Apparently if a movie series has female protagonists some of the time, it’s an outright cultural assault on men. At least that’s what one Men’s Rights Redditor is arguing. About Star Wars. Take it away, Vinniikii:
Most men lost Disney decades ago, the ethnic men and other non cis white heterosexual men lost Disney even earlier. We didn’t get to enjoy misandrist animations, we had to find stories that celebrated men on our own.
For most of many men’s life, Star Wars was the gold standard for that entertainment.
I did not know that Star Wars was the only force, heh heh, holding up masculinity in the west.
While Lucas lost his way in the 2000s with the movies, men online used video game technology to create huge communities. Star Wars meant imaginative freedom and complicated accomplishment.
MALE SAFE SPACE!
Now, Disney has begun the misandrification of Star Wars.
“Misandrification,” huh?.
The foregrounding of evil old man Palpatine and abandonment of huge open galaxy for feminist, single mother ruins. The constant ideology and purposeful teaching moments.
Er, I’m admittedly a couple of Star Wars movies behind but what the fuck are you talking about, dude?
Even many of the feminists this is supposed to cater to, reject it on sight as false, a rehash of rehash, so resolutely insistent on hating men that it refuses to allow them to succeed or prosper in any way.
How are these movies male hating?
Do you have the conditioned response to pervasive Disney influenster misandry? I know whenever I see their pseudo original memes I cringe, the same reaction I used to have to fratty homophobic presentation, this material is going to hate and demean men without warning. The “safe target” is evil no matter who the scape goat.
I’m completely lost at this point. Maybe give some examples of this terrible misandry of which you speak?
So much of gamer hate is simple misandry. They are so reactionary and attack focus they forget to achieve or accomplish. So sad to see Disney become the locus of current hate, using false narrative of “accessibility/inclusion” to profile and exclude. Changing Star Wars bc they couldn’t compete.
Well, that answers precisely none of my questions.
In the comments, though, Vinniikii gives a couple of examples of the misandrificationizing of which he speaks. After accusing one critic of “gaslighting,” he declares that
Padme is high key the star of 2 and Obi/Qui are gay so you don’t really have a point. Jar Jar is a misandrified Chewbacca. Also the whole single mother plot line in 1. … Ewoks are neutered Chewbacca. Every movie had less virility.
Ewoks are “neutered?” They’re murderous forest monsters who may be eating the stormtroopers they kill. Don’t mess with Ewoks.
Elsewhere in the comments Vinniikii suggests that
we’ve finally started to come out of the total man-hating era where a man couldn’t even wear the traditional symbol of masculine pride, a fedora.
This made me wonder for a moment if Vinniikii was a troll, but a scroll through his comment history suggests that, nope, he’s serious. Ridiculous, but serious.
But what do I know? I’m a misandrificationalist.
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@Surplus,
Well, this is about what I expected.
Your reasoning here is not solid. Apart from the many other possible causes that involve no human action (of which Contrapangloss listed just a few), there are such things as human error, negligence, or just a chain of events where no one even made any mistakes or bad choices.
For example, a scenario that comes to my mind is a mechanical problem that couldn’t be properly fixed immediately because the one person who would normally be present and know how to has COVID and people were scrambling to find a temporary fix.
Or a new employee did not follow proper procedure and it took some time to find someone who could get it properly sorted.
Or a software “update” to their system was buggy, attempts to fix it went badly, and it took time to get it reverted. The update was buggy because it wasn’t thoroughly tested, because the developer was under pressure from their clients and decided that getting the update out now was more important, and that they could always patch any problems that came up later.
Do you notice what those scenarios have in common? None of the involve any bad actors, and none of them have anything to do with you. Likely none of the people involved even have any idea who you are.
But what is very concerning to me is that whenever some event like this happens, your immediate response is “This has to have been done deliberately, and to hurt me specifically.” That is extremely irrational and concerning.
