Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

You left out Spider-Woman’s leotard. Purple boot — maybe Scarlet Witch?

Meanwhile, who else noticed on watching some of the recent Marvel films back to back that the Marvel universe has two major family lines of engineering experts with involvement in the arms industry, one good and one evil. The good family’s surname is Stark. The evil one’s surname is Trask. These are anagrams of one another.

You can see two generations of Starks in the single film Captain America: Civil War, and two generations of Trasks by watching X-Men: Days of Future Past and X2: X-Men United (in that order). And the elder Stark and the elder Trask are both assassinated, the one by the Winter Soldier and the other by Mystique … until X-Men: Days of Future Past revises the timeline, that is. Both families also have had TV appearances now, Howard Stark in Agent Carter while The Gifted has Trasks as major villains. The Trask-designed Sentinels also keep cameoing, usually in X-Men movies in Danger Room sessions.

With the Fox/Disney merger, how long do you think it will be before a Stark and a Trask meet on-screen? (Or at the very least until Iron Man fights a Sentinel or something.)

@Shadowplay

Gamergate idiots are still about? 3 1/2 years later?

I’m not. These guys are classic grievance collectors, and so hard up for legitimate examples of grievance that they cling to the half-dozen marginal examples they can cling to. “Big Red.” “Trigglypuff.” “Matt Taylor’s Shirt.” “Manspreading!” I still find Twitter goons bring up freakin’ “manspreading” as if that was the biggest culture war battlefield out there!

And in the next breath, these are the same jokers that want to put the brakes on #MeToo for going “too far.” Just zero self-awareness.

Racism is creeping back into mainstream science – we have to stop it

I can see the problem and I think it has multiple knots that need untying. One is if these people come from tenured positions, that tenure and that academic body of work is their ticket to an editorial board position. Second is that the people proclaiming that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” won’t be the ones to feel the impact of the racism seized upon by these articles. Third is that these scientific articles are often misrepresented by media outlets that distort their findings, even if they do pass peer review.

Ask me the answer and I think it takes a combined approach. Science education needs to be improved so media clickbait doesn’t trick people. Academics really need to have a firm grasp on who these people are and be prepared to resist the influence of racists with an ulterior agenda and marginalize fringe people when necessary. The media needs to stop promoting crap like The Bell Curve which has no more academic validity than a Deepak Chopra book.

Despite tenure, guys like Philippe Rushton at Western languished in obscurity and rightly so.

But to take the point a bit further… I’m worried about science being abused by transphobes in a way that was certainly done in the past, but seems to be more pernicious on social media. I can’t help but be reminded of Magnus Hirschfeld, a name that should honestly be spoken of more if for no other reason than to remind the public that science has a keen humanitarian interest and biology is not walled off from the social aspect of gender the way TERFs want to pretend. Hirschfeld should also stand as a solemn example of what authoritarians can wreak upon academic institutions if their findings don’t conform to fascist dogma, for his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft stood as a bright light in Weimar Germany for the study of sexuality and gender expression. But even Hirschfeld could see the writing on the wall and fled the rising tide of Nazism, leaving much of his work to be lost in the book-burnings that followed.

It’s the same phenomenon that lead to eugenics and justified black slavery: a bunch of a-holes say “You’re not worth caring about and here’s some ‘science’ that justifies why we’re treating you as less than human.” No, it’s not science that says that; it’s you. Science illuminates the human tableau, which is why I found it enthralling enough to pursue after high school.

Remove the human element… well, you get Blade Runner 2049, which I finally got around to watching. The original Blade Runner is one of those films that I think is a masterpiece, but so bleak that I only watch it once every few years. 2049 was not quite up to the lofty heights of the original, but was just as visually engaging and atmospheric. Ironically enough, it was almost ten years to the day after I watched Armitage III on TV (which I remember because it was the first thing I watched when I moved to Lakefield) and was struck by the similarities in plot. But the concepts of reproductive capacity as a measure of personhood, the disposable underclass, the marginalization and shameless sexualization of women’s bodies for corporate profit, timeless topics that need to be explored.

Where I think 2049 fell down on was some aspects of pacing, and Hans Zimmer’s farty music score. Zimmer’s a solid composer who I consider at his best when doing high-tension instrumentals, but Vangelis’ score from the original film had the variety that such a moody, atmospheric film really needed.

I’ve also got a few questions about the statues sitting in the Nevada desert… mostly along the lines of “the hell????”

@Katamount

Completely agree with your assessment on gamergate – I just figured that, gamergate coming mostly from the chans, they’d either get bored or fracture into opposing factions, like they normally do. They enjoy infighting far more than anything else, by the looks.

Bit saddened, really.

Regarding the statues in 2049, I’ve seen a couple theories. The one I can most agree with is discussed (fairly superficially) here. Link goes to a lot of spoilers, for those who have not yet seen the movie.

