I had the incredible pleasure of spending a cocktail party seated next to Stewart Brand back around '94. I did not know who he was, but by the end of the evening I was convinced this was the most witty, empathetic genius I'd ever encountered. And I've met quite a few. At one point, astonished at his quick wit, a group of us throw topics at him, and he knew them all, and the biting sarcastic jokes about them was how he let us know. Extremely fun guy.
> In order to provide live two-way video between the lab and the conference hall, two microwave links were used. English also commanded a video switcher that controlled what was displayed on the big screen. The camera operator in Menlo Park was Stewart Brand, who at the time was a non-computer person, best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Stewart Brand advised Engelbart and the team about how to present the demo. Engelbart got to know Stewart Brand when they experimented with LSD at the same lab.
I believe that when people are in high contact with things that look to the uninformed like serendipity, it's a sign of something in them as a sensory organ, and something they are tapped into in the information environment... though perhaps we don't have good enough language to label it yet.
Whatever a "sense of smell" is for information (and surprise, and comedy, and aliveness...), this confirmed to me that Stewart Brand totally has it.
I think the new model with music is they don't make a very serious attempt to keep a monopoly on the content. They only really care about a monopoly on convenience. If anyone would set up some convenient way to stream these concert recordings they would get sued to oblivion. But the recordings circulating as inconvenient downloads? Not a big target.
These are all almost 10 years old, many are 20 or 30 or even 40 years old. Time makes a big difference.
There's a 2004 article about the taper [0] posted elsewhere in the thread, he definitely did get into a bit of trouble at the time.
> When he got back from England, Shanahan–who’d known Jacobs’s family for years–lectured him, warning him always to get clearance from bands before recording them and to be careful when trading tapes. Soon after this, though, Jacobs snuck his gear into a Bob Mould solo gig at Metro–he’d been unable to get permission, Shanahan says–and was caught by venue staff. Shanahan didn’t let him on the premises again for six years, relenting only after Jacobs got Flaming Lips manager Scott Booker to plead his case.
Everybody still cares, so you should get them while they last. Nobody who cares has noticed and maybe won't notice for a while, or it won't be in the budget to go after IA after just hitting them. The only protection these probably have is that they are recordings of real bands, and the bands that later became corporate darlings are in the minority - and labels like Touch & Go and other Midwest indies not only probably don't exist anymore and are not interested, but also don't control any of the publishing for the people who put out albums on their labels.
But the ones playing the music are all very old people now, and many of them have likely sold their publishing to the our blob overlords for a pittance. If massive multinational media corporations can make it difficult to figure out what they might have a claim to, it will end up easier to take the whole thing down. They attacked IA last time based on wax cylinders.
The reason orgs like the RIAA exist is to take PR hits for the industry; they will eventually demand they be taken down and probably make claims based on the length of time they were hosted. Get what you want while you can, although if you're a Millennial/Gen Z hipster you won't know any of it because it wasn't marketed to you (or anyone, it was just music, we enjoyed it.)
-----
edit: Looking through the list, I remembered how awful Chicago shows at the big clubs were, how Metro banned punk rock, and how I only ever went to those places to see touring bands that managed to get an opening spot for some A&R industry plant. Most of these are not good, and tons of them have all of their publishing owned by multinationals. It's the kind of selection you'd expect from somebody who thought that Bleach-era Nirvana was just alright and stalked Pavement.
Was happy to see a bunch of Fireside Bowl shows, but it looks like he dodged the good ones. This is almost pure "indy." I bet anybody could still find 100 that they'd like though so I don't want to seem too negative. This is mostly Gen X mainstream suburban hipster music.
Codex also has a similar issue, after finishing a task, declaring it finished and starting to work on something new... the first 1-2 prompts of the new task sometimes contains replies that are a summary of the completed task from before, with the just entered prompt seemingly ignored. A reminder if their idiot savant nature.
You could say I'm a music snob, big time. I can't stand any of the streaming services, because they only have a small fraction of my favorites (which is variations of discord jazz, often in other genres. I like when music decomposes into noise and then restructures again.) Due to my interest there, I've done a deep hole with AI music generation, not the services, but developing the models and exploring the open weight models being released.
There will be quality real art music created by these systems, but not by those that prompt alone. This is a whole new level of instrument, and the levels of control beneath are there to seriously transform one's thoughts to music, and melody, and that composed symphony of separate elements into a symphony of intended meaning.