Even assuming there was some malefactor, so many of the events that you describe as targeting you would have affected many, many people, yet you insist that you must have been the target. That is not just irrational, it is unhealthy and worrying.
Did WHTM go down just for you? You know it didn’t, as others here have clarified.
Did ONLY your power go out? Nobody else lost power? Almost certainly not. And yet, even humoring your certainty of a malefactor, why must it have been someone “punishing or bullying” YOU and catching others in the outcome, and not that someone else was the “target” and you and others the “collateral damage?” Do not take this as any acceptance of your baseless claims of your problems being caused deliberately, I am just showing the flaws that follow those claims.
You are not well. You need help. You have repeatedly demonstrated delusions of persecution that are a sign of probably more serious mental health issues, and you need to get help for them. Please get help.
@ surplus
I really hate to see you distressed like this. But as others have commented, you need to be aware that your comments can cause distress to others. Specifically, blowing up all angry, but then going back to being calm, without acknowledging or even referencing the blow up is behaviour that some people may have encountered, or are even experiencing now in abusive relationships. So it’s bound to be a bit unnerving for them. It’s that ticking time bomb uncertainty that puts people on edge. I’m not for a second suggesting you mean to upset people; but perhaps be aware of how your actions may affect people around you?
I appreciate that one person’s good advice is another person’s pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But people here are genuinely trying to help you. So even if you find the advice unsuitable, perhaps just acknowledge that they took time to try. Bit of courtesy and appreciation never hurts.
But as to the matter at hand, Surplus, you’re a really smart person. So I think it might be worth your time exploring the phenomenon referenced here. Just see if it gives you a path to getting out of your unfortunate situation.
https://www.apsychology.family/news-1/2018/3/21/hyperactive-agency-detection-device
Thanks all for the sympathy on the dialysis crisis. It was really rough, partly because my kidney disease was the one aspect of my health that I felt was at least under control.
Feeling the increased effects of kidney disease for a few days on top of my other issues (notably AVN in my left hip, meaning I can barely walk, and tendonitis in my right thumb, rendering it largely unusable) has not been good for my mental health.
@Allandrel
Having several health problems is exhausting all by itself, nevermind when you get problems with your dialysis. I hope you are sufficietly dialysised(?) now.
With respect to the origins of chirality,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)
The only thought I have is maybe it’s related to Flemming’s right-hand rule?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleming%27s_right-hand_rule
That’s the only thing I know of that might put a bias in place. But I haven’t thought it through very far.
It’s possible that at a level only one choice is geometrically possible with how things were added to acetyl+NH3,+SH, +…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetyl_group
So to be clear, this is not directed directly @Surplus, this is more a “oh hey the woes of things being down is reminding me of the woes of things being down.”
There’s been a lot of personal stuff going down for me that I’m not entirely up to sharing, but ‘funny’ inconvenience of note:
Where I live, all the trash gets shipped/barged/trained out for lack of waste services in the county. Not terribly long ago, the compactor that lets the waste group condense a county’s worth of garbage into a reasonable volume for transit broke. Because Covid and parts problems, it was down long enough they stopped collections…
…right when I was at a point for reasons (out of my control) where my trash generation had increased AND my motivation to reach the dumpster the bulk of the month previous had been nil. So, there I was with three small kitchen bags of trash sitting in my bathtub where they could be kept from the doggo whilst I was at work. And my landlord wanted to do apartment inspections…
They finally fixed the compactor just in time for a different part to break on the same compactor two days later. They’re doing Very Limited drop offs/pickups, but we’ve literally only had a fully operational operation for two days in this entire month.
The compactor was not out to spite us. Or the entire county. I mean, it’s a good reminder for folks that trash doesn’t magically evaporate in dumpsters so I guess that’s good(?) or something.
I also work in the upkeep of different large equipment. And while yes, it is prudent to keep some critical spare parts around and do good maintenance, you CAN be too thorough, and actually HURT the reliability of your equipment, ironically.
