By David Futrelle
It’s not exactly news that former space show actor William Shatner can be something of a dick. And in the year of our dark lord 2017 all dicks end up on Twitter, so it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Shatner has been acting like a dick on Twitter.
But I have to say I was a little bit taken aback to see Capt. Kirk adopting not only some of the opinions but the lingo of the terrible people who congregate in or around the Alt Right. In a series of recent tweets, Shatner has railed against so-called SJWs and castigated his opponents as “snowflakes,” a term that seems to have almost replaced what seems to have been his previous favorite patronizing putdown, “sunshine.”
He’s also picked up one of the favorite terms of the Men’s Rights movement: “misandry.” He started using it earlier this year, slipping it into his disquisitions on the evils of political correctness and feminism and whatnot.
Needless to say, his thoughts on the subject are not particularly enlightening, consisting mostly of assertions that “misandry exists.”
Misandry is real. Sorry. https://t.co/HzNcwWhbhV
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) February 20, 2017
You can say that about misandry all you want but it exists. 🤷🏼♂️ https://t.co/fKhNpEt6h1
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) May 1, 2017
Misogyny exists. Problem is that she didn't want to accept misandry does, too. https://t.co/f1mlk7wKek
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) May 1, 2017
Misandry does exist & toxic masculinity is a skewed definition. So boohoo that I used a word you don't believe exists & 🙄 on a phrase. https://t.co/kAaBVj4lXn
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) June 2, 2017
He is also keen for his Twitter followers to know that, yes, he in fact sometimes uses the word.
All of that is true. I also use words like snowflake and misandry. What's your point sunshine? https://t.co/3Z0Zj1USIX
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) July 31, 2017
And this is your failure of logic. SJWs stand for inequality, where they are superior to any one else hence my use of Misandry and Snowflake https://t.co/8uBGuFFM7a
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) July 31, 2017
Tweets reiterating these two points pretty much make up the entirety of his commentary on the evils of misandry.
I look forward to his further contributions to misandry theory.
Hold on — reality shows have “stories”?
Well, it’s not like I’ve actually sat through a whole episode of one. I’ve merely had the misfortune to have had roommates etc. at times who have done so in my presence, while I tried to tune it out to the best of my ability and do something else. Preferably something involving earphones and music/dialogue/lighting zombies on fire.
Oh gosh yes. I’m pretty sure the reason that the reality shows are so powerful on TV is because they’re just viral marketing campaigns. Cheap to produce and bring in huge piles of money from the companies sponsoring them. People living in Alaska? Paid for by Alaskan tourism companies and gun manufacturers. Cooking show? Quisinart and whatever other stuff they’re using. Home reno show? Paid for by construction/reno lobbies, tool manufacturers, and the like.
That’s why they eat time slots and seem to do well regardless of how much people watch them. The ratings almost don’t matter at all, and they certainly don’t matter more than inputs for a number-of-eyeballs-per-show marketing calculation. They’re modern day infomercials.
The whole thing is designed to hook into your autonomic system and force you to watch it. Intense sounds, fast movements, human voices with signs of strain – these things engage our fight or flight responses. That suppresses critical thinking, creates anxiety, and can also create an emotional attachment if we have good feelings about the subject as well. That’s why they have gentle periods and will put in cute or sweet moments with the characters, so that you identify them as “friend”. This way when the drama club hits you, you get emotionally invested. You’re in their tribe, on their team.
A natural extension of that is to signal membership in that tribe, by undertaking activities and behaviours typical to them. Doing your own home renos, going on a hunting trip, whatever. That’s the behaviour the whole process is designed to encourage. They want the viewer to feel as if they are friends with/kin with the characters in the show, and induce stress to make you want to demonstrate that kinship. And it works.
Reality TV’s creepy, you guyse. I don’t like it :C
@ History Nerd
I haven’t had much to so with the online autistic community because I only got my initial diagnosis in late January, I’ve still got assessments to do to get it all official, but I’ve heard about Autism Speaks in all their horribleness.
Re: pay walls
Some of them rely on cookies, so opening the page in incognito mode (Chrome) or in Private (IE) will bypass them.