Perhaps traditional music and this form of music should be treated separate. The distinction between AI music that is prompt-only and what can be created from a deeper set of controls is immense, and is not distinguished at this time, and may never be with how surface level this entire public assessment of AI music happens to be.
My take is that it will be somewhat similar though perhaps more complex to using sample based libraries, whether it’s for electronic music, symphonic loops, etc., I feel like this will just be the next generation of that kind of music making. I find it very unlikely that it will replace the kind of music making that comes from playing actual instruments and recording them from a live human player but it could still be interesting in its own right.
I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!" It was an early screener and I think that reaction was a surprise to the film team. I own a copy and watch it more than once a year. One of my favorite hard satires.
Agreed. It’s cited so often on Reddit by people who want to establish their superiority over the masses. “It’s a documentary!!” is a meme unto itself.
It’s also got a kind of weird eugenics-y vibe to it (like establishing “stupid people breeding makes stupid people” as incontrovertible fact) when you step back and examine it as a movie that’s making Serious Statements. But it isn’t. It’s not a bad movie. But it’s a comedy, the satirical elements are heavily over exaggerated by fans.
It's kind of funny when you say the movie isn't making serious statements when the highest of our publicly elected officials isn't a serious person. We elect people that are actively harmful to our well being. These people say things so incredibly stupid it can be painful. And then you wonder why people look at the movie like it's a documentary?
He might not present as a serious person but he is. The nativist impulses, the gutter racism, the “F you I’ve got mine” attitude, the party establishment that enabled him despite all that… these are all serious things worth serious analysis.
“Stupid people vote for stupid guy” is exactly the kind of analysis I’m critical of Idiocracy for.
I think you may misunderstand what the term "not a serious person" means. Just because someone is an ego driven performer doesn't mean their actions don't have consequences, it means you've fucked up if you follow them and take them for face value.
There has been a ton of analysis for why said stupid people vote for stupid people, but very little of it can prevent said behaviors.
Just to be clear, the smartest person is still a minister in Idiocracy, and the whole premise hinges on the idea that the elite still recognizes intelligence as something desirable.
It's not a eugenics-y vibe. The inciting incident is dysgenics, and the in-narrative apocalypse would have been prevented by eugenics.
It doesn't preclude the movie from being enjoyed or appreciated. The movie also came out at a time when test scores, literacy rates, and whatnot were all _increasing_, so that was the more salient lens to criticize it by.
That trend has reversed now, though. I don't agree with the dysgenic narrative, but I have often found myself thinking, "Gotta hand it to the movie Idiocracy, it's feeling familiar".
For all its flaws, I was a child at the time saturated in post-Y2K optimism that tomorrow would always be better than the day before. It was one of the first things that made me seriously consider, "What if humanity is not on a linear path of improvement"?
Given the number of people in this thread saying “it’s a documentary” I don’t think there’s a significant difference. And there’s also plenty of criticism of Idiocracy on Reddit too.
I never understood that eugenics criticism of the movie. They make zero references to genetics in that opening sequence, and the nurture side of that argument is readily trotted out as a truism even here on HN: "people from affluent parents have easier access to education".
The introduction describes it as a "turning point in human evolution", and that "natural selection ... began to favor different traits". These are some of the very first sentences of the movie.
The thesis is given: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". The characters dramatizing the inciting incident in the introduction are introduced with their IQs. It's very explicitly a dysgenic apocalypse narrative, which could have been avoided with earlier eugenicist intervention. (They attempt "genetic engineering" later on, but they fail, as the unintelligent are able to win by sheer numbers.)
It's okay to like the movie, and it is fiction. But it's certainly a dysgenic narrative which has eugenicist implications.
That's not a eugenics argument, that's merely an evolutionary argument (identifying a change in selection pressure). The eugenics argument would first have to make the case that the people are stupid/intelligent because of their genetic lineage rather than their upbringing.
This is one of those threads that's making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Like, I don't think enjoying Idiocracy makes someone a bad person or anything like that, but it's pretty clearly making a eugenics argument without any mitigating counter-hypothesis.
It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.
I hadn't seen it since it came out, but had a that kind of general movie recollection that it was as funny as it was prescient. Watched it again with my wife who had not seen it before: it's not funny. Maybe I'm getting too old.