For instance, couplings! Any time you break into a coupling to check the lubrication/inner teeth/grid, you run the risk of not getting it realigned/relubricated or the fasteners properly torqued. Depending on the kind of coupling and operation, a minor misalign can range in severity from “eh whatever” to “oh no we just killed some people”, so the frequency of coupling checks and the amount of verification/quality control will also vary.
Any time you bust into a gearbox to make sure none of the gears are wearing/chipping/rolling, you run the risk of contaminating the oil or gear case, which can cause MAJOR problems in the fancy high speed high efficiency cases. There is nothing that can ruin someone’s day as much as even little metal shavings from grinding the machine foundation flat getting in the very fancy gearcase. Or misalligning the gear meshes. Or screwing up the fasteners for the case or gear covers.
I guess what I’m saying is, no matter how good the planning department is at keeping spare parts and scheduling maintenance outages, no matter how good the people working on the parts are, and no matter how robust the maintenance program is, there’s always a chance an inconvenient maintenance window is going to happen because stuff goes wrong. It’s what stuff does.
There’s lots of things that can be done to mitigate risk, but you can never 100% eliminate it. And mitigating can get prohibitively expensive for a local utility, so most of the time there’s just the “and we’re probably going to have this many outages a month and if outage time exceeds x we need to reassess” approach, with a quick “and this outage was caused by z, how can we/should we
And this has been “Life is Complicated” with Contrapangloss.
@ contrapangloss & brony
Well as we’re finding out from Brony, life is complicated at a molecular level. And then it all just goes from there.
But I do think the two things are related. It’s amazing that life works at all; especially us. We’re just big gloopy bags of chemicals that have somehow managed to organise themselves into a thing that can move around and think. But all those quirks of evolution and repurposed organs. It’s amazing we work at all.
Same though with society. I sometimes find it overwhelming at how complex our world is and the amazing way it actually manages to function. Like I can get a phone signal in the middle of a moor, I can buy a coffee at 3am on the motorway, someone has put pipes that take sewage away. And that’s all done by imperfect humans utilising technology with near infinite points of failure. It’s truly chaotic.
So I’m alway just amazed, and grateful, that we’re here at all; and some stuff works.
@ contrapangloss
I’ve a friend who makes their and a few others livings by having kit that can test whether you need to break a big bit of kit down now or it sounds good to go for another six months. I’m talking big like blast furnaces and power station turbines big. And sound is a part of the analysis, but beyond human hearing up and down. These huge machine are incredibly exxpensive to have off-line for repair, as well as being incredibly desructive of themselves and any humans around when they fail, so there is a living to be made keeping them going as long as is actually safe rather than safe according to the specs. I guess at some point some of the stuff that company do will work it’s way down to smaller kit and be economic for people like you to be able to do rather than having to open couplings or gear boxes up.
@Surplus
People who have nothing to do with the negative events in your life don’t owe you explanations as to why they occurred.
The fact several offered such explanations anyway shows they truly care.
A person’s due process rights are enforced by their government, not a bunch of commenters on a blog who don’t even live in the same country.
@Alan
I can’t easily find a review, but one way membranes are related is that the complex and mechanisms for how membranes are made are related to other complexes and mechanisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatty_acid_synthesis
Like non-ribosomal peptide synthases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonribosomal_peptide
Lots of things are collapsing down into rRNA and tRNA sequences so either membranes were environmental, made by a dual-purpose ancestor of the ribosome and those complexes, or membranes were added.
“The Ribosome as a Missing Link in Prebiotic Evolution III: Over-Representation of tRNA- and rRNA-Like Sequences and Plieofunctionality of Ribosome-Related Molecules Argues for the Evolution of Primitive Genomes from Ribosomal RNA Modules”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609737/
I can also imagine a planet with diverse molecular communities that fed off of and lived in minerals as much as the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen.