In twitter news, Unilever (the biggest consumer goods company in the world) is threatening to pull all ads from both Twitter and Google if they don’t sort their shit out.

@Shadowplay

Well if that’s coming from Villenueve’s mouth, then I guess that’s what it’s meant to be… it just strikes me as a bit odd for such statues to be that toweringly gigantic in a place that went out of its way to radiate glamour (no pun intended). Those statues were large enough to be seen from a plane. O.o

Granted, holographic Joi advertisements spring to life fully nude, 12 stories tall and beckoning to passing men, so clearly the world of 2049 lost all pretenses of modesty some time back.

From the article Weird (thumper of trumpanzees) Eddie linked:

There are plenty of mediocre comic books about straight white men that these guys don’t even talk about.

They also like to wave around direct market (comic book store) sales data to “prove” that diverse titles aren’t good. Never mind that:

1) Given how the system works (non-returnable stuff ordered 3 months in advance on very slim info) the only thing these sales represent how much faith the stores have in the titles.
2) Titles featuring white men are canceled thanks to low sales regularly too. (From Black Knight to Foolkiller.)

@Shadowplay

#MeToo shuts out eroticism

Seems to be a frequent criticism from the “MeToo has gone TOO FAR” crowd. IIRC that was a big part of the French petition against MeToo:
https://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/full-translation-of-french-anti-metoo-manifesto-signed-by-catherine-deneuve

It’s also a great example of every sickening anti metoo argument.
-What about the mens careers!
-Limits sexual freedom
-Hurts “artistic expression”
-Makes male/female “courtship” less fun and less “Sexy”
etc. (rubbing on the subway is okay? WTF?!)
-Slippery Slope to puritanism

“Next we’ll have a smartphone app that adults who want to sleep together will have to use to check precisely which sex acts the other does or does not accept.”

Imagine the horror! (BTW saw an episode of Black Mirror where they literally had this app and the couple somehow managed to still have satisfying sex.)

@calmdown

That is the best summary of the BS arguments against #MeToo that I’ve seen. And as I read them over, it strikes me that the element that unites all of them is the implicit assumption that women are sexual gatekeepers. Why else would this hashtag have a chilling effect on eroticism or courtship? Only if sexual contact is a goal for men (forgive the heteronormativity) that must be extracted from a less-then-keen woman would this ever be a problem.

Fuck, this is a trope that has been the cause of so many freakin’ cultural problems. The “Friend Zone.” “Scoring.” “The Game.” “Involuntary celibacy.” “She just regrets it.” All of it is predicated on women as sexual gatekeepers, providing access or denying it for their own malicious wiles.

I’ve written my fair share of sexy stories (I’ve actually been meaning to do a word count and I’m sure some of the unedited ones are novella length….) and there’s plenty of eroticism to be found between enthused lovers. Why rip a bodice when it’s being taken down inch by inch?

@Shadowplay @Katamount

Thanks, I’ve just heard the complaints so many times now I’m much more familiar than I’d like to be with them! I agree that they definitely rely on women being the sexual gatekeepers. This makes it the woman’s responsibility to stop harassment/assault because men “can’t help it” and it’s this BS all-powerful biological drive. I remember in High School that we only talked about consent in relation to how the woman has to say “No” adamantly enough to convince the helpless male to stop. Like it would be her fault if he didn’t listen. I hope it’s better nowadays, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up, I went to school in a pretty conservative area.

Then we have these people saying that “pestering” is a normal part of courtship, which is obviously so wrong, but look at how many still believe it! I really don’t know how to talk to someone like that. I’m tired of having to explain consent to people who it sometimes seems are being willfully obtuse! Jordan Peterson (bleghh!) said some dumb stuff recently too about how men and women can’t work together because we “don’t know what the rules are anymore.” Why is this so hard for some people to get? btw Katherine Deneuve also defended Roman Polanski (no surprise there).

Oh, and I forgot one more talking point: be sure to compare #metoo to “witch hunts” at some point.

Jordan Peterson (bleghh!) said some dumb stuff recently too about how men and women can’t work together because we “don’t know what the rules are anymore.”

Maybe we should start turning this back around on them.

“I agree. If men can’t stop themselves from harassing women, they can’t work together. I guess this means men are unsuited for the workplace. At the very least, they’re unsuited to be in positions of power. But really, just to be on the safe side, men should probably stay home and cook dinner for their wives and clean the house.”

If the guy has to fuck off and go flip burgers – he might burn his wienie!

Hey, I can’t help it if my idea has a few extra benefits! 😛

I heard somewhere recently that the only two white actors in Black Panther are Martin Freeman, who played Bilbo Baggins, and Andy Serkis, who played Gollum.

They’re the Tolkien white guys.