> like establishing “stupid people breeding makes stupid people” as incontrovertible fact
That’s based on environment and not on genes. You might not be born “stupid”, but if you’re surrounded by retards (like in the movie), chances are you won’t be splitting atoms.
It definitely activates something within people. Maybe I'm just terminally online, but there is always _always_ someone who will say "Idiocracy isn't satire, its a documentary."
I don’t think that when people say “it’s a documentary” they mean that it’s literally a “documentary”, more like “this satire is so close to reality, that you can call it documentary”.
Not just 'other girls'. That happens, but also, it's a theme that has been around a long time. The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992
Was also in Snow Crash.
"All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice…With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.
But as long as you have that fourwheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream.
"
Snow Crash
Chapter 39 (Hiro's observation as he drives along the Alaska Highway)
Eh. I don't really see anything wrong with that. Every industry flubs things because the people creating the product aren't the same demographics consuming it. No big deal IMO. I think it's just a product of your typical Hollywood filter bubble. The Average American(TM) isn't so stupid as to not see the glaring "left to it's own devices middle america would turn the whole country into white trash, also with literal trash everywhere" undertone even if they can't quite put their finger on it.
You could make essentially the same movie about how impenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracy and abstraction of responsibility away to 3rd parties is going to make society grind to a halt (e.g. trash piling up because all disposal methods have been declared not environmentally friendly enough, etc, etc) and someone who just doesn't give enough shits to ask permission can be the hero of the story and frame it to offend all the people who specifically identify as the opposite of the dumb people in idiocracy.
That said I think it's a great movie and they struck a good balance.
Another way of looking at it is that Idiocracy illustrates what it will look like when we try to rebuild after the Grump catastrophe. The various sci-fi stories of advanced civilizations that depend on machines but have no idea how build them or of the first step to understanding them never really spell out how society would get there. Well, now we know. Eventually the ignorant taking-for-granted of Grumpism will turn into helpless appreciation as they realize how dependent they are on those technologies. Grumpism already has a strong contingent of mysticism and woo, which can just as easily be applied to real phenomena with solid technical explanations that few go looking for.
It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling truth from fiction.
I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political.
For instance, their famous 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens article they post all over their page whenever there is some high profile gun related crime. It's all over their page and no doubt they get a bump in traffic from smug people who feel it's clever. It's just so exhausting. It was a great headline, but by the time the joke gets its own Wikipedia, it might be time to retire it. You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Look at their trending article: Critics Outraged By Flippant School Shooting Plotline In ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’. Where's the joke? There is obviously no school shooting plotline. It's not clever or creative. I guess the joke is school shootings are a thing, and Mario is a popular movie?
It's basically South Parks criticism of Family Guy where they write jokes by having a seal put together random words from popular culture. School shootings + Mario = funny. And this stuff gets clicks because people think they're clever or subversive when it's just lazy and unoriginal.
You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
The "joke" in this case is people's reactions to school shootings. And people's reactions haven't changed, so I don't see why the article should change.
It's just so exhausting.
This has some real "The worst thing about school shootings is knowing that The Onion is going to repost that article I personally am tired of seeing" energy to it.
That article has some real "The best thing about school shootings is we get to have literally every article on our website be this clever headline we wrote 10 years" energy to it.
A joke does not stop being a joke because of how often it’s repeated. You may no longer find it funny, but it’s still a joke. More importantly, it’s still satire, and The Onion is a satirical news website.
> That article has some real "The best thing about school shootings is we get to have literally every article on our website be this clever headline we wrote 10 years" energy to it.
If that’s what you take from it, you have completely missed the point. The headline works because it’s social commentary, being funny is secondary. The fact they keep reposting it over and over is itself part of the criticism, it shows disapproval for an easy resolvable situation and removes teeth from the arguments of those opposed to it.
> I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political.
After reading this comment thread I think this would best be rephrased as "Some people don't like Onion stories because they feel like they're the butt of the joke." Which is fair enough, but let's not over-intellectualize it.
That may be true in some cases, but not in all. In particular, the Onion school shooting joke strikes me as a satire of a strawman. Whatever humor can be derived from ridiculing a stupid version of a position (like "school shootings are unavoidable") is, at least for me, made flaccid by the counterproductive nature of the satire. In other words, when the satire ridicules a dumb argument that not many serious people make, it's not so funny.
