sense of smell is unique in this regard. Lots of our sensory processing (preprocessing really) happens outside of the CC, so smell isn’t unique in that regard. It’s unique in lots of other ways, but for that one I’d argue that it isn’t! Just a minor quibble, though, it’s a very nice and informative diagram!)
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
I wouldn’t mind stuff like that, but I also wouldn’t mind some cool shaved style that don’t look too modern or out of place. Maybe, like, Vikings style…the show. And more afro-textured/natural hairstyles. I haven’t seen any hair mods that aren’t anything but straight. It’s sad.
@Scildfreja
Thanks! It got pretty weird sometimes. I’m not even sure I remember exactly what this one was for.
http://i.imgur.com/gCK9cb7.jpg
Yeah, joking aside, Jack, there’s certainly a lack of variety. You’d think that they’d be happy to do shaved or short styles, those are easy to model. From looking at the Nexus, though, most mods are about making porn puppets and battle-lingerie-warriors. grumble grumble.
(Best mods are the ones that give you a hunger stat so that you have to eat, or give you a temperature stat so that you have to light fires and wear heavy clothes to stay warm in blizzards, or make roving warbands wander around so that there are actually battles between the Imperials and Stormcloaks. And the scenic ones obviously. Those are my favourites)
@Scildfreja
Quibble away. I’m sure there are places where I’m not quite accurate or in error in a minor way (I hope), and I’m a lot more careful about the knowledge that put in a form like that and is meant for public consumption. I made things for arguments too.
http://i.imgur.com/xcn9JDK.jpg
@Brony, I think you may be on to something. Perhaps next paper I publish, I will use ponies to demonstrate points. It’s a surefire strategy!
Rustling!
Or my favourite,
Yes! I have some hunting mods, camping mods, alchemy mods, and cooking mods, plus interesting NPCs, new potion bottles, a whole bunch of armors and weapons, some stuff that adds in dummied-out content, and this really nice clothing mod that adds hundreds of clothing items that are just kinda remixes of game stuff so it matches nicely. And a mod that adds lady soldiers to Imperial patrols.
I’ve been trying to find jewelry mods for a while but they’re all delicate and overly intricate. Same with hair.
Can’t people make mods that match the actual game, for real? And make skin textures that don’t look greasy? At least the Sims doesn’t have that problem anymore. (So much Maxis Match for Sims 4, delicious.)
Your analogy would be more accurate if it went something like this:
Roger: I want to donate money to the KKK, so they can defend us against meteorites!
Mamotheers: What? Why would you support a clearly bigoted association in order to gain protection against something literally astronomically unlikely to happen, especially when there is no evidence that any of the KKK’s policies would do anything to prevent meteorites from falling to earth?
Roger: Are you saying that NO ONE has ever been killed by a meteorite or other space debris?
Mamotheers: No, but but the chances of it happening are incredibly small, and there are dozens of way larger threats to life that could be lessened in ways that DON’T involve giving money to the KKK.
Roger: Well the numbers might be tiny NOW but we’ve been sending lots of satellites into space; they’re all going to come crashing down someday!
Mamotheers: That’s not how… Look, how will the KKK even stop this from happening?
Roger: Well obviously the KKK are going to build missiles so they can blow up the meteorites before they hit earth.
Mamotheers: So your solution to an infintesimally small risk is to give violent bigots weapons that can be used to kill hundreds of people at once?
Roger: They’re obviously not going to use the missiles to kill PEOPLE. Well, not ordinary people, anyway.
Mamotheers: …Yeah, this is why we tend to just mock you with GIFs.
I really have to go back into the Nexus and dig into the mods that are there. I really want more diversity in clothes and shoes and stuff; more visual diversity is awesome.
(I am also a super-roleplaying-nerd and will do things like, on arriving in a city, go to an inn and change from armour to clothes, just to fit in better. I wish they would react to that sort of thing! C’mon Bethesda, this is supposed to be all GOAP’ey and stuff, fancy AI and all that, come on now!)
I will take your advice next time I go in!
I actually have a commerce mod that has a part that you can adjust prices and services based on what you’re wearing (plus a bunch of other things)! I think it’s called Trade and Barter.
My mods are only to expand on what the game offers, or tweak things here and there for more realism. (Like this animation mod I got so your character performs opening doors, picking ingredients, looting, etc.) I don’t do Adidas shoes mods or whatever so I think we’re on the same page here.
It’s guys like Roger that make me feel bad for playing Lawful Evil characters or liking the Overlord/Dungeon Keeper series. I do it because I like playing the cartoon villains or want to see how much of a moral code I can get away with while still being not Darth Vader, not as some excuse to drink the blood of virgins or find some fantastical reason for genocide.
I don’t.
http://i.imgur.com/nF19SzB.gif
@Oogly
Nonsense. Your self indulgence is what makes the poetry good ?
@Catalpa
Perfect!
Other than the people that kept me coming back there were a couple of things that I miss from the general image board format. One was the language involving pictures. A habit that can form on an image board is posting a picture with every single post to provide emotional subtext. That really gets addicting and I think that I went through something I want to compare to withdrawal when I posted in places where that would have been weird exclusively. I started out as a Pinkie poster, went to Twilight, and then used Discord until I left.