@contra: You’re obviously totally right, of course (and in a way that is funnily connected to your name, since if we lived in the best possible world bad stuff would never happen despite it being statistically near-inevitable because we got so lucky), but for someone like Surplus, there’s one more piece that’s necessary before that picture becomes reasonable to understand.
See, a smart person can recognize that of course there are breakdowns in systems on occasion, but still think that it’s implausible when it’s this frequent.
But for that to be a reasoned conclusion, one would have to know exactly how frequently one should expect this kind of breakdowns to be.
Like, for example, how often do sites like WHTM go down for maintenance?
I’ve checked here on and off for years and it’s not that common. And yet it obviously happens, and I know that from other sites who are also infrequently but very occasionally down.
Surplus would need to really think about how likely it is that the number of statistically odd bad things that keep happening around Surplus would be as high as it is and how many statistically odd good things that Surplus is missing.
I’m honestly wondering how the hell this guy looked at the original trilogy, where the Empire were a bunch of white guys while the heroes were a diverse coalition led by women, and said “yes this definitely supports my white patriarchy values”.
Late to the chirality party, but I was sorely disappointed when I recently found out oranges and lemons don’t have mirror-image limonine molecules (at least, with each other). Another myth shattered!
Re: “stuff happens”, yeah. It’s the Anna Karenina principle. There are many different ways for families/people to be unhappy, but relatively fewer paths to happiness (because you’re depending on every part of a complex system to function smoothly). It’s the same reason Christmas tree lights are often tangled when you take them out of the box, no matter how carefully you packed them the year before. Topologically, there’s only one way for them to be untangled, but many, many configurations that lead to snarls. Entropy isn’t personal. It’s the way of the universe.
Personally, like Alan, I’m astonished and grateful when it all goes right, or even when just some of the stars align. If you only ever focus on what goes wrong in life, you’ll just be endlessly frustrated. There’s so little that we control.
@hammerofglass:
I suspect a lot of these right-wingers root for the Empire and the rest just like watching manly men shooting at one another and blowing things up without caring much about the actual plot.
@contrapangloss:
You’ve no right to privacy where you live?! Here, a landlord can only intrude uninvited for certain emergencies (mostly, a fire or a water leak), and anything else requires a court order (e.g. eviction, search warrant, or similar).
@Allandrel:
They don’t have a backup for something as life-critical as dialysis machines? Shame on them!
Yes, I do notice what those scenarios have in common: carelessness. Moreover, an acute awareness of who they can get away with harming through carelessness, and who they can’t. I bet they are a lot more careful not to knock out the power to people like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates than they are when it’s just me, and other random nobodies, whose feet they might metaphorically step on. And that they scramble to fix it a lot faster when it affects one of them than when it affects only people like me. And that, too, indicates that they are making choices, that they have a concept of who it’s okay to casually harm via carelessness and who they actually have to respect and treat with decency. And I am saying that that is wrong; they should choose to treat every single person with the same care that they currently reserve for the rich and powerful.
For a concrete example, it’s clear that at some time yesterday a couple of hydro guys in southern Ontario had a conversation that went more-or-less like this:
“Shouldn’t we double check that before we tick that little box on the clipboard and drive away?”
“Nah; I want to knock off early today, maybe even catch the matinee showing of Fantastic Beasts 3. Besides, even if there’s an issue and this repair fails after only two hours or something, it’s only going to affect that poor neighborhood at the south edge of town. There’s nothing there but a church, a junkyard, a 7-11, and a few hundred druggies, welfare moms, and non-union burger-flippers and potential scabs. The Nob Hill hoity-toities won’t have the mayor showing up here and demanding we be fired from our nice, full-benefits union jobs or anything like that.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Time to relax.”