@Scildfreja:
Sounds like quite the right-wing psyops, both from the fiscal right (buy more! Make corporate America great again!) and, increasingly, the social right (border security et. al.).
And using some of the techniques of dysphoric rituals to induce group identification. (You can read more about those over at cliodynamica, of course.)
Disturbing.
Raises the question of why, though? I can think of three alternative explanations, off the top of my head:
1. Organic outgrowth of existing trends, assorted corporate ideas, some encouragement here and there from the security sector and the usual suspect right wing think tanks, etc., but no overarching conspiracy.
2. Right-wing conspiracy aimed at world domination.
3. First comes the brainwashing via TV, then the mesh caps, and then the Tripods. They’re heeeeeere…
@Scildfreja:
Oh hey, it me.
Oh, no no, @Surplus, it isn’t some sort of psy-op nonsense. It’s marketing. The whole point of it is to make you engage in behaviours that require you to spend money.
There’s no conspiracy here, this is just what late-game Capitalism looks like. People as Consumers, being configured to consume. Communities as Markets to be exploited and managed in the same way that logging companies exploit and manage forests. Horrifying on its own, no conspiracies required.
The right wing influence shows, on the other hand – hard to tell where the funds on those comes from. They are more than likely not primarily funded by right wing think tanks. They’re just fulfilling a demand for authoritarian shows. I don’t know, though, that’s a guess.
@dslucia, oh dear. I was being sort of sassy with that picture actually, very sorry :s
Reality TV arguably has four types of story going on within it at any given time, though the production and advertising teams desperately want you to believe it’s only one type:
1: Naturally occurring events. This is the one that they like to claim is happening all the time, of course, but the truth is way more complicated. Example: One of the contestants, in the first season of Survivor, falling asleep from exhaustion and actually tipping into the bonfire he was tending, burning badly enough they had to ship him off the show.
2: Staged events. These involve the personas of the show deciding to deliberately ‘up the drama’ in order to make things more entertaining (or at least, what they believe the audience wants to see). Example: Ninety percent of any show with the words “Real Housewives” in it. Also, Jersey Shore.
3: Manipulated events. Here, rather than the personas creating the drama, it’s the producers deliberately instigating fights or creating ‘shock’ scenarios. My most memorable version of this was “Average Joe”, where the entire premise was built around getting women to be surprised that they were on a dating show featuring guys who were, frankly, not even ‘average’ in the conventional looks department–and then surprising the guys by introducing a bunch of typical The Bachelor contestants partway through to compete against them.
4: Edited storylines. Here, the producers take interviews taken at different times in the series, and splice them together with the regular footage in order to create what looks like a narrative, but was anything but prior to the editing room.
***********
Voyager, for me, had 7 major flaws:
1: Neelix
2: The Maquis rebellion angle from the set-up was really interesting. Okay, halfway through the first season, we’re done with it, until we bring it up at random and always in a very hamfisted manner that made it clear that anyone still holding onto the old grudges was dead wrong, and the Federation was always wonderful.*
3: Neelix
4: The plots. Sometimes they worked, but some were just horrible, and then there’s Threshold which I consider the nadir not only of the series, but the franchise as a whole. I’d sooner re-watch Spock’s Brain.
5: Neelix
6: Q was unnecessarily creepy in the series, and I always wanted Janeway to respond the way Sisco did.
7: Did I mention Neelix?
* Side-note: I find that a lot of shows seem to shy away from their original, intriguing and novel premise, and immediately veer into something more akin to shows that already exist. It’s… unfortunate. My go-to example was Person of Interest, which started as a really cool (albeit creepy as hell) notion of an AI directing the good guys to intervene at the right moment to stop a small-scale crime from happening, which was ditched very quickly for a ‘battle the evil mob boss’ plot that dragged on far too long for my tastes.
Today sucks. Really don’t want to get into why. I just need wine. And kittens.
@Scildfreja:
Oh, nothing to be sorry about, at least in reference to me. That’s the sort of sassy way I’d leave a thread, and it’d be true too, ’cause that’s the kind of music I love. XD
<3 Kupo! All the kitties and wine for you. And thanks, @dslucia!