Another one was watching memes evolve. Have any of you ever watched a meme evolve? From when the things everyone gets amused by appears…
…and then everyone disassembles it into pieces and swaps parts with other parts of the things the community likes…
…and then it just blows up and society does what it does.
@Scildfreja
http://i.imgur.com/BJhTUf6.gifv
http://i.imgur.com/tC5INVE.gifv
@Scildfreja
I had to think about this one for a while. For some reason the chemical senses like smell and taste were more difficult for me to wrap my brain around, and that was the impression I had a the time. It still seems to me that the chemical senses process in some unique ways as far as the basic logic seems to work compared to hearing, touch and vision. For example I seem to remember their primary cortex regions are not as straightforward.
But the anatomy gets even more difficult to figure out than the rest of the brain on average in that area so maybe it’s still similar patterns scrunched together.
What did you have in mind?
@Handsome “Punkle Stan” Jack
Well if you don’t feel bad, why should I?
Nothing wrong with evil when it’s this cute.
http://nisamerica.com/games/mylord/wp/data/wp5.jpg
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Overlord.jpg
At first seeming to be an uncaring ruler, upon closer inspection takes proper care to make sure all of his minions are clearly visible for the group shot. A lesser Overlord probably would get the camera angle wrong or not practice proper hygiene nor encourage his minions to do the same.
http://www.ealasaid.com/fan/vetinari/images/vetport.jpg
“Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.”
– Havelock Vetinari, Discworld
Plus Paradise Lost would be so dull without Satan as the lead.
Ohmigosh I love that one. Super immersion time go!
http://pinkie.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/rsz/mlfw4974_huge.png
I have! It’s wonderful and fascinating. (Aside, I am actually sort of grumpy about how “meme” has become “funny picture”, when its original meaning was do deliciously nuanced and useful. Oh well, I unfortunately am not the language police)
I’m on my tablet so likely won’t be too verbose here. It’s been shown that a lot of the processing that we figured happened in the brain is actually happening in more distant nerves. Lots of visual processing happens in the retinas themselves, for example. To my memory, the same thing’s happening with all of the senses. So, again, it’s a picky little detail that in no way changes your overall message! But you seem to like that sort of attention to detail, so I figured it’d be a worthwhile observation for you.
@Ooglyboggles
Isn’t the Overlord technically the lesser evil in the games, anyway? Unless you pick Velvet over Rose because goth chicks are obviously much more evil and then you’re the only slightly lesser evil?
Also, I am NOT the person you should be judging your moral compass with, believe you me.
Oops. That was a little descriptive of what regularly happens around here. In my head I wanted to convey something about degree and how often. Some of us exclusively communicated that way and there is something really useful and addictive about mixing modes of communication like that. Something synergistically comes out of it. There were people who I would argue conversed in poetry.
Something inside me wants to yell “it’s iconography!”
/awake
Ahhh, Dungeon Keeper. That’s my childhood, right there. When we first got the internet, I was terribly excited ’cause it meant I could look up Dungeon Keeper fansites. Still can’t get past mission 11 of War for the Overworld, though.
Speaking of mods… I got sick of Skyrim pretty quickly, but I’ve done a lot of modding for Fallouts 4 and NV. The difference between the two fanbases is pretty apparently. I mean, they both have well-thought-out bugfixes, gameplay tweaks and immersion boosters, and they both have mods to turn the games’ entirely female population into hentai problems… but one has a lot more of one and the other has a lot more of the other, y’know?
(Actually, one of my favourite FO4 mods was the one that let you sew everything-proof ballistic weave into all clothes, not just a small selection, so that my companions and I can be stylish -and- bulletproof, 24/7!)
@Handsome
Great, now you made me realize that Overlord was a parable of how thinking you’re inherently more moral by being the “Hero” can easily lead you down a very bad path self indulgent corruption. And the main villain is an absentee father who got possessed by your predecessor and made everyone corrupt, and you stop him with the help of his daughters who don’t like him much.
Oh god the Overlord games are insidious anti male propaganda pieces calling about against people who would leave their comrade for dead and loot the Second Overlord’s stuff like common thieves. Even the main player’s powers are a critique of the Chosen One, by making it so that your power comes from the minions, not from you yourself. And your mistresses pretty much run your base and in many cases are better at being an administrator type leader than you. Even worse, they don’t get convinced by your charms, they chose to help run your Evil Base and worse, like being in power and are good at it.
One of my favorite games, its writing being part of the reason I was charmed, was written by a woman. How could I have not known with such a blatant satire of toxic masculinity.
You could swap that with practically any form of MRA and it wouldn’t change much in context.
I am genuinely shocked.
@ Roger
You left out the part where person A only believes the device will make planes safer because they refuse to acknowledge a vast body of research which proves they’ve a) grossly overestimated the danger posed by planes and b) the device doesn’t work as advertised.
I’m going to leave this here too, because I’m just tired of dealing with the willingly ignorant.