<cue the repair indeed failing at the 1h57m mark, and heel-dragging on going back out to the site to do it properly this time>
@Fred B-C (and contrapangloss and various others):
I would suggest “the least frequent they’ve been in the past” would be an upper bound. Since there were no outages here from the start of December clear through March, despite a few significant freezing rain events, I would submit that they are demonstrably capable of limiting outage frequency to once every three months and cumulative duration to a few hours a year (modulo summer thunderstorm surges/outages); events this month (and there have been no thunderstorms here this month) indicate that they simply are not choosing to do so right now. That is a choice I feel it well within my rights to take issue with. I would like them to provide for the whole year the same QoS they provide during the winter months; instead of their observed habit, which is to provide maximal QoS during the winter (they don’t want old grannies freezing to death and generating bad press, I guess) and then slacking off and half-assing it the other 9 months of each year.
@Prophet309:
This points toward a larger issue. Wherever I have ever gone, usually, people will, at least grudgingly, tolerate my presence if I’m either quiet and out of the way or else useful, but if I ever express having any needs of my own or object to anything, most people promptly reject me. Some will just ignore me, some will try to make me feel unwelcome, and some will go so far as to advocate for my removal or silencing by force. Apparently, other people get to at least occasionally express unmet needs and the like, but I am not permitted this.
Clearly, there is a double standard in how I am treated by, quite frankly, most of the population of this planet, one which cannot solely be explained by socio-economic status, since even low-income people treat me in this fashion. I think that double standard warrants exposing, explicating, and examining it, and of course then disposing of it.
There is a wider issue, too, of how “bottom of the pecking order” I get treated including by commercial and other entities. For example, the power reliability thing. I bet they don’t have very many outages at Jeff Bezos’s mansions; nor at 10 Downing or 1600 Pennsylvania; but who cares if a neighborhood in Podunk, Ont. seems to be blacked out more often than it’s lit?
I bet all of the rich and influential types can also, if it does happen to them, get power restored quickly with one phone call. Meanwhile, I can’t seem to get my OESP renewed with seven or more.
Perhaps it would be prohibitively expensive to give as good treatment QoS-wise to everyone as is currently given to the jet-setters and above, but surely there’s some sort of a middle ground?
Instead, the working class get the shaft, and even compared to others among the low-income, I, personally, get treated more like I’m furniture than a person. I get to be useful once in a while but heaven forbid it if I have any needs of my own; and if someone steps on my toes, at least metaphorically, they get mad at me for causing them to stumble, rather than apologize. Or if they’re a business entity I’m in a position of unequal bargaining power with, they will apologize, profusely and insincerely, while not lifting a finger to actually rectify the issue nor taking any sort of greater care in the future to avoid similar events.
I just realised! We’re talking about diversity in Star Wars and I forgot to post this…
@BQS:
That’s a privileged position. You are in a good enough situation that “when it all goes right” is a perk or a bonus, rather than something you have to have or Bad Things happen.
Contrast my situation, and specifically when they fuck with the hydro. The best case scenario is that I spend the next who-knows-how-long in a condition not entirely unlike being jailed: I can do next to nothing, just stare at the walls of my
cellhome, until the warden deigns to come by with the keys and let me out. If it went on long enough my food would spoil and I’d be out as much as a hundred bucks, maybe more, just on someone else’s whim; and it is a very threatening position for me to be in, where someone else can make me hemorrhage money any time they feel like it and there’s nothing I can do to defend against this possibility. That person has the power of life and death over me, or at least the ability to have me relocated to a cardboard box, if the mood strikes them, and there is no apparent mechanism of accountability to rein them in from doing so one day. The ODSP people who write my checks are in theory answerable to higher-ups and ultimately to the courts and to elected officials, whereas the people whose decisions determine how reliable the hydro here is, the ones who currently choose to cut some corners during the warmer 9 months and tighten up QoS only during the coldest three, apparently are not publicly accountable at all. And if they make the wrong decision, I could find myself living on the ground floor of a state-of-the-art ultra-low-energy-consumption portable lightweight ultra-sub-bungalow with a nice watermelon scent and a “Loblaws Produce Dept.” logo on the side.The worst case is I’d go to bed one night during one of our infamous “polar vortex” episodes in mid-winter and simply not wake up the next morning because they’d shut off the heat right after I’d gone to bed and never bothered to switch it back on again. That one might actually lead to manslaughter charges, or negligence charges or something, but if it did, I would be past caring at that point, wouldn’t I? (That’s the scenario, perhaps, that has them upping their QoS from December through February and often March, I expect — and thus proving that their noticeably shoddier QoS the entire rest of the year is a choice, rather than the best they could do within the realm of the practical. They provably can do better. They just don’t.)