I don't pretend to be an expert on political satire but I never noticed that steelmanning, to use the modern vernacular, was ever a technique featured in high quality work like Tom Lehrer or George Carlin. I mean, literally never.
It sounds like you're describing something very boring, but if there's a political satirist (or Satanist, or Salafist, or whatever) you think is funny and an exemplar of what you're describing, drop it here.
I'm not in the USA, but I think the issue is not so much the joke getting tiresome, but the repeat school shootings. Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings, then the joke wouldn't keep getting repeated.
First and foremost you should endeavor to be a human, and The Onion does not owe you a thing. It's not a joke anymore, its a class ware and genocide that they are reporting on with headlines that make you cringe.
> Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings
It's odd that you seem to believe no work has been done. Lots of work has been done. Lots more work is blocked by people who steadfastly refuse to punish criminals - claiming instead that it's not their fault that they're violent.
I'd love to hear any additional ideas you have other than violating the rights of citizens.
"I'd love to hear any additional ideas except those that work everywhere because that'd require big changes"
The answer is trivial and well-known: federal-level gun controls (because anything state-level is a joke without hard borders between states), coupled with a buy-back program, amnesties, and real enforcement. There are no school shootings in the UK or Australia.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who'd rather have more guns and more dead kids (and adults) than fewer dead kids and fewer guns around. They'd justify that by talking about "preventing tyranny" or something, ignoring that paramilitaries executing people in broad daylight on camera with no consequences is already the reality of the US today, and guns played zero to negative role preventing that. Coincidentally, there are no such paramilitaries in the UK or in Australia either.
As for "the rights of citizens": there is no such thing as an immutable unconditional right. American citizens don't have a right to own nuclear weapons, neither should they, even though it's perfectly possible to have a very expansive definition of "bearing arms". Plus, the Constitution itself was amended many times in the past, and by now is clearly in need of a major overhaul, as evidenced by the US sliding down in various democracy indices (for example, World Press Freedom Index puts the US under Romania in 2025). So there is nothing impossible or uniquely oppressive about the reforms necessary to stop children being shot in schools, but because it's such a foundational element of identity for so many with a lot of money behind it (the NRA is exceptionally well funded), in practice there's indeed "No Way to Prevent This".
> "I'd love to hear any additional ideas except those that work everywhere because that'd require big changes"
When you pretend to quote someone, but you alter the quote, you're being dishonest. What you just did suggests that you don't really have any good arguments on your side - that you don't have any arguments that would stand on their own, without requiring a lie.
So, if we were having a debate, I'd say that you lost.
I agree, most of the arguments have been basically "do anything" hysterics that are divorced from reality. For instance, much focus is given on rifles, specifically big black scary looking rifles. In reality if you look at murder rates by weapon type
> Many school shootings in the United States result in one non-fatal injury.[63] The type of firearm most commonly used in school shootings in the United States is the handgun. Three school shootings (the Columbine massacre, the Sandy Hook massacre, and the 2018 Parkland High School shooting in Florida), accounted for 43% of the fatalities; the type of firearm used in the most lethal school shootings was the rifle.[62]
Note that this is shootings, so excludes murders by non guns. Rifles are not any more effective at murder than handguns. It's much easier to control, conceal, reload and attain a handgun. They're the preferred weapon of choice for practical reasons.
"…much focus is given on rifles, specifically big black scary looking rifles"
Military-style rifles designed primarily for killing humans? That's called a low hanging fruit. If the U.S. can't even restrict those I expect everything else to be a wasted effort.
> I'd love to hear any additional ideas you have other than violating the rights of citizens.
That's a strange take. There's citizens' rights involved in not being shot at and also the right to own guns, but when people are being killed, I would think that the right to life would take precedence over introducing some rule over gun ownership.
Here in the UK, we have strict rules on gun ownership (which I'm not particularly familiar with) which involve some kind of assessment (to prevent unstable people from owning them) and the guns have to be kept in a suitable locked cabinet. It's entirely possible for people to own guns for sport or for culling animals etc. and yet we have a very small amount of gun crime.
> I would think that the right to life would take precedence
Well, let's do a thought experiment to test this. Which of these two rights takes precedence: (1) life (specifically in this case, the right to not be murdered) or (2) freedom of movement
That's an easy question, isn't it? (1) takes precedence. But how many 9's of protection are you willing to "purchase" at the expense of (2)? How much of (2) are you willing to give up in order to get a little more of (1)?