I refer to them as “Allistics Speak”.
A documentary about events that haven’t happened yet but look more and more likely as time grinds on.
@kupo
http://i.imgur.com/CeGrDfw.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/O8EWeKd.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/NKxzY3s.jpg
@Jesalin
OMG those kitties are gorgeous!
@kypo
I don’t know what PBS is ))) first time i watched is on ‘dave’ – TV channel that my dad likes in England.
Neeelix was annoying for the simple reason of drawing out sometimes mildly funnly responses, mainly from Tuvok.
The Doctor and Seven of Nine received some meaningful character development in Voyager, the rest were bland caricatures. Doesn’t come close to Deep Space 9.
Holy fucking shit I just love that David’s first reference is simply a google search for what a jerk William Shatner is. I cackled for 5 minutes straight. Seriously.
If anyone thinks that this is a result of a shobby job done by a social media crew, check out the Mary Sue article* about William Shatner making a joke about how a women’s place is in the fridge 3 fucking times at a con. Because I guess if no-one laughs at a misogynistic joke about a misogynistic trope the first 2 times, the 3rd time must be the charm?
William Shatner has been the proverbial Not-All Man in twitter fandom for years, flitting from fandom to fandom defending all the poor white male actors from meanie pants female fans**, often for the terrible crime of being queer, female, femslash shippers with opinions. In the OUAT fandom he took on the SwanQueen fandom (along with Yvette Nicole Brown***), in Outlander he took on the much creepier female fans who ship the actors themselves. And he’s done this in other fandoms as well, again often against women, often queer women.
So yeah, fuck him.
*Let me just point out that the phrase “set-phasers-to-sexist” is quite frankly the best sentence I’ve ever read in reference to William Shatner ever.
**Though, to be fair, fandoms do tend to be dumpster fires fueled by toxic wastes.
*** At one point she supposedly said something like “Jesus fix it” in reference to Swen. Which… is a “fun” intersection of black colloquialisms meeting queer fandom.
Welp, fuck I typoed my email address. Again. Woops, sorry.
One thing I wanted to add, is when Shatner goes on these twitter wars with “bullies”, a lot of the time what happens is that his followers dogpile on whoever he’s arguing with and dox them, threaten them, whatever. He’s not stupid, he should know this happens.
So yeah, fuck him.
The Twilight books. Because in addition to wrapping a thinly-disguised self-insert fantasy about an abusive relationship and Mormon propaganda in the trappings of a popular mythos… they’re just terribly written!
Seriously, the whole series is like this! http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/post/28889817150
I’ve read my fair share of paranormal romance and the vast majority are better written than those books. Sexier too.
On the other hand, they do serve as a great reminder to me as an aspiring fiction writer that if Meyer can get her stuff published, there’s hope for me yet. Hell, after re-reading my first work, I’m a better writer than Meyer. My sentences aren’t minivans. So Twilight… you inspire me.
By contrast, the movies are hysterical. I re-watched ’em with the Rifftrax on and it’s clear that Pattinson, Michael Sheen and Mustache Dad are the only ones in on the joke. Sheen’s hamminess is pure gold through and through.
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
Oh, thanks for telling me about how my opinions came about. It’s not possible that they came about by means other than you claim or are subject by me to constant review. You’re definitely the expert on how I came to believe things and maintain them as I carry on throughout my turgid existence.
I’ll be sure to consult you in future about why I believe things and please feel fucking free to tell people why I believe whatever it is you think I believe. That is not fucked up at all.
You’re right, I apologize.
Re: Reality TV
Charlie Brooker did a nice little piece about the techniques used to promote a particular impression or narrative.
If Luke’s lightsaber has developed its own Force-stuff, so that it helps Finn and it’s not just due to his “natural skill” (idk why the quotations), why is the same not true for Rey? What about when Finn feels the deaths of the villagers in one of the first scenes?
Finn is Force-sensitive just like Rey is. He’s as much the awakening as Rey is. Fandom counts him out because he’s black.
vweeeeeee