@Surplus
Mumbled, eh? Your disrespect is noted, and I’ll be reporting you shortly.
@ buttercup
Appropriately enough in light of Brony’s work, that’s how someone explained protein folding to me.
@ brony
Are you familiar with Sagan and Clarke’s ideas about possible life in Jupiter’s atmosphere? A while ecosystem with simple lifeforms grazing on the hydrocarbons, then various other species predate on them.
I love the idea of the probe sampling Enceladus’ water spurts. I’d like to see us doing DNA trawls of all potential life habitats. Both in the solar system, but also on earth. Like in the oceans and upper atmosphere. Who knows what lurks? I suspect abiogenesis occurs all the time. But the newly emergent life gets gobbled up or just can’t compete with the pre-existing life. But it’s still worth checking to see if anything has managed to survive that. Some niche none of the locals have nabbed. Comparing DNA/RNA from a completely separate origin would be fascinating, and give us some clues as to what else might be out there?
@Surplus:
Then I’ll explain it for you. People try to help, and you snap at them, abuse them, and insult them.
We’re all tired of it. Stop.
Well, this might be helpful in elucidating the mechanism, at least. Evidently people perceive me as “snapping at, abusing, and insulting” them — even in a text medium where it is impossible to snap at anyone, and even if at no point did I engage in anything resembling name-calling — at least, none directed at the people in question, even if I may have had unkind words about someone not present, such as whichever idiot keeps tripping over the wrong cable over at Hydro HQ.
Now where would this perception actually be coming from? A pre-existing prejudice of some sort that colors the interpretation of whatever I actually did say? Some sort of bizarre reality-distortion field? Aliens? More data seems to be needed.
I’m going to passive aggressively leave this here: https://psychcentral.com/blog/maybe-the-problem-is-you#1
It addresses the old saying if everyone has a problem with you, then you might be the problem.
Anyway, Surplus, I don’t know what to tell you, it seems like there is no getting through to you. This makes me feel like I am one of many ganging up on someone who apparently is simply incapable of understanding anyone else’s point of view in this matter, which is unfair and makes me out to be a bully picking on, no nice way to say it and most likely violates policy, a disabled person.
Also, as someone who is presently working in a factory setting, your imaginary conversation of two very prissy little workers makes me want to beat them up and tell them to man up.
Surplus,
I’m going to repeat what Buttercup said: ” People try to help, and you snap at them, abuse them, and insult them. We’re all tired of it. Stop.”
Seriously, you need to stop with this. No one here has the power to fix your electricity or the ability to explain why it went out. No one here owes you an explanaton.
As for being locked out of this site for a half-hour, you weren’t. The site was down for everyone, including me, for a half hour. I didn’t do anything to make it happen, nor did I do anything to fix it — it was evidently caused by a plugin that I need to use to keep the site running. Yes, that’s right, a thing that keeps the site running knocked it offline for half an hour. Because life is weird and technology is weirder.
In any case, you can’t do this every time you have a problem with something. I’ve never restricted you from the site before (I don’t even know if that’s possible) but I can restrict you from commenting if you keep this up. And I will.
@hammerofglass
The short snarky-ish answer is ‘carefully’. 😛
Then again, I’ve heard that some people took a White Supremest message away after viewing Marvel’s first Black Panther movie, so…. People see what they want to see in their media, despite what the creator(s) actually put in to it.
That’s…an original take on the film. I’m actually curious what that message was, if it’s not too offensive and you’re willing to share it.