If we reduce (2) to 0 ...by locking every person in a padded cell, then we can achieve 99.99% protection of (1).
Presumably though, you don't like that idea. Presumably, you'll want to be let out of the padded cell, and get a bit of right (2) back. But giving you a bit of (2) back is going to cost someone their life! If we let you and others out of the padded cell, someone somewhere is going to get murdered.
What this thought experiment demonstrates is that the issue is not as simple as, "(1) takes precedence over (2)" - the thought experiment demonstrates that there is an amount of (2) that you will not spend in order to purchase a marginal increase in (1) - a situation where (2) actually takes precedence.
> Here in the UK, we have strict rules on gun ownership
And I totally respect that. Just to be clear though, "gun ownership" isn't really the issue. Gun ownership is a proxy for the actual right: self defense. You place a low value on the right to defend yourself and your family. Again, I totally respect that. You've "spent" that right to purchase lower gun crime. Have I mentioned how much I respect your personal decision?
As for me, I value the right to self defense above all. I've looked at the data, and I've realized that I'm much more likely to be stabbed or beaten to death than I am (well, was when I was in school) to be in a school shooting.
So to me, having actually looked at that data, it seems obvious that the right to self defense should take precedence. I think that my way of thinking is perfectly rational, and I think you're way of thinking is not ...but I totally respect your personal decision. I'm sure you also respect mine.
I have no clue what I just read or what kind of mental gymnastics are required to say that a right to a weapon overrides a right to live.
It used to blow my mind when I moved here (Netherlands) that I wasn't allowed to use a weapon to defend myself... but then you realize ... basically nobody has weapons.
An irony is that guns are vastly more often used for self harm than for self defense. These supposed defenders of rights are often losing their own lives and the lives of family members with the instruments they demand to have a right to have.
I'm having a hard time understanding your point. Here's what I think just happened:
Me: I value the right to self defense
You: Guns are used for self harm more often than self defense [as an aside, I don't disagree that this is true - I've heard this stat many times]
You: This is ironic!
Please help me to understand why you think that's ironic. What do you feel would be a non-ironic position? Is it this....
Me: I value the right to self defense, but one day I might want to kill myself, so I guess I'd better give up the right to self defense.
Is that a non-ironic position? To me that seems like an irrational position. Those two issues (self defense and self harm) seem orthogonal, and conflating them because of a superficial similarity (they both involve guns) seems odd.
Ok. Now this is logic I understand. Nobody is saying you don’t have a right to self defense. The question should be: why do you have a right to bring a gun to a fist fight?
> The question should be: why do you have a right to bring a gun to a fist fight?
Great question. The answer is: bad people are often significantly stronger than their victims.
Have you ever seen this video [1]? The woman is 72 years old. She might be able to defend herself with a gun, but she has no chance with fists.
How about this video [2]? I have many, many examples like this. It's honestly kind of terrible that you hadn't considered this: guns give average women a better chance against strong, violent men.
So the question should be: why do you seek to deny women this right?
A lot of people are incapable of contending with hypotheticals or thought experiments. It's okay.
If you'd like to try again, I encourage you to read up to the point where something doesn't make sense. Quote only that sentence, and ask me to explain.
Notice how I'm not even asking you to read the whole thing - just to the point where you have trouble. This is very reasonable.
> You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
As Jon Stewart put it in the Crossfire interview where they asked him “which candidate do you supposed would provide you better material if he won?” because he has “a stake in it that way, not just as citizen but as a professional comic”, the citizen part is much more important.
The point of satire is social criticism first, funny second. I have little doubt everyone at the Onion responsible for reposting that headline would a million times prefer that they didn’t have to do it ever because the situation were resolved.
> It's just so exhausting.
It really says something about the state of society when an atrocity is perpetrated over and over and the complaint is that someone keeps talking about it rather than the atrocity continuing to happen.
Reader's Digest: What pleases you more, applause or laughter?
Tina Fey: Laughter. You can prompt applause with a sign. My friend, SNL writer Seth Meyers, coined the term clapter, which is when you do a political joke and people go, "Woo-hoo." It means they sort of approve but didn't really like it that much. You hear a lot of that on [whispers] The Daily Show.
Obviously we can't see that people aren't genuinely falling out of their seats laughing when that headline get rolled out again. There's no way argue that someone doesn't earnestly think bad (or tired) jokes make effective satire.
I don't think a whinge is a joke just because it has the shape of a joke and a point I like. Overall, I agree with you. But you'll never convince anybody.
Its okay to find things not funny that other people do find funny. Not everyone agrees or has the same sense of humor. Bko is not the final arbiter in deciding if something is funny or not.
not quite; spell it out for me. are you suggesting that the onion has never, under any circumstances, been funny and therefore are guilty of having pretentious opinions that are "not funny", which makes them bad? Or is it that you're suggesting that you are the sole arbiter of what is and isn't funny, so you're the only person who gets to determine the worth of specific types of humor? Sorry, I have a hard time distinguishing which type of childish, smug bullshit I'm dealing with, so any help you can provide would be appreciated.
In any case, I've never laughed as hard at anything Lenny fucking Bruce said as I did at The Onions "Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work" bit. So if you've got some favorite bruce bits, I'd love to get educated on what is hilarious about 60 year old observational standup.
it's amazing how much asking someone to actually explain what they are trying to imply will completely shut them up. Thanks for playing! I hope your next one is so pithy that I'll rue the day I spoke against you. fingers crossed
I know a comedian who is very good on absurdity. He's been doing that for ages (he kind of popularized it in my country), and he generally attracts right-wingers. I don't appreciate all his humor, as in I don't find it all funny because the goal seems to be to shock (kind of like Goatse, which was also a joke/meme riddled with a political message). I do find it political and humor though, as I can clearly see the intent is (at least also) to humor, and also can recognize political virtue signaling within. I've also found him, at times, funny.
Whether something is humor can be objectively established by disassembly of the structure of the content, whereas 'if you find it funny' is personal, yet 'if it is funny' is a summary of whether a certain group (such as 'the general public', whatever that may be) find it as such.
As such, I believe the expression of not finding someone or something funny a red herring. Different emotions obviously flourish, and the person who expresses that they don't find it funny finds these (more) important.
The red herring here isn't whether The Onion is funny or not (personal), it isn't whether it is humor or not (it is, specifically satire). It is that you fundamentally disagree with the political message it entails. Which you are allowed to do so, but in a discussion it is useful to recognize a significant amount of people do find it funny, and either have no problem with the political messages (tolerance) or agree with these (acceptance).
Demanding to respect a claim is a political act by itself.
Something being 'political' or not is a red herring. Politics is deeply ingrained in our society. How much is it ingrained? It is a spectrum, not a binary proposition. Trying to portrait it as a proposition is trying to oversimplify, removing nuance.
All it does is it wants people to ignore issues and let different political wings try to live in 'harmony' with each other by pretending the other side doesn't exist. This strategy doesn't work, and will hit in the face like a boomerang.
a famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act III, Scene II). It means that someone's overly emphatic or frequent denial of a situation suggests they are hiding the truth, are insincere, or actually guilty of what they deny. It implies their defense is covering up a secret desire or truth.
> You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Ok, who made you arbiter of what people can do? Have you missed entirely the point of repeating this little bit of dark humor is to perhaps SPUR THE PEOPLE TO ACTION THAT NEED TO TAKE ACTION?
You're right, it isn't a joke. Its very serious. Children are being killed at school. Kids are anxious about going to school because they don't want to be shot. How is that OK? And how is the thing you're taking issue with the repeated headline in a rag that is pure satire? Its like taking issue with the people who point out the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. Maybe direct your ire at the people taking no actions on gun control, eh?
The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proofs anyone could invent your life ordering fiction.
A little more punctuation would have made it easier, and it took me a little while.
Once it finally clicked for me, I actually found it an interesting point I haven't heard before. That the main cause of the satanic panic was a fear that world-building becoming too popular would expose the likelihood that Christianity was also a fiction.
Personally, I think I find the idea more interesting, than I find it convincing.
>The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proves that anyone could invent your life-ordering fiction.
I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
> hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
Presumably they identify with cultural elements (e.g. amateur football, professional wrestling) and then interpret the rest as "this is how dumb I think you are" and "you are not fit to rule yourselves".
Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate fact/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. On the Right they really could not differentiate Fact/Fiction.. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are living in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence.
If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
I'm interested to see any studies you can find on this topic. Here are some studies that I have:
Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias [1] - in study 6, liberals were shown to be ...pretty racist.
You claimed the Right believes fake news. I wont dispute that. I'll just reply that there's a lot of that going around. Here are some examples that debunk fake news you yourself might fervently believe:
Girls Who Code: A Randomized Field Experiment on Gender-Based Hiring Discrimination [2] - leftists tend to believe that women are discriminated against in STEM.
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force [3] - debunks the common belief, on the Left, that police are more likely to shoot people of color. Quote: "we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, ocer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics"
Rathje et al. (2023), Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information, Nature Human Behaviour. This one emphasizes that misinformation judgments are shaped by both accuracy motives and social/identity motives, which helps explain why partisan gaps are not simply about intelligence or total inability to separate truth from fiction.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_sourc...
Pennycook et al. (2022), Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing online misinformation, Nature Communications. This paper discusses baseline sharing discernment and notes worse baseline discernment among conservatives in the samples they studied, while also showing that simple accuracy prompts can help.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_sourc...
summary is: there are studies showing conservatives, on average, perform worse on certain misinformation/truth-discernment tasks, but the strongest scholarly version of the claim is narrower and more conditional than the popular retelling
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc...
Great! So, let's start with your first study. Note this quote:
> it is possible that conservatives’ relatively low accuracy about political information is a by-product of the fact that issues used in forming this assessment were selected with an eye toward detecting misperceptions among the political group
That's definitely a way to bias a study against conservatives. It's good that this study claims it avoided that bias. But did it? They don't list the questions that participants were asked. I checked the list of supporting documents, and couldn't find it.
Without that list, I can't accept this source. Sorry.
If I went out and asked a bunch of Liberals, "did Trump say that Neo-Nazis are 'very fine people?'" I suspect that upwards of 90% of Liberals would answer "yes" ...and they would swear they heard him do it! You may (falsely) believe this yourself!
I could ask, "did Trump advise people to drink bleach?" and many Liberals would swear he did.
He didn't do either of those things. But many Liberals emphatically believe he did. I could very easily design a study that included only these sorts of questions - questions that Liberals will get wrong.
The only way to spot this bias would be if I included the questions in the study, so that you could vet them yourself. Without such a list, it is completely reasonable for me to reject your source.
Should I continue to the next one, or are they all like this?
If you don't want to accept sources you disagree with.
Then isn't that part of the problem?
The onus is on you, to tell me what would be acceptable sources for you.
You didn't really debunk any of these sources, just supplied some random sampling of your own creation.
Interestingly, I have gone back and watched the full video of both of those quotes. He did say all of those things, but 'in-joking'. That is a common tactic. Everything he says can be re-cast as 'he was only joking'. The trick is, the right can always shift what was a 'joke' or 'not-joke', depending on the argument. Was it serious, or not serious? It really depends on shifting views, and the interpretation can change day to day.
I tend to agree liberals really piled on those examples too much, there were really so many better examples.
Many US citizens didn't get that Starship Troopers was a black comedy. There are serious video reviews taking it seriously as an action movie where the characters are true US heroes.
I have a feeling these people are the same as the ones you're talking about.
As a fan of Heinlein's book, the movie flattened the exploration of the political themes from the book and turned it into said black comedy. It would be like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy.
I read the book, was very interested by the points he made, but I completely understand and support Verhoeven's take on it as a naive utopia that will get completely derailed. Just look at how the "veterans" of the "forever war" are foaming at the mouth at the idea of war-criming and sending others to die in Iran. Heinlein's central idea that people who offered their service to the rest of society are better qualified to vote doesn't survive the slightest encounter with reality.
it was a dumb action movie, with a bit of satire and some non-trivial nudity.
the book is a political science treatise about the role of the citizen in government and draws heavily from Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber, basically invented the "space marine" concept that we see in 40k or Starcraft or Doom, and touched on things like haptic feedback and non-traditional UI and how it could be C2.
The nudity is also part of the point. American will heavily restrict movies with nudity or swear words, but see far less problems with showing gore and violence on screen to youngsters.
Seen from Europe (Verhoeven is Dutch), this is completely deranged.
I thought it was just the opposite: people recognized it as satire but what they really wanted was the dumb action movie. Spare us the social commentary and show us some power armor with jump jets.
I own the official release, and upon first viewing I do remember slight changes from that screener version, but nothing material. I half expected all or at least some of the brand names to be replaced because the film was so insulting towards them, but that all remained. Starbucks whores were okay, I guess, with Starbucks.
Yep. The studio didn't know what the hell to do with it.
I'm guessing that we (those of us who have seen it despite the lack of promotion) are lucky that they didn't just can it completely, or demand it get cut to ribbons and reformed as something else.
I think director's in that era can avoid this by not doing extra takes for scenes that would never make it anyways. Mike Judge did not have the budget for that anyways.
Nowadays they just change the scenes in post anyways, leading to some of the worst and most atrocious continuity errors.
Indignant behavior may have been a result of a perceived attack on viewers belief system. Possibly combined with no 2nd order awareness of thought. Additionally, a subtle “critique” framing from the screening host or “open mic” framing may prime the participants to command attention. Outrage is the easiest when one has no conceptual lens to add interpretive value.
I did feel that the use of an open mic encouraged the negative opinions to cascade. Once one of them voiced negativity, it really turned into a "me too! I was insulted by..."
I wasn't insulted, but it did feel a bit too on the nose to really work as satire.
Idiocracy got there just in time, before things became so stupid that satire wasn't possible any more. You have to exaggerate so hard that it lacks the feeling of cleverness required by satire.
The Onion struggles on. They've always been true masters of the form. I wrote my own news satire back in the 80s and quit when I saw The Onion; they were far better than I would ever be. Practically nobody else can still pull off satire here in the worst timeline.
Armando Iannucci - creator of The Thick of It and Veep - has said this in public statements. Politics is so ridiculous now on both sides of the Atlantic that he finds political satire impossible to pull off anymore. His last show for HBO Avenue 5 had to take place on a space liner for rich people with Hugh Laurie as a faux-captain who can’t keep his accent straight.
Texas Monthly (“The National Magazine of Texas”) covers local news with a straight face, letting the absurdity speak for itself. Read the recent article about ranchers and rabbis searching for the perfect heifer to bring about the end of the world - you can see the movie coming (Coen Brothers or The Daniels?) https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/red-heifer-prophe...
A straightforward rendition of the last 10 years wouldn't even pass the smell test for a satire. It might work as some kind of experimental dark slapstick.
I guess I see why, though. Taken from the perspective of tropes of middle Americans, it's pretty condescending and claims everything they are is idiotic and responsible for the state of the world, when it is more complicated than that and the ivory tower has its own culpability
Why doesn't X have Y? When talking about nations, that is typically corruption.
Why can't NationX have quality public transit? Corruption.
Why can't NationX have quality political parties or politicians? Corruption.
Why can't NationX have a quality education and produce people capable of understanding and supporting their own political system? Corruption.
This is a thought-terminating cliché [1]. Not an actual explanation.
Like, why is the assumption that countries should be homogenous? Since when did geography, culture, industrial structure, natural-resource availability and national wealth become irrelevant?
Maybe thought terminating but it is discussion instigating, and if stated in a public conversation by anyone of authority and power, it's a nuclear bomb going off. This is the unstated conversation that needs to occur in public, and not by me or you or anyone less than a ruler of a major country, and not that idiot Trump.
Not really. "Corruption" as the answer to why America doesn't have 25 Gbit internet is (a) mostly wrong and (b) useless in terms of developing next steps.
> the unstated conversation that needs to occur in public
Everyone is constantly talking about corruption. Pretending it's "unstated" is wrong. The conversation usually doesn't go anywhere because saying corruption with zero evidence is essentially useless for generating next steps. Maybe you're right. Maybe it leads to a wild-goose chase. Either way, insufficient to actually do anything with.
But the "everyone" is not the political leaders, and not officially, not in any forum that could do anything about said "corruption". It is literally a game of speaking about corruption only in venues where nothing can be done about said corruption. When Trump talks these issues, it's a projection of his own ideas and actions. The entire action of "discussion corruption" has been normalized as pointless, as you are advocating.
Plus, and this is huge: people cannot discuss anything materially important in any rational manner. They get emotional, they cannot control their thoughts, and all of that is manufactured in them by our society to impair action against our powerful manipulating organizations such as industries, political parties, and any collection of anyone that feels they can demand their wants or needs.
You got shuttled into one bubble and the previous commenter into another advertising / news bubble. It's incredible how different the media experience is for people in different media bubbles.
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